Friends

Steve had the stomach flu this week. This flu had made its way around both of our work environments, leaving folks with 3-5 days of GI issues and a nasty fever. Our goal had been to make sure that Katherine and I didn’t get the flu, and so far we seemed to have ducked the virus. Steve basically quarantined himself in the family room for two days, while Katherine and Patty stayed out of the house as much as possible. I took care of Katherine for a couple evenings – which was brutal given that she woke up every 3-4 hours!

Faerber-izing Katherine

We finally decided last night that Katherine needed to learn how to fall asleep on her own. Instead of rocking and walking her to sleep, we’ve prepared her for bed with a bath, books and brief walk. Then, we’ve put her directly in her crib the last two nights. Last night, she cried for 40 minutes straight. She spent almost 30 minutes standing in her crib, clutching and shaking the railing, and screaming at the top of her lungs. When we walked in (5, 8, 10, 15 minutes apart), she had tears running down her face and was convinced that we would pick her up to comfort her. Just as the book suggested, we consoled her (she would momentarily stop crying – and snuffle), but didn’t pick her up. At the 30 minute mark, just as I asked Steve “how much longer do you think this will go on,” she started to snuffle and cry only intermittently. At 40 minutes, the crying stopped!

Tonight, Steve walked Katherine around the neighborhood after her bath and books. Once she was sleepy and had started to suck her thumb, he put her down. This time she only cried 20 minutes before passing out in her crib. All in all, this experience hasn’t been too traumatic for us and Katherine. She was fairly cheerful today and didn’t seem the worse for the wear after her crying jag last night. I passed the 40 minutes of crying reading the new Harry Potter book, and much of the 20 minutes today cooking with the fan on. 🙂

Katherine Gets Her First Pair of Shoes

To date, Katherine has been wearing her little baby Merrills (3-6 months) and Robeez (6-12 months). Now that she is walking around, Patty informed us that she needs to wear shoes with rubber soles. So we stopped by the local shoe store at Redmond Town Plaza. The owner of the store was very knowledgeable, and the shoe store clerk managed to measure Katherine’s little foot using the silver measuring thingy (size 3D – thin foot!). Anyway, we got a pair of Stride Rites – fairly flexible leather with rubber sole and laces. He said that Katherine can still wear her Robeez inside the house as slippers. But when she is outside she should wear normal socks with the shoes.

Katherine looked very funny walking around the store in her shoes. Steve called it “high stepping” – the owner said it was like learning how to walk again, because there is a good .5″ inch between her big toe and the end of the shoe. That said, Katherine seemed to enjoy the experience and we manage to capture her in her stroller wearing her first pair of real shoes today. How exciting!!

Developmental Milestones

Katherine can pull herself up by herself using either her Neurosmith block, her Leapfrog learning table or her toy shelf. She’s also a very practiced sitter, thunk!, and still loves to walk around. She’s also increased her speed of crawling and modified her technique. Instead of the army-type of crawl, she uses one knee and the other foot extended to push herself forward alternately. It’s not a traditional crawl, but it seems to work fairly well.

Katherine can now sort of clap. If we clap, she’ll get excited and move her hands together. Often times her hands will actually meet – which is what we call clapping. This Friday, she also started to play ball. We spent the last couple days rolling her little ball to her. She would then flap her arms around and manage to hit the ball, sending it back in our general direction. She loves being able to interact with us!

She has also started to push food out of her mouth. Food that she’s liked in the past, like pears and mango, are now on her “do not like” list. When we try and feed her this food, she sticks it out on her tongue and pulls her tongue back into her mouth without the food. Today we fed her the old sweet potato standby which she ate without any issues.

Over the weekend, Christine and I bought a Kelty Summit Backpack. This allows us to carry Katherine on our back for extended periods of time. Katherine loves the ability to see everything from our eye level. We tried it out with a trip to Molbak’s, a great nursery in downtown Woodinville. We cruised around Molbak’s with Katherine in the backpack and bought some tomatoes, squash, and peppers for our garden. Although Katherine’s too young now, we wanted to start planting an annual garden as a family experience. After 15 minutes or so, Katherine fell asleep in the backpack. This is great news for us because Katherine hasn’t been able to sleep in the Kelty Joyrider jogger stroller we bought.

Katherine Eats Yogurt

This was a tough week in the BushChang household as the entire family caught a cold. Normally when you get a cold you want to sleep it off but with a child these plans go out the window. You opportunity to sleep is when she sleeps and when she’s sick she doesn’t sleep much during the night. Needless to say, Christine and I were very tired from Monday to Thursday as we were fighting a cold and Katherine was a bit cranky due to her cold. Katherine had a running nose and congestion. She would sneeze and green snot would come flying out. It was like a snot shooting range. You heard the sneeze and the snot would hang from her nose like a slinky or be projectiled onto your shirt. Life with kids.

Despite being handicapped with a cold, Katherine learned a lot of new things this week. First of all, she’s got the assisted walking thing down cold. You hold her fingers and she walks across the room. She loves walking and will reach up her hands to signal you that she wants to walk around. It’s so cool to see your kid learn new things and be able to repeat it over and over again until they’re experts.

According to Patty, Katherine learned how to blow kisses to people. She puckers up her lip and makes a smacking sound. Christine and I have yet to see this new behavior though we heard it once. She’s also blowing raspberries a lot. She must be teething again because she’s drooling up a storm (baby Niagara Falls). She soaks a bib after about an hour. Christine and I had to stock up on bibs because we couldn’t wash them fast enough.

Beautiful Weather

The last couple of days have been sunny and warm. We’ve spent our early evenings on the deck talking and watching Katherine play. I snapped a few pictures of Katherine and Mom in the beautiful dusk light.

PEPS Meltdown

On Thursday, we hosted PEPs at our house. This is the second to last meeting of our group. We’re going to miss the last meeting as we will all be in Fullerton visiting my parents. We’re going to continue meeting after PEPs officially ends. We really like our PEPs group.

Christine and I arrived home shortly before 6P to discover that Katherine hadn’t taken our full complement of naps today. Usually this results in a challenging time getting her to go to bed as she battles us to stay awake and be social despite being completely exhausted. Unfortunately, tonight was an extreme case. She basically melted down. We tried to get her to take a nap before everyone arrived but she would have nothing to do with it. She started crying and became almost hysterical. Nothing we could do would soothe her. We walked her around, bathed her, breastfeed her, and laid down next to her. Usually one of these tricks works but not this time. She basically screamed for over an hour. Finally, Steve took her for a walk outside that calmed her down. She didn’t fall asleep but was now calm enough for Christine to breastfeed her and get her to fall asleep. Walking with Katherine is a new tool for us to add to our tool belt but we don’t want to go through another night like tonight anytime soon. We’re just exhausted and it’s so hard to hear your kid scream in tears and not be able to soothe her.

The same thing happened two weeks ago at the Ladies Night Out PEPs event. We need to chat with Patty to see if there is anything special about Katherine’s Thursday routine that might cause this behavior.