Huirou @ 23months

It seems like only a few weeks ago Huirou was born. Then now Zhixin has arrived. It is hard to believe what she could not do as a newborn that she easily manage now.

Growth, Food Intake and General Well Being

• Eats a ton. But still about the same size.
• Generally happy, cheerful and loving.
• She is losing some of her baby features and starting to look like a little girl.
• She will behave like one too, wanting me to pin up her hair AND demands to look into the mirror at her prettier self.
• She loves to ask Hubs to bring her to the playground in the evenings.

Physical Development and Communications

• For some time now, she can go up the stairs by holding on to the hand rails. She still have to rely on us going down though.
• She can also do a true jump now.
• Often when she’s behaving cheekily, she will walk on tiptoes around the house.
• She can roll her ball with pretty good aim now; but can’t throw at any target yet.
• I have begun to teach her to count and so far she can manage one,two, three and yee, er, san (same thing in English and Chinese respectively). Something exciting usually happens on “three” :)
• She can string together simple sentences with words and phrases she already knew.
• She will claim her possessions by saying wo de (ch: mine)
• Able to sing  a (yes just one) song. actually just the chorus and not very well either. The chorus goes something like this:  yippee-ya-ya-yippee-yippee-ya-ya….

Character and Temperament

• Did I already mentioned that Huirou has a temper?
• and will throw tantrums when she don’t get her way?
• with tears and screaming too?
• Despite all that, she loves her brother very much, wanting to hold and cuddle and kiss him when she arrives home. If she don’t get to hold him in the evenings, she will ask again as soon as she wakes up in the morning.
• If Zhixin cries and we don’t attend to him fast enough she gets upset too. The slightest sound from him will prompt her to ask us to baobao didi.(ch: pick up younger brother)

Small Beginnings

Zhixin is always sleeping.

Hubs say that that’s because he is so small that he has to concentrate all his resources on growing.

He is indeed small:

• His head fits easily in Hub’s palm.
• His clothes overwhelms him most of the time. The sleeves are so wide apart that his arms slip through them easily while he is asleep. I often wake up to find him wearing his clothes monk-style, exposing one shoulder.
• He don’t get to wear mittens either, because no mittens fit him. They all slid out 2 minutes after I put them on.
• When he wears socks they reaches up to his shins, making it look like he is wearing loose boots.
• When I change him, the tabs on his diaper overlaps. The smallest diaper hangs until his knees. Luckily he doesn’t wriggle around too much yet because the leg holes don’t close up properly either.

Right now, Hubs and I hope that he will grow up quickly and healthily. Hubs can’t wait to teach him all the “guy things”, and is already telling him that he has to protect his sister when he grows up. Well, we shall see won’t we? Coz we all know that from small beginnings come great things.

Huirou’s mealtimes

Whenever I ask Huirou to smile for the camera, I get the following cheeky expression. Over and over again.

So now y’all know why I take so few pictures. I laugh too hard to be able to take any good shots. Anyhow, I like to remind myself that enjoying the moment is more important than having a picture to show for it.

After much persuasion, and a lot of bad shots later. I got a semi-good, semi-candid shot.

I realise that everything is green in this picture but it’s merely a coincidence ok? Also, she now likes to eat most of her meals in her chair now. She also insist not to be fed. Therefore, dinner now takes twice as long. Luckily, she has more success putting food into her mouth now. No more messy floors. Yeah.

Here’s one where we were at The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. She loves the muffins at this place.

Our Family (updated)

By the way, you can make your own stick figure family by clicking on the image above.

Granma visits

Granma only came to visit about 1 week after Zhixin was born.

She was very happy that the baby was born safely but she was particularly concerned about the tiny baby and the almost non-existence of my “confinement month”.

Tiny baby, understood. He just have to drink more milk.

Me. A puzzle to her. Since she couldn’t make me feed formula to the baby she decided that she had to feed him through me. I ate 5 meals a day while she was here. Luckily she didn’t force me to wear sweatpants nor disallow the fan. Also as long as the baby was swaddled she couldn’t care less what he was wearing underneath.

Before she went home, she pre-fried a whole bunch of ginger in sesame oil , cleaned up the house and left a whole lot of chinese herbs behind.

We are going to visit her for prayers around Zhixin’s full moon celebration. Hopefully he would have fatten up by then.