Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 0 No. 79

2005-05-10 22:15 (Kristen) Jamie's use of language grows by leaps and bounds. I'm pretty sure that I've lost count of how many words he knows, and he is parrotting and learning at least two a day. He's getting pretty clever about how to use the words, too. Today, Mio asked him if he needed a diaper change, noting a suspicious smell near Our Boy. Jamie beamed at her, said "Bye-bye poo!" and led her upstairs to the change table. He was pretty pleased with himself, and we were all pretty impressed ourselves.

He ran around outside in sandals with Mio today for a couple of hours, and so we can chalk up his shoes as the culprits behind his lack of enthusiasm for walking by himself. His sandals still fit, being open-toed, and we have a pair of back-up sneakers for the times when he will need them. However, I don't think that he'll enjoy cramming his feet into a hot pair of sneakers this summer, and will likely live in sandals.

With his increased activity, his lunch was much quieter, and involved more food ingestion, and less food flinging. We're also giving him less, and making sure that he eats what he has before offering more. This helps. He ran around outside with Mio, giggling wildly, and walked to school with Daniel and Ross, checking out all possible places to sit, inclined planes to walk on, and metal poles to slap for the ringing tone on the way. He played with Mio again in the afternoon after his nap, as I had a hard deadline to meet, and John still isn't feeling his best, as they say, after yesterday's dental surgery. We ate dinner together, after Mio went home, and then went with Ross West to the Dairy Queen, where Jamie showed a slight preference for John's butterscotch dip cone to my cherry sundae. He walked there and back most of the way, and so was pretty tired when we brought him in. He fell asleep on my lap while I sang to him in the bathroom while we waited for the tub to fill up, but I failed to successfully transfer him to bed afterwards. It was back into the bathroom for a bath with John, and then finally to sleep.

2005-05-11 23:00 (John) We took Jamie to see Dr. Albino Chiodo, an otolaryngologist, for the first time today. Longtime readers may recall that Jamie has had an intermittently swollen left cheek, which seems to worsen when teething, and was worst late last summer. We showed Dr. Chiodo photos from that time, and he examined Jamie's ears and cheeks (inside and out). He said that it's either salivary or lymphatic, and either a stone or a congenital abnormality (such as a stenosis), and is sending us back to Toronto East General Hospital (where Jamie was born) for an ultrasound next Wednesday.

Mio came and looked after Jamie for the afternoon, so that Kristen could work, and I could experiment further with the pharmacokinetics of codeine. We had ma po tofu dinner at Tai-Tai's, then headed up to the Scrabble club on our regular Wednesday night schedule. Jamie gorged himself on excellent seed rye that Lisa picked up for us at a local bakery, fell asleep on the way back home and is sleeping peacefully now.

2005-05-12 23:17 (Kristen) Jamie fell asleep in the car last night on the way home from the scrabble club around 10:00, which isn't much later than usual. He slept in until 10:00 this morning, which was unusual. He stirred around 7:00, nursed his usual morning snack, and stayed asleep. I got up around 9:00, wandered around, had a quiet breakfast, let Mio in, and still he slept. Finally he woke up, and was in a pleasant mood (which was not a given: sometimes he is very crabby when he wakes up after a particularly long sleep). He wasn't all that hungry, though, and because he had woken up so late, he didn't run his feet off the way that he usually does in the morning (in fact, he watched a little tv instead).

At Browning for lunch, he ate some fruit but not much else as he had eaten relatively recently. I was concerned about his walk with Ken, and figured that he'd sleep for forty-five minutes or so near the end of the walk. Ken met me on the Danforth at 3:00, and told me that Jamie had Not Slept. At All. He was cheerful, and had enjoyed his walk, but not a wink. I was resigned, and figured that some food might help the no-sleep situation. So, we went home, and I managed to convince him to eat some kielbasa, cheese, and raspberries. Once that was done, we headed out the door again in search of sleep and other adventure. He held on until we were almost near the Danforth about ten minutes away from home before drooping and falling asleep. He stayed that way for an hour and a half, before waking up when John and I were walking him home from Bill's Garden Centre.

Dinner was at Browning, and Jamie ate two dinners, both small, a couple of hours apart. He played with John in the basement for an hour, which gave me a chance to rest, and was very happy to see the moon on the way home. He had his head on my shoulder, gazing up at the sky, and listened sleepily while I recited a good chunk of Goodnight Moon from memory. He had his bath, and took a long time to fall asleep tonight, finally closing his eyes a little before 11:00. I think that I'll wake him up tomorrow morning by 8:30, even if he isn't too thrilled by it, and try to get him back on schedule.

2005-05-13 22:42 (Kristen) As if to make up for being a sleepyhead yesterday, Jamie was bright- eyed and bushy-tailed at 8:00. That suited me, as I had a chance to get him and myself dressed, fed, and ready when Mio arrived at 9:00. I got a full morning of work in, and met Mio and Jamie over at Browning. They had gone to play at the school playground, and then met us. Jamie was well run about, and a little tired. That's the only explanation I can think of for why he suddenly was so frightened of Ken. He had run up to Ken and swiped at his knees, playfully, and when Ken came up behind him in the living room a minute after, he cried out like he was terrified. He clung to me, and wouldn't let me go. I calmed him down after some work, but he decided that Ken was now Scary, and would cry whenever he saw him. Understand that Ken has been taking Jamie for walks since he was five months old or so, and Jamie loves going for walks with him. The only explanation we could come up with was that he wasn't ready to go for a walk, and knew that Ken would take him away from me and John. We walked with Jamie and Ken down to the Danforth and across as far as the Second Cup (a good ten-minute walk), and said proper goodbyes before he and Ken went off. Ken said that he cried for a block or two, and then fell asleep. He slept until 3:30, when he woke up in the front hall of our house, in the stroller. He was still upset, but we had an hour of quality Jamie and Mom time (read: Jamie nursed and I cuddled him) which put him back to rights.

He could be going through a spate of separation anxiety, as he is nursing more than usual (every hour or so, if he can) in the afternoons and evenings when we see more of each other, and doesn't want me out of his sight for longer than a few minutes. He will go off with John and Mio, and will play with other kids if they are around, but if it's just him and me, we're conjoined. Oh well, it's not like he isn't fun to be with.

We've been looking for sidewalk chalk for Jamie, but it's a popular item in this neighbourhood. The conquering hero, John found some today, and left the bucket on the front porch. Jamie, no fool, found it pretty much instantly, and knew what it was and what it was for. We spent a pleasant half hour outside, drawing this and that on the sidewalk. It's raining right now, so Nature is erasing and cleaning our chalkboard in time for tomorrow's artistic endeavours.

2005-05-14 22:00 (John) We were all up by about 8:00 this morning, which was easier for some of us than others, according to when we went to sleep last night. More surprisingly, we managed to leave for the market by 10:00, a recent record, stopping to pick up orders and snacks from my mom and then again to drop Kristen off at the library to work. Jamie enjoyed playing with the current installation at the Toronto Sculpture Garden (not yet shown on their web site), which consisted of a geodesic jungle gym in a sand pit, with two Muskoka chairs in front of sets of bicycle pedals that generate electricity to light up an LED sign.

He then ate his way across the market (chicken samosa, turkey kielbasa, garden cucumber and raspberries) and Loblaws (cherries) before passing out in the car with a very full stomach. We picked up Kristen and Jamie napped for about an hour and a half, just in time to get changed and go pick up Auntie Jennifer at Union Station. We went to the Second Cup for more fuel and running around, came home in a fruitless attempt to nap, and then spent the evening at Browning cooking (scallops and fiddleheads) and making much noise.

2005-05-15 25:00 (John) I'm not sure why but we were all very sleepy today. We went to the Detroit Eatery, a diner on the Danforth that Kristen likes to take her family to whenever they visit, and then took Jamie over to Withrow Park to use up the rest of our collective energy. Jamie fell asleep at about 12:30 on the way back home, and I sat on the porch (yay, wireless) and watched over him while Kristen took Jennifer back to Union Station by subway.

We had a few more people look at the room we have available for rent again, and Jamie was at his kawaii* best. For dinner, we went to Pearls and I made one of our regular favourites, the huachinango* tikinchik*.

The highlight of my day was in the bath, when Jamie added the word "Duckie" to his vocabulary while I was performing my nightly rendition of the Sesame Street classic, "Rubber Duckie".

(Kristen) He can say 'mango' very clearly too, and lately has added 'oh no!' to his running monologue throughout the day. He let me cut his fingernails with a clipper while he was awake for the first time yesterday. It helped that he was nursing at the time, but that hadn't helped in the past. I was very proud of him.

2005-05-16 22:41 (Kristen) Jamie had a disturbed night last night, and something seems to be bothering him. His cheek is a little more swollen than usual, which if it remains so, means that we'll be taking him back to Dr. Chiodo so he can see the swelling in action. Wednesday is the ultrasound, so that may be helpful too. He is also drooling a good deal, so it may just be teeth. Who knows? I am waiting for when he can explain things to me better.

He is, however, chattering away in his own way. "Oh no!" (more of a neouw!) is used to cover everything from 'oops' to 'augh! keep that scary thing away" to "forget whatever it is that you're thinking, because I'm not doing it!" Today, we were playing with his new sidewalk chalk (brilliant invention), and I was drawing letters on the driveway for him. He can now, almost every time, identify the letters B, M, and O, and can identify, with about 70-80% success and only a tiny bit of prodding, S, A, and E. We're working on H too. He learned S and E today, and thinks that S is hilarious because I teach him the sound, not necessarily the name of the letter (his ABC computer game is fine for that purpose right now). So, I ask him "What sound does that make?" and he supplies the sound. So, S is for snake and makes a ssssss sound, which he thinks is very funny. Possibly because it is close to the sound we make for a bodily function, now that I think of it, but maybe not (toddler humour is very quirky). I'll keep at it tomorrow, and I hope that he'll learn the rest of the alphabet this way. He's pretty quick, and seems more limited by his physical inability to pronounce certain letters than anything else.

It was a normal day, with Mio over in the morning. John helped Daniel and Michelle with an orientation meeting at Daniel's new school for next year because Tom is away, and so was into the evening. Because it was Monday and there was fish to fry, I made dinner with Ken instead. Ross was a big help keeping Jamie amused while I cooked, but I had no choice but to cook with a Jamie on my hip a few times. It was nice to know that I could get things done with a fractious toddler with a minimum of tears and hysteria. Jamie had a huge meal, eating his spinach, zucchini, rice, chicken, salmon, and okra with gusto and a fork. He's getting really good with utensils. He enjoyed looking at the moon on the way home, and fell asleep without incident.

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

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