buttons

December 23rd, 2009 | By Kyoko

Todd’s friend is in town for the holidays and we met up in Stumptown Coffee in downtown. The super nice barista offered immi a cup of whipped cream (lucky immi!) she even sprinkled cocoa powder on top!

After the coffee we went to the Button Emporium and Ribbonry. The shop looks like it would be the kind of place unfriendly to kids, but the ladies who work there adore them (they even had couch area with toys to keep them occupied…). They let immi scoop out a grab bag full of buttons (She always gets free things, life is so unfair like that isn’t it??). Anyway, she is in love with the colorful and interestingly shaped buttons and she is still playing with them a few hours later (I confiscated a few…ok maybe a bit more than a few…for my stash).

Random immi news is that immi has fallen in love with …receipts! She loves them so much that she even says “receipts” and wants to look at it, roll it up and put it in her purse. It seems that receipts are longer the better, according to immi (like the ones from grocery store). We think that this obsessin of immi’s is funny, except for when we get a receipt and then have to give it back (merchant copy!) and she gets really mad.

more beading

September 8th, 2009 | By Kyoko

I found a set of alphabet beads and grabbed them thinking that immi could perhaps teach herself alphabets while beading:D She got much faster at it by stringing 2 or 3 at a time!

Immi has been beading the entire day and evening. She got tired and fell a sleep with a bead still in her hand!

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.

thursday

June 25th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Today is the last day Todd’s away (he is coming back sometime past midnight) and we are having pajama day:)

This is the amount of stuff immi carried from the living room to her room (the two purses have both been stuffed with all the little items prior to the departure) just to get her diaper changed. I find that I need to give her a 10 minute warning before I can get her to go anywhere…

Immi and her pink cat are playing with dominoes — she enjoys taking them out and putting them back in the box.

I dreamt that (dreaming often is supposedly a pregnancy side effect, and I have been dreaming often lately in my sleep) that I was pregnant and that immi speaks Japanese. I woke up to find that I am pregnant and immi does actually speak Japanese. Normal dreams are the strangest ones! I’m telling you this just to preface that immi said an entire phrase is japanese:

“Aaah-ah. O-i-shi-ka-tta!”

She said this after she *finished* eating her lunch, and it means “Hmmm!. That WAS tasty!” She used the past tense correctly…! And this is interesting to me also because the first thing she said in english was “Hmmmm. It’s so yummy!”. I’m glad she thinks that food is good (I would never know from how little she eats!).

diaper

June 3rd, 2009 | By Kyoko

I went to change immi’s diaper because she pointed out that it needed to be changed and it was indeed a bit bulky. …and this is what I found inside!

Yes, it is a used a diaper. With a whole bunch of little toys stuffed in it.

things she does

May 26th, 2009 | By Kyoko

When I went into the living room in the mid-morning, I found that immi had opened a bag of grits and made herself a little beach!

And then around noon-ish, I peeked inside her microwave and found four eggs — each in a mug, and two other miscellaneous food items also in a cup.

And then in the afternoon I found immi’s little purse stuffed to the brim with her tiny toys.

In the evening we went out just for a short while (immi’s dad needed his glasses fixed). I happened to dress immi earlier in a matching color outfit as her Hello Kitty which she wanted to bring along. The strange thing was that immi insisted on taking her purple lunch bag (which she has never asked to bring along!). It wasn’t until immi sat her Hello Kitty on the bench, her purse next to it, and I sat immi next to her purse that I realized that the Hello Kitty also has a purple purse!!! …I didn’t have a camera then, so this photo is when we came back (you can sort of see that they both have purple purse…).

Around 10:30pm, Immi’s dad discovered that immi had plugged the mini-jack of the portable speaker into the cat-shaped (it poops candy when the tail is pushed, it’s currently empty) toy candy dispencer’s #%!.

….and this is just one day’s worth of quirky things immi does all the time. She really is a very strange little person.

sunshine

May 8th, 2009 | By Kyoko

It’s been mostly drizzling this past week but we managed to catch 2 hours worth of sunshine that we got today! We ended up playing outside for a while because our neighbor Shelly and her 4 year-old twin boys were at the playground and they had so much fun playing together.

Immi’s fun new words are ‘stickers!’ and “It’s probably a dad!” (she said that when she heard the phone ring).

I had a suspicion that Immi has been color coordinating her clothes and accessories for a long long time now, but now I know for sure that she does. Immi has 4 regular size My Little Ponies and the white pony gets white clothes and white shoes, the pink pony gets pink outfit and pink shoes, the orange pony gets yellow clothes (we don’t have orange clothes or shoes…) and the purple pony gets blue clothes with a purple trim. And she does this ALWAYS, no matter how many times she dresses and undresses them. Also, when I try to give her sippy bottle with mismatched color for top and bottom (they are supposed to be mismatched like that!!) she gets upset until I get the matching colored top:|

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

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.

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.

reading

January 10th, 2009 | By Kyoko

Immi loves books. She just doesn’t really care to be read to much. She prefers to read on her own: pointing, talking (…mostly in immi language though some times we hear real words like this evening she said “owl” while looking at one) and interacting with pictures. She has brought out all these books from the bedroom into the office. It’s a mess but I’m not about to complain about it since she will most likely sit there until she is done reading ALL the books one page at a time.

Immi discovered her own coping mechanism for her tantrums! When she gets her toddler tantrums she grumbles/screams as she runs around the house into different rooms and then by the time she comes back, she is usually much better! I know that whatever little situation was dire for immi, but I can’t help laughing it’s so funny.

music

December 30th, 2008 | By Kyoko

Immi loves music, she always has. What’s interesting to me is that she seems to think that music is synonymous with dance. She usually asks for music by gesturing that she wants to dance. And she really only like music that she can dance to one way or the other.

She definitely has quite well defined ‘taste’ already. When we are driving and immi is strapped in her car seat, she always wants music on. What is unfortunate is that, it has to be music that she approves of or she’ll be grumpy — what we listen to is being dictated by the taste of not-quite-two year old!

stuffed

December 5th, 2008 | By Kyoko

Immi is one of the most creative and imaginative person I’ve ever met (and I’ve known many artsy people through years of doing music!). But sometimes, the things she does is just …weird. Here she is stuffing her onsie (she is getting too big for onsies, but it’s too convenient for me to give up in a hurry since it’s the only item of clothing that she can’t take off on her own!) with huge amount of play-doh.

sick

December 1st, 2008 | By Kyoko

Immi is sick and she is very tired. But she is determined to put in play-doh time.

Immi’s cold makes her extra cuddly and she was sitting on my lap while I was g-chatting with her Auntie Junko. Then, she decided it would be much more comfortable to lay down on the table with a pillow and a blanket.

And now it’s quite late at night, a perfectly respectable bedtime even for adults, but immi is determined to have a full day. She took off her pajama pants, put her skirt back on and got her boots out and playing her piano.