monday

March 30th, 2009 | By Kyoko

It’s my birthday today. The BIG one in which I turn 30! When Todd asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday, I said “go yarn shopping in Alexandria!” (there is a cute little yarn shop called Knit Happens which I’ve never been to). Unfortunately, they are CLOSED on mondays! …so I picked Vienna instead which isn’t exactly my favorite town but it also has a fancy yarn store which I’ve never been to.

…so our day started with coffee and very very very delicious sandwich at Jammin Java. Immi and her dad are having ice water while we wait for the sandwich.

Then we found Uniquities which was located in a hidden area. For such an obscure location, there were quite many people shopping for yarn there! This was really fun for me (I crochet, and I’m very mediocre at it, but I’ve always loved pretty yarn!) but Immi was not pleased that we wouldn’t let her touch any of the pretty fluffy yarns so Todd took her out for a walk (very nice day out!), and then this is what I found them doing in the parking lot when I found them — driving immi!

sunday

March 29th, 2009 | By Kyoko

I’m making breakfast in the kitchen and immi is already making a mess with play-doh with Auntie Junko. She plays with play-doh  several times a day these days.

Auntie Junko took us out to Melting Pot for fondue for my birthday (which is tomorrow!). She had been wanting fondue since she missed it for immi’s birthday and I wasn’t about to say ‘no’ to fondue fun:) Thank you for dinner Auntie Junko!!

Unfortunately immi was totally and uncharacteristically grumpy…and then fell a sleep (I guess she was tired!) shortly after we got there, which is totally fine by me. We got to have fondue in peace with out immi grumbles.

Immi is having a second round of the day with the play-doh. I left her alone with it for just a few minutes, and this is what she did with it:

saturday

March 28th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Todd is at an all day event yesterday and today but Auntie Junko, Immi and I are having fun time having strange assortment of food at home today! One of the things we made is oden and here’s immi trying out quail egg. She didn’t like the egg much, but she really liked other stuff in oden (especially the fluffy white ball thingie).

When Todd got home, we went to get phở. Today, immi insisted on using chopsticks today. She was actually quite good (despite that these ones are really big!) and she managed to get the noodles between the two sticks and then into her mouth occasionally.

…though quite often she resorted to placing noodles on the chopsticks by hand or using them one stick at a time.

pony and jeep

March 24th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi put some shoes and a shirt on her pony. Then immi took her to the mirror so that the pony can see her reflection. …Apparently she was being dressed up because she is going out in the big blue jeep!

mess

March 23rd, 2009 | By Kyoko

We don’t have a table nearly big enough for immi to make a creative mess on, so here she is on the floor with all of her doodle supplies.

She pulled off all the foam alphabet puzzles and punched out the letters. Now she is playing in the massive mess she made!

apron

March 21st, 2009 | By Kyoko

We just got this craft apron for $1 at Michaels. Immi seems to enjoy wearing it. It’ll come in handy when we play with paints and glitter sticks!

bread

March 20th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi’s Granddad got back from business trip to San Francisco and brought us back a yummy loaf of sourdough bread. Immi looooooves sourdough bread. Here she is munching on her 2nd slice.

misc.

March 17th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi has been saying more words. Some of her new words are “gummi!” (she likes peach flavored pink ones), “hot!!” (she tells me so if the food is sizzling or otherwise steamy, and if the water from the faucet is a bit hot), “shoes” and “hat”.

Immi wants salt sprinkled on everything. The rule is that I have to do it for her (…so that I can pretend to sprinkle it on without actually adding anymore salt in her food!). I have accidentally left it with her within her reach and had to clean up entire content of sea salt in the shaker off everything.

Immi still loves Doraemon (the Japanese TV cartoon) a lot. She loves the song and I see her immitating things they do in various episodes. She also enjoys watching My Little Ponies, Hello Kitty, and Strawberry Shorcake. Most of these are from 80′s because they happen to be available for purchase for about $5. We rented one of Dora the Explore dvd, and Immi didn’t like it at all! Only thing she wanted to do with it was to turn it off…

I definitely hear Immi mixing some Japanese in her babble/language. This would definitely be because of Doraemon. Though I do read her Japanese picture books sometimes.

Immi enjoys singing. She sings often when she hears songs she likes. Immi sings almost exclusively in “ahhhh”s. Honestly it’s so badly out of tune that I think it’s cute and wish she’d never get better. But she has been getting much better lately (more tones are more harmonius with the music she is singing to).

Immi loves giving us massages. She likes to pretend to put lotions on her hands (pretend-soap that look like massage bar like the ones we like, or an actual hand lotion) and give us a rub.

Immi has been rubbing/patting my belly. I’m not sure that she knows there is someone in there. She could just be noting that it feels different…

That’s a lot of words so here’s a picture of immi playing with her ponies. She wanted me to help her put the faery wings on.

sunday

March 15th, 2009 | By Kyoko

We got this big pony immi wanted a while back because it was on sale! Immi of course loves her and she rides around everywhere.

Immi and her daddy are playing Galaga. Todd finally had a chance to get the Nintendo (NES!!) setup and working. Immi has a controller too but I didn’t plug that one in…so she just thinks she is playing:)

friday

March 13th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi is scooping rice crackers in and out of the container.

Immi discovered the canopy I put up a few weeks ago in her room (…which is still not really done!).

It makes her hair really staticky.

We got the canopy for $5 and I decorated it a bit, it looks like this on top.

It’s finally friday evening and we are getting phở to celebrate end of Todd’s first week at his new and much better job:) Immi didn’t nap earleier today (too busy playing!) and fell a sleep in the car and hasn’t woken up yet. I’m sure she will wake up once she sees shrimp chips and noodles!

crayons

March 12th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi loves doodling (her favorite medium is a note pad and a ballpoint pen!). But all she wants to do with a regular crayon is to 1) peel the paper wrapper off and 2) break it in half. …So only crayons she has been allowed to play with at home is the ones in plastic casings that twist out.

Few days ago, Immi spotted the plastic bin that contained her art supply stash which I was keeping out of her reach. I got it out for her since I thought she was ready for most of the stuff in it. Unfortunately, one of the items in the bin was 64 color set of regular crayons. And as soon as she saw it, she set out to peel and break all of them. Of course I’ve tried to discourage her from doing this, but after several days, I decided to join her instead!

I put slits in the paper wrappers so that they come off easily. Then immi took the crayons out of the wrappers. (Immi is being very neat about it, putting wrappers into one box, and naked crayons in another!)

Then, we broke the crayons into little pieces and put them in the silicon soap mold (it’s actually an ice cube trey, but we only use it to mold soaps). And then, I put it in the oven to melt.

And when it cooled, I popped them out of the mold.

Immi is taking a nap right now, so I don’t know if she’ll like them yet, but at least we had fun making them:) Some of the color combination immi did at the initial stage made me cringe a little, but I figured that they would turn out much prettier for it, and I think they did!

pony tea party

March 11th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi is playing with her tiny ponies.

She is setting up for a tea party!

…and pouring tiny cup of tea from a tiny teapot!

We got this series of toys about half a year ago since none of her age appropriate toys seemed to be challenging her fine motor skills (she was able to pick up lint almost as soon as she learned pincer grasp!) (ok, the real reason why we got these is that immi loves small cute things…). Anyhow, it’s fun to watch her play with these miniature things now that she really understands what they represent, and spends quite a while engaged in a pretend-play.

no. 2 update

March 10th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Aside from the usual Monday fun, we also had an appointment with our OB. He talked to us again about the sonogram result and basically reassured us that there’s really no need for worry. We are to make another sonogram appointment in about 2 months to be sure that markers have gone away the way they usually do.

Otherwise, it was a very usual appointment. I’m 20 weeks along today (exactly halfway point!) and suddenly gotten much bigger. We got to hear the heartbeat mixed with lots of *thud*s from kicking.

I’m doing absolutely fine except for that I get quite bad cramps when I stand or move about for a while. I don’t remember this much discomfort from when I had immi so I asked about this and the doctor said that it’s basically a second baby syndrome (there’s more room for the baby to move around inside the second time around and this apparently hurts). I was actually happy to hear this since I was worried that I had grown more complainy!

monday

March 10th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi is playing with her assortment of stuff in her makeup bag (we got some $1 ones after I gave up trying to keep immi out of mine!). I’m going to wash the empty containers so that it will be mess-free pretend play next time…in the meanwhile it’s turning out to be very pink!

We finally got this huge bouncy ball last time we were at Target. Immi always wants to go to the toy section of the store to play with this ball, but we hadn’t bought it, not so much because it’s expensive ($2.59) but simply because it’s a big space commitment. It’s been immi’s favorite thing to sit on these days (I’m not sure where she got the idea!) and she is having a snack on it at the moment. She did fall off of it first several times (her feet don’t touch the ground yet) but she got quite good at it and has been accident free since.

We are playing with non-toxic glitter glue set that her auntie Junko got her last month. They come in very pretty color and immi seems to be enjoying it (I do have to help her squeeze it out).

And here’s immi playing with box of musical instruments. She was making music for a while but she seems to be making sculpture or something at the moment.

shopping

March 6th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Just getting some cat food and such at Target. We put on silly Easter ears on immi!

treats

March 3rd, 2009 | By Kyoko

Todd had a craving for ice cream (he is having more pregnancy symptoms than me!) and we came to a bizarre realization that we don’t know of any ice cream place in or near Reston! After few minutes of googling, I discovered 3 places all located in the Reston Town Center. I picked Iceberry for our first in-town ice cream excursion because it’s all natural frozen yogurt (more or less healthy!).

Immi is picking sprinkles off Todd’s plain yogurt. Immi didn’t even want to try mine (honeydew melon yogurt with fresh mangos!) because it didn’t have any candy toppings.

My mom sent me a goodie parcel from Japan (thank you!!!)! Immi found a package of arare and she wouldn’t let go of it since it was in a pretty pink packaging (immi thinks that everything pink and/or has Hello Kitty on it is her’s). Arare is a sweet rice crackers for Hinamatsuri (Girls’ Day festival in Japan) which is very timously  today!

maintenance elf

March 3rd, 2009 | By Todd

As the designated immi 2.0 maintenance daddy tech elf.   I must inform the immiverse that her cute little blog is going to have a worker elf fixing things up on the site tonight.  So if anything looks a little different or are acting a little funny, have no worries, it is just an elf poking around in wordpress to make things in immiville super sparkly.

misc.

March 2nd, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi loves driving the RC car! But we didn’t stay outside long enough for her to figure out how to make it turn because it was so cold out.

The strangest thing immi wanted to do lately was to bundle up pairs of her socks. When the laundry comes out of the dryer, I match my pairs of socks and fold one over both socks to keep them together. Todd doesn’t like this done to his socks (he thinks that it stretches them out) and instead only buy 2 kinds of identical socks (white ones and black ones, and they get replaced all at once) so that they don’t require being matched. I used to match immi’s socks, but I haven’t been lately (tired, lazy, and it really doesn’t need to  be done since her socks are so small). Anyway, she brought me her small drawer liner full of socks and started picking out pairs. Then I thought she wanted me to help her put them on, but as it turns out, she just wanted me to bundle it.

Immi is continuing to say a new word or two almost every day. Today, she saw a photo of herself and her dad and said “my dad!”. She also likes to show me words she knows by bringing me her word picture books, pointing and telling me the word. She likes to show me ‘cookie’ and ‘cheese’, sometimes she surprizes me witha new word she knows, but othertimes she makes up a word (and say it with confidence!) if she doesn’t know it.

snow day

March 2nd, 2009 | By Kyoko

We woke up to a few inches of snow this morning!

Now that Immi found out for herself that it’s really cold out, we are hoping she’d keep her mittens on.

…but she took them off immediately!