Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 1 No. 52

2006-10-03 23:16 (Kristen) Jamie was up around 9:00 or so, which was good as I had a lousy night myself. Jamie got into my bad books early by wasing up Liam after I explicitly told him not to ("But Jamie has to hold Liam's hand!"), and it was a volatile morning, exacerbated by an ant invasion which required me to take the southern half of the kitchen apart, kill a hundred or so ants and scrub wherever they might have been. I know that they were coming in the back door, but know not the location of their nest (lucky for them). Gary took Jamie to Browning for lunch, and Liam and I followed along. Lunch was fairly uneventful, and Jamie went out with Ken around 1:30 while John, Liam, and I sped to our last appointment with our midwife, Julie Witmer, before she transferred our care to our family doctor. Liam was weighed and measured: he weighs 11 lbs 4 oz, which is very respectable, and is 22 11/2 inches in length. I don't recall his head measurement, exactly. (John: I think it was almost 16 inches.) I hope that John has it written down somewhere. We think the world of Julie, and have been very happy with her care, as anyone who has read the blog before will know, and we will miss seeing her regularly.

Jamie and Ken arrived at the Second Cup around 2:30, Jamie with sembei* in his stroller and cookie on his face (thanks to Ken). He was not asleep, and so I put Liam in the stroller and we walked to Treasure Island. We played with trains and other things, and Jamie and I read a few books before heading to the library. Jamie was very tired, and wanted to play "red light" (where you don't get to move until he says so), but the red lights were taking an awfully long time to change, and I wanted to get some stuff done before nightfall. There was some fuss about that (OK, tears and yelling), but we got to the library and had a good time reading some books (Run Franny, Duck and Goose, Henry P. Baloney and Two Little Trains) before meeting up with John at the Carrot Common. John and Jamie played at the park for abit, before coming home to the usual scrum of kids outside the house. Dinner and mosquitoes sent us all inside, and then John made dinner. The evening was spent cleaning and puttering, while Jamie played with Gary until a little before 9:00. He was bathed and in bed by 9:30, but didn't fall asleep until 10:30. Liam has been Mr. Awake all night, and even now is slipping in and out of sleep beside me. He's been very physically active, and I had hoped that would exhaust him and he'd sleep, but he's making up for time spent asleep in the first five weeks of his life, I think...

2006-10-04 20:24 (Kristen) Jamie woke up around 9:00 this morning when John woke him, so he got a good night's sleep. Liam had some difficulties, but eventually slept well. I was woken up this morning by a thunderstorm, but otherwise slept well, and John slept well for most of the night. How strange and wonderful!

Jamie went back to Hakobune for the first time in a week, and was very happy to be there. Liam and I spent a quiet morning at home, and part of a quiet afternoon. John took Jamie for his walk (after root canal surgery this morning--ouch), and came back around 4:00. Jamie was in a very good mood after an hour and a half nap (thanks, in part, to the grey, wet weather), and woke up when he wasn't able to find his large Beanie Buddy bat (named "Owl". He likes to take animals that he knows are one thing and call them something else. The dog he calls "cat," for example). Well, it's Gary's, but he's letting Jamie walk around with it. He played with Gary for a bit before we went to John's parents' place for dinner. He wasn't all that interested in dinner, initially, but ate much more afterwards when he got some one-on-one time with Tai-Tai. We left there around 8:00 after much play and silliness, while John had gone to the Scrabble club much earlier in the evening. We're back home now, and Jamie is playing with Gary again while I write. I should mention that Liam is getting stronger and stronger, and can clear his head and part of his chest off the ground when he pushes up with his forearms. He's enjoying the exercise, and smiles away madly while he does it. He has also started to coo, which is just adorable.

(John) Liam is also trying to crawl, and will wriggle happily the length of the bed if you give his feet something to push against. If you don't help brace his feet, he will become quite cross with you.

2006-10-05 25:11 (Kristen) Jamie woke up around 9 this morning, which was not good because we were supposed to have him at Hakobune for 9. I woke up around 8:40, and so was a large part of the problem. John had him there a little after 10:00. He had a good morning, and John gets him to talk about Hakobune by asking him what songs they sang, and what they did, rather than about who he played with. They visisted the library ladies, and Jamie ate most of his bento, which he hasn't done in a long time. They raced back for a walk with Ken, who says that Jamie fell asleep right away. Jamie slept for almost two and a half hours.

John took Jamie to Treasure Island, and then they came back to play with Kyup. He ended up playing with Iain and Clare as well, runningn around and having a good time. You would think that this would help him to fall asleep, but not really. A light dinner and a quiet evening meant that Jamie didn't fall asleep until 12:15. That's right: 12:15. Jamie would wake up Liam, who would need attention, which meant that Jamie wasn't getting his cuddle from me, and got more wriggly, and...and...and... Needless to say I am not a particularly happy camper tonight, and am leaning heavily towards having Jamie give up his naps so that I can get my evenings back. I won't have my afternoons anymore, but if I have to give up one, then I can live without the afternoons.

Liam has been a very active person as well. He was very active this afternoon, and needed more attention than usual. John says he's bored. He is much more awake than he has been, and likes being physically active. John has been getting him to crawl across the bed, like we did with Jamie at this age, and Liam is like Jamie in that he works very hard for ten to fifteen minutes, and then gets upset because he doesn't know what this "exhaustion" feeling means. He doesn't fall asleep on his own so well anymore, and I'm having to put him a sling to get him to fall asleep (like now). My back and shoulders are getting stronger, at least.

2006-10-06 23:19 (Kristen) Jamie woke up late again today, which wasn't surprising given how late he fell asleep last night. John was ready to go on time, but Jamie can be remarkably slow and hard to hurry, so they left late again to go to Hakobune. John says that Jamie was fine, but that he was easily distracted. Whenever another child got up from the table at lunch, Jamie was right after them. Consequently, he only ate his veggies and a third of his curry. They got home around 1:30, and set out for their walk a little after 2:00. The window of opportunity had closed, however, and Jamie didn't nap (which wasn't a bad thing, given last night's shenanigans).

I'm not sure what John and Jamie did, other than exhaust John, but they showed up at home around 5:00. Jamie played with Sam, Ben, and Luke in the alley for a bit, then we went to Browning for dinner. I played with Jamie for a bit in the basement and by showing him train videos on the Internet, and fed Liam, who was starting to get quite fussy. He's very gassy today, and I don't know why, but it's been almost impossible to put him down for the last six hours or so. The last two have been more intense than usual. Jamie was falling asleep by 8:30, so we went home after a little lemon cake for a bath and bed. I think that we may just have some bad falling-asleep habits right now, because he wasn't asleep until 11:00, despite his lack of nap. Another missed window? We'll try again tomorrow. In the meantime, there's always Liam to keep me up...

(John) We walked and walked and walked. We made it out to somewhere along the Danforth (at Greenwood?) where a road crew was working with lots of interesting construction equipment, and after watching them for a while, Jamie insisted that he needed to pee. We walked back to the Starbucks near Jones, visited the bathroom, then bought a cookie and sat by the window and chatted for a while. I got a little work done on my thesis while Jamie doodled, ran around visiting all the other kids in the cafe, or pretended to sleep stretched out by the window. When he started to get too wound up, we walked back to the Jackman schoolyard and played for a while before heading home.

2006-10-07 24:05 (John) It's past midnight and I'm writing this with Liam beside me in bed chortling away at how cool it is to be awake and aware of everything around you, emphasizing his points with dramatic arm and leg gestures. I think Kristen is asleep in the master bedroom, and the last I checked Jamie was quietly awake beside her.

I was unwell last night and Kristen let me sleep in. My mom had her monthly luncheon to go to, so she took the streetcar down to the farmer's market and by the time Jamie and I caught up with her, she had done almost all of our shopping for us, leaving us just to visit Jamie's fans and play, which would have been even more fun if we hadn't both been on the over side of tired. We did our usual shopping at Loblaws, then got home well past nap time. After putting away our groceries and discussing at some length what to do with the boys, we set out for the Danforth en famille.

Jamie and I chased pigeons for a while as Kristen and Liam shopped at the Big Carrot, then I went to work on my thesis at the Second Cup while Kristen took the kids to the library. Jamie fell asleep on the way back from the library, and stayed asleep for 90 minutes, long enough for us all to get home, do some chores, and for Kristen to get some risotto ready for dinner. We had a quiet night in, I spent a while cooing and gooing with Liam in my lap, Kristen and Jamie read from their new stash of library books, and so on. Around 21:00, we invited Gary and Ayami, Tom, Daniel and Ross to come with us to Customer Appreciation Day at Dairy Queen so that Jamie could get enough exercise running there and back to give us some chance of getting him to sleep at a reasonable hour. No luck there, but it was still a fun outing.

2006-10-08 24:18 (Kristen) Jamie woke up around 9:30, I think...I meant to keep better track of exactly how many hours a day Jamie was sleeping in order to figure out what effect naps really have. He had slept around nine hours last night, which isn't long enough for a little guy, and he was definitely tired all morning. John took him to the part for an hour, and brought him back home in time for a late lunch. I took Jamie and Liam out for a walk, and Jamie fell asleep at 2:00. I shrugged, thinking that it was early enough yet (if he was still awake by 2:30, I was calling it off, as I figured he's sleep too late and ruin his chances of sleeping early tonight). He woke up at the one hour mark and I talked with him, thinking that it was a good time to wake up, but he fell back asleep when I wasn't looking. All part of the experiment, I suppose. He woke up for good around 4:00, and I took him home because I had some work to do, and Liam was waking up hungry.

We went to John's parents' place for Thanksgiving dinner at 6:00. Jamie was in a good mood and Liam was too, and Liam let me eat most of my dinner in peace. Jamie was not interested in food but more so in playing with Tomoko, Nobuko, Tai-Tai, or whomever else he could grab. Jamie hasn't been at all interested in eating at the table in a little while, and will eat next to nothing if left to his own devices. If I follow him with food, or let him sit on my lap and feed him, he'll clean his plate. I suspect that he finds eating to be deathly boring, and needs the intense one-on-one time to engage him enough to spend the time at the table. He ate a fair amount tonight that way, and John and I have speculated that some of our recent difficulties with Jamie's bedtime might stem from his being hungry at bedtime because he hasn't eaten enough dinner. I should say, however, that he always has room for dessert.

We headed home around 9:10, as Jamie was looking quite tired. Bath was late, and he wasn't in bed until 10:30, after playing some bedtime vieo games with Papa online. He was almost asleep at 11:10 when Liam started to fuss, and I asked John to come and get him. Jamie asked John to stay, and things got silly from there. Papa, apparently, is for playing with, not for sleeping near. I got up and took a shower, they were awake when I returned (Jamie apparently fell out of bed while trying to fall asleep), and so I sent John and a fussy Liam out of the room while I got Jamie asleep. Jamie was asleep at midnight on the dot, and I got Liam asleep ten minutes later. Now it's my turn.

2006-10-09 23:55 (Kristen) So, doesn't Liam look like John at the same age? (Look at yesterday's photos if you don't believe me). It's uncanny: like I was chosen to host a clone, rather than contribute any genetic material of my own. John says that we can have a girl, and she can look just like me. I gave him the Look his comment deserved.

Jamie woke up around 9:30 or so, and was a Very Tired Boy from the get-go. Everything was a fight; everything involved much more negotiation than it really needed. Getting him to put on his clothes was a long, drawn-out process, but it was funny tonight, when I told him that he didn't want to put his pajamas on tonight, but he didn't want to take them off this morning, either! Breakfast involved much imperious ordering about, as His Majesty ordered his raisin bread (NOT raisin toast), and picked at his grapes. John took Jamie to the park while I made lunch. Not having cooked anything of note in a little while, I made a lovely kasha and orzo dish with mushrooms, sour cream, and toasted walnuts. I thought it was yummy. Jamie, uncharacteristically, refused to even taste it. He eventually retreated to the living room, where John fed him some chicken and cherry tomatoes before taking him away for his walk. I was Not Pleased at his rejection of my hard work, although I realize that it is senseless to get upset at a toddler about food. He has never been a picky eater, but I wonder if he is starting to reach the age of pickiness. He recently rejected some dinner leftovers that he had enjoyed the first time when we put them in his Hakobune lunch, because it was not "lunch food." Am I reading too much into this? He has been pretty anti-food lately, likely because it is boring (food as fuel for the toddler on the go).

The surprise of the day was that he didn't sleep on his walk with John. We speculate that we missed "the window," and that he gets overly tired and paradoxically won't sleep. Whatever the reason, he exhausted John by the time I met up with them at Browning in order to make dinner. We extracted him from Browning around 8:30, when he started acting out, and managed to have hiim in bed by 9:50. He was asleep by 10:45, which feels like a major accomplishment, despite the fact that he didn't nap. Now Liam is up, howling away, and generally unhappy and uncomfortable. Sleep is overrated in a world with coffee in it, anyway.

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

Back to Vol. 1 No. 51, or up to Jamie Chew's Web Log Archive. or forward to Vol. 1 No. 53.