Doing everything herself

So, G is really becoming independent. She wants to do everything herself. Some of that is really good: she can almost use a spoon by herself now. If I hold her yogurt right next to her, so there's no spillage, she can spoon feed herself a little bit at a time. I also taught her (OK maybe she knew already?) to use her finger to help push food into her spoon, so she can spoon feed herself ramen. She asks for a napkin so she can "cha cha" -- clean her own hands. She then uses it to clean her area of the table in front of her. She also always gets her plate for breakfast and wanted to carry my laundry basket in for me. The problem is that she _insists_ on this and won't do anything unless you let her. She won't let me spoon feed her. She won't let me clean her hands. She keeps coming back to the dishwashing rack and taking additional spoons out and I have to stop her. She even complained about me putting a diaper on her -- she wants to close it herself.

Sometimes I combat this by letting her discover that she can't do it herself, but I have to be really patient. Sometimes I get impatient and say, "Daddy bang," and then tries to help her but she then gets frustrated.

Speaking of eating, I've decided that bribing is really bad and to put an end to the practice. It's hard though. Really really hard, not to bribe. However today I did not bribe her with hardly anything, definitely not crackers (but I did say, "Do you want a cracker?" once). It just teaches the wrong habits and teaches G to hold stuff in her mouth rather than eat things.

G continues to say "sock" with an F at the beginning. Ai-ya! So, I'm teaching her the Cantonese for sock. She says it like "Mutt". Much better. :) Also, I'm teaching G to turn her pages in a gentle way, instead of smashing and crinkling pages when she turns her books.

Our day in reverse order (iPhone apparently mails photos in reverse sometimes -- or maybe I selected them in reverse, who knows). Went over to G's favorite friends house to hang out and have dinner and apple pie. G kept yelling "PIE! PIE!" as soon as she saw it on the table. I don't even know how she picked up that word. Anyways this is C, G's favorite friend, pushing her in a cart.

We all have such an abundance of food now, thanks to all our wonderful friends. S may not have to cook for a while when she gets back.

Earlier in the day I took G to the park and went in the swing. While she enjoyed it, she gets tired of it and wants out much quicker than in the past. She then played with the sand, but I cleaned her hands afterwards well.. I've been cleaning her hands before and after every meal.

In the morning she caught sight of squirrels on the backyard fence and got so excited she kept yelling "WATCH! WATCH!" She also dragged her two little chairs to the back door, and asked me to sit with her to watch the squirrel. I thought it was so sweet and cute of her that I had to take a photo. These are the moments I really savor.

Finally, G pulled my jacket over her on the way to the park in the stroller, to hide from the shade, but then decided she only wanted to shade her forehead :)

It's been a while...

E asked me this morning (3 days ago when I started this post) when was the last time I posted. It took several attempts to "fix" the problem of not being able to upload and access photos, but it's done. E also cleaned out the virus/spyware that I apparently downloaded trying to get the second part of a tv show (Criminal Minds, in case you wanted to know).

Chinese New Year, G wore a dress that E's cousin brought back for us from Hong Kong. It came with a matching jacket and purse (for all her red envelopes!). Speaking of red envelopes, G really loved them, so bright and shiny, and they made a great sound when crinkled. Here she is w/ her buddy from church who is 2 weeks older than G. I think they look like the Emperor and Empress of China!

For the Superbowl, we shuttled between two parties, and luckily, G fell asleep in the car and slept through most of the second half. Yes, because we were party-hopping, we missed the big 100 yd interception/touchdown. If you look carefully, you'll notice that G's wearing her 49ers shirt, just to show her loyalties. For the week before the game, we prepped G with a trick where we say "Touchdown!" and she raises her arms up. We had to alternate watching her and watching the game for the first half, but since she was sleeping later, we both got to watch. BTW, that's the camera lens cap in her hand.

G loves being flung into the air! E can't wait until she's old enough for roller coasters.

These are her cool climbing blocks that G got for Christmas. Now she can really practice all her Little Gym moves... except for the rings, bars, and balance beam. G's standing on her own briefly and amazes us with her great sense of balance! 

While I do tend to be picky about her toys (natural materials like wood, BPA-free, phthalate-free, PVC-free plastics, etc), we are also creative with some of her toys too. This was her diaper box, and I cut out a bunch of different shaped/sized holes for her to drop stuff into and take stuff out.  She thought it was really funny to be in the box too! (BTW, not that we're looking for gifts, but if you're ever wondering what to get G, our favorite brands of toys are Plan Toys and Haba, both make great wooden toys with natural paints, Manhattan Toys is also a great company.)

We are still waiting for G's 3rd tooth to come in, we keep thinking, any day now... but despite only having 2 teeth, G is eating lots of table food, but continues to be really picky about what she eats (we found out at our Chinese New Year dinner that she likes the chinese wood ear mushrooms, weird!). We did discover a great trick from another mom friend who suggested we read to G while she's eating. And funny thing, it works! I guess she's distracted enough by the book that she forgets that she's supposed to be refusing to eat and actually opens her mouth. She only feeds herself stuff she really likes, and even then, she stops after a while and waits for us to feed her. Notice the corn on her chin and the strawberry in her mouth!

G's latest tricks? Her best one is that she can tell you where her brain is. She can also tell you how a lion sounds, and blink both her eyes. We're now trying to change over her "Touchdown!" trick to a charismatic "Hallelujah!" trick. 

Her current schedule? G has two classes now, a multicultural/lingual music class where we sing songs in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, and maybe some other languages too. She also continues to take her Little Gym class. She's adjusting to the nursery at my Wednesday bible study too, doing a lot more playing and  a lot less crying. We haven't been going to the library because of her new class schedule, but are hoping to start going to a different library for story time. It makes for a pretty full week, especially when you start to add in the playdates that she has almost every week too!

G's New Year!

G had a quiet New Year, as she developed a cough a few days before. So far, she's only slightly congested and still coughing, so we are happy that she has not developed a fever, as her dr thought might happen. But despite her cough, she is still eating and sleeping and playing fairly normally (she is still waking up once every night, usually between 2-4am, but it can vary). 

G is now eating more and more table food. Recent table food she's had: nai wan bao and (unsalted) french fries, mushrooms and cheese from S's hamburger. The reason she only had nai wan bao at dim sum, was that she slept through most of the meal, so by the time she woke up, there wasn't much available for her to eat. I still have not given her boba, though I've thought about it the last few times. Her typical diet these days: For breakfast, she has yogurt or cottage cheese with pureed fruit (pears, apples, and/or prunes), maybe some fried egg yolk. For lunch, if we are out, more finger food type stuff like olives, grapes, tofu, chunky soft veggies, egg yolk, bao (bread) or crackers. For dinner, multi-grain puree cereal mixed with two kinds of veggies (usually one green and one yellow/orange) and maybe some meat. She has now had all the main meats, turkey, chicken, pork, and beef (in that order). She has bao (brioche dinner rolls) or crackers at almost every meal because we can give her some to start eating as we are preparing her other food. Foods she's not allowed to have yet: fish, egg whites, nuts, honey. We've also avoided citrus fruits and tomatoes for their high acid content. 

A few days after she learned to feed herself, G also learned how to spit food out. Now we have a constant battle of her pushing food out with her tongue. The funny thing is that it's not necessarily that she doesn't want it or like it, it could be stuff she likes, and eventually she will eat it if you put it back in her mouth enough times.

In other news, G also got a new car! New Year's Eve, we took a family trip to a Subaru dealer, and 3 hours later, drove away with a used 2008 Subaru Outback wagon, Blue. G loves that it sits a little higher than her old car, so she can see more, and also that it has the LATCH system making her carseat a little easier to install and maybe making it a little safer too.  Her new car also has more storage/trunk space so it easily fits her stroller, portable high chair, spare diaper bag, with plenty of room for groceries and Costco shopping, and room for small family vacations like trips to Tahoe for snow and trips to Yosemite for camping.

G's First Christmas!

Besides giving us an early gift of self-feeding, G also gave us the gift of sleep Christmas morning. For the past few weeks, G has been waking up at least once during the night... every night. We've commented that it feels like we have a newborn all over again. Anyways, this morning, G let us sleep until around 8, then went back to sleep after nursing (her usual routine for the middle of the night feeding as well as the early morning feeding) and didn't wake up again until 11:30! What a nice treat for us!

Anyways, so G loved ripping open the paper wrapping. We actually knew that from an earlier holiday party where, after all the other bigger kids opened their presents and ran off to play with their new stuff, G was left there in the room mostly by herself, and had a great time playing with some torn wrapping paper, and an opened toy package (made up of a cardboard backing and a molded plastic front that was half torn from the backing). 

Yay! A new 49ers outfit for next season! And with Singletary as their coach, a new era dawns!

Sigh, G insisted that we buy this for Daddy. And this was in addition to an A's book, to go along with the Giant's book G already had.

G's first bass guitar. It's stuffed, not electric, but she can still learn some cool riffs.

G got lots of cool toys and books, but her favorite thing was this paper tag that she pulled off the first present. She didn't let go of it the entire morning!

Here we are at our friends' house for Christmas dinner. Our Santa hat family portrait.

G's self-feeding skills are amazing! Here she is picking up some egg to go with her cracker, how clever! Yum, tastes good together!

Merry Christmas to Mommy & Daddy! I can feed myself!

Massive update with photos (I've given up on photos from our Breck trip, you'll just have to wait for the scrapbook and come over to see them, sorry!)

This was about a month ago, at her friend R's house. R's been using these to help her walk for quite a while now, so we thought we'd let G have a try.

Here we are picking out our Christmas tree, Thanksgiving weekend. Daddy, I like THIS one:

Playing with her favorite friend:

G likes her friend so much she decides to kiss her:

One of our early feeding attempts, organic buckwheat soba noodles, brought us back to the early super messy days. Here she actually managed to grab some noodles.

G loves playing peek-a-boo, especially with her pei-pei and her toys. However, she hasn't quite figured out that part of the game involves hiding, this little Chinese book is one of the toys that doesn't work so well for peek-a-boo, but she still looks cute playing!

At home, since we don't have any fancy walkers, G uses the ottoman to push all over the house. Sometimes she enjoys herself and squeals out in glee and pride, other times she complains that we make her work hard.
G definitely has the crawl mastered. Sometimes, because of the hardwood, she does a modified crawl with one leg up (so one leg she's using her knee, and the other leg she's using her foot).
Here we are visiting Swing Central for the last time, they are changing locations because the building has a new owner. This was their holiday party. E & S met here, so we made a special effort to go for this final farewell. We actually had to leave for G's bedtime before band even got started! I think next time we will put her to bed and have a friend stay home with her and then we can go out to have some dancing fun!

Here we are at B's holiday playdate, another of G's friends. This is the contraption they used to help him learn to walk. E decided to give G a test run in it, quite funny, actually!

Here's a close-up of her in it. Note her fancy outfit, one of the few times we put her in a dress or skirt. Don't you just love her stockings?! Yes, those are stockings, NOT SHOES! Too cute!

And the biggest news of all. For Christmas, G decided to give us the gift of her self-feeding! This was last night when we gave her a big piece of a brioche dinner roll (we're supposed to be aggressively trying to gain weight with high fat foods). She used one of her hands to stuff the piece into her mouth.

This was this morning at breakfast, feeding herself organic Ritz-like crackers. It's like a switch turned on inside her and BAM, now she can feed herself!
Whew! What a whirlwind! I'll be back to post Christmas day photos...

9 months!

G has entered her 4th Quarter.

At her peds appointment yesterday afternoon, she weighed in at 14 lbs, and measured 26 inches. I think the length might be a bit short, b/c G didn't want to stay laying down for the nurse to mark the paper. Anyways, she is in the half percentile for weight, and 9th percentile for height. She has gained some weight since her visit before our vacation. The doctor is not concerned yet, but wants us to continue trying to boost her solids intake and see how things are at her next (12 month) appointment, where hopefully she will be back on the growth chart. She didn't have any shots, but had a blood draw to check iron levels, results came back fine. I guess this is particularly an issue for breastfed infants, as formula is iron-fortified. G has been eating a lot of spinach b/c it helps with her constipation.

G is still constipated, but doing better. I'm upping her prune intake and have been laying off the grains. We have recently added proteins to her diet (yogurt, egg yolk, tofu) as well.

She's still a good sleeper, but no longer doing the 12+ hours at night. These days it's 9-11 hours, which is still good, but we miss the 12+ hour nights/mornings. Luckily, when she first wakes up, all she does is nurse and then goes back to bed for a few hours. G is still taking 2 naps during the day as well (not including the early morning one).

One of the things the doctor asked us was whether G could do the "pincher grasp" which means picking something up with your index finger and your thumb (a fine motor skill). I didn't think so because I've never really seen her do that, though most of her toys are bigger and she's not doing finger foods yet. When we got home, I decided to try it out and showed her a button (that fell off her pants and has been sitting in my bathroom for a while). She looked at it and promptly stretched out her hand and picked it up with her index finger and thumb. Quite impressive! I guess that means we need to start giving her little foods to pick up.

Another thing we discovered at the doctor's: G has a second tooth coming in, right next to the first one. So now she has 2 teeth coming in on the bottom.

Day at the Doctor's

So G's been having some drama lately...

Last night we had quite a scare. G seemed like she needed to poop while we were feeding her dinner, so we took her out of her high chair and put her on the toilet. She managed to poop, which we were very happy about. The bad news was that she seemed to strain quite hard and had a tiny bit of bleeding. We immediately called the advice nurse, and was told that we didn't need to come in but to give her a baking soda (or salt) soak to help heal her bottom and to give her more foods to "soften" her up.

So, after struggling all week about whether G really had ringworm, I decided to take her back to her regular pediatrician today for a second opinion and to check on her backside. The good news is that she did not think G's rash looked like ringworm at all. The bad news is that she is actually only 13 lbs 13 oz. Today's weigh in was with a digital scale, and the one that is usually used to weigh her. The scale from last week was an older free weight scale, which apparently can make a big difference. So instead of being in the 8th percentile, she's below the 1st percentile. The doctor wants us to up her solid feedings to 3 times a day and eventually increasing to 2-3 snacks as well, and says we can introduce new foods every 2-3 days (we had been doing 1-2 new foods each week). So G is no longer on a "new food hiatus" and this afternoon we gave her yogurt. Later this week we will try pears.

After her doctor's appointment was over, I waited to get a copy of her immunization records (it's what airlines use for baby identification), and E went to work. A few minutes later I headed for the car only to realize that E had my car keys! To make matters worse, last week E's phone stopped working, so I had no way to call him until he got to work. So I left him a message and sat with G on a bench under the trees and looked at flowers. Then we went back inside the office so I could feed her. All this time, I was repeatedly calling E's work to see if he was in yet. Before I had finished nursing G, E walked in the door. He apparently hadn't made it to work yet but had stopped somewhere to pick up some lunch and when he was going back to the car he realized he had two sets of keys in his pocket. All was good, and G and I headed home while E headed back to work.

After her nap and feeding, we heard a lot of noise outside the house. The city was trimming our tree because I had called earlier in the week after noticing that a branch had cracked after the latest storm and was resting comfortably on our roof. G was fascinated watching the 4 workers with their 2 chainsaws, sawing and dropping and dragging and woodchipping huge chunks of tree branches. They will be back again in the next few days to finish up the tree trimming.

Oh, and while feeding G, I am fairly certain she said "mamama". I've been trying very hard these last few days to get her to combine her "mmmm" sound with her "aaaa" sound. I think I have been successful.

Lots of updates!

We took her to a pumpkin patch to take some pictures. It was after Halloween, so there weren't many pumpkins left, oh well, I guess next year we will be more on top of things.

We also went to a party at the Little Gym, where G takes classes. G liked showing off to Daddy all the things she can do. Here she is crawling through a tunnel to Daddy. She got bored the second time around and Daddy came in to help coax her out. She was heading for a little container of bubbles she "won" in one of the carnival games at the party. As usual, she wanted to suck on it (but we didn't let her).

Here she is with Daddy jumping on the balance beam.
Playing peek-a-boo with Daddy on the bars.
And jumping on the low bars. Yesterday in class, we combined a low beam with these bars so G could "walk" along the beam holding onto the bars on each side.
G loved playing with Daddy and showing off all her new skills. Is that a wink?

Mommy had to do this one with G while Daddy took pictures. Here she is starting her roll:

Here she is with her hands down, that's a baby reflex.

Check out how excited G is to do her rolls on the beam!

We tried to put G down for a nap the other day and she wanted to have no part of it. After some time passed and it was clear she wasn't going to sleep, S went into G's room to get her and this is what she found. E rushed in and I told him to get the camera. You can't tell from the picture, but when she saw us, she had this big smile on her face, like she was so proud of herself!

The short story is that G finally figured out that one of the ties (in the corner) of the bumper was torn off so she could pull the whole thing down. I used a large  binder clip to clip the tie to the crib railing, but she managed to pull that off too. After much searching around the house, I finally found a needle and thread and attempted to sew the tie back on properly. So far so good. We also lowered her crib to the middle setting, but I'm sure soon enough we will have to lower it all the way down.

Feeding update: G is doing much better. We no longer have to strip her down to her onesie nor do we have to hold her hands down (much). While she still sometimes fusses, she will open her mouth and lean in when the spoon is in front of her. We are trying to do 2 feedings per day. We do, however, still think she's teething, as she's still more fussy than normal.

8 months (late)

I know, it's several days past her 8 month birthday, but oh well.

So, I think can rule out separation anxiety, as we were at a Halloween playdate and G was the only baby that didn't cry when all the moms (10+) wanted a group picture of the babies in costume and put them all down on the floor to take pictures. She just smiled at me and looked around wondering why everyone was crying (and all the mommies laughing). Too funny, it was the most chaotic few minutes I've experienced recently. However, G still tends to be more fussy when tired or hungry, but I guess that could be normal. She still could be teething or having a growth spurt. Also, within a few days after S's parents left, G was back to sleeping 11-12 hrs. She still woke up at 6am once, but I think she's back to a 10-12 hr schedule, plus her 2-3 naps during the day. And she isn't crying anymore during her bathtime.

Ok, so back to G and 8 months. She's crawling now, we realized that it's the hardwood surface in our house that's holding her back. She's been doing a hybrid crawl that looks like an inch worm where she comes up on hands and knees, then goes flat on belly, then back on hands and knees, etc, but she's still very reluctant to go from sitting to on the belly when on the floor (she'll do it on her bed, our bed, the couch, etc). However, on Saturday at our church's Harvest Festival, she crawled the entire length of the picnic blanket (maybe 6 feet) several times without going flat.

Stats at 8 months: 27 inches tall (I think we can say tall now, instead of long, since she's starting to stand), 14 pounds. For those tracking, yes, she lost some weight from last month. We think it is a combination of her getting sick last week and her becoming much more active.

Besides crawling, G loves to climb. I think she actually likes it more than crawling. She's also getting a little better at eating, and will actually open her mouth and lean her head forward for grapes and rice noodles. Her current list of foods: rice, oatmeal, zucchini, spaghetti squash, sweet potato, spinach, peas, avocado, grapes (once I let her suck on a piece of honeydew, so I'm not sure if that counts). Coming up of things to try: artichoke (I will steam whole ones and just mash up the hearts), apples, pears, butternut squash, broccoli, carrots.

We have also completed G's transition to cloth diapers. She just completed 24 hrs of all cloth. When we first started , it was only at home and during the day, then, last weekend, we tried overnight, and this week we have kept her in cloth going out on short trips where won't need a diaper change. We have not yet changed a cloth diaper outside of the house. G has been successful pooping on the toilet too, except for a tiny bit that got on her diaper once.

Here are some pictures of her Halloween costumes (yes, we borrowed a few):

This one was a bit small for her (and she didn't seem to like it), so we decided not to use it, but she still looks cute.

Here she was on her first Halloween playdate. There were two other ladybugs there but we think she was the cutest one! This is the one we will probably use for Halloween.

Here she is dressed up for our church's Harvest Fest & Pumpkin Patch! We took home the same pumpkin that we brought. What a bargain!

All good things must come to an end...

S's parents have been here all week, which could explain why there haven't been any updates since last week. Also, G's schedule has been changing, well, a lot of things have been changing. For a few weeks now, she's cut down her night time sleeping to 11-12 hours, which is fine with us, but I just have to be more disciplined about waking up earlier to do all the things I want to do before she wakes up. Lately, she has also become more fussy when away from mommy, this week, she began waking up at 6am, and yesterday afternoon started a runny nose that by the middle of the night, we realized was probably a cold. Today I found out that one of the babies in the church nursery (this was only her second time there, the first time was the week before where she was in for about 10-15 minutes only because of nursing and nap time) was sick. Live and learn, I guess - now we will ask if any of the babies are sick before leaving her there. So aside from her current cold, we don't know if she is 1) teething, 2) having a growth spurt, 3) developing separation anxiety, 4) adjusting to Wai Po and Wai Gong (grandparents) living with her this week.

Here are two of the pics we submitted to the Gap photo contest... the other two we picked were the one with the ball and the one from Gap that they took.
Here she is hard at work. We love this toy because it helps keep her occupied when in her high chair and the suctions on it are GREAT! She can grab the wires and pull herself, high chair included, towards the table. So far she only spins the beads, she hasn't gotten the concept of sliding the wooden beads along the wire yet, but we're confident she'll figure it out soon. Seems a lot of our pictures these days are of her eating. Maybe because they are so funny. I think this was zucchini.

E took this picture one early morning, it's my new desktop picture.