Happy New Year!

Ok, fine, it is a bit late for that. We didn't really go anywhere either. We are both scared of taking Max out for long trip during the winter. I know many people are doing it.

Anyway, the past two months, as usual, are months of sickness. Both Renee and Max had high fever, and both recovered. The recall of Tylenol and Motrin didn't help on that matter, but they are behind us now. Renee recovered pretty fast. According to the grandma, when her temperature came back, she would stop playing and ask for a nap, a perfect patient. After medicine, Max' temperature would drop and stay there. From the morning, Max would keep playing until the evening, and the fever would come back even higher. On the fifth day, we took him to the doctor and put him on antibiotics.

It is also worth noting that Renee has learned to recite a long poem：前出塞. She was annoyed whenever her brother repeats after her, so I told her to just learn something complicated. After teaching her on the way to school for three days, she was able to do it by herself, sometimes without any help.

Max learned to jump and catch air. He even dare to do it from stairs as long as someone is holding him.

Renee is a lot more friendly to her brother now. I think I mentioned it in the past posts. We are encourage this behavior every chance we get. Sometimes, she still hits her brother though. She also plays rough house with him, and Max just takes it.

One thing Max has learned recently is to hold on to whatever item that Renee is trying to grab from him. This has caused quite a few fights and ended up with both kids crying, and ironically quite amusing to watch. But we found out that as long as Renee asks nicely, Max will hand the item to her. It seems that Max doesn't really care, he just does not like being treated like that.

We went out for our first hiking trip.

Max didn't want to go at all and attached himself to the mom. Renee was able to go with me and climbed up the hill. This is the picture I took after we climbed up. You can barely see Max and his mother.

Here is Renee standing proud on the hill.

Here is Max visiting the zoo. He liked it very much and he would not leave any one of them.

Max at the petting zoo. I still remember how hard it was for Renee to do it when she was Max' age.

Renee made valentine cards for her classmates and had a fun afternoon. Max was very excited jumping around.

We took both kids out to the nearby park. They don't go out together that often nowadays.

Max was barely able to hold on in this one.

We also took them to a Children's museum. I am wondering if I should install something like this in our backyard. Both Max and Renee were very focused and played for a long time.

Here is the water play. Max is still not good at defending his toys. I wonder how he learned to be so good against his sister. Anyway, here is during the time when there were not many kids fighting for toys.

Holiday Staycation

I took three weeks off during December, combined with company shut down in the last week. I ended up spending a lot of time at home to be with Max and Renee. The grand parents took a break visiting China. It was time well spent for me, as I learned a lot about Max.

A funny thing happen about Max that I thought I should write down. He grew a bad habit of biting his lower lip, to an extent it seemed that I could see the upper teeth all the time. For several months, we tried different things to correct him but couldn't.

And guess what changed all that.

He got a cold and had stuffy nose for a week. As a result, he had to use his mouth to breathe. At the end of that cold, he forgot about biting his lips.

Renee had her dance recital. The whole class had only one boy. The rest dressed up as beauty. Renee also had a music concert at school, and she was very good. I don't have any pictures though, because I took the video.

During the break, I took Max to visit the place where I work. There were holiday decorations around the floor, and Max liked this one the most.

Renee had an intensive swimming training, one every weekday. The new teacher pushed her through her fear, such that when she went back to her old teacher after New Year, she got so much better. She can swim under water for 5 seconds now! We are all very happy how this turned out. We took Max to swim lessons too, but between his fever and my cough, it is on hold for the moment.

What is a Christmas without the Santa. Renee is finally not afraid of Santa anymore and she took very nice pictures. Max is another story. See for yourself.

It must be a parent thing. I just think these two kids are so cute when they are dressed up and walk around.

We finally had some good weather, and we visited central park. Here Renee was crying in my arm after falling off the swing because she let go to brush her hair. Opps.

We set up a small Christmas tree this year. It seems to work out better than big ones, because the kids can see the whole tree and play with the decorations. Of course, we took some pictures.

We took some cute pictures.

We took some funny ones, especially those when Max was laughing so hard he fell back into the tree.

And.... Merry Christmas!!!

Max' communication and Renee's Disney trip

This month is Max' month of communication. He can understand pretty much everything that we say now, and repeats pretty much everything we say as well.

If I have not mentioned before, Max has also built a very good sleeping habit, many thanks to mom and grandmother's sleep training. I still remember his crying in the bed during the training period. Now putting him to bed is really easy. He takes a nap around 9:30 am and 1:30 pm, depending on his sleep during the night. All you need to do is to pick him up, go through simple routine like wash his face with warm water and say 'nite nite' to all the doors, and he will go to the bed and lie down. Occasionally he does not want to take nap. He will play in the bed with the blanket and stuff Otter that he calls "You you". So if he is still babbling and playing after 20 minutes for the morning nap, he can come out and play, and have a longer afternoon nap. As far as I know, he never misses afternoon naps. The sleep at night is also very easy.

The only thing is that he likes to get up early in the morning to sleep with his mom. He will keep crying until she picks him up. Maybe we can still sleep train him, but we don't have the heart anymore considering how easy he is to put to bed, especially comparing to his sister.

Renee is getting better at expressing herself. But sometimes she still gets frustrated too early and start crying before she can say a word. I try to stick to the routine that her teacher is using, which is to hold her, let her quiet down, and ask her to say what she needs. Although half of the time, I can guess what she wants already. I just don't think crying and coughing is a good way to make requests.

Max is happy all the time. Well, not quite, as you can see in this picture. He can be as stubborn as his sister if he wants something. But he is also very curious and that makes it easy to distract him.

Yes! We went to Disneyland for the Thanksgiving weekend. We only met Pluto on the main street. Later people from work told us that to meet the characters we need to just hang out on the main street instead of going for the rides. In a hindsight, that is not such a bad idea considering we only hit three rides per day between napping, restroom and eating, hanging.

Renee used to be scared of big animals, real or fake. It is nice to see that she enjoy their company now.

We took Renee to visit Tinker Bell when Max was taking the afternoon nap. I think she was much happier to see this fairy than the Tinker Bell herself. Of course, after waiting in the line for over an hour, any fairy will make them happy.

As I mentioned before, Renee is very much into prince and princesses. She actually knows the name of some of the princes! Here are her favorite character: Beauty and Beast. She couldn't get enough of them.

We visited the aunt and grandma, who made a huge turkey.

While taking Max out for a walk, I discovered that he understood the concept of taking picture. He will stand to let me take a picture, come to take a look, then stand back to take another one. When I asked him to step backwards, though, he didn't understand. Instead, he pointed his finger at my index finger to urge me hurry up.