Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 0 No. 44

2004-09-07 22:24 (John) Continuing with the idea of Jamie's use of language, Gary found out yesterday that if you say "bam-bam" to Jamie, he will gleefully pound on the table. After the bath tonight, we were playing the pointing-and-naming-body-parts game, with Jamie holding my index finger. He seemed to have the idea of pointing (e.g.) to "Jamie no o-hana" or "papa no o-mimi", but I'll need to experiment more.

Today's addition to Jamie's diet was cherry tomatoes, freshly picked from my mom's garden. When I gave him his first bite of a quarter of a cherry tomato, I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head. After he had three tomatoes, we took him inside and tried to feed him soba. He kept popping up out of the laundry basket that we still use as a makeshift high chair, and I finally decided that he wasn't hungry but wanted to go for a walk. He walked us over to where we'd left the basket of tomatoes, and when we picked it up and brought it back to the laundry basket, he made sure we were both looking at him before ostentatiously sitting back down. Clever boy.

(Kristen) Jamie was up by 8:00 this morning, and so we went with Daniel and Ross for their first day back to school. Kelly was there too, and afterwards she showed me how to use the rollerblades that I bought on Saturday. We took Jamie around the block and down to the Second Cup, where we ran into Betsy who is hoping to do the same thing when her new one is born in December. Jamie loves it when Kelly pushes him in the stroller when she is wearing her blades; when she was putting them on this morning, he was very excited. I'm going to buy pads of my own tomorrow, so that we can keep going. John has threatened me with never being allowed to do anything interesting again in my life if I get hurt...

2004-09-08 24:19 (Kristen) Last night, Jamie dazzled us all with a display of agility by walking to the furthest point from the door frame that he could, stretching out his arm, and took a step, swinging his other arm over so that he could reach the other side of the door frame. Walking *very* very soon...

I took Jamie out for some errands downtown this afternoon, where he saw many University of Toronto frosh parading down Bloor. He liked the annual frosh parade, and the engineers painted purple. We looked at clothes for him, and bought some rollerblade pads for me, and went on the subway twice (oooh...). We also visited UTP, and had a good time. Jamie was a perfectly behaved boy, and got much attention. We were at the Scrabble club tonight, and he was pretty tired: when he's tired, he gravitates to the things that I tell him he can't play with. Dirty wheels, bathroom drains, the usual.

2004-09-09 23:43 (Kristen) Jamie slept in this morning, but was still having trouble crying and acting as though he was in pain while still asleep. Is it possible that he is having nightmares? I'm not sure, but his sleep is certainly restless after 4:30 AM. He was fine after he was awake, however, and we went for a walk around 12:30.

We accomplished all sorts of errands, including finding a warm top for him, and had lunch at the Carrot Common. It's a good place to watch pigeons, dogs, and other children, and we also saw John's mother and Ayami. Then we went to find John, and ran into all our neighbours. Alexandria was playing with Jamie and Sam, and was very excited to tell us that Jamie took two steps by himself while she had him. He repeated the trick at Tom and Michelle's tonight, and I think that we have a walker. We also have a climber, as John's heart stopped when he saw Jamie climbing into the bassinet that has Michelle's guitar in it. Jamie had both feet off the ground, one on the wheel and one on the brace, and he was pulling himself upwards toward the edge of the bassinet. I can hear my mother laughing from here (guess who climbed). Jamie was really, really proud of himself.

2004-09-10 22:04 (Kristen) We all slept in the same room last night for the first time in a month and a half, and no one slept well except for Jamie. We're back to our old arrangement, and will try again. Jamie and I had a two and a half hour nap together this morning, and he woke up before I did. Before that, he played by hiimself for a good while in the dining room on the Scrabble rug while I ate breakfast. He can get himself across the rug quite quickly in a half-sitting, half-scooting crawl. At one point, I heard a suspicious noise, and poked my head into the dining room. No Jamie. He was just a few feet into the living room, standing on a few books, and taking others off the second shelf of a bookcase. Now that he can get places on his own steam, he is very strong- willed about where we walk and what we see. John says that once he learns how to get food on his own, he's out of here.

We went to the university together this afternoon as a family so that John could get some work done at the Math Department. Jamie charmed some mathematicians and the secretaries, and ran up and down the hallway, chortling gleefully. We then looked at a few stores on Harbord St. nearby, and headed back to the car. Jamie walked most of the way around Sidney Smith Hall, holding onto my hand and John's, or a parental hand and the stroller. He has a lot of stamina: I thought that he'd give up long before he actually did.

(John) Jamie will now willingly take two unsupported steps to go from Handhold A to Object of Interest B. I am thinking of taking all Objects of Interest and putting them into a large storage facility for a few years, except that it might be simpler for us to move into such a facility and leave all the Objects here.

2004-09-11 23:58 (Kristen) Jamie is ten months old today, and is working hard as various forms of locomotion. He can scoot, lift himself up onto his hands and knees from a sitting position, stand for up to 30 seconds at a time, and take a step or two on his own. He almost pushed himself into a standing position from a sitting position today by pushing off of my knee, but missed it by that much. Tomorrow, then. He also started trying to climb stairs. We have baby gates now.

He spent the afternoon with his dad, as I got to go and see one of my two films at the film festival. They went for a long walk with a short nap, and Jamie exhibited more signs of teething, poor guy. Then they played with Daniel and Ross. When I took over, he seemed tired and so I took him for a walk too. We ended up walking past Claire, Ellen, and Oscar's house, and we were invited in for a while. Jamie had a good time, but crashed out around 6:00. Once more into the stroller, but no sleep until we were almost home.

Sleep would prove elusive for our boy until we got him home around 9:30. After his bath, John and he played on the bed for a while, playing "where is Papa's nose," and "where is Jamie's nose?" My nose was added when I came into the room, and Jamie was laughing and laughing like I haven't heard in a while. The sound of my son's laughter is still the best sound in the entire world.

2004-09-12 23:39 (Kristen) Jamie slept in until close to 10:00 today, and to make up for it, decided to sleep very little the entire day. He only just went to sleep now, and was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (if somewhat clumsy) until the very end.

He spent time with Gary and Ayami while John and I cleaned the house in preparation for a visit from Takako and Yo-chan, her new husband. Takako is the younger daughter of John's aunt Toshiko from Japan. They are visiting for two weeks, then heading back. They brought a beautiful yukata# and obi for Jamie, covered in little fish and shells. It's a little big, but we'll be taking photos soon. He's going to look absolutely adorable in it. We also went out as a group (Tomoko, Nobuko, us, John's parents, Takako and Yo-chan) to Mezes on the Danforth, and Jamie enjoyed adding Greek food to his list of international cuisines sampled. The waiters loved him, and stopped to say hi as they went past each time. He finally slept on a walk home from the restaurant, which must explain his inability to fall asleep tonight. I'm very very tired...

(John) He's been adding more syllables to his repertoire. The last couple of days, he's been experimenting with blissfully sighing "haaa...", sometimes using a voiceless palatal or velar fricative at the beginning. He also made it to three free steps today, from coffee table to Mom.

2004-09-13 24:05 (Kristen) It was a sleepy day for us, after a long, restless night. Jamie kept waking up all through the night, and I thought that it was his teeth, but nothing was settling him down for longer than half an hour or so. Finally, around 7:30, I clued in that he had pooed in the middle of the night, and that was what was bothering him. He hasn't done that in about five months, and I'm just not swift enough in the middle of the night to deal with the exceptional cause rather than the mundane. So, we were a little tired.

After his usual two breakfasts, we settled down together for a nap. Three hours later, we woke up feeling a little more human. We went out to pick up Ross and Daniel from school, walked over to Sun Valley and Baskin Robbins, and then John and Jamie went for dinner at Tai Tai's while I headed home for some work time. I was surprised when Jamie fell asleep for an hour when they got home, and then realized "hey...he's not going to be asleep until 11:30 again." And I was right.

He is a very social little being. Tonight, after waking up, he and John went for a walk and John said that Jamie walked to the houses of Sam and Ben, and Alexandria, looking for playmates. When they weren't available, they went to Daniel and Ross's. Daniel points out that Jamie says "da!" when he's around, and there is some circumstantial evidence that it means "Daniel." He let out a burble of consonants that may mean "Ross" as well, but it's less clear.

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

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