crawling, climbing, walking

So, Kaspar turned one and he's still not walking. He's been very close to taking his first steps, but he always bails on it the very last second. He is such a good and fast crawler, that walking simply does not seem to be a priority. However, he can stand up, in the middle of the room (without holding on to anything) and just stand there looking at a toy in his hands for quite some time. Today he stood up on his own and began to move to the music that was playing, sort of dancing without moving his feet. That was quite a sight! When he stands still, he seems so stable and so sure of himself, it's almost unbelievable, that he's about to get back down on all fours to advance ahead. A while ago, my mother and I were sort of placing bets ... She was convinced that he'd walk by the time we returned from our trip to Latvia. I was sort of aiming for twelve months. We both lost! And all Steve wanted was to be at home, when Kaspar takes his first steps, but I have a feeling he might not get his wish granted, either. He's leaving for another three week tour tonight. I highly doubt that Kaspar will start walking tonight, even though Steve has been trying his darn best to convince him, he should. But Kaspar is not only a crawler, but also an absolute acrobat on the stairs! He knows how not only to climb up, but also how to come down the stairs feet first. When there is nothing better to do indoors, or when the clock strikes 8pm and he's not even mildly interested in sleeping, we take on the stairs. Climbing the whole way up or coming down is one of those things that makes him so very proud and happy. Three or four climbs can also exhaust him enough, so that I can get him into bed! If I did not get bored assisting him, he would be willing to spend hours climbing up and down and up again until he'd probably just fall asleep right on the stairs. No, I'm not joking. I've heard of stories like that! In fact, Steve has been known to have fallen asleep in the hallway as a baby!

the heat is unbearable

The heat during the last few days here in Toronto has been absolutely unbearable. It’s disgusting! Every move makes you break out in sweat. Kaspar has been spending the days pretty much naked, but even then, as I bend over to pick him up or just give him a hug I’m met by a clammy, sweaty, hot little body. He doesn’t seem to mind the heat, except that his sleeping schedule is all messed up again. I wonder if it’s due to the heat. One good thing has come out of this heat wave - Kaspar has learned to like water. I tried for months to give him water to drink, in a bottle, a sippy cup, plastic cup, anything… but had no success, whatsoever. The heat has given him a lesson, though. Yesterday he fell asleep sucking on his water bottle.

Last week we put out the little blow up pool out on the driveway for Kaspar. It was all good for a few hours, while he was in it, but you should have seen the tears as he was being taken out. The tears, the screaming! It was just like the time, when we were on the beach in Latvia and he was not allowed to play in the water any longer. As I was carrying my squirming, screaming child back to the towel, I remember lifting my head up and having my gaze meet the gaze of and older woman, who looked at me in total amazement and anger. I wonder what she was imagining I was doing to my kid? Here, in my own driveway, I’m only worried about my neighbours. At least I can explain myself to them! Within a few days, the pool became a sort of a stunt thing for Kaspar, and we had to take it down for his own safety. While he did learn, that he was not going to be allowed to soak in the pool every hour of every day, he began to lean over the edge (just to put his hand in for a bit) and came close to diving into the pool head first several times. So, now the pool is back in the box. And Kaspar only gets a little bucket of water. That usually ends up getting poured over his own head in no time at all. :-) He does love water. I'm looking into swimming lssons in my own neighbourhood.

I have to leave for work in just a few minutes. In some ways I would love to stay at home and spend the day doing nothing in the back yard, but today the enticement of an air conditioned office is making me very happy. Last night was hot. I had a hard time sleeping. Then the wind and lightning kept waking me up. I wonder if there was a tornadoe somewhere close by. Will have to listen to the news this morning....

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

It's his birthday! Yes. Today is Kaspar's birthday. We did have a party yesterday - here are some pictures to prove it :-) The cake did not go down well. He was fascinated by it, but only by trying to shove all the icing and blueberries off the cake and onto the floor. Apparently that's what you do with a spoon. Taste test proved to be disastrous, because he simply spat the spoonful out. It's a miracle it did not land only the cake itself. Steve called, just as we were serving the cake and he got to sing happy birthday to Kaspar over the telephone. We had a fun day, which lasted well into the evening. Kaspar took a three hour nap and gave me a good break, but then he was ready to party again and we ended up calling it a night at 10:30pm.

work, work and more work

No, this is not a picture of Kaspar working. This one is still a good little shot of Kaspar sitting in a bowl at my friend Rita’s house in Talsi, Latvia. After taking a sauna with us several times, he had come to the understanding that sitting in a tub is a pretty cool thing to do. The old fashioned saunas in Latvia get heated up pretty hot, around 80 degrees Celsius, so, it’s not advisable for a little fellow like him to spend any considerable amount of time in such heat. However, he was really into it. So into it, that I could hardly keep him out of there. So, I devised a plan – a nice cool tub of water on the floor of the sauna with Kaspar in it up to his armpits. Boy, was it a hit! But ever since then he has been climbing into every large laundry bowl he comes across…

Speaking of the little guy… he’s going to be ONE in just a couple of days. We’re throwing him a party on the weekend. I’ve been loosing nights of sleep over this. How do you throw a party for a one-year-old? What kind of cake do I give him, so that he does not get sick after? (I’ve heard some horror stories from friends with little kids!) I’m hoping that it all just falls into place, somehow. Uh!

I have been about two weeks since we got home from our trip and yet I feel like months have passed. The first ten days I spent every free minute in my studio, because I had been accepted into the TOAE, but had to finish all this work for the show. Otherwise I only had a small array of pieces to show and that’s hardly acceptable for this show! The show was a success. Drew a good crowd! I was in a new spot, right by the city hall, in the shade. I still have not decided, if that was good for business, but it was definitely good for sanity. It never got too hot in the shade, and the weekend was a pretty hot and sunny one. It was nice to be in that show again. I cannot believe that it had been two years since I had been a part of it. Time flies!

The Monday morning after the show I had to begin working. Yes! I’m back at work. Back to sitting behind my desk. Computer humming. Telephone ringing. Number crunching. Typing. Filing. All that fun stuff. I don’t like it much. I’m just not used to going to work every single day. My job is actually awesome, even if it sounds like a bore on paper. My boss is great. I can work at whatever pace I set for myself. I have very flexible hours. I have an office all to myself. I’m really like a queen bee at that place! But… yeah, there is a ‘but’… I just don’t want to work. I like being home with Kaspar. I like doing the mundane little things at home. I’ve really gown to appreciate being home over the past year. Besides, I have my studio at home. So, whenever I get bored with ‘home’, I go into the studio, close the door, turn on CBC One and get cracking. I love that option. So, it just feels like I don’t need another job outside of the house. However, our financial reports tend to disagree. So, I have a job and it’s not at all a bad job and that’s my consolation.

It’s 3:30 in the morning and I’m beginning to wonder if I should try to catch another couple of hours of sleep before Kaspar wakes. I fell asleep tonight at 8:30, while I was putting Kaspar to bed. Only woke up at midnight, feeling uncomfortable, hot. I was still in my jeans. Yuck! Undressed, slept until 1am and then the thunder woke us both. It took me an hour to put Kaspar down again and by then I was wide awake, myself. So I figured that this was my chance to finally update this blog. I’ll try to get back into doing it on a regular basis. (“Try” is the key word here!:-)) Goodnight!

disappearing act

Sorry for the long disappearance! Our last three weeks in Latvia were overrun by family gatherings, weddings, trips of all sorts and sizes, spectacular summer weather, lack of internet connections … and to be totally honest … keeping up with this blog and emails became such a ‘job’ that I figured – I don’t need a job during my holiday! So, I disappeared, only to return to a mail box full of 68 emails (thank god, gmail sorts out junk mail, because the junk mail folder had 348 emails in it) and a whole lot of angry messages about not keeping my blog going. My appologies…

We’ve been back for two days. Back in Toronto. Back at home. Back in the swing of things. I’m still processing the last few weeks of our trip and the whole ‘returning to our regular life’ thing. Kaspar is going through some heavy jet lag, I think. His lack of sleep during the night and long naps during the day are sort of forcing me into an odd schedule myself. But, we’re happy to be back home! Here is a picture of Kaspar still in Latvia. The day before we left…

nightingales & rain

Last week a friend of mine from Toronto was here. She stayed at my mom’s place and we got talking about families and history and grandmothers and it turned out that her grandmother was a friend of my grandmother’s way back. Go figure! The world is so small, so small…

Last week it also rained a lot. It was a cold and wet sort of a week. One night, as the rain stopped pounding on our windows and the evening was approaching, my friend decided to hook up with some old friends and go for a drive out to a town called Tervete, where she used to work in a sculpture park of a sorts. It’s a large property with wooden and bronze statues that are made after characters from books by a Latvian author Anna Brigadere. She wrote a lot for children, fairy tales and stories… so, the sculptures are of the one foot tall boy “Spriditis”, the “King of the Forest” and so on…. But that’s really not important. So, she decided to go and invited me and Kaspar along. I could not resist. After several days indoors we both were dying to get out. Even if it was going to be a late night!

We piled into her friend’s car, tight like sardines at 8pm in the evening and drove into the sunset. Kaspar slept for the hour in the car, while we drove. By the time we arrived the rain began to sprinkle again, but that was not going to stop us. Armed with umbrellas, Kaspar in the sling across my shoulder we went for an evening walk. We stepped out of the car shortly after 9pm. It was still somewhat light out. Dusk. (Evenings are light, here! In fact, I think the night (as darkness) only lasts for about four hours right now.) We paid little attention to the sculptures, but went to all the beautiful nature spots in the park and listened to many stories about the park, many local tales and past love affairs with this place. My friend’s girlfriend’s husband is a local from Tervete. He had stories galore! Very interesting fellow! But the best part came around 11pm, as we were crossing a little meadow and approaching a creek with a little bridge across it, someone said: “Hear it? It’s a nightingale!” And sure enough, there were a couple of them calling out to each other across the field. It turned out that the interesting local fellow could not only tell tales, but do the nightingale call, too. By the end of our listening session we could not count the nightingales singing back to us. There were at least seven or eight of them singing back and forth to one another from every corner of the field. I had never heard anything like it in my life! A nightingale’s song is not all that special, when you listen to just one bird, but when there are many of them singing back and forth, it becomes an entirely different experience. It was magical. As the night started to come upon us, we hurried back to the car, but not before exploring the edge of the creek and finding a remnant, a piece of an old clay pot. I thought it was quite something. But the locals were not at all surprised. Somewhere, just up from the park are ancient burial grounds, never excavated… and the creek washes out smaller pieces occasionally. So goes the story!

But, that was not the end of our trip. We still had to stop by the mother in law’s place in town, where we got showered with hugs and kisses and were given freshly milked cow’s milk, a whole 3 L jug of it… and a whole lap full of lilacs, that she kept breaking more and more of, as we were starting to pull out of the yard. And it did not take us long to realize that my cousin is about to get married to a guy, who has grown up only three doors down the street from this lady and for many years has taken milk from her. I’m telling you…. This world is a very small place!

We drove back watching the night time sky and listening to an amazing mix of Islandic pop, a band called “Pink Martini” and some Latin American music. It was a perfect conclusion to the night. Kaspar had stayed awake on the whole walk and was in a great mood thoughout the night, but slept soundly in the car on the way back. I managed to pull him out of the car and carry him up to the bed, without waking him. So, our fine little trip came to a conclusion and the next morning we all slept in until 11 am. I love sleeping in until 11!!!

The picture of the field is the view of the creek, where we listened to the nightingales and the picture of Kaspar is taken in the car, just before we started driving back. Yes, he does look exhausted, doesn't he?

retreating

We've been chilling at home for a few days. On Saturday Kaspar hit a rough patch and I was forced to accept the inevitable - teething or not, it’s time to take it easy for a few days. We’ve now spent the week-end at my mom’s place (the house, where I feel most at home, where I grew up), with regular nap times, getting to bed on time in the evenings and spending the days playing and walking and digging in the dirt in the back yard. It seems to have worked magic on the little fellow. He’s back to his old self, again. I guess the gypsy lifestyle can be hard on anyone, especially such a young chap!

Last week we spent a day hanging out on a farm, where they raise racing horses. Standing in a field surrounded by these gorgeous animals was both magical and a little frightening. Even though the woman, who takes care of them, reassured us of their friendly temper, we were cautious. The last thing I wanted to experience was being trampled by a herd of horses, especially with Kaspar in the sling. Even being kicked or bitten by a horse was not on my list of things to do. So, we kept our distance and made sure not to be swarmed by more then a couple of animals at a time. Kaspar loved to touch the soft nose of the horse. Every time his little hand managed to reach far enough to touch, he’d quickly pull away and squeal with pleasure. This black horse in the picture was very friendly! He kept trying to nibble on my hand and I was a little afraid that Kaspar’s hand might fit too far into his mouth. But in the end Kaspar only managed to put his fingers in the horse’s nostril. That kind of put an end to our relationship. I don’t think he was impressed. The horse, I mean. Kaspar was more then impressed! He was just waiting for the next opportunity to pick another nostril.

On Friday it rained. It’s been pretty cool all week, in fact. I’m so very glad that I brought my spring coat and a few extra jackets for Kaspar with us. We were visiting a friend of mine and went for an unusual stroll. Unusual for Jurmala, at least! Since Jurmala is a town that stretches for miles along the coast of Riga bay and has gorgeous white sand beaches, most residents of this town go for walks along the beach. But this time we had a nice stroll through the pine forest just before the beach, where the city has put pathways that are not unlike the boardwalk along the beaches in Toronto.It was great! A clean wooden path slightly raised above the forest floor, smooth… perfect crawling surface for Kaspar. Even though it rained a little the pines gave us just enough cover not to feel soaked and kept the path just dry enough for us. I’m calling this one “Chasing Kaspar”. I bet it will be spectacular here in the fall, when all these light green colored blueberry bushes are full of blueberries. Path or no path… I bet they’ll be picked!

cats

Latvia is full of stray cats. Maybe some of them aren’t stray, but just not looked after, too well. Who knows... but it’s May and wherever we land, I’m always listening to a half a dozen of howling cats at night. The apartment buildings and the courtyards in the cities are the havens for these night time sopranos, but I have noticed a couple on the street where my mom lives, as well. The best night time choir I’m hearing right now, just below the third storey window, where my sister lives. The loud choir of miow’s and screeching occasionally gets interrupted by someone screaming at the poor creatures to stop the noise and a little while ago it sounded like water (or some other liquid substance) being thrown out the window. A swoosh of a sorts followed by a whole racket of cat noises. Entertaining to say the least!


My sister has a sweet little cat named Hercog. He has accepted Kaspar as an equal, a playmate of sorts. They get along famously and even seem to be alike in some ways. They both like to play with the sheer curtains in my sister’s pad, very often getting totally tangled in them. They both are equally good at using up the toilet paper. The roll quickly gets spread throughout the entire apartment, if someone leaves the bathroom door open by mistake. The painting above my sister’s couch often gets attacked, even though the cat seems to scratch and Kaspar seems to pull and I’ve learned to restore with the use of nail polish, gum and other innovative, spur of the moment procedures. Thank God my sister cannot complain too much abut the painting, as it really is my painting, that she’s acquired by fluke. The stroller has also become a favourite of the cat and Kaspar. Hercog can spend hours sleeping in the basket underneath the stroller and Kaspar can spend hours trying to get him out of it. It’s great! It keeps Kaspar busy and entertained and I have time to watch bad Latvian day time drama.

on the road

Even though I haven’t had a chance to update this blog on a regular basis, I’ve been keeping notes on paper. These next few entries might not be in the right order, but you should still get the general idea of what we’re doing and where we are these days.

We’ve been on the go the last few days. I’m beginning to feel like a gypsy, spending a night or two in one place, before packing up and going to the next home. My family members all live in separate towns and we’ve pretty much have done the rounds in the last few days.

About eight or nine years ago, some European report listed Latvia as the country with most traffic caused deaths per capita. It changed soon after that. I think the government realized that this was not good for tourism :-) Police cars were posted on highways and tickets were handed out left and right for a while. I remember one drive, with a friend of mine, from Riga to Jurmala... I think we got stopped three times within that half hour. Every time we got away with the minimum 5 Ls (about 12$ CAN) charge. Today some things have changed. However, highways are still the same old narrow two-way roads. Yes - there is only one highway in the whole country that is more then a two-lane (one lane each way) highway. It's the short stretch of road that leads out of Riga, passed the airport and on the way to Jurmala (the long narrow city stretching along the shore - beach capital of Latvia). The roads are not policed quite as much. People still drive way over speed limit. And the way people pass the slower driving cars still at times takes my breath away. I think, living in Canada has turned me into a 'pussy cat', as far as driving is concerned. Even though I sometimes find myself in complete moments of panic, while sitting in the front seat of someone’s car, I must admit, that those Latvians are very good drivers! It must be the Soviet training… having to learn to deal with the worst conditions and still come out on the top. The drivers here are defensive, quick, fast to react…

We’ve spent so much time in cars the last week or so, that Kaspar has finally learned how to sleep in his car seat. He now takes naps whenever we go for a longer drive and has adapted to ever changing schedules and sleep patterns. I’m amazed at his adaptability! He’s hardly ever cranky and at times, when company is good, he’s willing to stay up until 11pm or even midnight. Then we usually spend the next morning sleeping in until 10am or so. He’s a spectacular travel companion! Am I repeating myself.... ??? I can hardly remember what I wrote in the last blog entry.

dandylions lilacs & violets

We caught this picture on the last day before the rain began. There are dandy lions everywhere! They hardly use any chemicals on lawns here, so, dandy lions are an inescapable part of reality. Kaspar is thrilled, because these are the only flowers he’s allowed to pick. If he had his way, he’d have my mother’s yard all plucked and turned into mush. And then he’d go for the next door neighbors’. He’s definitely a “flower child”, but on his very own terms!

It seems like the whole world is in bloom. Cherries are just dropping their petals. Apples, plums and pears are in full bloom. So are most of the lilacs. It’s a gorgeous spring, here! I don’t even mind the rain these past few days. However, I cannot say the same about Kaspar. I’m beginning to think that he suspects a conspiracy against him. No one is willing to take him outside, no matter how much he begs and pleads. The last day we were out for a walk must have been three days ago. We spent the morning walking around the grounds of the property, where our wedding was held about six years ago. It’s near Talsi. I took this picture of Kaspar under the old oak. That is, if you can spot him there, a speck at the foot of the trunk. It’s said to be 220 years old and many people here believe that such trees hold a certain sense of magic in them… maybe Kaspar felt it. He sure did not want to leave this little spot under the tree.