Tomboy

Don't let the hair clip fool you. Stella, in the last week, has morphed into a full on tomboy. There is a little boy that is living in our hotel for the next two months. His name is Tristan and he's 22 months old. He is a very sweet boy and often climbs into my lap for hugs, but he makes me grateful for having a little girl. He is crazy. He would kill himself if the hotel playroom didn't have fully padded floors and walls. His mom and helper are usually both with him in the playroom and it's all they can do to just "play" with him. Stella loves him. The door to the playroom is glass and yesterday he had his face pressed up against it, looking in at us while his mom was taking off her shoes and getting ready to bring him inside. Stella squealed with glee. She then stalked him, crawling as fast as she could and copied everything he did which was at warp speed. If he ran into the bouncy pirate ship (which she normally hates), she followed him full speed right up the ramp. If he climbed up the padded blocks, she would too. She's never done that before. The blocks are about 2 feet high and she kept attempting them by bending her leg up while pushing on the top of the block with her arms. It's hysterical to watch. We were all astonished when she succeeded. It was seriously amazing. And then she did it again, and again. She crawled the blocks to my shoulder level. I was talking to the other moms and sort of had my hands loosely around her waist in case she fell. She had climbed up another level and I casually looked up because I thought her arms were on a higher block with her feet supported by the one below. She was holding her entire body weight by her arms sort of like a vertical push up (though arms bent on top of block) and her feet were actually dangling below. She has become incredibly strong.

Before the playroom, we went to Panda Junction and it was the same thing there. All of a sudden she is climbing all over everything and no longer gets timid when in a group of kids. She gets right in there. She crawled all the way to the other side of the room to see another baby without looking back at me. Same thing today at Gymboree, which is where I took the picture above.

Dan needs to ease up on the Mein Kampf, I think.

Progress Report

So here's an update as to what Stella can do these days:

1. She loves to "share" though she is the ultimate Indian-giver. When she's eating (she eats mostly finger food now) she likes to share her food by sticking her arm out to feed us whatever it is. Because of drool and general sloppiness, the food can get really gross. Dan and I either fake eating it or suck it up and really eat it, while fake grinning and thanking her for sharing. Today, we went to her friend Summer's house. Summer is a few days younger than Stella. Stella fed Summer rice cakes and it was very cute. But the bait and switch is quite something. She'll offer you food by fully-extending her arm. As this is happening, shell take a long, loving look at whatever it is (you can tell her brain is spinning) and as you're leaning over to accept it, she'll circle her arm back toward her. Whatever it is then goes into her mouth and, believe me, we're totally ok with it. She does this with toys too. She'll hand them over to share and then decide that sharing is a horrible idea and that she'd actually like the toys back.

2. Dance:  If there is a commercial on TV or if her music table/toys play a song she likes, she will bounce up and down to the music. She also does a Kanye West style head bob sometimes that's hysterical. She LOVES American Idol. It's by far her favorite show and she stops whatever she's doing to just watch the commercials on TV. Maybe she has a crush on Simon Cowell. She also loves the Spice Girls and that song "Who Let the Dogs Out."

3. I play a Baby Einstein DVD in order to clip her nails. Because we have to switch the TV inputs to watch it, if the TV goes black but is still obviously on, she thinks her show is coming on. She does this thing where if I'm holding her on my hip (as I often do while fiddling with the TV), she'll swing her head in front of mine, make eye contact, smile and squeal when she thinks something she likes is on the horizon. She can be in the worst mood in the world but she'll do this if the TV goes black and her show is coming. She also does this when we're about to get in the elevator because if she's on my hip, she knows she's going to the playroom. She's in her stroller otherwise. She'll also do this if I open a certain cupboard door because her snacks are in there.

4. If one of us disappears to the other room and she wants to talk to or find us, she says, "Ah" once and pauses for a response. If we say, "Ah" back, she'll keep saying, "Ah" and wait for a reply until she finally crawls into our sight. She even does this to try to get the maids' attention when they are cleaning our room. They will disappear to the other room, she'll crawl in, look around and if she doesn't see them she'll say "Ah" and wait for them to say something.

5. She loves board books. All of a sudden, last week, she showed some interest in them and now they're all she wants to play with. I saw a poll on babycenter.com last week that asked parents if they ever skip pages in their children's books in order to speed up the process. I laughed. Now I get it. I probably read this one dog book a minimum of 30 times today. Dan bought these two Baby Einstein cat and dog small board books in order to get the VIP card at a baby store here. Now they are her favorite books. She digs them out of her toy buckets and then hands them to us to read aloud. And then again, and again, and again. I made myself carsick today reading the one dog book about 15 times on very a short taxi ride. Also, luckily, she loves "The Hungry Caterpillar" which was one of my favorites.

Lastly, she is sleeping like a champ. Sleep school was the best $300 we've ever spent. The sleep consultant adjusted her schedule based on a week of me logging her sleep and eating habits and gave us some other advice about this and that. No real crying was involved--Stella just settled into her new schedule and all of a sudden has been a consistently great sleeper. We've even been able to delay her nap and bed times an hour or two to go to boozy lunches with friends or parties with zero sleeping problems. And, her gross stuffy nose didn't interrupt her sleeping either. I just started being able to sleep decently as I've finally kicked the anxiety resulting from constantly waiting for her to wake up. She was waking every hour or two for a while.
All is well for the time being.

Smells Like Cheap Beer

This was sooo funny. Dan spilled his beer all over Stella. Right after it happened, she looked up at me totally confused with her eyebrows bunched together. It was as if she was saying, "I don't get this at all..." because Dan and I were laughing. She didn't think it was funny.

Mein Kampf

This is Stella's new favorite game. Dan and Kate used to play a version of this when they were little. Dan would yell out that he was covered in 10,000 lbs of solid rock after burying himself in sofa pillows. Then Kate would come dig him out or vice versa. Dan piles our bed pillows (we have a lot of them!) on top of Stella and she fights her way out. I'm surprised that she likes this because, as Dan says, sometimes if you throw a Kleenex on her she starts to cry. So now he's always throwing blankets on her head and dumping laundry on her so she has to figure out how to break free. Sometimes the pillows are 3 high!

Dan's always saying that "it's the struggle" she likes (I'm not convinced) and when she gets frustrated he laughs and shouts, "Mein Kampf!" at her. It's pretty funny.

Kung Hei Fat Choy!!!

It's year of the rat. I was glad to be here for Chinese New Year as the entire town is in a good mood and decorated extravagantly. Dan had a few days off. It technically started Wednesday with a parade on Thursday, fireworks on Friday and some other stuff over the weekend. We missed the parade and fireworks as they started after Stella's bed time. We're in sleep school so we can't be very flexible with her schedule. She's been sleeping really well though so it's been worth it. The photos are from a party we had on Sunday at Stella's friend Nana's house. Stella is trying to grab Max's hat in the photo. She's always trying to do something like that. Everyone brought something to eat and there were plenty of biscuits for the babies. All of the babies were dressed up. Stella also received quite a few lai see envelopes (I'll have to remember to bring some next year...we're never here on CNY so I forgot about that) so she was able to pay for the taxi rides there and back! Dan was pleased that she earned her keep for once.

The hotel had a party on the following Wednesday. CNY is now over so we're sad to see all decorations disappear until next year.

Big Ol' Jet Airliner

Sooooooo...the bottom line is that we survived. As I was lugging my new suitcase to the car, I thought it would be a good idea to weigh it and it was about 20 lbs over the 70lb limit. I had to hastily chuck some of my stuff into our other suitcase all the while thinking about how ticked Dan was going to be about it. We had agreed to throw this one away in the US as it had a gaping hole in it, we have no space for it in HK, and it's hard to dispose of large items at the hotel. I had 2 huge suitcases, diaper bag, stroller, very large red carry on duffel bag, mini igloo type food shoulder bag for Stella's food....oh yeah, and Stella too.

We got lucky and the lady waived us through the handicapped security line at LAX, probably due to me clumsily trying to deal with all the baggage plus child. We arrived at the entrance to the brand new oneworld lounge and, of course, the elevator was broken. Stella was starving which made waiting for the sluggish TSA escort to the cargo elevator just miserable. The lounge was packed which made it hard to find a place for us to sit away from the riff raff. Stella wolfed down a few jars of food and my outfit and hers were both trashed before we even got on the airplane because I had no place to strap her in. No, she won't eat in her stroller. She wanted to crawl around the floor and kept banging on the lounge's emergency exit. I was afraid she was going to set off some kind of alarm.

We boarded the plane and I gave her the first dose of Children's Benadryl and silently prayed (hard) that it would work. It did. She fell asleep for 2.5 hours. I reclined her seat fully flat and strapped her in. I watched The Nanny Diaries, ate lunch and had a few drinks. Though as they were serving the main course she started to stir (I kept thinking NO NO NO!! PLEASE NO!!) and then, presto, she was wide awake gunning for my Kobe beef. And then it was miserable. She did not want to sit still. She would rotate from sitting in her seat, sitting on me, playing on the floor, etc. for the entire flight. She ate an entire canister of Puffs, a ton of Japanese rice, Japanese mashed potatoes and basically whatever she wanted because I just wanted her to be quiet!!! After 7 hours (per the doctor's instructions), I gave her the second dose of Benadryl and she was tired but fought it. She was ticked I wouldn't let her crawl into the aisle, crawling all up the back of her seat, banging on everything, squealing and basically doing everything you don't want on an airplane. She finally fell asleep as we landed in Tokyo. And, the flight took over 12 hours because we didn't get clearance to land for some time. I was sooooo miserable. That's the longest it's ever taken me to get to Tokyo and I seriously couldn't believe that we had to get on another flight. I was having a terrible headache because I had to wear my contacts on the plane. Stella would have been pulling off my glasses the entire time. And, I did not sleep at all, per usual.

The bathroom trips were the worst. Very clean, thankfully...the bathrooms, that is. She did not want to lay on the changing table and at one point while I was trying to get her pjs back on she had ripped about 50 kleenexes out of the box and threw them all over the floor. She broke the amenity basket too trying to get to the Shiseido lotion. I could go on and on.

We arrived at Narita and went to the older JAL lounge. The last one we were in was soooo nice but this one was almost gross. Gave her the 3rd Benadryl dose and she slept the entire way to HK. The only thing is that we were on the older 747 and the business class seats didn't recline flat so she slept on me. I didn't get to eat a thing and the food looked sooooo good. Dan picked us up at the airport and we were both overtired and cranky.

To top it off, 2 days later she got a stomach flu that almost sent her to the hospital. And then I got it, too.