Category: Ah, me boys

Lucas at six months (and a bit)

Did you hear the choirs of angels singing, and did you see the beam of light shoot down from the heavens to glow lovingly over Lucas’s high chair last week? Or maybe that was just me singing the Hallelujah chorus. We’ve made one of those huge developmental leaps that makes Mommy’s day so very much easier. Lucas can cram food into his own gob now.

Aside from sitting up independently, which he is still on the cusp of doing, this is one of the best milestones in babydom, as measured in units of maternal freedom. I’d been slow in integrating new solids into his diet, taking a week or so between each new food, but now that I can give him something to hold and nosh while I eat or empty the dishwasher or put dinner on the table, we’ve progressed quickly through all the old standbys in the course of the last week: Cheeries, toast, Egos, organic cookies, Mum Mums (do y’all have Mum Mums in the States? Best baby cookie ever!) and even pizza crust.

It’s been a while since I’ve given you a Lucas update, no? Lucas at six (almost seven!) months is a dream baby. He’s pleasant, sweet, and friendly. He continues to (*shhhh, don’t tell anyone!*) sleep through the night. He’s only disagreeable when he’s hungry or tired or is not the centre of attention, much like me. When I brought him for his six-month checkup, I was quite sure I’d find out he’d grown out of the baby bucket car seat/carrier. (Maximum is 22 lbs and 29 inches long.) We had only half an inch to spare, but a whopping five pounds of room to grow before we have to give it up – another hallelujah, please! – because he was 28.5 inches long but only 17 lbs. He’s the longest and the lightest of his brothers at six months, on the 50th percentile for weight and the 95th percentile for length.

My only two concerns going in to the appointment were that he still lolls his head a bit, and he still spits up ferociously. The head-lolling is resolving itself quite well, and the ped said he is not at all concerned. While Tristan sat up independently at five months, Lucas is not quite there yet at almost seven months. He does it for a minute or two, sometimes as much as five, but mostly because he’s propped up. He’ll get there, I’m sure.

The spitting up is driving me bananas. He still does it up to ten times a day, or more, sometimes enough to make a “splat” sound as he launches it over my shoulder and onto the floor below. (My apologies to the people at Canadian Tire, where he christened not one, not two, but three aisles in the sporting goods section while I was looking at skates for the boys last week.) We switched his meds from Ranitidine to Zantac caplets, but if anything he seems to be spitting more. Anyone else out there have a champion spitter and if so, when did it resolve? Seems to me that although Tristan and Simon were both like this, both of them dried up a lot when solids were introduced. Lucas just spits up more colourfully now.

One of my favourite things about this age, aside from the tiny increments of independence (tiny is okay, huge is not allowed) is his affection for me. My favourite is the “I love you so much I must grab you by the hair and suck on your face” kiss. It makes me laugh out loud every single time.

And does he ever love his brothers and his daddy. His whole body wriggles with delight when they talk to him or even walk into the room. Tristan can make him laugh just by looking at him. Is there anything better in the world than a baby belly laugh?

Does it get any cuter than this?

DSC_1948

Tristan takes a dive

It seemed like a straightforward question. On the enrollment form I completed on the first day of Tristan’s first day-long day camp: “Can your child swim 25 meters unassisted: yes, no, I don’t know.”

25 meters? How long is 25 meters anyway? That seems kind of far. So I checked “no”.

Then I thought of Tristan bounding off the diving board and dogpaddling happily the length of our friends’ pool, and his success in swimming lessons, and scratched out my “no” and checked the “yes” box.

Then I paused, and reread the question. And I had visions of Tristan foundering in the deep end of some lake-sized pool, alone and far from safety, going under for the third time. And I quickly scratched out my check in the “yes” box and circled the previously scratched out “no” box and drew a little happy face beside it.

Then I paused again. Suddenly, I was picturing Tristan sitting dejectedly on the pool deck in a life preserver as the rest of his camp mates splashed happily in the pool. I pictured him at 35, in his therapist’s office, describing how a childhood spent in a protective bubble ruined his life. So I drew a squiggley line through my circle around the “no” box and scratched it so definitively out that I bled through the paper. And I put a big X on the happy face, too.

I hovered my pen briefly over the “I don’t know” box. I tried to imagine in which universe a skinny, pimply-faced teenager with no investment in the future social and mental well-being of my oldest son was somehow in a better position to make this decision than I seemed to be capable of, and didn’t check that box either.

In the end, I redrew the little box above the “yes” and ticked it off. For good measure, I pointed a few arrows at it and wrote the word “yes!” at the end of the question, and underlined it. I think maybe I was trying to sell the answer to myself.

At the end of the day, I grilled Tristan with the usual questions about his day, and he answered with the usual dreamy inexactitude I have come to expect. He told me about his art class (it was an arts camp) and the monster he was creating in a distracted sort of way. I asked about the pool.

“Oh yeah!” he said, snapping awake into the story, eyes bright with the memory of it. “It was great! I jumped off the highest diving board!”

I paused to digest that. “You mean the one closest to the ground, right? The low board? Not the one that you have to climb up a ladder to get to?” Surely to god my six year old who only learned how to jump off the diving board in the last year was not jumping off the 3m (10 foot) board.

“No, Mommy, the big board! I climbed up the ladder, and the first time I was scared, but then it was a lot of fun so I did it a bunch of times! And it was great! I can’t wait to go back tomorrow and do it again!” At least, I assume that’s what he said. I think I died of fright somewhere around the first exclamation point.

Lukey’s boat is painted green

When he’s really frothed, I can rely on three songs to calm Lucas down. “You are my Sunshine” is my lullaby standby, and I have sung it to all three boys. It reminds me of my Granda, my grandfather on my mother’s side, and I cringe when I hear it used to huck orange juice. Chet Baker does a much better version of the song than I do, but Lucas seems content to listen to me serenade him endlessly as he fights off sleep.

The second song is Great Big Sea’s “Lukey.” Beloved sang this to him ’round about the time he was a week or two old, and in those first colicky weeks we must have sung it hundreds of times since then. I like this song because it comes with many verses, and Lucas doesn’t seem to mind if you mix and match them so long as you just keep singing. On a good day, humming may be permitted.

I have one failsafe song in my arsenal: I have never seen him so worked up that “Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes” doesn’t immediately calm him. (Yes, it’s weird. Don’t judge me, it works!) He will settle and listen as long as you keep singing, and will resume his histrionics with renewed vigour if pause for so much as a quarter-rest worth of time between repeats. I have bellowed it across the back yard to him, trying to yank just a few more weeds from the backyard jungle while he demands attention from his swing; I have blushed rather furiously while singing it to him in a crowded waiting room over and over again; I have danced a little jig while singing it in the grocery store, just to spice things up a bit. Did you know that the song comprises only 10 words, and even with repetitions the whole thing only draws out to 23 words? Do you have any idea how many times you can sing a 23 word song in the average trip to the grocery store, let alone when traversing a highway across a national park? Many, many, many.

Anyone who has had the misfortune to hear me warble in person knows I’m no Amy Winehouse (which, all things considered, may not be such a bad thing), but I have to say there is something sweetly empowering about being able to soothe my baby simply by singing to him. One of my favourite memories of this age will be of Lucas with his face red from bellowing against some indignity, chin trembling and tears held in abeyance. “Well, okay then,” his teary gaze says to me. “I’m righteously ticked off, but as long as you keep singing, I suppose it’ll be alright. But don’t you dare stop. And no, as a matter of fact you may NOT sing any other song. Don’t even think about trying that Old Macdonald had a farm shit with me.”

For the record, it has not escaped me that the song my son best loves me to sing has no actual melody to speak of. And no, I do not accept this as a criticism of my inability to carry a tune.

My dufus-savants

I know, the term is officially “idiot savants.” They’re not quite idiots, my boys. They’re plenty smart, they’re just not overly clever sometimes. Dufus seems about the right term for someone who walks out of a public washroom with a vaguely puzzled look on his face and asks, completely lacking in guile, “Did I have underwear on when I left the house this morning?” (They likely got left in the pool changeroom at day camp. At least, that’s what I choose to believe.)

Anyway, dufuses, yes. But savants as well. At the dinner table recently, Tristan announced à propos of nothing, “Mom, I can spell my name backwards.” And proceeded to do so. Then he went on to spell Mommy, Daddy, Simon, Lucas, Costco, Webkinz, and bacon backwards. We were suitably impressed. He even did a few requests. He’s barely learned how to spell things forward by sounding them out, and can do it backwards in his head as well.

But we were positively gobsmacked when we were out with Simon the other day and he announced from the back seat that he could spell “Tristan” backwards — and proceeded to do it flawlessly. Beloved and I regarded each other with open mouths of astonishment. I frankly didn’t think he could spell his own name reliably forwards, let alone spell his brother’s name backwards. This from a four-year-old preschooler who regularly omits the number 14 when counting to twenty.

I’m thinking with a little practice, they’ll be those freakishly precocious kids you see on TV, the ones who can name any country you point at on the map or have memorized the periodic table of the elements in utero. Anybody have the contact info handy for David Letterman’s people?

Lucas’s first cereal

Every now and then I feel the need to conform to the expectations of those who castigate mommy blogs as self-reverential shrines to minutiae. What could be more self-indulgent than four minutes of baby’s first cereal posted to YouTube?

But seriously, could he BE more adorable? If nothing else, watch for the infectious baby giggles in the second minute.

(or, click thru and watch it here)

Crazy mornings

We’re early risers around here. Most mornings I’m up somewhere between 5:30 and 6:30, and at least one of the boys is up around the same time. I can’t remember the last time all of us weren’t up by 7:15 with the exception of Beloved, who would sleep until tomorrow if we let him.

Even so, it takes us a while to get going in the mornings. I nurse Lucas when he wakes up, put on a pot of coffee, make a pre-breakfast snack for the big boys (this is a holdover from the old days when they were wee, and they probably don’t need it anymore but we are nothing if not creatures of habit around here) and read the paper for a bit before nursing Lucas again on the other side to take off the overnight milk pressure build-up. By then it’s time to shower and do my morning ablutions, get the boys dressed and breakfasted, and get Beloved up. Lucas likes a wee nap in the morning, and usually gets held by one of the grownups while he’s doing so. Yes, he’s spoiled rotten. I know. I’m okay with that. He’ll wake up for a bottle around 9:30 or so, which takes the best part of a half-hour to drink, and then get him dressed. Three mornings a week I sneak off to the gym and leave Beloved to tend to the boys, but nobody else gets dressed and goes anywhere without a major effort. We’re ready to face the day in public by 10:00, maybe 10:30.

We live close enough to the school that I can hear the schoolbell ringing. Each morning for the last month or so of school, I’d hear the bell ring for 9:00 and suppress a little shudder. Starting in September, we move from our leisurely both-boys-in-school-afternoons-only to both boys in school mornings and Tristan in school all (gasp!) day. How the hell we’ll get all of us out the door and across the street for 9:00 am has been a puzzle I’ve been worrying for a couple of months now.

I found out today just how ugly it will be. Without even realizing the foreshadowing, I’d enrolled Tristan in an all-day arts camp and Simon in a mornings-only camp at his former nursery school. The chaos of getting everybody out the door was nothing short of insanity, but it’s now not quite 10 in the morning, Lucas is sleeping in his car seat on the bathroom floor with the exhaust fan on (his second most common napping place, after our arms – don’t judge me, it works!!!) and I have both a hot Tim’s coffee and an entire blog post at my fingertips.

This might work out after all!

The question now is what on earth will I do with myself all day with only Lucas to take care of? For at least the mornings this week, with Beloved home the parents outnumber the kids!! How did we ever find just one child so difficult to manage? The silence (aside from the hum of the exhaust fan) is blissfully deafening.

4022

Four-thousand and twenty-two. It’s Simon’s magic number, a quantity that delineates anything between a lot and infinity. As in, “Is my time out done yet? Because I’ve been here for 4022 minutes.” Or, “When I grow up, I’m going to have 4022 webkinz.” Or, “Do I have to eat another pea? I already ate 4022 of them.” I have no idea where this particular number got its significance, but it’s entirely of his own creation.

And, it just happens to be within a couple dozen of the number of unread posts in my bloglines account. Four thousand unread posts calling to me: “Read me! There are funny stories and anecdotes to be read, memes to be filched, wry observations to be appreciated, photos to be admired. Read me, read me, read me!” Sigh. I’ll never catch up. Sorry I haven’t been a good bloggy friend lately. Maybe next week when the boys are in day camp for the week, I’ll catch up. But, probably not. I got up at 5:30 this morning, thinking I’d catch up before everybody else woke up. I did spend more than an hour on the computer, after I savoured the newspaper and a hot coffee, but I still didn’t make it any deeper than the backlog on three or four of my very favourites.

It doesn’t mean I’m not thinking of you guys, though!

I’m good, but I’m not that good

I’m feeding the baby on the couch. Tristan and Simon are playing upstairs. Tristan calls down.

“Mom!” he bellows, coming down the stairs. “I need some red fabric.” I marvel for a minute that he knows a word like ‘fabric’ before replying.

“Well, there’s a red polar fleece blanket in Lucas’s closet, but it has teddy bears on it.”

“No, that’s no good,” he says.

“What do you need it for?” I ask.

“Brownie needs a superhero cape,” he replies. Brownie is his Webkinz doggie.

“Just use the superman cape that’s on your jammies,” I suggest.

“No, I looked for it but it’s in the dirty clothes hamper,” he whines. I’m mildly surprised that that stopped him, but shrug.

“Sorry, buddy, I can’t think of anything else we’d have that might work.”

“Well,” he says, a little petulantly, “can’t you just knit some or something?”

The look of love

There are a lot of wonderful things about mothering a baby not quite four months old. It’s fascinating to watch his personality emerge, bright-eyed and curious and more than a little stubborn. (Fancy that! Who would have guessed it?) It’s equally fascinating to see him growing before my eyes, gaining folds and bursting through footie sleepers each time I blink. And the quest to make the baby laugh has turned into a competitive sport around here, with Beloved as the champion but closely followed by me and even the boys. Lucas loves to laugh, and often at the simplest of gestures.

Considering he’s not quite four months old, he has a pretty impressive arsenal of communication tools. He coos up a storm, talking happily to himself or his hands. He cries with an impressive bellow, and it melts my heart when he sees me coming to give him the attention he is demanding and immediately smiles through his tears. And I had forgotten how much I love the “stick out your tongue” game. I remember playing this with Tristan if not Simon, but Lucas seems to be the champion, and I’m still astonished that it’s a game that can be played with such a young baby. If you stick out your tongue at him, he immediately sticks his tongue back out at you. He’s become so adept at this that it’s become a bit of a salute; when he knows he has your attention, out comes the little pink tongue in a drooley greeting. It’s clear from the sparkle of delighted accomplishment in his eyes that the exchange is intentional, and understood by him as such. I don’t remember how long this phase lasts, but I hope it’s quite a while!

But my very favourite part of mothering this lovely little boy of mine who still wants to be held all of his waking hours and many of his sleeping ones as well? It’s the look, that adoring, worshipful gaze he bestows upon me when I least expect it. He studies my features with intense concentration, as if burning each freckle into his newly-firing synapses, and then a smile sweeps over his dewy face like sunshine on a summer day, and I truly fear my heart might burst. All the injustices of the world are forgiven, all the wrongs are righted, and the universe is a place of blissful joy when I am bathed by the glow of that loving gaze.

How can anyone ever recover from such love? In all my long years of being loved, and I am lucky to say I’ve been loved by the best, nobody has loved me with the shining and silent adoration of my four-month-old son.

Lucas

Wherein Tristan has Beloved’s number

We’re getting ready to go out to visit some friends for dinner, and Beloved is taking a, erm, bathroom break. I’ve recently taken to teasing him that he uses the bathroom as a refuge. He has his book in there and the door locks. Can you blame him?

“When are we going?” asks Simon.

“As soon as Daddy is done in the bathroom,” I answer, putting diapers in the pack for Lucas.

The boys are giggling. “Oh, then we have lots of time!” Tristan says, and I laugh out loud. Apparently I’m not the only one who has noticed.

“Yeah,” adds Simon, “Daddy takes a LONG time in the bathroom! We could be here all day!” By now all three of us are laughing.

Tristan mimics holding a book out in front of him, squinting one eye and staring at the imaginary page with the other. “I’m busy!” he says in a gruff but accurate impression of Beloved. “I still have to finish this chapter.”

Lampooned by our own children. I expected this, but not nearly so soon!