Mirei's Mayhem Continues

Today was another one of those days for Mirei:

• She purposely wrapped her chewed gum around her head and got it all tangled up.  Eventually, I yanked out a tuft of hair around shower time.  She thought it was pretty funny and laughed.
• She fell backwards and banged her head against the ground.
• She had the usual walking into walls and door frames.
• She jumped on her bed and hit the bedframe or something.  Looked like it hurt.
• Lastly, right before bedtime, she was fighting Taisei over turning off the lights for bedtime and grabbed the socket while it was half unplugged.  Yep - she electrocuted herself briefly.  That one was kind of nasty. I just did it a few weeks ago and it bites.

Sleeping

Edit:  I wrote this a long time ago and decided to post it just for our records.  I wish it would have posted with the original date though.  Argh.

This was a huge week for our progress with Mirei.  We didnt do a great job with her sleep training and kept hoping that because she has Taisei that she would somehow sleep train herself.  We hoped she would simply learn to soothe herself, or at least rely on Taisei and learn to sleep.  Neither things really happened.  That's partly good and partly bad.  Finally, we had to put Taisei downstairs to sleep by himself in the office.  Funny thing was he happily did it.  He was so fed up with Mirei screwing around before bedtime that he was happy to get some peace and quiet.  It was kind of a pain, but Mirei finally got used to sleeping by herself.  The funny thing is that she doesn't care whether Taisei's in the room with her or not.  She's not scared.  She's just unwilling to go to bed.  We had to go through patiently listening to all her excuses, listening to her bang on the door (since she hasn't slept in the crib since 8 months, remember?), and all kinds of the typical stuff before she finally realized that we're serious.  Then, she finally did it.  It's not consistent every night, but she'll go to bed after one or two times of soothing, usually.  If she's tired, she'll just go right to bed.  The good thing now is that she's finally learned to understand when she feels tired and sometimes she'll even tell us.  She'll say, "I'm tired, papa."  And I'll say "You're tired, Mirei?"  "Yeah."  "Do you want to go to bed?"  "No."  At least she's totally honest.

Mirei doing homework

Another email from Wami.

-------
From: Wami
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 1:50 PM
Subject: Mirei doing HW

Mirei has been doing well in her Japanese class without Mama.  Now she
has homework. This is one of the HW, practicing writing lines. I'm
quite surprised she can hold pencils well.  She is pretty happy to
have her own HW like Taisei : )

Injury Report

Week of January 8th.

Monday, Mirei fell down almost all the way down the stairs.  She was sitting on nearly the top step, and according to her re-enactment for us, fell forward and then rolled sideways until her head hit the railing.  Her account was verified by both one eye-witness, Taisei, and by the bruise on her forehead.

Tuesday, Taisei was walking up the stairs in his pajamas that are too big, and at the top of the stairs fell over backwards!  He stepped on the pajamas and as he tried to stand up straight, the pajama pants pulled him backwards off balance.  He luckily missed Mirei who was on his right behind him.  Unfortunately, with all his weight behind it, his head went right into a corner on the main supporting railing.  That was a scary moment.  Wami walked in just as it happened and saw his head ricochet.  He had a HUGE, 1/2" by 2" bump on the upper back part of his head.  It was a bit scary.

Yesterday, Mirei ran diagonally across her futon and jumped (or possibly tripped?) face-first right into the wall.  Yep, that hurt.  I have no idea what she was thinking on that one.  I was sitting right there next to her when it happened.

Tonight, Mirei was running around with her latest Chipmunks McDonald's Happy Meal toy and jumped (or tripped) onto her futon bed, with her eye ramming into the toy in her hand.  When she went to bed, she had a big welt above and below her eye.  When she closes her right eye, you can actually see the line going over her eyelid.  Yikes.  Lucky she blinked.  Again, another scary moment.

This really is only the major stuff.  Most of the more minor incidents that happen nearly every few moments it seems, was not included.  For example, Mirei probably has 2-3 head bumps on cabinets, door frames, hallways, and just the plain ground each day.  Anyway, welcome to our world.  And to think we have a newborn that we're trying to protect at every second of the way.