Birthdays

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween
The kids were so fired up for Halloween. Katherine lay awake until 10PM last night telling me, “I’m so excited. I can’t sleep! (yawn)” Anyway, she headed off to school today dressed as a Chinese girl for Cultural Halloween. After Kindermusik, she come home to join me, Allison and my mom. Steve’s parents also stopped by for pictures of the kids dressed as Minnie Mousse.

A couple of funny stories:

Steve’s Mom: “Allison, what are you going to say when the door opens?”
Allison: “Helwo”
Katherine also took it upon herself to hand out candy after about 30 minutes of cold trick or treating with Allison and Steve. Here’s what would happen:
1) Doorbell rings
2) Katherine swings open door, profers candy, “Take any two pieces”
3) Allison scoots or skids to the front door to take her place next to her sister.
4) Allison exclaims, “I have gwowsticks!”
5) Kids says thanks. Katherine shuts the door, carries her bowl to the stairs and waits for the next kids.

Both girls were exhausted tonight.

Steve’s Birthday
This was perhaps the biggest blowout in family history:

1) Thursday – we constructed a new basketball hoop in our garage starting at 6:30PM and ending at 11PM. Lesson: it takes at least 3.5 hours to put one together, backwards!
2) Friday – we had a huge family party at our house. Steve, his cousin, uncle and Katherine manage to fix the basketball hoop.
3) Saturday – we go car and couch shopping. Steve and I go to dinner with friends.
4) Sunday – I finish car shopping. we go to the Trilogy Halloween party.

Funny enough, we’re not done yet with birthdays since Katherine’s birthday is right around the corner. Between this, various nasty colds, volunteer work, a trip to NYC, a broken dishwasher, and everything else, it’s been one of the craziest months ever.
Kid Conversations
We try so hard not to laugh at their conversations these days. One priceless story occurred while Allison had a cold and my mom took care of her. Apparently they went to QFC for a donut (why, i’m not sure). Allison peered into the donut case to select a chocolate donut. She carried it to the counter for my mom to pay. On the way out of the store, Allison tried to eat it and dropped it. Out of the sky, a crow flew to grab the donut. A week later, they’re back at QFC and my mom buys a donut for each kid.

On the way home:

Allison: “Kafrine”
Katherine: “What?”
Allison: “Kafrine, Pau-pau and I went to QFC. We bought you a chocolate donut!” Allison is also quite the comedian or jokester. I had noticed for a couple days an odiferous smell in the minivan. Rhetorically, I asked her as we were buckling up to pickup her sister from school, “Allison, what is that smell??” She replied, “Kafrine!” (Note: it was her car seat. I hosed it down a couple days later.)

For Halloween, Steve had decided to dress up as Professor Plum, completing a Clue team at work. He worked hard to dye a cheap blue suit that he bought at Value Village. I watched as he wrung it out and then put it through the wash, and then as he pulled out a….blue suit! Anyway, the next day he wore it as reading parent at school and then to work. The kids got the biggest kick out of it. Katherine called Dad, “Professor Plum.” Allison declared at the party, “Happy Birthday Professor Plum…Ha Ha Ha Ha” in gales of laughter. She got such a reaction from family members that she repeated it over and over for good measure with lots of laughing.

Allison is now TWO years old!

Allison is now TWO years old!

After this past week, Allison has a much better grasp of her birthday. We hosted a party for her at our place last Sunday: 11 kids + 11 adults made for quite a busy house. Our theme this year was gardening. We went and bought little annuals, pots, potting soil and various plastic tools for the kids. They decorated their terra cotta pots with foam letters and stickers, selected and then “potted” their plants. This activity went reasonably well, despite a rather large age difference. The little ones who were Allison’s age really enjoyed just playing with the dirt, shovels, and pails. The big ones got into the spirit of things, by and large trying to do the activity end to end.

Memorable Moments:

– My mom held Allison while she blew out the 2 candles on her purple cupcake. No assistance required – those candles went out in a flash.
– Allison loved her gifts. One of her favorites was a new Corelle stroller, which she described as “my stroller” and rolled around the house for hours.
– Katherine really struggled to help in a meaningful way with gift opening. She ended up “starting” the unwrapping and watching Allison slowly peel paper off her gifts.

As the week progressed, Allison got a karaoke machine from Patty, books from the Bushes, clothes from Grandma Chang, a framed Allison print from Sharon/Jamey and….a toyhouse with little animals and furniture from Steve and I. By Wednesday, she exclaimed in a loud and forceful two-year old way, “I want MORE PRE-SENTS!” We explained that all presents had been opened. She declared, “more presents upstairs” and marched up to the TV room closet to see if any other gifts were hidden away.& It’s a good thing that birthdays only happen once a year. 🙂

What are they learning?

We spend a lot of our time in the car listening to Dan Zanes, and in particular his latest album “Catch That Train.” It’s got some catchy tunes like “Loch Lomond” and “I don’t want your millions mister” which the kids love to try to sing to. We heard the latter& (a union protest song) at his latest concert in Seattle, which was very raucous but fun.& The former I& found& out last week is an Irish drinking song. So, you have to wonder what are these kids learning?!

Development Milestones

So I can remember this stuff later (Does Anyone Actually Read This Blog Besides Sharon?), here’s what the kids are up to.

Allison:

– She has started to preface just about everything with “my.” She is getting possessive of toys, but expects Katherine to “share.”
– She intersperses Chinese in her conversations with Mom and me, and Spanish with Patty.
– She wants to be included in and “see” everything. If Katherine and I work on a project in the kitchen, she pushes a stool so she can try and sit with us.
– She has started to talk about being afraid. For instance, if something scares her, she will cover her eyes with her hands (but still peek out) and say “I’m scared!”
– No is a very common word. She refused to take a walk with Bisco this afternoon (we eventually did), didn’t want to stay in her car seat (“I undo buckle”).
– Despite her terrible twoness, she is very polite and regularly says “Thank you mama!”
– She knows all upper case letters and almost all lower case, for instance mixing up “b” and “p.”
– She can count up to two items, telling me “two lauwn-mowauers” when seeing the neighbor’s gardeners outside, but count up to twenty (and sometimes thirty) easily.

Katherine:

– She displays a sense of order from school, ex. lining up her shoes neatly next to the wall, arranging place settings on her play table.
– She wants to do big person tasks. In one sitting, she learned how to use the manual pencil sharpener and sharpened almost a dozen pencils. She also told me that she has learned the bleaching work at school and can now help me spray and wipe down the counters!
– We call her a fashion-ista. She has a definite sense of what looks good vs. not and often provides input on my clothes telling me what she likes and what doesn’t match.
– She is pushing and trying to learn social boundaries with her classmates at school. For instance, we’re coaching her on how to talk about food, name calling and other interesting interactions.
– Despite some rather& scary& handwriting, her reading is progressing. She points at signs trying to read them out loud and reads common three letters words that she’s seen before fairly quickly. Today she said out of the blue, “TOP!” when she saw a sign for Top Food and Drugs.
– She can read the “o-clocks” on a regular, non-digital clock. For instance tonight, I pointed to a drawn clock in a book and she said “7 o’clock!” We would probably make more progress in this area if we actually had a& non-digital clock in the house (note to self: buy clock!).

Halloween & Birthdays

Halloween & Birthdays

It seems that late October and early November are always a big blur. That is likely because Steve’s and Katherine’s birthday are almost a week apart, and then there is…Halloween!

Steve’s birthday was a low key event this year, with a dinner at his parents house and then an evening out with the kids. Funny enough, we went to Todai for dinner – and the kids just ate up a storm. Steve held Allison during dessert, pressed on her big belly, and she burped! Yes, Allison continues to eat, and Katherine continues to grow!

Following his birthday was four days of Halloween festivities. First we had a potluck party where the kids just had a blast. Then we went to the Trilogy Halloween party – more fun. The following day, Katherine went to the Space Needle with her Bush grandparents to celebrate her birthday in advance. Finally, both kids had parties at their schools the day of Halloween followed by some very chilly trick or treating.

To keep things low key, we decided to take the girls around to half a dozen or so houses in the neighborhood. They activated their little light sticks, grabbed their pumpkins, jumped in the red wagon and we took off. At the first two houses, Allison tried to go in the front door when the neighbors answered (very logical eh?). Then she learned from her sister that she was supposed to stick her hand in a bowl to get candy and put it in her bucket. Finally she learned that most kids in the neighborhood were walking. We ended the evening with Allison tripping over her bucket every few steps, as she insisted on “waaa”lking from house to house. She even cried when we entered our home – knocking on our front door as if to say “we need to go to more houses!”

These Halloween pictures show the girls after trick or treating, investigating their buckets and playing with their grandparents as they waited for others to arrive at our house. When that happened, Katherine and one of us would jump up, Katherine would insist on holding the big bowl of candy and tell the kids “take two pieces please!”

I should also explain their attire and outfits this year. Katherine decided that she and her sister would be Minnie Mouse this year. To that end, I ordered some outfits from Disney.com, and they arrived a couple weeks before Halloween. These outfits sort of worked out for Halloween. It turns out that it was close to freezing that evening. Both girls wore long underwear (hence the pink shirts); Allison wore a full body Hanna pink fleece under her Minnie outfit. Katherine wore pants and her shirt under her dress, and her winter coat over it. So, it really wasn’t clear what they were, but they had a great time nonetheless.”

No sooner had we recovered (sort of) from Halloween and Katherine’s birthday party arrived. I decided this year to have it at Emerald City Gymnastics, because it would accommodate a large group of kids and appeal to boys and girls. Katherine’s initial inclination was to invite her entire class – which is virtually impossible unless we went to an inflatable party. So, we scaled it down, with a close group of friends from school attending as well as other friends and cousins.

Aside from one injury, the kids had a great time tumbling, jumping and burning energy. Within 90 minutes, they had a fun workout, ate cake and ice cream and ripped open presents. We’re going to try and achieve some semblance of normalcy tomorrow and get everyone ready for school on Monday.

Allison’s Developments

I’ve been delinquent in reporting her progress on the site, so let’s see if I can summarize. In short, Allison’s vocabulary has blossomed. We have a list of written words on the fridge that she uses – in total I’d say she has a vocabulary of 50-75 words in English, Mandarin and Spanish. She’s able to clearly communicate what she wants to those who understand her sounds/words and understand her needs/wants. Allison is regularly singing too. We sing many songs together, and she tries to warble along with sounds that mimic the words in the song. Songs include Twinkle Twinkle, Itsy Bitsy Spider, ABC Alphabet, and several songs from Kindermusik. There is one song that we sing in class that involves dusters and we sing, “dust dust dust.” She loves that song. It’s really safe to say, without explicitly comparing word counts and such, that Allison is just as verbal as her older sister was at 18 months.

Allison has several nicknames: “Danger Girl,” “Miss Panipa,” and “Barnicle Girl.” The first and third are well deserved because she gets into EVERYTHING and likes to cling to me. Katherine calls her the second for no good reason at all. The funny thing is that if this nickname sticks we have no good explanation for it!

What does Allison call Katherine? She calls her “shisher” (sister) and very rarely Katherine. One of her favorite past-times is point to something that belongs to someone in the house like a big shoe and say “Dada!” Allison’s sense of humor is developing nicely – she cracks up at funny songs like one that she learned at Toby School. It goes like this: “I’m stirring and stirring and stirring my brew (x3)” “Tiptoe Tiptoe Tiptoe …. BOO!” We did this over Halloween, and she would scream with laughter. Other funny examples are putting her little foot inside other people’s shoes or boots and making a beeline for the pink booster in the back of the mini-van.

While distraction works, we are a point where we do have to say No to Allison sometimes when she climbs or egregiously tries to take her sister’s stuff. She gets so mad and screams or yells a few times before moving on to something else. The good news is that she recovers pretty quickly (fingers crossed she stays even tempered when she’s older.

Audrey’s Birthday Party

Steve and I continue to snap pictures when we see something funny or interesting. Here’s a bunch of pictures from Audrey’s birthday party, our house re-organization and more. Where do I start to describe the last several weeks?

Birthday Parties

Katherine has been busy going to birthday parties – three over two weeks as a matter of fact. It started out with a PEPs friend’s sibling followed by Audrey’s tea party the next day and then Sid’s the next weekend.

Katherine practically burst apart at the seams at Audrey’s party. During the party she ran up to me and told me, “this is the best party ever!!” She loved the games which involved stacking sugar cubes, a tea cup/water relay, making bracelets and musical chairs. Funny enough she was the first kid to lose a chair, but she gamely stood on the sidelines to watch the other kids. Katherine was so eager to prove that she was a big kid. She asked Tina at the beginning of the party if the moms would be staying. When Tina said that it was up to the moms, Katherine turned to me and said, “I don’t need you at this party. Mom you can go.” I did end up staying discretely in the background, until Katherine needed assistance.

House Reorg

Steve and I have had a vision for the last several years, one that involved massive furniture moving and reorganization. We started down that road last weekend, rolling up our sleeves and giving our muscles a hard workout. In retrospect, hiring moving labor (the original plan) was a good idea. But, thankfully, we managed to make it through last weekend in one piece.

What did we do? We emptied the playroom of ALL the furniture. The huge entertainment center is dissassembled in the garage. The 50″ rear projection TV was sold on eBay. We lugged, tugged, turned, and managed to get the huge leather couches down to the family room. The family room furniture is in the living room…and the living room couches are in the garage waiting to be put on eBay or Craig’s List.

We’ve decided to make the playroom a full fledged play area for the kids – wall mural, organizational system for toys, throw carpet for art projects and much more. The wall mural is one day away from being done, and we’ll post the day by day pictures when its completed.

An Eating Machine

An Eating Machine

Allison has turned into a mini eating machine. This all started during her birthday dinner at my mom’s house when she ate 4 meatballs, half a jar of carrots, a bunch of noodles, at least six small blocks of tofu and cake! We thought this might have been an anomaly. Since then though, she’s mowed down everything in sight. It’s not uncommon for her to sit in her high chair for over 45 minutes picking through her food, raising her eyebrows and carefully inserting cubes of food to her mouth.

A couple days ago we took the girls to Ruby’s. Allison dutifully ate her avocado, grated cheese, corn and black beans from our salads, while Katherine picked at her mac and cheese. Funnily Katherine insisted on sitting in a high chair next to Allison. Halfway thru the meal, Allison started pulling on Katherine’s high chair, and a very annoyed Katherine moved to sit in the booth. After this hasty departure, and before we could stop her, Allison reached for the mac cheese and stuffed some in her mouth! She loved it and must have had 3-4 more big spoonfuls before we left.

Tonight at dinner she ate an entire avocado (admittedly not a large one), 2 strawberries, at least 6-8 pieces of penne pasta, 4 or 5 pieces of broccoli, several large chunks of sweet potato and some bits of whole wheat bread.

Needless to say we’ve been changing a lot of big diapers. Allison is also starting to fill out which is great.

We’ve been pleasantly surprised at the range of her palate. New additions include edaname, grapes, mango, corn (straight off the cob) and broccoli. Between all four of us, we managed to eat 3 small heads of blanched broccoli tonight, and the girls could have eaten more! Allison is very clear about her preferences, exclaiming “mmm mmm” when she wants more of something. She makes the sound “saw” for strawberries which is also one of her favorite treats. When we go to the fridge and get water, her eyes light up and she says “agua agua!” Sometimes she reaches out with her arms as to say, “I’m really thirsty. Gimme some of your water!”

We started cows milk on her birthday. She’ll take a couple sips but hasn’t acquired a strong liking yet. I’m hoping this happens soon, because we have only 7-8 more weeks to wean her before I go to Napa without the kids!

Twelve Steps

We’re not sure what precipitated this eating interest, but we think it may have to do with her walking. For the most part she still crawls, scoots and cruises. When there’s nothing to hold onto OR she’s really motivated to get something, she’ll take small steps sometimes stopping to regain her balance and then walk again.

Tonight I brought out one of her favorite items…the blue vacuum cleaner. It may be that she heard this a lot in the womb (thanks to a hairy dog), or she may just think it’s fascinating. From clear across the room, she made a beeline to the vacuum. We caught this on video with our new Canon Elph (one of our old ones bit it). She showed us several times tonight that she can take upwards of 12 steps before she collapses to the ground!!

Sibling Issues

Most of the time, the girls enjoy playing together. Other times are just angstful for one or both of them. A couple days ago I had a meeting a Seattle which meant that Steve had the girls for 2 hours. He decided to take them in the Chariot for a ride behind his road bike.

I’m actually sorry I missed this experience because it sounded like a hoot. From Steve’s description, Allison discovered and learned to love the kid Camelback. She loved it so much that she and Katherine fought in the Chariot for it, prompting Steve to stop and figure out what was going on. Katherine told him, “Allison is going to drink all the water in the water backpack!!” Katherine also ate in front of her sister without adequately sharing.

Yesterday I had the kids in the afternoon and spent quite a bit of time with Katherine playing with Steve’s gear set while Allison was napping. Post nap Allison was a little groggy. But as soon as she heard the whirring of the gears and saw them in action, her eyes lit up, she gave us a big smile, flapped her arms, and wiggled her legs. I put her down next to the coffee table and mayhem ensued. Allison would walk around the table grabbing the gears and messing them up. Katherine would get really mad and tell her sister to stop. Finally I intervened and suggested that Katherine find something for Allison to play with. We also started dinner which saved us from further distress.

Happy Birthday Allison!

Happy Birthday Allison!

Allison turns one officially tomorrow, but that hasn’t stopped us from celebrating early. On Saturday, Steve’s parents threw a small family luncheon. The girls really enjoyed eating their sandwiches, chips (Katherine only) and the very cool Disney cake that Grandma ordered from Hoffman’s. Afterwards, their cousins arrived, and the kids played inside and outside – playing with marbles and hunting bugs. Both girls were exhausted, and we took them home for some much needed R&R.

On Sunday we hosted a relatively small birthday party with Katherine and Allison’s friends. I would describe this as relatively small compared to Katherine’s first birthday party which involved a caterer, storyteller and about 40+ people stuffed in our house. In contrast, we had about five families tie-dying t-shirts in the garage. Steve was a bit apprehensive the night before – which resulted in yards of plastic covering all work surfaces in the garage and laundry room. Thankfully everyone managed to emerge unscathed and undyed from our craft project. We have about 20 shirts for friends and us sitting in the garage right now waiting for their rinse and wash cycle. We’ll see how they turn out!! The only bummer was that Allison had a weird allergic reaction to her birthday cake. About 20 minutes after trying the frosting and cake the area around her mouth turned red. I guess she won’t be getting any more birthday cake from Larry’s anymore – although the cake from Hoffman produced no reaction at all. Very puzzling.

Tomorrow we’ll have early dinner at my mom’s house with noodles and any other traditional foods. The first birthday is a BIG deal in Chinese tradition, so we’ll wrap up our festivities tomorrow evening. I still can’t believe it’s been a year since we went to the hospital. Allison is still such a skinny small kid that she really doesn’t look like she’d be one yet.

Finally…she’s walking…really walking

Everyone who’s seen Allison scoot, crawl, roll and cruise around has said, “She’s just days from walking.” They’ve been saying this for about a month. Well….(big drum roll)….we finally saw her really walk today!! I’m not talking about a step or two here or there. This was the real deal.

After dinner tonight, Katherine and Allison were wrestling for the shopping cart in the family room. Katherine predictably took it away from Allison and loaded it up with all of Allison’s new birthday toys. She pulled it away, and Allison let go of the cart. I didn’t realize this until Steve walked by, gasped and pointed – but Allison must have stood by herself for a good five seconds. Then, she took 5 or 6 steps to the grocery cart. Katherine was more than happy to replicate this; she would keep the cart out of reach and Allison would stagger to it taking half a dozen relatively steady steps to it.

I taped it on our big old video camera for posterity. Funny enough, Patty’s been saying that Allison has been taking one or two steps for several weeks, but they happen so quickly that I usually wasn’t sure if / when it happened. Tonight’s incident was unmistakable, and we all cheered for the very happy birthday girl.

Talking Too

Allison’s vocabulary is starting to really take off, and it’s funny which words she’s chosen to learn first…

Mama, Dada
Dog – loves to watch Bisco in the living room from the alcove upstairs
Agua
Ball – (sounds like bawl)
Shoe
Hot – usually when she’s heading straight for her little heater
Up – she said this yesterday at the bottom of the stairs to tell Steve she wanted to crawl up!

I’m still amazed at the rate of growth. I’m going to have to start up the old word spreadsheet again to track her vocabulary (did it for Katherine until we got to 300 words). I swear tonight that she said, “cool.” If she says it again, we’ll just add it to the list. 🙂

Picking up Mom and Dad’s sayings

Katherine is picking up a lot of sayings from us and from her classroom. Some are funny, some are not and some are just annoying. As Steve said, “I had no idea how much I said that until Katherine starting saying it.” Here are some of her favorite sayings and their origins…