Springtime

Victoria

Victoria is walking, and running, and utterly fearless.  She's not hesitant or timid at all.  When she falls down or hurts herself, which happens not infrequently, she picks herself up and goes back at it.  She likes dogs and all sorts of animals and is only occasionally shy with new people.

Her vocabulary is coming along.  She's at the point where she's adding a few new words a day, but it's still hard for anyone but mom and dad and Owen to recognize them.

Mommy
Dadda
Brother
No
Love
Wow
Bubbles
Cold
Nose
Up
Doggy

Nose was funny.  She has a drinking cup with a dog's face on it and she pointed at the nose.  "No."  Then she pointed at my nose.  "Daddy no."  I touched her nose and said, "Victoria's Nose," and her face was filled with surprise and delight at the sudden realization that, yes, that's her nose.

She can be a handful, more than her brother was at her age.  When she doesn't get what she wants she'll throw something, usually her milk cup.  When she's done with food she tosses it off her tray and onto the floor.  She is unresponsive to our attempts to convey that this is not, in fact, acceptable.

Owen

Owen is figuring out where his boundaries are, in the same way that Victoria is, but at a more advanced level.  He is engaging in the use of rudeness and more adult language, to figure out the right contexts in which they should be employed, and which ones are passable for someone of his age.  This leads to an awful lot of time-out time for him.

He's very enthusiastic about a lot of things.  Peppa Pig is his favourite show right now (and V is along for the ride on that one).  We went to Peppa Pig Live and he had so much fun.  He likes to read and he's enjoying the French he's getting in school, more so than I would have expected, which is making me reconsider whether French immersion might be a good path forward for him.

Plus all the usual stuff: trucks, trains, puddles, sugar.

Writing

Book #2 was done and through beta-readers and revisions before I started the new job at the end of November.  I was about to start querying but that process was delayed by the job hunt and then put on hold while I established myself.  I wasn't in love with doing this but I can't do that and succeed at the new job ramp-up and also be a dad, so something had to give.

I'm thinking I'm about ready to get back to that, though, and maybe also do some serious writing (I've been doing short story writing in the meanwhile, but I can tell already that it's not really my thing).

Springtime

Spring is here, unevenly and unsteadily.  My allergies are going bonzo berserk this time around, which is too bad.  I got used to the easy ride last season.  Breathing isn't as easy as it ought to be.  The constant stream of illness from the two little germ incubators I live with isn't helping.

But I must say that the bus ride downtown is a lot nicer when the weather doesn't suck.

Happy Holidays

Twitter

I haven't been reading Twitter since Christmas.  The relentless negativity is seriously pushing my buttons these days.  Twitter has weaponized hostility and paranoia as a business model and I can't have that on a regular basis.  You can only read about how the world is about to end in nuclear fire and stock market panic so many times in a day.

I'm going to try to spend more time doing this I'd rather be doing, and writing stuff down on my blog.  So, if you want to find me, probably best not to ping me on Twitter.

Owen

Among the many holiday movies we watched this season was the Muppet Christmas Carol.  After watching it, we decided (Owen and I) to read the book.  It took all of the week running up to Christmas, finishing on Christmas Eve, as is only appropriate.

This is the first time that we read a grown-up book together, fairly long and with a lot of continuity from day to day, although it does have some pictures.  He did really well with it and enjoyed reading it.

At one point there was the following conversation:

OWEN: Daddy?
ME: Yeah?
OWEN: Scrooge is a bad person.
ME: Yes.
OWEN: He was nicer in the movie.
ME: He was at the end, after he'd learned his lesson.  That hasn't happened yet.
OWEN: Oh I see.

After that, he leveraged this experience to extend his vocabulary.  He asked me to build a house with him, using the new Lego set he got for Christmas, and when he wanted a roof but we didn't have enough pieces, I told him we didn't have the parts, and he says, "Humbug!"

Victoria

V is getting into the age where she's a lot more fun.  Her walking is becoming more sure and confident, although she still has the toddler wobble.  Her vocabulary includes "Mom" (both mom and food) and "Wow", which she always delivers with this breathy amazement, like the thing she's looking at really is the most remarkable thing she's ever seen.

She's also learned to shake her head no and sometimes nod yes, although the former is more likely to be situationally appropriate.

She had a great time visiting my sister's dogs on Boxing Day.  Owen is still scared of dogs, although he will warm up to them, but V has no fear (about dogs or anything else).  She had a lot of fun reaching over to touch their nose, and then giggling like mad when they licked her hand.

Road Trip

My lovely wife's sister Red has been with us for a week and change and will be here until after New Year's.  Her parents came up for the Christmas weekend and left yesterday.  Owen went with them, and will be returning on the 29th with Red, coming home on the train.

This is the first trip he's taking for any length of time without mom and dad and so far he's doing really well.  It helps that he's going with family, people that he knows really well and are comfortable with.

The house is pretty quiet without him but I'm not stupid enough to get used to it.

Catching Up

I didn't mean for the blog to lie fallow for a long time but long form writing just became something I had to hunt down time for, like so many cavemen stalking a woolly mammoth, and twitter gave suitable vent to most of that need to communicate.  And so here we are.

One of the things that blogs do so much better than twitter is to capture the context of a moment and accumulate a bunch of detail that won't squeeze into a 140 character window.  I had a lot of that with Owen when he was little and I don't like that I've been missing it with Victoria.  As such, this is equal parts catch-up and an optimistic statement about maybe not going away again.

The Kids

Victoria was born with coal black hair (oh so much of it) and eyes as blue as the cloudless summer sky.  Her hair has gradually lightened toward my own sort of middling brown and her eyes have lightened as she's gotten older.  She has her mom's nose and her mom's smile and very long toes whose provenance remains a mystery.

She's the polar opposite of her brother.  Where he has been cautious, she is reckless; where he waited until he had the full mastery of a skill, she begins trying as soon as she can and takes her failures in stride.  He eats everything you put in front of him.  She turns up her nose at all kinds of things, for all kinds of reasons, and is very demonstrative ("ugh!") when she is unhappy with a situation.

I always know what's going on in Owen's head.  V is a black box.

They do have a few things in common.  Both of them are affectionate little kids, and both of them are precociously intelligent, in their own different ways.

Fortunately for us, they get along well.  Owen loves his little sister and only occasionally makes forays into the realm of jealous behaviour toward her.  Today he took the opportunity to finish feeding her the last of her lunch, which was quite a feat.  I found no small amusement in the fact that Owen opens his mouth when trying to get V to take a spoonful of food, just as I do, and my father before me.

Owen Goes to School

Owen starts school on Friday and he is so ready.  He just turned 4 (celebrating his birthday at Day Out with Thomas in Pennsylvania, birthday party to follow) but he's good to go.  His school is a hair under one kilometer away so he can take the bus but the ride is only 4 minutes each way.  I suspect this will be a bigger disappointment initially than it will prove to be over time.

While in Pennsylvania, Owen got Wiggles Jr as a birthday present.  Wiggles Jr is a small scale version of Wiggles.  The pig probably had a different name at first, but it didn't survive contact with Owen.  He wouldn't stop talking about how much fun he'd have showing Wiggles Jr his room and house and toys once we got back.

Victoria, the First Nine Months

The agreement was that it would be 'Tori' and never 'Vicky', but Tori hasn't really caught on as of yet.  So far it's Victoria, or V, or one of her nicknames (sweet pea, B (?), cricket, sweetie, bright eyes).

At the end of nine months she has 8 teeth and no words, although she has few difficulties getting across her intentions regardless.  She went from rolling to crawling to standing with the aid of something to hold onto in less than a two week span, and is currently working as hard as she can on getting her balance.  She's pretty close, some days.

She's a cuddler, especially when she first wakes up.  She doesn't have a favourite animal yet (like Cow or Wiggles for Owen), and I haven't noticed a particular inclination toward any particular fetish object, like Owen's school buses, but she hasn't started talking yet, so maybe it'll come with time.

Writing Stuff

Novel #2 is ready for querying, which was delayed by vacation time and the aforementioned start of school.  In the interim, I'm having fun writing short stories.  It's not something I laboured with much ambition over the years but now that I'm writing them I find the challenge to be very engaging and very different than the other types of writing I've done.

Incidentally, if you think regular publishing is slow, write some stories and send them out.  Holy smokes.

11 Years, No Fatalities

Today I told Victoria that she missed the first decade of her mom and me, but she would be around for the really good stuff, because it does just keep on getting better.

Still not sure why my lovely wife married me but I'm glad she did.

Paddington

1. Paddington Bear is a really entertaining movie.

2. Owen is now, abruptly, getting emotionally engaged with movies.

Early on, the bucolic pleasantness of Darkest Peruvian bear life is interrupted by a disruptive earthquake.  I heard someone saying 'nonononono', very softly, and then realized it was Owen, staring, transfixed, at the screen, very concerned with the situation at hand.

He was like that for the whole movie.  Once Paddington gets to London he goes to the bathroom and picks up two toothbrushes, and begins to put them in his ears.  Owen reacted with a long, distressed, rising "OOOOOOOOOOOO" sound, followed by, "What are you doing Bear!?"  He kept asking the question, showing some obvious distress at the extent to which Paddington was oblivious to the normal expectations of society and his ongoing tendency to get himself into trouble.

It was kind of adorable, although it did mean we had to miss a bit of the movie while I took Owen for a walk around the theater to calm him down.

The parts where Paddington was in physical danger, and the one part where Paddington deliberately misled people, didn't seem to bother him as much as the parts where Paddington got himself into trouble by not knowing how things worked and/or what he was supposed to do.

3. Winter, I surrender.  I give up.  You win.  Just fucking leave already.

4. There is no point 4.

5. Editing my book is going much more quickly and more smoothly than anticipated, which I ascribe to two distinct factors: first, I had a better idea of what I was doing this time around, and second, the first half is much more solid than the second half, which is where all the problems await.  Still, I'm happy with how it's going.

Cows

This morning, Owen came in to our bedroom carrying two Cows. 

"Cow is mad at me," he said, a big grin on his face.

"What?  Why is Cow mad at you?"

"Because I kept going 'MMMMMMMM'," he said.

The Business

My blog continues to be basically just me relating funny stories about my son.  I'm okay with that.

Photography

Owen is very aware of when people are taking his picture, and he wants to do the socially expected thing, but he doesn't understand how.  The consequences are amusing.

When you ask him to smile he does Owen Face: toothy grin, nose scrunched up, squinting.  If you tell him not to do that, he doesn't know how to react.  He juts out his lower jaw and gives you a row of teeth, and then makes a duck face, and then a big O, which turns into an open-mouthed gape.

I got some great pictures.

Crafts

My lovely wife, inspired by a craft event at my work party this past Christmas, acquired a large supply of various beads and pipe cleaners.  Owen spent some time this morning making a necklace out of them.  He's really good at getting the small fiddly pieces together and he was tremendously proud of the result.

I got some great pictures.

You actually can probably assume that's true of just about everything I talk about here.

Owen (in a panic): It's stuck!!!!
S: Do you need help?
Owen: Yes I do please help

Bodily Functions

My brother and aunt J were over recently to take holiday pictures of the family.  You forget how much time you spend discussing things like the bodily functions of a toddler until people who don't have kids come over.

Owen was trying to poop, which is often a challenging issue for him.  My brother was in the middle of zooming in for a shot when Owen held up a hand and warned him: I'm pooping.  It's quite a thing if you're not expecting it.

He's now sometimes referring to it as 'the business', due to my habit of saying that he's taking care of business, or attending to business. 

Yesterday, at the Greek's house, it was "I'm having the business".

(Owen reaches over and squeezes my cheeks, expecting me to make fish-face)
Owen: It's not working. I'm going to try it on mommy and see if it works.

Soothers

We only let Owen take one soother downstairs.  Yesterday I took a second one from him and when he got downstairs, he produced another he'd smuggled out.  He's learned the basic rule about knives: one for the guard to find, and one for you.

His ninja training is coming along well.

Class

Owen has already done a season of Kindermusic, which involves lots of songs and games and the occasional instrument.  This year he's doing a new class, which is notably different from the last one in that it's two hours long and parents don't attend.

Given that he's never done day care, we had a certain amount of concern regarding how well he'd take to being left there, but he took to it like a duck to water, especially once he realized that they have a good supply of toy cars.

Me: What did you do in class today?
Him: I played with cars!
Me: What else?
Him .... I played with trucks.
Me: I see.
Him: Then they gave me a cookie!

It's beginning to look a lot like Xmas

Holidays

The holidays are upon us! Xmas is getting seriously nigh.

Thankfully I was ahead of the game on my shopping this year. Nothing like avoiding a last minute scramble. I'd chalk this up to good habits and foresight but it's honestly mostly just laziness and the practice of keeping an up to date Amazon wish list.

We're now through all the holiday parties we're going to get to before the actual holidays. More will come afterwards. Good times have been had, and will be had.

Naturally, we're sick. I got a cold which I'm now mostly over, but my lovely wife and Owen are now in the middle of it. The good news is that it seems to pass pretty quickly, so with any luck we'll be clear by Xmas.

The Island of Sodor

I picked up a whole pile of Thomas toys for Owen. He's also received a number of Thomas toys from other people. Did you know that Thomas tracks (a necessary element for a line of toy trains) are not all compatible? It's true! Somebody had a business meeting at some point in which they decided this was acceptable, and I want to get five minutes alone in a room with that guy. Just five minutes.

For future reference: mechanical Thomas trains have their own tracks which only work with those trains. Wood track Thomas trains, with disk magnets and weird looking wheels, work with their own wooden tracks and with all the knock-off wooden track sets. Those wooden tracks also work with the mechanical trains. The die cast Thomas trains, with rectangular magnets and better looking wheels, work with the plastic Play And Go tracks but not any of the others. The plastic tracks work with all types of trains.

Owen already has 4 different types of trains (some of which he doesn't know about yet) and 2 different, incompatible track sets.

Seriously, these guys can all go fuck themselves.

(No, I'm not even close to done buying him trains. Why do you ask?)

Monkey

Me: "That's right."
Owen: "That's correct."

Me: As one does.
Owen: As Owen does!

Travel

We are off to Kingston for Xmas and back between then and my birthday. The in-laws will be up for part of that. I don't know what my schedule will look like, really. I've been telling people that they might get a call from me to go hang out or whatever, but we aren't in a position to plan anything solid yet. There are a bunch of people I want to see but I won't be able to before we're into January, which sucks, but between work and kids and stuff in general, I guess this is how things go.

What I'm trying to say is that I've been able to spend a bunch of time with awesome people (including some that I haven't seen for literal years and didn't expect to see any time soon!) but there just isn't enough time to see all the awesome people I know before the holidays get here. That's a pretty good problem to have, I'm not complaining, but if you're an awesome person and I haven't seen you yet, just know that I'm sorry and we'll get together in the new year.

The weather network says we're due for crazy storms or freezing rain or zombies or something, right on Xmas Eve. This might play havoc with our travel schedule. Of course.

Beer

As I mentioned on Twitter, my New Year's Resolution is to spend >50% of my beer budget on local craft brews and 0% at the Beer Store. I've decided to get a jump on that plan and so far it's going very well. Ottawa has just a ridiculous number of really solid craft brewers right now (mostly within the last 5 years) and you can easily get the bulk of your beer from them and not be missing out at all. What these guys are producing is so much better than what the big companies are doing. Not patronizing the Beer Store is just the icing on the cake of moral superiority.

Also, the Untappd app is exerting an upward pressure on my beer budget. Seeing all the unique beers you drink over a period of time really reminds you both a. that you have a huge variety of really great beer at your disposal and b. that there are so many really great beers you haven't tried yet. I don't know that the quantity of beer I'm drinking has gone up since I started using that app, but the median number of times I've had each given beer has dropped like a rock. Which is a good thing! Variety is the spice of functional alcoholism.

And In Conclusion

I am posting on this blog less often, but I really do like the format. I'm writing on Twitter much more than the blog but some things just don't fit easily into 140 characters.

This is going to be post #12 for 2014. I think that once-a-month is a reasonable quantity of posting for the blog, although I might well try to push that up a bit next year.

As ever, I find it interesting that I have this blog and my Twitter feed as a combined archive of all the stuff that's going on, and has been going on, for lo these many years. Since it's all in the public eye (not that the public, as such, as much reason to eye it) this all also has some historical context. I shudder to think of Owen, in some future time, going back and pulling out this content and reading it and wondering why his old man was such a dipshit sometimes. To say nothing of the far future history student writing a paper on western society in the years before the Zombie Apocalypse, and all the trivial bullshit we found so fascinating.

On that note, I think I'll wrap this up. Happy holidays to all. Stay safe, have fun, drink good beer, and spend as much time as you can with awesome people.

Winter Time

Winter has arrived!  And possibly left again.  Whatever.  It'll be back.

The best part of winter is Owen in a snowsuit.  It's non stop comedy gold.

(Owen walks over to a stick.)

"I'm Gonna Pick Up That Stick!"

(Owen squats, reaches, strains, realizes he can't quite get to the stick without falling over)

"I'm Not Gonna Pick Up That Stick!"

(Owen bends over to reach for a snowball but he's facing downhill and so he falls into his face in slow motion)

We took him for a walk today, with the temperature well into the positive digits and all the snow melting.  He had so much fun pulling up big clumpy masses of snow and then throwing them on the pavement so they'd break up.  "This Is A Good One!" he says, and then waves his arms around when it breaks apart.  "It's Going To Break!"  You've never seen anyone so happy.

Houseguests

Our friends from Toronto came down to visit this weekend.  We took the opportunity to show them around some of our favourite places, and we played a bunch of games, including the most bitter grinding slog of a Firefly game I've ever seen.  It was a pretty awesome weekend.  For Owen, though, the highlight was Bear, their dog.

At first he was afraid of Bear, but very interested.  The night before, he told me, "I'm excited about Bear".  That fear went away pretty quickly when he realized he could pet the dog.

Today, they put Bear in his crate for a bit while they went out to meet family.  Owen was playing downstairs and then went upstairs and it was a little too quiet.  I thought maybe he was getting into some of the bins of toys we moved upstairs to keep them out of little doggy view.

I found him sitting beside the cage, legs crossed in front of him, just hanging out. 

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm Sitting With Bear," he said, very seriously.

When they left, everyone got a goodbye and a hug, except Bear, who got a goodbye and some petting.

Language

As you might have inferred from the above, the little man's language skills are growing like nobody's business.  He'll use long sentences and I've given up on keeping track of the expansion of his vocabulary.  He's currently working on getting down the difference between You Are and I Am, which is hard, because we can't explain it by example directly without confusing him more.  It's coming along though.

Year 2

He's very much a two year old.  He's very well behaved, all things considered, of course.  I don't know many two year olds who can happily spend an hour and change waiting outside with nothing to do, without completely losing their shit.  But he's still a two year old.  He'll get something into his head and then repeat-repeat-repeat, until you're going round the bend.  He'll know that he's not supposed to do something, and he'll try to do it, just to see what happens. 

Still, we can't complain.  This weekend, just as an example, we made an awful lot of demands on him, as we went out and came back and went out again, and had to wait without much for him to do.  He came through like a champ.
 

In which I drink a Bud Light Lime. FOR SCIENCE.

Before drinking: It looks like a bud light, which is to say, a particularly shallow bronze shade of water, like sallow tap water drizzling out of eighty year old pipes, like the saliva of a particularly slow teenager after chewing on the metal eraser-bracket end of a pencil.


First sip: Amazingly neutral.  I can't actually detect any sort of flavour.  This is a step forward from regular Bud Light.


Subsequent drinks: I suppose I can taste a bit of lime mixed in there somewhere, lurking about the edges.  The lime is the awkward unsocial fellow with a bow-tie who got invited to the party out of politeness but doesn't really know how to get involved.  He just ends up at the edge of the room, smiling gamely, really just happy to be there.


The beer itself manages the amazing feat of actually tasting like rice.  A lot of major market brands are basically just rice and caramel but this one really delivers the rice flavour, less the caramel.  If you took one of those rice cake snacks that has the texture of a cardboard drink coaster and the flavour of a cardboard drink coaster, and fermented it, this is what you'd end up bottling.


As I get about a third of the way through, the lime flavour has been washed away.  That poor fellow in the bow tie has given up his faint efforts to engage an awkward girl in conversation and has retired for the evening.  I wish I could give him an encouraging speech, maybe get a couple of shots into him, but people aren't projects, and this party is going in a bad direction either way.


I wonder how much time they spent working out the right level of carbonation to get such a stereotypical level of bubble activity.  Rather more than they did in working out how to make beer without wheat or hops, I suspect.


If you are looking for a beer to look photogenic on video, a medium without any context for odour or flavour, you could do worse.


I'm about half done and I'm going to wrap up this exercise because I don't think I can finish this beer if I have to spend this much time considering what I'm doing.

Bees

While camping I showed Owen a bunch of bees on a flower and I explained that bees make honey.

Once we got back to our site I asked him about the bees.  I asked, do bees make shoes?  He laughed and said no.  Do bees make luxury cars?  No!  Then I asked him what bees make. 

He thought about it and then said, Applesauce.  I said bees don't make applesauce!  He laughed and said, No!

This is the What Bees Make Game.  Owen spent a lot of time thinking of things that bees make.

Things bees make according to Owen: applesauce, yoghurt, trees, mommy, daddy, bears, Owen, horses, windows, cars, socks, sandals, sand, and bees.

Today I was talking with Owen and thinking that I needed to blog about this game, and he said, "Bees make honey," out of the blue.  He may be a witch.