happy days are here again!

The family all came here for Christmas again, since Mom and Dad were flew back into SF after their trip to Thailand anyway, so only Kim and Brent had to travel. As usual, everything was lovely and we had lots and lots of food, and presents, too! Here are a pile of pictures and a video for you to enjoy!

Buster helps decorate the tree

Daisy and Jim visit from Hong Kong

Buster enjoys his present from Nina, both wrapped and unwrapped

they love Nina

opening presents from Kelly on Christmas Eve

Hooray! Hat, jammies and hat, both jammies!

the tree, some presents, and a random balloon

traditional breakfast

this gift was the cause of much contention (on my part)

some particularly favorite presents

mad scientist carefully measuring sour beer

brush paintings from China

what kind of holiday would it be without visits from more family?

Charli decorates both of us

Buster discovers a fondness for rice, ribs, and fruit punch

Sam makes New Year's Day breakfast, including love toast!

obligatory family photos - happy + pirates

And last but not least, on New Year's Eve we found out that Charli loves Rock Band!

dual purpose visit

My parents came out this weekend to see Charli and to meet up with my grandmother and take her back to Colorado for a few months. It's spring break, so they were able to come out earlier than usual and make a long weekend of it.

They showed up on Thursday morning and the weather was so warm that Mom was motivated to get out our little inflatable pool for Charli. They both had a great time. Although you can't tell from this picture, Charli DOES have several swimsuits. She even had one on, but this is after she went to the bathroom, and she didn't want to put her wet swimsuit back on. After pool-spasse (I don't know how to say "pool" in german), they had a tea party, and after I was done working and Brian was home, we went to Yoyo Sushi for dinner again, where Charli once again ate a ton and took a long time doing so. This time she didn't want hamachi or miso soup as much as she wanted all of Mom's pork katsu, but she still ate everything.

On Friday I took the day off, and we went to the kids' museum in Sausalito. I haven't been in a long time, although Nina takes the kids there quite often. I forgot how awesome it is. Charli played in the water, climbed, crawled through "secret underwater tunnels", cranked cranks, ran around a play boat, made waves, played in sand, and painted. That was all we had time for before we had to leave to meet Hal (Dad's bro), Georgia, and Kate for late lunch in Corte Madera. The restaurant we went to had, rather than crayons and coloring books, colored chalk and a chalkboard for kids. How cool! Charli, rather than drawing on the chalkboard, got a mirror from Auntie Georgia and went to town on her face. We had a very pleasant lunch followed by lovely gelato, and it was so warm we could actually eat it outside - in the shade! What a gorgeous day!

After we got home, Mom blew a dozen eggs and we decorated them for Charli's Easter egg tree. Mom always needs a project to do while she's here, and this time it was an Easter egg tree. But what to do with all those eggs? Hmmm... read on!

On Saturday we went to the farmers' market for all the general things we buy, but specifically for piles of basil so we could make pesto. We were in time for empanadas (yay!), and the first good strawberries were in, but... NO BASIL! There was none in the entire market! I had no idea that there was season for basil, but apparently there is, and this is not it. We had to go to Safeway to get the basil, where they can import it from Mexico apparently. It must be in season in Mexico.

After that we met up with Kalei (Mom's bro) and family, who drove down from Sacramento with Grandma, for dim sum. Sam and her friends, also visiting from Fort Collins, met us there, too, and we had lovely dim sum and got full. Then we walked a couple of blocks to Yerba Buena Gardens, where we wanted to fly the kite that Mom brought for Charli. Unfortunately, you can't fly kites at Yerba Buena Gardens, as the security guy who came to visit kindly informed us. Fortunately, Charli found something else to keep herself busy.


Unfortunately, Charli took a good fall while she was doing this, resulting in an honest to god bloody knee (the first in a long line, I have no doubt), which pretty much ruined the rest of her visit to the park. Brian and I didn't have anything to put on her knee, of course, even though we carry around a big bag of stuff for Charli... It (stupidly) doesn't include any first aid equipment. Auntie Bernice, however, had a band-aid, anti-bacterial ointment, and a q-tip in her purse. Bernice = experienced parent. Shortly after that, we headed home. We decided it was better to just hang out at the house than to hang out in a park with no kite, a whiny 2 yr old, and dropping temperatures. At home we played Wii and made a ton of delicious pesto for dinner in the lovely new food processor, of which we still have a large amount. Charli practiced everyone's names, and the Sacramento Fongs headed home after another great day, while Taipo (great grandmother) stayed with us.



On Sunday, Dad had to make two separate attempts to get Tartine's morning buns. Those guys open later every time I look. But we eventually got our morning buns, and in the meantime, we used up the eggs by making a half dozen quiches. We made them with various combinations of cheeses, ham, onions, spinach, broccoli, mushrooms, corn, and pesto, and I must say that of the three we've tried, they've all been delicious, and we used up not only all of the eggs that Mom blew, but also all the other eggs we had left. Charli and Taipo had a great time, and overall it was a very relaxed day. As of the end of Sunday, all the visitors (ours and Sam's) have headed back to Colorado, and we have gone through 2 3/4 of the quiches. I have 1 1/4 still in the fridge, and 2 in the freezer to be eaten at some later, fortunate, date.

potty training - day two

aka Korin gives up.

Yes, today I have given up potty training. Charli is no longer willing to sit on the toilet for longer than a second, and even that takes a lot of convincing. She is not as enamored of her undas as she was yesterday, and I realized she pees a little bit like every 10 or 15 minutes. So, after she peed on the floor right next to her potty, I gave up and put a diaper on her and she was mad and hit me in the head, which resulted in a long time out and a lot of screaming. Potty training on indefinite hold.

Of course, most of that happened while Mom was at the library picking up all kinds of potty training materials - some videos, some books for Charli, a book for me... It was a quick meltdown. Perhaps we'll try some potty training preparation (on both our parts) before we actually get down to the nitty gritty.

who the heck is george?

Charli has made (and continues to make) her first joke. She started out two nights ago pointing to the pigeon in her Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late book and asking "Is that George?" We ask back "IS that George?", since we have no idea who George is, to which Charli responds "That's not George!" and laughs and laughs. Turn the page, repeat, until there is no more book. Then she moved on to the Winnie the Pooh book and asked it about every character in there, too.

Yesterday she started to include real people, asking everyone at the dinner table if they were George. She also started asking about her babus, in addition to characters in books. Today she has moved on to inanimate, non-representational things, asking if the wall is George, or the towel, or the cabinet door...

potty training - day one

Complete and utter defeat.

I got Charli this Elmo underwear pack, and she just loves them. So we put her in them, and let her wet her pants in the hopes that she really wouldn't like it and would start using the toilet instead (which is just like the one her friend Bella uses). Some of the online stuff suggested just using the cotton undies so that the child can really feel when they're wet (Bella really hates being wet, and I was hoping Charli would too), and taking them to use the bathroom every 2 hours whether they ask for it or not, and instituting some kind of rewards system. So that was my starting plan.

No dice. Charli wet her pants about every half hour. She didn't like it, and would immediately want to change her pants, but it didn't seem to encourage her to try to control anything, or warn us beforehand - instead we were notified the instant after things happened. So we went through about 4 sets of undies ("unda") pretty quickly. After that, I thought I would just hang out with Charli in the bathroom with or without undies for a while. That lasted at least an hour, with Charli having fun taking her undies off and putting them back on, and sitting on her toilet perfectly willingly for short periods of time, but never producing anything. Eventually she actually fell asleep on me, because she got up REALLY early this morning for some reason, and I gave up. She's clearly not ready for no diaper while she's napping, so I put a diaper on her (she screamed bloody murder, so we had to put the undies on over it), and put her down for a nap. That also didn't go well - she fell asleep the instant she finished some milk, but woke up when I put her down and then screamed for another 20 minutes. I went to check on her after she was quiet for 10 or 15 minutes, assuming she'd be asleep and I could put a blanket over her, but she was wide awake. So now she is up, in a diaper, and I have given up for the day and will make a second attempt tomorrow.

Potty training = the big suck.

let them know it's christmas time again

Merry Christmas everyone! We hope you are having a wonderful wonderful time, and we wish you could all be here with us, so that you could have a mustache, too! Yes, we all got mustaches in our stockings. Charli really didn't like them - she refused to wear hers, and kept telling everyone else to "take it off! take it off!" I guess they freaked her out a little bit. It was OK for us to stick them on our bags, though.

For some reason, I hardly took any pictures this Christmas. I know, what's the world coming to, right? Seriously, I think I took less than 10 pictures all day long. Fortunately, Mom took some, and a bunch of videos, too - although the one featured in this post is by Brian.


Charli inspects a present on Christmas morning










Brian gets a well wrapped gift











Charli gets a purse full of interesting things (in the hopes that she will stop going through everyone else's purses)




But apparently the best gift was...

the eve of santa's birthday

According to the card Ceci sent us, anyway. :)

Our Christmas Eve has been quite lovely, thanks to the snow everywhere! I love a white Christmas!

As has become a new tradition (is there such a thing?), we had our homemade eggnog, which we start making sometime around Thanksgiving and stick in a dark cupboard for a month. All the alcohol prevents the eggs from rotting and poisoning us, or, um, something like that. In any case, once you get past the fear, the eggnog is truly delicious. Anyone who wants to take the risk with us should show up late afternoon on Christmas Eve. Charli couldn't have any, of course, so she had to make do with spaghetti and a noisy card about how great eggnog is.

Sometime after that, we had some exciting Christmas Eve present opening and jammie wearing! Thanks, Auntie Kelly!

snow! snow!

O my gosh, it snowed all night last night and most of the day today. There is over 6 inches of snow on the deck! This caused a slight bit of disaster as I got Charli ready to go outside (good thing we brought the snow pants!) and went outside with her and forgot about the potatoes I had in the oven which I was supposed to be roasting for the brunch we were having that day. Oops. They burnt.

Charli was very wary of the snow. She didn't want to walk through it (good thing I bought her some snow boots a couple of days ago!), and she hated the idea of wearing either her mittens or her gloves. She also refused to try to eat any of it, although she loves eating ice. However, she was pretty keen on trying to shovel - she doesn't realize it's work yet!

It's going to be cold tomorrow, so the snow won't melt, which means we're going to have a white Christmas! Yay! Yay!

cake

We went over to the Willett's for birthday cake (happy birthday, Sally!) yumminess. Julie was home visiting and we had a lovely time. Charli associates pretty much all cake with birthdays, and most candles, too, so of course she had some 'hap birday TO you' going.

This post is basically just somewhere for me to put this picture up.

tree day

We got an awesome deal on a Christmas tree by being too late to pick any of the ones that anyone else wants. We got it at the Fort Collins Nursery, where Mom likes to go because they are so nice there, and they were indeed really, really nice. They only had about 10 or 12 trees left, and they were all really tall and expensive, and maybe a bit sparse or lopsided on some. Since it was so late, though, the guy told us that he just wanted to get rid of them, and although the sign just said some % off, basically we should just make him an offer. He offered to sell us a $160 tree for $50, and said he could cut it shorter if that was a problem. Instead we got a $120 10-ft tall tree for $40, and I bet he would have sold it to us for $30 if I'd had the guts to ask for that. I mean, what's he going to do, save it til next year?

This is the biggest tree we have ever had. Here's Brent trying to put something on the top of it and getting heckled:

home for the holidays

Well, we had a pretty good flight to Colorado this time - especially since that was our actual destination! :)

We left pretty early, so we took Charli in her jammies and changed her on the plane. We took her some stickers (can you tell?) and a bag of stuff, and she had her own seat and was pretty reasonable about using her seatbelt (not always the case).

We flew Southwest and did this thing called EarlyBird check-in, which is brilliant: when you buy your ticket, you can give Southwest an extra $10, and they will put you in line automatically behind the business travelers and the people in the super duper rewards class. We were A19 and A20, and we got the bulkhead seats so Charli had a little extra space and couldn't kick the people in front of her, and all in all it was so worth the $20 we spent (I didn't get Charli the EarlyBird thing. What the hell). Brilliant.

Then after we got home, Dad showed up with a turkey that he had spent the day smoking at a neighbor's house. Delicious! I love being home. :)

snow! and marbles

Well, we're back at home now, and it sure is nice to be home. Our flight left at 8pm, so ideally Charli would have gone to sleep at some point during the flight, but honestly I knew better than that. She obviously would not go to sleep with a whole planeful of people around. Unfortunately, we didn't check in early enough to get good seats, and the whole plane was completely full, so Charli had no room to run around, and was restless and little fussy, but not horrible. She fell asleep about 5 minutes before we landed, and this picture is of her passed out in her stroller while we were waiting for Brian to pick us up.

So what else happened in Colorado after Brian left? Well, of course, it snowed. I take credit for causing this to happen, because we brought a snowsuit out with us, and I sent it home with Brian, when it was 70 degrees and sunny out. Of course it would snow 3 days later. It was actually really great snow, except that it was only really great while Charli was sleeping. By the time she would wake up, it would be melting and slushy. We dragged her out into it anyway, and she really wasn't very fond of it at first. She got more interested after while, but it was really cold and wet and not much fun to play in, so after relatively few pictures, we came back inside. Due to the winter storm, though, there were apparently some avalanches in Colorado, and some highway closings, and Southwest allowed anyone who had flight plans on Friday or Saturday (that was us) to reschedule free of charge any time during the following 14 days. So, we decided to come home Monday evening instead of Saturday morning at a time that would require us to leave the house at 4:30am without knowing if our plane would even make it out. This meant a few more days without Brian (*sniff* but at least I had Charli - Brian said he was wandering around at home in the dark and reading Goodnight Moon to himself), but Mom was happy to have another weekend. I think Charli was really missing Brian, though - she started getting very clingy to me as the week went on.

Meanwhile, Sam brought out Marbleworks, one of her very favorite childhood toys, and built Charli a few different masterpieces. Charli did NOT destroy them. She loves Marbleworks! She spent days carrying marbles around in various containers, transferring them back and forth, maybe hiding them in shoes, and dropping them down the chutes.

Charli learned to play hide and seek! We spent a lot of time running around from the kitchen to the living room to the dining room, waiting for Charli to find us and screaming a lot. It was great!



Charli is talking more and more, and learning new words every day. Now she can say 'book', where previously she said 'boo'. She says 'duck' when she sees a duck (or most any bird), 'moo' when she sees a cow, and 'ba' when she sees a sheep. She says 'shoes' a lot, 'mas' (Spanish for 'more'), 'bubbles', 'bus', 'fishie'... She also says 'guck' when she sees a truck. That one took me a while (we thought she was saying 'duck', but she kept saying it when there were no ducks around), but I finally figured it out while we were walking around the neighborhood and she said it at the mail truck. When we got home, Carolina told us that's how Darian says 'truck'! Speaking of which, Charli can say 'Darian' and 'Bella', too. I should be trying to use more signs with her, but I don't know any more. She is learning the hand motions to 'The Wheels on the Bus' song, though, and she's starting to do the 'tick tock' part of the 'Cuckoo' song, too. Her fork skills are improving, she's running around like crazy, and she tests things out with her shoes before she touches them with her hands - Mom took her out to the green belt, where she very carefully inspected, followed around, and then deliberately stepped on... a bee. No damage (to either the bee or to her, especially since she was wearing shoes), but it was very funny to watch, according to my mom.

So that's a lot of good news. On the bad news side, I had to try a (completely ineffective) disciplinary technique on her. Charli was being deliberately disobedient at the dinner table - she held something out, and I told her NOT to drop it on the floor, and she looked me right in the eye, opened her hand and dropped it on the floor. So I smacked the back of her hand. She looked at her hand, rather curiously, and then she smacked herself on the back of her hand. Then she threw something else on the floor, and smacked herself again on the back of the hand. ROTTEN CHILD! Consider me trained; I won't be doing that again.

In other (non-Charli) news, Kim learned how to make TERRIFIC panna cotta, and we ate it twice. Kim and Brent are making a cello (yes, you heard me right), I gave Brent my cold, and Kim and Sam spent some time volunteering at a farm, where they were compensated with eggs of various colors and sizes, and fresh bread. Also, during this trip, we realized that Sam, Kim, and I all used to really hate French toast, and now we all really liked it, but it took all of us a very long time to realize we liked it because we all hated it so much that we were traumatized and just never ate French toast anywhere for years. Based on this coincidence/revelation, we came to a new conclusion: Mom used to make terrible French toast! Now she makes delicious French toast, and we all like it. Such a possibility never entered our heads before because we never knew Mom could make anything bad to eat.