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!):

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)…

Thing One and Thing Two

“I will pick up the hook.
You will see something new.
Two things. And I call them
Thing One and Thing Two.
These Things will not bite you.
They want to have fun.”
Then, out of the box
Came Thing Two and Thing One!
–Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

Just a few, quick things about my Thing One and Thing Two.

In Which Noah Learns About Addition
A couple of weeks ago I was in the kitchen minding my own business when Noah walked in very upset and asking what happened to his fingers. They looked ok so I asked him what was wrong and the following conversation ensued:
Noah (in a very whiny voice): My hands! I used to have ten fingers and now I only have five!
Me (laughing): What?! You still have ten. Count your fingers again.
Noah: (counting one hand) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. See? Only five.
Me: What about your other hand?
Noah: (counts the other hand) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Only five!  I told you!
Me: No, I mean add them together. Count all of your fingers.
Noah: (counts both hands) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…7…oh.

Boys vs. Girls
Another conversation that Noah and I had recently:
Noah: Mom, I don’t like girl friends.
Me: What?! What are you talking about?! But you have lots of friends that are girls.
Noah: I know. But I don’t like girl friends.
Me: Whatever. Girls are cool man.
Noah: Well…you’re ok.

Conditional Love
Noah also let me know where I stand recently when he told me this right before I took him to his swimming lesson, “Mom, sometimes I love you and sometimes I don’t love you. But right now I love you.” Thanks, kiddo.

Why Elton John Rocks
For some random reason, it turns out that Julian loves the song Bennie and the Jets. And by loves, I mean that if he is doing his inexplicable crying thing, he almost immediately calms down as soon as he hears those first few opening piano chords. My guess is that the song encourages me to perform the ideal combination of bouncing and swaying that will magically calm babies down. I downloaded that song only two months ago and iTunes shows that I’ve played it 97 times already. And that number doesn’t include the times I hit repeat without waiting for the song to completely finish or the zillions of times we’ve played the version sung by The Sippy Cups. So yeah, he’s a fan.

Julian Laughing
I take a lot of pictures of Julian to try to capture this very brief, but awesome, part of his life. But there are some things that you just can’t capture with a camera. Like laughter. Which is why video comes in so handy:

Mandarin Songs

Friday was Noah’s last day at the Woodlands Montessori School. The night before he and Cathy baked brownies for his class. Cathy stayed up late to make some extra M&M cookies. Noah was not excited or sad about his last day of school or the brownies. His real excitement was having his baby brother come to school. Cathy promised to bring him when she dropped off the food. It was all he could talk about the night before. He is such a proud big brother.

The only sad part of the entire day was when Noah kept insisting he was “going on holiday”. Since all his friend’s ‘holidays’ consisted of going to England, SIngapore, Thailand or other foreign countries. Noah would be stuck with us in Hong Kong (at least until October when we do plan on having a proper vacation). It dawned on him this morning when we had this conversation…

Noah: Daddy, where are we going on holiday?

Me: What holiday? I’m working. We’re staying in Hong Kong. You start your new school in a few weeks.

Noah: AAAAHHHH man.

His Mandarin teacher was kind enough to make a CD of the songs they sing in class. Noah really enjoys playing the CD and singing along at home. For your viewing pleasure here is a short video.

A Rockstar Birthday Greeting

I mentioned before that my sister turned 30 on Thursday.  Well, you can’t really turn 30 without celebrating it — regardless of whether you want to or not.  So for my sister’s 30th birthday, my brother and his wife, her fiance, our parents and (to a smaller extent) me and Mark put our heads together to throw her a surprise party.  After much deliberation we settled on a Rockstar Karaoke theme for her party.  Obviously Mark and I couldn’t be there but we were able to put together a short rockstar themed birthday video for her featuring her favorite (and only) nephew.  I’m having some youtube issues right now so I can’t post the video here, but here’s a link to where you can watch it:

Carol’s Birthday Video

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Christmas Greetings From The Boy

Noah had his school Christmas concert on Wednesday.  I was afraid that he would get nervous and refuse to sing since he does sometimes refuse to perform on demand (the nerve!) but he did really well.  For a bunch of three to five year olds, they did pretty well with their repertoire.  They got through I’m a Little Snowman, Deck the Halls (in both English and Mandarin), We Wish You a Merry Christmas and I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas, including choreography.  Not bad.  Noah fiddled with his band aid a lot but I could see that for the most part he was singing and having a good time up on stage with all his friends.  Poor Noah still had a bit of blackeye left over from the previous weekend but at least he wasn’t the kid who fell off the stage.  Mark recorded the entire performance but we haven’t uploaded the video onto the computer yet.  Instead, I got Noah to give me a brief encore performance once we got home and here it is:

A Noah Fix for Lolo and Lola

My parents’ iMac just died. We’ve been holding weekly video chats on Mondays ever since Mark and I moved to HK 1 1/2 years ago so we can catch up and they can see the boy. But since their computer is dead with no idea when or if it’ll ever get back up and running, we’ve missed the last two chats. I’m pretty sure my mom is going through some kind of Noah withdrawal right now so this Noah update is for them.

Here’s a video of Noah singing the Wonder Pet’s theme song, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and the ABC song:

And some pictures of the boy…

Scrabble

My friend Jae, who totally sucks at word games, pointed this video out to me and since Scrabblephilia runs in my family, I had to share it:

By Popular Request…

Ok, so only my sister requested this, but since I have nothing better to do than oblige her, this post is for her. Carol and I were IMing recently and she admonished me for not putting up more pictures and videos of the boy. So here are two short videos.

This one I like to call Noah Shakes His Booty and it’s (you guessed it) Noah dancing. For some reason he’s obsessed with Oingo Boingo’s Dead Man’s Party and we really only tolerate it because it’s cute to hear him asking for “Oingo Boingo Bango”. Watch for two of his signature moves, the “Shake Your Booty” and the “Ribbit”:

And this one is Conversation with a Two-Year-Old. Because if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to speak to the Nugget these days, well this is what a lot of our conversations are like — part truth, part made up, some moving around and a lot of unintelligible phrases: