Katie's Personality

It's exciting to see how Katie is adapting compared to us adapting to her. For instance, when Katie takes a nap or goes to bed, that's the time for me to ZzZzZz out too or to finally watch a dvd movie and volume level 01.

At the rate prices are going up with diapers, we thot it was a good idea to start Katie on a potty training regiment. Katie had her own ideas of what pottie training meant.

Katie loves to play with all our pots and pans in the kitchen. Our whole house is becoming a playground again for kids.


Katie has also been developing a very independent attititude toward us. She wants to feed herself and lets us know how she can do it better than us. She may develop a career in plastering. You can see how well she can feed herself and give herself a rice cereal facial at the same time and how cooperative she is with sticking out her tongue at us.



Life continues to be full of joys and challenges as Katie is growing up too fast. It's a blast to see her mimicking our family. I'm not sure if playing the piano and using a cell phone for a tutor was a good idea though. haha. Until the next blog.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Ahh the joys of Fatherhood. I'm learning a version of the game Rock, Paper, Scissors. It's called
Riotmode, Pooper, Starving. I play this game with her everyday. Most of the time she is in one of these modes when she is fussy. To make things worst, she likes to bluff here and there. She likes to do stink grenades and false hunger pains. Arlene is more conservative with the wipes. For myself, I would pour out the wipes and use as many as possible. It also makes her smell more fragrant.

Oh well, it's fun to see here grow and try and communicate with us. She is no longer afraid of our dog. In fact Thumper is more afraid of her! My next goal in the weeks to follow is to see how she likes to write or draw. I'll give her some paper and pencil or use a magnadoodle.

Anthony is now driving and Christopher is almost ready to learn. Katie is already driving, Flintstones style. Enjoy the photos.

Loy

Ground Hog Days again

It's hard to believe today is July 11th. Although we are back in wonderful Sacramento, it feels like part of us is still back in China. The weather is muggy right now and it's in the high 80's.

We finally got medical coverage from my workplace "The poor State of California" on July 1st, 2009. It took them forever. They were going to ding me on my paperwork because I used the wrong color ink and they were soo confuse which name to use for medical coverage. If we had to furlough off some more people, I know who I would recommend. grrrr.

Well it's been roughly 4 weeks and I feel like I'm in the movie Ground Hog Day like Bill Murray. I wake up each morning with the Alarm clock crying out " Wah, Wah, feed me, change me! ". I say to myself, where am I? We go downstairs and realize there isn't a beautiful waterfall downstairs nor a koi pond, nor a fabulous buffet. Oh well, it's back to CHEERios and wonderful work. Well live is actually more exciting and fun now that Katie has medical coverage. Katie still loves to eat food and somehow some of it gets stuck in her nose. Gross! We're proud that we taught her some sign language "more, hungary, and down" and she taught us some too " I want that, go down, go thataway, and change me" with just one finger! We met some cool parents at our church and they taught their boy 60 symbols and working on 61. I can only handle about 10.
Arlene and I were laughing thinking how the two kids could be eventually signing at each other about us and we would be oblivious to what they were saying.

The only ability I've learned to do so far is to watch my dog Thumper give me the poop alert and I go into my costume hero sidekick "Super Changer" where I can change her poopy diaper under 30 seconds with a singe wipe (actually it's more like 5). Thumper keeps her nose glued to her diaper until I change her.

Work has been challenging, but I have a great patient boss. Our governor is making us take off on Fridays. Our pay has dropped 14% and may drop to 19% At the rate we're going, we will have to resort to using regular cloth diapers. (NOT!) It may be better for her, it's definitely worse for me and my asthma. One advantage a cloth diaper has over the velcro ones is that Katie can't undo herself with cloth. One day she learned how to pull the velcro tab and shazam the diaper was off. Needless to say it was funny but then again it wasn't. Imagine the consequences of her doing that with a #2 diaperat your house! SCARY. I dread the day coming........................... that's why we have those diaper pants on her. They're really backup poopy catch all pants. Hmm, maybe we should put on two or three haha! Good thing we also have the PoopCon alert system.

I finally finished my China coffee book album at mypublisher.com via Costco and looking forward to seeing how it looks. I have 54 pages!