Category: Baby

So we finally brought Lauren outside.

It’s about time. We didn’t want to bring her out any earlier because there was really no need and the we’ve been pretty busy on the weekends.

On Saturday, the sun finally broke through, and we decided it was time for her to taste the outdoor life.

It was by no means a smooth ride. First of all, the place of choice, Japanese Garden in Hayward, closes at 4pm. We only found that out when we are ready to move out at 4pm, and I thought to check the park hours. So we switched to Plan B, which is Marina Park, kinda windy but will have to do.

The other hurdle was the Baby Trend Snap N Go stroller we have. It was given to us by my mom’s friend. She also gave us the infant car seat that we are supposed to use with the stroller frame. However, try as I did, I just couldn’t get the seat-belt on the stroller to hold the car seat properly. After consulting the manual, and tinkering with it for a good half hour, I finally found that the frame was actually set to the wrong setting, and I had to make some adjustments. I guess the family who gave us the car seat and stroller used another car seat with it.

So with Lauren fed and wide awake, we embarked on our first trip to the great outdoors as a family.

Marina Park was an absolutely beautiful place, however, because it’s next to the bay, it’s usually quite windy and chilly over there. When we arrived, things were looking up. The sun’s still up, the wind’s not too bad, and there are not too many people around.

We parked the car and put Lauren in the stroller and started strolling around.

Lauren was very interested in the change in scenery, she looked around and had this curious expression on her face, or maybe she was just feeling the wind on her face.

We decided to go to the playground because there is a building next to it to block the wind. There were quite a few kids playing in the area, so we found a bench, and settled down. There we were able to take a few photos. Lauren’s eyes were scanning the playground all the time, taking in all the sight and sound. Ten minutes into the photo taking, she got a bit tired and started to fuss. We knew it was time to go home, so we put her back into the stroller and strolled back to our car.

One unexpected find was a family of Canadian goose claimed the grassy area next to our car as their home turf. They briefly scattered when we arrived, but came back and stood their ground when we got in our car. Of course, by now, Lauren’s sleep so she didn’t see them. I’ll have to tell her when she grows up then.

Please keep our family in your prayers. Oh and don’t forget to adjust to Daytime Savings Time.

Photos from the trip.
  

Lauren is exactly ten weeks old.

JY Lauren to see her pediatrician last week. As usual, she brought with her a list of questions. We do have a few pressing questions for the doctor, and were given satisfactory answers.

The good news is that Lauren’s developing very well. She’s almost 12 lbs, and is now in the 75% percentile rather than the 50% she was in a month ago. Her height is also now in the 75% percentile.

We were also told that she has thrush in her mouth, we were wondering what those pink pasty stuff was on her tongue. She was given an oral suspension to treat the thrush.

All in all, a good checkup.

JY has returned to work, it’s really hard for her to achieve work life balance with a new baby. Thankfully, my mother-in-law is helping us with the baby. However, her visa is only for 6 months, we’ll need to find another baby-care option once she’s gone.

Please keep us in your prayers.

Couple of recent photos of Lauren.

  

Lauren’s now eight weeks old. She’s grown quite a bit, now much heavier than before. By our estimate, she’s about 11.5 pounds. She’s going to see her Pediatrician tomorrow, and hopefully things will turn out well.

She’s been mostly an easy baby and not so fussy. She has a few persistent problems that we are still trying to deal with.

1. She’s gassy a lot of the times. She sucks in milk with vigor most of the time, and as the result, a lot of air go down with the milk as well. Thus we had to interrupt her feeding and burp her quite often. Sometime, the burping can take an hour or longer for the air bubble to come up. We started using Mylicon drops couple of weeks ago, which sped up the burping process, but still her burping routine still takes considerable effort.
2. She sometime spits up milk. In the past two weeks, Lauren spitted up 2 oz of milk three times. Twice was because she was fed more than 5 oz of milk without burping, and the other time was because of her overeating. However, it was still a concern for us. JY will ask our pediatrician tomorrow if we should check Lauren for Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD).
3. Her nose fills with snots at least once a day, and because she doesn’t like to breath through her mouth, she’s fussy and cries until the snots are removed. The snot-removal process is not pleasant, she clearly demonstrate that by using her little fist to push away the bulb syringe. I’m usually the one who does the honor, and yes, I’m an expert at this stuff by now =)

Despite all her problems, Lauren has developed well. She sleeps well, is spending more time playing, is becoming more responsive, and she smiles at the most unexpected times.

Hopefully we’ll have good news after Lauren sees her doctor tomorrow. Please continue to pray for Lauren and our family.

As all you parents know, there are many types and brands of toys on the market, it’s really hard to find the toys that offers the best Return On Investment (ROI), both monetarily and in terms of time spent playing.

From the books that I’ve been reading, it seems to me that a good toy should serve the child’s needs for playing, holds her interest and helps her with her physical, cognitive, social and emotional development.

Given that toys are such an important part of a child’s development, it’s the parent’s responsibility to pick the best toys for the child, and engage in toy playing with the child.

It’s indeed an awesome responsibility and as usual, I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about which toys are best for my child at all different stages of her life.

Baby 411 book mentioned a booklet published by US Consumer Product Safeway Commission, called “Which Toy for Which Child, Ages Birth Through Five”. I was able to locate an online PDF copy of the document here. However, the PDF file’s quality leaves a lot to be desired. It’s better to request a hard-copy by email info@cpsc.gov to request Publication 285. You can find more information at the bottom of this page.

What this publication tells you is the appropriate toys for various ages, this particular publication covers birth till 5 years of age. I find the categorization of the toys into Active Play, Manipulative Play, Make-Believe Play, Creative Play and Learning Play makes a lot of sense, and the succinct abilities and interests sections quite informative.

There are also quite a few toy books on the market. The one recommended by Baby 411 is Oppenheim Toy Portfolio 2006 Edition: The Best Toys, Books, DVDs & Music for Kids. Although I have not read the book, the namesake website at http://www.toyportfolio.com has quite a few reviews of specific toys, and I found the review insightful and informative.

The book I did read, called Toy Tips : A Parent’s Essential Guide to Smart Toy Choices was also good. I found the information in the book a bit more general in nature than I expected, but it did brought several things into my attention especially regarding the repeat playability of toys, technology toys and classic toys. I wasn’t thinking in those terms before. I also enjoyed the http://www.toytips.com website. It features toy and other baby gear reviews for children.

Given the three wonderful resource I mentioned above, I was able to come up with a simple toy searching framework.

1. Understand the Lauren’s next development stage and the required toys categories ahead of time, focusing on the skills I want Lauren to build
2. Take inventory of current toys, find out which categories they fall under
3. Based on the categories of toys, browse through http://www.toyportfolio.com and http://www.toytips.com for their recommended toys.
4. Once the toys arrive, inspect them for loose parts, then note their future playable time.
5. Once Lauren reaches the age for a set of particular toys, play with the toys together with Lauren to observe whether she is able to play them with and her level of interest, and make adjustment accordingly.

I’m just beginning to understand the importance of toys, and will welcome any feedback you experienced parents have in order to be more “toy smart”.

Have fun.

Reading to a child since early infancy has been shown to increase the child affinity toward books and later toward learning through reading.

JY and I decided to start reading to Lauren early, actually we have already read her some Chinese children’s book in the past few days. However, the Chinese book didn’t not rhyme, and rhyming is very important as a learning tool for an infant because she can’t grasp the meanings of the words yet.

I’ve decided to buy some baby books for Lauren. It just happened that Amazon’s having a 4-for-3 book sale, buying 4 eligible books and the cheapest one is free. Combine this with free supersaver shipping and no sales tax, it’s indeed an offer too good to resist.

How did I decide on what to buy? As usual, I consulted my trusted copy of Baby 411. It has a list of recommend books at the end of Development chapter. I then read through the Amazon reviews on these book, and decided on these four timeless classics:

Goodnight Moon (Board Book)
Big Red Barn Board Book
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
Counting Kisses: A Kiss & Read Book

You can follow these links and add them to your Amazon shopping cart one at the time. Make sure this statement is right under customer review rating “This book is one of thousands of titles eligible for our Buy 4 Books for the Price of 3 Sale.” Then when you check out, you should see the total with the price of the cheapest book subtracted.

Happy book shopping!

Lauren’s almost four weeks old.

I never imagined an infant can eat so much.

Since JY pumps her milk, we were able to track how much Lauren eats each time, and have been tracking her total milk consumption.

Here is a diagram that shows Lauren’s eating pattern:

As you can see, she’s been steadily increasing her milk consumption. For the last few days, she’s been eating a lot, and feeding many times a day. I guess she’s in a growth spurt.

On some of Lauren’s earlier photos, she’s had some pimples on her face, which we were told were just fine. They seemed to clear out gradually over the past few days. It’s still evident in some of the photos on the site. BTW, you can follow the links on the right hand side to see all Lauren’s photos.

We’ve also graduated to the 8 oz Dr. Brown’s bottles since we are feeding Lauren around 4.5 oz every time. It’s a huge bottle compared to the Avent one, don’t know why they need to make them so big, and sterilizing them has been a chore.

I need to seriously think about getting back to work, there are quite a few things I started and not yet able to finish. It’s hard to not to see Lauren during the day, I’ll make sure to have her photos at my desk.

I’ve also been trying to find out a solution to the ant problem we’ve been having, look for details in a future entry on how I’m going to attack it.

Here are couple of recent photos:
   

It’s been a hectic week so far.

I brought Lauren to a dermatologist’s office on Monday 01/30 to have a birthmark on her neck checked out. It turned out to be nothing, the dermatologist told me that if I want it removed, I should do that later, when Lauren’s older, and only if it becomes infected or discolors.

On Tuesday 01/31, I brought Lauren to her pediatrician for her second well-child visit. Things again turned out well, I was told by Lauren’s pediatrician that she’s progressing, gaining 1.5 ounces everyday, which is the upper limit. I also learned that Lauren’s height is in the 50% percentile, her weight is 25%, and her head is slightly less than 50%. I also got a chart from the doctor so I can check her percentile at home.

JY’s parents also arrived on Tuesday, I fetched them from SFO in the morning. So far, they’ve been a great help, taking care of the baby, feeding her, and feeding JY. It really gave me some time to catch up on chores and pay a few bills. Hopefully I can continue to manage my time, spending as much time with Lauren as possible, but at the same time, getting more stuff done.

Couple of things I learned this week. Avent bottles don’t work well for Lauren. Although they are cleverly designed, but it’s very difficult to get the right tightness of the cap. If the cap is too tight, then air won’t be able to enter from the tiny holes around the nipple, if too loose, then milk leaks. After struggling with it for couple of weeks, we decided to switch to Dr. Brown’s bottles, and couldn’t be happier.

JY also had a fever on Tuesday, and since then, her milk supply has been dramatically reduced. However, due to the excellent care that her mom provided, her milk supply is gradually returning to normal. We think Lauren just had a growth spurt. She went from eating on average 25 ounces a day to 27+ ounces on Thursday, it’s pretty dramatic increase. She seems to be back at the 24-25 ounces/day level, but we’ll make sure she doesn’t go hungry.

We’ve made some more adjustments to the feeding rules we laid out initially. We were trying to steer Lauren to feed less and more frequent during the day, and more and less frequent at night. It worked out well, but since her appetite has increased, we are adjusting the amount we give her each time. We also made a new rule that even in “cluster-feeding” situations, we’ll always give her 3 oz to begin with instead of 2 oz.

People keep on telling me Lauren looks like me, but prettier. I happen to agree, what do you think?

I don’t have any new photos to post at this moment, and hopefully will take some more over the weekend.

Please continue to pray for our family.