Snow Day

This past weekend we took a little family outing to the snow. I was so excited to take Baby Bear to play in the snow...It wasn't too cold outside, so we made sure to put on some mittens and a jacket. When we placed her down to walk in the snow, she promptly started crying. Then she tried to take a step, but ended up falling. When she had pulled herself up again, her mittens were covered with snow. When she cries she tends to rub her face...so poor kid got another surprise when she felt that cold snow against her face. Needless to say, she wasn't too happy with the snow.

So we let her carry Sonja...and she seemed a little bit happier. She wouldn't walk around though, she just stood in one spot.



Perhaps she'll have more fun next season.

Dolly...er Baby Bear

Matt claims that Baby Bear is my clone. I keep reminding him that I am physically unable to just spawn another human being on my own. He likes to joke that the genes from my side of the family are just too dominating. What do you think?





Uh, if you can't tell, I'm the baby on the top and Baby Bear is the cutie on the bottom.

Prunes

"Baby Bear, it's time to come out of the bathtub."

"Moe." (translation: no)

"You've been in there for twenty minutes now. It's time to come out."

"Duhk!"

"Yes, you have a duck. You can take it with you, but it's time to come out of the bath."

"Moe."

"All right, but I bet your feet are prunes now."

Unburdening

It's amazing how much stuff you can acquire in 30 years. These days I've been going through a "cleansing" process, I guess you can say. After years of being a packrat, I suddenly decided that it was time to throw everything away. I'm not sure what prompted it, but one day I noticed that we just had too much stuff. I felt like the masses of acquired goods were suffocating me.

I've always been a believer in simplifying to live a well-ordered lifestyle, but you wouldn't know it if you looked at our apartment. Perhaps sentimentality had a play in the increasing clutter - "I can't throw it away because so-and-so gave it to me." The future unknowns also had it's hand - "I might use this someday so I better not get rid of it." Or perhaps it was just flat out materialism. Who knows?

So little by little I'm throwing away, donating and questioning the use of objects in our home, and in a way it's helping to unburden my soul. The more objects I toss, the lighter I feel. It's wonderful.

Although, looking around our place I see it still looks horrible, but hey, at least I feel better about it.

Nya-Nya

Meet Sonja. She's less than a foot tall, blond haired, blue eyed, loves to wear flowers in her hair, and always has a smile on her face. Her cheery disposition never wanes even though she looks weathered and worn. She has braved trips through the washer and dryer several times in her short lifetime. She is also well traveled as the constant companion to a one-year old.

It's funny how Baby Bear interacts with her. Baby Bear's actions tell me how much she loves Sonja. For example, I catch Baby Bear often feeding her Cheerios and water. She holds the food/cup to her mouth saying, "nyum nyum nyum."

Sonja's place of honor is always beside Baby Bear whether in the car seat, stroller or highchair. Bear wouldn't have it any other way. Traveling without Sonja is preposterous.

Baby Bear isn't walking yet, but it's still important for her to take Sonja along despite lack of a free hand to carry her. She grabs Sonja with her teeth like a mother lion carries her cub and crawls to her next location.

Sometimes Baby Bear will wail loudly after naps. When I enter her room she has tears running down her face and points to the space between the crib and the wall crying out, "ma ma, nya nya!" I must then save Sonja from the dark spaces where she has fallen.

Sonja is the last thing she sees before falling asleep and the first thing she grabs for when she wakes up. Baby Bear cares for Sonja with tenderness and affection that makes me smile whenever I see it.

Even a one-year old needs a best friend.

inglês por favor

I was 12 when we got cable television in our house. It was the same week when my mom, my sis, and I all had chicken pox. So I guess you can say that thanks to the chicken pox, my mom broke down and got us cable.

One day our cable went on the blitz. We couldn't figure out what went wrong and neither could the customer service rep on the phone. We had snow on all of our channels except for 2-3 of them. This lasted for a few days until a serviceman could arrive to fix the problem. They believed it was some sort of wiring problem.

Uh, no. It turns out that my brother (1.5 years old at the time) managed to password protect and block most of the channels. All the serviceman had to do was reset the password and all was good again.

We still don't know how he did it. We didn't even know our cable box had that kind of capability.

Yesterday, I opened my Netfl1x movie, popped The Lakehouse into my DVD player and realized that I couldn't understand a thing. I changed the subtitle from "espanhol" to "frances" and then to "ingles" and thought, "Hmmm...that can't be right?" Then I started hitting random buttons and I got, "operação proibida atualmente pelo disco."

Baby Bear somehow changed the language of our DVD player to Portuguese. Matt and I are still scratching our heads because once we found the DVD instruction manual, it was a 10-step process to change everything back to English.

Kids are amazing.

The Real Baby Bear

This is the real Baby Bear:



Our Bear is quite the expressive one. She's not even really that sad...she just happened to not get what she wanted.

Typical toddler behavior has appeared. Beware.

Celebrations!

Our Baby Bear truly is a lucky one.

At 100 days old she got to celebrate her baekil Her Granny came over and brought her some white Korean rice cakes to toast the occasion.

At the age of 3 months old she had a Red Egg and Ginger Party thrown just for her. Baby Bear got to celebrate life and she even received her Chinese name.

Now at 1 year, she gets yet another celebration. Lucky girl!



She loves fish, so just for her, Auntie made her these cellophane fish which hung from balloons all around the room. Granny made sure there were lots of balloons to create an ocean just for Baby Bear.



She got all dressed up in her hanbok and participated in her dohl jabi. (Not sure what that is? You can read about it here) Baby Bear picked up a paintbrush, waved it around, then handed it to mom. Afterwards she played with the rice a little bit.



There was cake. Oh boy, was there cake. Just for Baby Bear, Nemo and Dory were affixed on a beautiful blue cake.



Here's to the next celebration!

The Holidays (By Baby Bear)

A couple of weeks ago my mommy and daddy threw all my belongings in the car, strapped me into my carseat where I was trapped for 7 hours! They only let me out when I needed to eat or have my diaper changed.

After our car trip, I met these nice people who said their names were "grandma" and "grandpa." They fed me good food. All I had to do was say "more" and I got whatever I wanted.

Christmas? What is Christmas? Everyone kept saying that it was my first Christmas, but I still have no idea what that is. I guess that's okay. I got lots of presents, and mommy and daddy even told me it was okay to rip the paper on the presents. The paper was fun! And the ribbons! Wow! I think there was something inside, but I didn't really know what to do with it.



See, here I am confused. My Uncle gave me something that everyone said was really neat, but sheesh, it's just a box.

I loved all the attention! I didn't have to crawl anywhere...All I had to do was pretend to cry and hold out my arms and I got a free ride. Other times I would just point and say "Bah" and people would give me food, drinks, or toys. It was fabulous!

My favorite part of the week was when mommy and daddy took me to the park. It was cold outside, but I got to see ducks! If you know me, you know that I love ducks! Daddy kept saying something about geese, but whatever...they're ducks. I also got to see a really small dog. Mommy said something about a squirrel, but whatever...My parents are so silly.



Alas, the week came to an end and mommy and daddy shoved me back in the carseat again. But at least my pink pony got to ride shotgun! Daddy was happy to have company in the front seat, because mommy sat in the back with me. I made sure that she wasn't bored by telling her to feed me and entertain me the whole way. Aren't I nice?

I had fun, but it was good to come home and sleep in my own bed.

A Week of Firsts...

For the week between Christmas and New Years Eve, we were visiting my in-laws. I call it a week of firsts...Here we go!

1) Baby Bear's 1st Christmas - She just missed last Christmas by 12 hours.
2) My 1st whole week at the in-laws - I got to see more of why padawanlee is the way he is...(I mean all good things, of course)
3) Baby Bear's 1st Birthday - Yay!
4) Baby Bear's 1st bite of cake - Tiramisu cake - yum!
5) Baby Bear's 1st bump on the noggin - she fell off her new toy car, cried, but was soon appeased with another toy
6) My 1st ride in a Porsche - Padawanlee was driving, I was closing my eyes and holding on tight.
7) Baby Bear's 1st Stuffed Animal that is larger than she is - Er, it's a 4 foot stuffed pink pony. Try to imagine driving 7 hours in the car with that thing in the front passenger seat (Carpool lane anyone?).
8) Baby Bear's 1st (and hopefully last) Stomach Bug - Yuck! She promptly passed it on to her dad, her grandma & grandpa (and upon returning home - her auntie and her granny).

Needless to say it was a busy week. Pictures to come soon...

Oh, 2006...where did you go?

Did anyone else feel like 2006 went by in a blur? I sure do.

I am stunned at how quickly this past year flew for me. It behooves me that I can't even remember how I rang in 2006. Seriously, I can't remember what we did to celebrate New Years a year ago. All I know is that we had a less-than-a-week old baby at the time.

But a year has now gone by and we have a one-year old baby bear.

We've gone from this:



To this:



Wow. What a trip.

Can You Say Daddy?

For those of you Simps*ns fans out there, here's a couple of quotes:

Bart: Homer!
Homer: No, Bart. Homer is what grownups call me. Call me Daddy.
Bart: Homer.
Homer: Daddy.
Bart: Homer.
Homer: Daddy.
Bart: Da…da…Domer.
Homer: Why, you little…?!

Homer: Can you say Daddy?
Lisa: Homer.

Seriously though, trying to get Baby Bear to say "daddy" has been something straight out of the Simps*ns. It goes something like this...

Matt: Say Daddy!
Bear: Maaaaat!
Matt: No, Daddy! Da-yee!
Bear: (says with a smile) Maaaaatt!
Matt: Da-da?
Bear: Matt!
Matt: Argh! (Or perhaps he should say "Doh!")

A Little Rain...

Sometimes in life, a little rain must fall.

For a while there, I thought it was raining. At least I could hear the rain falling outside...

Or at least I thought I heard rain falling.

Then I realized that it was a bright, sunny day... (huh?)

...and the rain was falling in our bathroom.

Yup, our bathroom ceiling is leaking again.

Check out our ceiling.



Not looking so good, eh?

Update: Well, it's less than an hour since I last posted...and our ceiling caved in about 5 minutes ago. Ergh.

Here's the damage:



At least you can't see into the 2nd floor apartment...

Ms. P

There is a woman who lives in the UK named Ms. P. Every once in a while, I receive an email from her updating us about her life and circumstances. She sends pictures and jokes and writes about her vacations and friends. She's been letting me know how she's doing by email for about 5-6 years now.

The problem is: I don't know who this woman is.

At first, I thought it was just a spam email, but the emails kept coming. I was so confused. I even sat there and thought through any possible way I could have met this woman, and how she came to have my email address on her friends list.

I just don't know.

So I wrote to her last year and asked her to remove me from her list and mentioned that perhaps she has my email address mixed up with someone else's email. I was very nice in my email.

Today I received an email from her continuing to tell me about how she's doing and what her plans are for the holidays.

*Sigh*

Trouble? Me?

This picture is so fitting of our Baby Bear these days: A mischievous smile on her face and horns growing from her head. She's still cute and lovable, but man, is she starting to become a little bundle of trouble. Of course, no one ever sees it, so we can't prove a thing. And that's probably why she's smiling...

Baby Bear and the Giant Nectarine (aka Stop the Carnage) - by Padawanlee

WARNING: Scenes may not be suitable for young eyes or produce.

This story takes place 1 month ago at a dining table far far away...
Once upon a time there was a lonely nectarine named Nenny.
Nenny was happily playing and rolling around with his other fellow Nectarines...
...when suddenly he rolled away and found himself all alone on the dining room table.

As Nenny was rolling across the table to find his friends, he suddenly heard a "oooo..." sound approaching behind him.

Suddenly a great big hand out of nowhere was drawing closer to Nenny.

Just as sudden as the first hand, another one drew near until both hands were around poor Nenny.
Nenny was in the clutches of a Baby Bear.
The massive hands brought Nenny closer to what one person would call a black hole or bottomless pit with 7 menacing pearly whites about to close in on our poor nectarine.
A "Chomp" was suddenly heard with a "smack, smack" sound following. What could be happening to poor Nenny?
One "squishy "chomp" was followed by another and another...
and another... Oh please stop the carnage, somebody!
Until there was almost nothing left of poor Nenny.
Baby Bear's encounter was by happenstance and it was just unfortunate that Baby Bear's curiosity at first innocent turned to a messy and yet delicious treat.
Alternate story line: Momma and Papa Bear were feasting on other goods when they gave the poor nectarine to Baby Bear to play with to pass the time for a few more minutes since she already finished her feast. To their surprise Baby Bear no longer was playing with the round object, but rather decided to try to eat it. Once she broke the skin of the fruit, curiosity turned into an irresistable dessert for Baby Bear (she really likes fruit). And the rest is history (or in the trash).

Imperfections

I think the scariest thing about being a parent is having another person watch your every move, listen to your every word, and try to imitate every action. I mean, yes, there are the good things that children pick up on, but every once in a while I find that my child is a mirror to my imperfections.

These days, Baby Bear is a sponge. Not so much verbally, but she tries to mimic as best as possible many of the things we do. She picks up clothes and tries to put it on, picks up the remote control and pushes the buttons, and sometimes I catch her trying to feed her doll Cheerios and water.

Sometimes I hear in her tone how she vocalizes frustration or anger...and it reminds me of how I deal with my own frustration and anger. I cringe inside when I hear it, because I'm not proud of the way I exude these emotions. I can have a short temper...and I've always disliked that about myself. It's one of those things that I wished I could have changed more.

I'm afraid of what darker things I might learn about myself as I come face to face with it in my daughter...let's hope she picks up on Matt's patience and temperament.

Our little piggy...

Bad Hair Day...

Matt and I have been trying to take Baby Bear to have pictures taken. Now that she's almost 10 months old, we thought that it was about time to do some of those typical parental duties like taking portrait shots at Sears. That way, the grandparents would be appeased for a while (especially since it's been 2 years and we still haven't gotten our wedding album put together....shhh!).

So we've been trying to take her for a few weeks now, but something always comes up. She catches a cold and we figure dripping snot would not be something we want captured for years to come. So we wait. She wakes up with a scratch on her face that left a red mark from her forehead to her cheek. So we wait again.

So finally after days of waiting, I was going to take her today. Unfortunately, we will have to wait a little bit longer. She seems to have developed the most stubborn cowlick I have ever seen. I tried water, combing, rubbing...everything short of hair products, and it still pops back up. Oh well, pictures will just have to wait...again.

Words...

"Muh muh muh!"
"What do you want, Baby Bear?"
"Muh muh muh!"
"Mama? Mum mum? A cow says moo?"
"Muh muh muh!"
"Milk?"
"Muh muh muh!" (Motions wildly with hands).
"More? Oh, you want more cereal? Okay!"

I am so relieved that Baby Bear is starting to actually talk. A little less than 10 months ago, I remember complaining to Matt about how I felt like the worst mom ever because I had no clue what she wanted or needed. It made me feel worse when I read books that said, "You will soon learn to know what your baby needs by the sound of his/her cry." Uh, I never figured that out. I read stories where fathers were amazed at their wife's ability to sense what was wrong just by the sound of the baby's cry. Matt was never amazed at my sensing abilities, he was more amused by my utter confusion. Baby Bear either had the same cry for everything or I just didn't know what to listen for.

These days Baby Bear says "muh(more)" and "ah-puh(up)." She asks for milk (ah-ma) and asks me where daddy is (da-da?). She picks up her rubber ducks (duhhk) and watches dogs (dohd) from her stroller on walks. When she's excited she says "ooh" and "wow(wha--how)" and when she wants us to read her favorite stories she simply says, "buh" (book).

So our conversations consist of one-word remarks, but hey, it's a start.


"Mommy, what is Halloween and why am I wearing piggy ears?"

Phobias

Everyone has a fear of something. I am afraid of heights. I am also afraid of bugs that have hundreds of legs.

We recently discovered that Baby Bear has a phobia. She is afraid of whole avocados. Not sure why, but whenever the avocado came near, she would try with all her might to scoot herself as far as possible. She wouldn't touch the thing, and she started to cry when it got too close.

And I thought my fears were silly.

Perhaps she'll feel better when she watches me gut out the thing and mash it to a pulp.


The offender