And just like that, the kid can walk (well, sort of). I think I'm almost as ecstatic as he is; I guess his enthusiasm is catching. All it took was five hours of driving to and from and around Powell River to see my good friend from Montreal Jessica and her boys Maxim and Benjamin. Benjo just learned to walk. He's a month older than Sebastian. They were roaming around the Laughing Oyster, Jess's family's restaurant, and something must have clicked in Sebastian because that night when we got home he took about five steps. There had been one-step attempts the day or two before and of course months of cruising and the occasional stiff-legged stand alone in the middle of the room. He's got places to go, this son of mine. He wants to move bad.They say it's great for a kid's left and right brain to crawl for as long as possible. It helps them with things like math later in life. But what can you do.
In one week it will be his first birthday. I'm so so excited. He doesn't have any baby friends in Gibsons yet. There are some acquaintances and likely candidates but so far his best buddy is three year old Uma. So there will be no birthday party. Instead we're going to have a big family dinner for him. Mary and Bob (Alex's parents) have been slowly making their was across the country from Ottawa in their Subaru and will arrive tomorrow for ten or so days. They're staying at a B&B a block away. I expect to find my son kidnapped as of tomorrow. I am prepared for that and hope I can be as generous as possible to make up for their missed months.
We've been having a pretty mild, cloudy summer so far but the last week has been sunny. The garden is exploding: tomatoes are ripening, the seventeen-pound-squash vines are looking prehistoric and trailing across the yard, the carrots are actually growing (for once) and we've been having garden salad at least once a day for a long time now. Alex, Sebastian and I try to swim at the beach every night when one or the other has finished work. The tide is always high, we walk down to the dock and take turns jumping in. It's paradise, truly. There's nothing like a swim in the early evening as the sun is hitting the last of the beach and the mountains and the water is calm and warmed from the day. I'm in awe of this place even after twenty-odd years.
There's been a big black bear hanging around the place. He sauntered through the neighbour's yard last week and Alex just returned from a walk at dusk and ran into it two streets over. He (and others who have run into it) says it looked about seven feet tall which for a black bear is pretty damn big. The coyotes, oddly, are still hanging around as well. I've run into them a couple times and we often seem then outside the house or lurking around the neighbour's yard at night. It's not abnormal, but it's something you look out for in a condensed populated neighbourhood like Granthams. At my childhood home it's not as big of a concern despite the wilderness of it because there's plenty of space for everyone.There's been a big black bear hanging around out there as well. Maybe it's the same one, who knows. Apparently a couple years ago there was a bear in the house next door's kitchen. The owners are away for months at a time and somehow a bear got in and helped itself. Ridiculous.

Sebastian's not down with diapers these days. I can't blame him. It only took a few attempts at pinning him down on the change table with all my one-handed strength and wrestling with a carefully folded cloth diaper to realize I'd have to let him be most of the time. After a week or two of cleaning up endless puddles of baby pee Alex and I decided to embark on "elimination communication" more seriously. I check Diaper-free Baby out of the library, learned a few things, mustered all the patience I could and have since being trying to coax him onto the toilet. He's not down with the toilet, either. No, he's fascinated with it but, until I came home with a secondhand baby toilet seat yesterday, he refused to use it. Many times throughout the day I watch him open and close the toilet lid, try to flush the toilet, occasionally I've even caught him elbow deep in toilet water. It's almost involved as much cleaning up as just letting him pee all over the place. But that's okay. The other day he saw me spit my toothpaste into the toilet bowl because I was hurrying to hold him over the seat. Since then he's stood at the toilet about twenty times a day and pretended to spit into the water with a cheeky smile on his face. Sometimes I think he's mocking me....
But I know there's a lot of un-training to do. The theory is that along with everyone else babies have the instinct to hold their bladders until they have somewhere other than their pants to go. Hence newborns often peeing as soon as the diaper comes off. But that instinct is muted with diapers until the time comes to toilet train, and by then a kid has followed his instinct for a brief time, been taught to deny it, then asked to reconnect with it. With this in mind, EC makes sense to me. More than half the world doesn't diaper their babies. How could they? It takes so much time, water, energy. They simply know when their kids are going to pee and help them do it somewhere appropriate.
So we're giving it a shot. I like to honour Sebastian's signs that he's ready for changes. With sleep, he led the way. He seems to know when he's ready to leave a phase behind, but needs a lot of help getting to the next stage. I'm happy to do that for him. Obviously the point here is not to potty train him yet, I wouldn't expect that from a one year old, but to respect that he doesn't want a diaper on and find ways to make that a more comfortable reality for us all. I'm not approaching it with full-fledged vigilance because I don't want Sebastian or I to stress out about it. So far I think we're making a little progress.

Rainy weather doesn't usually get me down. You can't think that way when you live in a rain forest. But it's been grey and rainy for weeks now. I mean, come on July. I swear I spotted some mould in the densest garden plot the other day. Weird insects are breeding in the calendular and cabbage; I'm a little squeamish every time I got out there. The cherries are rotting on the tree. How do farmers do it? How do they just fret at the window watching their survival means disintegrate in flood, drought, infestation? Anyhow, between our amateur garden and my mother's impressive permaculture set-up we're still getting a decent yield. Last night we ate peas, potatoes, kale, rosemary and radishes from the garden. We've been enjoying the handfuls of cherries off the tree that we can actually reach and are taking advantage of the neighbourhood farms' successes as well. Right now the sun is making a fair effort above heavy low-lying rain clouds; outside we go for a bit of vit D.

Aside from not having any new photos, I don't have much to say. The last week or two has left me drained. A combination of the family's seven-days-a-week work schedule, house guests, lack of sleep and so on. In times like this I think about weaning Sebastian more seriously. He'll be a year old in a couple weeks, which is the World Health Organization's recommended duration for breastfeeding. Not that I really care about what WHO has to say., and in fact I think it recommends breastfeeding for as long as possible after a year. Weaning is something that's been in the back of my mind for a few months now, probably since the thrush fiasco. I haven't thought about it seriously because I knew neither Sebastian nor I were ready, I wasn't going to wean him before his first birthday, and I wasn't by any means eager to stop. But, these days especially, I am increasingly aware of how independent he's becoming and also how physically demanding breastfeeding can be. Foolishly, and conflictingly because I don't really believe in taking supplements, I haven't regularly taken vitamins while nursing, and we've undergone a lot of changes and stresses in the last year. With the stable, relaxing yet continually demanding schedule of the summer I can finally take a breath, take some perspective and recognize how much energy this last year, last two years, has taken. I gave a lot of myself moving to Montreal, a lot of myself being pregnant, and a lot of myself to nurturing my son. Now I think I'm ready to start taking a bit back for myself. Travelling to Vancouver for grad school in September will certainly be a remedy that I'm looking forward to. But it will be physically taxing no doubt, and that's the main issue I have with breastfeeding these days. I can feel my body being extended a bit farther then it can handle. I'm eating well, lots of fresh veggies from the garden are now filtering into our kitchen, and I'm consuming more meat than I probably ever have from working at The Shed. I've switched to green tea instead of coffee for a while, and I'm taking really good quality Herbalife multi vitamins. I guess I don't want to weaning Sebastian to come from a negative place. I'd like to fully acknowledge what I'm doing, because I know it will be hard for him and I know it will emotional for me. So for now I'm trying to take better care of myself and I'm encouraging him to nurse less. By the time September comes around he might be down to a couple times a day, which would be a huge improvement for me, or I might just have more energy to give him. We'll see.

So, my camera broke. At least I think it did. I haven't given up hope yet but it doesn't look good. I suspect a single grain of sand in the lens. Sigh. There will be no more photos of the wee lad until further notice.
This leads me to consider the ridiculousness of a disposable culture. Computers, cameras, ipods, cellphones... these inventions are not meant to last more than a couple years because, obviously, by then we should have moved onto better, more impressive models. Well, when you're someone who doesn't give a shit about impressing yourself or others but just wants the many hundreds of dollars spent on each little piece of technology to function with a reasonable level of reliability, this culture is very frustrating. Thinking of all the crap like this going into the landfill is basically one of the most stressful things for me. The saddest part is that at this point in our lives I really, for the first time, value having a camera. I have come to love taking photos of Sebastian, our life, our home, the town etc... and sharing them, saving them for year to come. So now what?
I don't have the energy for a rant right now. I think we all know how it would sound. 

On his way home from work Alex pulled up a coworker's crap trap between Keats Island and the Gibsons pier and got these two beasts for dinner. When I got home I found them half alive wrapped in a garbage bag in the fridge, then watched him tackle them, boil them and shell them. The kitchen was a salty, facintating place for a while. The plan was to make crab cakes but we got derailed and ended up eating Annie's pasta for dinner instead... Oh well. Tomorrow we will take advantage of the fruits de mer.
There have been coyotes around Granthams for the last couple weeks. I don't think this is unusual, but I'm surprised at how long they've been lurking. We've even seen them in the morning along Marine Dr eating trash on garbage day and we see them outside our livingroom window at dusk in the same place, overlooking the ocean. Growing up in more or less the boonies wild animals weren't really a huge concern. We were always aware of black bears, and often heard the eeriness of a pack of coyotes howling in the forest. Once Lee was stalked by a cougar in the middle of the day. But there was no point in really worrying about it beyong taking the usual precautions. But here, with town so close and development now surrounding almost the entire area, I think the threat of unpredicable wildlife is a little more serious. Food is obviously lacking in the animal world right now if the coyotes are here night after night. I've been keeping an extra sharp eye out for plump and juicy little Sebi in the garden.
Last night I was washing dishes and outside the window was a scraggly old raccoon. He looked so sage and kept reappearing as though he was standing there to listen to our conversation. So I went outside to see him. Usually I want nothing to do with raccoons but there was something about this old guy. We stood outside together for a long time, just looking at each other. He played with a stick for a while. Then later as Alex and I were drinking a bottle of wine on the deck the raccoon climbed the cherry tree and sat in the branch almost overhanging the deck, like he was just hanging out with us. Then we saw the coyote. As it got dark we lost track of the raccoon and suddenly heard it being shredded in the driveway by the wild dog. It was over quickly, no fighting, just that fierce snorting sound raccoons make when they're going down and the viscious snarls of a creature about to have a meal. I guess like the crabs, the raccoon didn't stand a chance.

Officially, Sebastian's first word after mumum and dadadada is "hot." The root of this comes from the stove, naturally. A way to warn him not to play around the spitting bacon fat or the warm oven. Every time he sees the stove he whispers seriously, "hot.hot.hot.hot.hot.hot." (This doesn't stop him from climbing into the expensive stainless steel oven drawer and rocking around in it). Some days almost everything in the adult world is "hot.hot.hot.hot." When I lift him up to the counter so he can see his lunch being prepared or when we're watering the garden things are often, apparently, urgently hot. (Right now, apparently my ipod is hot.) I wasn't aware. But he also has his own language, one which he barks out with a stern face or babbles sweetly in. He's also developing an industrious side, no doubt from all the DIYing around our house. Alex seems to always be hammering something outside, and I'm constantly making bread and gardening so of course he joins us. It's very important work, piling dirt outside the planters, throwing rocks and banging wooden blocks on the glass door. Hmm.
He's also standing more and more. Those jolly jumper legs are paying off. He clings to my legs and sometimes I look down and realize he's not clinging, just standing. I don't think he realizes it which makes it comical, this tiny person standing the middle of a room with no obvious self-awareness. Then he collapses. He's been able to walk holding onto things for a long time and now he's attempting to run while holding on the couch, which usually results in him tumbling immediately. I hear the trouble making really begins once they learn to walk, so I'm not especially concerned about the next steps.
Another advancement in Sebastian's life is the new found skill to take off his diaper. That's a fun one. I try to let him go nude a lot of the time but other times it's not worth it. Like naps, or going into town. The other day he was trying to go down for a nap and after a lot of noise from his room subsided into silence I crept in with a blanket and there he was, little piquano, fast asleep, naked. He cracks me up.
The other day Sebastian and I walked to the beekeepers for some honey. The deal is there's basically an old unplugged fridge in the driveway stocked with hen and goose eggs, jars of honey and whatever else he's offering. You put your coins in his mail slot. It's nice. The walk took about an hour each way as we tend to meander. After the jutting hills of Granthams (with many stops to eat our apple and drink our water and, well, rest because I'm kind of out of shape) we followed the long quiet road at the foothill of Soames. It's a bit of an old country road, if there is such a thing in this part of the province. Straight, flat, pretty. At one point we looked up and realized there were cotton blooms in the air, an unusual sight here. Snow on a hot, blue sky day. On the way back we picked salmon berries and daisies. It was a wholesome kind of day.

my view when i look down most of the time

alex started his new job on keats island this week

the best way to trick a baby into wearing sunscreen is to let him put it on you