Happy 9 Months Burl!!!!

Pics from yesterday at *bucks and dinner at beef noodle shop (which took over the empty storefront that used to be our fried rice place)

Christmas and Birthdays - Coming our Way!!

Whoo-hoo!

Yesterday, Ivo and Burl received pressies from Aunt Joanne and Uncle Bob. Yay!

By now, Ivo knows that if the mailman's at our door, it's either something really great or else some stupid piece of paper. So, if he witnesses the delivery, we've been letting him open the box and a present, or 2.

Ivo and Burl love their new shirts and books!

They play with the drumset and blocks every day!

Thank you thank you!

Ordinary Ornery - No special preparation

Happy Face - Takes a little effort

Super Cuteness - just the way he comes

Yesterday Burl Turned 9 Months Old

Here's a little video of Ivo and Burl from yesterday at *bucks before our friends arrived.



The boys both went to school, were happy and mostly healthy. I DID go by to feed Burl during my 30 minute break. While nursing Burl in the lobby, I heard Ivo in his classroom TALKING. A LOT. "No! Dat not wight!" "Dis is da head. Da head. Dis is da head." I peeked in - he was making a dinosaur with duplo blocks. And bossing people around - in English.

Ha ha. Ha. The little apple doesn't fall far from the tree, lord knows, I boss people around in English all the time!

Buding Mama told me that Ivo's Chinese is really coming along and that everyone can understand him. This is great news - though, I have yet to hear very much.

Yay - Ivo! Yay - Burl!

We just got back from an afternoon baseball game - Philippines and Thailand. Scoreless when we left at the top of the 10th. Karin met us out there. Today and tomorrow, Ryan is finished school at noon because of tests. Yay crazy stupid cheating education system!

Alvin, Ivo and Burl

Chipmunks.

Xmas Videos

I'm posting these cuz my students have to choose a Christmas song and they're sick of what they know...


Also Ivo likes these - well, he doesn't like Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer... Good for him!


Ivo looked at Miss Piggy and said, "What is DAT?"

Ivo Sings

A version of Old MacDonald and "dolphins, dolphins dolphins..."

Ivo & Burl Stayed Home from School Monday

Click on this pic to see Burl's beautiful brown eyes.

Ivo and Burl have colds. Ivo's is super slight - negligible. Burl's a little deeper. On Monday, Karin babysat the boys so they could avoid the daycare germies - yay!

Boys are mostly good. Burl's happy but cranky, congested and has a sad sad cough - if he's like this tomorrow, I don't want him to go to school... Today, the boys have stayed in their jajamas, as Ivo says, all day. Its nice - kinda feels wintry - even though we're all barefoot, in short sleeves or pant-less. The typhoon swirled as close as it's gonna get and left. Rain - not a lot, but WINDY! It was dark this morning and Ivo slept til 9:30. Even though it was dark, Burl woke at 6:15. Ouch!

Last night while playing with Ryan, Ivo bit him on the thigh. Right about then, playtime ended, Ivo was sad, we went up to bed. Biting has never been an issue with Ivo, he got bitten a couple times and I think, retaliated once - all well over a year ago. And, come to think of it, a few months back, he bit Burl... Upstairs Ivo and I were talking about not biting people cuz it HURTS and Ivo said, "YEA, Lu-ping bite me. I crying." I asked him where Lu-ping bit him, Ivo said, "At Baby World." I'm still not clear on what part of his body but it may have been a finger. Again, we were talking on Monday night - Ivo hadn't been to school since Friday, so this wasn't fresh information and biting has never been mentioned in his communication book. I know 2-year-olds aren't the most reliable sources, but I don't think Ivo was making this up. It sounded real. The only aggressive behavior the teacher has told us of is Ivo pushing other kids. So, I'm gonna ask about it in his communication book tomorrow.

This biting - real or imagined - may give me a little "hand," as they say, with the Baby World peeps. I don't think anything totally foul goes on at Baby World, per se. And my god, if I intimated I thought things weren't on the up-and-up, Ryan would make me quit my job. And while I admit to being out of touch with what is standard daycare operating procedure in Western countries, the Baby World policy of not allowing parents inside the school doesn't feel right to me and I've pretty much decided I'm not gonna follow that rule.

At Baby World there is a full-on concerted effort to keep the parents outside the school, and if they must come in, they are confined to the shoe changing area. Isabel mentioned this when Ivo was first starting. The way they keep parents out is by having a staff member run out to help you get your kids into school when you're dropping them off, and by ushering your kids - who are all pre-dressed and back-packed by the time you arrive to pick them up - out/over to you. When I've tried to enter, the staff member assigned to work the door spreads her arms wide, running interference. Choreography.

Quickly and efficiently transferring custody of the children IS convenient - for a lot of reasons, not to mention, it's possibly necessary to keep traffic jams to a minimum. In fact, the whole thing is reminiscent of a fast food drive-through. And while I don't need dozens of parents parading through the school, gawkers or otherwise, it feels wrong that (my) children's parents are prohibited from ever seeing their kids in situ. However, actual and con-artist kidnapping is HUGE in Asia - so maybe Taiwanese parents feel safer with their kids locked in a building in which even they, the parents, are unwelcome.

The thing is, little kids can't tell you what's going on. I don't need to know every single thing that happens, but I'd like to have a general sense of the classroom dynamics, what it looks like when the kids are all together.

During the first week that the boys attended Baby World, I asked if I could sit in with Ivo to help him adjust since he's never been to school before and he hadn't been in an unmediated Chinese Language setting since before Burl was born. The lao ban, Buding Mama, said NO - cuz my presence would freak out the other kids.

OK - fair enough, I thought at the time. And now, Ivo seems to enjoy school; he looks forward to it and doesn't complain about going. However having taught in kindies/day care centers in Taiwan, I can't just trust Buding Mama. I expect administrations to both withhold unsavory information as well as to outright lie.

During the SARS outbreak of 2002/3, schools and businesses began taking everyone's temperature before anyone could enter. My employer, Perfection Kindergarten - a misnomer, believe me - used this pivotal moment in history as an excuse to lock parents out of the campus in the name of both children's safety and public health. Cynical? Maybe, but there's more.

While SARS was spreading throughout pockets of Taiwan's population, Taichung simultaneously experienced a severe - but not as bad as the deadly 1998 outbreak- bout of Hand Foot and Mouth Disease (enterovirus). For weeks, my class of 25 students was reduced to as few as 7. More than half my students had the enterovirus, but because the parents weren't coming into the school, they had no idea how many kids were sick - with an infectious disease. And, because the parents were kept away from the empty classrooms, from each other, as well as from the teachers - who had been ordered NOT to discuss absentee numbers - the school did NOT report the cases of HFMD to the Taichung Dept of Health. At the time, the DoH would shut down a class for a few days (not the entire school) if there were 2 or more students infected with the enterovirus.

Finally a parent of one of my students, a journalist for the Liberty Times, broke the story - and we got the classroom cleaned. The school lost face - but not enrollment.

So, I dropped in at Baby World on Wednesday between classes to nurse Burl. Of course they had to let me, though it seemed like a novel request. Burl was brought out to me, I was not allowed to walk past the classrooms to the nursery. There was a toddler screaming the whole time I was there and I hoped it wasn't a classmate of Ivo's. When I had to leave I headed back towards the nursery and was quickly stopped, just outside Ivo's classroom. He looked sooo cute sitting at the miniature table with the hood up on his Superman vest sharing a book with a classmate. I said a quick hi-i'm-so-proud-of-you-i-love-you to him. No kid seemed stricken. No kid, including Ivo, left his/her seat. I was relieved to see that the screaming kid was across the hall - I didn't investigate - I don't wanna be a butt-inski - I just want to see how Ivo's doing and he was fine. However his friend, D-man was sleeping at 4:30, while his teacher reported in his communication book that he woke up at 3:30.

So, I dropped in on Friday too - I had a bottle to give Burl.

Typhoon Mitag

The Taiwan Central Weather Bureau has issued a typhoon warning! There are 2 storms happening now - VERY LATE in the season:(

The time-boxes are pretty much obscuring the island on the graphic... and if you wanna understand the warning, you've got to be a meteorologist. But, the gist is, it might rain in Taichung.

Also in the news, Typhoon Mitag caused a ceasefire in the Philippines - you know, so people don't die.

Burl is Not Playing Ball

Burl likes to play catch - maybe the game he plays is better known as "fetch." He likes to crawl after a ball, grab it, drop it, watch it roll away and start again.

Burl has recently entered the easily-distracted nursing phase... He just loves seeing what's going on and participating.

Among the sweetest things of all time is when Burl lays his head down on our shoulders.

Ivo's ready to sleep. Burl is ready to play. I've brought Burl downstairs and after just 10 minutes away from, even a sleepy Ivo, Burl's eyes are closed and he's nursing to sleep.

These pics are from this afternoon.

Burl can figure out in which hand I'm hiding something from him - so when he and Ivo shared the 10nt ride, Burl knew something was missing and cast his eyes over at the next ride where he spied an unused steering wheel of his own. Burl stared at the other car til we moved him over. "That's more like it!" - he seemed to say.

Ivo and Burl Weekend 24-25 Nov

Reading with Lulu and her mom - due 1/1












Bird on the walk home

All pics from this weekend.

We had such a nice calm coolish (25C and somewhat humid) weekend. We spent alot of time at the park and ate at the breakfast shop both days.

Boys are great. Everyone is bathed and in bed. Ivo's been saying lots - I'm too tiredand Burl-y to write. I do, however, clearly remember Ivo telling me for the first time today "I don't love you. I don't love me... - you don't love me." When I said that's ok cuz I really do love him enough for both of us, he said, "I don't care."




But I know he does.

Yea, lots of acting out - not just with us - even at the park; pushing kids, continually positioning himself where some other kid is - or is obviously meaning to be... ugh! That's why we left the park and that's why he was mad at me. I think it's all normal though - even though I don't like it. And I can't help but feel that it could be waaay worse. As a formerly brutally bullied kid - it's a lot better to see my child be the aggressor rather than the victim. A LOT. It's not even close...

Attn Burl: 5 hours is NOT a Full Night's Sleep!

Last night, Burl fell asleep at his customary 8pm. He woke up at 10pm, squirming, flopping and in a general state of sleepy discomfort. Yes, he has a touch of a cold. Yes he's teething. But these things don't usually cause him such inconsolable distress or trump sleep.

The resolution came around 2am with an explosive poop that prominently featured one of his name-tag stickers, intact - probably reusable. After new diaper, Burl slept til 7am.

Ryan and I reminisced about the time Ivo ate/passed a sticker. Good times. The difference then was 2-fold; 1) it didn't upset Ivo and 2) I took pictures. Not so with Burl. While, I was in equal measures charmed and chagrined by Burl's little sticker, it never entered my mind to run and get the camera. Another instance where the gap b/w #1 and #2, is real (though silly) and how unsettling it is to imagine the lengths a not-gonna-happen #3 would need to go to, to really wow us... sigh.

These pics are from Thursday, 22 Nov - Thanksgiving in the US - wow! The boys and I were at the playground 3x that day - after dinner with Ryan. Ivo's really loving playing baseball and he LOVES kids. Burl is loving being a kid! He can crawl up the steps on the jungle gym and go down the blue slide when I count "1, 2, 3..." Hilarious and so much fun!

Retune the Body by Fasting

Quinoa: A Sacred. Super Crop - with recipes

Babies Show "social intelligence"

Sleep and Losing the Baby Weight - a little more about sleep and obesity, cuz I LOVE sleep!

The Extreme Male Brain Theory: An interview with Simon Baron Cohen, Sacha's cousin - so much genius in one family...