Jalen's Limited Mandarin

Jalen is now almost 1 month into his bilingual English-Chinese kindergarten program and he has finally started to share some of his new Chinese vocabulary with us. For example, he knows his colors like red (hong se), yellow (huang se) and brown (kafei se); and he's learning shapes like triangle (san jiao xing) and circle (yuan quan). He is slowly starting to surpass his daddy in Chinese! The surprising part is that Max is starting to copy his older brother. The other day he said out of nowhere "dian dian tou" -- nod your head because Jalen had been repeating it in song.

First Week of the School Year

Last week was a busy week of transition.  On Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, Max started his first day at his new day care at El Centro de la Raza.  It's a bilingual English/Spanish daycare.  Before his first day, we brought him in twice to visit so that it wouldn't be such a culture shock for him.  He had a fairly smooth first week.  His teachers commented that Max knew just what to do when it came time to eat or sleep.  He was only fussy after drop off but then would be happy the rest of the day.  I guess Max is a day care veteran now that he's at his third daycare in less than two years.  I always feel a pang of guilt whenever I put him through a new transition but I also have to remind myself that kids are incredibly resilient and sometimes these transitions are harder on the parents than the children.

On Wednesday, Jalen started kindergarten at Beacon Hill International School.  The morning was pretty hectic where all the parents crowded in the class room with their iPhones and digital SLRs snapping away photos like the paparazzi.  There are 3 kindergarten classes and they're all in a big open room with bookshelves and easels as dividers.  It must have been pretty overwhelming for Jalen. When the class bell rang and all the parents were being ushered out of the class so we had to say good bye to Jalen, he quietly shed a couple of tears.  But he just bravely wiped them away and tearfully said good bye.  Initially, Jalen was assigned to the all day English kindergarten program.  We had hoped that he would be in the Mandarin immersion program but since we moved in May and kindergarten registration happens in March, we ended up as #3 on the wait list.  Then on Wednesday afternoon we got the call from the principal and received the news that Jalen is IN for Mandarin immersion.  So from Thursday on, he gets English and social studies in the morning then after lunch he goes to Mandarin immersion where he learns math and science in Chinese.  After he got home on Thursday, I asked him if he learned any new Chinese words.  He said he learned a lot of Chinese words but he doesn't remember any of them.  Haha.  We just need to be patient as I'm sure he'll pick it up in no time.  I'm so excited that Jalen will be learning Chinese consistently.  I better brush up my Mandarin as well so I can start speaking to him in Mandarin at home more.

So now we face a brand new world of bilingual education (can you imagine when Max starts speaking Spanish?) and public school education.  Next week there's a kindergarten potluck where the parents can meet each other.  Then later in September we have our first PTA meeting.  I'm trying not to think too much about it so that I don't get overwhelmed.  It just seems that there's always new transitions so I just need to start accepting change as the norm.

Max's Limited Sentences

Being a second child means that Max is constantly being compared to his older brother. I remember when Jalen was about 2 years 4 months old he really turned the corner and started talking in full sentences. He'd say things like "I want to sit next to you". Max, on the other hand, is still in baby talk mode. He says a lot of things but only I can understand them because I "talk" to him everyday. He is talking in 3 to 4 word sentences though and here are some examples:

I need help
I wanna go bye bye
I ride bike!
I wanna watch TV
I'm bao bao (full)
I want nai nai (milk)
I'm sorry
I want wafu (waffle)
I don't want it
I play cars!
Bye bye choo choo train!

Scenes From the New Daycare

One of the benefits of the new school, Bright Horizons, is that they send frequent email communications including pictures each week.  It's a new thing that we didn't have our old school and we've been really loving the ability to peek into their days at school.

Here's Jalen in his class on his first day.  He's still a little shy, but he loves coloring.

Here's Jalen on his trike.  The daycare features a small, grass-less, playground which is a departure from the suburban daycare.

Here's Max on his first day, tentatively looking at the toys.  What you don't see here is a big window overlooking the Space Needle and a, uh hum, gentleman's club.

Jalen's 5 Year Stats

Last Friday we took Jalen to his 5 year wellness check up.  Jalen is growing great: 46lb 3oz (75 – 90%) and 45.5” (95%).  He has always been on the tall side and it’s exciting to see that he hasn’t slowed down one bit.  His BMI is also healthy at 15.7 (50 – 75%).  Since Jalen doesn’t know how to swim yet, the doctor advised that we should get him lessons soon so that he learns within the next couple of years.  

We’ve had some sleep challenges with Jalen since the beginning of the year.  He had always been a good sleeper and he’d been in his own room since about 2 months old.  However, in the last few months he’s been having a hard time either falling asleep in his own room or staying asleep.  We had always been firm about not sharing a bed with him but we’ve had to pick our battles after too many sleepless nights.  We’ve tried all kinds of different rewards and punishments with mixed results.  Since one of his key complaints is that he wants to sleep with someone, we’ve moved Jalen into a room with Max.  This has worked well for the most part except on the nights that Jalen would accidently wake up Max and all hell would break loose.  Some nights Jalen has slept on the floor of our bedroom because we wouldn’t let him into our bed and he wouldn’t go back to his room.  Lately, things have been a little better where he would stay in his room and not wake up anyone until at least 6:30am.  His reward is that he could play with his favorite toys (Transformers) and watch his favorite shows (Transformer cartoons on Netflix).  However, I’ve noticed that Jalen makes very calculated trade-offs when it comes to this reward system.  You see he goes to school all day on Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays.  On the night before those days, he’s more likely to break to rule and come into our bed.  That’s because there’s very little time, if any, to enjoy his reward the next day.  Whereas on the nights before a non-school day (he stays home with Grandma on Tuesdays and Thursdays), he is more likely to follow the rule since he’ll have all day to enjoy his reward.  This theory has been proven at least once.  I’m really hoping that he’ll grow out of this phase and go back to sleeping well without us.  Until then, we’ll just have to keep refining our incentive system to outsmart a 5 year old.

The Big Move

I've been away from our blog for a while because we've been busy with our big move.  Everything happened pretty quickly.  From the time that we got the idea to move in with Rick's mom, to finding a renter for our Bellevue home, to putting a deposit down on a new daycare, to scheduling the move date only took about a couple of months. 

We were lucky with finding a renter quickly but it also posed a challenge.  Originally, I wanted to move right before September so that it would line up with the school year.  I imagined Jalen would start in kindergarten and I'd have some time to find Max a new daycare.  But the renters wanted to move in ASAP, so we settled on May 1.  Rick and I scrambled to look for a daycare for both Max and Jalen.  I knew it was going to be pretty tough getting full time care for Max since he's only 2 and not yet potty trained.  Most places were completely full.  I only toured 2 centers, a Bright Horizons downtown near my office and another center called Little Eagles also near downtown.  Bright Horizons is a chain and I had toured one of their centers before when I was looking for care for Max as an infant.  It's very nice but also really expensive compared to our current daycare.  Since our choices were so limited and we had to make a decision quick, I settled on BH because of the quality of the center and its proximity to my office. 

Once we got the daycare down, we needed to figure out what to do with our stuff.  Rick's mom's house is 5 bedrooms with a full basement but she already has a house full of furniture and so do we.  So we had to decide what to keep for use, what to store, what to sell and what to dump.  We posted a bunch of stuff on craigslist and had some luck early on. We also got help from my parents and borrowed a truck to move some stuff before the moving date.  On top of that, Rick filled our SUV each night and made almost daily runs to his mom's house after work to drop off stuff.  Even so, on moving day we filled a full 24-foot truck.  Rick and I spent 9 hours organizing and working alone side of the movers.  After the movers left, we spent all night unpacking the essentials so that we could actually take a shower and have linens to make up the beds for the kids.  That was one of the longest days of my life.  Then we spent all of Saturday cleaning our Bellevue house to get it ready for the renters.  We then spent all of Sunday unpacking so we could do basic things like making breakfast and do laundry. 

Coincidentally Rick's mom planned a trip to California to visit his sister for 2 weeks during our big move so she missed out on all of the mess.  For the week following our move, we had to figure out a new routine of drop off/pick up and commuting to/from work.  Jalen is only in daycare Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays now (to save some money), so on one of the days Rick took him to his office to spend the day there.  I took the kids to daycare by riding the light rail and it was quite a challenge to herd 2 kids through the streets of downtown.  Downtown traffic is very congested during rush hours so carpooling with Rick isn't a great option either.  It's definitely different from what we were used to.  Our old daycare was just a quick 5 minute drive from our home on our way to work and I didn't realize just how convenient and nice that was.  We're still trying to figure out what our new routine will be.

On a positive note, the kids are adjusting really well to Bright Horizons.  I took Max and Jalen to visit the center twice before their official full day but I was still nervous that Max is not going to last the full day.  When he started in daycare when he was just one year old, he cried and didn't eat at all.  We had to pick him up early from school because he was too upset.  His new teacher Lucy at Bright Horizon was nice enough to send me an email to let me know that Max was doing great, not crying and ate all of his lunch.  It was a huge relief for me!  Jalen was shy in his new class but by the end of the week he already made new friends.  When I was picking him up on Friday he was play punching with a boy named Sam and we couldn't even break them up when his dad was picking him up as well.

We moved our dining table a couple of week before moving day and the kids loved eating at their picnic table.

The whole house pretty much looked like this on moving day.  We just put things wherever we could.

We had the movers unload under the car port so we could move the boxes into the right rooms.

After a long day of cleaning on Saturday, our Bellevue house is all ready!

The place looked so big when it's all empty!

This was Max's last day at his daycare and his best buds Cordell and Henry gave him big hugs for bye bye.

Max's first day at his new daycare.

Max's new class has just 6 kids and 1 teacher.

This is an exciting and also stressful change for us.  I'm looking forward to our new environment and enjoying living in the city again.

Jalen and Max Perform Justin Bieber's Baby

Yuen Lui Photo Shoot

We've been taking the kids to Yuen Lui for yearly photo shoots since Jalen was one year old. In the age of prosumer digital cameras and iPhones, we always have a ton of pictures of the kids. However, these professionals still do the best job of bringing the best out of the kids. Jalen was especially enjoying the modeling.

Max is 2 years old!

Max turned 2 on Feb. 1, 2012. We took him for his wellness check up the next day and here are his stats: 28lb 10oz (50%) and 34 1/4" (50-75%). The doctor says he's growing great, in fact, his growth curve is increasing. Now that Max is 2, I know it's finally time to start making him give up the baby bottle. In fact, at the last check up, the doctor has already urged us to do it. I think I just really wanted to hang on to him being a baby a little longer. On the first night, Max asked for "nai nai" (milk in Chinese) and I distracted him and got him to sleep. The next night, we got him ready for bed in his PJ's, and he ran to Rick and said "good night Daddy" and then asked for "nai nai" again. When Rick said no, he started to cry and said "nai nai, nai nai" with tears coming down his face. It was so sad and funny to see. In the morning, when he asks for milk, we give it to him in a sippy cup and sometimes he looks at it and say "No!" But we don't relent, so we've been more or less bottle free for 1 week. One night last week, he woke up in the middle night and was really upset, so I broke down and gave him the bottle. Sigh, I will miss him being a baby although I'm looking forward to him being a little boy and watching his personality blossom.

Max's 2nd Birthday Party

For Max's 2nd birthday party I wanted another party outside of the home (no clean up before or after!). I also wanted a place where little Max could have fun and instead of only fun for Jalen and our friends' older kids. We had Dizzy's Tumble Bus over to our house for Jalen's 3rd birthday and they did a great job. I found out that they have a permanent location as well and it turned out to be a great choice. The place was fairly small so for the party we had the whole place to ourselves with 17 kids along with their parents. It felt really nice and intimate. We had 2 instructors there and they were really great at leading the kids at games and helping them tumble and bounce. They even tried to remember each child's name! Since Max's birthday is just a few weeks apart from Rylan's, we had a joint party since we also share many of the same friends. The adults had a good time catching up while the kids had a lot of fun as well!

Snowpocalypse 2012

This past week, the weather forecast predicted a record setting snow storm heading our way. On Sunday, Jan. 15, we got a few inches of snow with more promised on Monday. The kids' daycare closed early on Monday and I worked from home to be on the safe side. On Tuesday, there was still some snow on the ground but I made it into work via public transit no problem. Wednesday was supposed to be the big snow day and we got about 6 inches in Bellevue. It really wasn't that much snow but after that we got an ice storm on Thursday. Daycare was closed on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday! I worked from home all 3 days with both kids at home. We were pretty tired of being stuck at home for that long. Finally on Friday, we made it out of the house and went out for dinner. Yay!

Here are the boys all bundled up in their snow pants.

Max was not impressed with the snow. He was paralysed when we got outside.

Jalen was very enthusiastic. He jumped right in and made a snow angel.

Look at those real tears from Max from us making him sit on the snow.

Christmas 2011

Jalen and I spent many hours covering this entire gingerbread house with icing and candy. I had an ulterior motive, to get rid of all of the candy that has been sitting around since Valentine's Day (hence the candy hearts). It was so much fun spending time with Jalen this way. He even came up with the idea of using the white M&M's as gloves.

Here is Christmas morning and it was hard to get both kids look at the camera at the same time and smile. This is one of those moments where I wish I had the Microsoft "to the cloud" thing where you can swap out faces of the picture.


Jalen and Max playing with their new Christmas presents.

Sometimes Jalen pushes Max around in a laundry basket and plays choo choo. Max loves it and giggles while I brace for a bad crash.