I got it - first picture with two teeth

The mouth was so dirty, the little hand was moving so quickly, but it doesn't matter. This is the first picture that shows the little teeth from Alyssa

Constipation

After we returned from Hong Kong, the overenthusiastic Mami fed too much thick congee to Alyssa and that led to her constipation. For 2 days, Mami saw how Alyssa turned totally red during her feeding time, she seemed to have bowel movement and tried hard to pass that. But, there was nothing come out. For 2 more days, there were still no poop from Alyssa. Mami were very worry.

Finally, she took Alyssa to the doctor and doctor suggested to use thermometer to stimulate her bottom and hold her legs up and press it to her tummy while she is laying down. But mami said, she did it already, but cannot help Alyssa. At the end, doctor prescribed laxative for Alyssa. Mami gave that to Alyssa that evening and even so it was still a hard work for Alyssa and it took almost half an hour and loud cry from Alyssa (the way that someone pass difficult bowel movement and need loud cry to give them the power :-P).

Sorry about the constipation, honey, it was all Mami´s fault. We will give less rice but more vegetable in the future.

Balloon

Another Luftballoon (Floating Balloon) that we got from Saturday shopping. Alyssa liked it a lot.

two little teeth

It is so hard to capture the two little teeth of Alyssa's. Mami gave up and decided to write this blog without a photo. Since two weeks, Alyssa got these two little teeth (at the bottom). Now, when she bites hands of Mami's or Papi's, it is really hurting and leaves two teeth marks. Mami will try her best to capture that. When Alyssa smiles, her tongue is a bit out and hide her teeth. Sometimes when she cries, one can see it...

Pull herself up to stand (level 2)

After 10 days of practicing whenever she got the change, Alyssa can now pull on more different objects to stand up, one of it is the back of her high chair. Mami worried that she might fall and thus put the lamb skin behind her. Other object includes TV cabinet and also Mami's big gym ball.



Besides, she can use one hand to hold the bar in the playpen and the other hand to do other things. Few days back, she was still nervously and tightly holding the bars and not dared to let go of any of her hands.

No more Mazda 5

As Mami stopped working, she does not lease the Mazda5 anymore (as she is no longer an employee and cannot lease it at a cheap price). It was such a shame that she crash it once few months back when she was in the innenhof (inner court) at the day care. She needed to back off from the inner court to the main road, and during that, she crashed the back to one of the column on the way. At the beginning, she was very upset by this and thought it would have cost her at least EUR500 to fix it. Luckily, at the end, she didn´t need to pay a penny as it was covered by the lease contract already. Have a look at how big the damage was.

Now, we have one car instead of two and what left behind is our little “grandma car” – Polo.

Pull herself up

Papi had to lower the playpen to the lowest setting finally as Alyssa started to pull herself up 10 days back.

See the movie of how she managed to pull herself up in her crib.



To reach this, we trained Alyssa in the following way :-

First stage of pulling up
She was and is very eager to stand whenever there is a chance. When Mami shows her hands in front of her, she will crawl quickly and eagerly to Mami and takes Mami´s hand and Mami will set her hand as platform for Alyssa to pull herself up. This “platform” will raise in level. Firstly, it is high enough for Alyssa to pull from crawling position to kneeling position, then it will raise to the level that Alyssa can pull from kneeling position to standing position.




Second stage of pulling up
Mami held her hands on the bars of the crib / playpen to give Alyssa the idea that she can hold Mami´s hand as well as the bars to pull herself up. To hold the bar instead of Mami´s hand is more difficult as Alyssa´s fingers have to do all the work for gripping. However, she managed it well now. Alyssa made a mistake at the beginning, she didn´t know how to put her legs close to the bars and when she tried to pull up, her legs were too far from the bar and she couldn´t stand vertically up (but slanted/like a slope), which would push her face towards the bar. Not such a good experience. But Mami taught her once to bring her knees to the bars when she was kneeling and then bring her feet towards the bar after she stand, now she could manage that well and no more “crashing of face to the bars”. Well done, girl.



Third stage of pulling up
She is still very weak and most of the time does not know yet how to best return to the sitting / crawling position after she managed to stand up. Sometimes, she cried for help when she was stuck in the standard position.

Little cousin Cherie

This is Alyssa´s little cousin Cherie, she is 5 months older than Alyssa. She can crawl really fast. She has beautiful big eyes and natural curly hair. She felt jealous when she saw grandpa holding her cousin instead of her, that is very cute indeed, grandpa must be happy to be so popular.

Cherie has a birthmark on her forehead (a V shape). When she is tired, the birthmark seems darker. It is sort of a natural indicator of hers. Cute!

Last day at Tagesmutter (child minder)

This is Alyssa's child minder, Birgit. Mami took this photo so she can show Alyssa Birgit in future :-). Alyssa was named as "baby blue" at Birgit's place, the other babies (2-3 years old one) also followed Birgit and called Alyssa "baby blue". She was a "baby blue" in the early days when she went to Birgit. After she can crawl, she is a much happier baby.



This is Tharons. Often he is there when Mami pick up Alyssa at 5:30pm.

This is Nelly, she helps Birgit out.

Precious crawling / greeting moment

Yesterday, when Mami arrived at the daycare center, Alyssa was playing on the floor and when she saw Mami, she gave Mami a big smile and a happy soft scream and then crawled very quickly towards Mami. It was a very precious and happy moment for Mami :-)

Little cousin Katelyn

This is Alyssa´s little cousin Katelyn, she is a happy baby and smiles all the time. When she smiles, she looks like a joker (according to her Mami, Wendy), but Mami thinks she look so sweet when she smile. She is three days older than Alyssa, but she grew faster than Alyssa. She can now stand and walk a little bit when she can hold on to something. She can also say many different words and seems to know the difference (e.g. Ah Ma when she sees Mami or the household helper and Baba when she sees Daddy).

We stayed at her home during our January visit to Hong Kong, so there were plenty of chances for Alyssa and Katelyn to play together. A lot of happy moments.

Alyssa could also enjoy all Katie´s toy, especially the bouncing chair, it made her crazy.

The baby seat is great too.

Oh, the panda is funny as well.

Oh, the big tomato is another favourite for the two babies.

Por Por

Por Por adores Alyssa. Por Por met Alyssa the first time on 1^st Jan 2009 when we visited Hong Kong with Alyssa for the first time. Por Por cried when she saw Alyssa. She said: “ I felt so excited and couldn´t sleep well for the last two night. Finally, I can meet my dear granddaughter”. It is indeed so very touching that Mami was considering if we should move back to Hong Kong. Of course, there are other considerations.

Por Por tried to carry Alyssa with this very traditional baby carrier (Mer Tai). Por Por used this Mer Tai to carry Mami before. It is a piece of antique

Sleep through the night

How to put baby to sleep/nap and let them sleep for longer is from our opinion, the biggest challenge for new parents.

Some history of how we handled it so far :-

1. First stage: Alyssa slept after her feed. It was so easy. But of course, she woke up often for food.

2. Second stage: She hated pacifier for the first 4 months, so Mami tried so hard to teach her to find her thumbs. Newborn holds their hand so tight and Alyssa managed this when she was 3.5 months old. The first time that Alyssa could sleep for longer than 8 hours was after she learned how to suck her thumbs. Papi and Mami could hear Alyssa sucking her thumb and putting herself back to sleep after waking up. But this didn't happen long. After a while, she stopped sucking her thumb. We don't know why.

3. Third stage: Suddenly, Alyssa liked pacifier when she was 4 months old. Just gave her a pacifier and it was not so difficult to put her to sleep. During that period, when we heard that she was almost awake, we just ran quickly into her room , found her pacifier and stuffed it back into mouth before she was totally wake. That helped us during this stage to get some sleep.


4. Fourth stage: She didn't like her pacifier since she started teething when she was around 6 months old. She didn't like sucking anymore, whenever we gave her a pacifier, it would end up as teether (with the hard plastic from the pacifier), and she would be very busy with chewing this teether and this would make her more awake.

We tried different things during this stage.
4.1 Mami got back to work when Alyssa was 4.5 month old and Alyssa drank very little milk during the day. And for almost two months, as Alyssa really drank too little during the day (sometimes only 80ml for 9 hours during the day) and whenever Alyssa woke up at night, Mami would nurse her, on average, it was twice per night. The nursing chair became Mami's sleeping chair, she slept on it during nurse and then fell asleep there while Alyssa was nursing and subsequently fell asleep as well. When Mami woke up, usually, both of them slept there for 1 hour already. But nursing is indeed not a good solution as baby might get to used to sleep only by nursing.
4.2 We tried the cry-it-out method with Alyssa once. But she couldn't sleep after crying for 2 hours and we even got complaints from neighbour upstairs (they banged on the floor and let us know that they were all awake because of our daughter). So that was indeed a total disaster and didn't work on Alyssa. After this "trauma", we needed to hold and rock Alyssa to sleep and very very lightly put her down in her bed for more than two weeks to gain back her trust and then she became calmer when we put her down to sleep while she was still awake.
4.3 As Alyssa finally drank more during the day time in the day care, when she was about 7 month old, finally, we were back on track again with her bed time routine and putting back to sleep method. In principle, we tried our best to let her fall asleep not in our arms but in her crib. We picked her up when she was crying and angry, but once she went a bit quieter, we would put her down in her own crib, and sometimes, patted her a bit. But the key is that once she is a bit quieter, we said good night and left the room. And gave her some chances to sooth herself to sleep.



NOW:
Since last 2 weeks, she could slept for several nights for 11 hours. We were so happy to see through our baby monitor that she woke up and even got into her crawling position, cried a bit (not too loud nor long) for half minutes to 3 minutes. And then she found a good posture to get back to sleep again. This is so very nice !!!