Category: Ah, me boys

Random bullets of Mother’s Day

In lieu of a coherent blog post, which I promise you is forthcoming one of these days (ahem, weeks) here’s a few random bullets of Mother’s Day.

  • It started early as Simon woke me up at 5:25, clutching the Mother’s Day present he brought home from school on Friday anxiously as he stage whispered in a near shout, “Mom! Are you still sleeping yet?” Um, not anymore I’m not!
  • Barely a couple of minutes later, Lucas was awake as well. We’re early risers, but for the entire family to be awake and downstairs before 6 am on a Sunday is not only mostly unprecedented but bodes for a very long day. (On days when I’m not working, usually Tristan and I are up a good hour or more before everyone else, giving me precious time to have a coffee or three and peruse the morning paper before the rest of them tumble out of bed in all their needy and noisy glory.)
  • The coffee was still percolating as I opened the Mother’s Day gifts the boys brought home from school on Friday. Simon had asked several times over the weekend if I could please open my Mother’s Day gifts NOW, please please please, and each time I gently put him off and said I wanted to save the surprise for Sunday morning. Imagine the guilt I felt when I opened the beautifully-decorated brown-paper-bag he’d been clutching to find a small planter of annuals — inside a sealed ziploc baggie. Poor things were traumatized yellow by the weekend without air, but they perked up a bit with some water. We’ll see if they survive to be transplanted into the garden.
  • Tristan’s gift was instructions for a foot massage and a little bottle of lotion he’d decorated himself, and a cookbook of his classmates’ favourite recipes. Tristan’s pizza recipe:

    1/2 cup of pineapple
    5 pieces of pepperoni
    a bag of cheese
    some sauce
    one piece of wheat bread

    Put sauce on bread, add cheese, place pepperoni and pineapple and bake for 8 minutes at 20 degrees.

    (How cute is that?)

  • The day was already feeling a little long when I stepped out of the shower and in the midst of towel-drying my hair felt an unbearable wrenching pull in my back, just off my shoulder blade. It was so painful I could barely draw a deep breath. I’m not sure if this is what people mean when they say, “I put my back out,” but holy god in heaven does it ever hurt. Even 24 hours later, I’m holding myself stiffly to avoid the wrenching spasm that shoots across the upper right quadrant of my back if I move the wrong way. (The wrong way being just about any extension of my arms, turning of my head to the side, or looking down in the slightest bit.)
  • It’s still painful enough that I’d debated a bit about the merits of coming to work versus staying home, but with a houseful of kids and nanny, I thought work might be the more peaceful option. After just about a half an hour of typing and mouse-clicking, though, I’m beginning to think it was a bad choice.
  • Any insight into whether this merits medical attention or a wait-it-out approach is appreciated, as is your anecdotal experience with back pain. This is a new one for me.
  • The good news is that Beloved was a darling throughout the day, and the pull in my back forced me to pretty much take it easy the whole of Mother’s Day, something I might not have done otherwise. I didn’t change a single diaper all day, and read the last half of a photography book that was due back at the library this week. Of course, I also emptied the dishwasher, picked up some clutter and did a few loads of laundry — because I think I’m now physically and mentally incapable of actually doing nothing for a day.
  • After Lucas’s nap, Beloved took the whole family on a trip to Henry’s camera shop where he let me pick out my Mother’s Day gift. I waffled for a bit between a set of reflectors, a Gorillapod, and a neutral density filter, but finally settled on a circular polarizing filter. A polarizing filter is cool to have because it balances the brightness of the sky against a landscape while bringing out details and colour saturation, and cuts down on reflectivity of water and glass. A fun new toy to play with!
  • To finish off the day, we had Granny and Papa Lou over for takeout fajitas from Lone Star, and they brought cheesecake from Costco for dessert. Five-star seal of approval on that meal!

Aside from the wrenched muscles and the fact that it was grey and just about subzero all day, it was a lovely Mother’s Day. You?

In which Lucas makes his preference clear

I was just settling into the comfy chair with Lucas, preparing for our regular bedtime routine. He’ll nurse for a few minutes and then I’ll cuddle him to sleep – the third child truly is spoiled rotten. I’d just pulled him in close when I realized I’d completely forgotten to give him his after-dinner bottle. (I blame Granny and Papa Lou for their scintillating after-dinner conversation.)

I looked down at him and said, “Oh no! We forgot to give you your bottle! I’m so sorry!” He looked up at me with his beautiful brown eyes and said, “Bottle.” Clear as day! He’s got a dozen or 20 words, but I hadn’t heard that one before. What really shocks me, though, is how much he understands of what we say to him. Unbiased as I am, I truly think he’s ahead of the curve in comprehension.

I laughed and started pulling up my shirt to offer him a boob, figuring even though he’d be down a couple of ounces of milk because we’d skipped the bottle he’d survive and it was too late to bother now. He looked at my breast, looked at me and pointed quite clearly to the shelf in the kitchen where I keep the baby bottles, which we could see from the chair, and said, “Bottle.”

“Okay,” I said, laughing again, “I’ll give you a bottle. But you have to drink a little bit of this first.” The nursing is staggering to a halt, but I’m doing what I can to prolong it. He took about four cursory slurps, popped off the nipple and pointed at the kitchen. “Bottle.”

This is the same child who last summer would pop off the boob randomly to suck on his own toes. It’s a good thing my ego is not fragile, I tell you. Apparently toes and cow’s milk are both preferable to whatever I’m brewing up.

So I brought him into the kitchen, where he giggled in delight as I poured the milk into a bottle. He pointed at the microwave and said, “Bottle!” while it warmed, and proceeded to snarf down all six ounces. For good measure, as I was finally settling in to cuddle him to sleep, he arched his back to look at the empty bottle on the end table where I had placed it.

“Bottle!” he announced, pointing to it and grinning at me with a look of self-satisfaction that clearly said, “I am the cleverest baby who ever lived, and aren’t I devilishly cute, too?”

Somehow, I think I’m going to spend a lot of this child’s lifetime thinking, “It’s a good thing you’re so darn cute…”

The not-yet-toddling menace

I am finding this particular stage of Lucas’s development exhausting. No, really? EXHAUSTING. Also exasperating, challenging, and frustrating. (And, to be fair, delightful and charming and wonderful.) But mostly, exhausting.

He stubbornly refuses to walk on his own, even though he can stand with no problem, has walked across the room unaided, and can perch himself precariously on a peanut butter jar, presumably to get the jam hidden on a higher shelf in the pantry.

But he can climb up and down an entire flight of stairs, make his way on and off the sofa, and simply cannot resist an opportunity to clamber onto something… chairs, end tables, diaper crates and toy boxes (not to mention, as I said, peanut butter jars.) The good thing is that he really is getting pretty good at getting himself back down again, so if I’m nearby I can at least supervise and let him climb up and down to his heart’s content. This assumes that I am at liberty to stand benevolently nearby for the 16 hours per day he would prefer to engage in his furniture-scaling adventures.

When he isn’t trying to climb every elevated surface within two feet of the floor, he’s dumping stuff. Emptying cupboards of their pots, drawers of their tea-towels, and bookshelves of their books is *almost* as much fun as climbing into the cupboard and drawers and onto the now-empty bookshelves.

In the 10 minutes it takes to make sandwiches for lunch, he can create a mess that takes me 20 minutes to clean up. I pick up the books, he dumps the plastic plates and cups from the cupboard. I pick up the plastic plates and cups, he ransacks the shoe closet. I rearrange the shoes, he dumps the books off the book shelf. I found the TV remote in the dog’s food bowl yesterday and he unfolded an entire basket of folded laundry in the time it took me to answer a telephone call.

Did I mention exhausting?

At the end of a long day, I look at Tristan and Simon and think, “They survived — and I survived them. Surely this phase doesn’t last forever.” It just seems particularly taxing, not to mention early, to be struggling with this at only 14 months. It’s a good thing he’s so darn adorable, I tell him frequently. Only the cutest babies get away with that kind of ongoing mischief without finding themselves packed up and shipped off to Granny’s house!

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It’s hard not to indulge this kind of cuteness. But please tell me that this phase is a short one! The toddler years are not yet upon us and I’m already running out of reserve energy!!

I am so farked

This third child will be the one that does all the frightful things that the first two never did, won’t he? Now that poor old mom is too worn down to properly fight back.

83:365 Mischief in the pantry

Standing on the peanut butter jar (!) so he can reach deeper into the pantry. He’s all of 14 months old and can’t even WALK yet, for goodness sake!!

Rerun week continues with Notes from a Therapy Session

I’m guest-blogging over at Canadian Family magazine’s Family Jewels blog this week, and dredging up some of my favourite posts from the archives to keep you company over here. This one is from the summer of 2006.

***

Tristan: And did I tell you about that time when I was four, when my mother tried to kill me twice in the same month?

Therapist: Hmmm, I don’t think so. There was the episode where she locked you and your brother in a running car while you were sleeping…

Tristan: Right, and then less than two weeks later, she yanked me off some playground equipment and I dropped like a stone from eight feet in the air.

Therapist: Surely she didn’t mean to…

Tristan: It was one of those things where you dangle off a handle and zoom across a beam from one platform to another. She called it a zip line, but I insisted on calling it a zip code, which was pretty funny because we don’t even have zip codes in Canada. Anyway, I had just barely mastered holding my own body weight up but I loved that zip code. We went to a new park one evening on our bikes, and I was so proud to be able to actually reach the zip code from the raised platform, and all I did all night long was zip back and forth.

Therapist: And what did your mother do?

Tristan: Well, she was watching and cheering for me at first, but then she said it would be easier if I used my feet to push off the platform at the far end. The big kids could hurl themselves across really fast and bounce half way back on one push, but I kind of had to wiggle and squirm to make it all the way across and back. Remember, I was a big kid for my age, but I was only four years old.

Therapist: Mmmm hmmm…

Tristan: And so my mother said, ‘Here, let me show you. Just use your feet to push off the platform…’ and she grabbed me by the ankles to demonstrate, but she pulled me off balance and I lost my grip on the handle. I fell face first in the sand, and because she was still holding my ankles I landed with my whole body perfectly horizontal, basically doing a giant belly flop into the sand.

Therapist (cringes): Ouch! That must have hurt!

Tristan: Yah, it knocked the wind right out of me. There was a long minute where I just lay on the sand and tried to figure out if I was still alive or not, and my mother later said the entire city of Ottawa fell silent and every pair of eyes at that very busy playground turned to me to see what would happen next.

Therapist: Were you okay?

Tristan: After I cried for a couple of minutes and got over being pissed off about all the sand in my mouth I was okay. My mother said she had nightmares for days about how close my head came to hitting the platform on the way down. I mean, I got over it pretty quickly and once my mom finished wiping the tears off my face and the sand out of my mouth with the corner of her t-shirt, I went right back to playing on the zip code for the rest of the evening. Funny, though – when we got home my mother had a whole bunch of new grey hairs I had never noticed before…

***

Bonus conversation!

We were playing in the driveway last night, and there’s a little plastic toy that was supposed to have gone in the garbage. I’m not sure how it migrated back out into the driveway, but I ended up running over it when I backed the car out of the driveway to give the kids more room to play.

Tristan picked it up and ran over to me excitedly. “Look mummy! You sure broke the hell out of this thing, didn’t you?”

In which we talk about Lucas’s other favourite boob

Baby’s first smile, first laugh. The first time baby slept through the night. Baby’s first food, and the first meal baby feeds to himself. Baby’s first tentative steps, and baby’s first words. All milestones worthy of marking on the calendar, of noting, of celebrating.

And now, finally, after a YEAR of waiting — baby’s first favourite TV show. Actually, the first time the baby shows even the remotest interest in TV in general.

Yah, yah, I know. Both the Canadian and the American pediatric societies recommend against television for babies. Perhaps the Canadian and American pediatric societies don’t have full-time jobs and two other kids to take care of? Perhaps the Canadian and American pediatric societies LIKE to try going to the bathroom while diverting the baby from a rousing game of lick-the-toiletbrush? Perhaps the Canadian and American pediatric societies are eating a whole lot of takeout food?

It’s no secret we’re TV junkies at my place, and Tristan and Simon both loved the flickering electric nipple from an early age. We have more than a dozen Baby Einstein videos and DVDs, not to mention countless others: Bob the Builder, the Wiggles, and enough Thomas the Tank Engine to choke a conductor. And yet, despite our best efforts to ensnare him, the baby has steadfastly refused to be engaged by the idiot box. Perhaps because it is *always* on, he’d no more stare at it than at the sofa, or the vacuum cleaner. (You’d leave yours out, too, if you were using it ten times a week!)

But! Oh happy day, we have finally found a television program that captivates Lucas. And not only that, but he’s showing a remarkable amount of discernment in his first choice of favourite TV show. No whiney Caillou for my boy, nor pedantic Barney. No lispy ducks, no freakish blobs, no little blue doggies to endure. Nope, this is TV I myself could, and will, and DO watch happily for hours, and DVDs that are well worth investing in.

You know what show captivates Lucas? You haven’t seen from cute until you’ve seen him wiggling his little happy dance to its iconic theme.

Lucas loves the Muppet Show. Glory be.

A love letter to Tristan, age 7

My darling Tristan,

Today, you turn seven years old. Uncle Sean calls this your “champagne birthday”: seven years old on March 7. By coincidence, you’ve invited seven guests to your party, and the weather is even forecasting a high of 7 degrees! Remind me to go buy a Super 7 ticket for you, okay?

Tristan, this has been the year that you and I became friends as well as mother and son. This is the year you learned the fun of the inside joke, and the year you showed us a peek into what the future may hold with three big boys in our house.

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When I look back on the last year, the image I will remember most clearly is of you hunched over the kitchen table, markers and pencil crayons arrayed around your latest creation, be it book or drawing or comic. You are endlessly creative, my son, and you never fail to surprise me with your ideas and your ability. I’ve watched you turn a cereal box into a guitar and a packing crate into a rocket ship, with no prompting or suggestions from us. In fact, the problem now is what to do with your endless creations: before I can recycle that old tissue box it gets reinvented as a school bus for Webkinz. Endlessly charming, for sure, but we’re already a family that has clutter issues and now we’re swimming in random drawings and discarded art projects, too.

You are my adventurer, my athlete, my explorer. This summer, you astonished me by learning to jump off the diving board and cavort in the deep end of the pool long before I thought you’d be ready for it. You took skating lessons and went from barely able to stand to zooming around the rink with fearless abandon in just a few weeks. You love to climb, to leap, and to run. It’s nothing short of lovely, if not exhausting, to watch you move. And I’m constantly scolding you to stop using the furniture in your athletic endeavours!

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But you are a scholar, as well. You read well beyond your Grade 1 level, and because you are a renaissance child, you also do well in math. You have a sweet crush on your French teacher, and your accent is better at seven years old than mine is after 30 years of lessons. You want to please everyone so badly that sometimes you become overly anxious about performance and results, and you get that entirely from me. I’m so sorry!

You have yet to “discover” girls, but the girls have definitely discovered you. While I’ve long since become accustomed to sorting the love notes and heart-covered drawings from your school bag, I was left in open-mouthed shock just a week or so ago as one brazen little girl dashed over to kiss you goodbye on the cheek as we left the school yard. I think you are still generally nonplussed by the attention you get from the girls, and I think you’d be just as happy if they stopped their constant demands of “who are you going to marry,” but trust me: you’ll love it one of these days.

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You are a wonderful older brother to Simon and Lucas. Simon is both your best friend and, not surprisingly, your arch nemesis. I love to listen in as you provide sage and worldly advice to Simon on the rules of school; ironically, just a few weeks ago one such nugget exclaimed in horrified reaction was, “There is NO kissing at school!” You are unbelievably patient with Lucas, and you love to make him laugh. You are even responsible enough now that I can leave Lucas in your care for a few minutes and know that he will be safe and well entertained.

Brothers

At seven, your favourite things include Pokémon, Webkinz, Fairly Odd Parents and SpongeBob SquarePants. You have been working your way through the Warriors series of books at bedtime with Daddy for weeks now, and you all seem enthralled by them. You also love to play the Wii, including Star Wars Lego and Big Brain Academy. We see all of these interests come out in your drawings and in your imaginative play with Simon, and it’s fascinating to watch.

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This has been a fun and playful year with you, my sweet and handsome Tristan. Every single day with you is a joy, and I wish you the happiest of birthdays and a year brimming with love and adventure.