Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 2 No. 25

2008-02-26 23:43 (Kristen) Apparently, according to Jamie, there is also ParkerLand, where things aren't the same as JamieLand, but interesting things happen. I don't know if Parker (one of Jamie's classmates) came up with ParkerLand before or after Jamie, but it's interesting to get reports from other people's imaginary places, as well as Jamie's.

Today went well. Jamie had lots of good things to think about at bedtime tonight, and Liam spent a good part of the day unable to contain his glee. John took the boys by toboggan to school, but Liam decided that he was going t walk, and not ride: this slowed things down somewhat. It may be that Liam's reason was his snowsuit isn't waterproof, and they hit a puddle on the way. Snowsuit #1 down for the day. They got home, I changed Liam, and Liam spent a good part of the morning railing at me for being so boring while I got a job out the door to Purolator. Going to get his brother for lunch made up for it, but snowsuit #2 was only marginally more waterproof than snowsuit #1. Snowsuit #2 down for the count. I am now rummaging through closets for next year's outerwear for Liam's afternoon walk.

John cooked chicken pibil* for lunch, along with refried beans and plantain, and we were the beneficiaries of his experimentation. Both boys were happy to eat lots, and liked the corn tortillas that we found to go with the lunch. Jake came over to play for the afternoon, and it went well: the boys played Marble Blast, and trains, and Jamie very excitedly showed Jake all of his Exoforce and other robots/Lego items. He had been very insistent upon Jake coming over to our house today (despite the mess) for just that reason. This was another good thing, as far as Jamie was concerned, about the day. We had enchiladas for dinner, as I shredded some leftover chicken pibil*, put it on leftover tortillas, along with some of the tomatoes from the pibil*, and added grated cheese. I grilled them long enough to melt the cheese, and voila! Jamie's favourite meal. He liked that very much, and was very happy. He played with Gary for the evening, and with John a bit when horsie rides were available. Liam enjoyed the rides very much. It was an uncomplicated bathnight, and both boys are now asleep.

2008-02-27 24:13 (Kristen) Jamie now knows that John will be going to Texas last next week for four days or so. In fact, he told me today, when I picked him up at Hakobune, "Papa is going to Texas in eight days." He is uneasy about it, and we're thinking that it is because a) John is going away, b) no one is coming to stay with us while he's gone, and c) he spends a very large percentage of his time with John, and so his absence is more anxiety-inducing than it might otherwise be. It is good to be reminded that I need to spend more time with Jamie, and John with Liam, and I'd been thinking on my own that I needed to spend more time with Jamie, as we haven't been doing the things that we used to do together all the time. John's trip away will give me and Jamie more time to spend together, and have fun.

John took Jamie to school, but not Liam as Liam refused to sit on the toboggan and insisted on walking and there was no time for that. Liam was put out. We speculate that Liam got his bottom wet the last two times he was on the toboggan, and doesn't want that to happen again. We'll suggest his being on his knees, and not on his bottom next time. John took Jamie to Hakobune, although Jamie was somewhat tired, having been woken up by a snowplow at 7:30 AM, and wasn't in the mood to go. He was happy when he got there, and apparently enjoyed his lunch of enchiladas. He had asked for bubble tea for the first time in a while for breakfast this morning, but I told him that he could have one after Hakobune. I decided, given that it was very cold, that I would pick one up for him and take it to him rather than walk to the bubble tea shop. John took Jamie's order, after Jamie realized that a cold walk could be avoided that way, and acquiesced to the change in routine. I took Liam for a walk to the neighbourhood near Hakobune, and puttered around until it was time to get Jamie. Liam slept for 2.5 hours, and woke up when I picked up Jamie. Jamie was delighted to see me, and even more delighted that I had remembered to get his bubble tea. He drank it and the boys played as Liam cooled down from his sleep in his warm, size 2 snowsuit (the others are in the wash). We got home around 5:15, just in time to meet John at the bus stop, and to spend a little Papa time before John went to the Scrabble club and their 33rd birthday party.

The evening was pleasant: Gary joined us for dinner, and then took Jamie downstairs until bath time. Liam and I cleaned, hung out, and did a bit of this and that before I got Jamie at 8:10. The boys were tired, and I explained to Jamie that he needed to be quiet after lights out so that Liam coujld fall asleep. "But I have lots of questions," Jamie said, and I told him to remember them so that I could answer them when Liam was asleep. Jamie fell asleep first, of course. Liam took a little while to calm down, possibly because he was excited at sleeping in the white room with his brother. He is old enough now to care and notice the differences in sleeping arrangements. When John is away, we will all sleep in the same bed, so the excitement should wear off then, I imagine.

2008-02-28 23:49 (Kristen) I slept in a little with Liam this morning, and didn't get up until John and Jamie had left for school (I did get a kiss good morning from Jamie, however, that I recall). It was a quiet morning, without incident. Liam and I walked to Browning for lunch with Gary and Ayami, which he enjoyed enormously. He walked between them for a bit before he got Gary to carry him the rest of the way (which was cause for glee). He ate french toast, tomatoes, olives, cucumber, and bagel for lunch, and Ken took him out for a walk in the afternoon. He only slept for a bit under 90 minutes, instead of his usual two hours, which was all right. Ken had dropped him off at a friend's house, where I was visiting, and Liam played with some play-doh and was cute before we headed home.

Jamie was all smiles and cheer when he came home with John, after John finally managed to extricate Jamie from Hakobune. He ran downstairs to play with Gary at the first opportunity, and spent most of the rest of the day with them, except when he had to come upstairs to eat dinner or do his homework. He has five new cards for his Japanese card game, and so we played a round of that too. Instead of putting his hand on the cards, he threw his entire body on them all to "claim" that card (we were playing on the dining room floor) and this was cause for much hilarity. We put the kids into the bath early, as I had a book club night at our neighbour Karen's, two houses over. I put Liam to bed at 8:00, as he was quite tired, and left John and Jamie watching Anpanman videos a half hour later. A half hour after that, I came home to nurse Liam back to sleep. Not longer later, I had a phone call from John saying that Liam was up and watching Teletubbies. I came home affter John called to ay that Liam was signing that he wanted to have me come home and nurse him upstairs (going to my backpack, pointing upstairs). I did, and it took about an hour or so to get Liam asleep again. I have no idea why he's having trouble sleeping, but I think that I will be waling him around tmorrow, when the weather is supposed to be much more agreeable for that sort of thing, in case a lack of exercise is the cause. Jamie, of course, fell asleep more or less instantly when John put him to bed.

2008-02-29 23:44 (Kristen) Liam had me up early this morning, for some reason (arrgh), and we heard the alarm for John and Jamie as they got up to get ready for school. The morning was average and normal, and Jamie enjoyed school while Liam played with electronics. We all went to get Jamie at school, and Liam stayed awake while we dropped Jamie off at Hakobune. We let Liam take his boots off and go in for a moment, and he was ticked when he had to leave and not play with the toys. I really hope that next Friday goes well when he gets to stay! John, Liam, and I got the groceries done, and Liam slept for an hour and a half in the car. When we picked Jamie up, he was very tired and ended up sleeping for an hour himself in the car. Dinner was at Browning, and Gary and Daniel watched the boys fo an hour while John and I went to the Sadie Hawkins dance at the school. Liam fell asleep almost instantly after the bath, and I do not know how long it took Jamie but do know that he's asleep now. (John: longer than it took me!)

2008-03-01 22:30 (John) Jamie had trouble falling asleep last night after a late night at Browning, and was nonresponsive when I tried shaking him awake half an hour before departure. I packed his breakfast tamago-no-gohan to go, made his snack and checked his knapsack, then woke him up with ten minutes to go, hustled him through the bathroom, into his clothes and out the door. It was his first time back at Nisshu Gakuin since January, what with our travel, travel delays, and a school closure, and it was good to be back.

I went back and picked up Liam, took him to the St. Lawrence Market, where we spent an hour eating and charming our way around our usual vendors. We dropped the groceries back off at home, picked up Mom and went to get Jamie. Jamie played with Harry in the schoolyard until we were all much too cold, but it was hard to resist the lure of the snow-slick slides (see photo). We stopped at Loblaws to pick up supplies for Ted (visiting for a conference for a few days), then headed home. Liam fell asleep in the car, so Jamie and I played outside in the snow for an hour or so keeping an eye on him. We had snowball fights for a while, then I set up a very steep toboggan run on the five-foot snowdrift by our front steps, and Jamie had a lot of fun sliding down the hill, across the driveways, and up the somewhat smaller drift on our neighbours' lawn.

Kristen made dinner, Jamie played for a while with Gary. Everyone got tired and went to bed.

2008-03-02 32:53 (Kristen) Liam wasn't that interested in breakfast, which isn't unusual: he's not much of a breakfast person, as he's already full when he gets up after a good nurse. He ate the whipped cream and blueberries off his pancakes but that was it. Jamie ate his pancakes with great gusto to make up for his brother's disinterest. Liam was also not interested in lunch, which was less usual, and nearly fell asleep on the change table at 11:45, waking himself up with a jerk and a good cry. I tried to soothe him, and he fell asleep in my arms as I rocked him in the bedroom. That should have been my tipoff. He slept for an hour while Jamie pounced (finally! he'd been waiting since 9:00) on Gary, and John did some errands.

Liam was running a slight fever when he was falling asleep, and definitely had one when he woke up. I took him downstairs where he was a Liam version of a 'flat baby': he just sat in the crook of my arm and watched whatever was on the television, rather than attempting to change DVDs, or otherwise influence what was on the television. An hour later, he threw up all over me, himself, and the throw on the couch. He was very unhappy with this, and John and I raced him upstairs to the bath, where we cleaned up after he threw up one more time. I nursed him back to sleep, and he stayed there for two hours or so. When he woke up, he was feeling a little better, but was still flat. John and Jamie went out for an already arranged dinner with John's brother, Ted, who is in town for a few days, and John's aunts. Liam and I stayed home, and Liam fell asleep on my lap around 6:10.

Liam stayed asleep for the rest of the night, more or less, and Jamie played with Gary and reportedly had a great time at the Silk Road Cafe. He sharked his aunts and uncle again at the Japanese card game he's learning, and apparently spent 90% of the time speaking Japanese, once he realized that everyone else was speaking it at the table. He went to bed way too late, and has had trouble getting up this morning.

2008-03-03 23:40 (John) Jamie was tired getting up in the morning and may be fighting what Liam has or what Ross has. Or he might just not be getting enough sleep. Liam has an intermittent fever, very little appetite, and a pimply little rash on his torso and neck; a reaction either to a virus or the MMR vaccine the other day.

The weather was unseasonably warm today, reaching 11°C in the sunny afternoon, when everywhere you went you could hear birds chirping and snow melting. It was definitely too wet for the toboggan; already last night on the way home from the restaurant Jamie and I had had to float the toboggan across some of the bigger puddles on Broadview Avenue. (Kristen: I thought that Jamie was joking when he told me we could float the toboggan when we went to the Second Cup this afternoon.) I took both boys to school in the wagon, after spending fifteen minutes excavating it from the snow. Liam was subdued, but enjoyed going down the slides (after I wiped them down), then went to inspect the big kids' playground, and was persuaded not to go on the big slide. We walked back along the back side of the school for the first time in a while, and he was fascinated by a hopscotch diagram, making me call out the numbers until one of us got tired (it wasn't him).

I picked the boys up at lunch; both of them spent a long time playing with Parker and his brother. Liam wanted to be carried, but was willing to chase after me to be picked up. Jamie decided that the outer wall of the classroom emitted a force field that protected him from my attacks.

After lunch, Kristen took both boys down to the Second Cup for a walk and some fresh air. Liam slept for an hour or so, nowhere near enough (Kristen: more like 40 minutesat most). Jamie continued to be tired and logy, and was unusually resistant to doing his Nisshu Gakuin homework, but then ended up doing six pages instead of the four I initially asked him to do.

We went to Browning to make dinner, and Kristen went to sub at Pub trivia. Liam started running a moderate fever (38.5°C maybe), and his demands became more specific and bizarre. He made me pick up all the toys in the basement and put them away properly, then play Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii. Gary took Jamie home to play some new game involving an electric eyeball (I have no idea). Ted and I took an increasingly fractious Liam home. Liam was happy to have Ted read for him until he noticed that I had snuck up to prepare the bath. We ended up having Ted hold a very noisy Liam for a few minutes, then later escort pyjamaed Jamie to bed, while mostly sticking to our usual bathtime routine without Mom. Neither boy would sleep without Kristen though, because they were feeling unwell and needed special maternal comfort. Jamie eventually passed out at 22:15; Liam fell asleep with Kristen shortly after 22:30. (Kristen: I think that I will never be allowed out again on my own! Ever!)

On the bright side, Liam continues to work to try to increase his vocabulary. He will sometimes say "yeh" now for "yes", and sometimes "at-uh" for "that's it" rather than just grunting. He's still fine with playing Twenty Questions anytime he wants something, probably because we're all really good at the game and can guess it in two or three tries. (Kristen: He also says 'up' clearly when he wants me to get out of bed in the morning.)

Jamie has a nasty scrape under his chin, sustained in a fall on the icy play structure during outdoor play. He's being quite brave about it, but says it's still quite sore.

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

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