November 2008

Kyla's been a very busy girl! She loves to dance, play, and hit her parents. Okay. We are working on that last one. We fend off the frustration by convincing ourselves that it is just her exuberance!

In all her exuberance, she is increasing her vocabulary by the day. I started writing down all of her words so far, including often-used favorites like "goggies" (doggies), "wa" (water), "nana" (banana), and mostly "no". But every day she repeats something we say (time to watch our mouths...) and surprises us. Her list of words used more than once without prompting is up to nearly 40. Already a little chatterbox!

Okay. Now here are some recent visuals.

Fun in the tub!




Our budding acrobat:




Halloween night.
Kyla wore camouflage for a costume the day before, but on halloween itself she just doned some glamorous glasses for part of the time and chased kids down the block the other part. She was amazed that all of these people were coming to her house!






Dan's "costume" freaked out even the older kids. Clearly Kyla was baffled by it as well.





A piano lesson (from a guy who doesn't know how to play.... anyone can teach "banging" haha!) at Grandma's house.





And, yes, she is enjoying feeding herself as much as possible, even if it means pesto all over by the end of the meal. Too bad we forgot the bib this time!

The Return of Kyla G!!!

Well, it certainly has been a long time since we posted and to all you craving a little dose of images of our blossoming little QT Pi, I believe we can deliver.

One of her better moments was her 1st birthday party, which we threw a little bit late since we were out of town for her actual birthday. However, she had plenty of her friends stop by for a bite of cake, for which she took the first bite.




Here she is hanging with Tinya and Martha.




We all seem to hang out on the floor quite a bit these days. Our knees are very red from crawling around after Kyla, which she loves. She runs around and around the table laughing hysterically and we chase after her.

Eventually she slows down and sort of walks around soliciting opinions for her various theories about the universe. Here she is talking to Grandma Linda who was lured down to the floor. If I remember correctly she was trying to explain what Rachel has been teaching her class about small RNA molecules and their effect on post-expression gene regulation. She has really learned a lot from mommy while she prepares her lectures. Of course her pronunciation is not so good yet so it's hard to understand.




Some new words:

• "Dad-O"
• "Noonin" (means any toy animal: "What's wrong, why is she crying? I don't know...maybe she wants Noonin.)
• "Hiiiiiii"
• "Bye bye"
• "Extemporaneous"

Ok, maybe not the last one...

We managed to have a fairly low key July 4th this year with our friends Ken and Corinne (who are expecting soon!!). Here we are at the beach, which by some miracle was not crowded on July 4th. She loved the water and got a real rush every time the waves hit us. I lost my glasses (this is the last photo of them) this day. Ha, I lost my wedding ring about 3 weeks later when we went to Colorado for Rockygrass (bluegrass music camping festival)...sorry we lapsed on the CO photos.



It's been quite busy since all this stuff has happened. My work has been quite a roller coaster as there has been a lot of employee turnover in my department, including my great boss who moved on to bigger and better things. Being in a headless shop hasn't been too bad, but getting my boss's replacement will have to happen eventually. It won't be easy...she was excellent and they are big shoes to fill. Good luck Jean!



Now we are thinking a little about the next step, as many of you have inquired about. Our plan is to move on to #2 starting in early 2009. So hold on to your hats and keep checking the blog!

Say bye bye Kyla!

Finally!!

After several months of standing and holding onto things she has finally let go!

Fun way to beat the heat!

Kyla is Spot On!

Every parents nightmare.

Your child wakes up covered in spots! I was at work, minding my own business with the business of mass spectrometry when I received a mysterious email from Rachel, subject "KG is Spotty!"

A quick perusal of the contents revealed that she was covered in red splotches, what we later found out was likely to be hives. Kyla had dual ear infections the previous week and was on Amoxacillin to exterminate the devlish microbes that had invaded her aural cavity. Though not her first experimentation with this legal drug, it was clearly not as favorable to her the second time around. Something about secondary immune response being more intense than primary, etc. etc.

Kyla is still, 3 days later, a Wee Hoosier with deformed little Japanese flags all over her body. They started as little white spots with red perimeters, but graduated to all matter of crater-shaped things. Her whole body looks like Gorbachev's head. And they are evolving, too, so the fun is to try and play a memory game with the current state of her bas-relief hive map. Kyla does not participate in the fun, though. She is not a happy camper. She is hot, but feels cold. She is tired but she can't sleep. She is hungry but can't eat.

She is kind of feeling better as of later today, but still extremely uncomfortable. Though she got her mommy a card for mother's day, the real present of a glorious sun-filled day with a joyous smiling family never really came to fruition.

Happy Mother's Day anyway, mommy!

Riding the bike!

Fun...

...in the sun!!







... with peek-a-boo!

Baby's first passover

Turns out Kyla likes gefilte fish and matzah balls (R: I admit that I eat the gefilte fish too, and with horseradish no less. Anyone who knows my eating habits might be surprised by that!).


Things you never knew existed...

An inflatable matzah ball:





Stuffed plagues:

court day cont.

Kyla's grandma was interested in what pretty dress (thanks Trish!) Kyla wore to court so here is a closer pic. A week ago I was wondering what we should put on under the dress to keep her warm but since it was nearly 80 degrees here, sleeveless worked just fine.



Last night we celebrated by going to see the Padres play (Dan's work rewarded their hard work with tickets) so Kyla saw her first baseball game. It wasn't the most exciting game... we left at the end of the 9th inning when the score was 0-0. Read in the news today that the game finally ended after 22 innings! whew! I wonder how many die-hard fans stayed to the end. (Kyla's uncle Kirk probably would have stayed!)

Legal family!

Here we are at the courthouse after our hearing, which lasted all of 5 minutes.



They pretty much commented on how cute Kyla is (we knew that), we all signed a form, and the bailiff took a polaroid picture of us with the judge. Oh yeah, and the judge stamped the back of all of our hands with a cute mouse holding a heart.

It was a short event with large significance.
: )



Here's Kyla preparing for our hearing by picking her nose:

news from Kylanet!

Wow, has it really been a month since our last post? Well, it's not for lack of Kyla material!

First, our big adoption news is that we have, at long last, scheduled our finalization hearing. It will be April 17th, sometime between 2 and 2:30pm. To put thing in prospective, most people finalize around 6 months after meeting the baby. Kyla will be 10 months by the time we go to court and will likely run up, pull the judge's hair, and throw in a fake scream (she loves to pretend to scream --- much better than loud, piercing real screams, for sure). Okay, the "run up" part is a bit optimistic, but not for long. More about that in a minute.

Our post-placement experience has included several steps of snail-paced paperwork, a correction of Indiana paperwork requested by California discovered, oh, four months later, a couple of typos (including Kyla's birthdate) that needed to be corrected, and finally, a couple of weeks delay because when they are all finally ready, Rachel starts teaching on Thursday afternoons! (mind you, she’s had Thursday afternoons, the only time adoption hearings are held, open for months and months and the first week she starts teaching is when dates are available) The original plan was to dash back to work and be there for the rest of the afternoon but a very kind co-worker offered to cover and suggested that we both take the rest of this very special day off to celebrate!

Unfortunately we probably won't have any family here to share this with us. Maybe we'll have to post a video so you can all share with us afterwards. We'll, of course, have a party the weekend following and will be missing all of you who are too far away to celebrate in person with us.

The hearing itself is apparently a very fun formality. It takes about 5 minutes and involves statements like "do you take this child...". I'm sure they have a good supply of tissues on hand. :)



As far as the girl herself, the progress report is varied and exciting.

Standing/walking: She has been on the verge of walking for a while now and is quite adept at standing and walking along things. She can stand unassisted for a good 10 seconds, but then gets so giddy from the experience that she collapses in an infectious and quite maniacal giggle.



Crawling: She crawls with the best of them, scooting along the ground at a high rate of speed. Our latest game is chase the crawler, and she will back you into a corner, get a monster smile, then pounce on you with both hands. See yellow overalls pic for a visualization of the pounce event.


Talking: Not in English, except for some serendipitous syllables that happen to be words. But she is talking constantly. Dahdahdah, bahbahbah, trilling her tongue, brrbrrbrrbrrbrr, mehmeh (we think this one is “milk”), mahmahmah. She also has a 3 octave range which manifests itself in a swooping kind of “Ahhhhh”, as in “Oh, I get it now”.



Eating: We have been a little slow moving her in to the next phase of her life that we cherish a little too much, but have really started to mover her into new foods now. She loves yogurt, most fruits, a little rice, biscuits, and red hot chili peppers doused in wasabi. Still reading? Good, then you likely realize that last one was farcical hooey. But she pretty much sticks anything into her mouth. She makes a great face when trying new foods, scrunches her face in disgust “what the heck are you doing to me you scoundrel???” Then after a few seconds she opens her mouth for the next bite.

Sleep time: We recently had the unenviable task of forcibly changing Kyla’s bedtime from 10-11pm to 8pm. Everyone we heard from and all we read suggested to put her in bed and let her cry thru it, self-soothing. Boy, were we excited to do that! And then after that we could stick needles in our eyes! All kidding aside, we made the decision to try it, and she cried. OHhhhhhh did she cry that first night….for nearly, uh, uhm, 6 minutes. But they were a continuous 6 minutes!!! It was like Armageddon!! The next night was equally horrific, it was nearly 2 minutes.

☺

Suffice it to say it worked better than we could have possibly imagined and now she is down when we put her down and there is very little fuss. It really makes doing anything in the evening easier, since when she is up, you really don’t do anything else without a tag team effort.



Also new is what we call Kyla. We are continually coming up with nicknames for her since she is such a character. It’s almost impossible not to. Some of the more used ones are:
-Scoochy McPants (requested to be retired by Mommy due to overuse by Daddy)
-Cheeks McGirk
-Chickadee Choo Choo
-KG
-Mini Miss
-Junior
-The Squirt
-Pippy the Squeak

Finally, an update!

Hello from the land of Kyla!

We've had a crazy few weeks here, starting with Kyla coming down with her first real winter virus. She had a fever for several days and followed that up with her first ear infection. It was great fun for all of us and of course we slept well too (not!).

Here she is with an attractive runny nose but feeling better:




Luckily the illness wasn't a week later because Kyla's birthmother and her sister came for a visit. She hadn't seen Kyla since last June (at her birth!) other than the pictures we sent so she was meeting a little girl for the first time. It seemed to go well so we hope that she and Kyla maintain some sort of relationship with each other. From everything we've read, that kind of contact can be helpful for an adopted child.


In other adoption news, we might *finally* be able to have our finalization hearing sometime soon. It usually only takes about 6 months but we've had one paperwork delay after another (seemed like there were people sitting on things which was very frustrating). Most of the official papers were signed long ago but this is the paperwork and the agency telling the state of California that we are doing okay as parents, etc. The hearings are mostly ceremonial ("do you take this child..." really!) and happy. After this is complete then we will get a copy of her new birth certificate with our names and the name we've given her and all of that, so it makes it all official!
We'll have a big blog-world toast on the day of our finalization!!

It's possible that Kyla will be able to walk up to the judge on that day because she is spending lots of time in this position:


Needless to say we've been quickly making sure everything is babyproofed as this curious child explores up and down:

Celebrating 8 months with a new important skill!

It's so much fun to be able to move around and get to stuff! She has been super happy with her new found talent.

Here are some more pics; enjoying the sun, checking out her valentine's card, and playing guitar.

mini-miss in action

She loves to clap together her new grandpa-made blocks (that is until she hits her finger and cries.... this just happened yesterday!). See a video of it at the bottom of this post.





And here is evidence of something that parents cheer about! Baby can feed herself! Okay, just the bottle part. Now we also spoon feed her other stuff like cereals, fruits and vegis. But at least she can enjoy the lounging with bottle herself. (something that comes back around again later with adulthood ???)

Life at 7 months

How quickly they grow!






Here is a better pic of the cute teeth that are growing in:




Kyla's baby book has pages for baby's first holidays and I fear we have little to fill in! For halloween she visited her friend Laili where we carved pumpkins and the mini-folk posed amongst them (hopefully I'll get the pics soon!), so that was quite festive.
For Thanksgiving we had dinner with one set of grandparents instead of the usual two (but one is enough to write about!).
For Hanukkah we typically see the Jewish grandparents but they were on an amazing tour of Egypt and Israel so there was no dinner this year.
For Christmas, grandparents from the east coast arrived late in the day so there was a less ceremonial gift exchange (not that Kyla suffered!). And finally, we didn't properly observe Kwanzaa!
However, we dragged Kyla to a New Year's event and here is how she rang in the new year:


Of course, as soon as we went back to our room she woke up and then proceeded to spend nearly an hour playing with the noisemaker! At that point we old folks were just ready to go to bed...

A few weeks ago Kyla almost made it to her first football playoff game. I was skeptical about whether or not it was a good idea to take a baby to the game and then because it was a rainy day here in San Diego the decision was easy! Baby stayed with friends where it was warm and dry while we donned ponchos and cheered on the Chargers. Kirk is not even really a Chargers fan but he riled up his brother-in-law and was perhaps one of the rowdier fans at the stadium...




Even though Kyla didn't make it to the game, she is the only one of us with a jersey:



Note the attempt to crawl...




We never used to be such football fans, but Dan has gotten quite caught up in it now that he is back with what has always been his favorite team, the Chargers. Kirk certainly encourages this behavior. :)

Perhaps our active little girl will end up being much more athletic than her parents and happy about the early influences!!