Category: Baby stuff

Everything about the baby

Bryan Starts on Solid Food

Bryan has been showing interests on adult food for a little while now. A couple of days ago, we finally got him his first baby cereal to try on. And he loved it! But sometimes he thinks it’s too slow to eat by the spoonful and prefers to gulp on his milk bottle. But he’ll eventually get used to it. Ah~ It’s almost time for some cool bibs.

On a separate baby news… I got to “speak” to Laura ON THE PHONE today! Brian called and said Laura just had to speak to someone on the phone. She is so sweet and cute!

Turning Over

Bryan is just starting to learn to turn on his side as he falls asleep. The action is similar to that of a tortoise on its back, extending its neck backwards, desperately trying to flip itself over. Bryan would extend his neck backwards while stretching the legs and bending them slightly towards the back, causing his body to tilt over to one side or the other (lately it seems he prefers to the left side). Then he hugs his blanket as he suckles the pacifier to sleep (the only time of the day he will even take the pacifier nowadays).

Nobody taught him how to do any of that stuff. It’s amazing how brains just learns and improves upon itself so rapidly.

Bryan Updates

Hmm… where to start…

Bryan is now becoming more and more precise in focusing and then grabbing something he wants. Prior to last week, he couldn’t control his hands even if he was obviously interested in something. With this new ability, Bryan is also starting to realize that he can cause an effect on something he touches.

Speaking of grabbing stuff, Bryan has one hell of a grip. Just today he grabbed my skin (what adults would other wise characterize as “pinching” ) and held on to it pretty tight. I couldn’t shake his hand off! That hurt like a biatch. And then he did it again with something else he grabbed on my desk. I actually had a hard time taking it off of his tiny little hand. I guess there’s a good reason babies should have good grips.

At almost five months, Bryan is also increasingly alert and aware of his surroundings. He will respond to sounds, precise movements and the ability to track them has also dramatically increased. Grace also noticed that Bryan now knows he should be sleeping when we put him on the bed, turn down the light and put a nice thick blanket on him. Very nice.

Since I am on the topic of sleep, it reminds me of a weird dream I had the other night. I dreamt of Bryan crying for some reason one night. But the weird part is, as soon as I opened my eyes and turned around, Bryan immediately started crying (in real life)! Spooky.

Back to Bryan…. He really wants to be able to sit up (so that he can see more stuff). But he can’t balance himself yet. Heck, he can’t even roll over! So now every time we put him on our laps, he tries to sit up as much as possible, or else he’ll make this weird sound until we let him sit up. What a jerk, huh? This applies to when he’s being bathed, when he’s playing and sometimes just right before he naps.

Pork Belly

I was giving Bryan his daily routine bath at its routine hour (at around 7PM), except this time I didn’t bother to change to shorts. There comes times when you feel confident in doing something routine enough that you just know nothing can be messed up. So as I sat on that tiny stool, trying harder than usual to bend over to wash Bryan’s hair, immediately I felt uncomfortable with something. And that something is giving me a hard time, hurts even, to bend over further to the normal position at which I typically give Bryan bath.

It turned out that it was my stinking fat belly. No more jeans.

The belt in my jeans unnaturally restricted my belly from getting out of my way like a nice pair of shorts with elastic waist straps would. When you can’t give your child bath bending over, that’s when you know you are too FAT!

I actually don’t eat that much (anymore). I mean, the only thing I don’t do is exercise. Where’s the crime in that? God I hate skinny people. It’s true, I used to be one.

I gotta look into that “cut the calories” program. Rumor has it that it’s going to be big. Or maybe this is a good time to go vegetarian full time!

But meat… so… hard… to… give… up… Hmm… Meat…

Let the Good Times Roll

We had a good time with Jason and Alicia again tonight. And this time we got to see a picture of Jason that’s totally unrecognizable.

Bryan, for some reason, was not comfortable with them tonight though. He’s seen them before, but he would just blast out crying whenever he sees them being too close to him. That doesn’t really happen when Michelle or Chee-hoi were here. Maybe that was why he cried so hard last time. Maybe Bryan is more used to the plain Asian facial features; their bolder features make his sensitive eyes hurt… Hah hah…

I also got to take out my teapot set today. I have only used that thing maybe 10 times the entire time I’ve owned the set. I oughta use the damn set more often. They cost me a fortune to have them brought over from Taiwan (thanks to J.J.).

It started raining heavily as Jason and Alicia were leaving. I love rain… so long as I don’t have to be soaked in it. I find the dripping sound on the ground soothing. This is the only time I like water (and drinking it, showering in it and toilet flushing with it), other than that, I am with my cats on this one — water sucks… getting wet sucks even more.

Calm Thyself to Sleep, Baby

We just witnessed an amazing achievement with Bryan today — he put himself to nap all on his own! Typically, Bryan’s sleeping routine requires someone to hold and cradle him with soothing classical music in the background (Jason, Alicia and Michelle can testify what they witnessed). And that’s been the regiment for the past two months or so. But today at around 2PM, the usual time for his afternoon nap, Grace started iTunes with some classical music as she prepared for a late lunch for both of us. Then Bryan started by playing with his hands and cooed. Slowly, the cooing disappeared, and he fell asleep!!

This is good stuff. Soon he’ll feed himself too! 🙂

Poopy Bath

Grace and I always try to come up with worst case scenarios about certain things so that we don’t panic when they happen. One of those things was: What if Bryan poops during bath? We never did come up with a clear action plan for it.

And of course, it’s the things you don’t plan for that will always strike you… Kind of like The Murphy’s Law: “Everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong”. A couple of weeks ago, Bryan made a small poop-poop while I was bathing him. Lesson learned: When the water becomes murky, leap into emergency action… but before that, always have your emergency actions planned.

It was a mess. I had to call Grace to change out his bath water while I rinse him in the bathroom sink. Even though we laughed more than we panicked, the whole experience was just silly.

I think this is the beginning of a whole new way of life: To expect the unexpected. When there are children involved, no moment is ever a dull moment; there’s always something going on. The same has been true with Bryan. A friend once told me to be happy when my child is hopping, jumping and getting into trouble because it’s when he’s not, I should be really worried. Wise words.

Other developments of Bryan include:

  1. the ability to lift his head at 45 degree angles when on stomach;
  2. discovered screaming and is not shy to use it;
  3. just begginning to brush on the concept of object permanence where we notice that he realizes something in front of him can be behind him when we turn him around;
  4. chuckles when he sees things he likes;
  5. is able to finish whole 8 oz of formula in one go;
  6. is beginning to be able to trace the origin of a sound;
  7. discovered hands and starting to manipulate objects with them;
  8. discovered starting to explore his toes;
  9. developed independence where he can stay and play by himself in the crib or playpen for up to 40 minutes at a time…

Pets, Infants and Allergies

My mom’s been pestering me about raising Bryan while having two cats at home. Almost every time I talk to her on the phone, she never forgets to nag about it (on top of her 5-year nagging about my thesis). Rightfully, she worries that Bryan may grow up with respiratory problems and more prone to allergies like I have been. And she cites evidence from everyone she’s talked to about the subject. Of course, everyone has an opinion when it comes to childrearing practices.

While at dinner at Jason and Alicia’s, Alicia casually mentioned that a recent research concluded that having pets at home actually HELPS infant and young children build up their immune system to resist allergies when they grow older.

CBC News

The 10-year study showed children who were exposed to the furry pets during their first year of life were half as likely to develop common allergies by about age six than those living in petless homes.

CBS News

The bottom line is that maybe part of the reason we have so many children with allergies and asthma is we live too clean a life. When kids play with cats or dogs and the animals lick them, the transfer of bacteria may be changing the way the child’s immune system responds in a way that helps protect against allergies. Parents should not be concerned about having pets in the home with a new baby but the findings do not go far enough in allergy prevention to warrant the purchase of pets.

The fact is, the society today is super freaked out about being sterile and germ-free. Every cleaning agent you can buy in America sports a guarantee of “killing 99.99% of germs and bacteria” on contact. The same hysteria is driving people to use obscene amount of antibiotics to the extent that someday there will be a new species of superbugs that will be resistant to all antibiotics and kill off a significant portion of the human race. I bet those hardcore, conservative right wing Christians will somehow tie that into the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ the Savior, the only son of God, the one and the only salvation to eternal afterlife. So let’s not piss off God by using too much antibiotics and leave them germs and bacteria alone once in a while.

People, let’s relax. It’s perfectly natural and OK for kids to be dirty from time to time. It’s good for them.

As for my mom, I found similar report in Chinese and am planning on sending it to her, with key points highlighted, along with the latest video clips and printed pictures of Bryan.

Baby Jam

We took Bryan out to the mall yesterday for a walk. Ever since his one-month-old party, he’s never seen so many people in his 3.5 month-old life! He stayed up past his 2PM nap time people-watching. He was fascinated with the sheer number of the Christmas crowd. Jason was right about the crowd. The fact that all those malls and department stores having sales early doesn’t help either.

Another phenomenon Grace and I never noticed before was how many babies there were at the mall. Babies, toddlers, baby strollers…. There were so many strollers at the mall that occasional traffic jams were common among narrow strips full of strollers of various sizes. Grace and I even caused a couple ourselves. Did the architects of the mall even take the strollers into account when they designed those walkways?

It’s a weird thought to see that all those babies will someday be competitors with Bryan for jobs, food, breathes of clean air and social benefits. Good thing competition for mating isn’t quite as bloody as it used to be.

Baby Jams

Late Night Rumbling

These couple of months seem extraordinarily long. Most of my classes at UCSC finally came to a close. As for my “Human Centered Design” online class at SCAD, next week is the finals; and finals at SCAD is always hell. Fortunately I invested a lot of time on the project in the past couple of assignments, everything is on schedule to be completed.

On a different note, Bryan finally “discovered” his hands a couple of weeks ago as well. Sometimes when one of his hands gets in his field of view, he freezes the hand and analyzes it carefully with his eyes wide open. At about the same time, he also realized his fingers were better than the pacifier. With his newfound soothing object in his mouth, pacifiers are no longer good enough for him.

Another interesting development about Bryan is that he has developed the ability to giggle out loud. We found out last week when I pretended to sneeze. He just laughed and laughed. Apparently it doesn’t take much to amuse an infant. Nor does it take much to keep an infant occupied for half an hour with the same mobile on top of his crib for the past three months.

Busy baby lives.