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 :)

Photo Update

This is how we put G down in her crib:

This is how we sometimes find her:

So the question is how many times each night is she spinning around in her crib? Does she do it in her sleep or when she semi-wakes up? We'll need a night video or video monitor if we want to find the answer. Last night I went to check on her about 20-30 minutes after I had put her down for the night and she had already done her 180. She unfortunately woke up about 3 hrs into the night, but was still able to get her 10.5 hours in after that.

Here is G in her new bathtub. Bathtime is Daddy-time. Now we need a collection of bath toys for her. Notice her ball, which used to be tied to her stroller has now been reallocated for bathtime use. A few of her teething toys that we used to link things off her play mat have also been reallocated. I'm excited, because I've been eyeing this since before she was born, and now we have an excuse to get it. I thought it was so cute (and functional as well, easy clean up and has a drain hole too! I don't care about the mounting issues from reviews because we have to eventually remodel this bathroom to put in a proper showerhead instead of the handheld we installed, or at the very least, re-tile it because it originally didn't have a showerhead, so the tile doesn't go up very far).

I realized at some point that all her toys were unisex. That's not a bad thing, I'm actually a big fan of unisex toys (why push the whole gender stereotype stuff on them? I want her to do and be whatever she can dream, without being hindered by gender. Growing up a tomboy, I was never into the girly/doll thing, my toys of choice growing up were legos, back when you actually needed imagination to build stuff, not just following instructions to build what's on the box, but that's another rant). Anyways, so I liked this one because it's not all girly. Notice the natural wood rings at the arms, and I picked the blue one, it also came in a pinky-purple. Supposedly it smells like lavender too, but who knows. When she gets older, I will probably get her these dolls, they're un-stereotypical & multi-ethnic, if she wants dolls to play with.

When E's parents were in town last weekend, we took a little trip to Hakone Gardens. G handles her paparazzi very well. At one point E was holding her and Grandma, Grandpa, and Mom (me) were all taking photos of her.

Several people have commented over the last few weeks about her eyelashes being curly. No, I'm not curling them, they are naturally growing like that. And no, I'm curling her hair either, it's also natural, comes from S's maternal grandfather, who has wavy hair, as do all of S's maternal uncles. S's hair didn't become wavy until post-college.