Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 0 No. 74

2005-04-05 22:15 (Kristen) I forgot to mention yesterday that when we had a prospective tenant over, Jamie grabbed her hand and attempted to make her play with him the entire time that she was here. We don't know if he confused her with Mio (which is less likely) or if he has realized that all Japanese women are indulgent towards little children like himself and he'd found a new victim...ahem... playmate.

After going to sleep late last night, Jamie slept in until 9:30. He played with Mio, and really is enjoying the little Fisher-Price trike that my mom got for him for Christmas. We had lunch at Browning, he had his walk, and only slept for an hour and a half (barely). Perhaps it was because he woke up late, but it may be also that he has a new eyetooth poking through. I discovered it while we were playing and he was upside-down, laughing. The funny thing about this one is that it is the tooth kitty corner to the other one: he has diagonal fangs. Very strange: his teeth are coming in in an odd order, but they're not obviously crooked or otherwise a problem. He hasn't slept with Leon by himself for over a week now, and the teeth may be part of the reason. Maybe he'll start putting himself to sleep again now that the tooth is through, but I'll not hold my breath. As a person once said, it's not the despair but the hope that does you in.

(John) We took our neighbour Ben for a walk to Jackman School at the end of the afternoon. Ben delighted in demonstrating all sorts of hazardous activities to Jamie, but Jamie exhibited restraint for the most part. He did however insist that he could climb the three-metre geodesic dome by himself, which caused me a few moments of concern.

2005-04-06 22:50 (Kristen) Jamie was awake around 8:30, which suits me well these days. Mio arives at 9:00, and that gives us enough time to get changed and into breakfast before Mio takes over. I'm getting a lot of work done, which is good, but I need more work to come in, which is bad. The joys of freelancing.

Jamie went outside twice in the morning, and ran around for close to two hours in total. I think that's why he was so tired by 12:30, and nearly fell asleep in his highchair#. It was very cute: his eyes would droop, and he would let his head loll forwards so that Mio and I had to talk to him very loudly and brush his lips with a spoonful of food to get him to eat. If he didn't eat, then he wouldn't nap for very long, and would wake up hysterically hungry. We did manage to get a respectable amount of food into him, before he went off for a walk with Mio. He slept for three hours, and was in a moderately good mood afterwards.

He is missing the snow, and wanders around with his shovel, looking for things to shovel. John is looking forward to gardening with Jamie: we think that he'll take to it. The digging part, anyway. We ate dinner at John's parents' place, where John's mom had found some child-sized chopsticks. John rigged them up so that Jamie could hold both of them at once, and he managed to get some noodles into his mouth using them. Much applause from the surrounding adults.

He proved that he is blood of my blood today, and John's too, when he decided that the truck book that John bought for him was just "un-putdownable" as the bestseller blurbs say. He set off for his walk with it open on his lap, and reads it at the highchair#. He had it on his lap on the drive to the Scrabble club, letting me sit up front with John for the first time in a while. They say that children do what they see, and he sees a lot of book reading. This is the first time that he seemed to really enjoy doing it for himself as opposed to having people read to him. He also likes the board books that I got for him from the library yesterday. I am so very proud and pleased.

He had fun running around the community centre tonight while I played Scrabble, and we found a nice, comfy place to read and nurse together while we waited for John. He really liked it when I let him fall backwards between my knees while I was sitting on the couch, and we must have done that for fifteen minutes. He changed into his pajamas for the drive home, and fell asleep in the car. He's still sleeping peacefully, and I have the feeling that I've forgotten a lot of the neat things that he did today. The days are getting richer with anecdote and activity, as he learns more and more about his world and interacts with it more and more. I'm losing track of the words that he's picking up ('nanana' for 'banana,' 'boh' for 'boat,' etc.), and he's getting to be a little boy, and I never imagined that it would be so much fun.

2005-04-07 22:50 (John) Jamie and I went out for a walk before dinner, heading toward the lookout point at the end of Chester Hill Road, but we didn't quite make it because there were too many points of interest along the way. Magic pebbles and sticks on the ground, cars and buses, dogs and cats, but above all Things to Climb Up and Down. Mostly little embankments and retaining walls. Jamie would go "Eee!" climbing up, then "Ah!" going down. Over and over again.

(Kristen) Jamie woke up in fine fettle, after sleeping in until a little after 9:00. He enjoyed playing outside with Mio, and watched some Teletubbies for the first time in a while. He is starting to pick out what he wants to watch, and what he doesn't, which always impresses me. He continued to be thrilled by his truck book, and is still showering favour on his stuffed lion, Leon.

He didn't sleep until nearly an hour into his walk, and ended up sleeping for only an hour. He was in a pretty good mood for all of that, however, and lasted until 9:30, when it was bathtime. He exercised his ability to choose, or to have a plan and execute it, when he started doing his "run in a circuit around the bathroom" routine, in a slightly hyper fashion. We put him in the bath, and he promptly climbed back out, soaking wet, to continue his circuit. This marks the first time that he has gotten out of the tub almost entirely on his own. He fell asleep pretty quickly after I picked him up, wrapped him in a bog blue towel, and brought him into the bedroom. A little nurse, a little visit with Leon, and some quiet gave us one sleeping boy.

2005-04-08 21:59 (Kristen) Jamie's been bothered with teeth lately, to the extent that I dosed him up with Tempra around noon, so that he could sleep on his outing with Ken. He was crying a good deal, which is not common, and was hard to distract, even with a trip outside and lots of trucks. He seemed to feel better afterwards, and while drooling, hasn't shown that degree of discomfort again. I was brushing his teeth and checking on the teeth that I know are showing up, when I saw a white flash in the back of his mouth. Sure enough, I stuck my finger into his mouth (which he permitted for a second before removing it) and found a new tooth. It's a second-year molar, in the back left, and it's not supposed to show up before the eye tooth (working on it) or the first year molar. There's a little gap between it and where the fang is going to be. I'm flabbergasted. He's also working on two more eye teeth, and a first-year molar. Poor guy. But, he'll be able to chew crunchy things, and I know that he's going to love that.

He also learned how to turn on the cold water faucet in the bathroom. He can flush the toilet and turn on the water in the sink. I'm shaking my head, imagining our water bills. In other respects, it was a normal day. He played with Mio, slept for two hours, and ate a good deal of food. A little Teletubbies, and life is complete.

2005-04-09 22:10 (John) Kristen looked after Jamie in the morning, while I looked after tech support for the School Scrabble Championship, then I took Jamie and my mom to the St. Lawrence Market. My mom had packed a lunch for each of us, so Jamie ate my mom's lunch, finishing just in time to fall asleep as I was unloading the stroller from the parked car. This disappointed his usual fans at the market, but did make for faster shopping. He woke up at Loblaws, and took great glee (the only kind he ever takes) in running up and down all the aisles with us. I'll let Kristen take over from here.

(Kristen) Jamie woke up around 8:00, which was around the time that I had to get up anyway. He ran about and read books, watched Teletubbies, and played with his toys before it was time to go with John and his mom to the market. He came home wide awake and happy as a lark, and I thought that there was no way that boy was coming inside. It was a beautiful day, so I went with it: Jamie played with his trike and his shovel, and I worked on the front yard. Gary and Ayami saw us, and came to play with Jamie and talk with me for a little while.

Jamie enjoyed dragging Gary and Ayami around, as he hasn't seen much of either of them lately. When they went in, we saw Ben and Alexandria come by, and we ended up packing Jamie into the stroller for a walk down to the Danforth with Ayami (who was going to work) and our neighbour, Betsy (Ben's mom). Jamie enjoyed the walk, as he munched on a spinach-cheese croissant and read his truck book. When we got home, he played with Sam and Ben for a few minutes before everyone scattered to their respective dinners. John had gone to Chinatown to see his chiropractor, and came back with noodle soups from our favourite noodle shop. Much food was had, and John then volunteered to watch Jamie for an hour while I played a game of Scrabble with Glenn Mosher, who had dropped by. Jamie still insisted on a nurse in the middle of my game, which was a challenge to my concentration, but it was so nice to have a spontaneous game. Jamie almost fell asleep before his bath, and we had a speed bath to get him into bed before meltdown. I gave him some Tempra because his teeth seem to be bothering him again, and I think that it'll be rough until those three new teeth come in.

2005-04-10 22:10 (John) It was a beautiful spring day today, 18° C, sunny, irises, tulips and petasites growing visibly.

(Kristen continues) It was the sort of day that you can't waste indoors, and so we went out to do errands after Jamie was awake. He slept in until 10:30 this morning, much to my great surprise, as I thought initially that I was doomed around 7:30 when he started stirring. We had a breakfast of Mexican eggs (scrambled eggs with sauteed onion, garlic, goat's cheese, and tomatoes, with some nopalitos. The white, red, and green effect mimics the colours in the Mexican flag.), mangos and guavas, and headed out.

Jamie thought that Home Depot was very interesting, and liked Sanko, the Japanese food store too. We bought some eisei* bourou*, which are a Japanese baby snack made of potato starch. Jamie loved them. He didn't spend much time in the store, however, as he needed to run up and down the sidewalk on the side street where Sanko's parking lot is, and charm everyone he saw. He was full of beans. We headed home, and he fell asleep just before we got there. It was such a great day that I didn't want to go in, so I took Jamie for a long walk. He had fallen asleep around 4:00 (late, because of his late wake-up) and slept until 6:30, while I went to the library, had a coffee, and gardened with John.

It was dinner at John's parents' place, and Jamie had a good time playing with blocks, impressing his grandfather by turning on the tv by himself, and eating as much as he could. He managed to get more than three mouthfuls of food into himself using chopsticks, which impressed everyone. He devoured a kumquat on the way home, which was the first time he had done so. He hasn't been thrilled by citrus before now, so that might be changing. With his late schedule, it took him a long time to fall asleep.

Today's big event was Jamie's first haircut. For those who read this blog regularly, you may have noticed that Jamie's hair was getting a little long. We'd put it off for a while, citing the wrong time, the moon in the wrong astrological house, sleeping babies, and so on, but we couldn't avoid the fact that Jamie's hair was making him look like the sheepdog in old Warner Brothers cartoons. I was terrified of making him look silly with one of those "your mom cuts your hair, doesn't she?" haircuts, but started with his bangs. Sure enough, we now have photos that will make him say "Mom, you cut my hair yourself, didn't you? Thank you [sarcasm]." We only cut his bangs, which made us both exclaim "he doesn't look like a baby anymore! He looks like a *boy*." Which, of course, was what we had been avoiding. On the bright side, we can see his beautiful face, and that's all right. He laughed and laughed at our reactions, and seems happy without the hair in his face. We'll try the rest of the hair when he's asleep, and we've got our courage back up again.

2005-04-11 22:10 (John) Jamie chooses some of his vocabulary according to his own phonetic development. He doesn't have any unvoiced consonants yet (he has B, D, G, GH, M, N, W, Y), and he finds some vowel patterns easier than others (the AH-EE of MOMMY, the AH-OO of BABOO (= ブーブー = car). So he sometimes delights in a word like YAGI (ヤギ = goat, referring to the narrator of one of his Baby Einstein books) in large part because he is able to pronounce it. At other times, he decides that he needs a word he isn't able to pronounce yet and just appropriates a word that he's heard, like NANI (何 = what, but he uses it to mean "Do that!").

The language he understands continues to grow by leaps and bounds, and I find it safest to expect that he always understands what I'm talking about, and find myself spelling out words that I don't want him to catch me saying (mainly names of foods that aren't ready to eat yet).

(Kristen)Jamie is seventeen-months-old today, and he flips back and forth between being a boy and a baby. Sometimes, when I watch his face, I see that he has rather subtle facial expressions now, but he loves exaggerated ones as well. He doesn't do them for show, although he likes the reactions they get, but will do them when he thinks no one is looking. He loves books, and likes to read them by himself now. He doesn't for long, and usually he runs and finds me to read more to him, but I am happy that he gets enjoyment out of them for his own sake.

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

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