Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 0 No. 68

2005-02-22 13:15 (John) We all woke up at 6:30 this morning. Kristen went for one last yoga class, while Jamie and I had breakfast and then went to pick up Tai-Tai and the car. When Kristen was done, we all finished packing perishables and laundry - Jamie helped by munching on stray guavas and prioritizing toys ("this one doesn't go in the suitcase yet").

We left our big suitcases with Coni Butcher, took everything else over to the Pagoda, and my dad and I went out for a swim while Kristen took Jamie out for a nap-inducing walk. (We saw the whole shebang - five big fat barracudas over the Ojo de Agua, three ocean triggerfish, a huge school of pompanos, a yellow jack nearly a yard long, and just as off the palapa pier a stubby-tailed spotted eagle ray.

Kristen and my mom are out snorkelling now, and when they get back we'll have a bite to eat, take Jamie to say goodbye to the ocean, and head to the airport.

2005-02-22 21:30 (John) We're about three quarters of the way through our flight home now, and everything has gone fairly smoothly so far. We were at the airport in plenty of time, didn't have to wait in any lines, had farewell ice cream with my parents at the airport restaurant, got a free seat between us for Jamie, who was very excited to be on the plane.

We've been telling Jamie about the trip home for a couple of days now, and he understood that we were leaving my parents and going back to the house with Gary and Ayami. I think much of his excitement is the anticipation of returning to Toronto.

Anyway, he managed to keep himself awake through a full Teletubbies DVD and some ABCs and Elmo flash animation, but is now dozing peacefully in Kristen's lap.

2005-02-22 25:41 (Kristen) We landed on time around 10:30 P.M., with a sleeping Jamie. We waited until we were the last people off the plane before trying to lift him and dash the length of the plane to where the stroller was, assemble it, and put a sleeping Jamie into the stroller without having a Wide Awake and Unhappy Jamie. Score one for us: with the help of a kind ground crew person, we made it. Then we had to go outside briefly with a child in a stroller covered only by a thin blanket and a light coat and plunge onto a shuttle bus to take us from the Boonies of Pearson to Terminal 1. To make matters more challenging, it was full of a troop of high school students returning from Cancun. Score two for us. Then it was another plunge off the bus and into the terminal, and up to claim our baggage. We made it through without incident, and were found by a man whose fare hadn't shown up and was looking for a fare to take into town. That was easy: then we successfully transferred a sleeping Jamie into the carseat. I then told John that if we got him home and into bed without him waking up that I was going to buy a lottery ticket. I'll go out and pick it up tomorrow morning, because he made it into bed without stirring, and has stayed asleep since. It will be a little disorienting for him to wake up in his Toronto bed tomorow, but I think that will only last a minute as he dives out of bed and into his next set of adventures back home.

2005-02-23 25:39 (Kristen) Jamie woke up at 8:00 or so, which wasn't bad, considering how much sleep he had the night before. John and I were feeling a little rougher, and John spent much of the morning recuperating from yesterday and working in bed getting ready for the Scrabble Club's 30th birthday party this evening (the pleasures of laptops and wireless networks). Jamie waited until he had eaten half a mango and two guavas before insisting on knocking on Gary and Ayami's door. They answered, and Jamie flung himself with a huge grin into Gary's arms, making him late(r) for work. After Gary peeled himself away, Jamie played with Ayami a bit before allowing himself to be dressed. We went for a walk to the Big Carrot, and sure enough, he fell asleep by 11:15 or so. We picked up Ross at lunch, had something to eat with Ross and Michelle (Daniel was on a field trip), and took Ross back to school. Jamie slept through it all, and finally awoke when I was picking up my groceries where I had left them at Michelle's. We ended up spending the afternoon there as Jamie visited his favourite places and things at Browning, including the new activity of vacuuming the kitchen floor with the central vac. We headed home to get ready for the Scrabble club tonight, and to feed Jamie even more. I gave him half of a small avocado, nori, and umeboshi* paste on rye, which he happily ate/sucked/ingested. This is the sort of sandwich that John's mom makes for him, and he seems to like very much.

He fell asleep just outside the club tonight, and slept through registration. He played with John for the first hour, and then with me for the rest of the night while John ran the club. It was the club's thirtieth anniversary, so it was very busy. Jamie was particularly frenetic, and didn't even fall asleep in the car on the way home, which I had expected. So it was a bath with Dad (no screaming: not even a peep!), and straight to bed after playing with Gary and Ayami again. Everything seems to be where he left it, and he has been very happy to see all his people again.

2005-02-24 21:20 (John) After Jamie's breakfast, I took Jamie to the Sobey's supermarket to go shopping for my own breakfast. I still can't get over the difference in colour palette here; the stark bluish white of the ubiquitous snow is nothing like the warm, buttery white of the coral sand in the Yucatan, and it makes our tans stand out all the more.

Jamie continues to be delightedly revisiting his familiar things: mainly brooms, hockey sticks, Swiffer mops, and anything else that he can push around on the floor. He tried calling them "baba" today, which I think is his version of "broom", and marks the first time he's made up a baby word instead of having us give it to him.

He's not especially happy about the whole snowsuit and snow boots thing, but is putting up with it. We spent a happy half hour in front of the house with Jamie alternately watching me shovel snow out of the driveway (leftover accumulation from our absence) and following the construction work going on across the street. Jamie is also learning about puddles of ice, and traction.

We had both lunch and dinner at Browning, where the kids were all happy to play together, but we're going to bed early tonight to avoid catching what I hope is a mild cold bug from them.

2005-02-25 22:33 (Kristen) Jamie slept for a very long time last night, waking up and getting out of bed finally at 10:00. He was happy and chipper, eating a good breakfast before hammering on the basement door for Ayami to come up and play with him. We went to have lunch with Daniel and Ross, and Jamie went for his walk with Ken while I worked for a few hours at Timothy's.

Ken dropped Jamie off at home while I was still out, and so I headed home to find Jamie and John "shovelling" snow: rather, John was shovelling and Jamie was pushing snow around with a broom. We really have to buy him a shovel of his own, and maybe a hockey stick or two: he is obsessed with brooms, mops, showevls, and swiffers. Anything that looks like a honking long stick with soomething on the end. Tonight in the bathroom, he grabbed an old mop and was swinging it about, with John and I avoiding being hit or having it hit something important like a vaudeville routine in a Buster Keaton movie. I pulled him away from his snowy work with a trip to the grocery store before we came home and Ayami came upstairs again to Jamie's imperious knock.

I fed Jamie some soup and crackers while I was talking with Ayami, and he was remarkably adept at getting the soup into his own mouth with a deep spoon. That's not to say that there wasn't soup all over the tray...there was some...but by and large, most of it ended up in his mouth. Well done! It was a quiet evening at home tonight, and Jamie is waking up right now. Maybe John will add something.

(John) I took Jamie to Sobey's supermarket after dinner to let him run around a bit (you have to use your imagination when it's cold outside), which worked fine until he discovered that the barbecued soy beans bin in the bulk section had no lid. Not that he wanted to eat them; he just wanted to shovel them onto the floor. Fortunately, the produce section was not far away, so I bribed him with an apple (he hasn't had any since before Mexico), and he happily worked his way through half a McIntosh before bedtime.

2005-02-26 23:15 (John) Daniel and I took Jamie shopping at the St. Lawrence Market today, so Kristen could get some peace and quiet. Jamie and I were returning after a monthlong absence, and it was made quite clear which of us was missed. "Ohmigod, it's that beautiful baby!" "I love your baby's hair!" "Awww...!" everywhere we went. His fans are quite devoted too, because not one of them mentioned that he was coated in food (guavas practically inhaled on the car ride down, along with Pepperidge Farm goldfish, a McIntosh apple that he worked on all day and a spinach cheese croissant). Thanks to Daniel's heroic efforts Jamie stayed awake for the whole two and a half hours of shopping (we're having people over for brunch tomorrow, so we needed to buy more than the usual), but he passed out in the car on the way home and stayed conked out for two and a half hours.

Toward the end of Jamie's nap Daniel helped me build a large snow fort in the back yard, which we hope Jamie will play with tomorrow. See photos.

For dinner, we took our outgoing and soon-to-be-missed tenant Rika Shiraishi out to our favourite# Laotian Thai restaurant, Ban Vanipha, which we last visited the month after Jamie was born. Jamie thoroughly enjoyed the tom kha gai (chicken and galangal soup), which I think I'm going to have to start making for him at home, and didn't mind the larb gai (my fave#) or the purple sticky rice and beans cooked in a banana leaf. He also (crazy Icelandic boy) insisted on going out for walks in the cold to inspect the snowbanks and traffic, learning a new word "Densha!" (Streetcar!) in the process.

When we came home, Jamie played with Gary for a while so that we could cook some more for brunch tomorrow, and I'm off now to do some more of that.

2005-02-27 22:42 (Kristen) Today we had Daniel, Ross, Tom, Michelle, Leslie, Peter, Laura, their son Jonathan, and John's aunts Nobuko and Tomoko over for a Mexican brunch. We have a lot of food that we brought back, and rather than let it spoil, it seemed best to cook it all and invite friends to eat it with us. We had started cooking yesterday, and were mostly ready this morning when our guests started to arrive around 11:00. Gary and Rika also came, and Jamie had a good time with many of his favourite people under one roof. After brunch, Sam and Ben came over to play with Daniel, Ross, and Jamie in the snow fort that was built yesterday, have hot chocolate, watch Totoro, and give their mom some quiet time (Betsy's two-month-old, Luke, is in the hospital). Jamie didn't sleep for very long today, despite (or because of) the excitement, but he ate very well today.

(John) Brunch consisted of (more or less left to right in the photo): two slide shows of our photos and Peter and Leslie's, cumin guacamole, refried beans, two types of corn chips, plain store-bought salsa, pico* de gallo*, salsa verde, arroz verde, chorizos, beans and cheese, tortilla casserole, coffee, chipotle sauce (two kinds), corn tortillas, huachinango tikinchik (red snapper with achiote), scrambled eggs with nopal, fried plantain, homemade limeade, orange juice, apple cider, grape juice, grapes, guavas, and Japanese kasutera cake made with Mexican vanilla.

After brunch, and the snow fight (where Jamie eagerly swept the battlefield clean with his broom), I had to go to Canadian Tire to look for two sale items, which it turned out were (severally) not in saleable condition and sold out. Faced with having to spend either ten dollars on merchandise or eight dollars on parking, I went to the sporting goods section for a quintessential Canadian dad moment.

We've mentioned Jamie's obsession with sweeping in recent weeks: mops, brooms, Swiffers, you name it, he has to be pushing some great big stick around on the floor all day. I figured he's either telling me he wants to grow up to be a janitor, or he's ready to play hockey, and sure enough when I showed up with two 40" plastic hockey sticks and a street hockey ball, his eyes lit up and he deftly stick-handled the ball from the door to his SpongeBob throne.

I sure don't know where he gets it from. Kristen and I have done our best to pass on our bookish traits to our offspring, but I guess he's Canadian deep down. I confess I was a little misty-eyed picking out Jamie's first hockey stick at the store, casting a furtive glance at "junior starter kits" of hockey equipment, and was surprised at how emotional an experience it was for me.

(Kristen) Tonight, we went to Tom and Michelle's for chicken katsu, and Jamie finally managed to make it up their stairs without me looking. He was pretty wired when we came home, but very tired, and was in bed and asleep by 10:00 or so. Tonight, I spoke with our former tenant, Chihoko, who will help babysit Jamie during the mornings this week while we try to find someone who will look after him on a more permanent basis for the same time for the next three months while I work and John finishes his thesis. After that, we hope that we can have him start Japanese-language day care in the mornings, which I think he will enjoy very much. Our boy continues to grow, and grow, and grow.

2005-02-28 23:18 (Kristen) It was up around 8:10 this morning, with incentive to stay in bed until 9:00 or so. We tried, and failed, to see Jamie's pediatrician this morning, because that problem with a salivary gland in his cheek seems to have returned. Around six months or so ago, he may have had a blocked salivary gland that made one cheek larger than the other. There is a lump in his cheek again, and it is larger than the other again. More news as it develops.

We went to Browning for lunch, and then Ken took Jamie for his walk. John and I worked at Timothy's until Ken called at 2:30, saying that Jamie was awake and demanding food. We took him home, fed him, and then let him run around the back yard while John shovelled yet more snow. They say that there was no snow while we were in Mexico: how nice of them to have saved it all up for our return. Jamie, however, decided that he would like to see Daniel and Ross, and walked John over to their house. We ended up staying for dinner again, and Jamie had fun trying to use chopsticks to stuff spaghetti into his mouth. He is pretty determined to use them the way that John and I do, and was starting to have some success in shovelling food into his mouth. If it had been something sticky, and not slippery like spaghetti, he probably would have done it. Later, I took Jamie into the basement while John, Tom, and Ross were busy at important activities, and Jamie melted down on me. He was jumpy while we were in Mexico: loud noises would make him climb up John and me like we were trees and he was a monkey. He did this again to me, while I was sitting, and I couldn't calm him down. Finally, he laid his little sweaty head on my chest, and I stroked his hair, shushing him. Sure enough, he was asleep in less than two minutes. I don't recall the last time that I put him to sleep in my arms without the benefit of nursing: it was at least nine months ago. He woke up when we tried to take him home, but he went to sleep well enough when it was officially "time," after his bath. Maybe it was teeth, maybe fatigue. It was strange, but it felt so nice to have him fall asleep on my shoulder like that again.

(John) I didn't get to spend too much time with Jamie today, but what I did was a lot of fun. Shovelling snow with Jamie, as he helpfully pointed out stray bits of snow with his broom; the ever more elaborate bathtime rituals and play, revolving these days on imaginary construction accidents ("Uh-oh, digger as played by the yellow stacking cup has just dropped a full load of debris as played by bath water on Dad's face! Gasp!"). He's always been happy to take baths, but since we got back from Mexico, he's been trying to climb into the tub as soon I sit down in it.

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

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