Trying To Even Things Up A Bit (…But Not Really)

Even before Mark and I had Julian, we always knew that as much as we would like to give the boys the same opportunities and experiences as one another, it’s just an impossible thing to do.  It doesn’t mean that we don’t try, but still, things are much different here in Hong Kong.  The one area I have the hardest time juggling is in making sure that both boys get enough attention — attention in general as well as from both me and Mark individually.  And if anyone gets shortchanged in the attention department, I hate to admit that it’s Julian.  I naively assumed that as children got older they would require less constant attention.  Well, color me surprised when Noah turned out to want to hang out with me just as much now as he did when he was younger.  Toss in a preschool with a strong parent-participation ethos, weekly playdates, running around town for the usual banal household errands, plus a weekly knitting group for me (so as I don’t go insane), and there are days when I feel that I barely see Julian.  Luckily he’s at an age when he’s happy as long as there’s someone around making googly faces at him, but still, it doesn’t make me feel good feeling like I’m missing out on seeing my youngest (and last!) baby.

So last week I started looking around for a parent/baby class that we could do together.  I was originally thinking of doing something along the lines of a kindermusik or gymboree class, but after looking around on some local parenting forums, I saw some rave reviews about the PEKiP program here in Hong Kong.  PEKiP is a German program which essentially teaches parents how to play with their babies.  The classes are separated into very specific age groups so all the babies are roughly the same age and on the same level developmentally.  Anne, the instructor, then teaches you some games and ways to interact with your baby that’s best for where they’re at developmentally.  There’s even a baby massage lesson at the end of the class.  I know that “playing with babies” sounds like a complete no-brainer but I’d forgotten all this stuff from when I’d first done it with Noah and there are only so many times you can play peek-a-boo before you want to start banging your head against the table.  Besides, it’s interesting to learn about how your baby is physically and mentally developing.

The crazy thing about the class is that all of the babies have to be naked.  Supposedly it’s to enhance the sensory stimulation but secretly I think she enjoys playing a private game of “guess who’s going to get peed on next”.  Julian and I went to our first class on Tuesday and I’m happy to report that I did not get peed or pooped on.  He did throw up all over me but for some reason, I find getting puked on a little more sociably acceptable.  He had such a good time in class.  He was interested in everything — the toys she brought out, the games we played, the crying babies all around us.  And I loved having an hour and a half where all I did was just focus on Julian.  Another cool thing about the class is that most of the other babies were Western (that is, not Chinese) which meant that they were all on the bigger side and Julian was not the freakishly large baby of the bunch.  No double-takes and surprised looks, no inane comments like, “Are you sure he’s only six months old?”  Just a lot of oohing and ahhing and even a couple of “He looks just like you!”  (Hooray!)

Even though the babies were all about the same age (he was in the class for July and August born babies), Julian was the only one who was able to sit up by himself and crawl (which he does, but backwards…but I’ve been told that counts) so at the end of class Anne asked if she could move us to the next class which is for June babies.  I’m trying not to be too braggy about it, like he somehow just got promoted or something, but still I can’t help feel a little…eh, like…yeah, my baby is better than your baby, so suck it!  Of course now that I’ve written that down he’s probably going to regress or something, but whatever.  Just as long as he’s just as happy in the new class.

Pictures of Super Cute Babies*

*ok, just one baby (…and he’s mine)

Have I Mentioned…

By the way, look who knows how to roll over now…

Crying Babies…For Your Viewing Pleasure

Obviously, I lied when I was all like, “Oh yeah, I’ll upload pictures from our trip to Hawaii and California. No problem!”  I hate to pull the preschool-card again, but we’ve barely been back a week and I’ve already volunteered three times at Noah’s school — including doing an art project with the class (tip: glue + glitter + preschool = sticky, sparkly four-year-olds)  — and arranged to host another multi-child playdate (some people never learn) so finding the time to go through some 500+ photos is a little difficult.

I’m almost done but to keep you entertained while I finish up the photo galleries, here’s a short video of my brother making a baby cry.  Nice one Tito Dennis.  (And thanks Carol for the video!):

Two Things That I Love

Dimpled baby hands

And pudgy little baby feet

New Year, New Blog

I’ve been seriously neglecting this blog lately. And to be honest, when 2010 rolled around I was kind of considering just letting it fall by the wayside. Not that I hate blogging — it just takes up a lot of time. But then I got this in the mail earlier this week:

Yes, that’s right.  Coming and Going…THE BOOK.  As a belated birthday gift, my brother slurped my blog entries and turned it into a handy, portable, yet oh-so-stylish book. Two and a half years of my life condensed into 252 neat little pages. And since I am now kind of a published writer (ok, not really), I thought, well I guess I better keep this writing business up.  And so here I am again.

But first things first.  Before I can write about anything current I need to quickly recap my December.  Because it just wouldn’t feel right otherwise.  So here is what you missed since my last post…

A Cookie Decorating Playdate featuring five 4-year-olds hopped up on sugar.  This meant lots of Ben 10, yelling, screaming, some fighting, quite a bit of crying, colored sugar all over the floor, and have I mentioned the yelling and screaming?  Yeah…

A trip to Disneyland with Santa Claus, manufactured falling snow, a small monsoon and having to buy emergency ponchos.

A trip to Ocean Park with fake snow (tip: soap suds, while resembling snow, do not taste like snow.  Don’t eat them), fake snow innertubing and Noah riding on his first roller coaster (a water ride which he was enjoying…until, you know, the 20-foot plunge at the end…).

A new lens for me — a cheap, plastic Diana lens for dreamy looking pictures.  So pretty.

And general cuteness all around.

Then we jetted off to spend Christmas in Hawaii followed by me, Julian and Noah flying to CA to spend the next week with my family.  But I’m saving that for another post.

Happy New Year everybody!

A Couple of Firsts and a Makeover

First Number One

Have I mentioned that we started Julian on solid food?  Yeah.  Already.  Given Noah’s history of allergies, Julian’s doctor had recommended that we wait until Julian was six months old before introducing solids (the later a baby starts, the less likely they are to develop food allergies) but Julian went from needing to eat every six hours one week, to every five hours the next week, to every four hours the following week, and by Thanksgiving weekend he was hungry every three hours.  It was a little much.  So Mark and I decided it would be a good time to start him on solids.

I found an organic four grain porridge from a UK company for babies starting at four months, and I know you’re supposed to start with single grain food but a quinoa/rice/millet/amaranth blend sounded so much more appetizing than just plain old rice.  Plus, Julian loves this stuff.  Like, seriously loves it.  From past experience I was expecting the first feeding to be messy — more a chance for the baby to get acquainted with rice cereal than to sate his appetite.  But Julian took to solids like an old pro.  He pushed some of the food out of his mouth with his tongue of course, but surprisingly most of it ended up getting eaten.  And when we ran out of cereal, he screamed at us until I fixed another serving for him and fed him that too.  Halfway through that first feed he started grabbing for the spoon and trying to guide it into his mouth, not letting go until the spoon was empty.  He also screams when we take too long putting cereal on the spoon and his mouth is empty for more than two seconds.  Yep…I have a good feeling that of my two boys, Julian is going to be my adventurous eater and potential chef (which more than makes up for the fact that he is a crappy sleeper).

Naturally, I have video of the first feeding, but it’s boring and I don’t feel like trying to edit it into something watchable.  But here’s a picture instead:

First Number Two

Mark has been trying to convince me for the last three months that Julian needs a haircut. I’ve been resisting because his hair is finally long enough that it doesn’t stick straight up all the time (plus it’s kind of cute like that and it smells good). Part of it is also vanity because I see so many babies — some twice Julian’s age — with less hair than he has so I like to flaunt his long, flowy locks (and no, I really don’t mind that most people assume he’s a girl because of it). But with Christmas coming up (read: lots of photo ops), I finally conceded that the boy looks a little on the raggedy side. So this morning, while Mark held a sleeping Julian in his arms, I grabbed my hair scissors and started snipping away. And now the boy has gone from looking like a baby girl with shaggy hair:

to a baby girl with a bad haircut:

Oh well. At least it’ll grow out.

A Makeover
Way back when Noah first outgrew his crib, Mark and I were kind of unprepared for it so we ended up buying the first toddler bed that we happened to come across — which just happened to come from Ikea. Mark and I have a love/hate relationship with Ikea. Ikea has saved us many a time when we’ve been too broke or busy to buy real furniture and a lot of their stuff is actually really cute, but we have quality issues with them. And sizing issues…that is, furniture from Ikea doesn’t seem to come in standard sizes so if you ever want to accessorize them or, say, get new bed sheets, you’re kind of forced to buy them at Ikea too unless you want something that isn’t quite the right size. I hate Ikea bedsheets. Especially their overly cutesy children’s sheets which we had because, surprise, they were the only ones that fit Noah’s bed. So, we’ve been itching to redecorate Noah’s room for a while. We finally found a children’s furniture company in HK that we liked and that wasn’t exorbitantly priced so we designed and ordered a bed for Noah. After four weeks, it finally came yesterday:

Mark loves it because he designed it to look like a castle; I love it because the steps are also drawers so there’s a ton of storage in his room now; and Noah loves it because it’s got steps and a curtain for privacy. So happiness all around. Here it is after four hours of rearranging books and toys:

And if the new bed provides an incentive for Noah to stay in his room all night long rather than coming into our room in the early morning and crowding me, well, to me (and my poor achy back) it’ll be well worth the money.

Cultural Food Festival

Today was the Cultural Food Festival at Noah’s school.  I’ve been feeling a little burnt out with his school lately — what with volunteering, fundraisers, playdates, assemblies and all that good stuff — so I thought, “Well, why don’t I skip just this one event?”  I tried to ignore the gazillion notices the school sent us about the event but eventually I clued in on their message — hey, this is actually kind of a big thing at the school.  So I got in touch with the parent coordinator for the U.S. table to let her know what our “American food” contribution was which meant that this morning I was up at 8 am making a ton of grilled cheese sandwiches.

The Cultural Food Festival was actually really fun and I’m glad that I decided to participate in it after all.  They started off the cultural assembly in the gym with their Parade of Nations, where all the children got to walk on stage with their flag while the Head of School, Dr. Andy, rattled off facts about each nation.  Going into HK Academy, I knew that it was a pretty diverse school and it was one of the reasons that I liked the school so much, but I had no idea just how diverse it was until I went to the assembly.  There were students representing 40 different countries — from Argentina to Wales.  Of the 14 children in Noah’s class alone, there are kids from the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Mexico, Hong Kong, Australia, Japan, Thailand and Germany.  It was amazing to see all of that represented on stage.  Hands down, the U.S. delegation was the largest.  Here is Noah getting lost among all the other Americans:

Some of the children were dressed in extravagant costumes representing their country.  Whenever we travel, we occasionally pick up clothing for Noah so he’s got things like a rugby jersey, a traditional Singaporean shirt, t-shirts for Japanese baseball teams, etc. but nothing that really shouts “I’m American yo!”  The most American thing I could find was the football shirt that Cristina had sent him so an extra big thank you again to her.  Here are all of the different flag bearers on stage at the end:

Some of the things that I learned during the assembly…

• Canada is the mosquito capital of the world
• In Malaysia, more people are born during the month of October than any other month
• In Poland, the largest section in any grocery store is the candy aisle
• Nepal has the only flag that is not a quadrangle
• New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote
• Japan has a 100% literacy rate
• India is the only country that has a bill of rights for cows

There were a few performances after the parade and then we all headed up to the rooftop to where all the food was.  Here is the map of food table locations just so you can get an idea of how they were organized:

It was awesome to see all the different types of food they had there and to get a chance to sample them.  I actually didn’t get to try too much — Noah kept hovering around the Chinese table because apparently they had the best desserts — but I was able try a couple of new items at Argentina, Iran and Israel’s table (I purposefully stayed away from the Australian table because I suspected most of their food offerings might have been laced with Vegemite.  Uh, no thanks.).  So overall, a very fun event.  I’m actually even looking forward to next year’s festival.

Julian vs. The Pacifier (vs. His Hand)

At 20 weeks old, Julian’s gaining more and more control over his movements daily — particularly his hands. On the plus side, this means he’s just that much more fun to play with since he’s more interactive. He reaches out for his toys, he grabs his toes and my fingers, and he swats in the air when he’s happy. He even fights with me when he’s choking on his bottle and I try to take it out of his mouth — he’s strong enough to keep the bottle jammed into his mouth despite a heavy coughing fit. On the downside, this is bad news for his pacifiers.  We get a few Dr. Strangelove moments where it seems like Julian is fighting with his own hands — one struggling to keep his pacifier in his mouth, the other trying to fling it out.  But let’s face it, this is actually pretty entertaining as well (mostly because of all the screaming involved)…

Birthday Nom Noms

My birthday was on Saturday and normally I like to have something nice and low-key (with the exception of #29 when Mark threw a surprise birthday dinner party for me…and #30 in Thailand…but really, they are usually low-key). For some reason, for the better part of this year I thought that I was turning 33. So when I actually did the math and realized I was only 32, I felt like I had gained a year and was pretty happy with that already. Bad math aside, Mark knows that eating also makes me pretty happy so he planned my birthday around some pretty good meals.

First of all, there was some sleeping in. I’m not sure in what part of the universe waking up at 9 am is considered “sleeping in” but apparently I live in that part of it. Mark and Noah left so Noah could do some birthday present shopping for me, so Julian and I had a nice, leisurely morning by ourselves. At noon I met up with Mark and Noah at Sevva, one of Mark’s favorite restaurants, where we had lunch reservations. Noah was pretty tired from all the shopping so he kind of conked out in our booth, but not before he presented me with the gift that he had picked out — a modernized friendship bracelet in silver and pink:

Of course, Noah woke up in time for my birthday cake — the Marie Antoinette Crave cake. Yes, my cake comes with its own name, but then again, if you were a cake and you looked like this:

well, you’d probably want your own name too. It was a pistachio layer cake with a light raspberry cream filling, studded with different types of macaroon cookies and topped with a huge mound of cotton candy.  Naturally we all had massive stomachaches afterwards…but it was totally worth it.

Mark and I had dinner reservations later at Spoon (which is one of my favorite places…in the whole world) but we seriously needed an eating break.  So after spending some time with the kiddos at home, Mark and I did a little pre-dinner shopping.  I had seen a coat at Ted Baker a few days ago that I loved but had resigned to “strictly covet only” status, but with Mark alongside me (and more importantly, his credit card), I got to pick it up as my birthday present:

I seriously love this thing.  Seriously. There’s nothing about it that I don’t drool over — double-breasted, military-style trenchcoat with a twirly lower half — how could you not love that? And it’s red! And even the lining is cute. Of course, the cold spell has ended (for now) and we’re back to running the A/C again but this gives me just one more reason to look forward to winter.

So it’s safe to say that Mark done good. Leave it to him to find a way to make aging less painful.