Category: Baby stuff

For those of you who’ve know Grace for long enough, you know Grace is an organization and clean freak. Everything in the Universe has to be in certain order — her order. For example, anything with a 90 degree angle MUST line up with perpendicularly with the edge of the table the object is sitting on. If it’s even one degree off, she’ll take the time to realign it no matter how busy she is.

So you can imagine I kind of live in a Cubist household where everything is lined up straight.

Ever since Bryan has become “mobile”, we noticed that he’s taken on this particular habit of Grace’s… at the age of 15 months… Three examples here:

1. Grace taught Bryan to put his toys back to where they belong before we pick him up from his playpen. The other day when I went to pick him up from the playpen, the first thing he did wasn’t putting his hands up, waiting for me to grab him from his underarms. But rather, he immediately started putting all the smaller parts of his toys into this “cooking pan” and even put its lid on. What’s more is, if an angular toy was misaligned in some way, he’d also take the time to put it back “in order” before he even closed the lid (i.e. if a toy was put in there side ways, he’d flip it around to make sure it’s in standing position). NUTS!

2. Bryan crawls all over the place in my work room when he plays. He’d throw things around and crawl to fetch them himself. One time I saw him, god forbid, accidentally bumped my computer bag out of “alignment”. He intuitively reached out his right arm to adjust it so that its back is flushed to the computer on the floor! WHAT THE….

3. The other day a friend from L.A. was in the area with his wife and 13-month-old (whom, by the way, has been WALKING since 12 months). The kid was walking all over the place and kicked the rug hard enough so that one corner was turned. Bryan, who was crawling behind him, immediately made sure the corner was put back in place before he crawled on to his play.

Now that’s discipline.

Plans are in the works to turn him into a back-scratching, shoulder-massaging, dish-washing and foot-rubbing machine.

Patrick and his wife, Ee-bin, had a baby last night (the big-C). They named him Tai, or “Lucky Tai” to be precise. They say he brings luck to Patrick because ever since Ee-bin’s pregnancy, Patrick’s screen writing career’s been going pretty smoothly. Hard work, you say? Blah! Hard work is overrated — luck is everything… 😉

Speaking of Patrick and luck, he and his partner, Marcus, are having a ball with some of the latest projects they are working on. Rumor has it that they’d been contracted to write the script for The Saw 4!

Here’s the clip for which they got picked and went on to win the Project Green Light.

No, I am not talking about expensive or hard-to-find or one-of-a-kind rarities that probably us adults enjoy more than the kids. As I imagine most parents may have discovered by the time their children turn one, Grace and I find that the things that make the best toys are…. ordinary household objects.

Think about it from a child’s perspective: They come in different forms, shapes, functions and colors. Many of them are “durable” (depends on how hard your particular child throws things). And many of them will engage the young minds for a good while. One of the things Bryan enjoys doing is fetching and digging out what he can find from my “office supplies” drawer — which happens to be the bottom drawer. The one thing he enjoys the most (for now) is to put a roll of scotch tape on an upright position and to watch it roll across the floor.

There are some things I don’t allow Bryan to take out of the drawer, though. But sometimes he’ll do it just to see if I’d stop him. One time he saw me observing him taking a few of those objects out of the drawer. He looked at me, and then he looked at those objects and slowly puts them back in the drawer one by one. All that without me saying a word! It was pretty funny when it happened. 😉

Wow… I can’t believe I went for 3 weeks without posting anything!

First some stuff on Bryan… He’s now practically a toddler with new vocabulary that continue to surprise us on daily basis. Even though we speak Mandarin to him 99% of the time at home, he seems to understand a whole lot of English words whenever Grace converses with the neighbor.

Speaking of languages, now we set Bryan’s Baby Einstein DVDs to French so that all three of us can learn it together from scratch. But boy, we really murdered some of those French pronunciations… Can you say “refrigerator” in French? Yikes! (For you German speakers, I can’t even begin to imagine what it is!). And all the “le, la, les and l’xxx” are confusing me. This makes me want to go back and dig out the French edition of my Rosetta Stone language DVD.

Also, Bryan is showing some early signs of “Terrible Twos”. He’s become very fussy and demanding of what he wants (and wants 5 minutes ago!) even though he has very limited vocabulary — no matter; action speak louder than words! I read somewhere that the “.5s” are even worse sometimes.

Bryan looks like a big rat in that Kangaroo costume… but CUTE nonetheless!

Discovery of H2O…

Ever since Bryan started crawling, it’s like the world is totally new to him again! And the best part is, he can go almost anywhere he wants to whenever he wants to… Almost!

The other day he discovered my black Dell keyboard and just started pounding away on it — with his feet…

On the other hand, he does look good with a keyboard… Chu 2.0 in the making…

Ah, the new era of crawling. For Bryan, his newly discovered mobility has lent him the ability to explore ever further in areas he’s never been to before — by himself. I try letting Bryan make his own mistakes as he continues his quests of discovering new objects and their uses (with adult supervision, of course), but these painful lessons sure take time to stick sometimes.

He has crawled pretty close to our cats water bowl a few times. But the kitchen seems like a bad idea for him to be around anyway. So we’ll be getting one of those adjustable gates to block his entrance to the kitchen for as long as possible, knowing fully that sooner or later he’s going to figure out how to dismantle the fence with brute force.

We’ve already moved our mini rack of wine collections near the entrance of the living room to where the bookshelf is. It’s a lot less accessible until Bryan discovers THAT part of the room. Until then, our 1997 Ruffino Riserva Ducale Chianti Classicos are safe.

Bryan discreetly dropped his toy in my mug as he simultaneously concentrated on sucking the yogurt through the straw. It was pretty funny.

Everything in Bryan’s hands these days goes to two places: the mouth and the floor… Occasionally he tries to put whatever in his hand (or just his hand) in any open container.

I had to implement my first child proofing today since Bryan started crawling — duct-taping an extended telephone line. Since we don’t own the house we live in, anything we do can not be permanent, hence the ghetto, but universally accepted, solution of duct taping!

Next we’ll probably have to look into those table edge bumpers.

August and September are probably the two busiest months for birthdays — or at least according to my humble calendar. I am sure nationally, aggregated birth dates probably average similarly throughout the months of each year. But at so far, August sure has been a busy month — Birgit gave birth to Ella, Hanny gave birth to Prestin, Su-fei is about to give birth to Xin-yi. And let’s not forget that Grace gave birth to Bryan, also in August! And just a side note, my ex-boss, Bella also gave birth to her son in August…

So maybe Sprint is not the season of love… Fall is!

Changing Bryan’s diapers has now become a real chore. Before he knew how to crawl, he’d just lie there helplessly to let you do whatever you need to do with him (change diapers, change cloths, putting on pants, apply sun screens.. etc). The task got tougher when he learned to turn around. And now we have to deal with him crawling all over the place with his butt naked. I had no idea how fast kids can fly with their butt naked even when I thought I got this “diaper change” thing down!