Category: Baby stuff

Everything about the baby

Invisible Fruit

I was feeding Bryan small, chopped pieces of fruit (which he LOVES) when one of them fell right of out his mouth onto this booster seat. Before he could pick it up and throw it all over the place, I got it and put it aside. This was when Bryan started to “pretend” the fruit was still there — He picked up the invisible fruit with his thumb and index finger, pretended to put it in his mouth and smiled while tilting his head upwards looking at me. I laughed out loud. Now he knew I thought it was funny. So he did it again just to make me laugh.

This is now part of the “dropped food” routine. I didn’t think kids were able to “make-believe” until they are much older!? But whatever…

Kids are the best!

Crawl

Murdza sent me a link to a short video clip of his son, Walker, taking his first steps. That was actually pretty exciting seeing a child started walking for the first time right in front of you. Seeing how fast and steady Walker was crawling all over the place, we started wondering why Bryan is taking his time with this “self mobility” business. Every child has a different development schedule and all, but when he’s falling behind on something, perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at what was REALLY happening.

It turns out that Bryan has been too cautious with the idea of being “hurt”. He drawls just fine on our bed (admittedly, he still falls face down on the mattress because it’s still relatively too soft), but when we put him on the hardwood floor, he refuses to crawl… because he knows it hurt if he falls face down… And crawling on the stupid hardwood floor hurts his knees….. What the hell!

So Grace started putting a spare area rug that Margaret had given us on the livingroom floor to encourage Bryan to crawl to her and/or to his toys. The “area rug” experiment worked wonders. In just two days, he can now fly across the area rug to his destination… sometimes in tears because he REALLY doesn’t want to do it. But hey, the kid’s gotta learn to move around sooner or later.

Now the task of child-proofing the apartment begins. Joys of early childhood development!

Record High

The past few days in the Silicon Valley have been unbearable. Record high temperatures appear to be everywhere on the map. But of course, that’s no global warming, just the nature… The White House says so.

Bryan has been having trouble sleeping at night because it’s so hot and humid at night. So we have had to mobilize fans in the apartment — one to move cooler air into the apartment when the sun sets and another to cool Bryan off. The strategy is to give him a nice and cool bath before bed time and try to keep him cool with the two fans going… But last night was so exceptionally hot that we had to use THREE fans!

So now Bryan takes 3 cool baths a day to stay cool… Or else nobody gets any rest in the apartment…

Bloody Nose

Bryan woke up a couple of times in the middle of the night crying. The ritual has been to rock him gently back to sleep in the dark– and that usually works. But this morning he cried a little harder for a little longer. At first we didn’t pay much attention, but the second time he woke up within 10 minutes, I turned the light on and found his nose covered with blood!

Although we found no cuts, bruises or any obvious signs of wound on any parts of his body, the amount of blood (enough to cover the entire upper lip and then some) worried us. I quickly cleaned him up to examine further but still found no open wounds. And he stopped complaining as soon as I cleaned up his nose.

Margaret said her daughter also had bloody nose once when the weather was really dry. Hopefully I will never see blood on him ever again! Poor kid…

What Does the Deaf Dream?

I asked myself that same question a while ago about dreams of the blind and deaf. Apparently the answer involves a lot more than I’d thought. The article links intellectual development to language development, which is an entirely interesting topic I’d never thought about.

One of these days I have to look into Noam Chomsky and the like and their theories on langauge and brain. This philosophy in conjunction with neuroscience is fascinating stuff!

License to Raising Children

We live in a day and age (and specifically in Western Worlds, a society) where almost everything we do needs some kind of proof, certification or license to show that we are capable of doing what we say we can do.

Job hunting — diploma or relevant skills,
Driving — driver’s license (different license types for different vehicles!),
Teaching — teaching certificate for k-12,
Owning a pet — pet license,
Owning a gun — gun license (boo!),
Fishing — fishing and gaming license,
… etc.

So, if something as trivial as owning a pet needs licensing, I don’t understand why there isn’t a license for being parents?! If we need a license and proof to take care of someone else’s children (in the case of K-12 teachers), is it not important enough that we get a license that shows we know how to take care of our kids as well?

Children are probably the single most important asset a society has for its own long-term survival. But yet we do everything we can to trivialize childrearing and children’s education. Ever since I took those Early Childhood Education classes, they’ve opened my eyes on just how typical parents (mis)treat their children in all kinds of circumstances.

That’s why I believe that before becoming a parent, everyone should attend compulsive but FREE government funded childrearing and education classes and pass a basic “parenthood competency exam” to receive a license. Having observed what some people do to their children, there has to be a comprehensive understanding on just WHAT children are and how to give them a healthy life. This kind of law will probably never fly, but if you think about it, the society as a whole will be a better place if one were implemented well.

Take, for example, abused children are more likely grown up to be abusers themselves. If the society can spend the initial dollars and initiatives to make sure these kinds of problems are fixed in the beginning, it wouldn’t have to spend millions of dollars later trying to patch the problem — and the “problem”, of course, is what started as an innocient child. I think I wrote about this before.

I guess issuing licenses for the right to become parents is a little too extreme. And I guess that won’t stop idiots from getting licenses either — considering how many drunk driving violations there are every year despite driver’s licenses.

Toys

When taken with a broader definition, “toy” can mean a lot of things — gadgets for geeks, frivolous and over-priced show-off transporations, relationship between two people, or, simply, just something to play with.

Adults seem to have no problems treating ourselves with “toys” of all kinds. Of course, all justifiable in the name of productivity, utility and convenience (but seriously, when can a Rolax do that a $50 Swatch can’t?). We are also compulsive buyers who crave for the latest and the greatest model of everything. But what it comes down to is this: We are no more childish than the kid standing next to us, sobbing from the cold rejection of his parent for that Pokemon “toy” he really wanted. The only difference between us and him? Cold, hard cash and a parent standing in the way. We are no more clear-headed than he, nor are we more logical or reasonable than he.

I think males have a worse tendency in this than the female species, too. Just think about that for a moment. (Though ladies do have a tick for different types of things).

So I wonder why adults subject the double standards on kids when they themselves can’t control what kind of “toys” they think they ought to have and sometimes for unexplanable reasons. Raising kids takes a lot of responsibility. And everytime when I see a parent dragging his/her child away from a toy with unqualified reasons, I can’t help but wonder what kind of lessons s/he is teaching the child — that it is OK for me to impose this on you even though I can’t really tell you why.

When implied in a social order, this kind of subjective non-reasoning can take a toll on how we solve problems socially and politically. When a whole generation of kids growing up thinking it’s OK to have double standards, as long as it’s enforced top-down, we are going to have problems in the society. I guess I could argue that the same thing goes to raising children in general. But that’s a whole other topic altogether.

Baby Language

We are beginning to think that Bryan is a “talker”…. maybe it’s from all the phone excited phone conversations she had when she had Bryan that he picked up his exceptional skills with words. He can now comprehend and “speak” quite a few of the words that matter to him (“milk”, “mama”, “wua-wua” [one of the cats], and “mumum” [I want to eat whatever you are eating]). But there’s one word that he probably invented that we haven’t been able to figure out what it meant… maybe some of you parent-readers know what it is… “ah-boo-tchee”…

It’s been studied that babies who know of no spoken language can indeed communicate with each other with their seemingly innocent and meaningless talks.

Maybe the adult langauge is the stupid stuff. Maybe the baby langage is so much more supreme that we are actually dumbing them down to our tedious, boundary-driven and rules based languages.

Season of Sicknesss

Bryan caught a cold two weeks ago. He was really congested for the first few days and got really mad for not being able to breathe through his nose. I read somewhere that younger infants don’t know how to breathe through their mouths if something blocks their nasal passages — this makes me feel better that Bryan got his first cold now.

We had to learn to use one of those suction bulbs to clear Bryan’s nasal passages so that he could breathe better. At first he hated it — he would cry, scream, use his hands to block the bulb, turned his heads so that I couldn’t get to his nose… etc. It was heartbreaking. But after first couple of suctions, he realized that thing did him good and remained calm for the next few suctions. Luckily he got much better after a few days. But man, getting that mucus out of his nose was quite an interesting experience…

The first three nights of his cold was almost unbearably heartbreaking. He couldn’t sleep, eat or even enjoy his toys. He coughed so hard that he’d wake himself several times in the middle of the night — it was almost like we had a newborn again — taking turns to wake up every couple of hours to comfort and soothe him as he cried himself to sleep.

We also learned something new through this new experience — Bryan has associated the verbal sound of “mamma” with Grace as being the mother. And often he preferred Grace to comfort him over me (to which, strangely enough, I don’t feel jealouse). And we know this because he’d call out “mamma, mamma” while unstoppably sobbing, looking at Grace’s direction even when he was in my arms.

He recovered from the cold in about a week. Sooner than Grace recovering from her cold — the same one the Bryan had*.

Then a couple of days ago, Bryan experienced a mild fever. We were pretty scared being that this was his first fever, and we saw that he became very inactive and reluctant to play. The doctor said to observe him for a couple more days and see if the fever goes away or that he develops any rash.

Sure enough, we saw rash all over his body on Sunday**. Now with more evidence, the doctor determined that Bryan had developed Roseola, a very common viral illness for young children.

I guess Bryan’s immune system will be bombarded with more and more illnesses from now on. It’s also time for Grace and I to buckle up and brace ourselves with more sleepless nights and occasional sore throats.

Ah~… Parenthood…

*I am usually considered the weak one in the family. But I was okay throughout the entire cold episode.

**We had to cancel our plans with Jason and Alicia because Bryan didn’t feel very well.

Awakening

A person probably goes through hundreds, or maybe thousands, of “awakenings” in his lifetime. Some ideas I simply couldn’t grasp a few years ago seem so clear and obvious to me today. But observing and experiencing such awakenings isn’t always so easy. However, it’s very breath-takingly memorable and refreshing when Grace and I see it in Bryan as he becomes ever more aware of everything around him.

Ever since our last observation with Bryan’s awakening to his hands, it seems like he’s suddenly seeing the world through a completely different perspective. To illustrate this, take Grace’s observation of Bryan at our neighbor’s: Bryan was excited to see some kittens as our neighbor fed them. So he started clapping his hands to show “approval” (as in, “yes, this is worthy of my clapping hands) and his excitement. The he proceeded to take the neighbor’s hands and waved them in the motion of clapping hands. Bryan was trying to teach our neighbor how to clap hands to share his joy!

Life is good.