hao jio bu blog

It's been soooo long

17 Nov Papa and Ivo in the garden 

Kevin and Kaia Nov 15 

Kevin and Kaia

Kevin and Kaia came to visit last week after work - they cabbed over. Kaia was not as excited about the whole thing as Ivo was. Kevin said that when she got home, she made a contented sighing sound which he took for relief!

toybox baby 

toybox with book 

climbed into the toybox with phone 

hello from tooth city

At least 4 teeth are coming in up top - maybe one from the bottom. It looks painful. Ivo says it's excrutiating. we are shui bu jiao - which is to say we aren't sleeping well. The lack of rest and erratic nursing seems to cuase blocked milk ducts which hurt and ache maybe the way ivo's gums do... but all in all, he's in a good mood about everything.

right now he's screeching while Ryan walks him around the living room - it's happy screeching. He sort of looking for his voice. He sings when he's about to fall asleep and he dances when he hears music. He chatters away. If we ask him a question like; "do you want to go downstairs?" "do you want to go for a walk?" He says "da!" very 4th tone emphatically. He also waves - but doesn't vocalize - bye bye. And he's gotten pretty good at it. He doesn't always do it when appropriate - depends on his mood - but it seems to me that when he's ready to leave a place, he starts to wave bye bye.

standing before dinner 16 nov 

napping nov 15 - notice temperature difference 

nb boy napping november 17 

winter here?

ivo is nursing. we're listening to wnyc.org - the brian leher show from veterans' day. we skipped the veteran/soldier poetry... we've moved on to the story about people leaving nyc - it's based on an article in nytimes about people leaving CA for kansas city... taking paycuts but improving quality of life... a disabled vet called in to say that both he and his wife both have good jobs and can't afford to buy a house/apt even w the gi loan - it caps out at 300,000 US$... you can't buy anything in nyc for that - you might be able to get a studio for that - w a 600/month maintenance fee... and the sadness of never being able to buy a home where your family is...

it's crazy... but they're referring to ny-ers who move to places like philadelphia, allentown, albany, charlotte... as expats! i love it - the idea of a nyc hipster diaspora - of which i would count myself - of course! a ny-er who moved out of hell's kitchen to pittsburgh called in and said that maybe nyers should move out and improve these hinterland locals...

getting squeezed outa nyc - rents/property costs excrutiating - years ago I heard the statistic that 1/6 people in the US have lived or have family in Brooklyn - pretty awesome...and the whole idea of community - artistic, intellectual, spiritual, political ... writers, students, artists, musicians living among eachother - spawning and supporting bookshops, theaters, galleries etc and how pregnant and exciting that sort of place can be...but how all the old hip/sexy spots are way too expensive for true punk art... how authentic could it be? and that outside the village- east or west, even outside williamsburg, outside the cools spots in paris, london, berlin, sanfrancisco... to places people can afford but don't think of as cool stimulating breading grounds for the creative mind; like cleveland... places poor people can afford to live a life where they have space and 5 hot minutes to BE creative... Taichung is like that... all the bands that came outa Moncton/Halifax... but you have to be able to find a job

garbage truck is coming

Ivo's asleep on the couch next to me - which is why there is now punctuation and capitalization happening.

but the real reason that i'm listening to this show is the update on the trial in dover, PA on "intelligent design" being taught in the pubic schools - still working on becoming a science missionary. my friend bob said there should be a book a la the whole books for idiots craze like physics for dummies, philosophy for dummies called "dummies for scientists" - i like the idea - a handbook for rational thinkers with tips on how to relate to those who eschew logic.

ok ivo's up!

weather report

It has been humid and hot later in the year than ever in our experience here! Into the 30's celsius during the days. Ugh! Shorts and t-shirts still - tho jeans aren't out of the question when yr gonna get dirty! Ivo is sitting with his friend Adriaan who is 2 weeks younger than Ivo.
Here are some pics from brunch and the greenway by the science museum taken 13 November, my mom's bday!
Ivo's started to eat Cheerios - he loves them! He can wave bye-bye, and we think he's saying "ball" and "mama" on purpose and in context. He understands when we say "give it to Papa" "give it to Mama" - and usually he does it:) He loves shiny helium balloons - he saw a vendor from half a block away this weekend and started squealing! Then he picked out a Winnie the Pooh balloon.

halloween pics

The top pic is Ryan w Ivo at my school's party. It was craziness and not really baby friendly. They had to stand the whole time.

The other 2 are at Nate and Jessie's in Chang Hua - one in costume the other out. We're thinking about getting a rocking horse like that for Ivo's bday.

His finger in mouth has been pretty constantly how he deals with teething. That and a few fingers and also using his tongue as a cushion b/w his gums. He's had a 3rd tooth break thru - it left of the center top 2 teeth spot - but at least 2 more are in the works.

update

Ivo was a bumblebee for Halloween. He went to 2 parties. That Saturday - the 28th - evening, we were all in Chang Hua for Nate's 40th bday and kids' party. It was great - they even had a haunted house and all the food looked like other things; fingers, spiders, even a kitty litter cake!

Earlier that day we temporarily adopted a street cat. It had been living on the roof of our neighbors' across the street for at leat 5 days. Meowing and crying all the while. We think that it may have been born up there and then abandoned. Anyway, finally he got to a place where our neighbor could reach him. He freed him to the street a couple doors down. More crying and he came back here, he was so tiny... we fed him and took him to the vet. The kitty was 4 weeks old and healthy - worm-free. After a few days, I got hives. Once I stopped interacting with the cat, the hives stopped too. But it was too heartbreaking not being able to give little kitty any love. Luckily a coworker of Ryan's took him in!

The next day, we found out that Karin had broken her knee that same Saturday night. She'd been playing baseball. She's had surgery to reconnect her knee cap pieces and seems to be healing really well. She can't get around very well tho - her cast is terribly heavy. So she's home for a while. She thinks Ivo will be walking befor she is;/

Ivo doesn't really like when I use the computer. But somehow he's ok with it now. Maybe he knows he should cut me some slack since he woke wide up at 3:30am and nothing I did got him to go back to sleep so we came downstairs. It's now 4:45! He just had a big poop - yet still seems wide awake.

I'm gonna post some pics:)

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.