Jefflog

Well, well, if it isn’t my old friend the weblog. I typically don’t have much time to write these days, but Maggie is taking a nap, Oliver is busy chomping on the teat, and I’m too tired to get any work done, which makes this a rare opportunity to post an update.

Oliver is doing much better lately. Some of it has been due to a thoughtful friend buying us the book The Happiest Baby on the Block, which is full of good advice to soothe a fussy baby. The other part has been due to Hong cutting out dairy from her diet, which we strongly suspect causes a lot of intestinal grief for him. (Did you know that some 90% of Chinese people are lactose intolerant? Neither did we until recently.)

Maggie’s also been behaving more like a two-year old lately. Four or five weeks ago, we started letting her sleep on the big bed. She hadn’t yet started to climb out of her crib, but we had let her take her naps on the big bed for a while and she always slept just fine. And even though she could have gotten out at any time, usually she’d just wait for us to get her after she wakes up. She was so easy to deal with.

Then about two weeks ago, I guess we waited too long to fetch her because she figured out that she could get out of bed by herself, anytime she wanted to. This includes immediately after we tuck her in and leave the room. Now bedtime and naptime have become a power struggle, with her wanting to get out of bed unless she’s drop-dead tired. It was really bad for the first week, often requiring a couple of trips taking her back to bed, but last night she didn’t leave the bed when we left, being content to pout while staying on the bed. Before long, I imagine, the crying will dry up, too.

Actually, Maggie’s grandmother just sent over some little stuffed animals and a Noah’s ark pillow that we can bribe Maggie with. Every day she goes to bed without crying, she gets an animal to put in the ark. We’ll see how well that works.

Meanwhile, she still gets out of bed when she wakes up in the morning, which is fine by me. She quietly opens her door, softly knocks on our bedroom door, and waits for us to open it. I don’t know where she learned that she should knock on our door before coming in. We didn’t teach her, or at least we can’t remember teaching her. I guess some parts of raising children turn out to be easier than they could be.

During the weekend before this previous one, we had the chance to take Maggie out to see a public fireworks display. This involved taking her out way past her bedtime, since things don’t get dark here until 10pm now that Indiana has adopted Daylight Saving Time, but it was a one-time thing and we thought she would really enjoy them.

She hated them. More accurately, she was scared of them. She put her hands over her ears and complained of them being “too loud”. I don’t think she was impressed by them at all. We drove home long before the display could finish.

Actually, it must have made an impression on her, because she kept talking about “fireworks” all week long. Not really talking about them, mosting just saying the word “fireworks” in her typical non sequitur monologues. I thought that since the noise was what bothered her the most, we could go buy some fireworks that didn’t make noise and she would enjoy those. We set them off on Saturday night.

Wrong again. When the fireworks started flying, shooting sparks up a few feet into the air, she cried and ran away. We tried several other similar ones to no avail. Even if she was watching from the safety of indoors, she would run and cry as soon as the sparks started flying. We’ve got this on video, maybe I’ll post it up here later.

This event just caused her to talk about fireworks more. She seemed to speak as if she liked them, saying “fireworks pretty” and “Daddy light fireworks outside”, although she would also add “too loud” and, just to be consistent, “too pretty”. She’d talk about fireworks morning, noon, and night. We still had plenty of fireworks left over from our aborted display from Saturday, so we decided that I would light some more for her for July 4th.

You can figure out how well that went over.

Three weeks into the new arrival, we’re still hanging in there. Oliver’s still waking up several times a night, but most of the time he goes right back to sleep after feeding. I’m probably getting close to seven hours of sleep a night, albeit in two-to-three hour increments.

The harder part to deal with is his incessant crying. He’ll go on these crying binges shouting at the top of his lungs, and nothing we do seems to console him. We thought it might be colic, but apparently it’s not considered colic if it only happens a couple of hours each day. Whatever’s bothering him, it must be real bad, but all we know to do right now is to wait it out. In another 3 or 4 months, it should solve itself.

Maggie has been very understanding with the new addition. We’ve taken extra steps to make sure she doesn’t feel ignored, but we certainly haven’t been able to take her out as much as we used to. She’s not jealous of Oliver at all; if anything, she’s too enamored of him, constantly wanting to touch or kiss him to the point that we have to restrain her to avoid unintentionally hurting him. We joke that the reason Oliver cries so much is because he hears his sister squeal “Hi Baby Oliver!!” For the record, Oliver is pronounced “Ah-wa” in Maggie’s parlance.

She’s also developed a cute way of singing the Alphabet Song. Sometimes she ends the song with the following:

Now I know my ABCs,
Next time 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.

It took me a few listens before I understood that “won’t you sing” sounds a lot like “1 2 3″. She just continues the number sequence past that point. Sometimes she’ll even extend it to 20, although it’s not quite there because she’ll skip a few in that sequence.

Four new movies of Maggie posted. Check them out.

With this posting, I’ve taken down the Quicktime streams. Getting them encoded in Quicktime was a real pain in the first place, and when I rebuilt my Windows machine, I lost my Linux partition I was using to encode videos. All videos are using the Theora format exclusively.

At 20 months, Maggie likes to be involved in everything we’re doing. Whether it’s cooking, cleaning, biking, weeding, or going to the office, Maggie wants to do it all.

She’ll typically announce this by intoning in a loud voice “Maggie do it!”. At this point, we’ll let her try (putting on her shoe, eating food with a fork, wiping the table). When she realizes that she can’t do it, her next sentence will be “Daddy do it!” or “Mommy do it!”

We’ve reached the stage where we have to be careful what we say around her. More than once, we’ve used the word “stupid” (NOT referring to Maggie, by the way), and she’ll say “tupid” or some other adorable mangling of the word. Still, we don’t want her to get in the habit of saying the word “stupid”, because of course she doesn’t know when it’s appropriate to use certain words.

To take a prime example, when we’re eating at a restaurant or out shopping, she will often point at people and say “man!”, “woman!’, “baby!”. Sometimes she gets it wrong, saying “boy!” while pointing to a girl. Sometimes she’ll point at a random man and say “Daddy!”. The last thing we want her to do it start pointing fingers and saying “stupid!”

Maggie has learned “the magic word” in recent weeks, knowing that if she asks “please?”, she’s more likely to get something than without it. Only she can’t quite say “please?”, it’s more like “peas?”. She often combines this with a cute bob of the head that melts your heart and almost makes you want to give her ice cream for dinner instead of broccoli. Of course, the magic word doesn’t work in that situation, but it will work if she asks me to pick her up even though I’m really tired.

Speaking of broccoli, Maggie loves the stuff. Most kids hate it, but she’s been known to pick it over chicken nuggets. And you know she’s half-Chinese when, asked what she wants to eat, her first response is usually “tofu!”, followed by “rice!”.

The weather is starting to warm up, and I’m looking forward to riding my bike again. It should be especially fun this year because I’ll be taking Maggie along for some of my rides. Given her zeal for bikes, I think she’s going to have a great time.

I ordered a child carrier and a helmet for her. I got the kind of carrier that fits on the back of the bike; I don’t like the trailers that fit on the back of the bike, mostly because I’m afraid it would make the bike harder to maneuver. The infant helmet just arrived in the mail, but I completely format that Maggie has a big head, and it doesn’t fit her. We’re going to need a toddler helmet at least.

Just before Maggie was born, we bought a video camera, and have been recording her ever since. No doubt you’ve seen some of the better video clips on the sidebar. Naturally, we shoot much more footage than that; we’ve filled up 12 DVDs of home movies so far, and that’s just the edited footage.

On each of these DVD’s, of which we make copies to send to family members, we include a photo slideshow of the pictures taken during that period, set to music. On the latest DVD (volume 12), the slideshow was good enough that I wanted to share it with my readers. If you are so inclined, you may download the Quicktime video. It’s about 10 megabytes and doesn’t stream, so expect to wait a while before it starts playing.

The music in the slideshow is a piece called The Chase by The Wiggles. We downloaded (legally!) their Yummy Yummy album a few months ago, and Maggie loves it a lot. She likes to dance to most songs, and after each one is over, she exclaims “More!” (in a very sweet tone).

The Wiggles are surprisingly good, mostly original pieces that are simple but not dumb. They’re much better than most “children’s music” you find on the market today, which tend to be uninspired renditions of children’s classic songs. (Barney the Dinosaur, I’m looking straight at you.) The Wiggles seem to be good enough musicians on their own, but they’ve used the niche of kid-oriented themes and songs mostly under 2 minutes. Despite this, I find myself liking some of the songs almost as much as Maggie does. It’s hard not to sing along to Hot Potatoes or Fruit Salad. If you’ve got a toddler in the house, I highly recommend them.

I’m used to seeing snow on the ground for weeks in January and February, but not as early as December. Where is global warming when you want it?

On the plus side, we bundled little Maggie up yesterday (“like a tick about to pop!”) and let her walk around in the snow. She loved it.

Each time we take Maggie to the pediatrician for her regular checkup, they measure her height, weight, and head size. The last few times, she’s come out within the same percentile for her age:

• Height: 75th percentile.
• Weight: 50th percentile.
• Head size: 97th percentile.

The size of her enormous head didn’t really register until we shopped for a winter hat for her. The typical hats for 18 month-old kids didn’t fit at all; we had to get one labeled 3T-4T. She’s not even 15 months old yet.