Halloween - Monkey

We dressed Hannah up as a monkey for Halloween. (dh had gotten the costume for her a few weeks ago.) The parents were trees (though not the greatest tree costumes ever...but we were good enough trees for Hannah to climb on.)

Insert picture here. Imagine a photo of Hannah as a monkey. I'm going to try to download & the photo from our Blackberry Pearl...

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update many moons later:
Finally we got a small memory card for our pearl and did transfer some pictures over to the card before our blackberry died on us & we needed a replacement. we managed to only save 3 pics...all the other photos of stuff from our pearl are forever lost.

Peas in the Eye

So have you ever gotten peas and turkey in your eye? Well, tonight, I did. While being fed, Hannah blew a mouth full of peas and turkey in my face. A big glob flew at high velocity straight into my left eye. It got on my contact and under my contact. Now that hurts. Try it sometime. Baby food is just the perfect consistency that if you blink, it gets everywhere in your eye. Since I was in pain from the gritty protein, and I couldn't see, it made it difficult to try to get to a location where I could take out my contact and rinse my eyeball. Funny daughter. She got her point across. She didn't want to eat anymore.

And I've just spent the past hour and a half trying to put her down to bed. We did the normal nighttime routine. I finally had her down, but I decided to turn up the ceiling fan b/c she had a head full of sweat. She woke up from the clicks of the fan. She sat up, and then insisted on playing. Crawling all over the bed. Crawling out of bed. Playing with her shadow on the wall (from the nightlight). Crawling on mommy. Crawling on daddy on the floor. We left her up there, and she fussed and then escalated to ear piercing screeches. So up I go again, and finally nursed her to sleep after another 30 minutes. What are we to do? I don't want to nurse her to sleep...it's a horrible crutch. And I feel like somehow with all this travelling and being off-schedule with sleeping, naps, eating etc. ... these past 6 weeks have been such a crucial window in her development, and it was such a bad time to be travelling and switching up her routine to "no routine" - I fear that there will be long-term bad results from this, and we the parents will suffer the most from these consequences. sigh

No Camera :-(

So we left our camera at A-ma's this weekend with Auntie C's wedding festivities. It has lots of photos and such on it...and they're not downloaded. Since mommy has been super busy helping auntie C prep for her wedding since we've been back from Taiwan, there are no updated photos and such on the blog. No Taiwan updates, no Hannah photos or videos. Now we have to wait for A-ma to mail mommy & daddy their camera. And then wait for mommy to download, resize, upload and post. So to all of our loyal readers, we apologize for no photos for now.

But mommy is a much happier mommy now that auntie C's wedding is over. She's so much less stressed out. She wore many hats for the event, and now Hannah's glad to have mommy's attention back, so is daddy.

Here's auntie C's website that mommy works on.

And some of auntie C's photos from the wedding,

and a few of mommy and daddy's from their engagement & wedding, that mommy found on the photographer's website. and if you explore the site, you can find other photos of mommy & daddy & even a-ma and a-gong.

She likes her jumperoo again

Yay! After much acclimating and conditioning...she likes her jumperoo again! Though she's not as enthusiastic in jumping anymore. Video to follow soon.

Sad morning

Hannah had a bad fall this morning. First fall to draw blood. She busted her gums and/or top lip...it's hard to tell b/c she flips out when I try to look at it. I've not felt so panicked in a long time. Her cries of pain were more frantic and scary to me than I've ever heard. I picked her up and found blood on me and her, and I was totally scared. But we cleaned her up, and she's okay now. Sheesh! It was a panicky experience for me and her.

4 teeth & baby food

Her 4th tooth has broken through the skin today. It's the other front bottom tooth.
The others are making good progress.

She also eagerly gobbled up her food today. She had rice baby crackers (which she always likes). Afterwards, she willingly opened her mouth up for a carrot and beef concoction I made. It's the 1st time this whole week she's consistently opened up her mouth for food besides the 1st couple of bites. She willingly opened up her mouth for all of the beef & carrots. I guess she likes the taste of them. yay!

Three teeth

So she now has 3 teeth. I just noticed the 3rd today, on top in front. It had been starting to emerge on Saturday. Her two front teeth have both decided to emerge. The bottom right tooth is much longer than the top ones since it was the 1st to emerge. The other bottom tooth hasn't shown any signs of emerging yet.

She's much better when she has another baby with her and they're parallel playing. I can actually move around the house without her flipping out when I leave the room. I helped to watch Emmie for a couple of hours today, and they had fun together. Of course the toys that usually aren't interesting to Hannah, became interesting after Emmie was playing with them. Emmie enjoyed the jumperoo, though Hannah still does not.

Getting used to being back...still.

So we're working hard on getting a schedule and routine back. So far, sleep is going rather well. We've taken early morning walks this weekend to reset our biological clocks. (Though this morning it was raining so we didn't walk.) Hannah's doing better with sleeping longer blocks at night. She slept last night from about 6:45pm to 7am (with 2-3 brief wakings). I slept from 6pm to 6am (with brief wakings to care for Hannah). Nice for me overall. It's so wonderful to be back in our own beds. While travelling, Hannah & I co-slept. Not the best for my sleep or hers... She rolls around and wiggles too much. And for fear of disturbing others at night, I'd latch her on ASAP when she cried.

So the weird thing is that she's scared of her jumperoo now. Super scared. She doesn't want to be in it at all. We've tried several times to put her in it, and each time she cries and seems super scared and insecure. This morning, I showed her video of herself jumping happily in the jumperoo. She looked at the video, looked over at the jumperoo, looked back at the video. She cooed, and I thought maybe we'd give it another try. I tried again, and she clawed at me and whimpered as I was trying to put her down in it. So... we'll give it a rest for awhile.

She likes to cruise on the furniture now. She's super interested in climbing up things and holding on and exploring.

I'm going to eventually post up stuff on what we did in Taiwan.

We're back!

Hannah & I got back to the good 'ole US of A today. It's been a very long 36-hour day...long day of travelling. Luckily we caught an earlier flight on standby from DFW to our place. Hannah totally crashed. She's sleeping now. I'm tired too.

When we 1st got back home, she woke up in her car seat with this pitiful wail. Each time she has woken up these past 2 days, I've had her in a different location. Probably really disconcerting for her. It seemed to take her awhile to get used to "home." It also felt unfamiliar to me after being gone for 3 weeks, and so I can only imagine what she felt like.

More to come later.

Happy Eight Months!

I just wanted to celebrate with Hannah on making it to eight months. Having grown so much, she is now ready and enthusiastically asking, "What's next!" Of course her parents are also asking the same question but with a slightly different tone, "What's next?"

We still love her.

H's 1st Typhoon

We survived Hannah's 1st typhoon - Typhoon Krosa (Ke1 Ro2 Sha1). It was rather large, and we were indoor bound for Saturday and Sunday as it hit Taiwan. (Though we did watch the news and there were ppl that still went out Saturday). The winds were strong and fast and the rain was hard. There was footage of this mom holding onto her baby stroller as the winds were lifting it way up in the air. The winds were sorta scary as we were on the 15th floor.

There was a period of calm as the eye was directly over Taipei. Sunday it was not so bad b/c it weakened. The power went out several times on Saturday, Sunday and today (Mon) which has just added to the discomfort since Taiwan is already so hot, humid, & muggy.

"According to the power company, Typhoon Krosa - the 15th typhoon reported in the West Pacific area this year - caused the largest-scale blackout since Typhoon Herb battered Taiwan in 1996."

China Post article: 7 dead, 52 injured after Typhoon Krosa

We're looking forward to heading back to the states at the end of this week. Tomorrow we take A-zo (H's great-grandma) to the hospital again. We went last Tuesday and will go for a follow up this Tuesday at Cathay General Hospital (Guo Tai) in Taipei. We're also heading to Zhong Li tomorrow. So today I packed our stuff up. I had already packed a bunch of it up on Thursday, since we were out Friday, and were supposed to go Southward on Saturday. Due to the typhoon, our plans were changed.

What's been going on?

Sorry we haven't added any posts in the last few weeks. Hannah and Grace have learned there is no place like home, and three weeks is a little too long to stay as a guest in someone's house. At home Hannah is able to have a regular sleep schedule, a cool bath, and lots of neat toys. Although, Hannah has been restless and overstimulated, I am ready to have her home.