…is that they will wake each other up in the middle of the night.

Claire had been sleeping 10-12 hours straight through the night since she was about 9 months old. And as you can imagine, all that changed when a screaming newborn came into the picture.

And while this issue wasn’t quite as bad during the second month of Aerin’s life, when she regularly slept 7-8 hours straight through the night, it has recently become more serious as Aerin seems to have hit her 4-month sleep regression a few weeks early — waking up practically every hour during the night for the past week.

Aerin has been sleeping in our room — in her bassinet, the swing, or on our bed — since we brought her home from the hospital. I know that once she outgrows the bassinet, we will move her into a crib. The question is, where will we put the crib when we do not have any extra bedrooms?

Option 1:  Have the girls share Claire’s room. But this can only mean additional months of restless nights for poor Claire. (Because at least now, the sounds of Aerin crying is somewhat muffled by two closed doors and a white noise machine.)

Option 2:  Put Aerin’s crib in our living room. But this means that we will lose access to our living room after she goes down for the night.

Option 3:  Leave Aerin in our room and just move in a crib. But this somehow feels unfair to both girls — Claire for not being around her parents as much as her little sister, and Aerin for not having her own room.

What would you do in our situation?

When we purchased our 2-bedroom, 1067 sqft condo 4 years ago, we definitely did not have babies in mind. (At the time, I wasn’t sure if I even wanted kids.) We didn’t bother to check the school districts, and thought that we would always use the second bedroom as a guest room.

For these reasons, we know that we will be moving to a larger place in a more child-friendly neighborhood within the next few years. But for the moment, we have to make do with what we have.

I ask my mother how she did it when my sister and I were young. Back then, our entire family of four slept together on the floor of a tiny room.

“No one slept,” she answers.

We do our best not to push our girls into stereotypical gender roles or characteristics. And while we would secretly love it if they turn into tomboys, we never force them to play (or not play) with certain toys and encourage them to allow their own preferences to develop.

As it turns out, our 16-month-old Claire is becoming the exact opposite of a tomboy.

She is, in fact, turning into a frilly girl.

Our suspicions started about a month ago, when we began to let her “choose” her own clothes. (We give her an option of weather- and activity-appropriate clothes to choose from.) And wouldn’t you know it — she would ALWAYS pick something pink.

And just in case it was a fluke —

“Why don’t we wear this pretty blue one instead? Or this brown one?”

She would vehemently shake her head and reach for the pink. ALWAYS.

(image source)

Now that her hair is getting long enough to pin up, we have started to put to use the many hair pins and barrettes we have received as gifts. She loves them and asks us to put them in her hair every morning. She will then take the leftovers and try to put them in my hair, as well as Aerin’s.

She has a jade bangle bracelet that J’s mother gifted to her when she was born…and insists on wearing this every day too. She even shows it off to strangers!

She poses in front of the mirror. She watches intently whenever I put on makeup (and loves it when I take a makeup brush and fluff it over her face). She is fascinated by jewelry, and I can already picture her a year or two down the road, playing dress up and draping all of mommy’s jewelry over herself.

Last week was Aerin’s 100th Day Celebration, so I decided to splurge a little and bought both girls adorable dresses from Baby Gap. When I came home and showed Claire her dress, her eyes lit up by about 100 watts. She laughed, and buried her face into her new dress. She took my hand and led me into her room, and motioned for me to change her.

The dress I had chosen for Claire has a tulle lining that makes the skirt fluff out. She absolutely adored this feature and kept playing with the skirt of the dress, swishing it back and forth. She wouldn’t stop giggling and repeatedly posed in front of the mirror. She spent the next hour or so walking back and forth between the mirror in her room to the mirror in J and my room to check herself out.

And when it came time to take off the dress? Banshees wailing. Niagara Falls. I couldn’t remember the last time she cried this hard.

Yep, we definitely have a girly girl on our hands. 

I cannot help but wonder where she developed these early preferences. Magazines? The little amount of TV we allow her to watch? Observing how others dress and present themselves? We have certainly not purposely encouraged these partialities, but could we have subconsciously done it?

Are we disappointed? Hardly. There are so many things that parents wish for their kids, but we never love them any less for not fulfilling them. If anything, we just see these instances as mere surprises.

Besides, as J — the metrosexual — likes to say, “Hopefully, now there will be at least one female in the household who cares about fashion and likes to go shopping with me!”

Most of my readers know that we have been teaching Claire three languages since she was born. And at this point, at 16 months of age, she understands Cantonese Chinese the best, and more than half the words she speaks are Cantonese.

I have no problem with this. I believe that Chinese — regardless of the dialect — is one of the most difficult languages to learn, and that our children having a good foundation in Chinese will not only help them more easily learn additional languages in the future (because you use both hemispheres of the brain with Chinese and other tonal languages), it may also be benficial if they choose to study music.

I actually took two semesters of Mandarin Chinese in college, but I only recall a few phrases here and there.  However, I still remember my very first class clearly, when my professor showed us how, by saying “ma” in different tones, you can ask, “Did mother scold the horse?”

媽駡馬嗎?
(mā mà mă ma?)

Despite my musical training, I still have difficulty differentiating between the different tonal sounds in the Chinese language. And while Mandarin only has 4 tones, Cantonese has between 6 and 9. The exact number depends on whom you ask, which makes it that much more difficult in this blogger’s opinion.

Perhaps it is easier to learn music if a tonal language is your first language, than vice-versa? That, or I am seeking justification for my difficulty in understanding Chinese. (But then again, I have always been horrible with languages in general.)

Anyway, the real reason for this post is because I recently came across a nifty scan from a Chinese instructional book which illustrates just how difficult Chinese can be:

(image source)

And, just in case anyone is curious, the name of the poem is “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” by Zhao Yuanren. According to Redditor robo_t:

The poem was written in the early 20th century as both an: 1. argument against the romanization of classical Chinese 2. argument for the romanization of modern vernacular Chinese

Writing out classical Chinese often yields results like “shi shi shi shi shi shi shi”, thus making it completely uncomprehensible. A few literary movements in the early twentieth century moved Chinese away from using a single syllable per word to having compound words. This language development can actually be credited with helping modernize China and closing the gap between the literary elites and the masses.

Example: Classical – 睡 – shui – to sleep Modern – 睡觉 – shui jiao – to sleep

Adding a second character clarifies the meaning by adding a verb-noun phrase!

Apparently, most Chinese people would only understand this poem if they read it, not if they heard it.

Last night, I noticed that Aerin’s tongue was green. 

Okay, so it wasn’t that bad. She has always had a white patch on her tongue, which is common in many babies due to their milk/forumla-only diet. But last night, when she happily stuck her tongue out at me during her bath, I noticed that the white patch had taken on a green tinge.

It didn’t seem to be bothering her so I did not feel it warranted a visit to the ER. But I did take her to the doctor first thing this morning to have it checked out, and my suspicions were confirmed: Aerin has thrush.

If you can remember, Claire had a stubborn case of thrush when she was young. In fact, recurring thrush and mastitis infections is the reason I quit breastfeeding her, because it physically became too painful to a point where I was not able to properly take care of her.

For once, I was extremely happy that I am no longer breastfeeding Aerin. Thrush, which is essentially a yeast infection, can be passed from mouth to boob — back and forth — which is what kept happening with me and Claire. And while the pain level from a breast thrush infection varies with each woman, it is extremely painful for most, and in my case, it literally felt like razor blades ripping through my breasts for up to 2 hours after each feeding session.

At its worst, I could not do anything aside from being curled up in a ball of agony with tears streaming down my face. It had also made my holding Claire practically impossible, because every time that anything brushed against my breasts, the pain would start up again.

And that’s when I had decided to quit breastfeeding — because personally, my being able to hold my own child and tend to her needs is more important than any added benefit of breastmilk over formula.

These painful memories all came rushing back to me as the doctor gave us the diagnosis. He said that the infection wasn’t bad, especially since it was localized only to the tongue (thrush tends to spread to the inside of the cheeks, gums, and even the diaper area) and didn’t seem to be bothering Aerin at all.

As for the green color? He told me, “Fungus comes in all colors.”

The first line of attack against oral thrush is nystatin, which we will administer to Aerin three times a day for 2-3 weeks. The problem with nystatin is that it is only effective in about half of all thrush cases. We had been in the unlucky half with Claire, so we had tried yogurt and grapefruit seed extract before finally turning to gentian violet. (Remember Claire’s purple lips and my purple breastmilk?)

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that nystatin will work for Aerin. If not, we will go straight to gentian violet.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about thrush — aside from the pain for the mom — is that we need to disinfect everything that comes in contact with the baby’s mouth during the course of treatment. So, as we have done in the past, we will be boiling everything after each use, and then discarding them and getting new items once the infection is gone.

(image source)

It’s been a tiring morning. Let’s hope that we can beat this infection quickly and effectively. 

My mother has been telling me ever since Aerin was born that the best way I will survive the next two decades is by getting both girls to help me out as soon, and as often as possible.

Obviously this is still an unreasonable request to ask of Aerin, but now that Claire is walking — and growing more curious and precocious with each passing day — we have slowly begun to teach her little ways to help around the house, and with her little sister.

For example, yesterday as I was cleaning I made a little game of it by pointing out dirty spots, making an overly exaggerated disgusted face as I said, “더러워!” (“Dirty!” in Korean), then wiping up the dirt, showing her how the dirt was now on the paper towel and not on the floor, making another disgusted face as I pointed to the soiled paper towel, then throwing it away in the trash can. And every time a dirty spot disappeared I made a big spectacle of it by clapping and saying “Yay!!!” Soon, she caught up and wanted to help out too.

It goes without saying that she wasn’t much help — if anything, she slowed down my cleaning time significantly as I needed to wait for her to slowly and deliberately wipe, and go over the dirty spots myself again because she did not get everything — but just the fact that she wanted to help out, and was so proud of herself for doing so, made it all worthwhile.

Claire’s latest word is “Juice!”

It is also evident that Claire loves Aerin and wants to help out with her as much as possible, because she will almost always learn copperative activities on the first try, or the first time we ask. For example, the very first time that I made a bottle for Aerin and gave it to Claire, telling her “Go bring this to daddy so he can give it to your little sister,” she did it right away. And the very first time that we asked her to bring us one of Aerin’s diapers from the other room, she did that without hesitation too.

And heavens forbid that we even burp Aerin without her — every time that she hears the telltale “patting on the back” sound, she will practically run into the room and insist on burping her little sister too.

J rolled his eyes at me when I told him of our little cleaning game yesterday. “You’re not gonna turn our girls into neat freaks like you, are you?”

“Of course I am! Wouldn’t you rather have a clean house than a dirty one?”

I also like to remind him that whenever his mother plays with Claire, she always ends playtime by putting toys back in the toy box, so that Claire will know that that’s where they belong when they’re not being used. 

I think Claire is definitely starting to catch on. Because now, whenever she sees a dirty tissue anywhere, she will pick it up and throw it in the trash.