Pre-Xmas Prezzies!!!!

Burl makes this silly-happy face on purpose and I love it!

The boys are soooo happy with their toys!

Happy Halloween

We are getting ready to go to *bucks and then our long day at school.

We went to the big PO this morning and picked up a big box from Gramma Maureen - Yay! Pics soon, but we let Ivo open one present and Burl opened his drum set. The boys are thrilled - heaven. Ivo just said "I build a cool house!"

Our neighbors are all acting funny, we are wondering if there's been a death a couple doors down.

We are hoping to hang with D-man tomorrow - It will have been 4 weeks since we've seen them. And come on, Heather's belly???? Burl's teeth, crawling etc???? And all the new skills acquired by D-man and Ivo... First we were sick for 2 weeks, then D-man got pneumonia... Insane.

Here are some pics from Nate and Jessie's Halloween party. Ivo decided NOT to wear his bat costume - unexpected for a guy who wears costumes all the time. At the end of the night (for us, anyway) poor Ivo stepped on a tack. So owie! So horrifying!

Ryan was a guy named Leisure Suit Louis and I was Ryan. Make that Classic Ryan circa 1999. Burl was a bat for a few minutes and Ivo would have been a bat if he had worn his costume...

More about Halloween party soon.

At the Park and Lunch

Ivo and Burl have been loving going to the playground on Tai Yuan in the mornings. We see the same people we've seen for more than 2 years. During the summer, we only go at night, when it's dark cuz it's TOO HOT. But mornings are the bomb! Autumn weather kicks butt! Lots of friends there - and today, for the first time, Jordan and her mom (from story time across from Karin - I think Ennis may have been canvassing for students) were there. Ivo loves Jordan.

Ivo Overheard:

• (to Aiyi-mama while perched on the sea horse) "I wanna get off, xia lai."



• pointing at the cutest little girl in ponytails, "Dat my girlfriend, mom."

Guess what Burl ate today at the vegi restaurant... and likes... and took a couple dozen bites of before closing up shop (pursing lips while moving his head evasively)... PUMPKIN!!!! Yay!

Last night, Burl asked for/grabbed crusty sourdough bread. I let him have a piece and watched carefully - choking hazard. He really liked it. Burl still refuses most food; he'll eat a little yogurt and nutrition-free rice crackers. My mom said maybe Burl is/will be a table-food baby and so far it seems likely. Unfortunately for Burl, our table-food usually contains more than one of the things I want Burl to avoid til he's bigger like tomatoes, butter, eggs, nuts, chicken, wheat. I'm happy to make him (and do) his own potato, sweet potato, rice... but he still won't eat that stuff.

You can click the pic of Burl and the bread in his chair to see his top teeth!

Also, you can hear a sleep specialist and one of the researchers who works with Po Bronson talk about the effects of sleep deprivation on the Brian Lehrer show. "An hour loss of sleep increases yr chance of obesity by 80%" How's that fr sensational? Sleep deprivation interferes with the production of at least 5 hormones, 2 of which tell the body whether yr full/not full and whether yr sugar level is ok (ie, you need/don't need to eat). This interference results in a sleep-deprived brain thinking you've had a 900 calorie cut in yr diet; that yr on a starvation diet. So yr brain panics and changes yr metabolism as well as re-programs yr appetite to crave high carb, high sugar foods...

Dr. Mark Mahowald, Director of Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, cites this statistic: falling asleep while driving causes more deaths than alcohol in people under 25 in the US!!!! And that doesn't count drowsy-drivers - just actual sleeping ones!

Tai Yuan Road

One morning last week the boys and I headed to the breakfast shop. Early - rush hour-y. There had been a scooter-on-motorcycle accident, leaving both vehicles in the road, in the way. The people were long gone, having been ambulanced to the hospital. The girls at the breakfast shop said the accident had happened 45 minutes before we got there. While we ate, the police showed up to take measurements and pictures.



All-told, the scooter and motorcycle sat in the intersection for about 2 hours, joined by a police car only for the last 30 minutes. It's insane to me that traffic flow is routinely inconvenienced and endangered by these unmarked fallen vehicles...



One of my heroes, Michael Turton has written and photo-journaled on the fiasco that is Taiwan traffic. Also read this excellent analysis of the impact of land use laws on driving. Here are 2 paragraghs I like (from 2 different posts of his) that help explain:

Certainly the drivers education and enforcement systems are daft here. Certainly people do not know the rules. Certainly there is no ethic of civil society that compels individuals to account for the needs of others. But the Taiwanese are not essentially evil or essentially stupid. None of the aforementioned can occur withoutthat most basic of needs, space, being able to respond to the requirements of Taiwan's nascent civil society. And I fear that until it does, civil society will not be able to fully blossom on the Beautiful Island. As long as Taiwan's land use laws encourage an artificial density of human activity, it will not benefit individuals to behave as though civic society existed.

In most of our home cultures, to impose on others is an impoliteness. But in Taiwan, politeness runs in the other direction: when someone else imposes on you, you're supposed to give way. That's politeness. Probably everyone here has noticed the incredible difficulty that Taiwanese have in saying "no." Their definition of politeness is different than ours, and the result is the incredible tolerance they have for foreigners.

This is the tofu delivery at our favorite local vegi restaurant on Tai Yuan - the same morning.

Hao Xiang Baba/Mama

Until 8 months ago, most people who were given to comparisons said Ivo looked like Ryan. We thought so too, mostly, but maybe Ivo's eyes were like mine.

All that changed when people saw Burl. And, mostly, we took the winds of change with a grain of salt. It is Burl who looks exactly like Ryan - sooo, according to some Chinese family calculus, Ivo must look like me.

Though nice, it didn't seem 100% sincere. Rather, it felt like some attempt at evening things out. Kinda like the sentiment expressed universally by those who care to comment, that we should have a 3rd baby cuz we should have a girl. Now, I'm no geneticist, but I don't think that's how it works!

Anyway, when I saw this picture of Ivo, for the first time I thought - wha! Ivo looks just like me! At least, like me when I was little.

Ivo Overheard

• "It ok, Baby Burl. It not so bad.'


• "Yea, shu-re, of courts."


• "You ok over dere, Papa?"


• "O, it Manny Wamiwez!!"
  

This past week, Ivo has stepped up his interest in reading books and identifying letters. Last night at his request, he actively listened to an ABC book, twice. Each letter had a picture. I said the name of the letter then the ame of the picture; Ivo repeated. Then I asked him to point to the big letter and then the small letter. Then I said the initial phonetic sound and the word again. Ivo repeated.

He never lost interest. We repeated that pattern 72x!

Also the Merry-Go-Round

Today was Ivo's 2nd time and Burl's 1st.

Ivo's first Merry-go-Round was on my birthday. Burl and I watched from the side.

Whaaa! Even as I type this, a super happy, incredibly loud, inexplicably NOT tired Burl is launching himself up into a standing position from my legs and letting go - for a couple seconds!!!! Standing up and balancing on his own ever so briefly on his 8 month birthday!!!!

(We are in bed and Ivo is sleeping next to us.)

Also Burl can make a few different clicking sounds and gagagaga!

Burl's 8 Months Old!!!

Whaaa! BURL - WE LOVE YOU SOOOOOOOOOO MUCH!

Burl's top 2 teeth are visible - they've broken through. Burl's tooth-count is now 4 - but, the top ones aren't really visible unless you look for them. (Ivo didn't get teeth til he was 8 months)

These pics are from today at CarreFour.

We've had an excellent and busy weekend. Yesterday was story time and Halloween party at Nate and Jessie's in Chung Hua (more on that soon). We got home at 1am. Today we went shopping and then out to lunch at Chili's. We are hoping to nap (right now - it's not going very well) and then go to some of Jazzfest.

Story Time!

At Parker and Ennis' house. They live across from Karin and have a 1-yr-old daughter named Jordan. And people say our family's names are unusual...

We were going to drop off laundry and feed Karin's cats cuz she and Mary are in China with .22 for Simon's wedding. Our timing was perfect. They were just about ready to start. Ivo wanted to go. He LOVED it and Burl liked it too. Ivo answered all the questions and identified the images on the screen. A couple of times when Parker talked too long about a word or picture, Ivo said, "What next?" But otherwise awesome. Ivo went on and on retelling the story the whole afternoon.

They're gonna do it every week. Parker has a radio announcer voice - he handles the English. Ennis translates quietly and operates the projector. Jordan runs around being hilarious. She desperately wanted to hold/picke up/relieve Burl of his face...

Burl has Tooth #3!!!

Yep, Burl's top left tooth has broken through! Yay!

I said before that Burl's crawling style looks like he's limping. That's not right. It looks like he's skateboarding; his right foot kicks off the ground propelling him on his left knee and hands.

This video is from 13 Oct at RTMart... In the sickness but not yet beaten down by it. It's Burl's first time in the vehicle and he's super pround and excited! It's so fun being around Burl cuz he LOVES everything and is THRILLED with the tiniest thing. So imagine his joy lately with his accomplishments being so great. He can crawl anywhere and stand up anywhere, holding his own weight. He can stand up in the bathroom door way just holding on with one hand on the side.

So many firsts!

Ivo Plays a New Song

Some Ivo Overheard:

• For a while Ivo has been announcing "I a new superhero!" and "I have super powers!" or "I have new powers!" and "I da best superhero!" It's very cute. When asked if he wants to wear his cape he says, "Yea, help Burl."


• New superheros he's created; "I change into Zebraman!/Astronautman!/Dogman!/Ice-cweam-man!"


• "My cape is flying!!!" Pardon? "The wind is blowing my cape!!!!"


• When he sees something he'd like, "I will buy dat a my birthday." Also, "My birthday is Cwismas." And, "It my first happy Cwismas!"


• To Papa upon awaking, "I dweam bout you." Then he looks at me and says, "I dweam bout you too."


• To Papa, "I love you sooo much."


• "No! Don't pull my ha-ir Baby Burl! I sewious!"


• When indignant; in a steep rising tone "HUH????" Immediately followed by a sharp, "NO!!!!!!!"


• "Look at me! Look at me mom!


• "Maybe s/he like me..."


• "We all family!"


• And my favorite, "I just a cool Ivo."

Ivo can recite numbers up to 13. He can count things/pictures of things mostly accurately through 10. He has almost gotten over the little kid tendency of thinking a number belongs to one of the counted things.

And now Ivo's new song:

"I sowwy Burl. I sowwy Burl.

It all my fault. It not my fault.

It just an accident."

Sleep!!!!!

From NYMag 15 October '07, Snooze or Lose by Po Bronson who also wrote the excellent article on the Inverse Power of Praise.

On the effects of lost sleep on developing brains:

• “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development...”


• “Sleep disorders can impair children’s I.Q.’s as much as lead exposure.”


• Sleep loss debilitates our body’s ability to extract glucose from the bloodstream. Without this stream of basic energy, one part of the brain suffers more than the rest: the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for what’s called “executive function.” Among these executive functions are the orchestration of thoughts to fulfill a goal, the prediction of outcomes, and perceiving consequences of actions. So tired people have difficulty with impulse control, and their abstract goals like studying take a back seat to more entertaining diversions. A tired brain perseverates—it gets stuck on a wrong answer and can’t come up with a more creative solution, repeatedly returning to the same answer it already knows is erroneous


• SAT scores up and teenage car accidents down SIGNIFICANTLY in school districts where high school start-times were changed from 7:30 to 8:30

There's much more info about how learned information and memories are encoded, how our bodies, when sleep-deprived, metabolize differently, linking sleep-loss with the worldwide childhood obesity epidemic. Good, interesting stuff.

The NYTimes published this on 23 Oct '07 which echos much of the NYMag article.

The real agony emerges in adolescence. As children go through puberty, two
things happen to make getting enough sleep problematic: they need more sleep
than prepubescent children, not less — 9 to 10 hours a night — and their body
clocks shift to a later time to fall asleep and, consequently, a later
awakening...their bodies do not begin to produce the sleep hormone melatonin until 1 a.m., as opposed to 10 p.m. in most adults.

I hope that all this research on sleep deprivation vis poorer grades, moodiness, depression, disciplinary problems and traffic accidents will be embraced by school districts by the time Ivo and Burl go to school...

Phases Faze Us

Maybe 50/50. Maybe even better than that. This is the approximate ratio of loving vs. aggressive behavior from Ivo to Burl. And it comes in waves.

We are in an aggressive phase. Sometimes sneaky and sometimes bold. Poor Little B. His love to Ivo ratio is 101%; the excited kind that sometimes involves hair pulling and drooling, but also the sweetest most sincere smiles ever.

Witness Wednesday morning:

Ryan, Ivo and Burl in the play room, Ivo kicked Burl in plain sight, didn't even try to be stealth. Ryan told Ivo not to kick B and asked Ivo why? We have never gotten any satisfactory explanations to why questions yet. I don't think Ivo quite gets it... he'll usually just cop to what he did without illuminating us as to his motivation. Anyway, Ryan told Ivo to say sorry to Burl which he did. Ivo then grabbed his guitar and started singing "I sorry Baby Burl. I sorry Baby Burl. I sorry Baby Burl. All done."

A little bit a Ivo

Ivo Overheard - This morning:

• (on being nice & calmly told - for the 5th time in as many minutes - not to hit Burl on the head) "I want to, dumbass!"*


• "I no like peoples. I just only like kids."**


• (while walking past the friendly family who sits on the street drinking tea and cleaning fish on our way to the park, Ivo refused to say hi but instead did a little dance) "I funny. I do dis, make da people laugh."


• (at the park at the top of the slide) "Watch out! Here come Ivooooo!"

* Over the last month Ivo has started to say "I want to..." and "I don't want to..." in response to directions with which he takes issue. I'm not even gonna try to explain the dumbass, I only will say that both Ryan and I suppressed all laughter and didn't comment on it, focusing instead on the hurting/hitting/squishing Burl's head compunction.

** I am no longer secretly worried that Ivo will thpowt awl my thpeech impedimenth Yay! Through the early grades, I was intelligible only to my mother and sibs. Even the thpeech thewapith couldn't undowthand me. Ivo can say a nice crisp "s." He's working through the final "-s" sound by adding a t. So when he says "peoples" it sounds like people-ts.

Burl Crawls

We've got to post some video. Burl crawls effectively but with a little "limp." His arms and left leg are positioned in standard crawling posture, however Burl keeps his right foot flat on the floor - so his crawl is a half-walk.

Burl can pretty much go anywhere he wants. Usually, he wants to go wherever we are. But this morning, for the first time, he wanted to go into the bathroom all by himself. To be fair, who doesn't wanna play in the bathroom?

When Burl sees Ryan, he puts down whatever he's playing with, does a couple of bum-jumps and heads over to bao bao Papa.

Burl says: la la la, da da da, ah-da, ba ba ba

Burl fake coughs, clears his throat and laughs all the time.

As far as health goes, everyone is finished with their antibiotics - I ended up taking Burl back to the dr on Friday and he too had a middl

e ear infection. Everyone seems to be better - but I just noticed that one of Burl's eyes is all pink... boo hoo.