"You've Gotta Fight...For Your Right...To PARTY!!!!"

Oy vey. Somehow Stella must have known that if she'd have taken her afternoon nap per usual, we would have been late to Summer's (she's in the tutu in the first photo) birthday party. She went down at 1:30pm (nap time) and talked to her Duckie blanket until 2pm...that's normal lately but the sleep lady said it's ok. I think she's sleeping too long in the morning, as she sleeps 2 hours and we have to actually go in and wake her up. Anyway, she was wide awake when she went down for her afternoon nap. Then, at 2pm, she started screaming her head off, which she hasn't done since we left CA in Jan. She's been an excellent nap-taker. So, I went in to see if she had a dirty diaper or had climbed out of her crib...she hasn't done the latter yet but it's coming any day now, I'm sure. Nothing. She just straight up didn't want to sleep and by this time was totally hysterical in that way that I even couldn't soothe her. So, I put on her favorite American Idol video (see previous post about Renaldo Lapuz) and that finally calmed her down--instantaneously, I might add. It was 2:30pm by then and since Summer's party started at 3pm, I just said ok, well, we'll just get ready and go.

Note to self--no-nap Stella is very unpleasant. She loves her friends and was very happy for the first hour. Though she's got this habit now of wanting to climb up on anything. She'll use me as a stepstool to get up on to the couch or bed. She does what Dan calls "climbing the alps" by throwing herself head first from the sofa into our adjacent club chair and then back again, and again. It's a really terrible game for parents as it's super boring and labor-intensive. Though today, Dan and I watched her make her own stepstool by pushing a box right underneath the club chair. She then climbed on top of the box and made it on to the seat of the chair. It was very calculated and she was clearly very proud of herself. She giggled like crazy. Anyway, she tried to use her friends as stepstools to get on to this coffee table you see above. One time, her friend Natalie (who is almost 2 months younger), was crawling next to the table and Stella stuck her foot on Natalie's back to try to propel herself on to the table to get the tube of Puffs. It was totally exhausting. Then she started "doing the fussy" because she was so, so tired. Lily (Summer's mom) baked a special cake that the babies could eat. Stella loved it and ate a whole piece. But, she was a handful and by the time we got home I was wiped. I rarely get this tired but I told Dan that I just needed 5 minutes of personal time, which is his standard line.

She also has become very attached to her "babies" in the last week. Her babies are her "Teddy" which is a Four Seasons Hotel bear that the staff gave us when she was born, a Shanghai Tang doll, and another doll that was a gift called "Stella" (really, that was the name on the box). It's a crack up because we'll say, "Where are your babies?" She'll chirp and round them up. She was fussy getting into her stroller the other day and I handed her Teddy to hold. All of a sudden eveything was fine and she was all smiles. She'll play by herself for extended periods of time if she has her babies near by.

Stella Br0ke the C0mputer

S0 we can read emails but n0t send any. I can still upl0ad ph0t0s but it's just a matter 0f time bef0re the entire thing crashes, I think. The bl0g will be 0n hiatus f0r a while until we s0rt it 0ut!!! Am busy backing up all 0f her vide0s, etc.

First Lasagne and Walking

As you can see, Stella likes lasagne. Except, I used spinach no boil noodles that had some trouble being cooked on a stovetop. We have no oven, so this was a toddler stovetop chicken lasagne recipe. I thought they were fine but Dan kicked up a fuss and then Stella "voiced" her opinion by tossing some noodles on to the curtains. But anyway, she gobbled up the filling and there aren't really any leftovers. She is not a neat eater so our laundry machine is constantly running. As I type this, I am laying in a mess of toaster waffle that she rubbed into our bedsheets. It's Easter Monday, so we're on our second day of no housekeeping which has been horrible!!!!

This week, Stella has started walking. A few steps here and there only, but she's getting much more confident. I apologize that we aren't able to rotate videos so you have to watch it sideways on picasaweb. I tried to upload it here but it wouldn't take.

First Easter and Pizza

Dan and I debated about how to present Stella with her Easter basket. I ultimately insisted that it be placed outside the front door as that's how my parents did it when I was little. So, Dan put it out in the hall and we opened the door and let her crawl to it. Dan is primarily responsible for the Easter baskets. He's put together one for me every year. We have a Japanese discount store called Jusco where everything in the store is $10 HKD ($1.25 USD). That's where we bought most of the contents which is why they are sort of random. Mine always has candy in it but Stella's had:

1. Plastic grapes...kind of a choking hazard but he thought she'd love them, and she does.
2. Big crayons
3. Origami paper
4. Hello Kitty tupperware
5. Hello Kitty cell phone (from Toys R Us)
6. Hello Kitty tea canister
7. Gerber biters teething biscuits (her favorite)
8. Hello Kitty frisbee

The cell phone and grapes are the big hits. We then went to the LRC for lunch. Stella is eating tomatoes now which has opened up a new world of food. Messy food, that is. I ordered her a chicken pizza and she loved it. She's tried pizza once before but didn't like it, I think now because it was thin crust. This was thicker crust...she got that from me as Dan only likes thin crust and I don't. The Easter Bunny was there but I think she thought he was very strange. She didn't cry, but was not all that interested in him--confused really. However, she was VERY interested in all of the little birds that were feasting on the pile of crumbs she dropped. We started off in the family clubhouse area and then went up to the playground so she could see all of the little kids running around. She loves that.

The other highlight of the day was that Stella picked the "o" key off the laptop. Therefore, this has taken a long time to type! I hope the computer guy in Dan's office can fix it. We tried, but no luck.

Inside Out

According to my books, Stella is not getting enough fat. Does she look like it in the photo above? Granted, she'd just eating piles of meatloaf, sushi and veggies and has settled in to watch this week's American Idol (her favorite show). 50% of her daily calorie intake is supposed to be from fat. She needs it for her brain growth, mainly. It's not anywhere that high, believe it or not. She eats sprouted wheat bagels, plain fruit and veg, etc. Chicken or lean beef meatloaf (she's getting sick of meatloaf) and avocado are the exceptions along with small amounts of full fat Yo Baby and cheese. She used to love almond butter, but she's sick of it, I think. Dan is still reeling from the fact that one jar in HK is $20 USD so her ambivalence toward it at the moment is not "convenient" for her mother. So today for lunch, I made her an organic black bean and free range/organic chicken quesadilla with lots of organic jack cheese on an organic sprouted wheat tortilla. I swear it was really good because, per usual, I wind up eating her scraps as I can only manage cooking once. Sprouted wheat or corn tortillas are the only ones here in HK that aren't loaded with lard and/or preservatives. She was very excited as I was making it. I even fried it in butter (unsalted). She LOVES cheese, especially orange cheddar cheese but we ran out of that.

Anyway, she figured out quickly that she could split the tortillas apart, turn them completely inside out and then scrape all the cheese off with her teeth, thereby leaving the sprouted wheat tortilla shreds all over her placemat and the floor. Fortunately, she loves black beans so after she split the tortillas apart, she first picked all the black beans off one by one before scraping the chicken and cheese off...

Magic Box Update

Last week, because of the flu scare, it was just us and another mom and baby at Gymboree. They are very, very careful about disinfecting the entire gym and all of the toys after each class. Also, if a baby chews on something during the class, it's immediately put in the "toy wash" bucket for sterilization. For hygienic reasons, I assume, the Magic Box only had easily-cleanable board books in it this time. Stella was very disappointed and her facial expression made that really obvious. The instructor excitedly took all the books out and put the box with it's lid to the side. Stella crawled over the box and opened the lid to make sure that there wasn't anything else fun in it. She then started putting the books back in the Magic Box as if to say, "Alright, this is boring...let's move on." The instructor kept telling her that it wasn't time to put the books away. They only get about 5 minutes to play with the Magic Box toys anyway!!!

Daddy vs Stella

Written by Dan:

We've begun casually encouraging Stella to start to play by herself a little, rather than needing to be constantly held or otherwise attended to. And she is starting to do so. But it comes with a catch. When playing by herself, she almost exclusively prefers to play with "adult" things, rather than her own toys. (Her own toys, like her books or her plastic balls, tend to be "played with" by handing them to us, and then staring, expectantly and indeed presumptuously.)

Her play with "adult" things, can, unfortunately, be summarized in one word from high school science class: entropy. Stella has become a destroyer of order, a devotee of chaos for its own sake. She has only limited interest in these "adult" objects individually, be they empty plastic bottles of spring water, or old newspapers thrown in the trash. But what she loves, for example, is to pull them out of the trash, carefully, and with purpose. And spreading them out around her. Only then, when an almost perfectly distributed mess has been created around her, will she crawl off, a job well done.

Her current fascination in this regard, illustrated above, is with the lower shelf in our pantry. The pantry is small and now, with Stella's food too, is always crowded. This drives me (Dan) crazy and I am forever re-arranging the contents to make them neater and less jumbled. But whenever the pantry is left open a crack, Stella will crawl over rapidly and begin pulling everything out: cans of black beans, bags of tea, organic rice, vitamins and what have you. She will pull everything off the shelf, dump it on the floor and then seek to remove the contents of any package that is open. All of this she will do with extreme concentration, silently and with purpose. Sometimes this will go on for 10-20 minutes at a time, during which she will be oblivious to anything around her. Yet she appears almost entirely disinterested in any of the objects: be they of irregular shape or with packaging that has unusual colors or drawings. All she wants to do is to create disorder out of order, to spread everything on the floor, as fully as possible. Above you see that she has gone so far as to remove even the individual cheerios from a foil bag that was previously inside a cereal box. Once all the items were as fully pulled apart and dispersed on the kitchen floor as far as possible, she crawled away and back into my arms...

Written by Katie:

I must note that Dan had just come home from the gym when these photos were taken. Also, it's Dan's fault entirely that she likes to toss things off the pantry shelves as he's been the one who has encouraged her to do it, not knowing this would evolve into one of her favorite things in the world. The can of organic raisins lives on the bottom shelf of the pantry. Stella hates raisins. That can cost about $10 so I was a little bit disappointed about that. But now that it's contraband on the pantry shelf, she'll pull it out, bite the lid and pop it off. Next, she'll spill them all over the floor while trying to choke (not literally) a mouthful down. She's very good with food so we're not worried about her choking, but it's funny because you can tell by her facial expression that she's conflicted. She hates the taste of the raisins but she can't not put them in her mouth after popping the lid off. It's as if she's trying desperately hard to like them.

"G-L-A-M-O-R-OUS..."

First, check out the new shoes. There was a Pediped sale (lucky us!!!) so we stocked up since all of her shoes are now too small. We got talked into this pair, but are having minimal buyers remorse since they were on sale.

Second, we decided to download some songs to burn to a disc for Stella since she likes to dance so much. I have tried many, many times to get her dancing on video but as soon as she sees the camera she stops. She is obsessed with electronics, as I've mentioned before. She hears music on TV mainly and in some play gyms. Some of the open gyms play contemporary music while the kids play on whatever for an hour. It reminds me of the roller skating rinks that were popular when I was little, except Stella is climbing all over padded jungle gyms. Her favorite song is actually from an American Idol commercial featuring this guy that obviously didn't make it. Search Renaldo Lapuz on YouTube and you'll see it. It's so insane. She smiles like crazy when she sees him in the commercial (he's dressed up like a white bird pretty much) and stops dead in her tracks if she's in the other room and hears him sing. It's so funny.

But the others so far on her iPod playlist are:

1. Glamorous by Fergie: She loves this song. It was on a commercial here. I downloaded the clean version but at play gym I think they played the non-clean version (some things get lost in translation). The song talks about living the good life and flying first class. It cracks me up that she likes it so much.
2. Billie Jean by Michael Jackson
3. Makes Me Wonder by Maroon 5 (edited): This has also been on many commercials since they are having a concert here. She has the PG version that's played on the radio in the US.
4. Yeah! by Usher (edited): Also from play gym.

She really loves "Who Let the Dogs Out," but I can't bring myself to download it because I don't want to listen to it all the time. She also loves the Spice Girls and I can't stand them.

In light of all of this, we did go to a music class which was a little bit disappointing. The instructor spoke really broken English and the theme was New Orleans jazz. I had to really try to keep it all under control as she was skatting in Chinglish...

Does My Bathing Suit Look Too Tight?

...because it is, unfortunately. It's soooo cute though. We finally made it to the pool today. I've been hearing about how this is the best time of the year to swim because the weather outside is warm and the pool is still heated. Stella hasn't been in the pool since well before Christmas. And, let's face it, we live in the Four Seasons Hotel and the pool is nice! The real reason why we haven't been in the pool is because Daddy thinks it's too cold (!?!?!?) and I was worried about getting Stella in and out of it by myself because there are no graduated steps, but ladders instead. Now, I can sit her on the edge and hop in while keeping one hand on her. She swallowed a ton of water because she lost that baby instinct to hold her breath when submerged. I didn't dunk her but she tried to imitate me blowing bubbles and drank a ton instead, for example. They have yellow (her favorite color) kick boards so I grabbed one of those and she was really happy after that. She was a little nervous at first. We played chase with it. It would float away and then she'd get excited, point to it and start flailing to try to get to it. What was interesting is that she didn't get that she was supposed to kick to stay afloat until some guy (yeah, in a speedo...see previous posts) dove in and started swimming. She watched him and then instantly started kicking her legs. She held the kick board with arms outstretched like an adult and kicked her legs while I barely held her stomach to keep her above water. She also liked to swing the kickboard up to hide her face and play peek-a-boo. I kept her in for 30 minutes, which is the length of the average baby swimming lesson so I consider that a victory. She genuinely had a good time and was babbling a lot toward the end trying to get other people's attention. It was 4:30pm by the time we got out and starting to get a little chilly. We'll try again tomorrow (Saturday) if we can convince Daddy...

I Am Your Leader

Errrr...Happy birthday to me. So let me tell you about the chaos. I meant to ask Stella for "no fussy" as a birthday present but forgot. Not that it would have mattered.

The sleep consultant told me that she's not getting enough good fat and calories. What? The girl can not go a day without a hefty amount of avocado. But, she's weaning and after going over her diet, that was the conclusion. Her naps are getting shorter and she's crabby in the late afternoon before dinner. She now needs a morning and afternoon snack that's crammed full of calories, protein and fat. That's 5, yes 5, meals a day really. That's also 5 changes of clothing more or less. Ugh.

Today was the first 5 meal day and that pretty much threw this family into chaos. Dan got back from Jakarta late last night so the house was already reeling from 2 days of just me and her. I can't get a thing done functioning like that because she's attached to my leg during her waking hours and when she sleeps the acoustics in our flat are so bad that I'm banished to our bedroom. Dan made me a really good breakfast while I fed her. I got her lunch and "snack" ready to go since we have to leave for Gymboree straight after her morning nap and we don't get home until 30+ minutes past her normal lunch time. Those things took up most of the pre-morning nap time. Her snack was an entire grilled cheese and chicken sandwich with the crust cut off. She ate it on the way to Gymboree and that was by far the happiest she's ever been riding in her stroller.

She also caused a mini rebellion at Gymboree that was funny but slightly embarrassing. Stella is not good at not getting exactly what she wants. She has trouble during the "instruction" portions of Gymboree and Panda Junction. Yesterday at Panda Junction was the worst. At one point they gave us a ball, a ladle and a plastic pot that we were to play various games with. Like drop the ball in the pot with the ladle, play catch with the ball, etc. Stella flat out refused to let go of the ball, period. She pitched a fit. In order not to disrupt the class, we just sat there with her clutching the ball. Everyone else did what they were supposed to. I think it may be because she gets tired and hungry toward the end of class. But, today she ate an entire sandwich on the way to Gymboree so I figured today would be different. And it was...sort of.

There is a portion of Gymboree that Stella and the other babies love called "Magic Box" where the instructor brings over a treasure chest full of different toys every week. There is a big production during the opening of the box and then they get about 5 minutes or so to play with whatever is inside. The exercise is to be able to put the toys back in and then say "bye-bye" to the Magic Box without getting fussy. She is not good at this. She clutches on to whatever toy and even to the sides of the box while the instructor is politely trying to take it away. Today was no different, but she didn't cry or act fussy as it was being taken away. Progress, I thought. We moved on to the next group exercise which involved blowing bubbles. She loves that. Except that during this she crawled away from the circle where we were all sitting, to the ledge where the Magic Box is kept. I thought she'd crawl back, so I stayed with the group and waved her back. She didn't come. I thought to myself, "ok, well, I'll go get her" and as I was getting up, she stood up, pointed her fingers in the air and started screaming "DA DA DA BLAH BLAH" babble at the top of her lungs with serious conviction. Then ALL of the babies rushed over to her. The instructor totally stopped the lesson because the parents and nannies had to go corral their kids. The other babies were all now with her, staring at the Magic Box. Then, of course, they ALL started to cry as they were being taken away. There were 8 babies in the class today. It felt like it took forever to get them all back under control.

The upshot was that she wasn't fussy in her stroller on the walk back home for once. She was all smiles and even managed to take off her shoes and socks during the walk. She put her socks on her head and thought that was funny, as did the seemingly millions of people rushing out to lunch. Central Hong Kong is a mess between noon and 2pm but I plow through the crowds with the giant Bugaboo at full speed. I thought I was going to get yelled at in Cantonese for her having bare feet, but instead just a lot of giggling at the little girl with messed up teeth and socks on her head. Then, she ate a full lunch and an almond butter, banana sandwich for her late afternoon snack before we went out to Thursday coffee with her friends (and mine). So that's 2 extra sandwiches on top of her normal eating.

Not to mention that this morning I pulled a muscle in my back and my reaction time is pretty slow. So, as a result, she got into the pantry and ate part of an Earl Grey teabag, dumped my expensive powdered makeup all over the floor, rubbed banana in the rug, pulled all of the trash out of one trash can (the bedroom one which only has papers in it), and several other unsavory things. Like when I tried to change a disgusting diaper, in desperation, I gave her my cell phone to try to distract her enough to get her to lie flat. During our wrestling match, my cell phone fell on the changing mat and she sat on it therefore rubbing poo into the buttons. It's like chasing after a tornado. Our house was in so much chaos that we couldn't even have housekeeping come clean it...

"Don't Treat Your Mouth Like a Duffel Bag"

These photos are from Mother's Day brunch. In HK, I get to celebrate it twice. UK Mother's Day falls in March every year and it's a big deal in HK though the local Chinese celebrate it in May like we do. Stella was by far the messiest eater out of the nine babies that were at our table. She ate mashed potato, cucumber rolls, spinach tortellini, chicken congee and basically whatever would keep her from squirming. She wanted to get down and play instead. This restaurant has a genius play area with TV and a bunch of toys and bottomless Prosecco included in the brunch price. So, everyone wins.

Her favorite foods are maybe in this order:
1. Avocado: She never gets sick of it. She must hold one in the grocery store to keep calm if she's gets bored before I finish shopping.
2. Avocado/cucumber sushi rolls: We pop out the cucumber. Dan often gets sushi from downstairs for lunch. As soon as she sees him sit on the sofa with a green City Super bag, she's all over him. She knows the sound of the sushi container popping open.
3. Meatloaf: She pile drives it in her mouth. This is when Dan tells her not to treat her mouth like a duffel bag. She stuffs her cheeks full of meatloaf. It's just equal parts organic ground beef, grated organic carrots and baby cereal. The recipe calls for a little bit of baby formula but since she now likes to share her food by feeding us, I leave that out.
4. String cheese
5. Dark chicken meat
6. Blueberries
7. Yo Baby! yogurt: She'll only eat Yo Baby! though and no other brand will do.
8. Ripe kiwi
9. Zucchini (this surprises me) cut in half moons only.
10. Freshly baked pita from the bakery below us. If it's not fresh out of the oven (still warm), forget about it. She won't take it reheated.