Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 1 No. 17

2006-01-31 18:30 (Kristen) After going to the zocalo* last night for a taste of lime sorbet and to watch some local kids play soccer, Jamie had some difficulty falling asleep. He did manage to finally do so around 9:30, which is late for here, and slept in until 7:00. Today was my mother's last day in the Yucatan, before she had to leave for home. We puttered around the room until she woke up at 8:00, and we made our way to Mama's Bakery for a final sticky bun. Jamie was very happy to have the sticky bun, but Chica was banished to the back yard after rolling in something that was redolent of old fish and garbage and so Jamie didn't have a chance to play with her again today. Then it was down to the beach for some sand and surf before Mom had to leave. Jamie asked to go into the ocean, and when I said that he'd have to walk across the sand to the ocean, he did so gleefully. His phobia of walking on sand seems to be at an end. He not only walked to the ocean, but walked into the water on his own steam up to his armpits, yelling out his glee the whole way. John and Sai were in the water, and came to meet us. Jamie liked it when John and I swung him in the water (John: occasionally dropping him in with a theatrical splash), which I would too if I were his size, and some friendly giants came along and offered me the chance.

All too soon, it was time to take my mom to the airport. Jamie almost fell asleep as we arrived, but was roused to look at planes. He asked a few times if he could get on a plane today, but seemed to accept that his turn would come in a few days. (John: it helped that we offered the beach as an alternative.) We ran about the airport, and had lunch at the airport cafe before seeing my mom off at the security check-in. We put him back in the car, and he fell asleep quickly. John and I took the opportunity to drive along the hotel strip in Cancun, to see how much damage there still remains after Wilma. The bigger hotels seem to be mostly recovered, while a number of hotels along the most easterly part of the strip, which is the most exposed to the ocean, were still in advanced states of disrepair. It also seems that if you are a smaller chain or an independent hotel, that there is more to do. Workers are everywhere, and many of them are planting large palm trees to replace all the ones that were blown down in the storm. Many of the small shops are still closed, along with one or two malls, and many condominiums are still shells. The amount of work that has been done in the last three months, and that is still ongoing, is staggering.

Jamie slept until we stopped the car outside John's parents' house, about an hour and fifteen minutes after he fell asleep. He was a little rangy, so John took him to the beach while I tried to get a little sleep. I went down to find them, in time to take Jamie into the ocean again. He is fascinated with the red buoys that float about twenty metres offshore, and so John put his snorkel, mask, and flippers on, and Jamie put his PFD on, and they both went out to visit a buoy. Jamie squealed in delight the whole way, and was not happy when it was time to say goodbye to the buoy and come back to shore. He was pacified by a trip to the pool, where he happily walked on the bottom, floated without my hands or John's hands on him (he held onto the bodice of my swimsuit), and declared himself to be "Jamie Haku" when he went quickly, kicking through the water. (Haku is a river spirit/dragon in the Miyazaki film, Spirited Away.) He had also been pretending to be Diesel 10 from the Thomas the Tank Engine series, with many theatrical growls and scowls (Diesel 10 is a "scary" engine). There is nothing wrong with my son's imagination, or his fantasy life.

Right now, he is watching Totoro as I write, and we are waiting to have dinner. We will go to the zocalo* for the inevitable frozen dairy confection after dinner, and then put Jamie to bed. It shouldn't be that difficult tonight, given how tired out he must be after a short nap and so much swimming.

2006-02-01 22:30 (John) Jamie woke up early this morning, after another night that was just a little too warm for comfortable sleep, leaving us all a little edgy. Jamie is torn between wanting to enjoy all of his favourite# activities here and wanting to go home, and I think we chose the right duration for our trip this time. He adores the beach, and his two total meltdowns came today when he needed to leave the beach for lunch and for dinner. He shovels sand into pails (which he calls cups) and has a parent invert it into a sand castle. He digs rocks and bits of coral (Japanese "sango") out of the sand and sets them aside carefully, rinsing them in a bucket of sea water. He passionately dislikes sand on his feet, but will completely forget this if he gets excited or angry enough. Likewise, he doesn't like being immersed in cool water, but will forget this if he wants to be towed out to look at a buoy or a boat.

We got past each meltdown by resorting to our last resort: the portable DVD player and at Jamie's request, "Kiki's Delivery Service". He's been asking about people back home ever since Grammie flew home. He was quite insistent this morning that we go visit Becky and Anna, named a pair of shells he found "Becky" and "Anna", and played with them in place of the real thing. He also asks every now and then about Mio and Taka, and if we might be able to videoconference with them again.

My mom points out that his linguistic abilities have grown quite a bit in the week that he's been here. I think much of this is due to his developing fantasy life: when we leave him on his own he starts telling stories about trains, playing with words to see how he can make them fit together. We don't have any trouble explaining to him anything that he needs to know, though getting him to accept it is another thing. I know he's started using and understanding some compound noun phrases and verbs ("Mommy Papa go-go zocalo, eat ice cream" rather than "Mommy go-go zocalo, Papa go-go zocalo, Mommy eat ice cream, Papa eat ice cream"). I think he still thinks that all Mexicans are named "Hola!", and uses the word as a generic term for a Mexican. And so on.

We have a quiet day and a half planned for the rest of our trip, and we'll try to spend most of it at the beach with Jamie. Not that I think we have much choice!

2006-02-02 21:30 (Kristen) We had a third meltdown last night, when Jamie decided that he was not walking to the zocalo to meet up with John after all, and wanted to be carried the whole way. We're trying to wean Jamie of being carried everywhere now, so there was an impasse halfway there where Jamie and I sat on the curb, and John went back to the hotel for the stroller. Once we did that, he settled in as we took him for his usual lime sorbet. He fell asleep almost instantly at 21:30.

He woke up in a better mood around 6:20 and the two of us played quietly until John woke up around 7:00. We spent the morning on the beach, as usual, but we were the only ones out there. A rare, cool, southerly wind had blown clouds over most of the sky, and was whipping up the sand and the waves. We had to set up the beach umbrellas as defence against blowing sand instead of against the sun, and we used a beach chair to help support one of the umbrellas. It had a nice, airy, tent-like feel to it. We played at making sand castles for a while, until Jamie decided that he wanted to play in the ocean. We told him that the waves were too big, and he compromised by running into the surf up to his knees, and running out whenever a big wave came in. He wore his PFD for extra insurance, and this amused for a while. He was very concerned that sea grass was accumulating on my ankles, and would stop every once in a while to pick it off.

We hauled him in to get ready for lunch, and he spent some time running around the hotel pool and restaurant first. Then Hisae, John, Jamie and I went to Los Pelicanos for lunch, where Jamie enjoyed eating ice cream and olives, and his usual fare of a parent's entree (filete de pescado tikinchik, sopa de mariscos). He fell asleep in the souvenir shop across the street from the restaurant, and I walked him back to the hotel. He slept for two and a half hours, and I had to wake him up out of fear that he'd sleep for another hour and not sleep at all tonight! John was out, so I took Jamie down to the beach again for half an hour after he filled up on crackers and cream cheese, chased down with a limonada. Jamie and I both wanted the other to do all the work of filling the bucket with sand, but compromised on alternating one scoop at a time. I told him when it was time to go that it was getting dark and that we could make one more sand castle before we left. We did, and he left quietly, without any argument, which is a rare thing nowadays.

When we got to John's parents' house, their tenant Beatriz had bought some toys for Jamie: a Spiderman bath toy, which features Spiderman rowing a dinghy, and a horse that dances and sings "Tie A Yellow Ribbon 'Round The Old Oak Tree." Jamie thinks that the horse is hilarious, and I predict that the batteries will run out quickly (John: and possibly under suspicious circumstances).

We've finished dinner, Jamie is watching Totoro, and we'll be setting out for home soon to finish packing. Jamie is going to miss the beach, and being able to run around outside without any clothes on, but I think that he's going to be very happy to see his friends back in Toronto.

2006-02-03 21:30 (John) We woke up at around sunrise and compromised between the need to get to the airport in time and the need to keep Jamie amused and happy. He had a good long run around the pool area and a long swim in the pool itself, where we remet Jackson and his sister and dad from Maine. Jackson was born on the same day as Jamie, and we're sorry we only overlapped by one day with them this year.

Beatriz took us to the airport, and Jamie fell asleep in the air-conditioned comfort of her car. He slept for almost two hours, through the transfer to the stroller and our lunch at the airport snack bar (the fajitas are not bad), and woke up refreshed in time for a rousing good-bye chorus of Gin-Gin-Gira-Gira. The flight to Detroit was bumpy but uneventful. He played trains, watched "Ice Age" on DVD, and snacked. He was even well-behaved being processed in Detroit, which involved lining up six times: disembarking from the plane, immigration, customs, checked-baggage scan, personal explosives scan, personal metal scan, carry-on baggage scan.

Six times so far, that is, as I'm writing this as we wait to board our flight to Toronto. The processing still left us with time for us to feed Jamie more of one of Tai-Tai's famous rice sticks, go get ice cream (he chose French vanilla soft-serve, raspberries in syrup, and mini M&M's - I thought the chocolate was a bit much, but the combination was edible), and go for two laps on the intra-terminal monorail tram. When I brought out the camera to take a picture of him eating ice cream on a train, he looked like he wanted to say "And I didn't think life could get any better: Dad, train, ice cream, and now the camera!" I've just sent him on his second lap, with Mom, to share the joy.

Postscript: we're safely home now. Thanks, Gary, for driving us home from the airport.

2006-02-04 21:00 (John) Jamie woke up early with Kristen, and they let me sleep in while taking turns playing with our much missed tenants. I went over to my parents' house to get their car late in the morning, stopping along the way to clean up the mess the raccoons had made in our back yard rifling through Gary's shredded credit card receipts. I think they wanted to order a pizza.

Ayami and I took Jamie to the St. Lawrence Market, which thanks to unseasonably warm morning weather was very busy. Nupur saved us a bag of samosas, the sausage guys treated Jamie to some kielbasa, and Wei gave him a mini cucumber that he eventually gnawed his way through. Jamie also pointed out that an Ontario Early Years Centre has opened up in the market's north building and offers a drop-in program from 9:30 to 12:30. We played together there for a little while, and will make it a regular part of our shopping in future.

We also ran into Vivienne, Robin and Alison (separately), which was a nice way to welcome ourselves back to Toronto. Jamie fell asleep on the way to Loblaws, and Ayami looked after him in the car while I did some quick shopping. The weather turned bad (heavy rain and sleet) in the afternoon, which was good for Jamie, as it helped him sleep for two and a half hours and wake up refreshed.

He spent the rest of the day fairly quietly reacquainting himself with his favourite# toys, and is just about to get in the bath and go to bed.

2006-02-05 21:00 (John) Aargh. The Bay promised that we would have our new washer, the one we paid for four months ago, today, and what do they do? They send us a truck loaded with the right model washer (for the first time), but with two huge dents in it. Aargh. Nothing really to do with Jamie, but I had to vent.

Anyway, Jamie and Kristen went to swim class this morning, and Jamie's new skill for the week was kicking while holding onto instructor Jonathan (not Mom) and blowing bubbles in the water (only once pausing to yell "Yummy!"). They played for an hour at the play group at the community centre, then came home for lunch.

Jamie is still jet-lagged by about 45 minutes, judging by the time of his afternoon nap, but after he fell asleep in the stroller I took him to the Second Cup where I worked for a couple of hours, falling back into our regular routine, right down to his wake-up Rice Krispies square. As carefully negotiated before his nap, we proceeded to Treasure Island Toys after the treat, and stayed there for an hour until they closed. Jamie climbed up on a chair to inspect the higher shelves of the Thomas the Tank Engine secion, and otherwise spent most of his time playing with the trains.

We had dinner at Mocha Mocha, then came home for a quiet evening with Gary and Ayami. In the bath tonight, I trimmed Jamie's hair a bit - I hadn't realised how long it had gotten in Mexico, where it had been tightly curled. Jamie also took vocal glee in playing with a foam bath W, turning it into an M and back again. Getting ready for a Scrabble "M-W" prize in a few years, I think.

2006-02-06 21:59 (Kristen) Jamie woke up at 8:00 AM, which was a welcome surprise to both of his parents. Jamie has not been waking up particularly well, and insists on being carried around the house until he decides what it is that he wants (and really, he doesn't quite know what it is either). We had a little quiet time together before Jamie ambushed Mio around 8:30 and dragged her off to an entertaining morning working on the railroad. I got a morning's work done before feeding Jamie lunch, and before Mio and Taka took Jamie off on a walk down to the grocery store.

I got a call from John at 2:55, saying that he was at the Second Cup with Jamie, who had woken up after only 45 minutes of sleep when John was pulling his boots off (Jamie's feet are little furnaces, and hot feet wake him up). I got there half an hour later to find Jamie awake and happy, and munching his usual fare of his snack and that of the nearest available parent. I took Jamie to Treasure Island. His request: we asked him what he wanted to do, and he did his usual, which is to request leaving where we are. John offered him a series of silly options, until Jamie volunteered "toys." "Oh?" said John. "Do you mean Treasure Island?" This was greeted with rapturous rejoicing on Jamie's part. We went off, Jamie and I, and played there for some time before walking back to the Second Cup together to pick up John.

Dinner was at Browning, and Jamie had fun playing with Tom, Daniel, and Ross, as well as with Gary and Ayami. Gary and Ayami brought him home, and played with him until Jamie's bath. It's a late bath, unfortunately, particularly given his lack of nap today. Maybe he'll sleep in tomorrow. Ha ha. Black Mother humour. However, I have to say that other than the usual tooth-brushing fisht, he's been amazingly happy given the amount of sleep he's had today.

Jamie has quite clear pronunciation for a two year old, but still makes some interesting errors. For some reason, he has trouble with initial "l's, and turns them into a "ly" sound. So, "lap" becomes "lyap," "loop" become "lyoop," and so on. It's hysterically cute.

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

Back to Vol. 1 No. 16, or up to Jamie Chew's Web Log Archive. or forward to Vol. 1 No. 18.