When life gives you lemons ask for salt and tequila!

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

13 Month Update

A little late on this but I need to pencil this down so I remember…

Books- Gaven still shows 0 interest in books since he was a baby baby. He won’t sit still for us when we read to him, which makes me really sad. He would sit still for a few pages, then he just wants to get down and play. Does that mean he won’t like to read in the future? I mean what baby doesn’t like books? Most people I talk to said their kids love books, love pointing out objects in the books. I hope this is just because he is still too young to appreciate it and every baby is different.

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Sleep- We stopped the bad habit of bringing him to bed with us in the middle of the night when he cries. We read/ heard many stories how their kid won’t sleep in their own bed till they were 9 or 10. I can’t imagine a 5 year old still sleeping with their parents, let alone 10?! So we let him cry a couple nights and eventually he got the idea that we won’t come and get him, so he went back to sleep. He wakes up at 6 sometimes and we bring him to bed with us. We just decided 6 am is fine, at least he slept most of the night alone in his crib. He starts his day at 7 am anyway, we have about 30-45 min to cuddle in bed before we all start our day.

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Talk- He talks gibberish all day long. I wish I can understand what he is saying because I sometimes really think he said “what the hell mom? do you know what you are doing?”. Haha! I think we can officially say that his first word is “ball”. He holds a ball and said “ba…….” He is associating it with the ball. So, ball is the first word. “Ma Ma” and “Da Da” still doesn’t mean anything to him I think. Either that or he is fooling us. He sometimes call John “Ma Ma” and sometimes “Da Da” and sometimes “Pa Pa”. We don’t think he knows exactly what “mama” and “dada” means yet. He also says “bath time” when we tell him it’s bath time. He repeated the word to us but of course the pronunciation is not that clear but we swear he says that sometimes. Since he doesn’t say that all the time, we can’t really determine if that was his first word. Damn this first word thing, so hard to determine which one!

Walk- At 12 months, even after he started walking, he would still prefer crawling if he wants to get to somewhere faster. So you still see occasional crawling from him. Right when he turned 13 months, he stopped crawling altogether. He is practically running now. That means lot of head injuries and crying. He doesn’t walk that stable yet so he is constantly falling and hitting something on his head if he is near an object. We noticed that he is afraid to walk on grass. We put him on the grass on our backyard, he would not move. It makes things easy for us, if we don’t want him running around touching stuff, we just place him on the grass. Problem solved.

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Slides- We took him to the playground and he loves it! What kid doesn’t right? He loves the slide. It is pretty entertaining to see him playing at the playground. He almost always tries to get down by turning around and go down feet first. I said almost because he still sometimes tries to get down by going head fist, then injury & screaming happens. So he applies the same theory when he tried to go down on a slide. We had to show him how to do it the first time, he picked it up quick. After a couple times of me pushing him from the top and John catching him from the bottom, he now just scoots his little butt and slides down himself without waiting for me to push him. He wanted to go on a bigger slide, at first he was a little hesitant. He sat there for a few seconds and then scooted his tiny butt and slide down. It was pretty awesome to see his tiny little face filled with excitement and joy each time he goes down the slides. Ah… kids… so easily entertained.

         

Gaven on the big boy slide

Teeth- Still the 8 front teeth that he had. Tonight I saw 2 teeth that are about to come in but that is an update for 14 months. clip_image005

Food- He is trying a lot more new stuff. He doesn’t seem to be a very picky eater which is good. I gave him soup, and he seems to like it. We took him to Dim Sum and he ate bits and pieces of our food. He doesn’t like to chew his food so we still have to cut his food into little tiny pieces because a lot of times, he would just swallow them. Not sure how to encourage him to chew his food. He gags if the food is too big so we are afraid to take the chance and continue to cut his food up into itty bitty pieces, including bananas.

Milk- He has fully transitioned to cow milk now. We took his bottle completely away from him a couple weeks after he turned 1. He just drinks milk off a sippy cup or a straw cup now. It wasn’t hard to take the bottle away from him. I heard stories where kids still like to hang on to their bottle. It was never a problem taking the bottle away from him. At first we thought we would continue giving him a bottle at night time, only 1 time a day versus taking it completely away from him. After a week of giving him bottle only at night, we thought that it was time to stop completely since he seems to forget how to suck on to the nipple. Drinking out of a cup is so much easier for us since it is hard to get him to finish his bottle. We have to coax him, distract him so he would finish his 6 oz bottle. Not to mention all the bottles we need to wash every night. With a straw cup, he holds on to his bottle and drinks it like a champ. He doesn’t chug it like his bottle but he is usually pretty good at finishing the cup within an hour. He drinks about 20-24 oz of cow milk a day.

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Daycare- He really loves his daycare, so much so that he doesn’t want to come home! When we pick him up from Penny’s, he cries when we get there. So sad… he would rather stay there than to come home with us. He usually perks up again when we step out the door and buckle him in his car seat. He just wanted to continue playing with his friends there so when we come in the middle of his “playtime”, he cries. Once we step outside, he forgets about it and is happy again. Still kind of sad that he choose “play” rather than mommy and daddy. Penny told us that he is very attached to her and refuse to let anyone feed him or change him besides her. She has help from her assistants, her kids and husband however, Gaven only wanted her to “serve” him. He hasn’t done that to us yet. He hasn’t shown any preferences toward me or John. So far, he lets either me or John feed, change or bathe him. I heard some kids only want daddy to feed them or bathe them or vice versa. He is still young to know things yet, so we’ll see.

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Personality- He is still a very sociable baby. We noticed one thing though… he is such a drama queen. He screams or pretends to cry when things are taken away from him or things don’t go the way he wants. Like he made a big fuss over it as if somebody had just hurt him really bad. We just look at him when he does that, and eventually he stops. He does that just to get our attention. We try to ignore him when he does that and when he knows we are not responding to his cries, he stops and moves on to do other things.

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Potty- We let him sit on potty to get him familiar with it. We started it because Penny told us he is always wanting to go to the bathroom when he sees other kids at the potty. So Penny let him sit on the potty when he demands it. We figured, we’ll just continue the habit at home and let him sit on the potty as well. Of course he doesn’t know what to do with it yet, he just wanted to do it and thought it is fun since he sees other kids do it. He loves to sit on it. He thought it’s a toy or something. We bought the BabyBjorn Toilet Trainer. It was on sale when we got it.

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I can’t think of anything else to update, I am sure I will post an update here and there when I have the time to do it.

Bak Kwa/ Rou Kan

I made my first attempt of making the bak kwa couple weeks ago. This is my favorite food in Malaysia. I miss it so much. I looked at some recipes and it doesn’t look that hard to make it. I googled recipes from everywhere and mixed and matched them. With the help of John, we successfully made it. It tasted good but the texture is a little off. It was too soft. I think I didn’t bake it long enough and the meat is too fatty. It didn’t yield that much from a 2lbs ground pork, will definitely use more meat next time. IMG_1026IMG_1028

Done baking… off to next step, grill.
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Gaven decided to help out…

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We kept taking him away from the propane grill each time he went near it. He was frustrated and off he went to play with something else. The hose.

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Tasty, but texture is too soft. Lesson learned: Try baking longer and use leaner meat.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Our Citrus Trees

Remember this from almost a year ago? Yes, our dwarf citrus trees are alive and are bearing fruit for us! We are surprised because nothing we grow stays alive. To have them stay alive and give us fruit is beyond amazing! We are super duper excited. You can see Gaven is all excited too!IMG_0007IMG_0016IMG_0010IMG_0009IMG_0019IMG_0020IMG_0021IMG_0022IMG_0023IMG_0014IMG_0230

Wait… they are not all alive. See the one in the middle? The apple tree didn’t make it.

A growth chart…

… for a BIG boy! Smile 

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Thursday, February 9, 2012

The Aftermath of His Birthday and Christmas

I feel like we are constantly cleaning up the house and it still ends up looking like this! A disaster!

This is how my house looks like at any given day. We are too embarrassed to have people over or when they do, we have to do a lot of cleaning up, which is why we rarely have people over now. Where do we find time to clean up?! Don’t come show up to my house uninvited, because we won’t let you in.

I am obviously not ashamed since I posted these pictures on my blog for you ALL to see! Embarrassed smile

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These pictures were taken a week or 2 after his birthday. If it helps you feel better for us, the living room now is looking a lot better but his room is still a disaster.