egads! 

same barber and colorist 

on the balcony same sartorial style 

just some pics

no time to write here are a couple pics of Ivo at Cuyler's house in Taipei. They are men of action!

family 

karen and ivo at fingas 

garden bells 

roadtrip taipei

ivo and i are going to taipei with karin tomorrow to bring mary her stuff, go shopping, see a rock show and mostly to hang out with friends.

we are excited. maybe too excited - ivo woke up w 5 red circles on his face which i hope are bug bites, i guess, but i have no idea really... yesterday he ate pineapple and a bit of cheese - but i don't think it's an allergic reaction.

we got new brake pads and two new tires on the opel astra. yippee! safe!

so this elimination communication: yesterday morning i anticipated 2 pees and brought ivo to the bathroom in time, made the shhhh/pssss sound - viola! he wore a diaper in th pm bc we had stuff to do and couldn't be monitoring wee wee all day! well, today, i missed each time - and in any event, ivo seemed to have diarrhea so he's wearing a diaper. we'll go at it hard core when we get back from taipei.

i'm still working on the missionary of scientific thought bit and i'm also thinking about the dif b/w language and dialect in the Chinese world - i think it's a political distinction - i don't think that taiwanese and mandarin are simply dialects like Queen's english is to Bostonian english... especially since it wasn't until intellectuals in the 20th century made a successful push for written chinese to reflect spoken chinese/baihua rather than classical chinese which has long been unintelligible to all but the super educated

so baihua in the 1920s and simplified characters in the 1950s - isn't it clear that the chinese language(s) hasn't been one uninterupted unifying force thruout/among china an han people...

please let me have ice cream! 

just waiting for these new shoes to take me first steps! 

chicken??? 

out to lunch! 

standin 

sly 

happy 

new shoes new tudes

Ivo and Ryan are napping - at least one of them will probably wake up before I finish this and then I might not get to post - oh well. What a glorious and eventful long weekend it's been. It's 1010 Day here in Taiwan - Founders Day or such like. The date chosen to mark the beginning of the Repubulic of China - though not on this Island and kinda by accident but down with the Qing anyway - they weren't even Chinese.

The weather has turned beautifully less humid and a bit cooler. We spent a lot of the weekend outside. On Saturday 8 Oct, Ivo and Karin and I met on tea street. I'd been waiting til I got paid to buy some sumptuous scented cream at the Body Shop - anyway, while enjoying our tea and fried dofu, we met up with the woman who owns Sahara Restaurant. She was out with two of her 5 sons - the youngest is 18months. She told us that a shoe store down the way was going out of business and all the kid shoes are only 199nt. They're soft leather and flexible like mocassins. So we picked up a dark blue pair for Ivo. These are the first shoes that Ryan and I bought him. He's been given shoes by Steve and Lisa and by my sister.

Another thing the woman from Sahara - this is her actual name - told me was about potty training. I didn't really get it all but suffice it to say super-early - diaper-free - prewalking, like 7 months of age. She's done this with her later kids and they don't even wet the bed... Well, ok. Ivo's still pretty small and his pee is largely inoffensive to me but I haven't even considered potty training yet. Then I read an article in the New York Times about "elimination communication" and how 50% of babies worldwide are toilet trained by the time they turn 1. So I don't know what we're gonna do - but I like the idea of not having to train a 2 yr old to do anything he doesn't wanna do. Unlike the whole baby sign language phenomenon - this actually seems to hold water! This is a link to diaperfreebaby.com - it's useless to link to the new york times cuz they start charging after a week.

Now to the big concidence. Drumroll, please. On the day that Ivo got his blue shoes - he also took his unassisted first steps. 1-2-1-2-and catch him - he did it twice on saturday and once on sunday... so exciting.

There's some more stuff but I'll wait - both Ryan and Ivo are up!

measles vaccine chinese lessons

i had my first chinese class in a long long time. it was my first with ivo. sho is my teacher and she's wonderful. very encouraging and i love her spoken mandarin. today i read her a story from Frog and Toad Together called "Flower Garden" - excited cuz she could understand me and then she asked me a bunch of ?s which i understood and could answer.

The Frog and Toad books are among my favorite from childhood and they're all translated into Chinese with the phonetic spellings next to the characters. Yippee!

Before our excellent class - Ivo and I went to the pediatrician for his 9 month immunization - we're a little late on it - he's 9mos 11 days. I sort of forgot cuzall the baby stuff I read is in English. In Taiwan, kids are immunized against measles at 9 months vs. 18 months in the states. The doctor said this is because measles is still around in Taiwan. So Ivo got the shot and didn't even cry. He's the most amazing coolest guy!

Here are his vitals... he's 9.7kg, 74cm with a head circumference of 46cm.

He's got 2 teeth - the bottom ones. Eats mashed things with lumps like potatoes and sweet potatoes, apples, pears and rice. He was all about mangoes during the mango season... His finger foods include rice cookies that dissolve in yr mouth and just started eating corn flakes cereal. There are some other things too. He still breast feeds - I think he gets most of his needs met thru milk.