Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 0 No. 6

2003-12-16 24:00 Doing better again today. In addition to trying to fill him up much more when he's feeding, we're also trying to keep him warmer, with an extra layer of clothing and often an extra receiving blanket. He certainly fussed less when being exposed to the cool house air when being changed.

Kristen is practising talking with Jamie as I write this. He's practising making random sounds, and she's echoing the ones that are close to phonemes back to him. I think the subject of the rather animated conversation is the Mozart CD that they're listening to, which he seems to be quite fond of.

Visited Chris Sternberg at the midwives' clinic today for a weigh-in. Jamie's now 9 lbs. 13 oz., which plots him dead centre on the 1.5 oz. per day line since he came home from the hospital, and means that on Thursday he will weigh ten pounds. Chris also gave Kristen helpful advice on nursing while lying down.

2003-12-17 26:00 A mixed day. Jamie was well-behaved during the day, feeding well and sleeping lots while we started our Christmas shopping on the Danforth. We took him to Lynda Wise's house in the evening for a special session of the Scrabble Club, and that was less of a success. Jamie went through six diapers in three hours, with much accompanying noise before I discovered that he finds vertical blinds mesmerising.

2003-12-18 21:39 (Kristen) Jamie didn't go to sleep until 3:00 AM last night, but did give me a four-hour stretch to make up for it (what a good little guy). John had to have a tooth extraction done in the morning, and so Jamie and I hung out until he got back. Jamie slept through my breakfast, which was a first!

We have a new tenant for the next month. Rieko is visiting from Japan until the middle of January, and is a friend of a friend of Mihoko's. She seems very nice, and joined us for dinner at Tom and Michelle's tonight.

Today's big outing was to see a movie at the Varsity (Jamie's first movie at the theatre!). It's still too busy to take Jamie to see Return of the King, and so we were going to see Master and Commander. However, the listings were wrong, and they aren't showing it in the afternoons anymore. I was pretty disappointed, but we decided to see Love Actually instead, and ended up enjoying it very much. Jamie was an angel, and slept through the whole movie, waking only for a nurse twice (and I'm not sure he was really awake). Something about the dark and the warmth that appeals, i suppose. Anyway, the theatre workers at the Varsity were very impressed with him, as were the people we shared a row with. So were we. He was still fussy tonight, and managed to soil at least six diapers again in under a two-hour period. Now, however, he's asleep in my arms, and I hope that he sleeps as well tonight!

2003-12-19 23:50 Inspired by our movie-going success yesterday, we were much more ambitious with Jamie today, and went on not one but three outings.

Our first outing combined Jamie's first trip to Bakka Phoenix Books (to rescue an ailing Michelle and show Chris how much Jamie's grown since the shower) with a shopping trip to Canadian Tire to buy our first Christmas tree (at 60% off, thanks for the tip, Suzanne) and spend all of our savings on impulse purchases. The high point of that trip was finding that Jamie is still small enough that the basket section of a shopping cart makes a cozy cradle.

Outing #2 was to The Coffee Mill in Yorkville with Daniel, for our traditional end-of-term celebrations, augmented this time by Jamie's first extrauterine appearance there. The low point of that trip was the forty-minute wait to get out of the city parking lot on the north side of Yorkville. Don't ever park there on the Friday afternoon before Christmas.

The Outing of the Day was to see Jane Siberry give her Christmas concert at the Berkeley Church on Queen Street East. Kristen, Christine Miller and I had helped Jane with the unexpectedly complex copyediting of the liner notes of her new album, Shushan the Palace (Hymns of Earth) (available online from Sheeba and elsewhere), and Jane had invited us to come to the concert as her guests. I'm going to go on a little two-paragraph soapbox here, so if you want to just read about Jamie, please feel free to skip to here.

I don't know how to begin to describe how thrilled we were to go, which I suppose is one way of distinguishing me from Jane. I'm good at understated sarcasm, and Jane is the mistress of evoking the inexpressible ecstatic experience. I first heard her at the long-lamented Forum at Ontario Place in (I think) 1984, and until I moved to France in 1989 I went to her concerts every time I could. Her songs "Everything Reminds Me of My Dog" and "Hockey" are about 25% responsible for my retaining my sanity throughout my sojourn in France.

In the unlikely event that you're reading this log and you haven't heard Jane sing, I probably ought to describe her, modulo the caveat above. Jane's message, which has become more focused as the years have gone by, is that people should truly be themselves and be true to themselves. She does a good job of demonstrating how successful this can be, and comes across on stage alternately as a woman who is near the end of the ecstatic path to enlightenment, or at the very least someone who is enjoying high function despite an apparent autism-spectrum disorder (which describes 80% of my friends). Sadly, I don't think her message is for everyone. If everyone let themselves be who they truly were deep down inside, the world would be much uglier on the whole, with a few jewels of beauty buried in the muck. Better that the ugliness be kept tidied so that we can see the jewels.

Well, enough about that. Jamie of course, being a newborn, pops in and out of meditative trances with the greatest of ease, looks at everything in the world with fresh eyes, and if he could only express what he feels to anyone other than his parents, he would be an even better songwriter than Jane. To get him ready for the concert, Kristen nursed him, I burped him, then Kristen took him down to the bathroom to change him. As she came out of the bathroom, a security guard told her, "The artist would like to see you." A bemused Kristen walked nextdoor to Jane's dressing room, where Jane invited her to finish nursing Jamie in privacy. Fifteen minutes later, I started to get worried (the most likely reason for a diaper change taking longer than a few minutes is uncontrolled and adult-incapacitating distribution of baby excretions), went looking for her and ended up in the dressing room myself. Jamie, being a baby, was mostly oblivious to this all, and went on feeding, pooing, and occasionally stopping to charm everyone with his intense gaze.

As we all expected, Jamie enjoyed the concert immensely. Halfway through, Jane managed to blow his mind - there's only so much mental stimulation he can take before he needs a snack to boost his blood sugar, so Kristen went down to Jane's dressing room again to nurse him, but came back in time to hear herself being publicly thanked between songs for the work she did on the liner notes. Then I took Jamie back down to change his diaper, and to calm him down as well, but he got mesmerised (in Jane's words, "bound by the beauty") by an architectural decoration on the wall, and started to cry only when I tried to pick him up after the change.

I'd love to write more, but I'm bushed, and maybe a little mentally overstimulated myself. Good night, all.

2003-12-20 23:22 (Kristen) Perhaps we were overly ambitious yesterday; it would have been nice to have spent the whole day in bed, rather than the whole morning, but groceries needed to be bought, and Christmas presents sought.

So, today was a bit of a crabby, tired day for everyone. We arrived at the St. Lawrence Market remarkably late in the afternoon, even for us, and got our groceries bought just before they closed. Then it was up to Leonidas for the yearly chocolate run and a few other errands before we came home. Michelle and Tom invited us for dinner, and as we three were exhausted, we agreed. Jamie is having a high-frequency feed day, with accompanying gassiness and fussiness. Poor guy.

(John) Jamie has become noticeably more people-oriented over the last few days, finally fixing his gaze on faces more than architecture, and paying closer attention when people seem to be doing something interesting, like talking or looking at him. He's also developed about a minute's worth of expectation, so that he now gets excited about getting undressed for the bath, rather than outraged that he's being stripped for no apparent reason.

2003-12-21 24:11 We took the day off, but did end up taking a lot of photos as a result. We wrote a few Christmas cards, and heedless of our karmic account balance, accepted Tom's invitations first to brunch (pancakes and omelettes) and then dinner (chicken katsu). Jamie's fine, still on a shorter cycle than we'd like him to be, but really developing an interest in the world around him. While getting ready for the bath, we sang him all the Christmas carols we could think of, and he forgot to mention his dirty diaper until we'd finished. Of course, he now thinks that Jingle Bells is a song about Batman and Robin, but he'll straighten things out eventually.

2003-12-22 25:09 Introduced Jamie to his future family doctor, Dr. Josephine Kennedy, today. According to her scale, Jamie weighs 10 lbs. 9.5 oz. This suggests one of three possibilities: (1) Jamie has increased his rate of weight gain, (2) the doctor's scale weighs three ounces heavier than the midwives', or (3) Jamie was carrying three extra ounces of pee and poo. We only have firm evidence for #3.

Christmas shopping on the Danforth and in Leaside, and I have no clue how it ended up being 1:00 A.M. again.

Back to Vol. 0 No. 5, or up to Jamie Chew's Web Log Archive. or forward to Vol. 0 No. 7.

* For the benefit of Scrabble players, words that are not in the Scrabble dictionary are marked with an asterisk.