A few minutes ago my girlfriend woke up in a panic thinking our son was being drowned by the babysitter. She’s starting to relax.

She and Victor were sleeping on my couch when she woke herself up while yelling “no, I can’t do that”. When I turned around she was frantically making sure Victor was still breathing. I think she was still mostly asleep at that point.

Victor is fine, he’s been in his basket, waving his arms around and passing gas, for the past thirty minutes. My girlfriend, however, is still a little weirded out.

She told me she had a similar nightmare when her four-year old son was about Victor’s age. She believes dreams have meaning beyond the scientific reasons. Kind of… I know she’s more superstitious than I am.

But now they’re both asleep, and both snoring.

Victor is over twelve pounds now. According to the nurse at the local Watch Me Grow clinic, his growth has been slowing over the past three weeks, so we should be preparing for a growth spurt soon. He had been putting on 10-12ozs per week, but now he’s down to six to eight.

He’s pretty much outgrown all of his bunting bags and snowsuits. It’s his length, for his nicest snowsuit we have to fold his legs a little to get him in it. Just a few days ago, thankfully, two of my girlfriend’s friends offered garbage bags full of hand-me-downs.

The average income for a single mom in this part of Canada is welfare, so their kids tend to wear each others clothing… our kids, I guess. Clothes are basically community property. As Victor has grown my girlfriend has donated bags of clothes to charity, as well as to one of her friends who had a baby five weeks after Victor.

I’ve been worried about money lately. I basically outspent my March budget in ten days, so there’s that. But the Ontario Disabilities Support Program has a program which should be adding $200 to my monthly cheque, which would then go to Victor’s care. But they’re being incredible assholes about it.

The guy in charge of the program at my local ODSP office told me I should be going to court to get shared custody of Victor — six weeks after my son was born, douchebag is asking me “what happens if your girlfriend leaves the province and takes your son with her?”. Then he says I should be applying for half of my girlfriend’s baby bonus cheque.

He also told me he had never heard of a living arrangement like the one we have — we live in the same apartment building, just in different apartments. Either he was having a bad day, or he’s a fucking idiot. For crying out loud, this is the single mother capital of Canada. If he’s been in that office, and paying attention, for more than two weeks he should have seen every conceivable combination of living arrangements by now.

At the moment I’m waiting for the birth certificate, which still hasn’t arrived. When it gets here I’ll make an appointment with my case worker and see what hoops I have to jump through.

There have been a couple of changes in Victor’s behaviour recently.

He’s dreams have become more expressive. He’s laughing, smiling, and getting agitated while he’s a sleep. He’s having his own nightmare right now, actually. When it’s bad he waves his arms around and cries. The thing is, he’ll slip from laughing and smiling to crying and back to smiling again, all in fifteen seconds.

I have no idea, other than “boobs are there / boobs aren’t there”, what he could be dreaming about.

Victor’s vocabulary expanded this week. For the first couple of months his crying was mostly a one note thing, but his crying has range and tones now. I think some of the new sounds have scared him. He’s definitely reaching deeper into his lungs and learning how to use his diaphragm.

…speaking of months, Victor is now three months old.

Victor and I spent a lot of time together this week, so I know we watched more movies this week than I can remember… this weekend we did watch Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown”, written by Tarantino and Elmore Leonard, and based on Elmore’s novel ‘Rum Punch’. I’m a big Elmore fan, and the movie stays true to the book… this is also my favourite Tarantino movie.

Then we watched “Babel”… it looked good, it almost felt good, but other than telling its audience we’re all perverts and perverted and this connects us, I didn’t really see much point. And any movie that has a couple — one of whom is dying from a gunshot — getting out of a helicopter on top of the American embassy, only to be confronted on the staircase by the cameras and reporters of the omnipresent “news media”, automatically gets an F from me.

We did have a big music week. I introduced Victor to Lily Allen, Robbie Robertson, Talking Heads and a lot more of The Tragically Hip. Robbie’s self titled 1987 album was one of only three cassettes I brought with me to Northern Ontario, back in 1989. The other two were Midnight Oil’s “Diesel & Dust”, and Iron Maiden’s “Seventh Son of A Seventh Son”.

So listening to Robbie over the past few days has been bringing back a lot of memories. Victor, however, really seemed to get into the bounciness of Lily Allen’s “Alright, Still”. I just hope he’s well into his teens before he starts to understand the lyrics.

…although, that could explain the smiling bits of Victor’s dreaming.

.

.