Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 0 No. 84

2005-06-14 21:21 (Kristen) Jamie's last first-year molar has popped through his gum, but still has a way to go before it will stop bothering our boy. He's definitely in some discomfort, and there have been minutes of active pain, but he's holding on. He's a little quick to have a small temper tantrum (he stomps his little feet and yells, which is kind of funny but I make sure it doesn't show on my face), and has been hyperfocused on his trains or whatever his groove of the moment is, but otherwise is all right. The funny part about the train focus is that he has been press-ganging Ross into building track for him when Jamie is over at Browning. Ross has press-ganged others into building track for him for years, and so what went around has come around. He's being very good about helping Jamie, and the two of them will play well together for a long time, moving "densha" around the tracks. Ross is getting to understand that Jamie's need to tear up track isn't a personal criticism of the track, and Jamie is learning that a little laid track is a good thing to leave down for a while.

Speaking of densha, Ken told me that he took Jamie into a Country Style Donuts on the Danforth to the east of us yesterday, while Jamie was awake. While they were there, there was a Japanese girl sitting morosely in the corner. Jamie was talking a mile a minute about densha in his usual way, and at the sound of his little voice saying "densha? densha" perked right up, and ended up talking with Ken. He thinks that she was homesick, and a little voice helped her to feel a little less far away.

Jamie is turning into a little bit of a rules weasel. He had a piece of track in his hand at the lunch table today (I have started letting him sit at the table without his high chair tray, pulling the chair right up against the table), and was banging it on the table. I gave him three warnings, saying the third time that it was the last warning and that I would next take it away if he kept banging the table. He fumed, thought, and then lightly banged his plate, but not the table. He was within the letter, if not the spirit, of my word...like I said, a rules weasel.

2005-06-15 23:04 (Kristen) The weather has turned, and the night is cool instead of warm. The sun was hidden by cloud for most of the day, but the moon is out and half full. Our friend Jane is back from her cottage, and Jamie was delighted to see her. Jamie's tooth is still coming, and it pains him, but he is willing to be distracted. He is having tantrums, but is willing to put them aside if he is given enough warning before change occurs. The moon is in Gemini, which favours intellectual action. Jamie prefers problem solving with train tracks and reading books that involve lots of kisses to other activities.

I took Jamie for his walk this afternoon, and we hung out at the Second Cup at our favourite position on the sidewalk patio. He woke up early, however, with a great cry and I think that his teeth were hurting him greatly. He had me hold him, and he would tighten his arm around my neck whenever it hurt too much. He also insisted, between bouts, on walking and took me into the Big Carrot, although I'm still unsure why. We headed home, and played for a bit. Jane dropped by, and we were delighted to see her. We went to dinner at John's parents' place, and Jamie ate fairly well although he was more interested in drinking juice and crowing his pleasure or displeasure at this and that. He doesn't eat well when his mouth hurts, so I am hoping that it's going to ease a little to give him a bit of a break. John went to the Scrabble club without us, since I was tired and I knew that there wouldn't be a chance to play. Jamie dragged me out to Tom and Michelle's instead, where he happily played with tracks and I chatted with Michelle. Jamie cheerfully demolished a piece of banana cake while there, hopping up into into his high chair without complaint when told that cake was available.

When we went home, Jamie was looking for the moon up in the sky. When he found it, his face lit up and he had a beautiful, happy smile. He talked about the moon a good deal (moon! moon? moon!) when we went in, and I changed him into his evening attire (a fresh diaper). After brushing his teeth and washing his face and hands, I tried to get him to fall asleep in the usual rocking position that we've adopted lately, but he wouldn't settle. He insisted that I carry him downstairs (not walk on his own), and put on my shoes and take him outside so that he could look at the moon some more. He fell asleep while I rocked him at the end of the driveway, looking at the moon with that sweet look on his face. He loves the moon.

John and I were talking about how Jamie is learning to play pretend. He was pretending to eat something today while he was on the change table, with a wicked, gleeful look on his face. John saw him sitting in a plastic baby bathtub, with Jamie at one end and his doll at the other. John told him that it looked like they were in a boat, and Jamie's eyes lit up as he realized that he could pretend it was. Jamie is going to have a fun imagination.

2005-06-16 10:31 (Kristen) Jamie can now open the lock on the bathroom door by himself, despite the tricky wrist-twisting action. Arrggh.

(Kristen) Jamie is now fully in the grips of an obsession, and it's kind of nice to have the obsession be unconnected to the television. He is utterly obsessed by trains and streetcars. The dining room is awash with trains and tracks, and everyone who comes within his sphere becomes part of the train gang. In the morning, it's hard to get breakfast into him before he's off pushing trains from here to there. He's remarkably good with handling the track himself, and can put a line of track together very well. The bridges cause him some manual difficulty, but he's getting there. He demands to go over to Browning because they have more and different kinds of track there. John is muttering about going out and buying more Brio for him to make better tracks at home.

He ate very well sitting in his high chair at the table again tonight without his tray. He is slowly learning that people will play with him once they finish eating, and he will grab the first person done to drag them off and make them put track together. He ended the evening by eating two bowls of blueberries, and then running up and down the hall into the kitchen in a little ball of kinetic energy. He fell asleep pretty quickly and rather late, and is sleeping well so far...

2005-06-17 22:56 (Kristen) Mio took Jamie to watch the streetcars this morning, and then to Riverdale Park to play. She said that he played very well there, and I was very happy to hear that he got along well with others! Not a bad life skill to pick up early.

Jamie played a lot with his trains, and didn't eat very much except for blueberries until dinner. He seems to have fully entered the "I don't have enough time to eat" stage of his toddlerhood. He does understand a remarkable amount of what we tell him, however, and I think sometimes that I should be capitalizing on this somehow. He is very drawn to anything musical, and we're talking again about getting him down to the Conservatory for music classes. We'll be in town for a full two months, so we won't miss any in the way that we would have if we'd registered back in January.

I tried to put Jamie to sleep tonight by rocking him, but he was too awake, even after reading him a book three times. He pointed outside, so I took him down to look at the moon. He fell asleep when I walked him to the end of the block and back (the moon was behind a cloud) but I blew it when the screen door woke him up again. I confess that my back was starting to spasm after carrying him for so long (he's almost 30 pounds now), and so I rushed it a little rather than staying outside a little longer before trying to take him inside. A second expedition outside yielded no sleepy results, and I brought him inside to read more stories. John was working on his laptop in the bedroom, and I couldn't convince Jamie to lie down and close his eyes on his mattress. Well, he'd lie down but not close his eyes. He is now watching the Rubadubbers DVD that he bought John for John's birthday with his dad, and John seems to think that this will lull him into sleep. Not if he's like his mom: I only fall asleep in front of a movie if I've been awake for 48 hours in a row. Judging from the chirpy little voice coming out of the bedroom, he's like me. Oops... I'm being called.

2005-06-18 23:01 (Kristen) Jamie didn't fall asleep until 11:30 last night, and it looks like tonight is going to be a repeat of last night. He woke up close to 10:00 AM today, and didn't nap until 4:00, despite being stuffed full of food at the St. Lawrence Market. He slept for just under two hours, and despite behaving like a tired boy, he is Wide Awake at 11:00 PM. I was thinking recently that I had completely given up naps by the time I was eighteen months old, and that Jamie wasn't sleeping as much as he used to during his afternoon naps. My life is not going to be the same when he gives them up. His current behaviour is making me wonder if he has finally hit the stage where his afternoon nap postponed his bedtime: if he sleeps at all during the day, he won't sleep at night. Oh, what a happy thought.

As I said, Jamie went with his dad to the St. Lawrence Market this morning, and they came back a little after 1:00. I had to pick some books up at the library, and so took Jamie on a walk, thinking that he'd fall asleep on the way back. We had a nice time at the library, looking at books and talking about them. He liked the book on birds, with the photo of two lovebirds "kissing". He made a kissing sound, and pointed at the birds, obviously talking about what they were doing. It was very cute. We walked home, and had to stop off at a park, since he was very upset being in his stroller and wanted to run around.

We found a quiet little playground, and Jamie had great fun exploring. His excellent physical coordination surprises me, and he dragged me down slides and up steps, across stepping stones and up a "rock face" with handgrips on one apparatus. We did this for an hour before we left and he finally fell asleep. We camped out at the Second Cup and I was happy that I'd brought some work to do with me. John came and met us, and when Jamie woke up we went and picked up Greek food to take home. Jamie liked the calamari, but really enjoyed the olives. He adores olives, and particularly the kalamata olives which we have to pit for him. After dinner, he dragged us and our new tenant, Kayako, into the dining room to play with trains. When he tired of trains, and I took a quick break, Jamie grabbed his father and made him take him over to Daniel's house, to play with their trains.

We came home at close to 10:00, and had a bath. He sat on his new potty for a little bit, with no result but we're happy that he's getting more comfortable with the idea. When I dressed him and took him into the bedroom to rock him to sleep, he demanded to be taken outside to look at the moon. The moon was obscured by cloud, unfortunately, and the street was a little busy for him to settle. We finally came back in, and I have handed him over to John at 11:00 to work his magic. John has taken him for a little drive, and we hope that the Magic Car will do the trick.

2005-06-19 22:00 (John) Jamie's molar is continuing to cause him severe discomfort at times, but it comes and goes, and for the most part he's his usual sunny self. It's been a couple of weeks though that he's been working on this one, and everyone's looking forward to when it's all the way through.

I returned late last night from a night-time drive to put Jamie to sleep Usually I would just walk him around the block in my arms, but it was chilly, and I needed to tank up the car anyway. He's been enjoying car rides around the city lately, though we haven't tried him on anything more than half an hour or so. He understands that vehicles take you to interesting places, and that when you're driving around the city, there's a good chance of spotting a densha* (in this case, streetcar).

A few nights ago, I was trying to ease Jamie into the idea that Japanese and English were separate languages with largely separate lexica. We were eating chicken, so I said "tori", Kristen said "chicken", and when we looked at Jamie, he said "gaki". O-kay. We tried it several more times, with consistent results, and Jamie grew increasingly pleased that we were taking the time to learn his language, and had finally understood that he is speaking neither English nor Japanese, but an idiolect of his own invention.

To celebrate Father's Day, I took Kristen and Jamie to George's Trains to shop for my Father's Day presents: a Thomas the Tank Engine Figure Eight Expansion Set (because I was tired of not having any track switches to play with in Jamie's train set), and the TTTE Cargo Dropper module (because it was irking me that we had one of the shipping containers with the magnet for attaching to a crane, but no cranes to lift it with). Jamie pointed out all of the trains in the store ("densha!") and spent a happy hour playing with the Brio/TTTE displays upstairs, followed by a somewhat less happy few minutes leaving the store behind.

After setting up and playing with my presents, Jamie and I set out on his afternoon walk. He insisted that I sing "The Wheels on the Bus", which is not my favourite# children's song, but I made do by making up my own verses. Whenever I tried to switch songs though, he shook his and sang "NooOOOooo". That lulled him to sleep close to schedule around 14:01, and had it not been for a sharp toothache at 14:03, we would have had a quiet afternoon.

We watched streetcars and buses at the Broadview loop for half an hour while munching on his packed lunch, then went down a new footpath past the Riverdale Community Garden and down to the northwest corner of Riverdale Park. There, a somewhat tired Jamie jumped out of the stroller, examined a riding mower from a safe distance, then spent an hour wrestling with and blowing dandelion seeds with his father while watching the other park users play soccer or Ultimate.

He fell asleep at 15:45 on the way back up the very steep hillside to Broadview Avenue, and slept solidly for two hours until we went up to Ken and Tami's house for Father's Day dinner. As I write this, it sounds like he is playing with Kristen and Ayami downstairs, who are trying to tire him out before bath and bedtime.

2005-06-20 24:30 (Kristen) Jamie's sleeping pattern was seriously out of whack, but he seems to be getting back on track. He woke up around 9:00, ate a good breakfast (a good half of mine, really) and played with Mio for the morning. We took him over to Browning for lunch, where he asked to find "Da'l" (Daniel). It turns out that "Da'l" can mean Daniel or Ross interchangably, since he can't pronounce Ross. He grabbed Ross and played with him for a while, ate lunch, and then Ross was happy to say that he could play with Jamie for a bit longer since he wasn't going to school in the afternoon. Jamie was delighted.

He slept for three hours in the afternoon, letting me get some work done, and then played with Ayami while I got some threads tied up. Some time with mummy and the densha* later, he played with Sam and Ben, looked at baby Luke, and went to dinner with me and John at Browning. I should say that I left to go play Trivia and he did not miss me at all. Too many interesting people and trains around, I should imagine. He fell asleep in the car on the way to pick me up with John around 10:00, but woke up when we got home in time to admire the huge, almost full moon and to watch the baby raccoons gambol across the lawn. He had his bath, and fell asleep around 11:30, a tired little boy.

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

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