babyboba

Tori’s one year birthday has come and passed, and our little girl is quickly becoming a toddler. One small step at a time. She took her first steps last week, on July 26th. Or at least, the first that her mom had seen. It was when no parents were in her immediate vicinity and she took 3 little steps between couch and chair. Of course, the moment I exclaimed at her brilliance, she sat down because she didn’t know what just happened.

To celebrate the big birthday, we went up to see the grandparents and had a nice family party with relatives. As the first grandchild, and the first baby out of all my cousins, Torito is the center of attention for everyone and the recipient of many many presents. However, I also know that being the oldest comes with responsibility, so while she gets to be the most spoiled, she will also eventually be the one who has to occupy all the other kids, find games for them to play, be generous with her toys, and be in charge of holiday performances and playing the piano for Christmas carols. For now though, she held everyone’s attention as she pushed toys across the floor and got spoiled as they kept a steady supply of strawberries and blueberries in her grasp. We got to dress her up and did our version of zhua zhou. For our version, we had a music box, a ballerina, a pen, a calculator, a tennis ball, a necklace, and a violin. After dressing her up in the chi pao grandma bought for her, we let her loose and she went straight for the calculator. The next 2 times, we added a strawberry to the fold, but she missed her culinary calling and picked up the necklace and then the ballerina. So, if we take all that into consideration, maybe she’ll be a dancer that comes out with a fashion line and then owns her own business! It was lots of fun. We also got her a little cake and she enjoyed digging in and stuffing her face.

After coming back to LA, we had a baby party where we had like 5 kids come over to swim in the apt pool. It was so cute. We started Tori swimming too late. She is now very clingy and not really willing to let go. I’ve been taking her into the pool more often now that the weather is so warm so I’m hoping she’ll start to feel more comfortable in the water and relax.

Also since her first birthday, her hand eye coordination is getting so much better. I love watching her as she picks up blueberries one at a time and puts them into her mouth. She’s discovered that sometimes they are tart and sometimes they are sweet so now she will often take a bite to try it before stuffing the rest in her mouth. She’s learned how to climb up on the couch now, using her arms to pull herself up.

Torito got sick for the first time this past weekend. I guess we’ve been lucky that she hadn’t gotten sick at all in the last year, but all that made for the first time she did get sick all the more scarier because we didn’t know what to do. It all started during dinner. We had just finished a full day of lunch at Furaibo, the husband’s fave, stopped at Babies R Us to buy a small dump truck and some diaper genie refills and by dinner time, I noticed Torito just yawning and yawning. We picked her up and mommy knew at once she had a fever. We finally opened the thermometer from the package and tried both the butt and ear one and were pleasantly surprised to see that they were pretty close. And then I called the doctor. Thankfully the doc called back in about 20 min and said I didn’t need to panic and that we could give her some motrin or tylonol and she’d be fine and if after 4 days she still had the fever to bring her in. That night she slept with me and now a couple days later, she is pretty much back to normal. We knew she was feeling better when she wouldn’t stay still enough to let me take her temperature anymore.  And now we know what to do with the baby feels sick.

TummyTubs

The TummyTub® is a baby bath, designed in the Netherlands by professional caregivers, that creates a womb-like experience for baby. It helps with colic and gas, and saves space and water!

This must be why my kid loved being put in an ottoman.

Parents cope with child with schizophrenia - Los Angeles Times

Jani’s psychiatrist at UCLA, Dr. Karen Lim, has tried several medications. A whopping 300 milligrams of Thorazine manages to stop the psychosis, but it too causes dystonia.

Michael worries that the heavy doses of medication might kill his daughter. But without it, she might kill herself. Jani had recently told Michael that the temperature in Calalini had risen to 200 degrees — a sign that her hallucinations are worsening. She also says that 400-the-Cat is being really bossy.

One of the best things about Torito getting older is her awareness to the world around her. I took her to the Long Beach Aquarium last week and it was pretty awesome being able to show her the fish and sea anemones. I put her hand in the water and she made some funny faces. Just as I am able to show her more of the world, she is also freely discovering it as well. She will now look at us and gesture her thoughts to us by handing us books she wants us to flip through, pointing to the tupperware holding the crackers, bringing over the container with cereal, and bringing us various toys in her play area. When we were at the aquarium, she was often times more interested in all the kids and babies in their respective strollers as we walked around. And I could see her eyes taking it all in, processing what everyone was doing.

Just as our kiddo is extremely curious, she is also just a big ham. I feel like she is going to be extroverted, unafraid to share her emotions, and also very stubborn in knowing exactly what she wants. As a parent, I think I’m going to have to embrace that and really learn how to harness that determination and outgoingness. When I see how determined she is to put a ball on the walker and push it across the room, it reminds me that as she gets older, I don’t want to be the one telling her not to do something because it doesn’t make sense. I need to let her learn and try what she thinks is right and guide her when she looks at me to help.

But until then, I can laugh when she makes funny faces.

In 2 weeks, Torito will be 11 months old. I’ve never known 11 months to fly by so quickly. In the recent weeks, she went from sleeping through the night, to waking multiple times without being consolable. Now, though she wakes a few times still, I let her cry it out for a minute or two and she’ll fall back asleep. However, this makes for some odd dreams for yours truly since I’m never fully asleep and never fully awake.

This past weekend, we had a scare where Torito managed to use the bumper and toys in the crib to flip herself over and end up on the floor. How she did it exactly, I don’t know. I was in the bathroom when I heard the thud and crying, running out I saw her on the floor. Needless to say, she ended up in bed with me after that.

Her walking is getting better, the lion walker is her favorite toy and she will try to load it up with whatever toys she can get to stay on it and go back and forth across the room. She’s also a little monkey, climbing in out and around whatever she can get her hands on.

She’s learned how to point, and will often take to holding her hand up with her finger pointed, as if she were saying, i’m #1, or as her mom likes to call it, the ET phone home finger. And as she’s becoming better at expressing herself, we can tell when she’s done eating by the way she starts to throw her food over the side of the high chair. She loves to drink water and will exclaim the goodness with a nice long ahhh after each gulp. And when she’s tired, she’ll crawl into our laps and put her head on our legs. It’s so exciting.

So it took several months, 9 to 10 to be exact, but our little one is finally sleeping through the night. It started one night where she was exhausted and went down at 8 pm, cried fora couple minutes around midnight and the next time I woke up to her cries it was 5 am! I was shocked, she had never slept that long before. I thought it was a fluke. But then it happened again and a couple more nights and now we are on a roll. I’m so proud of her.

While we get more sleep now, it comes at a tradeoff. Since Torito is sleeping more soundly, that means she has that much more energy during the day. Plus she is getting better and better at walking on her two little feet. She can pull herself up and move across the room while holding on to the furniture. And now she can push her little yellow lion walker across the room taking a couple steps at a time. She is becoming more fearless as she climbs over everything and gets more and more confident on her two legs.

Tori’s take on the current economy

Every week now, Torito is growing, growing bigger, growing up. She has started to stand, and now that she can, there’s no way she’s going back to her previous life of rolling around the floor. The world is new when you can now see 1 and a half feet above the ground. No longer is her world a view of shoes and feet, though she’s always been a fan of feet. Instead she can pull herself up now, and the goals are bigger and better. The top of the couch, climbing out of the crib, pushing open and closing doors. Her favorite right now is joining us in bed and then nosediving off the couch to the floor. If we’re there to catch her, she gets to flip and tumble and she’ll scream with joy. If we’re not there, then she face plants and cries. We’re working on showing her to use her feet to crawl over.

ma ma! Well, to be fair, her first word was Ahhhhh, Ahhh, Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! She’s very good with the letter A. All other vowels are yet to be heard, but the first word with a consanant… dum dum dum… ma ma. Hooray! We are hitting milestone after milestone. She is definitely getting better at standing, and is learning how to fall back on her butt from standing position.  She likes taking steps while we hold her up and is super proud when we cheer her on. She is eating finger foods on her own and loves feeding herself. She has learned how to clap and will put her hands together as we sing songs, and when the nanny comes in and leaves, she’ll wave her arms like little airplane propellars to say hello and goodbye. And now, the talking. First there were coos, then there were yells.. Then she learned how to grunt, growl and smack her lips. From there, we got mmmmmm.. and today finally we heard the ma ma ma ma ma… She doesn’t associate it to me yet, but it’s a first step. We’ll be saying it a lot the next couple of days. I guarantee it. Though it’s funny, every time we try to get it on camera, she clams up. Don’t be shy Torito!

We’re almost at 9 months, and this week Torito has discovered that she can pull herself up to standing position. She discovered this and since we’ve moved her to the crib, we have found that she will tend to pull herself up, but can’t seem to let herself fall down. The result? She’s been waking up at 4 am the last couple of nights, first with a little hey you scream to let us know she’s awake. Then after we ignore her for about 15 min, she’ll start the screaming. Oh the screaming. Eventually, we get exhausted and we pick her up and bring her to bed with us. But that’s not the end of it. She’s now adept at crawling and rolling so she’ll roll and crawl everywhere, often to the edge of the bed where we’ll then have to pull her back. Of course she thinks it’s a game, of course she does, so she’ll do it repeatedly with no thought of the impending fall off the bed that will occur. Last night, Daddy gave in to the cries and was the one who brought her to bed with us, of course Daddy was also the one who then proceeded to leave the room to sleep in the living room when she was rolling around the bed. What does that mean? That leaves mommy half asleep holding on to her baby making sure that she doesn’t roll off the bed, even though it’s already happened twice and mommy feels really guilty about it.