This week marked Nik's return to work and Kai's return to daycare. In addition to daycare, we've enlisted help from our families to ease the transition as Nik returns to work and depending on the day, we have various different family members helping us out. This is definitely a time when we're grateful to have family nearby and I've been visiting the Huang house more often since we need my family's help with childcare. Kai discovered Matthew's old Legos in his closet and now when we visit the Huang house, Kai makes a beeline for Matthew's closet.
Kai and Sora are still slowly recovering from their coughs and today Sora had a particularly large (and messy) vomiting incident, but I'm hopeful that they'll both recover soon. In fact, we hope to move Sora out of our room (and move Nik back in) once she gets over her cough.
Kai now likes to say "tur-tle" randomly because he realizes that saying it will get a laugh out of us. Sora is becoming more aware of the world around her and has been making direct eye contact with us; she's particularly interested in looking at faces and tracks our movement. She's even begun to develop a bit of a social smile. :)
Kai, Sora and I are slowly recovering from the cold. We're all still coughing, but thankfully, Kai's appetite has returned and he's now eating with gusto (fingers crossed that it stays this way!). While Sora never got too sick, she still has a nasty cough as well and will sometimes have uncontrollable coughing fits, poor little girl. The worst is when she coughs and gags, and then subsequently throws up.
Still cute in spite of sickness
We celebrated NYE with some of our church friends. Since this was a family party, it was pretty low-key and we passed time playing King of Tokyo with the kids, though I was mostly trying to make sure Kai didn't destroy the game board. We ended up leaving at 8:30 pm and turned in by 11 pm.. that's just how life is, now that we have kids.
We took Kai and Sora to the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo. Kai absolutely loved the zoo, particularly the turtle and bobcats.
Kai's current favorite continues to be cars. He also loves looking at cars outside the house and will ask Nik to hold him up so he can look out the kitchen window to see the cars and identifies them with an excited, "cah!"
We love Kai's developing sense of humor.. he loves to do things just to make us laugh. When Nik was putting Kai to sleep the other day, Kai repeatedly misidentified the animals in the book they were reading as a "tur-tle", because he knew that it would get a laugh out of Nik. Maybe it was a "you had to be there" moment, but we certainly thought it was awesome. :)
The sad news is that Nik returns to work tomorrow. I'll certainly miss the extra hand around the house and it will be a bit hectic at home until Nik's mom arrives in February. But most of all, I think that Kai and Sora will miss having their papa around all the time, because papa's the fun one. :)
Within the past week or so, the persistent cough that Kai had had has gotten worse and these past couple of days he's had a low-grade fever. He remains mostly cheerful, although even more resistant to eating because of the illness. Unfortunately, Sora and I also got sick, although Sora has only been mildly sick since she's still breastfeeding.
On Christmas day, we opened the presents under the tree, although Kai only had a limited understanding of the concept of tearing into gift wrap and only tentatively tore the wrapping after Nik and I prodded him to do so.
We had Christmas dinner at Ching's house in Miplitas. Ching has four egg-laying chickens and seven bunnies in the backyard and after some initial trepidation, Kai had a blast chasing after them. Harsha stayed over with us this past weekend and we had a number of visitors come by the house on Saturday, including a friend for Kai: Xanthia!
On Sunday, we headed up to San Francisco, the first long-ish outing with both of the kids. We went to Mason's red egg and ginger party in Chinatown, and then headed across town to meet Mei Li at a dog park near the Castro. Kai had never seen so many dogs and was transfixed by the dogs running around the park.
So far, probably the best trick that we've taught Kai is to give kisses. These days, he loves running up to Sora and giving her a kiss (which is probably how she got sick), and kissing his stuffed animals or having them kiss each other.
Because of Christmas and the New Year's holiday these next two weeks, Kai's daycare is closed this week and the next. This means even more fun (and exhaustion) for Nik and me. We've been keeping busy since there's always something to do. We've been frenetically sending out Christmas cards, more friends have come by to meet Sora and we celebrated my Mom's last day of work and retirement this past week.
Kai continues to be difficult during meals, though lately, he's been interested in trying to eat with chopsticks. Of course he lacks the fine motor skills and dexterity to actually use chopsticks properly, so his technique comprises of trying to spear whatever he's trying to eat.
Kai has also been more independent lately and seems to really enjoy playing in his room alone these days. Right now, his favorite toys are cars and he moves them along saying, "vroom". In fact, during meals he sometimes likes to pretend that his food is a car, taking a scrap of bread, calling it a "car" and then proceeding to play with it as if it was a car.
Kai likes to peek at Sora through the mesh lining of her pack 'n play and when Sora is awake, she's usually watching all of Kai's moves (though Nik and I are convinced that she's monitoring his movements out of fear that he'll attack her).
"What's big brother up to now?"
We're hopeful that Sora's sleep cycles are starting to lengthen out and that she's finally figured out that 2 am is not the time to play. Happily, we've received Christmas greetings from a number of friends and sent out quite a few of our own. It's hard to believe that 2014 is almost over, but 2015 looks to be an even more exciting year for our family. :)
Now that Sora is over four weeks old, Nik and I have started taking her out of the house more. Her first excursion out was a much-needed trip to the park when there was a break in the rain since Kai gets antsy when he's holed up in the house for too long. We also took Sora to my parents' house and to church for the first time.
Since we've had a drought in California for so long, Kai has never really experienced the rain, so with the recent "stormageddon", we finally got to introduce Kai to the rain. He was laughing and yelling "wa wa" while Nik carried him from the car into the house, while patting his head. Very cute...
We broke out the potty and Nik introduced Kai to reading magazines while doing your business, so Kai now thinks potty time is story time.
We also managed to do a Christmas photo shoot with Sora in her Santa outfit and got our Christmas cards printed out.. now all that's left is to send them.
Since my last post, we've set up our Christmas tree, Nik's dad came for a visit and then Nik's parents both left to return to Thailand. Now that it's back to just me, Nik and the kids, and while we're missing the help that we got from Nik's mom, we're trying to figure out a rhythm that works in our family. So far, we have Nik sleeping alone in the office so he can be well-rested to take care of Kai in the morning while I sleep in the master bedroom with Sora. Also for the record, whoever penned the saying, "sleeping like a baby," obviously never had a baby because it's nearly impossible to sleep in the same room as Sora. All night, she grunts and cries out in her sleep and the only reason I can sleep in the same room with her is because of sheer exhaustion. We've nicknamed Sora our "little grunter". Hopefully, it will get better in time. I vaguely remember Kai being like this as well, although Nik insists that Sora is louder than he was.
She never sleeps so calmly at night...
We love Kai's new-found love for hamming it up for the camera.
"More pictures please."
Photo bomb!
Kai continues to be fascinated by Sora, though ensuring that he's gentle when he interacts with her can be a challenge.
And another adorable Kai picture, just for good measure (and because I can't resist).
We're adjusting to life with two kids and Nik's mom will be leaving us in a week. I think we'll manage okay between the two of us, although I am dreading the end of Nik's paternity leave in January. We attempted to do some nap training with Kai with no success. While we're happy that he naps twice a day, he only naps while in a stroller and refuses to nap any other way. Eating has also become much more of a chore lately. Our great eater has become picky and usually refuses to try anything new.
Kai's vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds, and while a lot of what he says is still baby babble to us, he is able to identify a number of different animals and whenever he runs over to check up on Sora he says, "bay-bee!" Funnily he also can identify Batman and says "Batman," in a whispered, under-his-breath voice. He's also loves taking pictures and hams it up for the camera when you say "cheese" and then signs for "more" as you take pictures of him.
"I know how to use the Boppy too!"
Sora is doing well, alternating between good and bad nights of sleep. Her circadian rhythm is still flipped, and she sleeps mostly during the day and then wakes up, bright eyed and bushy tailed, around 10 pm. We try to have her sleep in the co-sleeper, but she makes noises and grunts throughout the night unless she sleeps in the bed between us, so caught between the choice of having her sleep the "right" way and exhaustion, we usually end up with her in the bed with us. She's been a mellow baby thus far, tolerates her older brother's poking and prodding, eating like a champ and even sleeping soundly through our Thanksgiving party.
Speaking of which, we also hosted Thanksgiving dinner, since we were stuck at home with Sora. We did it potluck-style and ended up with way too much food, but a good time was had by all. We've also had a number of friends come by to visit Sora.
Nik and I were also (amazingly) able to get out of the house for a brief respite while Nik's mom and Chris watched the kiddos.
