haircut

April 2nd, 2009 | By Kyoko

I’m giving immi a hair cut now. It’s almost done. The way I’ve been doing this lately is to pop up immi on the bathroom counter (she is usually not allowed there!) and let her rammage through whatever she likes and I chop of her hair while she is keeping herself busy pretending to put perfume on or toothpasting  her tooth brush etc. I cut her hair quite short hoping that I won’t have to do this for at least a month!

Immi has been saying more words here and there. Some of the new ones are “bird”, “balloon”, “fork”, “spoon” and “juice”. The japanese words she says are “hai” (she uses it to mean both “yes” and also “here it is” when she gives me something.), “yada” and “iya” both meaning “i don’t like/want” and “nai” as is “empty or gone”.

Interesting she has been doing lately is that when she watches a her movies, she immitates her characters’ actions and emotions. She sits like the characters,  pretends to look for things, dances, cheeres, waves her arms around etc. One time, I thought she was crying (volume of the TV was nearly off), but she was just pretending/immitating the character crying…

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.

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.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3aVxMg9HZQ

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.

immi says…

February 21st, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi has been saying all sorts of things lately. Addition to regularly used words are ‘ice’ and ‘lights’. When we walk into a dim room, immi always asks for lights to be turned on.

She also said ‘key’ (I think I’ve heard her say that long time ago…) and ‘popcorn’ (we made some last night). These days, immi has been saying quite an assortment of words that I can’t exactly remember all of it.

Immi is also getting quite good at dressing herself. She can — some with more effort than others — put on skirt, pants, socks, shoes, jackets and shirts. Tights and Onsies (those buttons on the bottom!) are still a bit difficult to put on correctly.

block tower video

February 11th, 2009 | By Todd

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUQRaY6YfOA

Immi continues to amaze me with here intelligence, creativity, and dexterity.  I show her how to stack a few blocks and she build a block sky scraper! 

Before our poopy-pants  western doctors attempt to tell us that Immi is too thin or Immi does not talk early enough…perhaps they should read Immi Blog.  A two minute screaming office encounter is hardly enough to tell anything about anyone, much less get to know Imms.

Perhaps they should not use outdated development charts from fat, white, American bottle-fed babys from the mid-west that were taken like half a century ago.  Perhaps they should ask more questions about the childhood development of the parents to discover things that might be relevant to her development like that Kyoko has always been petite and that I started talking late…in order to make a relevant diagnosis BEFORE they subjugate children to additional, needless, expensive and sometimes painful testing. 

I wonder if our Doctors themselves were stacking blocks 18 high @ two years of age?  Probably not.  Oh well!  Immi is too smart and cool to want to be a doctor anyway, she will probably be a fashion diva or rocker star!

misc.

February 7th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi said “chip!!!” yesterday — she wanted some tortilla chips. I guess she is going to say all variety of food names before much of anything else. (apple, cheese, cracker, banana, ice …she tried to say yogurt the other day, but it came out sounding more like “gurgurt”)

Today she came to me and said “cheese!!!” because she wanted some. She usually pulls on my arm to get me to fridge and point at the cheese drawer, so telling me what she wants, I think, is a milestone:)

We got immi another potty, this kind just sits on the floor. She has been sitting on it periodically when she comes into the bathroom. Yesterday, she wanted me to take her skirt off (but didn’t want her diaper off) and sat on her potty. Then, she made a funny squeezing face and …tooted. I think that it was a nice try anyhow.

weekend and misc.

February 2nd, 2009 | By Kyoko

1. Immi went to a babyshower with her Grandmom on saturday! She had a lot of fun playing with other kids, reports her Grandmom.

2. …and then that evening, immi stayed at her Grandmom’s for sleepover which totally helped Todd and I get going on the Phase II of completeting immi’s play room (we got and assembled a huge shelf in our office/studio so that we can move our stuff out of immi’s room)

3. On sunday, immi spent some time at her grandparents’, it was warm enough to go play at a park!

4. I don’t have any photo of the above events since I wasn’t there.

5. Last night immi woke up screaming. I think she had gas in her stomach or something. Nothing cheered her up (except she did let me rub her back for a little bit). She ran around the room crying for a while and then when she got exhaused, she tucked herself back in bed and fell a sleep.

6. Only one more week until immi turns two!

7.  Some days, we hear immi saying several words in a day, and then nothing for many days. …in otherwords, she isn’t really talking yet.

8. On the other hand, she adds new moves to her dance-vocabulary quite often. The most recent addition is vertical (?) wavy thing (sort of like belly dancing). She can also jump quite high if she hold onto something for balance.

9. Immi likes to pretend to heat her real dinner in her pretend kitchen microwave before eating. She has also asked me for real bread to ‘toast’ in her toy toaster.

snickers bar aquatic feline surprise

January 16th, 2009 | By Todd

I am still in dis-belief  by the startling and mysterious events of this evening.  Sitting in the next room, I heard Kyoko parroting in varying tones of utter curiosity:

“What is that?!? What isssss that??? Toddd! What is thaaaat?”

As I rounded the corner to the kitchen, kyoko stood near the gate cautiously pointing and peering down at the cats lonesome water bowl…something very strange was floating in the kittie water.  A brown anomaly.  I slowly quickly connected the dots:

missing diaper

+

cat’s water bowl

+

snickers bar

=

???????

Time for a little word association to aid in the detection process -

When I say water bowl, you say…Toilet!!!

Conclusion –

Immi left a floater in the cats’ water bowl.  Mystery solved, case closed.

Political Ramifications -

Geo-fecal submarine and international maritime lines have been crossed.  A aquatic feline war has been declared.  Mew battles have begun.  Code brown weapons have been deployed in the immediate vicinity.  The kitty water supply has been intentionally contaminated.  New meaning has come to the phrase “don’t drink the water.”

And somehow I landed decontamination duty. This is definitely getting classified under “development” and “milestones!”

poop

January 15th, 2009 | By Kyoko

I was playing with immi in the living room and then I suddenly found that she was wearing no diapers (she was wearing a skirt so I couldn’t see under neath that until she squatted). This is no big deal really, she takes off her diapers when we aren’t looking quite often, and surprisingly, we’ve only had one accident with it.

Several minutes later, as I was passing by a kitty water bowl, I spotted something quite big (a lot bigger than a piece of cat food which finds its way into the water bowl sometimes) and brown. Upon closer inspection, I discovered it’s a POOP! And it’s not a kitty size poop — much bigger than that :0

The diaper immi had taken off had no sign of poop, and her hands were clean (so she probably didn’t poop somewhere and then dropped it in the water bowl). So there’s really only one conclusion: immi must have squatted over the kitty water bowl and pooped in it!

…and you know, it IS a bowl with water in it — just like a toilet.

Immi has been able to tell me when she is about to make the big one for a while now by pointing at her diaper. I’ve tried to sit her on the baby potty seat (which sits on a standard toilet) but she didn’t like it, so I haven’t bothered her about it for several week and she had been using her diapers just fine.

…so I’m thinking that it’s time to try out the baby toilet seat again, and if she doesn’t like it, we should probably go get the potty chair (the kind that just sits on the floor). In the meanwhile, I’ll be monitoring the kitty water bowl very closely.

Poor kitties. I’m sure immi meant no harm towards them.

problem solving

December 9th, 2008 | By Kyoko

When immi was done with her apple juice box, she went to throw out the empty container (she shook it to make sure it was more or less empty). She took out the straw to put in the recycling bin (she has been able to identify plastic trash for recycling for months now) but then when she opened the recycle bin, she seems to have realized that it hadn’t been lined with a bag yet (bad parents!). Instead of stopping her from chucking the straw into the unlined trash can, I watched immi to see what she would do (I was curious!). To my surprise, Immi paused to think about it for a moment, changed her mind about putting the straw in the recycling, and put both straw and the box in to regular trash which was lined. …very pleased with her accomplishment, she clapped and said “yaaaay!”.

Immi is still refusing to talk to us in English much. At the moment, she seems perfectly happy speaking her own language and her invented sign language (my favorite one is for ‘music’, she holds out her hands with her palms facing each other and make air clapping motion). She did say “Okay!” the other day and also “Goodbye!” (she usually says “bye!”).

stool

December 6th, 2008 | By Kyoko

Immi seems to think that being short is just a minor inconvenience easily remedied by something to stand on. She can now climb on to a kitchen stool amazingly fast considering how tall it is for her. At this point, it’s quite impossible to immi-proof everything since there is no such a place as ‘out of immi’s reach’!

chair

November 4th, 2008 | By Kyoko

Immi seems to have decided that she likes my chair better.

Immi loves her veggies probably more than candies and other treats. And I am very happy about that, I really am. But I wish she would eat the whole thing and not just the tips… Here’s the photo of what was left since I didn’t know what else to do with them besides to share them with you.

Today, when immi wanted to have her diaper changed — instead of coming to get me — she pulled out her changing mat, fresh diaper, pulled off her leggings & her diaper, put the used diaper in the diaper bin, unfolded the new diaper, and held it in place on herself correctly before coming to get me. She just couldn’t figure out the sticky side tab thing.

stool

October 24th, 2008 | By Kyoko

Now that Immi figured out that she can reach more stuff if she brought over a stool and stood on it, she spends large portion of her day standing on something and grabbing anything she can.

friday

October 17th, 2008 | By Kyoko

Immi figured out how to use step-stools (in this case a big puffy pillow) to reach things out of reach. She can also open the dvd slot, load it correctly and with some trial and error (can’t read the tiny descriptions above the buttons yet) get it to play all by herself.

Immi’s dad is home from the trip! And he got for her a purse at a fancy kitty boutique at the airport. He must have read my mind because I was just thinking that immi could use a brown purse (she already has a black one) since about half of her wardrobe goes better with brown (unlike mine, I don’t really need any brown purse since I don’t even have any brown shoes).