I did mention in the last post we’d started Xavier helping out around the house, right? Here’s the confirming video: .

Also, Frank initially uploaded the whole tape’s worth of film by mistake instead of isolating the vacuuming sequence. We’ll probably take it offline in a while to get back some Picasaweb space, but for dedicated Xavier fans, here’s a quarter of an hour enjoyment. Warning: there’s an overly long sequence of Xavier in diaper “dancing” and other endless minutes of Xavier’s face looking at himself through the camera’s LCD screen flipped toward him, while I just won’t stop saying “allô” in the background in the hopes of getting him to say it (you know how it is: we tape 5 minutes to get 15 seconds of what we’re trying to capture, always believing we’ll get a better shot, until we give up and that’s when he does his thing again).

Transl. “At the birds”
[French expression, close to "on cloud nine", delighted, enchanted, lovely.]

Little mish-mash of news from the small Gélinas family:

Baby 2

Baby 2’s pregnancy album is now online! It’s a little website similar to the one I kept when I was pregnant with Xavier (and similarly in FRENCH only, sorry!); it presents ultrasounds, doctor’s appointments, probably some belly pictures to come and the accompanying measures. The URL for the site is http://bebe2.emilieonline.com/ . Happy browsing!

Xavier

I sort of stopped lately jotting down Xavier’s progress step by step. At his age, it’s like an explosion of discoveries he takes on, and while he’s surprising us daily with new levels of comprehension he demonstrates, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly which development stages he’s getting at.

He’s experimenting a lot through his playing : he loves to roll his cars and trucks (or just push around various toys on the floor), as well as any object, in fact, while making an abstract steady noise that could be an engine imitation. He can fit two bristle blocks together better and better. He likes to ride his little ride-on and push himself forward or back, and he loves starting music from a toy or another and dance by shaking his head or bending his knees a little (actually, he bends his knees a little, slowly, and only once, while leaning his head forward, then he goes on doing something else, it’s quite funny). The cats (particularly miss Wang) are still highly interesting. We have also noticed he’s starting to imitate us as he can – notably, we let him have the vacuum, and he applied himself to pass it on the floor in a rather funny imitation of his parents, especially as he presented a big proud grin all the while. I will bug François for him to get the video out and online.

What we are working on a lot lately is language. He chats a lot, and he has started putting a lot of effort into imitating the words we repeat to him. He exclaims “allô” (hello) once in a while, which he learned at daycare (apparently the kids say hello to one another often when they run into each other), and sometimes a deformed version of “poisson” (fish), accompanied by the bubble sound we identify as the fish’s language. He doesn’t quite associate word with concept, but we are actively working on that. There’s also the word “chat” (cat), which he doesn’t say at all, but he seems to associate it with the cat when we mention it.

But most of all, most of all! are the “oiseaux” (birds). My mother repeated the word to him a couple of times while pointing a bird in his image book, and we pointed to birds in the sky a couple of times, (and the babysitter mentions the kids like to point at the birds they see when playing outside), and now everything is a bird. “Oiseau!” exclaims Xavier while pointing in the air, again and again; sometimes, he even points any object in the house and indicates to us that, surely, this is a bird? “No, Xavier, this is a ball, BALL” we correct him. He looks at us, tries to decide if we’re telling him stories, then repeats “oiseau” pointing. “BALL” we prononce clearly the object’s name. Finally, he tries to pronounce the new word in a version that usually ressembles “oiseau” again, but more transformed, and we congratulate him on his efforts. He pronounces many words randomly, in fact, but they all ressemble “oiseau” a lot : bateau (boat), gâteau (cake), cadeau (gift)… etc. It’s a work in progress.

The parents

Frank and I are mostly well. The fatigue and nausea from the start of the pregnancy are starting to wear down, and even if I don’t have illimited amounts of energy yet, it’s a lot better than it was – I almost stopped taking Diclectin and I probably will in the next days. I still maintain casanier tendencies a little, but oh well… François, for his part, is a wonderful dad who takes good care of Xavier when I’m feeling so-so, and with whom I’m happy to share this new parent experience.

We’re not much for folding laundry. We often forget loads in the dryer until we’re looking for a piece of clothing, or we’ll bring a hamper of clean clothes upstairs because we have to clear the dryer for a fresh load. That hamper usually stands in the corner of our bedroom through the week, we’ll take a shirt out once in a while and sometimes drop dirty clothes in it by mistake, until we can’t remember if that laundry’s clean or for washing.

The other day, Frank brought a clean load up and set the hamper in a different place than usual. When I came up to bed and found it there, I asked why the change of location.

F – Oh, I just figured by placing it there we’d be more likely to get it folded.

He said this quite casually and without really thinking about it. I looked again at the new location.

E – Have you figured out why this is so?

Frank paused, thought for a second or two, then tried really hard to refrain from laughing just before me.

Here’s our bedroom layout, “A” being the old usual location, “B” being the new.

You can come to your own conclusion.

Two weeks ago, I started to experiment with the programming language Ruby on Rails and needed a project to work on. I decided to revive an old web project that Emilie and I created a long time ago.
Now that the main parts of the site are functionals, I present you the new Cherry’s club, the drinks database.

-Edit It seems the site is actualy quite ugly and broken with Internet Explorer. I’ll work on that later, just use FireFox

– Frank

Amazon delivered! Xavier got a box for playing, and I got a stack of goodies. Guess what I’ll be doing tonight? Once I figure out which one to open first… See you in a month!

I was supposed to order on Thursday, but with the ultrasound Wenesday and a family gathering in Beauce (2 hours away) yesterday – terrible cold weather for August, with no coats packed, just our luck – I just remembered and got the time to hit the Amazon.ca pages. Here’s the final verdict:

“His Dark Material Yearling 3c Box Set”
Philip Pullman; Paperback
(Turned out slightly cheaper than getting the last two books separately.)

“Hyperion”
Dan Simmons; Mass Market Paperback

“The Time Traveler’s Wife”
Audrey Niffenegger; Paperback

“Widdershins”
Charles De Lint; Paperback

“The Black Company : The First Novel of The Black Company”
Glen Cook; Mass Market Paperback

—–
Dropped “Jonathan Strange…” in favour of the Black Company novel. Both seemed interesting and I’ll probably go back to Clarke’s novel at some point, but its length put it off this time around. Dropped the Bourne Identity, too. It was way off range, and there were just too many other good options, so I decided to take that risk at another time.

By a happy coincidence, all of these items are marked “In stock”, so I expect the parcel to drop in my mailbox mid-week, or at least before next weekend. Yay!