The long week

This week that just finished was loooooong around here.

Jamie was out of town (in Baltimore of all God-forsaken places) and of course when he's not here we certainly miss him. No more tag-teaming at sunrise and sundown or the exchange of "just go see if he's looking for a soother" hopes in the middle of the night when Cole can't possibly be hungry an hour after his last midnight feeding. I missed out on sharing tales of our days - tales from the outside world, stories of misadventures and new discoveries and all that good stuff... But on the other hand, on Thursday night I could loll around until the highly irresponsible hour of 10pm to watch both back-to-back episodes of CSI's goodbye to Grissom, sitting on the floor and cutting out fabric. I'm so glad he's back now (Jamie, not Grissom) - he shared a can of Guinness with me, ordered us a pizza and read Cole Grumpy Bird. He listened to my (somewhat) crazy ranting, and to stories of how I was fabulously rude to perfect strangers for various reasons this week because I'm tired and therefore entitled to be somewhat unpleasant. And had some quality Daddy-Baby time with Cole today while I visited the hairdresser.

Despite my crazy level of exhaustion, our days this week out and about, in and around were great. Daylight hours are good - it's the nighttime that's killer... Cole's been having fun with a bunch of lovely new toys too, thanks to terrific trio of my brother Bryan, s-i-l Michelle and niece Robyn who sent us a gift card to the toy store for Christmas. We strolled on up to Toys r Us and had a field day.

He's been highly entertained by one of his new favourites - his rotary phone. I love this thing - the ringing, the creepy woggly eyes, the 5 centimetre cord... Cole is nuts about it. I was thinking - do kids today (wow, old person phrase alert!) even get the concept of a rotary phone? I mean, for him this is just a fun toy that rolls and makes ringing noises - it's not like it relates to something he sees us using around the house. We don't even have a home phone, just a couple of mobiles...

And, just this week has just started to wiggle along to music. Almost clapping too, when we're playing in the kitchen and he's enjoying his other new toy, a magnetic animal-matching game complete with various cute down-home songs. And his first standing up solo dance was to Spoon's The Underdog. We danced around together as we do often and when I put him down he kept right on wiggling his legs while holding on to the sofa - so adorable! I'm a hard sell on most kids music, personally. I find it makes me want to, oh, gouge out my eyeballs, pour hot oil in my ears, you know... Like the collection of songs I saw advertised on tv a while ago featuring kiddie favourites "sung" by screaming children. When the woman on the commercial puts the cd in for a car trip so that her kids can scream along on top of the recording well, I just can't imagine how she keeps the car on the road! We have a huge (mostly bootleg) collection of music and are big fans of a lot of Internet radio too, with a good sprinkling of CBC Radio 2 and whatever that French station is that plays good stuff... I rotate through a loop of various musical moods. Sometimes it's Miles Davis or Coltrane (the inspiration for Cole's name) for months and then not again for a year, but I always come back to my favourite genres... And lately it's been back to some indie stuff. Here's a bit of what we've currently got in our playlist, in honour of Cole's first dance: