By the way, this update has absolutely nothing to do with it being hot. I just had to put that somewhere. Kieron, I know you just came back from a tour of India, but did you have to bring the heat with you?
By the way,there's pictures at
http://www.blacksphotocentre.com/authenticate.asp?p1=BPVT13X77M5K0
and as far as I know they're still there. Daniel is growing his hair so he can put it in a ponytail just like Daddy. (I told him that little boys don't generally grow their hair long and that some kids might think he's a girl if he does. He looked somewhat nonplussed and said "But I'm not a girl." I told him if it didn't bother him he could grow it, and that seemed to be the end of that as far as he was concerned.)
(AKA the Chris, the move, the law schools and the uncertainties of life)
Chris is doing fairly well these days, considering that he became a vehicular statistic April 5th. He's back at work full-time. Granted, this is "regular folk" full-time, not "medical folk" full-time (it's a difference of about 50 hrs/wk). He's also still limping a bit and fairly tired at the end of the day, and he'll probably never regain full wrist mobility. All things considered, we figure he got off pretty lightly. Plus, now he's got cool manly scars.
Three days after the accident, Chris was offered a 2nd year residency spot at Ottawa starting July 1. Three days later, I was offered a spot at Ottawa law school. Considering how hard we had both worked to get these two things, our response was not exactly as enthusiastic as I once imagined it would be. More of a sure, OK, we'll think about it later, instead of YYYAAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!!!!
Which is OK, since we're not actually going to either one any time soon. I told Ottawa Psych about the crash right after they offered Chris the spot, and they sent best wishes and said don't worry about us, just get better.
So we didn't worry about them. We concentrated on Chris' recovery, and once it became apparent that he would be going back to work, we contacted them to say, OK, let's start the transfer process.
"Sure, yeah, we'll get right on that," they said. We figured we would wait until we had official word before doing anything else, since technically London could put up a fight to keep him and delay our move. So we waited. And waited. And started bugging them. And eventually started to get going on the move - we were, after all, going to move by July 1.
On May 7th, four weeks after I had told them about the accident, and two hours after I had given notice at our rental office that we were going to leave July 1, they contacted us to say, "Uh.... we need to think about this transfer thing."
Ack!
Frantic call back the rental office, heart-stopping moment hearing them say "We've already given away your house," slow ulcerative burn while we waited for Ottawa to figure things out and distinguish their collective asses from their elbows. I guess it had finally dawned on them that if Chris had been in an accident, he might not be ready to start the second year of his program when they thought he would. Not sure why it took a bunch of DOCTORS that long to figure things out. I mean, I don't have an MD myself, but even I was aware that Chris might have to miss some work after snapping his femur and pulping his wrist.
They dangled usfor a good long time and finally told us they would accept Chris after he was all done his first year. The original plan was that they would take him with 2 months left to go till second year. If they had kept to that but just added on the missed month due to the accident, he would have been transferring in October. As it was, December was now the transfer date. When Chris explained that this would mean that I effectively would not be able to go to law school, they said Oh goodness, that really is too bad, isn't it?
(Translation: call someone who gives a damn).
When Chris asked why the change, he was told, Oh, uh, we just thought that would be best.
So we grumbled and then made the best of it. Decided that since we had quite a while to go before December, we could probably find a house to buy instead of to rent. So we did. There's a long story behind this too, about a crazy old man who listed his house but didn't actually want to sell it as far as we could tell, but in the end we got the crazy guy's house.
It'll be soooo nice to own our own house again! And to have an enclosed back yard. Both the blessing and the curse of our current neighbourhood (which I wish we could take with us to Ottawa) is that we have common back areas. This means there's always lots of neighbourhood children to play with, but it also means that I can't just let the kids go to the back yard and do housework, since our back yard is right next to the parking lot and the street. And at this point Justin has more speed than sense of self-preservation.
Then we found out that because of transfer-red tape, Chris might not be able to move to Ottawa in December after all. More like February. Almost simultaneously I was accepted by Western law. So I thought, what the hell, I'll start law school here, then Chris will move to Ottawa in February and we'll follow him at the end of my school year in March. One month apart, that's not so long.
So when we found out that Chris could indeed still transfer in December, it was a bit bittersweet. I've just been so up and down about the whole law school thing.
I mean,
Justin was mostly composed of one big clingy whine for about 8 months. Ear infections and teething, one after another after another. In January, we were finally referred for an ENT appointment ... for mid-May. Earliest possible time. When we finally saw the ENT, he said that Justin's ears were fluid-filled and he currently had an ear infection (which we hadn't noticed because he was no more whiny than usual). Plus he'd already had 8 infections by that point. And his hearing was barely normal for a child and his language was somewhat delayed already. So, says that ENT, although we're no longer quick to recommend ear tubes for little kids, THIS case definitely shows a NEED for ear tubes. ASAP.
Apparently ASAP = 7 months. December 18th.
Chris called back and managed to get him in for October. But it's kind of sobering that the earliest possible appointment for a kid who desperately needs ear tubes was in 5 months.
Health care crisis? What health care crisis?
However, with the warmer weather his ears finally cleared up and his sunny nature shone through. He finally unglued from me (what a way to lose 30 pounds!) and even started to talk. It was pretty dramatic. Chris' dad was visiting and at one point he asked, is it me or has his vocabulary doubled in the last three days?
Within a couple of weeks, I had my first actual conversation with Justin. We were at the pool and the large water sprinkler was turned on. He pointed to it and said "SSHHAOW!" (his word for Shower).
"Yes,that's right, Shower. Do you want to go to the shower?"
"Nah."
"Is that a yes or a no, Justin?"
"NAH."(accompanied by head shaking).
It took me a minute to realize that we had just had our first verbal exchange of ideas.
Then a few weeks later Justin said his first honest-to-god sentence with both subject and verb: Bye, bye, doggie.
Now his latest word is Bee! He loves imitating Daniel, so he stands in front of the toilet yelling Bee!!! although as of yet no bee has been forthcoming. I know it's early for toilet training, but I have such a hope that he'll think imitating Daniel is so cool that he'll start to use the potty early. Imagining my life without diapers takes my breath away. Actually, sometimes diapers take my breath away, but that's completely different.
I realized one day as I scooped the cat litter that there are actually people who don't deal with feces much in their daily lives. No cat poop, no soiled diapers, no preschool bum to wipe. I was struck by the fact that these people, when they don't poop themselves, can actually go through an entire day with no contact with excrement at all. It seems like such an alien existence to me. I yearn for it.
Daniel, for his part, having pretty much mastered speaking and peeing, is now onto social skills like making friends. He has made his first real honest-to-gosh friend here (as opposed to kids he plays with because their parents are friends). Her name is Sandra and she's almost, but not quite, entirely unlike him. Which is good, actually, since they've had to adapt to each other and learned some valuable skills in the process. Sandra has a lot of fun with Daniel, but sometimes gets overwhelmed by his intensity. He's had to learn to respect her right to not want to run around yelling or being yelled at. This was a tough lesson to learn, but eventually it got through. It was the cutest thing in the world seeing Daniel trying really hard to calm himself and hearing him tell me seriously "I'm learning how to cool down just like Obi-Wan Kenobi, so that I won't freak out Sandra."
For her part,Sandra had to learn to stand up for herself or perish. These days, if Sandra has had enough, she's quite capable of yelling NO! STOP! instead of running to her mom. Sarah, her mom, had Sandra practice saying "Daniel STOP" until even her little brother started saying "Daniel TOP".
So now they have lots of fun together and miss each other when they're apart. It's very cute. They even made up a game together, in which they wander the house chanting "I'm BORED, I'm BORED", and then think of stuff to do.
Speaking of social skills, I had the dubious pleasure of seeing Daniel being beaten up by his playmates at a party. Daniel has avery strong personality, and although he's a friendly kid he can be a bit of a bully. Many's the time I've had to wade in and pull him off of some (usually larger) child who has earned his ire, make him apologize, explained to him that this is not acceptable behaviour, etc...
So imagine my mixed emotions one day when I heard screaming and came upon Daniel being beaten up by Sandra and Alex. Two (usually) very nice, very well behaved little girls. So, feeling really weird about it, I hauled _other people's children_ off my own kid. I couldn't help but chuckle inwardly, but tried to look very stern as I told the girls that this was totally unacceptable and made them apologize. Inside though, part of me really wanted to yell, Way to go, girls! It's time somebody taught him what being on the receiving end of this feels like!
I went and told their moms, and we all shared a laugh, well hidden from the kids.
Speaking of beating up, Justin and Matthias, Sandra's little brother, have a fairly conflictive relationship. They're too little to really make friends, and both of them are at an age where they're just learning about cause and effect. This is not always good, since sometimes the cause and effect experiments involve knocking each other down. You can see Matthias thinking, Hm, when I push Justin, he falls and cries. What happens if I try that again?
By George, the same thing happens! What if I pull his hair?
****
Sandra decided she would marry her brother when she grew up. She was thinking out loud one day and told her mother Sarah, "Meryn and her brother are a boy and a girl, and me and Matthias are a boy and agirl, but Daniel and his brother are two boys. So they can't get married."
Ignoring the...Alabaman aspect of marrying your own siblings for the moment, Sarah said, "Actually, Sandra, sometimes boys do marry boys."
"Naaw..."Sandra giggled, "They can't do that!"
"Why not?" Sarah asked.
"Because if they had a baby, how would they nurse it?" (Sarah, incidentally, is a La Leche League leader.)
"Well, that is a problem." Sarah had toadmit. Then she asked, "What if a girl wanted to marry a girl? Would that work?"
"Of course."
Now, Sarah had explained to Sandra that a baby had to come from the mother's egg and the father's seed (although the logistics of the union are still hazy), so she was curious about how Sandra had reconciled this particular fact.
"Where would they get the seed?"
"From the house!" Sandra said, with a disbelieving smile and eye roll like, Oh come on, that one is SO obvious! Then she went back to playing, having resolved the issue definitively.
It'll be tough when Sandra's family moves to Manitoba in September, especially for Daniel and Sandra.
****
There's been lots of socializing this summer. There were visits to Ottawa and Toronto, then various grandparental visits (one of which actually involved me getting some time to myself while Chris' dad took the kids for extended periods of time). Then my teenage brothers Nicholas and Mark came for a few days. They're really into computer games and Speedvision TV. Well. You just couldn't ask for more as far asDaniel was concerned. I mean, two people who want to play computer games all the time, including the shooting ones that Mama and Daddy don't like? Heaven!!
****
The other day Daniel was alone with Justin for a long time while I did laundry. After I came back into the room he said, "I have a really terrible wish today."
"What is it, sweetie?"
"I wish we didn't have any baby."
Poor guy. He's such a good big brother, and tries so hard to be patient, but sometimes has a really a rough time with this little roving Destructo we call Justin.
So I cuddled him and said "I bet every single big brother and big sister in the whole world thinks that sometimes."
He tumbled out "Because if we didn't have a baby he wouldn't wreck my books and he wouldn't grab my breakfast and I wouldn't have to hear him yelling and yelling and yelling!"
"That's true. You know what though?"
"What?"
"You also wouldn't have a little guy who thought you were his hero. And you wouldn't have someone to run around the house with. And you wouldn't have someone to play with in the sandbox."
He thought for a minute and said "... and I couldn't pat his head and he wouldn't be chubby. And cute."
****
We had am eningitis scare in London (5 cases). I have mixed feelings about shots, but we decided to get both kids immunized. It seems the entire city came out to immunize their kids. There was almost a festival atmosphere, except for the kids currently getting their shots and screaming. Whoever planned it though... wow. Schools and churches all over the city were set up to immunize kids over a two-week period, and nowhere did anyone have to wait more than 15 minutes to get in. There were hundreds and hundreds of children both times we went. Thank god whoever does the logistics planning for the line-up to get adriver's license didn't organize it.
****
Daniel was standing behind me the other day, yelling nonsense words.
Chris asked,"Daniel, are you yelling at Mama's bum?"
No answer, just a smile.
"Daniel,why are you yelling at Mama's bum?"
"To see if it yells back."
-- - Jimena
"But now", says the Once-ler, "Now that you're here,
The word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
- The Lorax, Dr.Seuss