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New Years

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

It was a very festive weekend as we celebrated the Year of the Dog. On Saturday morning, Steve and Katherine headed down to Gene Juarez salon for Steve’s haircut with Katherine as a curious observer. She did well, all things considered, watching our hairdresser wash, cut and comb Steve’s hair. Allison and I then met them at Paint Away, a local ceramic painting store, where Katherine slathered six different colors on a small valentine dish. Steve’s original intent had been to surprise me with the dish. If you ask Katherine though, the dish is for her baby sister. How’s that for sisterly love?

Afterwards, Katherine had her regular haircut and we headed home. It became apparently clear as the afternoon wore on that Katherine observed not only a haircut that morning but also the pedicure and manicure area of the salon. She repurposed one of her kitchen wooden trays to include utensils, a comb, hair bands, barrettes and a bib. She sat next to me and gave me a faux pedicure – which consisted of taking a plastic play knife and moving it around the heel of my foot. Then…she asked me to pick a color and used the corresponding utensil to “paint” my toenails. Lambey received a haircut as well, with the bib serving as a cape and a baby blanket as a towel. That evening my mom came over for a noodle dinner and gave the kids the traditional red envelopes.

This morning, Steve’s parents came over to visit with the girls briefly. We took care of some errands and went to my mom’s for a New Year’s celebration with Steve’s Aunt Pat, Uncle Art and his mom. Katherine had a blast – eating her way through two eggrolls, curry dumplings and other treats that my mom put out for dessert. We had a nice time catching up with family and kicking off another healthy and happy year!

You’re Getting Hotter, Cooler…

One of Katherine’s occasional games is hiding this blue squishy thing that her Grandma Dottie bought her at the aquarium. We tell her to leave the family room while one of us hides it then exclaims “done!” Katherine then wanders into the family room using hotter, colder as hints to find the squishy thing. Funny enough, she loves to hide the squishy thing but doesn’t realize that she needs to be quiet during the hiding process. During one of her turns to hide, she told me (while Steve was in the hallway), “It’s with the gears.” The next time, she dropped it behind the couch, but made such a racket with the plastic gear box that we all knew exactly where she put it!!

Need Milk, Mama

I can’t figure out if Allison is a really fast learner of sign language or if she was just waving at me this morning. One of Allison’s more endearing qualities is to wake up at 4AM with a dirty diaper. It’s almost like she’s on East Coast Time. Anyway, as I was cracking open Allison’s diaper at 4:30AM this morning, she let out several wails and proceeded to open and close her little fist as if saying “I want milk!!” I had been using this sign with her that day. We’ll see this coming week if she continues to use this sign – hopefully not at 4:30AM anymore.

Allison’s vocabulary of sounds is growing. We’re hearing “awa,” “adada,” “ava,” “aza” – lots of good consonants. Everyday she is growing and developing. This seems to be a huge period of growth. I can’t wait to take her to her 9 month checkup to see how she’s tracking.

Catching Up on Family Events

Our family blog is woefully out of date. I’ll also try to catch up on family events, not just Katherine developments, given everything that is happening.

December was a very busy month….

  • Our family flew to DC to help my mom finish packing and move to Redmond. Katherine learned how to use a camera and got into all sorts of things – packing tape, bubble wrap, etc. We got back to Washington just in time to spend a few days with Steve’s parents before New Years!
  • Steve was working hard getting ready for the launch of his product at CES among other activities.

January was even crazier…

  • Steve went to CES (see his blog entries), caught the crud that’s going around, which developed into a bronchial infection just in time for our vacation!
  • Steve, Katherine and I went with the LeVines to Oahu and Maui for a week. The trip was long, even traveling first class, and the passengers behind us told us about how hard it was to travel with their 4 children years ago. (Hmmm…) Katherine and Sid played on the beach. Steve and Eric learned to surf. Steve caught a sand crab, which we didn’t get a picture of unfortunately. Katherine developed a strong appreciation for sea creatures and learned all about sting rays, sharks, dolphins, etc. The trip back was more hellacious since we got in at 1AM, but in all the trip was well worth it. We learned a ton about how to and how not to travel with Katherine to a vacation destination, just in time for #2.
  • Our radiologist confirmed that #2 will be a girl. ๐Ÿ™‚

Our focus in February is on pre-schools and getting ready for the next child.

  • Steve and I have gone to six open houses so far for preschools and I’ve submitted 3 applications for next September. Fingers crossed that plan A or B pans out for next year.
  • Katherine is growing up so fast. She now sleeps thru the night in her junior bed. We moved her stuff to the old guest room this weekend, so she has her own room. I’m also weeding thru Katherine’s old baby stuff and figuring out what we need to do before May.
  • Katherine just started gymnastics class and she’s fearless. She loves the balance beam and jumping into a foam pit that the gym uses to teach equipment to more advanced kids.

Katherine Developments

Katherine is talking like a little person these days. Today while in her car seat, she recited the days of the week and months in the year. According to her calendar, her birthday is in February and the months of June and November don’t exist. Also, there are only 5 days in the week – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. She’s trying really hard though. ๐Ÿ™‚

She’s also picked up different songs that she changes at whim. She recently started singing the Old MacDonald song, “EIEIO”, where the farmer has a chicken that says “moo,” and all sorts of other non-farm creatures. Other favorites are John Jingle Heimer Schmidt and the Bingo song – repurposed to sing about Katherine and her dog Bisco.

Katherine loves to crack jokes. After the December Tiny Tots concert, she will say that Mama plays violin and Dada plays the sippy cup! Sometimes, he plays the trombone or tuba. She finds ridiculous ideas funny and just starts to crack up. For instance, Steve was reading a book about a girl who has diarrhea among other troubles and is moody (learning about emotions). Katherine just laughed up a storm tonight – and I don’t think she has any idea what that is!

She really started speaking in full sentences right before the holidays (5, 6, 7 word sentences), and her verbal skills are continuing to progress. She asks “Why” all the time. Tonight, she asked “Why Santa in sleigh?” She’ll keep asking until she gets an answer that makes sense. Along with this is her attempt to reason or negotiate with me and Steve and do Everything Herself (ex. “Me [insert verb] myself”).

Key areas for development are still around sharing and resisting the urge to grab toys from others when she’s excited and a bit of stranger anxiety when she’s not with a primary caregiver. We’ll keep working on it.

Katherine Language

Now that New Year Day is over, things are looking up. We’ve had an amazing 2-3 days with Katherine. It’s going to be tough to go back to work tomorrow and leave her at home all day. One small consolation…I bought and inserted pictures of our family in frames to take to work. Also, we are scheduled to start a family evening class with a local toddler group – part education for parents, part socialization and fun for the children – and a Kindermusik class on Saturday mornings.

Katherine Language

It goes something like “daba daba yib … yib….” and many other sounds as well. She’ll point at Bisco and say “dao.” We still don’t have a consistent “mama” but we get plenty of “dadas” and “da”. She’s definitely talking to us! We’re just not sure what she’s saying.

I think Katherine gets pretty frustrated sometimes with us. For instance, she was yawning by 4PM today when we were shopping. I popped her back in her crib for a late afternoon nap, but she must have spent 10 minutes crying intermittently before I heard a thump. It turns out that she had dropped her lamb and one of her shoes on to the floor. I got the picture and took her downstairs for a small snack. She was very hungry and ended up eating a bunch of green beans, cooked chicken and a fried egg – she had eaten less than 3 hours earlier!

Stranger Anxiety

Katherine has been definitely going thru a bout of stranger anxiety. This first showed up over the holidays whenever she saw Steve’s sisters’ in-laws. She’d seen them before, but they would look at her directly, and she would cry very hard.

This happened again last night. One of our PEPS friends, Frank, looked at Katherine and said “hello.” She just cried and cried until we distracted her with toys. For at least an hour, Frank would avoid any eye contact. Finally, towards the end of the evening, she walked straight up to him, smiled and handed him Bisco’s toy. What was really weird was that she was fine around all the other adults – they held her and she didn’t have any issues.

Katherine also attended a birthday party for her friend Mac yesterday. She spent the first 20 minutes of the party wanting to be held or right next to us. She then ventured to play with her friends in an inflatable house with plastic balls. Once we were fully into the party, she joined other children playing with toys and even riding on a plastic rollercoaster. We put her on it a couple times and she was pretty excited to zip up and down the curves and then coast for 20 feet on a plastic cart with wheels.

More New Foods

I gave Katherine a fried egg for the first time this afternoon. She loved the yolk and ate the pieces as fast as she could pick them up. She would also pick up an egg pieces, place it on her spoon and then try to get the spoon to her mouth!

The other new food that she just wolfed down was a carrot cake cupcake at the party. I crumbled the cupcake and gave her maybe 6 or 7 little bites. Steve took her away to get cleaned up. After they were done, she walked back, stood next to my leg, raised her arms and pointed to indicate that she wanted more cupcake. I guess while she didn’t want to eat her own birthday cake, eating someone else’s birthday cake was fun.

Sporting New Sweaters

We’ve had record low temperatures, snow and ice over the last week. In addition to her cool new boots, I bought Katherine a couple new sweaters to see her thru the winter. On of the sweaters has this matching cupcake hat that looks really cute on Katherine. Check out the pictures to see her new duds – a whale sweater, a striped sweater with matching color hat.

What a Fun and Busy Christmas!

What a Fun and Busy Christmas!

We had yet another wonderful holiday. We spent Christmas with Steve’s extended family: his parents, Ramsays, Olbrights, and Fialas. To celebrate Christmas Eve, we went to Everett and a children’s Christmas service. Lots of families with little ones attended and Katherine and Kevin both did very well during the 30 minute service. It consisted primarily of singing and children enacting the Christmas story. Katherine was so taken by the service that she would zip around to the back of our seats and sing (off key) in a very spirited way. After the service we went to Steve’s sisters house and had a nice pork BBQ dinner. The cousins played very well with each other – Kevin even took Katherine’s hand and led her to the tree to see all the ornaments and lights. After the excitement, Katherine took her bath and we discovered a new rash, brought on we think by the heavy tights she wore. Thankfully, by the next morning, it had disappeared.

We opened our presents Christmas morning with Grandma and Grandpa Bush. After they left to participate in gift opening in Everett, Katherine took a very early morning nap. This was highly unusual as she’s been on a 1 nap schedule for several weeks. When she woke up, we piled back in the car, headed north and enjoyed an hour or so with the Olbrights. Katherine had great fun eyeing all of Kevin’s gifts. Kevin had received a musical keyboard with bright plastic instruments. Katherine wanted to play with the instruments and Kevin was determined to keep them with the keyboard. After tussling over them for a bit, Katherine finally grabbed two of the instruments, thrust them to her cousin, lifted her chin, turned around and walked off in the opposite direction. We weren’t sure if it was a case of “sharing” or having had enough, but it was quite amusing.

For dinner, we went to the Fialas where we had a delicious potluck with ham, beef, turkey (I think), beans, salad, pink stuff (yum), and mashed potatoes. The dinner closed with a vast array of cookies and ice cream that the Olbrights had brought. While the food was very tasty, the parents really enjoyed watching the three children interact. Will and Kevin ran around and by the end of the evening, Katherine had figured out that she could run around too. So, we had all three cousins doing laps in the living, dining and family room – with Katherine waving her hands and screaming (ahhhh!!). Even better, some adults joined in the fun too. ๐Ÿ™‚

Another highlight of the week was visiting the Seattle Aquarium. It really is a wonderful resource for families, and the whole family trooped out to see it. Will and Kevin were in perpetual motion, and Katherine took turns riding in her stroller and braving the crowds by walking around. We saw the fish get fed by a scuba diver (very cool), other fish get tossed food and the otters eat their shrimp. After a fun-filled couple hours, we headed to the Spaghetti Factory. Katherine ate mac and cheese, the boys played with plastic barber toys and crayons. The boys even treated us and neighboring diners to a rousing rendition of the ABC song.

Prior to a family dinner, we visited the Redmond Town Center and tried to go to Gymboree. Unfortunately, they were closed, so we stopped by a Paint store – its one of those places where you paint some object and then they put it in a kiln. I painted three ornaments, Steve painted a cake platter and Grandma Bush a heart platter. Katherine had her hands painted (three times!) and then stuck to the platters. That was probably the most interesting part of the visit, because she couldn’t check out the pottery or paints or brushes…Grandpa was a good sport and took Katherine around the neighboring stores while we painted. We did eventually go to Gymboree later with Grandpa, which was a good workout for Katherine.

On the last day of the Bush’s stay with us, we hosted a family dinner potluck at our home. It was a nice way to spend some quality time with family and allow the children to play together. Will really enjoyed playing with Hokey Pokey Elmo. The children took turns playing with the trike, and there was just a lot of running around and excitement in general. Grant seemed to enjoy the mayhem from the family room (what an adorable baby!). By the time the evening ended, both Will and Kevin were determined to stay and were very sad to leave. I guess that’s the mark of an enjoyable and successful play event!

We capped the visit off with a family photo sitting at the local mall. While the Olbrights weren’t able to join us, we did get some nice shots of the Bushes with Katherine, us with Katherine and then all five of us. We’ll be sure to send pictures to the family.

Another Growth Spurt
Holy Cow – Katherine has been eating a ton lately. Two days ago, she must have eaten 5 meals. With every meal, she’s been stuffing down a lot of food. Favorites these days are spaghetti, tofu, peas, bread, yogurt…There really isn’t any food that she doesn’t eat. We also found that while we eat dinner that Katherine would tug our pants and try to climb in our laps. Grandpa Bush was very accommodating and we found Katherine perched in his lap pointing at food and trying to explore the food in his mouth. During a rotation on my lap, Katherine pointed at salmon, got a taste, wanted more and double fisted fish into her mouth. Of course, this whole eating thing has been accompanied by real growth. She now sort of fits into a while sweat suit that Grandma Chang gave her for her birthday. She also is starting to outgrow one of her red jackets.

More Learning- “What a Busy Child”

We must of heard this at least 5 or 6 times during the holidays from family, friends and random strangers. Katherine is indeed busy. She never stops very long for any one task or event. For instance, this morning I took out all of her shape blocks from her puzzle and asked her to put them back (a new development!). She inserted one, picked up another block, tossed it aside and headed off to her toy bin.
Katherine is so funny with her Jumbo Knob Puzzle. It has big wooden knobs with shapes – circle, square, pentagon, etc. For a couple weeks, this puzzle had been on our coffee table. Katherine would do a quick drive by, grab a puzzle piece and take off. We had encouraged her to put the pieces back, demonstrated and even had her friend Audrey play with it. Finally last week, she took the rectangle piece and managed to put it back in. Steve and I cheered and Katherine loved it. Now, she will grab any puzzle piece, put it back and look up to make sure we saw her do it. At a minimum, she gets a big smile – other times clapping and always encouragement.

We took her to the local children’s shoe store to get snow/rain boots. The sales person said as Katherine stomped off in her shoes, “what a busy child…” The shoes by the way are very cute – purple patent leather boots with flowers. She also got some pink leather shoes with a mouse chasing a piece of cheese. We can’t get away with putting her in this stuff much longer, as she’ll soon have her own opinions. So, we might as well buy it now!
Katherine has also reached a number of other milestones as well. She’s points consistently at food that she wants to eat and objects that she wants to checkout. It may be food on our plates or things on the counter. It’s been very handy for us, since we can now respond directly to her requests. The only downside is that she can be very insistent with what she wants.
We also have been trying to encourage scribbling…on paper that is. I read in a parenting book that scribbling is a key milestone. So we put her Crayola washable big crayons in a diaper wipe box. Assuming the box is open, she’ll dig around and pull one or two crayons. Katherine likes to walk around with crayons, and occasionally she’ll even draw a line on paper. ๐Ÿ™‚ Her other favorite activity is handing Bisco her crayons. He’s managed to eat and destroy a couple already. At least the stains wash off the carpet. Grrr.

An Inauspicious New Year
We sincerely hope that 2004 is better than what happened New Years Day. To start things off, I managed to get a nasty 24 hour stomach bug around…1:30AM on New Years. I’m about 90%, but to shake it required a ton of sleep and rest. While New Years Day sucked for me, it was even worse for Steve.

He decided to build his own PC from scratch (why, I don’t know…) Anyway, he goes to Fry’s and gets the parts. He comes home and discovers voila, no processor in the box! He heads back to Fry’s and they think that he stole the processor, so he has to wait at customer service while they figure this all out. He comes home, and I’m passed out on the couch trying to watch Katherine who can’t figure out why Mom is stuck on the couch. He then makes lunch for Katherine and in the process spills coffee beans, breaks a glass and then cuts himself on a soup can. Even worse, the credit card company thinks that between a gas station visit and Fry’s that the card has been stolen. Wait…it gets worse! The processor that he gets from Fry’s doesn’t even work because the box had been opened already and the pins had been bent.
Its a good thing he made the bean soup because we’re going to need all the luck we can get with 2004!

Final Stages of Weaning

Our goal had been to breast feed Katherine until she was 12 months old. Between pumping at work and managing milk inventory, we made it! Starting at 12 months, we began to remove one milk feeding every week. By late November and early December, we were down to one feeding at bedtime. The last several days have really been a great opportunity to finish the weaning process. My production has been down with the flu, and Steve has been home to feed her a bottle of formula at bedtime. Hopefully, in the next week or so, we can wean her from her bedtime bottle, and we’ll be done! From here on out, Katherine will be drinking full fat, organic milk and water from her Playtex insulator cup and straw.