wednesday

August 11th, 2010 | By Kyoko

We are having a usual sort of Wednesday. Immi is dressed up as a princess today!

Immi and I are hanging out in the studio during Ashland’s nap time. She really wanted to play with my fabric scissors (not in 20 years!!) and I remembered I had gotten her safe plastic ones a while ago. She is trying it out (blue one cuts straight and red one cuts zigzag) — her hands are still a bit small for it but she is getting better already!

Before dinner, Immi spent some time painting. It’s one of her favorite activities but she hadn’t done this for few weeks because we ran out of paint and I kept forgetting to buy them. During the weeks she didn’t paint, she seems to have gotten better at it (or if not better, then at least more deliberate about it). Suddenly, she didn’t want the colors of the palette getting mixed up and it really upset her until she understood the purpose of washing the brush between changing colors.

And here’s her finished painting!

bubbles

June 15th, 2010 | By Kyoko

Immi is drawing and having some tapioca in coconut milk.

Painting

March 14th, 2010 | By Kyoko

Immi  is very serious about painting lately.

plastic things

March 1st, 2010 | By Kyoko

Immi is making a bracelet.

I got out nesting plastic cups that immi used to play with for her little brother. She is far too smart to enjoy nesting/stacking now but she found new use for them! It’s a field of plastic flowers for her twin Hello Kitties to sleep in…or something like that. She is quite specific about where each cup goes, so it’s like an installation right?

And here’s the variation this time created on a kitchen floor.

painting

February 16th, 2010 | By Kyoko

Immi is having lots of fun painting.

Immi going Jackson Pollock on her paper.

Here’s the finished piece. Just so there’s no confusion (i.e. You offer her $8000 for this painted piece of paper — several pieces of notebook paper stuck together actually — and then tell me she didn’t possibly do this on her own, I take the credit for purple dots on the left hand corner. I did those when she had just started on it ).

Here’s another one:

Paper

January 31st, 2010 | By Kyoko

It’s really nice out and Immi, Ashland and I walking about and wondered into a store called PaperZone. They have lots of office paper, stationary and scrap booking stuff. Immi is having fun at the crayon station.

beads

September 6th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi is beading. She’s been doing this often lately (…and the pink tutu wearing). Today, she is stringing just the pink ones.

beading

August 20th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi is stringing beads. We hadn’t tried this until now, but it seems that she was probably ready for it long time ago.

Here’s a video. It almost looks like a tutorial with immi’s commentary:D

thursday

July 9th, 2009 | By Kyoko

We are having some electrical work done and immi and I are trying to stay our of his way. She is keeping her self busy doing the usual stuff. …One of which is stuffing her little toys into various things (toy toaster and toy mug!) that they can be stuffed into.

…And the other is doodling. I offered her a clipboard for her paper, but she didn’t want it, immi seems to have decided it’s fun to poke through the paper.

I got immi a pencil case the other day for her color pencils, but the only thing she wants to do with it is to take her pencils out and stuff them with her little toys!

The baby No.2 and I had a weekly appointment yesterday. I had few hours of contractions for several hours (about 1 minute long and 4–5 minutes apart) very early Monday morning and we considered calling the doctor since that’s exactly how immi happened. But I decided against calling in since we weren’t ready to have him yet! Anyway, it all worked out fine and the baby is staying put for the time being. The workout on Monday morning did get me 2–3 cm dilated so I guess i’m 25% of the way there. Everything else looks good, my belly measures on target, the baby has good heartbeat, and I didn’t gain any weight since last week (which the doctor said is fine).

Immi has been extra cuddly lately. She definitely suspects something is on the way. I finally set up crib with new crib bedding (pastel-green/tan safari) and immi’s been on her tiptoes looking in. She KNOWS it’s not for her because it’s not pink.

doodle

July 5th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi is doodling. She seems to really like color pencils now. …and I’m sewing. Immi thinks that my sewing machine is her’s because it has Hello Kitty on it.

doodle

July 3rd, 2009 | By Kyoko

immi is sitting at my desk and doodling with color pencils. She develped a new technique.

Here is her doodle.

stickers and no.2

May 28th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi is sitting on the office/studio floor stickering.

…and stickering…

We had a check-up appointment with the OB yesterday. We did go over the sonogram result from the week before and one thing I didn’t catch from that is that the baby’s bowel seems to be working just fine (sounds like a good news to me! ….even if it doesn’t help otherwise with diagnosis). Everything else is great. The doctor even complimented us on how well immi truned out (she has been coming with us to every appointment)! Let me just add here that we totally LOVE our OB! If all the doctors we ever had to see were just like him, I’d be 100% pro-western-medicine:) Apparently, there’s nothing we need to do to prepare for the chance that baby might need some sort of medical intervention (other than getting bi-weekly sonogram). That all gets sorted out when he is born, if he needs it.

Aside from mental preparation, we really haven’t done much for the No.2. We are so relaxed about it that I suddenly remembered yesterday that we were supposed to get a bed for immi before he is born (she has been sleeping on crib mattress which has been move out of the crib on to the floor in her room)! …we really should do that.

When we found out that we were having another baby, I imagined that we would have another girl. And that they’d probably look alike, at least until they are a bit older. And that the no.2 will be wearing at least some of the same clothes as immi (…admittedly many of them were thrown out because they got too shabby to keep!). And that it would be difficult to tell them apart in photos years and years from now. It’s odd to think that it won’t be like that at all. I sorted out immi’s shoes the otherday and I have a bag full of her  shoes that are now too small for her. I haven’t decided what we are going to do with that. We even kept kangaroo outfit from halloween, but he won’t want to be dressed up as a mommy kangaroo (with baby roo in the front pocket…)?

eggs

April 10th, 2009 | By Kyoko

We are decorating eggs at immi’s Grandmom’s.

Immi doodled on the eggs with white crayon and then they all went into the color baths. Two of them got dropped and cracked in the process.

Immi got really mad when there were no more eggs left to dye!

Now she is prettifying the eggs with Hello Kitty stickers.

…and then peeling the stickers off eggs and decorating herself and her monkey instead!

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:

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!

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!

monday

November 24th, 2008 | By Kyoko

Immi loves to play with play-doh a lot these days.

Here she is contemplating.

And now making something.

…and here’s the video:

bow & play-doh

November 20th, 2008 | By Kyoko

I had the last of the 5 hour driving lesson today so Immi was at her grandmoms for a bit. She came home with a bow in her hair and matching mittens! She seems to like the bow and has been keeping it on for past several hours. She is eating lunch now.

I’m making dinner and Immi is playing with play-doh.

If you wondered, I don’t bake cookies on the silver baking trey immi is playing on (…so don’t worry!). This one is just for immi to do various activities on (play-doh, beads, ponyville…) to make clean-up a lot easier:)

wednesday

November 19th, 2008 | By Kyoko

I was beginning to think that immi was bored of doing stickers. But, as it turns out, she was just bored of the ones I was giving her ($1 booklets of 500 stickers, we’ve had 3 different ones). She spotted a sheet of Hello Kitty stickers I was hiding and this is what she did with them:

It’s been really cold out lately! Here is immi bundled up. Immi’s Obaachan got her the jacket last year and it’s almost not too big at all. It just looks big because it’s a bit off her shoulders at the moment.

thursday

October 16th, 2008 | By Kyoko

Immi is doing stickers as usual. She doesn’t seem to get bored of them. Luckily (for me!) she almost never sticks them on anything other than her notebook or herself.

Immi and I got back from immi-shopping with immi’s grandmom. We went looking for a dress but came home with a whole lot more. …And I thought immi was going to take a nap, but she seems to have forgotten about being tired and happily playing with her first set of normal size My Little Ponies that her grandmom got her. (She is putting tiara on the unicorn.)

Lately, Immi enjoys spilling a bit of water in her cup on purpose, grabbing a towel from the kitchen and wiping it clean. The main problem I have with this is that, most often, she throws the towel (not disposable!) in the trash bin and not in the laundry basket…