Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 1 No. 41

2006-07-18 09:30 (John) According to Jamie's TTTE height chart this morning, he is now 3'1-1/2" (95 cm).

2006-07-18 16:45 (John) It's been a tough day so far. It was too warm outside in the morning for Kristen and Jamie to go out and play, so he didn't get any exercise. When I took him out for his walk around 13:30, he was tired but not close to sleep and I finally through in the towel at 15:30 and called for Kristen to take Jamie on his requested subway ride. I hope she is having better luck than me.

2006-07-18 21:32 (Kristen) Both John and I have felt better; John hasn't confirmed it, but his yelp when I turned on the dining room light makes me think that he's got a migraine, and I've felt like I got whumped with a truck all day. Early to bed, you would think, but I didn't get Jamie to sleep on the subway until close to 4:00. He was just manic as we sat on the subway, doing everything possible to drive me nuts, until just past Bathurst: then he fell asleep on my lap and stayed there until Kipling Station, when I finally managed to get him into his stroller. He slept all through the trip home, and even in the front hallway, which he usually doesn't do all that well. I finally woke him up around 6:00 by moving him from the stroller onto my lap on the couch, but he didn't become fully conscious until 6:30: early to bed might be a little optimistic.

I managed to get some dinner into him, but he's been very contrary today: hair-trigger temper, and generally difficult (how long does it take a toddler to go to the bathroom? About half an hour, if you do it right). He's doing a little better now, and John has taken him out to the playground for a run before bed, which I hope will do the trick. They've just come in, so I think that I'll go downstairs and ask them how they did. Whuff.

2006-07-19 21:12 (Kristen) Jamie went to sleep around 11:00 last night, after we got him into bed at 10:30. He fell for the old "parents talking about borhing things" routine. Heh. He woke up around 8:00, which was great, as it meant that he was up in time for us to have a chance at making it to Hakobune on time. We ended up leaving about fifteen minutes later than I would have liked, but caught a bus almost immediately, which helped to make up for it. We arrived around 9:20, and Jamie was happy to show me things until I told him that it was time for me to go: I gave him a hug and a kiss, and he chirped "bye-bye!" and played with his friends.

He was a little rambunctious when I picked him up at noon, and not really pleased about the change in his routine as we weren't going on the north-bound streetcar, but the south-bound one. We had had a little argument on our way out of the church, so he was a little fragile to begin with (he tried to stomp both his feet at the same time and fell flat on his face: no good). We were bound for the gyoza place on Spadina for lunch with John's dad, John, and John's sister Pamela. Jamie didn't want to get off the streetcar, so I had to carry him off, which he didn't like at all. In the end, we sat on the sidewalk near a store with merchandise in front (it being Chinatown), and had a hug and a talk about the things we saw, which calmed him down a bit. He needed the little space/break, but was still utterly fascinated by all the stores along the way to the restaurant. We talked about what we saw, and then arrived to stand in line for lunch (note: leave lots of time to stand in line when going to the gyoza restaurant at lunchtime, because everyone else wants gyoza too). Jamie ate a good deal, and we had a nice visit before it was time to go. Jamie and I decided to take the streetcar back, so that he could have his nap. We made it to the subway, and all the way to Kennedy Station to see the buffers and halfway back before Jamie fell asleep in his stroller his mouth still full of apple.

He woke up around two and a half hours later, when it was time to go to John's parents' place for dinner. Jamie was extremely helpful, putting chopsticks and napkins at everyone's place, along with putting his own plate and cup at his own spot, and helping me to fetch the apple cider from the basement. We also dealt with the five monsters under the dining room table (the big black and the big blue one, along with the small blue, small pink, and small green ones) by asking them to leave, and thanking them for doing so (although the two big ones had to come back later for one of the little ones, like good parents). He didn't eat much dinner, but happily ate guavas after a little time watching a documentary on elephants.

John took Jamie out to the playground before coming home (where we played with 8?-year-old Grace and 1-year-old Clark on the big slide, and Jamie went down the Scary Centre Red Slide for the first time with a little push from Grace), while I headed home to get some work done and rest. They're home now, after Jamie notified John that he was too tired to climb the stairs to the slide, and should be in the bath soon.

2006-07-20 23:16 (Kristen) Jamie was up at 7:30 this morning, hot and a little crabby. It took some work to get a glass of water into him, but it helped, along with the bowl of vanilla yoghurt with frozen blueberries that he had thirds of. The frozen blueberries are something that he particularly enjoys when he's teething, although there was't reason to believe that his tooth was bothering him particularly yet. He and John were out of the house by 9:00, and off to Hakobune. John says that they went into the library at lunch today, and Jamie asked to read three books. They read their three, and then John offered to read one more but Jamie was going to have to go quietly afterwards, no crying or carrying on. Jamie thought about that one, and put the book he was holding back, deciding that it was time to go home. He was pretty tired, and knew it.

So tired, in fact, that he fell asleep in the car on the way home, requiring me and John to perform an emergency extraction from the car to the stroller. This time we rolled perfectly, and he was still sleeping beautifully when we sent him off with Ken at 1:15. John says that he slept for 90 minutes, and woke up as soon as Ken wheeled him into the Second Cup. John fed him a bit and then took him to Treasure Island, where they played until I got there and found them reading Thomas the Tank Engine books in the back. We left together, at Jamie's request, because we bought him a set of three Brio trains (an engine, and two passenger cars) that were on sale. He was very happy with that, and played with them in his stroller while John and I quickly walked through theiincreasing rainfall to get home.

Upon arriving at home, He played for a bit, found Gary, played with him, and then was most insistent about not eating his dinner. Finally, we realized that his behaviour was because his tooth was hurting him, and I fed him dinner as he sat on my lap between slurps of popsicle. I did manage to get a reasonable amount of food into him that way, but it set the tone for the rest of the evening. Thank goodness that this tooth is breaking through *before* the baby arrives, and not afterwards, or there would have been trouble. I decided to give Jamie his bath tonight, as his hair needed a wash, and when John brought him up, he had a certain look in his eye when he suggested that Jamie really needed some pain killer before he went to bed that I am familiar with myself. John trimmed Jamie's hair and then I washed it, and we managed to make it to bed before 10:00. Can't remember the last time that happened...he was asleep around 10:30, I think, as I dropped off for a few minutes myself, and so far the pain killer is doing its work.

2006-07-21 21:45 (Kristen) Jamie woke up around 7:30, wanting me to get up with him. John gallantly sacrificed himself to the Toddler of Terror and took Jamie downstairs until 8:30. Then I got up, and covered for him until 9:15. Yay, parental tag-team! Jamie was a little dictatorial, and we suspected that his tooth was hurting him again, so we gave him a little pain killer before he headed off to Hakobune. I gather that he had a good day, but didn't eat a lot of lunch because it was someone's birthday, and he had to gorge himself on birthday donuts instead.

John bought Jamie a bubble tea on the way home. Jamie is addicted to mango and milk bubble teas (if lichee and milk isn't available), and has gotten John to buy him one near the daycare for the last two days. He drank about half of it before falling asleep in the car, and I got the rest after John managed to get Jamie from the car and into the stroller without waking him up. I was not foolish, however, and left some for Jamie when he woke up. Sure enough, after he woke up around 4:15, the first thing he asked for was bubble tea and I was able to provide the rest of his snack. Whew.

We went to Tom and Michelle's, as they had kindly offered to look after Jamie while John and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 (yarrr!). Gary and Ayami did too, as it was a traditional Browning dinner night, and so John and I tripped off gaily to our movie with no worries. When we came back, around 8:45, Jamie, Tom, Gary, and Ayami were nowhere to be found. We tracked them down at the schoolyard, where Jamie was doing his best monkey imitation and running around and sliding down slides. We stayed and played for a little bit, until Jamie started running into people and laughing his "oh my god I'm so tired" laugh. We're home now, and getting ready for bed and an exciting weekend ahead ofus.

2006-07-22 21:45 (John) Kristen and Jamie spent a very happy and quiet morning reading and doing workbooks while I slept in, furthering the notion that he gets noisier the more bored he gets, and there may be something we can do about this. I took him to the market on my own, where the combination of heroic quantities of food and pouring rain had him fast asleep even before we got back to the car. He stayed asleep for three hours until it was time to go to Reid and Luisa's house for their annual water gun fight extravaganza. It took a while to coax Jamie into the pool, but then he didn't want to leave. He ate vast quantities of everything, especially the chocolate-covered strawberries that Ruth brought. Then he played hide-and-seek with all the kids, and then all too soon it was time to come home. As I write this, Kristen is over at Scott and Kate's for a birthday party, and Ted, Alice, Ian and Amy have just walked in the door for their weekend visit. Time to go fetch Jamie from Gary and Ayami's apartment.

(Postscript) Gary and Ayami brought tired Jamie up to the first floor, then passed him off to Uncle Ted and Aunt Alissa to carry him the rest of the way up to the second floor for his bath. He was tired enough that he wanted none of it (though he was happy with the Shinkansen toothbrush they brought him), and pitched a full-blown tantrum, pounding the steps with little fists and waving them off with stern and clearly enunciated cries of "Go away, please!" and "No, thank you!". I could tell that Alissa was unfamiliar with Jamie's somewhat Japanese use of politeness to convey being really p.o.-ed, so I donned a towel and rescued him. After a quick bath I put him in his yukata# and we went to fetch Mom. As he was falling asleep, I told him that tomorrow we would go ride on a Big Thomas The Tank Engine, bigger than the Centerville Train at Centre Island, and he fell asleep smiling.

2006-07-23 21:08 (Kristen) Jamie woke up around 7:30, after stirring, and hearing his cousins moving about. They went downstairs and played together, and seemed to do reasonably well in getting along. Jamie ate a bar-b-que pork bun (half) for breakfast, but nothing else; not even mango. John had told him the night before that we were going to see Big Thomas (John: I've retroactively added a note about that), and all else was paling before that. I don't think that I have ever seen Jamie this wound up about going somewhere ordoing something: he just wanted to get going. The car wouldn't do; he wouldn't go to the bathroom before we went without an enormous fight. Why weren't we there NOW? (John: He didn't come out with the cliched "Are we there yet?", though yesterday on the way to Reid and Luisa's, when Daniel tried to get my goat with that line, Jamie put him in his place with my standard reply "Almost there!" before I could utter it myself.) We told him that we were going to stop off in Waterloo to have food with Pat and Adam, and Jamie was having nothing of it. He insisted that the dumplings we were going to have would be dirty and bleah, and although he calmed down as the trip wore on, he sneakily tried to feed John and me as much fruit as he could stuff into himself as a way to keep us from getting hungry and have to stop. John had to tell him that this was not going to work, and that we were going to stop anyway.

Jamie was fine at the dim sum place we ate at in Kitchener (John: Cameron Seafood House, at Cameron and Charles, which as advertised serves fabulous dim sum but is very crowded at noon on Sundays), but in a bit of a hurry to get food into himself so that we could get going (acknowledging, finally that food might be a good idea). He played a little with the new Leap Pad Pro that Ian and Amy brought for him (they don't use it any more, so they generously gave theirs to Jamie, who loves the things), but dragged us all outside eventually to get back onto the road. John, with help from Pat and Adam, found a bubble tea place (John: Sweet Dreams Tea Shop, which offers for customers' use a folding Hasbro Scrabble board with 7 (!) racks and 93 tiles, missing the letters REUNION from the standard 100) nearby, and so we stopped by for Jamie's favourite treat on our way out of town. A cloudburst while Jamie and I waited in the car put Jamie to sleep a couple of minutes before John returned with his treat, but it turned out all right. Jamie and I slept for about an hour and fifteen minutes (approximately) and an hour, respectively, while John drove on. We got off the highway, and John told me that Jamie and I made good mirror images of each other, with our heads back and mouths open as we slept. Sigh. John saw a Day Out With Thomas sign first, and exclaimed excitedly — Jamie stirred, and woke, and we all happily spent the next twenty minutes following the signs to the Elgin County Railway Museum, where the event was taking place.

Jamie was very excited (he said, "I'm excited, Mommy")which means that he was very impatient; he isn't the jump up and down type when he's feeling excited. John took him to the gate while I went and got the tickets out of the car, and there were Thomas events and sights all over the place, along with hundreds and hundreds of little boys Jamie's age and not much older. There was the occasional girl, but it was sometimes hard to tell if they were there for their own pleasure, or because they had a brother who dragged them along. We went and looked at the play stations, with different types of Thomas setups, then went over to look at the HO-track system in the museum proper, which had some Thomas trains running in honour of the event. Apparently, at one point, Jamie gave a talking-to to the (much older) operator, as he (apparently) wasn't using the turntable correctly. John had to make Jamie say thank you as they left after the man kindly acceded to Jamie's expert opinion. Jamie also loved the Lionel's Trains railroad setup in a trailer, which was all we had time for before it was time to line up to see Thomas, who was just pulling into the station after pulling some children around. We took photos, and then got into line so that we could have our 4:00 ride, as per our tickets. It seems that a lot of people had missed the 3:00, and were being allowed to get on at 4:00, which meant that we missed that train. I told Jamie that Thomas was going to take those children around and come back to get us, which he accepted, but the sudden downpour was not so easy to take. John took Jamie back to the car to get rain gear while I stayed in line and managed to get not as wet as I had feared. The skies were consistently threatening (see photos) but we were lucky, and managed to get on Thomas before the next cloudburst hit.

The ride on Thomas was definitely the high point of the day for Jamie. We asked him if he was excited and happy, and he said that he was very excited and happy. He kept himself glued to the window, and enjoyed waving to people outside the train as we passed by. It was a 25-minute ride, with the train going backwards and then forwards back into the station (a limitation of the track setup, I think), with Thomas the Tank Engine songs from the show piped through the train using a soundsystem. Jamie was just so happy, as were almost every one of the small boys we saw. Every once in a while, you would see one of them set off into tears as a parent took them away from a desired tent or (worse!) took them Home, and I began to wonder if Jamie was going to do the same. After we got off the train, we went to the (inevitable) merchandise tent, and bought a puzzle, a knife and fork set, and a few no-name pullback trains that he was enjoying playing with. A bathroom break later, it was time to go. John went to the car to rest, and Jamie dragged me into the HO-train room again, which was shutting down as it was close to 6. Jamie then dragged me back to the merchandise tent to play more with the no-name trains, until I told him it was time to say goodbye to the trains. He had his meltdown then, just as many other little boys were around the grounds, and I had to carry him to the car (which John had brought to the gate to save me a long walk/drag/fight.

Once we were on the road, we asked Jamie if he had had a good time. He notified us that he had had a good time a little bit — still upset about leaving. The rest of the trip was spent feeding Jamie, watching for a large rainbow that stayed up for a remarkably long time, and reading all the books that we brought with us. We came home around 8:15, and Jamie ran inside to tell Gary and Ayami all about his wonderful day with Thomas. I'm blogging, and John is spending some well-deserved time in the bath before I bring Jamie upstairs. We're all going to bed as soon as possible tonight.

2006-07-24 21:22 (Kristen) Jamie only asked to ride Big Thomas three times today, and seemed to accept, if not like, the explanation that it was a special event and that we'd do it again next year. He really had a good time yesterday, which makes me glad in so many ways.

He slept until 8:30 this morning, then insisted that we all get out of bed. John could have stayed, but he tried to put himself between me and Jamie, and was up too for his trouble. Jamie seems to feel that I am the one who gets up with him in the morning--sigh. He shared a big bowl of cereal with John, and some tamago no gohan* with me in an effort to hurry me up so that he could play with me some more. He read a book with John, played trains with me, and grudgingly came outside later in the morning. He perked up when he realized that he could eat peas off the vine, and eight of the ten raspberries that I picked (John and I usually get 1/5 of any yummy garden produce each, and Jamie gets the other 3/5.) It has become very clear that Jamie watched television when he's bored. Well, maybe not all the time, but it is definitely what he will ask to do if I am not interactive enough, or if we're doing something he isn't interested in. Generally, if he asks to watch television and I make an interesting counteroffer, he'll take the counteroffer. It's interesting.

It was hot outside, and I started to feel distinctly unwell after only a short time out. I also was not conforming to Jamie's ambitious plan of towing three wagons at once, and so he became very upset with me when I told him that it was time to go to Daniel and Ross's, and put the wagons away. John came out to check on us, and we all went inside instead. Jamie immediately went to knock on Gary's door, and we ended up going over together about twenty minutes later. I still wasn't feeling all that well, so Gary helped keep Jamie happy while I rested. Ken took Jamie out for his walk, I started to feel better, and John and I did a little shopping for Ayami's birthday party tonight. I met Ken and Jamie at the Second Cup while John did other errands, and he slept for almost two hours exactly. We did a little shopping at the Big Carrot together, met up with John oustside the Big Carrot (he arrived with a big mango bubble tea, our hero!), and John took Jamie to the playground while I went home to get a project sent out by courier. Soon it was time to go over to Daniel and Ross's again for Ayami's birthday party, and Jamie played happily with whomever he could find until dinner.

Jamie knew that cake was in the offing, so he didn't eat as much dinner as he could have, but still ate enough. He was practicing singing "Happy Birthday" over and over, and pretended to blow the candles out at the end of each rendition ("foo foo foo"). It was very cute. He helped Ayami to blow out the candles (Jamie's favourite part), roared around some more, and watched "The Wrong Trousers" again with Gary and Ayami. I came home early to have a shower, and John tells me that they would have been here earlier if they hadn't run the gauntlet of kids playing outside in the front yards (the usual complement of kids). Jamie is down with Gary and Ayami now, and I hope that the wide variety of people he has to pay attention to him and play with him will make a difference to him when the baby comes.

Baby update: I am enormous. Really. I am. Today the heat was really bothersome, and made me almost pass out at one point. I think that I'll be hiding inside this week when the next heat wave hits. The baby is kicking a good deal, moving about, and is growing exponentially (which would explain why I feel so tired today). We see the midwife tomorrow, and she'll tell us if all is still hunky-dory, which I think it likely is.

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

Back to Vol. 1 No. 40, or up to Jamie Chew's Web Log Archive. or forward to Vol. 1 No. 42.