Back to Vol. 0 No. 61, or up to Jamie Chew's Web Log Archive. or forward to Vol. 0 No. 63.

[a bar of photos of Jamie's face]

Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 0 No. 62

2005-01-11 23:15 (Kristen) It was a very happy day in Jamieland today. He woke up around 8:30, but I convinced him to stay in bed until 9:00 or so. John got up with him, but my attempt to sleep in was short-lived as the phone started to ring, and other daily intrusions began. Jamie and I had fun playing with his trains before he had breakfast with John, during which John and I discussed the redness around the bottom of his right eye that keeps coming back. His eye also had a big bit of goop in it at one point, and so John took Jamie to see Dr. Kennedy while I worked on a deadline. It's the first time that Jamie has been to the doctor without me, and so I was feeling a bit odd about it. Dr. Kennedy was pleased with Jamie's weight (25 pounds even), and says that he has a bit of an eye infection. Apparently, Jamie needs eye drops four times a day for five days: when John told me that, we looked at each other with a perfect understanding of how much fun that was going to be.

It was about that much fun, but we got through the first dose. Jamie nibbled a bit of chicken rice and veggies at Browning, and set off with John for his afternoon nap. He slept a good long time, and woke up around 4:00. He was a little disoriented, but a nurse helped, and he proceeded to have a big lunch. The notable part of lunch was how well he used his little spork* (a cross between a fork and a spoon) to spear up food and put it into his mouth. He was praised lavishly for each successful sporkful*, which he responded to very well. Maybe he'll continue to use it, instead of his hands. OK: in addition to his hands.

He spent the rest of the afternoon watching Tubbies and making sure that his toys (especially his trains) were put back out after Trifina cleaned the dining room where they are kept. We headed over to Browning for dinner, where Michelle once again witnessed Jamie attempt to slide down the little Fisher-Price garage slide. We explained that we had failed to find a slide for hiim on Sunday, and so Tom and Michelle went to a bigger Toys'R'Us and found us a slide for Jamie before they ate dinner. We are very happy with his new Step 2 slide, and as you can tell from the pictures, Jamie is ecstatic. He was full of baby glee as he went down the slide at least ten times. We are keeping the slide at Michelle's, since we haven't the room, and expect that we will rarely be allowed to leave the basement there where it is kept.

We took a tired and happy Jamie home, where Rika was waiting after arriving home from a whirlwind five-day trip to Japan for a wedding. She brought Jamie two little Winnie-the-Pooh pillows from Japan, which he was very pleased with. He watched a little more Tubbies before having his bath and heading to bed. He fell asleep listening to the local classical music station, which he has been enjoying in the car lately. He finds it very soothing.

(John) I've been testing Jamie's language comprehension, and he often surprises me with what he understands. Tonight, when it was time for Kristen to lift him out of the tub, he was paying little attention to her. We told him it was time to nurse and go to sleep, and he made the udder-grasping sign for nurse and went back to carefully stacking cups. Without any confirmatory body language or emphasis, I asked him "Mom dakko?" (Mom pick you up?) and he smiled, stood and lifted up his arms.

2005-01-12 23:56 (Kristen) Jamie was up around 9:00, on a grey, wet, blustery day. I thought that I'd take him to the library and to Ms. Miriam's indoor play area/nursery, in an attempt to meet other children and to give him a chance to run about. We made it most of the way down Browning (about seven minutes into our fifteen-minute walk) at 12:00, and he was fast asleep. Gnash teeth! So, I did my errands and decided to go into the Second Cup for a coffee after an hour or so. I unzipped the cover (it had been raining quite hard), and pop! Up he was. Gnash teeth some more! He didn't go back to sleep, and that was that.

I brought him back home after we shared a little cheese scone, and fed him some apple. He nursed a bit, and by 3:00 I was just about ready to drop because I hadn't eaten. I left Jamie watching Tubbies, put my toast in for a sandwich, and heard a big thump and Jamie crying. Sure enough, he had tried to climb onto his hippo car to reach something on the coffee table (he has never done this before, btw) and fallen, taking my clipboard down with him and inflicting a cut just over the eyelash line on his eyelid. Much trauma. He was mad, as much as hurt, and demanded that John take him outside for a walk. John ended up over at Michelle's place, where Jamie went in and played on his slide for a while until he felt better.

I went over to pick him up around 4:30, and he was absolutely blithering. He walked like he was drunk, but he wasn't going to sleep, thank you. The bright side to this was that he slept all the way to the Scrabble club. He had a good time eating sushi, playing with the play structure, and watching two ping pong players who were quite good. He was ready to go home, and made the sign for teeth brushing (using his finger to make his lips go "blub blub blub") to indicate that he wanted to start his bedtime routine. He's getting pretty good at telling us what he wants.

(John) As the pictures show, Jamie has been obsessively scrubbing things whenever he gets the chance. As he was scrubbing the shuffleboard diagram inlaid in the Scrabble clubroom's floor, he pointed at the numbers and said "Ah! Eh! Ee!", which I finally understand is his version of "ABC". He's been saying that intermittently for a couple of months now, whenever some letters have caught his eye, no doubt thinking we're all as thick as short planks.

2005-01-13 23:33 (Kristen) It passed unremarked a couple of days ago, but Jamie is now fourteen months old. It's such a strange thought, but there is a little boy running all over my house, cackling away with an infectious laugh that I can hear rooms away. And he's really really cute. His hair is almost exactly the same colour as mine, which is so funny: I was so sure that John's genes were going to stomp all over mine in that area. His hair is long and straight on top, but it's shorter all along the sides and back, and really really curly. Cathy, who lives next door to Michelle and Tom, commented that he was getting really tall, and that he was a very handsome boy. He is that, and bright, but he's happy, and that's what makes my heart swell most.

It was a pretty standard day: up around 10:00, play and eat a good breakfast, and head out to visit Tom and Michelle for lunch. It was unseasonably warm (+12 C), and we were enjoying the beautiful weather. He wouldn't fall asleep for John in the stroller until he had a piece of banana loaf in his little hand, which led us to speculate that he may need something to touch or stroke before he goes to sleep. I'm somewhat tactile myself, and will try giving him some blanket edges or other things that may help. We are going to try (once again) to get Jamie to sleep on his own better, or at least put himself back to sleep, and maybe this will help.

He ate well, he slept well, and he played and laughed a great deal. He is lord of all he surveys.

(John) Jamie's on his third day on antibiotic eyedrops, and his eye has looked fine for about a day now, except for the bruise from yesterday's cut to his eyelid. He's gone from being terrified of the drops to being completely incensed at the indignity (and possibly the sting). Today he started howling in outrage when I merely mentioned the word "drops" to Kristen. Granted, we were about to administer the eyedrops, but I had kept the bottle carefully hidden and I don't think he was reading any body language "tells". I have to substantially revise upward my estimate of the size of his passive vocabulary to perhaps a couple of hundred words.

One of his bath books is a collection of pictures of items of interest to babies: car, cow, house, cat, truck, etc., and we have sounds and activities associated with each of them, which Jamie has gradually learned to imitate with varying degrees of success. At Kristen's suggestion, the house for instance goes "Tadaima!" (Japanese for "I'm home!"), which comes out "ta-dai!" on good days. The most complicated activity has to do with the bulldozer. When we turn to that page, I get out the yellow stacking cup and make bulldozer noises while using it to move water from one part of the tub to another. Vroom-vroom noises while moving forward, whistled backup beeps when reversing, and two different hydraulic sounds for lifting and dumping. Last night, when Kristen came to take Jamie out of the bath, he realized that we hadn't played bulldozer yet, and started going through the sound effects and routine himself for the first time. It was quite cute. He is my little boy.

2005-01-14 15:42 (Kristen) Jamie's a pretty relaxed boy, so it is only slowly dawning on me that he is, indeed, somewhat a creature of habit. Tami was telling me today that he has a routine when he goes into the basement at Browning: first he goes down his slide. plays with the little popup characters, makes cars go down a ramp, and checks out the Fisher-Price garage, before heading back upstairs.I knew that he liked to fall asleep in his stroller, and he has his routines around going to bed, but I'm finding it curious what he will make routine. He also has to touch the newel posts on the railing when going upstairs, and won't step into the lower places in the sidewalk where repairs have been done.

2005-01-14 22:17 (Kristen) I forgot that he also requires the bulldozer routine in the bath.

He was in his usual sunny mood for most of the day, despite not eating very much until after 5:00 PM. He made up for it, however, by eating two dumplings and two bowlfuls of rice, curried veggies, and chicken. He had a cookie and a bit of corn for a chaser. I am not sure what to make of this, other than he has a hollow leg and stores it all up for later.

(John) He also drank enough to last him a few days. Next diaper's a scary one. It'll be worth it though, it's an indescribably good feeling to make your family a big meal and watch your child happily mm-ing his way through it.

We went to the Manulife Centre en famille today to buy a new suitcase for our trip to Mexico. We bought a large blue Samsonite that has four wheels on the bottom, so that one of us can easily pull it while pushing a stroller, and also so that Jamie can amuse himself by pushing it (empty) around the house.

Most of what I know about interacting with children comes from helping raise my godchildren, who are both high-functioning examples from the ADHD spectrum. I have never met a child though who minded routine, or having everything explained to him before, during and after, regardless of how familiar it was. "We're going in the car now. There's the car. We're getting in the car. We're in the car." etc. Jamie's no exception: everyday we accumulate new ritual actions and dialogue; and I can't imagine living life any other way.

Today's child-rearing quote, heard on Radio Canada: "C'est plus facile d'élever sa voix que d'élever ses enfants."

2005-01-15 23:00 (John) Continuing on from yesterday's discussion of routine, of course the reason we end up trying to instil routine in Jamie's life is because of what sometimes happens when routine is broken. On Saturdays, Jamie and I usually go to the St. Lawrence (farmer's) Market together to do our weekly grocery shopping. That we did, though perhaps because of his huge meal last night and a near diaper-buster in the morning, he slept in and we got off to a late start.

He was happy to sit in his stroller the entire time, munching on samples of this and that (samosas, croissants, apples, bagels, lox), and it wasn't until we were on the way home that I realized my error. Usually, Jamie gets a little restless in the stroller, so I let him run alongside while we shop. That means he gets some exercise, which in turn means that he feels tired and in need of a nap in the afternoon.

Not today. He skipped the first two hours of his usual afternoon nap, sleeping lightly (and under great duress) from 16:00 to 17:00, and woke up not especially refreshed. After our semiweekly telephone conference with Tai-Tai, I took him over to Browning for dinner, as they have a whole house full of toys and distractions that make our collection look spartan. He's in bed sleeping peacefully now though, and I think he'll have a good night's sleep tonight.

2005-01-15 24:30 (John) We've been putting on the local classical music station the last few nights because Jamie's used to it from the car, and it seems to keep him calmer than random background noises. I think we have to switch to CDs or streamed MP3s though, because everytime the announcer comes on to identify the music, Jamie stirs, and on news breaks he tends to wake up.

2005-01-16 24:00 (John) Jamie woke up a little early and went off to Kettleman's Bagels with Kristen to buy provisions for the first annual Toronto-Mississauga interclub Scrabble match, which took place today at our house. Jamie was a little concerned at the invasion of his house by nine players of varying familiarity and the putting away of his toys and Scrabble rug, but pleased with the buffet we set up on the coffee table, delighted with the veggie dip I made (spinach, red pepper, green onions, sour cream, mayonnaise, salt, pepper) and comforted by his Teletubbies. When everything quieted down in the evening, he spent some time with Gary and Ayami to bring him back to normalcy.

Did I say he liked the dip? He has decided he Likes Dips, and spent a good fifteen minutes amusing himself dipping, licking, splattering, wiping, etc. I will have to research Other Interesting Dips for him to try out.

He also likes Feeding People, because he has observed that people spend a lot of time feeding each other, or at least him. He fed me a lot of carrots today, and I wish he would learn to accept my "I'm done" (gochisousama) signal. My stomach is rumbling.

2005-01-17 22:50 (Kristen) It was a quiet day, but still full of observations about our favourite boy. Jamie is enjoying learning to eat with his little spork, and meals go much more smoothly when I spear food for him to put on the spork so that he can put it into his mouth himself as I praise him fulsomely. He really blossoms and thrives under praise: yes, I know, most people do, but it's so immediate with him. He still isn't completely willing to brush his teeth with help...a few swipes, however, do not teeth brush. I help him, but he hates it, and howls in protest. To even the score, I let him brush my teeth, and now it is de rigeur that when I finish brushing his teeth, he gets to brush mine. He's somewhat gleeful about it. He tried to climb out of the bathtub tonight in search of me when I didn't appear when he called, and nearly made it (note to those about to call the police on me: he was with John) (John: to clarify further, he would have made it out on his own if Kristen hadn't stopped him.). He enjoys watching Teletubbies while seated in the lap of a favoured person. Ken took him for a walk today for the first time since the end of November. It was a success. He enjoyed running around the house with his hippo, picking up peek-a-blocks, and making the little battery-powered train that goes with his Brio set go off the tracks. He was happy. It was a good day.

(John) As shown in the photos, Jamie hopped on my back piggyback style as we were going down the stairs, and thoroughly enjoyed a romp around the house. Jamie also made tremendous progress with his shape sorter, repeatedly getting the tricky star through the star-shaped hole.

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

Back to Vol. 0 No. 61, or up to Jamie Chew's Web Log Archive. or forward to Vol. 0 No. 63.