Speaking Japanese

Taisei had a epiphany during dinner yesterday.  With his eyebrows furled, he proclaimed (in Japanese):

Mama!  You say you don't speak English, but Baba only speaks English and you speak to him!
That means you can speak English!  I'm going to speak English at home too!

Wami tried to explain that she wanted to speak her native tongue.  That didn't really work.  She explained that he needed to speak Japanese if he wanted to go to Disney Tokyo.  To that, he asked:

T: Why?  I've already been to Disneyland!  
W: Because there's one in Japan.  You can even ask Rachel!
T: Why do I need Japanese?
W: Because if I have to go somewhere, then you need to be able to speak Japanese for Baba.
T: Oooh.  I see.  (A-so ka?)

Phew - disaster averted!  And, all for the sake of dad (whom he always feels bad for because Dad can't speak Japanese)!

Anecdotes

Even having seen it before, it's mind-boggling to see these kids grow.  In about two week's time, Mirei's desires and cognitive abilities have changed dramatically.  For a while, it was the most amusing thing to see her go crazy about noodles and food in general.  That was what she lived for.  Since that time, she's become aware of many more things, such as our presence - we can't just walk away and expect her not to notice anymore.  She goes crazy when she hears the shower and wants to get in immediately!  She still loves noodles and anything that other people are eating.  Now, she definitely recognizes everyone.  She LOVES Taisei.  Everything he does is funny to her, no matter how rough he's being.  She's suddenly a daddy's girl.  All it took was for me to rock her to sleep in my arms one evening about a week ago.  Ever since then, she's all smiles when I get home.  It's a nice feeling.  I guess the bottom line is that she lets us know what she wants now.

A few times, she's tried to get our attention from behind by grabbing Wami's pants or something, and then just looking at us longingly.  She's obviously trying to get our attention.  It's scary - this little baby isn't really a baby-baby anymore.  When she's sitting in her high chair, she looks over to see if Hiro's there.  If he is, she giggles and starts to feed him food.  When he takes it, lots more giggles.  Crazy!  I really don't think Taisei was this advanced at this age.  She's getting faster and faster at crawling - definitely getting places way before we expect her to.  She loves Hiro's bowls, unfortunately.  She even ate his food the other day.  Ugh.  Also, her "babababa" and "mamama" tend to sound intended sometimes. She hasn't stopped doing her zombie baby act, which I love.

Anyway, this post was just trying to get some memories down on paper.  No good pictures to share lately.  Will post if I get some.

9 Month Stats

Today is Mirei's 9 month mark.  At the doctor's today, she measured out at 17.8 pounds (~40%), 27 inches tall (~35%), and 43.6 cm head circumference (~45%).  She's still in a higher percentile than Taisei ever was at this age.  She was also a "yes" for every developmental milestone they asked us about.  Some of these included eating solid foods, mumbling "mama dada", pulling herself up, crawling, drinking from a cup, etc.  I remember when Taisei was this age, we thought they were crazy to think he could do all these things.  A small part of that was probably his parents' tentativeness to introduce too much too quickly.  On the other hand, Mirei does have a big brother to learn quickly from, and most definitely parents who are a lot less worried about every little thing.

She had her first shower the other day.  She loved it.  Couldn't get enough.  I was afraid she would make a big deal when we tried to get her back out.

Here's Taisei enjoying an ice cream cone.  This is the reason that we go outside.

Little Things

Mirei recently started climbing up small steps and onto the low futon bed that's in her room.  Today, she climbed onto our platform bed!  So now she crawls into our bedroom and gets herself onto our bed.  Even though you think it's lame I wrote about this, to us, it's very amusing.  Now that school's done, I'm finally able to enjoy those little things again.  I have to make a note to do this as much as possible.  Enjoy the little things.

I finally caught Mirei being zombie-baby on video.  I couldn't edit out all the dead time b/c my editor can't recognize .3gp files.  What a drag.  It's dark because it's nighttime and she's supposed to be sleeping.  I couldn't help but let her zombie out for a while before putting her back in the crib.  Check it out here, yo.  Make sure you wait for it...

Today, Taisei's girlfriend came over and they had a happy reunion.  They drew pictures, folded origami, cut out shapes, and played mommy/daddy with stuffed animals.  It's quite interesting that he plays differently with her than with his boy-buddies.  They usually run around, tackle, and shoot guns at each other.  With his girlfriend, it's definitely gentler on the house and easier to supervise.

Taisei finally started learning and memorizing songs.  Here's one of the first ones I've seen him just spontaneously sing without the music playing (although it's playing here).  Ok, it's more of chanting than singing. This is on a recent drive back from Vegas.

Far From Ideal

Why can't everyone be happy when they're awake and go to bed when they're supposed to?

A quick follow up to last week's post.  Unfortunately, the behavior fix for Taisei was only temporary.  The smiley faces don't mean as much to him when there isn't a tangible goal in sight, such as going out to see a movie.  This weekend, on Saturday and Sunday, he had his first and second temper tantrums ever.  It was a sight to behold.  Full on screaming, balling, writhing and kicking on the floor.  The first one was something about Dad's supposed behavior that he didn't like.  We have no idea what that was about.  The second one was about wanting to have everyone eat breakfast in front of the TV.  We had a very limited time because I had to leave for meetings, and everything had already been set up in the kitchen.  So we said no and he went totally bonkers, especially when we started eating without him.  After the first tantrum, we thought maybe it had something to do with lack of sleep.  But then the next morning, when he's normally in a good mood, he had another one.  It's extremely disheartening, especially when you think you're making progress.  Hopefully this is a short phase and not the start of a bad stretch.  As parents, we're trying to unravel the mystery of where this sudden spat of bad behavior is coming from.

As for Mirei, she's getting to be more and more of a handful herself.  She's crawling faster and constantly on the move. We used to be able to put her in the crib when she was very tired and she would go to sleep eventually.  Last week when my aunt and uncle visited from Chicago, we spent the day out in the town and Mirei missed her naps.  Ever since that day, she has never been the same.  It's a struggle to get her to her crib.  One bit of good news is that I was able to get her to sleep without Wami's help - a big first.  I knew she was extremely tired.  I'm not sure if I could substitute for Wami during the regular bedtime routine.

Anyway, not a happy post for us, but not  everything about parenting is roses, eh?

Four and Eight Months

That's Taisei's age and Mirei's age at the moment, respectively.

I hope one day Mirei doesn't read all the blogs are realize that there lots of posts missing about her every sneeze and poopie.  I have lots of excuses - school, work, 2 kids, etc.  Really, blogging has just been much harder to do, especially with Taisei now sleeping in the computer room and Mirei sleeping upstairs in Taisei's old room.  Tonight, we're attempting to let them both sleep in the same room.  When we go on vacations, it seems to work, so I don't see why it wouldn't at home.  We'll see how it goes.

Mirei is now in her eighth month already.  She's highly mobile now.  Her crawling doesn't seem to be quite as fast as Taisei's was, but at the same time, she would rather be standing then crawling around.  I'm trying to keep her on the ground because I've heard it's good for hand-eye coordination and it seemed to work for Taisei.  Alas, kids do what they want.  Anything that's higher than about 1 foot, she'll try to use it to stand up.  Her legs are pretty strong that way.  NO problem standing up and almost balancing.  At this rate, she may be a pretty early walker, even though I'm trying to prevent her from being one.

Mirei LOVES food.  When there's food around, she wants it.  She doesn't care what it is.  She wants it in her mouth.  Especially noodles.  She gets mad if we don't give her noodles.  As a result, she's stayed over the 50% mark and has super chunky legs, face, etc.  It's amusing to us, since Taisei is the complete opposite.  He doesn't care about food unless he tries it and it's just amazingly delicious or he's amazingly hungry (and that's rare).  Otherwise, he has better things to do than eat.

We thought Mirei would be a pretty demanding baby because of her quick-to-squeal attitude.  That hasn't gone away, but as long as she gets her two naps and early bedtime, she's happy.  She still lets us know immediately if she doesn't like something (see picture on right), but it's not quite life and death anymore.  Phew!  :)  This girl knows what she wants, but she's definitely more tough than what we've seen with some of Taisei's girlfriends -- in large part thanks to not being the first-born.  Taisei does crazy things with her and she actually laughs more than cries.  She doesn't like Taisei to grab her from behind and roll onto his back.  But it seems like almost anything else goes.  He sits on her, pokes her face, pulls her appendages, etc, and most of the time she just laughs.  What a mystery.

Mirei lights up when Taisei walks into the room.  She loves to see him and laughs at everything he does.  I can be trying my best to entertain her, and she'll just be trying to get away to do something else.  Then, Taisei walks in and she just beams.  It's nice to see.  Hopefully we can nurture the sibling bond and prevent it from turning into rivalry when they have to start sharing (fighting over) things.

Taisei wouldn't go on to level 2 swimming class.  :(  He said he enjoyed level 1, but wasn't keen on meeting new friends and a new teacher.  He said to us "Mary-sensei is good."  In other words, he's familiar with his pre-school at the U of U and prefers to stick with that.  I'm sometimes afraid that he has talents that won't be fostered if we don't get him out of his shell.  I know, I know.  He's 4.  :)  All parents have high hopes and want their kids to achieve their potential, no?

Taisei's really not a toddler anymore.  It's weird to make that realization.  We can reason with him, and when he really wants something that we disagree with, he has the self-discipline to say "OK, kondo" which means "OK, next time."  This happens often when we go out and he sees those 25c capsule toy vending machines.  Another time he says this is when we want him to do something but he's either scared or shy.  Like when I tried to get him to go talk to someone or something.  He'll say "Kondo, OK?"

For a month or two with Taisei, I think we started to lose control (and our minds) a little bit.  It maybe had something to do with trying to get mom and dad's attention, or something else.  He was getting rebellious and pushing the limits constantly.  It was driving us nuts.  I even started reading discipline books (such as 1-2-3 Magic!) to try to figure out what we're doing wrong.  I got some good ideas, and learned some new things.  For example, that there are Stop behaviors and Start behaviors.  That's obvious, but they both frustrate you the same way and you have to approach them very differently.  Overall, I think we were on the right track.  We just needed to back up and calm down a little.  Obviously, the fight is not over, but everyone is back in a good state of mind now and we can all talk things out again.  Probably the main thing we did was conscientiously back away from "1-2-3 you're busted!" back to the positive reinforcement.  We started the happy-face routine again, using the Doug and Melissa Responsibility Chart.  For Taisei, the key is to have a tangible goal and reward.  We've tried different things with the chart.  Last week, it was "If you get x number smiley faces, then we can go see a movie Saturday."  The one going right now is "if you can get more this week then last week, you can have this toy."  (It happens to be McDonald's Happy Meal toy from the movie we saw last week, How to Train Your Dragon - nice to have a theme going on to keep it connected.)  It seems to be working.  He's been happy, Mom's been happy, and there's a lot less stress and unhappiness all around.  And one of the biggest outcomes - he pays attention to his behavior!  If you have more than one kid... then I guess you'll have to be extra creative.  I can't imagine that situation yet.  We'll have it in a few years... YIKES!  Bottom line - the key for Taisei has been to keep it fresh, positive, and rewarding.

Hopefully the kids will keep going to bed on time, and I'll be able to put more updates on here.