Game Time

I am always conscious of how much time I spend with Gabriel and how good that time is.  Still, I have a gag response to the term "q--l-ty time" that inhibits me from forcing the matter or parenthesizing a moment as one of intense purposeful bonding that I could close and discard. Instead I've contented myself with being there with him for walks to and from daycare; and books, whether read on the sofa, in bed or from the side of tub. Whenever I give into his request for TV I try to sit with him to avoid using it as the electronic babysitter. Invariably, though, I will gravitate toward the kitchen to prepare supper or tidy something up rather than zone out or silently critique as Gabriel makes the mental shopping list required for him to achieve his (apparent) goal of becoming a Paw Patrol completist.

Because of his attachment to TV time and my tendency to disengage when he's in front of the TV, I have grown conscious of that void in the day where we are out of touch with each other.  There will be programming at some point that we can connect over and talk about, but the programming for a five-year-old only prompts conversation if there is a nostalgic, "This is what I watched..." introduction to the likes of Friendly Giant or Mr. Dressup.

In the face of the void that TV imposes on the day, I've tried a few times over the last year to get him interested in board games.  The gathering around the table for a board game, cards or a jigsaw puzzle each is loaded with memories of family and place that is immensely evocative. I've tried quite a few times to interest Gabriel in a game and there have been a few lapsed-attention efforts at Snakes and Ladders and a few occasions where I've gotten Trouble out of the box but could not engage him in much more that the percussive sequence of crush-pop-rattle that was the "roll" of the dice.  His mastery of jigsaw puzzles, like that of Lego is set and it is easy for him to lock in on the challenge when it is in front of him, but that can leave me on the sidelines.

Last night, with a stint in front of the TV finished and him asking for more TV after supper, I attempted to get him to try Trouble and we finished two games.  Best of all, this morning he asked if we could play again.  He counted his turns properly and mastered the simple task of starting his count on the next space on the board rather than the one he was in.  Rules were grasped and followed.  They were tested at times to but it comes with the territory.  There will be many games to follow.  I'm recall my capability to play double solitaire when my grandmother at the lake when I was seven and ponder introducing Gabriel to war (the card game).  More games will appear after Trouble, in their rightful sequence: Sorry, Clue, and maybe we will, in time, aspire to Life, Monopoly and the board flipping etiquette of Risk (ok, maybe not that one.)  All things to look forward to for the laughter and small lessons that will come from them and the closer connection that will come from sitting face-to-face on the floor or at the table.

At a time when he is holding his own more and more in conversation and surprises with the turns of phrase or topics that he introduces it is good to discovery that a refuge in the week where we will slow down to connect face to face.  He is in the middle (or early stages) of a growth spurt that has turned him ravenous, cranky and drowsy at times over the last 5-6 weeks and it is one of the unnecessary-necessary reminders that this will blur by fast and that the bond will be challenged by friends with the lure of video games, suppers over at friends, after school activities where he'll be home later and the kitchen is nothing more than a transit point or a node of quick fuelling as lives diverge step by incremental step. There will be stolen conversations on the road but the first successful foray introducing the game habit will promise a stillness and trove of memories that we have not been able to form yet.  It is a comfort to see his growth be complemented by the capacity to sit through a game and finish it, not to mention dust himself off for the needed rematch.

By the way, if anyone has a green peg they can spare, let me know.

First Lullabye

We are at a moment where my son seems formed and less likely to present a revelation to us.  He will grow, but there is the feeling that for the next little while, there is little likelihood for surprise. According to what I have read about growth in children and the formation of their personalities, he is pretty much wired, as it were. At the age of 5, he is obsessed with Star Wars, Lego and Paw Patrol. His knack for completing complex Lego sets is prodigious.  Consequently, I have consigned my quiver of ironic jokes about pressuring him to go into Art school, because it now seems unlikely on the part of the budding engineer.  As he assembles Lego or completes puzzles, he shows a spatial ability that makes the completion of a 1300-piece set uneventful for him and an affinity or affection for those challenges that surpasses any tolerance for wrestling with a creative block.

He is big for his age. He loves to run with me and no walk is complete without him challenging me to a race over some distance.  As was the case as a newborn, he fights sleep even seconds after acknowledging he is tired or burrowed into us for the assurance that he will not be alone for his transit into the night. Books are both obsession and refuge and might still be ahead in the neck and neck race with the iPad for his attention. He is a poor sleeper and the nights are still punctuated by his dark AM requests to sleep with us. He continues to demonstrate a knack for music and has filed away a few favorite hooks and choruses that he will sing or dance to when the mood strikes.

He is still the same extroverted, affectionate kid he was when he was a budding candy striper visiting his grandfather in the hospital in early 2012. He left Tim Horton's yesterday only after giving a hug to an older gentleman who complimented him on his new interest in practicing his letters. Once again, mom and dad struggle with the dilemmas that come with having a child who is so open and trusting with strangers (most of the time.) In that is an example of the questions that lie ahead: will his affection and openness make him vulnerable to the overrated threats all parents dread or will they evolve into something that is supportive and nurturing to those around him.  Time and the forks in his road ahead will determine that but it is clear that he is on a path that will shape his affections rather than the more emotionally cautious route that I have followed.

But, last night, as my weary extrovert was giving into fatigue and the early stages of a stomach bug that ails him today, which I believe was his first "sick day" (albeit from daycare) I surprised myself. After a long reading session on the sofa, the floppy, fatigued, yet still sleep-resistant lad sprawled on the sofa rather than dragging himself to his room, which prompted me to utter, with the faintest hint of melody, "Little boy, little boy won't you lay your body down," the first of many lines from Paul Simon's "St. Judy's Comet" that summed up the moment.

I've found it a challenge to sing my son to sleep, never quite finding the precise melodic whisper something I could get the right volume and pitch on, words trapped and muffled in the throat rather than given their appropriate whisper.  I've usually delivered a burr or a hum of some sort that was only a half-hearted approximation.  Last night though I did the song justice and sang it out - except for the "make your famous daddy look so dumb" which is Mr. Simon's own private confession about his struggle with lullabyes.

The likelihood is that he will surprise my wife and I in some way and that there will be some discovery of character or timing that will catch me off guard as we go through the journey together. There will be times as well though when, I excavate some part of myself and surprise him and perhaps myself too as I retrace parts of myself that are dormant or buried under the detritus of (dubiously) adult preoccupations.  He'll have a revelation that I was a kid once or that there are sections of my path that can be retraced and shared with him as I tentatively unveil some forgotten or hidden aspects of myself.

On the Playground

My family lives in a condominium so we do not have a backyard to lay claim to as our own. Fortunately we are within 500 metres walking distance of three playgrounds and we regularly take advantage of those when Gabriel is restless and needs to get some burn for a while. It is quite easy for him to lose all track of time as he chases other kids around, make friends for the brief time that they share together and expand his abilities on the apparatus.  It is an interesting way to mark the passage of time as he progresses.

He still has a fondness for the toddler bucket swing, but he has limited his turns to about 10 minutes instead of an arm-aching sequence of an hour top off by a half-dozen additions of "two more minutes." He has graduated to the bigger swing and after getting a scrape or two - but thankfully not a faceplant - when he first ventured onto it this summer he is managing to pump his legs in time with the movement and I have more opportunity to sit back and observe.

Observing alone can be fraught with dilemmas. There was one occasion where I found myself observing him observing to older boys who were playing some game and inflicting some punishment on one another.  The smaller one of the two was consistently at a disadvantage and I winced when they started using the term "pole-dancing," but commenting on their behaviour or Gabriel's immobile curiosity was probably going to bring attention to the odd dynamic between the three of them. My interest and focus on them heightened when they invited Gabriel to play with them, some odd for of tag that required the one who was "it" to walk with his eyes closed on the playground equipment. Gabriel said he understood the game, but after a moment of unresponsiveness when the game started the older boys adjusted and integrated him into the game without much harm.

There is always the opportunity for Gabriel to get exposed to something "mature" when he is there and most recently it was a new acquaintance who was quite quick to issue the "double bird."  Gabriel did not seem to pick up on it or attribute any meaning despite the fervour with which it was issued. (Gabriel has stuck it out incidentally from time to time and despite an occasion a year ago when he earned a loud response to it when he did it at the Thanksgiving table, he still hasn't adopted regular intentional use of it... I think.)

I'm not always at a distance.  More often than not, I get roped into a game of tag with Gabriel and whoever else he has gotten to know during our visit and somehow these sessions of tag take more out of me than a 10K run.  It must be the stops and starts. Aside from that, there is always the requirement to spin the carousel for a while as kids climb up and down.

The toughest thing about the playground visits is when the convergence to make new friends results in an untimely parting and his own upset at being left alone.  It is one of the few times when I get the sense of the vulnerability that he feels at being alone and without kids his age nearby and always at the ready to play. Often the occasion makes it difficult to settle him down and it is hard to console him. The flipside of that, two weeks ago, was when Gabriel found himself spontaneously invited to a birthday party that was taking part at the playground.  I had a sense that the invite was not parentally endorsed and anticipated the painful awkwardness as Gabriel's status as an included friend would have quickly diminished in a furrow of confusion. The range of logistics covering grab bags and unreceived presents was going to test the goodwill of people I had never met before.  We had been at the playground for well over two hours and it was time to get some food into him.

The playground visits will continue, even through the winter months and there will be times when I will have to figure out how to maneuver myself and my son through the interactions that present themselves as he grows into more independence and new relationships. He will continue to give challenges to his acrophobic father and I'll even dare to climb what he climbs far easier than I.  I can also tell that he has my lack of upper body strength when he's on climbing apparatus.  It is hard to tell what comes each time we go there as the cast of playmates evolves, but each time I ask him to behave or come back to me to check on something or to head for home he comes back - the tether between us still solid for all of the influence and opportunity that emerge each time we go there.

As Ever, On the Cusp of Transition

I should treasure this day for the more fleeting moments of childhood that adorn calendars on the theme of innocence or some such attribute of early youth. The sight of him stopping to smell a neighbour's flowers as the thunderclouds loom and darken. His fascination with the spores of a dandelion as he sends them into flight. The translucent down on his upper arms as I put sunscreen on his arms. These are all things that we try to convince ourselves that we saw and treasured, but there is the risk that we have a template of our child's growth and experiences that we assume conforms to a catalogue or a parenting magazine rather than be mindful and conscious of them as the occur out of the corner of our eye.  Today I can assure myself that I did indeed take note of them, and magnified those moments.

There was much today that made me note that those innocent explorations and discoveries will pass. The cool years, much like those thunderheads, seem to loom. With Gabriel at 4 1/2, I may be getting ahead of myself but it is hard to gauge how precocious each generation of kids is actually becoming. That aside, I'm conscious of how my earliest memories take me back to age 5 and also noticing the ways that Gabriel is asserting himself more and expressing his wishes.  I get the sense of the quest that will shape the next decade of his life as he seeks friends and acquaintances to fill the ineffable void that only a sibling can fill. There are also the times when he wants to play with his mother or I and we fill the time as well as we can - ever, in my case, conscious of playing in a way that gives him the lead and lets him set the rules and the standards of mastery.

Today, on a Saturday morning, the challenge was to get him to listen and as a result of that challenge it took him about three hours to get out of his pyjamas and dressed for the day. The carrot was that I'd play with him when he was ready for the day. Despite that, the hours drifted by and he only got dressed when he was ready to go out late in the morning while I mentally checked off the moments that we were setting aside in exchange for a stand-off that may have ultimately been about redefining independence or influence over one's day.

As for Gabriel, he has made his expectations of me clearer and clearer. Whenever he makes an extended visit to the toilet he expects two books to be read to him, even if their length leaves his dangling legs asleep and piercing him with pins and needles before the second "happily ever after" is checked off. This morning I was in the middle of something far less important and he called out "I've been waiting," in his effort to nudge me to set things aside and read Charlie Brown while perched on the side of the bathtub.

For all the sense of transition that the day posed, it is a normal one where the poignant glimpses are too brief and too easily overlooked.  Instead, the negotiation between two wills becomes the highlight - the dramatic highlight stripped of any of the gentle sense of passage or childhood that came with those more photogenic moments. As he sits for a calm moment with his first-ever bowl of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream cooling his stomach, and I brace myself for the task of assessing the ROHSI (return on housespace investment) of the toys he doesn't think he's outgrown, I want to take a moment to attach the same appreciation of the moment as I have to seeing him become more expert with the camera. He's not growing up in every way at every moment, just a few ways at a time.

The Lad Unplugs for Summer

For the second time in the last four days, my little showman and chatter-upper extraordinaire has sought solitude. He has made a clear effort to excuse himself and get some quiet time to decompress or just chill.

On Sunday, he sat by himself in the Star Wars camp chair that he has in his room and tonight he flopped into bed, each time plowing through book after book for a while to find some quiet time. He has done it before and it has always been good to know that he has identified books and time with them as a refuge. It was the end of the day and there was some comfort in what he surveyed in each book, even though he is not up to reading on his won yet.

There is the sense that things are a little off of late.  Apart from being a little hard to induce into listening to dear old mom and dad, he confessed yesterday to feeling tired and angry because he did not have the chance to nap during daycare yesterday. Naps, however, have not been part of his routine since January. He also said he was a little angry a while back because his hair was too long and he wanted to have it shorter - an aggravation that he might regret us accommodating if we give him a cut as aggressive as he wishes.

Tonight as he lay in bed looking through a Dr. Seuss anthology and asking that the music in the living room be turned off, his supper barely touched it was a reminder that summer has thrown him for a loop. In my own instance, recall the discombobulation that comes with the long days that spike one level of energy with the extended daylight and erodes the sleep that is just as important for the regulation that it brings. He struggles with it, but the quiet time with the books is a sign that he has a strategy for dealing with it.

The strategy and his willingness to acknowledge when he is angry are blessings that I cannot cite from my own childhood. Perhaps my parents would be more capable of citing this than I could in retrospection. Still, his willingness to drop out for a while and cut off the stimulation is, for an extrovert, a knack that I am quite happy to see.

As he came out of that quiet time to proceed with the rituals of bed time there was a burst of energy and foolishness, but it faded to calm as he went through the brushing of teeth and tongue, his vitamins and the two bedtime books I read him.  Summer will probably sustain the alternation between suppertime listlessness and childish chaos for a few weeks but I am thrilled to see that he can cope with it from time to time.

Now, if I can just get him to reshelve his books.

Holding Him Back

"So, what have you decided?"




I'm in the dentist chair, puzzling over the question. My dentist adds that he read my post about whether or not to send Gabriel to school this year and I muster a nod of recognition. The topic of when to start a child in school is an exhaustively discussed one and, for the most part, the advice I've received is a chorus of, "What's the rush?... I waited... My daughter was fine early but... my son was... well... uhm..." Or struggled, or what have you.  Parents of the autumn-born who were particularly experienced and informed on the subject and the advice was all valuable. There was also a serendipitous barrage of articles on childhood and education that advised us to sit tight and hold him back a year more. Last week, we even encountered a parent who had found her 18-year-old son foundering and dropping out of his first year of university -- an account that made me ponder the math if her son was still only 18 years old in the spring after his freshman year.

Unwittingly, he is looking forward to the graduation from day care that the rest of his classmates will celebrate.  He is not, however, going to graduate with his friends. The social disruption for him will be a challenge. Close friends that he has had a lot of history with will be moving on and his friendships with those kids may end or require a lot more work to maintain as routines change. The social connections are already changing form as this fork in the road emerges.

Still, we have to look long term rather than reinforce the social expectations.

As great as he is in our eyes (except for when he is too tired to listen to us or insists that his diet consist exclusively of starches, or as I put it, "his whites") we would rather not have him spend the rest of his childhood and adolescence pressured into playing catch up. If we made the move to include him with the older peers who are moving on over the next little while we will be doing him an injustice. With an extroverted only child, who is at turns a nurturing leader of younger kids and displays great vulnerability trying to find a random kid to play with or be accepted by, we suspect that he will play to his strengths if he stays behind with kids who are a little younger than him.

While his daycare suggested there was a risk of Gabriel getting bored while in the same room for another year, I recalled a concept from my studies in Education - over-learning. If he is covering similar topics or themes in the coming year, I am fine with that. I get the impression that Gabriel is more of an analytical mind and that he may continue to process familiar knowledge in different ways. (Recently he wanted me to "play" with his Hot Wheels with him. For some reason our play consisted of sorting out all his dinkeys and separating the Hot Wheels from the non-Hot Wheels cars.

If he grows bored with too-familiar lessons and stories, perhaps there is an opportunity for him to play more of a nurturing or empathetic role. Since making our decision to keep him in daycare for another year, we told the daycare that we are prepared to adapt what we do at home to ensure that we are on the same page as the staff at the daycare in encouraging the leadership, empathy and social development that we would like to support in the coming year.

We have been conscious from day one of Gabriel being big for his age and my wife and I still tell one another that he was never that small when we see newborns. We have always seen his size as presenting a mixed blessing when he is in school and it is probably better for us to embrace that and get him accustomed to that size distinction rather than try to get him to blend in with a group of kids who are three to nine months older than him. When he is with younger and smaller kids we can prompt him to be gentler with them and perhaps he will get the sense of the responsibilities that come with being the big kid and take the opportunity to protect with his size and maturity.

All in all, we have concluded that it is better and lower stakes to hold him back now rather than pressure him throughout his school years to keep up or hold him back later in life when the stakes are a little higher than they are now.

Instead of Anger

Once again at daycare, I caught a more stern countenance from the staff as I arrived to pick my son up at the end of the day.  There is an element of performance or ostentation to the communications and the most important or obvious part of the dialogue at this point communicates to me, "Something's up," or "We didn't have a good day." I brace myself and call him over as I'm told there is a report for me to sign. I review the report and add my ink in my assigned task. My face is all scowls and furrows as I shed all desire to nudge in an additional few minutes of play time before we roam home.

He has bitten one of his classmates. I have edged toward livid but know that a rant is not going to get me anywhere. I still approach the border of rant, with the litany of the base questions that get me through the walk home. Does Mom bite you? Do I bite you? How would you like it if N bit you? I dread writing them down again for their utter lack of originality or constructiveness, but that is what I was left resorting to.  From there I get a sense of needing a different approach, a strategy that will give him a different approach or outlet rather than urging greater and greater levels of self-control.

The conversation turns and we get into the details of what happened, which I already gathered from the report. Earlier on in the day, he bit a girl in a fight over a spoon. For clarity and context I have to add -- despite it making me sound like a 4-year-old -- that he had it first. For whatever reason he was expected to give the spoon over and in the escalation over said spoon, he bit the girl. The conversation lead to the topic of sharing, but it was clear to me that sharing was not quite be what I would be encouraging. In reality it would be capitulation that I would be insisting upon: keep giving you her her way and... well... she'll walk all... over you. Everyone would. 

No Gabriel, sharing is a little more complicated than you'd like or hope it to be. Your conflict-averse father knows that all too well at his age.

By the time we got home my mind was onto the topic of what he ought to be doing.  I ushered him to his spot at the kitchen table and brought out the green plastic IKEA spoon that is core to his breakfast rituals - green being his favourite colour.  I gave him the spoon and tried to role play what happened this morning. He didn't play his role with the emotion that he had in the morning. It was loosely gripped and it was easy for me to pluck it out of his relaxed fist rather than take him the brink of the conflict he was in prior to the bite.  I never quite got him to act it out as vividly as I would have liked, but I did make the case that it was time to inquire when something was leading to conflict or disrespecting his boundaries.  (The boundaries conversation will be for another day.) I tried to instill in him the question, "Why are you doing that?"

In the role play, however, Gabriel didn't abstract well enough to pose the question to me. Instead he felt compelled to answer it and he never quite got around to asking it.  We discussed it again when my wife got home and tried to coach him on using the question throughout the evening and we will do it over the coming days and weeks as well. Hopefully he will be able to employ it and make the effort to defuse a situation before it gets to the point that it did in daycare yesterday morning. My hope is that the question will bring about another level of consciousness on the part of both protagonists in this rite of childhood. I would dread Gabriel merely receiving the response, "Because I want it," and flounder with the challenge of coming up with the appropriate follow-up question. Perhaps the question would give his friend the chance to ask herself the same thing or give him the time to tell her to get another spoon elsewhere rather than insist on the one he had.

On the topic of daycare, I hope this is not too jarring a transition, last night I wrote our daycare to inform them of our desire to keep Gabriel there for another year to ensure he is more developed before thrusting him into kindergarten and onto a gerbil wheel of perpetual catch up throughout his schooling.

The Acrophobe's Son

My own issue with heights can be traced to the nefarious influence of Looney Tunes cartoons.  I was walking up the stairs in our home as a 3- or 4-year-old and tried to climb them in the same way that Tweety Bird - lacking my length of limb - made use of both arms (ahem wings) and feet to scramble onto each individual step.  After succeeding on enough steps to get near the top, I shed whatever vigilance it took to keep all four limbs strategically placed on a step and... down the whole flight I rolled.  I don't believe I sobbed or anything that brought attention to my Chuck Jones influenced effort. I just swallowed my pride and walked up the steps upright, with a new fear firmly embedded and a dollop of playfulness gone.

Since that time, the legs quake at certain precipices, oblivious to the minor feats of engineering that will undoubtedly assure my safety - as I have often been told. I have kept my feet away from trapdoors in the floors of cable cars. I have steered clear of the view from skyscraper windows. I white-knuckled through a flight in my uncle's float plane Cessna in 1984 and gulped watermelon-down-the-throat-hard when he released the controls and told me to take over as the plane dipped.

If one needs evidence that opposites attract, exhibit A would be my wife: mountain girl. Born and raised in the Rocky vistas of Canmore, Alberta, she has had a long affinity for the mountains and her own long, unscarring history of rock-climbing - both indoors and out.  Gabriel has often demonstrated his mother's indifference to heights while I on a regular basis white knuckle from a distance at his forays up monkey bars or the other apparatus that catch his eye at the playground.

For the last month, he has been able to up the ante with participation in a more structured rock-climbing class.  He had been a little skittish about the climbing great heights during the first few weeks, rarely climbing any higher than two or three metres off the ground.  Each session my wife and I would watch as he climbed about two metres up the wall and called out, "Down." We would talk to the class instructor and she assured us that he was making progress. Gabriel would assure us that he was not afraid of heights and last week he boasted that he made it to the very top of the wall - an assertion of pride that went unchallenged despite the evidence to the contrary.

We had resigned ourselves to not signing him up for another class given his reluctance to get too far from solid ground but on the last night of the class he made steady progress up the wall.  My concerns that my anxieties were being transmitted to him finally abated and I applauded and fist-pumped to him as he beamed up from the floor after his belay to solid ground.  Meanwhile, my legs quaked as the waifs scrambled up and down the walls.  I had seen enough and I retired to a chair in the hallway and buried my nose in a book.

Saturday Lessons

The morning was not quite what I hoped. It did not turn into a sitcom domino of disasters, spills and snowballing delays.  There was a stagnancy and lack of enthusiasm or direction. After not getting to bed until an hour and a half past his bedtime the previous night -- the lad too tired to even know how to cooperate through the wind down routine and calling his mother (and not ME) a "bully" at one heated point -- there is a familiar, odd perversion of the biological clock that ensures he gets up early whenever he goes to bed late.  He was not particularly difficult, but that lingering sluggishness buried any momentum toward preparing for the day and getting ready for music class as quickly as possible.

I had been telling myself the night before that he was likely to wake early and that while it could be a long day with occasional crankiness, it was best to find some way to just 'roll with it' -- not exactly my strong suit. Nadine has work today and her own routine gets her out the door before we really need to get going. Gabe and I have an extra 10-15 minutes before we have to head to the LRT and we are booted, toqued and gloved with the promise that he has the pep to run up the hill. As we approached the station, our train pulled up at the platform and Gabriel started talking about the need to run to the train.

 "You never run at the train," calmly telling something that I have had to say a few times to him.

 "We can run, we can get it."

I have always padded our music class routines with the possibility of a missed train and was able to hold my ground and hope that he can pick up on my calm lack of urgency and get the lesson that he should not run to catch an approaching train. We chorused our exchange of "never" and "we can make it" a few times until the train pulled away. We had 12 minutes until the next train; enough time to return an overdue (roll with it, roll with it) Toopy and Binoo DVD to the library. That done, we returned to the platform to wait for the next train. 

There was a mother and son waiting as well; the son slowly working through the last dregs of a can of jalapeño Pringles. Gabriel asked me while eyeing the chips if we had snacks and the mother, with a chronic rasp the belied a more hardscrabble life, told him, "Of course! Everyone has snacks!"  In my case, snacks amounted to a chia-blackberry squeeze pack, some apple-cinnamon rice crackers and a Larabar, all of which I intended to dole it with a bit more discretion. I'm not sure if they satisfied his Pringle-whetted appetite.

The ride on the train is always a wonder for him. He kneels on his seat and looks out the window, over my shoulder at the sights that strobe by, percussive blurs of lampposts passing across the lenses of his glasses as he waits to see downtown.  I let him know that the Peace Bridge is coming into view and he shifts to look east as we cross the Bow River into downtown.

We get off and make our way to the bus stop for the next leg of the journey.  He enjoys taking the footsteps route across the Enmax grates in the sidewalk but he finds the individual trucks and and buses too noisy.  Perhaps it is a matter of those noises standing out that much more without the cumulative din of weekday traffic as a base line.  We put the package for the chia-blackberry snack-beverage-gel thing in the garbage and come to our stop.

While at the stop, he finds a discarded (3/4 full!!) beverage cup from Subway and starts emptying it out through the straw, trailing a brown version of urination Braille across the snow, while I ask him to stop before he soaks and stickifies himself if the lid finally gives way under the weight and pressure of his shaking and art making.

In the middle of this, I tell him that Anakin Skywalker grows up to be Darth Vader. He hasn't seen any of the movies yet, but he is getting a steady diet of whatever Star Wars books he can get and he tells me he likes Anakin because of his heroism in the primer reader equivalent of Episode II. My disdain for Jake Lloyd, Hayden Christensen and the prequel trilogy prompt me to give my warning about who Anakin really is, but in the end he is a big Darth fan anyway. He stares at me slack-jawed for a moment and I wonder if I have permanently cast myself or him as the spoiler of all stories.  He is undaunted by the revelation and I smirk at his command of the Star Wars canon, recalling my own ability to devote so much mental real estate to hockey trivia when I was in elementary school.

I also taught him the phrase "catch air" during a particularly bumpy ride on the bus. He is puzzled by this and points out that his mouth was closed and I give the example of a kite catching air and y to make the distinction between catching air and catching your breath.  With each bump that follows, he points out that he has indeed caught air again.

With those two lessons passed from father to son, we arrive at music class and I file my train-rushing lesson for later and later again.

After music, the day continues with a bus ride to pizza for lunch. The Saturday pizza tradition goes back to Gabe's bucket phase and it has been nice to see him grow into the routine and manage to eat half of his pizza. Lately, when we take the bus, he insists on taking position in the very back of the bus.  The back row was a factor contributing to how much air we caught on the shuttle bus and with the 73, there is often a character of some sort who Gabriel has no timidity about.  Today, it is a man with an air cast on his foot and a surreptitious can of beer that he keeps hidden in his nicotine stained hands rather than sipping from openly, his deference to authority heightened in front of the 4-year-old.  He talks about how he broke his leg at work and how has myriad rods and screw in his leg and is going to be laid up for about 14 weeks. I wonder how much mature content Gabriel actually absorbs here in the backseat and I look ahead to rides he will have by himself. I'll be better served by deft interrogation than backseat prohibition when those days come. Perhaps I'll have to trade him today's character for whoever he ended up sitting with.

Lunch is uneventful as he zones out in front of a Paw Patrol marathon on the iPad while my lunch time cronies sort through the bishop's gaffe on LGTBQ rights a week earlier. Gabriel only raises his eyes from the inane puppies to greet one of the staff in the restaurant, who has seen him regularly since he was in the bucket phase.  They have an indelible connection and when he sees her, he rises from his spot on the bench, strides over me and gives her a huge hug, feet off the bench and pressing as much warmth into her as he can.

On the LRT home, he finally catches up on the sleep he passed up on at 6:20 this morning and when I turn to tell him we are at our station he is out, face planted firmly into the back of the seat. Now in the hang of rolling with it, I read until we go all the way to the end of the line in Tuscany and commence the return trip back to the southeast. I watch him sleep calmly and with a stillness that makes me tune my senses for the confirmation of each light breath, something I have not done since he was just a few months old.

After about 45 minutes, he bolts out of his repose and looks around, all bewildered and bedheaded. We get off to make to catch the train home and the lad still finds himself out of sorts.  We wait for the train to takes us back to the northwest and he needs to be held and comforted, such is his state. He is still tired and uncertain of where he is and how he ended up in this unfamiliar place under these circumstances. The nascent independence he asserts all too often and in such unexpected ways is gone and for this moment he his younger and vulnerable. I manage to roll with it and as he burrows into me, I let him know that he is getting heavy. It is a warning as much for me as him that those cuddling totes across long distances are getting harder and we are perhaps down to the last few.

And I tell myself once again, to roll with it.  Somehow.

Five Stages of Grief in 68 Minutes

This afternoon, the optometrist, or opthamalogist, I'm not inclined to quibble, turned her back on my wife and I to have a one on one with the dude: "Gabriel, I have to tell you that your eye is broken."

A moment before, she had let us know that something was up while Gabriel occupied himself with eleventy bajillion dollar equipment she uses for eye exams. She showed us the scans of his eyes and the accompanying data on each eye. One measured something with a 1.50 and the other a 6.75 - a stark discrepancy. "Broken," though, for its simplicity to the ears and experience of a four-year-old sent palpable chills through mum and dad. I gave into to the urge to caution him to stop playing with the precision equipment, only to have the opto-expert chide me with, "Chill out, Dad," soon to be reused by my preschooler with some regularity, I'm sure. We booked another appointment to confirm the issue while I tried to recall the occasion where his reluctance to use his left eye presaged his efforts to get his right eye out from the shield she used for today's single-eye tests of his vision.

Mom's face reddened and eyes moistened. I was stoic and tried to joke about it. There is expectation that it'll correct itself with the proposed intervention of eyeglasses and further hope that he will take to wearing his glasses as I do. 

The walk home was somber and I pondered the restaurants we passed as a respite to stop and change the atmosphere. I passed, conscious that my appetite for sushi - the first option to present itself - surpassed that of my fish-phobic wife. I was not in the mood for the daily ritual of pulling Gabriel by the hand and running as hard as I could to drag him and his scrambling legs in my wake. It was only after some insistence that I relented and tugged him along. Even Mum trotted along. 

It is not the first time we have had a medical issue that sent us reeling to worst case scenario. Before he turned 3 months old, we learned that there were concerns about how his hips were aligning and he spent several months in a hips brace that kept his legs splayed until there was confidence that they were settling into their sockets the way they should. We know it could be worse and we ponder that aloud in first world problem terms as we acknowledge that we caught it and can intervene, and that elsewhere in the world, children do not have opto-experts near at hand and insisting on annual visits.

Gabriel is oblivious to his issue as far as we can tell. I moved his Toys R Us Lego catalogue to his left side so that he might use his weaker eye a little more. I also recall Gabriel's first evasion of his left eye. When I first introduced him to the SLR camera last month he peered through the viewfinder with his right eye and repelled my efforts to get to his left eye, the more balanced posture with a camera. It was of little comfort to recall that. 

The rest of the night unfolded as it usually does and I mustered the goofiness to try to read the first few pages of book to Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" until the cadence mercifully veered away from that melody. Gabriel demanded that I keep singing the book that way there was nothing resembling the chorus. (Whew.) If I write a children's book maybe I'll set it to the melody of "Everlong."

We have, for the moment gone from grief to acceptance and we'll return to the opto-expert next Wednesday to flirt with denial and bargaining for a few moments before our charming little daredevil becomes bespectacled.

Memories As The Lad Turns 4

There are moments of my son's life thus far that well up from out of nowhere to grace me with memories that I never imagined I would have.  In and of themselves, they are too brief to fill post of their own, but perhaps together they add up to more than passing anecdote. At this point, as he turns four, they are among the things that I will tell him about himself to give him some sense of his character, his talents and narrative. The question is how much the stories will amount to as time goes on and he forms memories through experiences I will not witness or document.

The first fond moment is from when he was barely 10 weeks old and the milestones were supposedly a bit further down the road... steps, words, sentences, commando crawl... but on the evening of January 21, 2012 - a number numerologists would probably drool over - his first gurgle of the laughter. I have heard it since in so many forms, including forced, vaguely maniacal and downright heart-melting.  On that night, it was a simple, pure peal of joy that moistened the eyes.  And so I started compiling the highlights of his life to report back to him to bridge these early years when his memories slip away rather than form and I wait to pass them on at a time when he is more autonomous and he compiles memories and evolves with less and less of my storage and memory.

There are some things that could remain evident without much intervention and I hang onto them as points of pride. Whether I tell him or not may have little bearing, especially if it is an innate thing that he is hard-wired for.

For instance, his first indication of a precocious connection with music is a eureka I pass on as sign of talent that has been handed down or skipped a generation.  After a few attempts of subversively slipping some jazz into his musical diet thanks to a video that featured a train, he called out "train" upon hearing a completely different acoustic arrangement of the same song while we were in the car.  That may be one of those unique things that I will not have to tell him about but can trust.

There are other moments that I simply hang on to as a joy of fatherhood. This summer, while I was coming home from work, I checked my phone to fire up the audiobook I was listening to. Before I got to it, I noticed that there was a text with an image from my wife and was puzzled by the solid black form that appeared with the image she sent. I opened it and was treated to a drowsy rendition of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" without any performance anxiety and his voice catching earnestly throughout as a profound reminder of the innocence and the delicateness that define even this robust boy at age 3.  I immediately replayed it again and again on my way home.  When the time comes I'll play it back for him and his embarrassment at the poignancy may mellow with the passing of time and the realization of how early he was generous in this way.

There are those embarrassing moments that we will remind him of, such as his first encounter with wasabi, which we warned him about to no avail.  He threw a sizeable dollop into his mouth and suffered no end of pain.

However many memories I accumulate of him, there will still be gaps as he leads his own life and he accumulates stories to share with friends as he grows older, forms his personality and creates his narrative going forward. There has been an independent streak from a very early age. When I first dropped him off at daycare three years ago, I hung around for about 15 minutes to ensure that he knew that I was leaving him behind and sure that he was aware enough to not panic and wail when he finally realized I was gone. The last thing I wanted to do was make him reliant on strangers during such a moment of anxiety, no matter how professional and experienced they are in addressing those moments in life (and they are.) Instead, he sat indifferent to my farewell waves and I only gave up and got on with my day when he toddled over to a new schoolmate and started playing with her. They still play (and play well) together most of the time at daycare and she is among the guests attending his fourth birthday party in a few days time.  As soon as he started playing, I got the feeling that it was safe for me to go.

From that moment, I have never had much trouble acknowledging, though not necessarily accepting, that I am not going to be there for every moment of his life as he grows up. I still beam at the second-hand account of one occasion at daycare when he relieved one of the staff from the challenge of consoling one of his classmates.  A girl was sobbing into the arms of one of the staff at the daycare when Gabriel approached and extended his arms for a hug. The daycare worker regarded it as an "I need one too" gesture at a moment when her attention simply wasn't available to him. He was brushed off for a few moments, but stood his ground until the staff interpreted the gesture as "Let me help," instead of "my turn." The daycare worker let go of the crying child and Gabriel gave the girl a hug and calmed this classmate.  After the hug, she gambolled off, her troubles eased and forgotten. He then extended his arms to give the day care worker a hug. He wasn't even two years old. That account of his compassion is another reminder of the innocence and sensitivity that children possess.

There are other secondhand accounts and other bits of data that will find their way to me as time goes on and less and less that I will compile on my own for him. Accounts will differ and conflict or I will give a more detached version of events than he will at times. I have no idea when the secondhand stories about him will come to me or what they will amount to, but they will each be a part of a life that he will control in a way that will enchant me, make me weep, beam, burst out laughing, or recall with embarrassment how much he is like his father. But I will never quite control it. The best I can do is bear witness to as much of it as possible and occasionally fill in the gaps for him when the story or the self at stake are unfamiliar to him.

Name Games

In preparation for Gabriel's fourth birthday party - sure to be a future post - I have had to distribute handwritten invitations to daycare friends that we do not have email addresses for.  I took care of that last week and the RSVP's have come in accept one. Last night, Gabriel mused about there being two boys with the same name at day care. With names trending the way they do, it would not take much for that to happen.  Given Gabriel's certitude that there are two boys that have the same name and the slow or completely absent RSVP, we had to weigh the possibility that I gave the wrong boy the invitation and that he and his parents, nonplussed by the invite by a boy he hardly knows, disposed of it.

After pondering our options, we decided to send the older boy - okay his parents - a letter indicating that we may have goofed with the invitations and given it to the wrong boy. We didn't wish to uninvite the child, but we kindly request an RSVP one way or another.  If we got a response indicating that the boy was not going to attend, we would be able to invite the boy that Gabriel had wanted to invite and had not yet RSVPed.

Convolutions galore?  Hang on.

I penned a light-toned, cordial note to the older child's parents with a self-effacing apology for any confusion and my aforementioned request for an RSVP.  We wanted to be able to confirm who was coming and, if possible, invite the same-named boy that I may have overlooked before it was two late. (I am already mentally writing the apologetic, sorry for the late notice introduction to any replacement invitation we issue.) I head to the daycare early, without Gabriel because it is his day off, to drop off my note. I stopped shortly inside the door trying to appear nonchalant and purposeful for my solo visit to the daycare to drop off my note.  I nodded confidently to parents I knew who were dropping off their kids while I hovered in a room other than Gabriel's looking for the name of this boy that we were convinced there were two of.

No such name.  After scanning the list four or five times to make sure that my bleary pre-dawn grasp of reading material and focus without my glasses was not completely failing me.  Finally, I gave up as my confidence in justifying my presence evaporated.  However, given the circumstances that brought me into the daycare with this note, I thought it best to spare anybody the trouble of bringing their morning routine to a halt to sort out what I was actually trying to explain with the birthday invites, the confusion over two kids with the same name and our need to get an RSVP and you have a sentence that is getting a little too long.  At 7:08 in the morning, it is hard to justify postponing someone's date with their morning coffee to describe and collate the layers of confusion that had fallen upon me and brought me to the daycare without my son.  In the face of that, I just feigned confidence that I knew what I wanted to do and that could possible, somehow achieve my assigned mission. The letter that was in my hand, hovering above the class list started making its way back to my pocket because there appeared to be no child to give it to. For confirmation, I asked one of the staff at the day care if there were two boys of this name. Nada. I turned for the door well after I gave the staff the wrong impression of me.

As I headed on to work, I was convinced that I had fallen victim to my son's first relationship with an imaginary friend.  We tried to sort through the mystery and discovered that it was simply a matter of Gabriel giving the name to a boy he did not know. He decided, on what grounds or formula I do not know, to just call this other, bigger boy that he regularly played with "Big H-----," after the younger boy, that I can confirm I did indeed invite.  He just has not RSVPed yet. If this older boy is at daycare tomorrow, I'll try to figure out what the boy's name is and take the opportunity to sort through the inner workings of Gabriel's mind to figure out why he reused the name on this other boy.

The party should be easy compared to this.

The Lad and the Camera

Things did not exactly go as planned. Plan A was to take him to a landmark that he would remember (or be reminded) was the first place or thing he photographed. He was not in the mood to walk to the modern red bridge that he was so excited to see whenever we take the train downtown. Plan B quickly deteriorated when he got more focused on eating all of the snacks I had packed for the day. There was not going to be a perfect moment to introduce him to the experience of capturing the world as he sees it. At the point Plan B filled my thoughts with the challenge of getting lunch into him after he ate all his snacks, I retreated to a more perfunctory introduction to the camera.

After getting him set on how to properly hold a point and shoot with a few simple mantras about holding it with both hands, keeping still and keeping the wrist strap on, he set out. After being the subject of enough baby shots to develop a dislike for the camera, he had one to call his own and he was off.

Once he got the hang of it, he was eager to get moving and find what else he could photograph. We wandered around the city parks, shooting construction sites, of course, but also fallen leaves en masse and in solitude as autumn sets in on us. Once he got into it, I was able to tell him little things like "get closer" and "look carefully," foundations of whatever progress he will make over time with the camera.

At the moment, he is amusingly unfiltered with the camera. He started taking pictures of passers-by, while I, who loathes invading anyone's space pleaded, "Ask first! You have ask first!" He even snapped a shot of his urinal when I finally broke him of his quest for "one more shot" and got him into a washroom. All in all it was a good start to something I had not hoped to get him into until he was big enough to lug the DSLR I've had waiting for him. For now, he is happy to know the shutter button and the on/off switch and to look back on what he took.

For now, it is a pleasure to ease him into one of my passions and hopefully get him familiar with the patience, presence and attentiveness that the camera has rewarded me with over the years. Hopefully those microlessons about observation and patience will inform other things but in the meantime there is the joy and wonder of an uncensored view of the world from a height of 40 inches. Onward.

Dad On Duty

A few months after Gabriel was born, I was able to attend a New Dads course. At this point, 3 1/2 years after the fact, I can't recall if it was two or three sessions but I can remember those of us who chose to converge being representative of a new generation of men, whatever that might be. We caught and corrected ourselves when we risked talking about babysitting our children. Others in the group bristled with the tension and challenge that came with fatherhood and in some there were hints of baggage that would cause or had already caused difficulty and left some overmatched for the task of being open and vulnerable to their prime vocation.

I have been capable of talking or writing a good game when it comes to being a father, but there are, granted, times where patience runs thin and there is a reversion to whatever offers expedience or an easy response.  In those moments where I'm losing my temper or just cutting corners to get out the door or the like I feel like the laggard of the partnership. For example:

When brushing teeth during the bedtime routine, I more often than not forget to wash his hands and face.  Same thing with sunscreen when heading out for the day.

Last week, I left a developmental screening report from his daycare in my backpack neglected long enough to become a sopping wad in the torrential rains that fell last Friday. A great "my dog ate it" variant.

I've let him stand instead of sit. (Discuss in your groups.)

I often forget his water bottle when heading out and have to buy him bottled stuff en route.

I mix up his indoor and outdoor shoes at daycare and bring him home in the wrong pair.

I had refrained from slathering every part of his zone with cream before sealing up his diaper.  I also preferred the pull-ups over the tape tabs even though I recall practicing with pins and cloth in the 1980s when I took a babysitting course and was willing to go the cloth route for the first few weeks of his life until I was overruled in favour of more sleep.

I occasionally rush ahead a step or two on a Lego project when his attention has drifted instead of trying to recapture it or setting things aside. I mean, c'mon, it's Lego!

I skip entire pages rather than mere adverbs in his books when it is time for him to nod off and he is adamant about his quota before turning in.

I've laughed when I shouldn't such as the time that he squeezed a bottle of ketchup and geisered a wad of the red stuff onto his shirt, his hair and myself.

Those little things out of each week or day or hour leave me conscious about the opportunities that are constantly available to me and leave me convinced that I'm the second-stringer or the laggard in the task of raising Gabriel.  I wonder if I have taken the verb "father" more literally than I care to admit.  "Father" doesn't have the long term connotations that the verb "mother" does and perhaps there is something wired in me, despite my better intentions, that prompts me to slack off or become reluctant to put on the original Disney score that he prefers when my jazz is playing.

I do, however, remind him to look someone in the eye when he says, hello, thank you, good bye or sorry.  I stroke his forehead or rest a hand on his stomach when he is too restless to find sleep and I get the chance to tuck him in or settle him down.  I've gently pointed out the proper use of "because" and "so" which he has mixed up regular in phrases such as, "It's raining because I'm wearing boots." I've even tried to work a second language into his head by practicing Japanese and a bit of French with him.

Perhaps it all stems from being the first one to leave the house after he arrived and in the nearly four years since he was born, starting with that rush to the pharmacy to get some formula while we were still waiting for the milk to come in.  In that time there have been so many moments that I have missed out on, things I have only heard afterward, secondhand.  I have not been synched with his every need the way that my wife has whether it is from the moment of his arrival or going back to the closer synchronization that they once shared.

Regardless of the cause, when I am on duty alone there always seems to be an error or two or an oversight to make me self-conscious. My wife assures me that there isn't a wrong way and that is a brief bit of balm. Last week, though, when I had full on Dad duty to put Gabriel down for the night, he was finally signalling it was all right for me to go with the see-saw rhythm of his sleepy breathing. I slipped out of his bed as stealthily as a could and promptly activated the hard rock guitar riffs of one of the toys that did not get put away (by me? by him?) before turning in.  A froze on the spot as a litany of curses went through my head.  I paused to see if I could detect some disturbance in his sleep. On the crest of his snoring he uttered a drowsy, "I love you," and remained asleep.

Whew.

Renaissance and Revelation on the Trail

As the summer of 2015 winds to its end, something harshly portended by a 24-hour cold snap that included freezing temperatures and snow, we took Gabriel for a hike in the mountains.  He had gone on a hike or two around the city on well-worn public trails, but today he took on a 4K hike with a gain in elevation of 250m.

Mum was in her element, having grown in the shadow of the mountains we hiked through and honed her rock climbing skills at the place where we peaked for the day.

She has regularly promised him that she will take him to Nepal and he in turn has promised to take her to Madagascar.  (I am not certain if it is the real one or the animated version he has in mind, but he has been earnest each time he has made the promise.) As we ascended the trail, Mum opted for the tougher trail and laid out the courtesies and the strategies of the hiking trails: step between, not on, the roots and rocks that obstruct the way; step aside for the faster hikers and make sure you say, "You're welcome," to those who thank you; to roll a needle between your fingertips and know that it is from a spruce by square edges make the roll rough.

I could see a long-dormant side of my wife resurfacing as she had a chance to initiate Gabriel into a long-held passion that she has set aside over (at least) the last four years and is now getting the opportunity to share the fundamentals of.  Whether or not he takes up this passion to the same extent that his mother has, it is a thrill to see that side of Mum emerge for him and flesh out one of the main characters in his life while she rekindles a spark that has idled for too long. He will see her, eventually, as more than just a provider and healer but as someone who has lived with this particular passion: to hike, to climb, to travel and so many other things that he still does not know about her. Perhaps there is knowledge of this in him already, aspects of her that will resonate and possess a trace of deja vu in a story she will tell about her achievements or hard-earned scrapes on rock-face.

He climbed his first big climb easily and with more enthusiasm than fatigue.  When we got to the top he was preoccupied with dogs that had made it to the top, but he did take note of the rock climbers who ascended by the toeholds that took them even higher than we went.  He confessed to preferring the hike down, despite the utilitarian scenery of an old fire road setting the background instead of the rock staircases and the approaching roar of waterfalls. Don't we all, though?

More importantly, Mum is already eager to get the next hike in sooner than later and is sorting through the terrain of the mountains and parks that formed the backyard of her youth and the landscape of her imagination. One thing that seems possible or even evident as Gabriel closes in on age four, is that we will be sharing more of ourselves on ventures such as this. It will be good to show more of ourselves to him as time goes on.

Mom and Dad Dare to Get a Babysitter

Letting ourselves out of the house, as adults, sans Dude, took us some time.  After a few months of having the memory of the clunker of a movie Tower Heist and an indulgent trip to Five Guys as our last "date," just hours before Nadine conceded we ought to go to the hospital just to see if everything was okay, we let ourselves go out for an evening to see the Blue Man Group.  The tickets were purchased long before Gabriel was born and it was the night of or night before my birthday.

Gabriel has been a low maintenance little guy almost straight out of the gate, but we still felt reluctant to not so much trust him with anyone as to ask for the favour or impose on anyone who dared to offer.  Even so, we settled on asking close friends first rather than asking one lone teenager to take him on. We basically enlisted a team: mother, father and their then 4-year-old who had been doting on him since his arrival and may have been ready to shoo her parents home to take over.  Instead, her parents shooed us out before we could complete our eighth utterance of the double checking, "Any questions?", with the assurance that they'd babysat before, or something like it and that Gabriel was in good hands.  We reviewed all of the things that might occur and reiterated our desired turn in routine and time as we retreated.

We trotted off to see Blue Man Group at a theatre that was a 12-minute walk away from home.  I'm still not sure if we would have let ourselves out that night if it was a 20-minute walk or drive.  We sat and never really allowed ourselves to acknowledge or enjoy the fact that we were out for the night. For the first part of the evening my cell phone sat on my thigh and kept glancing at it on a constant basis.  Eventually, the show grabbed a bit more of my attention, but (no offence intended) I never quite got fully immersed in the program.

We returned home after 2 hours and 23 minutes of entertainment, walk there and sprint back to find that the dude was sleeping as he was intended, but that the routine we had requested had not been followed to the letter.  Our "sitters" varied the routine as they were comfortable with and Gabriel responded well and, much to our surprise, was not thrown off kilter by the variation. There was, it seemed, even a broadening of horizons after the 4 1/2 months of being locked into the patterns that my wife and I established for ourselves.

It was not only good for us to get out, but it was good to realize that we did not need to be spot-welded to our routine.

We are still on our first hand when it comes to counting the times we've left Gabriel with sitters, other than my in-laws, for a night out whether it is dinner, a movie or something else but we are getting a little more daring.  Last week we even arranged to have that competent team of mother, father and now-8-year-old take on the first stage of the babysitting until a teenager - yes a teenager but she has graduated high school and is headed to university in a few weeks - could get to our place after finishing her day job.  We did spend a good part of the night texting to the team and the teen to ensure that the handover went as smoothly as it did and to let her know our ETA at the end of the show and we even allowed ourselves to be out for 5 hours.  We first used our new solo babysitter last October and we plan to use her again in November while we make a 12-minute walk to see a show...

Sleepy Bones

Gabriel was a great sleeper early in life.  While other parents from our prenatal class were quick to cite the sleep they had lost due to feedings and random dark AM crying, we were doing our best not to be conspicuously quiet during those laments.  We'd nod vigorously and add a well-timed, "I hear you," to avoid boasting and express our relief to one another when we were alone.

Those salad days have been long gone and apparently, according to The Walrus we are not alone. We now wake regularly to a cry of some sort from Gabriel as something disturbs his sleep.  There are occasions when he - despite our interventions - rolls out of bed with only a thud (and no howl or cry whatsoever), the soft patter of his bare feet wakes us as he comes down the hall or we stir at 4am to find his form wedged between us and eking out more space.  A recent conversation was something like this:

Nadine: Stop kicking!
Gabriel: I'm stretching.

Whereupon Gabriel is escorted back to his room and slept with until he is asleep again.  Often, Nadine or I fall asleep first and stir an hour or so later and return to our bed.  We have tried to implement a bit more of a routine and get him to stay in bed - quietly - when he wakes up rather than come to our bed or call out to us.  Nadine has come across a plan where she cues Gabriel to be in bed when the 7 is up on his digital clock and stay there until it reappears.  It has worked relatively well in the evenings but asking him to lie still and stare at the clock until the hour turns from 6 or 5 into 7.  As I type, it is 6:39am. He is just stirring now and heading to bed with Nadine.  A decent achievement, but still not enough sleep. We know that this will end eventually, when he is in his teens and the lethargy of growth sucks out all desire to move.

In the meantime though, there is the challenge of getting him to sleep through the night or cope with his interruptions on his own.  There hasn't been much luck.  Last night over dinner we talked to him about staying in bed and staying quiet until 7am, but he replied that he wanted someone to sleep with. Nadine reminded him of the retinue of stuffed animals that he shares his bed with each night and even suggested a rotation if there were new favorites that he preferred amongst, Sully, puppy, Thumper, and everyone else.

He replied, "I want to sleep with someone who has bones inside."

Nick Bland: Savior of the Modern Reading Parent

As a voracious reader and aspiring writer, the books that inhabit Gabriel's life have been a preoccupation from before he was born. I bought a Dr. Seuss compilation a week before he was born, read to him while he was in the womb and proceeded through the pages of a thick tome during the quieter moments in the delivery room and read to Gabriel from that same 900-pager in the days that followed.  Since that time, books have been a part of his routine and I can recall a meltdown two weeks ago where a very weary dude wailed his desire to go to the library that very moment despite being in his birthday suit and the library certain to close before we would arrive there dressed.

Almost everyday there have been a few books to round out the day and there are have been a few occasions where my little extrovert disappears on his own to a quiet space with a book.  I think the habit has been formed, though there enough bleary-eyed, first thought of the day requests to watch TV or something on the iPad to keep me vigilant about ensuring the habit keeps rooted.

The evening bedtime routine with books, invariably involves him promising that he'll turn in after one more book and then one more and so on.  Whether we are reading his books or those we hoard each week from the library, I am left to wonder at times what it really takes to publish a children's book.  There are so many books about fire trucks, fire stations or firemen, that have the exact same plot that I really wonder what sets a prospective kid lit author apart from the others.  After pouring through a book of truck photos or a story lionizing the limited things that trucks or construction equipment actually do, I shrug at the kid lit industry and wonder if it is all an inside game.  When bored with those books and their premature product placement by Tonka, I drifted into the tones and pomposity of a radio ad pitchman.  Gabriel responded with the first furrowing of his young brow. I've let up, unwillingly.

Apart from those books, there are my wife's well-worn and loved collection of Dr. Seuss books which we have complemented with the brilliant posthumous works that have come out in recent years. There has been great relief and pleasure in the discovery of current writers.

I've been lucky enough to have friends recommend the likes of Canadians Melanie Watt and Jon Klassen, but the great discovery in the kid lit section of the store has been the work of Nick Bland, who has in about 10 years assembled a body of work that I have quickly come to trust and adore.  My wife and I can recite the entirety of Bland's The Very Cranky Bear from heart in the dark as the concluding tale for the night before putting Gabriel down.  Cranky Bear has the depth of theme that is missing from so much of the other kid lit that is aimed at the appetite boys or girls have for the items that fill their respective toy boxes.  I know that there is a lot of Young Adult lit that will not match the depth that Nick Bland has etched into the few hundred words he carefully penned for this story and the subsequent ones with the Cranky Bear.

Beyond that brilliant series of five "bear" books are other paths that Nick Bland has followed about incompetent monsters, fathers, pigs and hugs (my non-Bear favorite) that have further confirmed his talent as a big-hearted, wise and ambitious author willing to give kids a little more or require it of them.

With that, I say a resounding, "Thank you," to Nick Bland and look to compile more of his brilliant work.  He will emerge as an author to join Seuss and Sendak in the masterful blending of poetry, humour and simple wisdom.

And if you want the kid's point of view, Gabriel's one word review is, "Again."

Walking Boy

A simple goal for Gabriel is for him, when the time comes, to walk to school.  It seems a simple goal, perhaps even an odd one to set or aspire to, but as someone who walked to school throughout Primary in 1972-1973, I'm motivated to make sure he manages this, especially since it is a shorter walk.  Too many children are bussed to school or ferried by their parents.  Apart from the concerns about the sedentary thumb-flexing routines of children today, I just want to have him walk a bit and get a sense of independence sooner rather than later.

After having Gabriel in a daycare closer to my wife's work than to home, we have had the luxury of placing him in a daycare merely 500 metres away from home.  With that, we have had the opportunity to walk home at the end of the day and there have been a few occasions where he wants to have me walk him to school at the start of the day as well.

The walk is usually a distracted dawdle as the seasons invite him to pick rocks or dandelions to bring home to mom or a preoccupation with whatever leaves and branches hail or strong winds may have thrown into his line of sight.  There is also the regular stop outside the fence of the daycare for him to bid farewell to his friends who are "still on the inside" and have yet to be picked up.  As our first winter of walking home passed we relished the first opportunity to walk home in daylight and I was happy to assure him we would have daylight for the walk for the next eight months.

On Saturdays, thanks to a theft of Gabriel's stroller, the test was a much more ambitious sequence of walks for the routine of story time at the library, the traditional pizza lunch that has been a part of my Saturdays for over 8 years now and then on to Mount Royal University for music class.  It is a long day, with a departure around 10:30 in the morning, two trains, two busses, a few lengthy walks uphill and a return home by 4:30 or 5pm.

On the occasion that the stroller's departure was realized, I grit my teeth in anticipation of how quickly he would walk and how much energy he'd have after a few long walks.  I dreaded the possibility of him trudging into his music class only to depart early because of a meltdown that would try the patience of his gracious instructor.  If he whined that he was tired, I was ready to loft him onto my shoulders and carry him along if need be.

Nothing.  Throughout the day that we were first thrust into the routine, Gabriel never uttered a complaint.  He actually liked being able to grab a seat on the train or the bus and interact with other passengers, not to mention the diggers and other construction equipment that are the only things that ever line his routes through the world.  He was great throughout the day, only to fall asleep on my lap on the last bus home to leave a puddle of drool on my denims.

Apart from putting in the mileage, the regular travel has made him familiar with the travels.  He knows the name of his stop on the LRT.  He knows to watch the traffic and press the button (about 9 to 11 times) for the walk light at the busy intersection between daycare and home on our afternoon walk.  I suspect that he is more capable than I am prepare to test to make his way to the playground near our house and to the library on his own.

Despite his potential to do those walks on his own, I'm in no rush to thrust that independence upon him.  I wonder if he would be able to make those walks on his own without drawing the suspicion of an adult who would raise an eyebrow and the possibility that the independence is required because of abandonment.  Colleagues of mine with school aged children have already admonished me for even thinking of letting Gabriel walk to school on his own when the time comes.  I also know that no matter how capable Gabriel would be at walking to the closest supermarket and traversing the LRT tracks and busy street that are in his way, the biggest issue would be the dismaying sight of an 8-year-old heading to the Safeway to buy a loaf of bread on his own.

That prospect is at least 5 years away, but there I already have to acknowledge that there will be pressure to put that off until he is much older than I was when I ventured on similar chores with the mantra of eggs, bread, milk dissolving in my mind and learning whatever there was to learn about my neighbourhood and myself in that interlude of the day.

Abbegard!! Or... As Memories Fade

As Gabriel closes in on 4 years of age, I thought it was time to start blogging about screwing him up raising him.

Why now?

It has not been a matter of suddenly finding the time to get to it. The notion had come to me on a regular basis over the years and even prior to his arrival. There were times that were learning moments for me when his ability to be excited, open, capable of resetting his moods in a split second and so many other things that he has the youthful capacity to do that I have treasured and taken pause to savour.

At the same time, there are moment of his life that he has moved on from and left behind without him even knowing and they are things that I know will predate whatever living memory he can look back to a few years from now. My wife and I and others who have seen Gabriel grow will be able to tell him the things that he used to do but already those conversations leave him puzzled and perhaps even nonplussed as we try to suggest where he has come from and he -- yes even at this formative stage -- was.

When watching Inside Out with him we had to have a conversation with him about the Memory Dump: a dark, forbidding place in the mind that was frightening with its darkness and fade of past. It may have seemed an apocalyptic setting to him, a place of demise although on so many levels that we are otherwise indifferent to. At least we are indifferent to it when we lose those early memories without much contemplation.

In Gabriel's case one of those early disposals to the memory dump was a made up word he sprung upon us when he was just becoming verbal. Amidst all the mama's, dada's and other combinations that my wife and I deciphered during his first year came this utterance: "Abbegard!" We struggled to figure out what it meant.  The first thought was that he had latched on to someone else's use of "Oh my God" around him and we went through mental checklists of our own possible use of it and then other people who may have been careless enough to use it around him. Time went on, the checklists turned up empty and we tried to figure out other interpretations.

Apgar? He might have heard the nurses or doctor complete their assessment of him while his mother and I were far too distracted to notice such a calculation being uttered.

Avant garde? That would have been just the tonic for this artsy Dad who would rather pressure him into art school that accounting, engineering or law.

All blue car? No. We didn't even get an impatient shake of the head that we, his parents, were already not gettting it and were out of touch.

All blue cars? Okay, never mind.

I wondered if it was some remnant from a previous life, a soul that had revisited this world clinging to that random fragment of language. A talisman to carry it back to consciousness and to shape the next road that he would follow.

After a while, my wife and I pieced together a pattern. It occurred at moments of celebration or excitement or simple bliss that he wanted to share or punctuate. Abbegard (my spelling) was a highlight of the day, a sign that things were good, great.

Other words formed and over time his single word disappeared. It was pushed aside by a more rational or shared connection to what we see and share each day and eventually it was gone.

As we watched the movie and tried to explain to Gabriel what happened in the Memory Dump and tell him that it was happening to him, I told him about his word and its demise from his vocabulary. He tried repeating Abbegard a few times. He was half-hearted and it was evident that the resurrection was brief, already ending.  His word had no chance to return to him.

And so I will write. To preserve those aspects of me, my wife, him and being with him that will not be as indelible as I hope when I am in the moment that I flood with their power. I look to the poignancy, the failure, the renewal and joy that live and morph into one another with such casual, passing power at any moment.