Stomach bug

This past Sunday, both Kai and I came down with a stomach bug. I thought that Nik had dodged a bullet, getting only a mild version of the illness, but last night Nik had to make a number of trips to the bathroom, so perhaps not. Fortunately, Sora has (so far) been spared from getting sick.. oh, the magic of breastfeeding! We're all exhausted, but we're slowly recuperating. One of the only nice things about Kai getting sick is that he'll crawl into our laps to take a nap, Nik loves this extra bit of affection.

Backing up a bit, before he got sick, we saw the return of Kai's appetite.. hopefully it'll come back as he recovers!

Chomp! Chomp!

Lately, Kai has been getting better at playing independently. He frequently plays by his table with his Mega Bloks and cars, talking or singing to himself.

We introduced Sora to Uncle Mauri for the first time, although she didn't seem too happy about it.

In terms of managing childcare, the worst should be behind us for now, and we did manage to visit Lake Elizabeth on one of my many trips to Fremont. Kai was fascinated by the ducks and birds.

Ducks, water and kids, oh my!

"I want to chase the birds too..."

I'm also trying be better about having Sora do tummy time on the exercise mat on a consistent basis and of course, if Kai sees Sora lying there, he wants to come by and see what's going on. I told Nik that one day when Sora is older, she'll have a recurring nightmare of not being able to move and almost being trampled by a rampaging beast. :P

Kai's hair has been getting long, so we took him out to get a haircut yesterday. Just take a look at our little man!

Kid taxi

This past week was a busy one for me, I spent a lot of time driving the kids around for childcare purposes--it'll be like that until the beginning of February when Nik's mom returns from Thailand and she'll then stay with us on a semi-permanent basis and help out with the kids. This coming week is an even busier week (because Nik will be working a lot), but once we get past it, things should get better.

We acquired a used exersaucer from Lin which Sora is too small to use, so right now, we use it as a place to put the chinchillas when we have them out of the cage. Kai loves watching the chins and messing around with them as they run around on it, although I'm not sure that either Chubs or Skinnay are enjoying this new toy.

We love watching Kai develop his imaginary play. These days, when we feed him he'll want his stuffed friends (or cars!) to also "eat" or "drink" and he won't let us feed him until we feed them first. In this picture he's "cooking" our veggie magnets, much to our amusement, he'd blow on the veggies as if they were hot.

He can also be quite bossy and a lot of time he'll want to sit in chair that say I'm sitting in, only to want to switch again a few minutes later. It can be hard for me and Nik, because most of the time, it's difficult to discern what he wants, and he'll just cry and cry until we figure it out.

"Outta the way, mama!"

Sora is still working on strengthening her neck muscles and can't quite hold her head up yet, but she's getting stronger. She hates tummy time, but we're working on it.

The dreaded tummy time

Almost a smile

She's becoming quite the little conversationalist and we love it when she smiles and coos. Here she is, having a conversation with her papa. In the background, you can hear Kai singing the "A-B-C" song to himself.

Social smile

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. :)

Is that a smile or grimace? Hard to say...

Kai isn't a fan of selfies

Back to work

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. :)

What?! All three looking at the camera at once?

Sick again

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.

Christmas holiday

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. :)

Stormageddon

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.

Santa Sora says, "Merry Christmas!"