Saturday, September 19, 2015
Juliana - 5 Years Old
I was under the impression that I wrote a little birthday update about the girls each year, but apparently I haven’t actually done that since Juliana was two. As you might imagine she has changed quite a bit during that time.
I’d say it’s hard to believe that Juliana is 5 already, but actually I’ve been thinking of her as five for a few months. Especially now that her bangs have grown out, she looks like a full-fledged kindergartener. She's still been known to throw a good fit, but she has grown up a lot over the past year. Still, it is hard to believe that 5 years and 1 day ago, I hadn't even met this girl yet!
Here are a few facts about the 5 year old Juliana.
Daily Routine: Wakes up around 6:30-7am and gets ready for kindergarten. She is usually excited to go to kindergarten, but she is also happy to eat breakfast in her pajamas on the weekend. She attends Chinese kindergarten from 8-12 every morning, coming home just after school lunch for a second lunch (half a sandwich) at home with the family. After lunch she has a rest time while Adalyn naps, which usually involves watching a movie, coloring, cutting pictures from a magazine, or playing with dolls. After rest time and a little snack, we do home school. In the late afternoon Kevin has been taking the girls outside for a little bit before dinner. Bedtime is about 8pm.
School: This year Juliana is in Chinese kindergarten and also starting home school kindergarten. She likes Chinese kindergarten because she gets to go somewhere and see people every day. She enjoys home school kindergarten because she likes to read books and have important school tasks.
Favorite Book: It depends on the day. She just listened to Yaya's recording of "Of Course Polly Can Ride a Bike," which she could really relate to since Polly got a bike on her 5th birthday just like Juliana.
Favorite TV Show: Mickey Mouse and the Clubhouse
Favorite Color: Rainbow (because why choose one when you can have them all, right?)
Favorite activities: Seeing friends, going anywhere, playing on the playground, playing with Little People, dolls or barbies, coloring, watching movies as often as allowed.
Favorite foods: Peanut butter and honey sandwiches (a daily necessity), Mac and Cheese, Chinese noodles, cake
Words to describe Juliana: Extrovert, enthusiastic, vivacious, opinionated, loud, fun, talkative, silly, bossy, in love with life.
What I most appreciate about Juliana: As a quiet, low-energy kind of person, I appreciate Juliana’s zest for life. She gets excited about everything. She loves new people and new experiences. She tries to squeeze the most out of every day.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
The Case of the Vaseline-Coated Stuffed Animals
It all started with an unusually long nap. Generally, Juliana rests for at least an hour each afternoon in her bed, but these days she only sleeps once or twice a week. Rarely for more than an hour. But today, when she woke up after 45 minutes, I decided to go in and lie down next to her to see if she wanted to sleep a bit longer. Juliana grabbed my hand and drifted back into a deep slumber. So did I. An hour and a half later, I looked at the clock and saw that it was 4:30. This wouldn't bode well for her bedtime routine. So I pulled the blankets off of her and prodded her out of bed.
After shaking out the cobwebs, she was wired, exuberantly running around, screaming, dancing, singing and playing at an abnormally high-intensity level.
After dinner and a bath, Yaya read her some books and we all told her goodnight around 8:30 and Ruth and I started to play a game of 7 Wonders with her Mom and sisters.
We heard Juliana paging through books a couple times and reminded her that she needed to sleep. After the game was over, she was still rustling around in her bedroom, so I went in to tuck Juliana in a second time. Immediately, my nose began nagging me with a question, "What is the strange, slightly sweet smell emanating from her bed?" Then it hit me. Vaseline.
I hesitated for a moment. "Were you playing with the Vaseline?" I asked. She nodded and looked away, guiltily. "Where is it?"
She rolled over and pointed to the alley of about a dozen stuffed animals, tissues, and various other knick-knacks she's hoarded alongside her bed. "Over there." Grabbing for the mostly empty jar, my hand grazed one of the stuffed animals she's packed around her bed. The elephant was completely coated in goo. It was dripping off of the eyes and soaked into the fur. As was her puppy. And a kitty. And Eeyore. Gross goo was everywhere. I dragged her to the bathroom to wash off her hands and saw a glob in her newly washed hair with dish soap. I asked where else she'd rubbed it. "On my face," she admitted, as I rinsed her off.
"Anywhere else?" I asked.
"Not on my feet. Not on my belly," she said smiling tiredly.
"Did you eat it?"
"No."
"Did you rub it in your eyes?"
"No."
I finished cleaning her up and brought her back to bed, telling her that she was going to have to sleep without a few friends and that if she ever rubs Vaseline on any other toys again she wouldn't get to play with them anymore. She nodded her understanding and I gave her another good-night hug.
Thankfully she's not the first to have turned her stuffed animals into slippery goo-monsters. A Google search for "Cleaning Vaseline from stuffed animals" leads immediately to other similar stories. Seriously, what would we do without the Internet? Grease-removing Dawn, baking soda and hot water seem to have gotten the goo out of the stuffed animals. By the time the goop was out of the animals, she was sound asleep.
Apparently cornstartch or baking soda and grease-removing dish soap and hot water is the way to go with hair. Lemon juice and Dr. Bonner's also seem to be strong contender. I'll have to try that in the morning, because I have a hunch the dish soap didn't get the job done.
I should have taken a picture.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Jesus was a two-year-old
By Kevin
This year at Christmas, I'm amazed by the fact that Jesus was once a two-year old. I see him running into a room and yelling, "I'm hiding," then screaming with delight when someone finds him. I find myself picturing Juliana playing with him like she plays with her little friends, running around in circles till he's dizzy, laughing his face off, then tripping over his feet and falling to the ground, crying for Mary to pick him up and hold him. I picture him spread-eagle, sleeping wedged between Mary and Joseph, while they struggle to find an inch of space to sleep.
I see him climbing into Joseph's lap, asking him to tell the story of the Exodus for the hundredth time (what did they do before picture books?). I picture Joseph laughing with Mary about the peculiar phrases he comes up with. "Daddy, I'm Exiting," he says in Aramaic as he tries to play the part of Moses in the Parting of the Red Sea, using a pile of rocks and a bowl of water as his toys. "He's trying to say he's leading the Exodus," they laugh, wondering if he meant it or it was a grammar mistake, after all he has been adding "ing" and "ly" to an awful lot of words lately. Could the Son of God have made Juliana's grammar mistakes as a two-year-old?
All the while he sings Psalms at the top of his lungs while he plays, then pauses, mid song, when he realizes he desperately needs a snack. And they beam with pride as they look at him and wonder just what he will become, just like we wonder with Juliana. I can see him excitedly mimicking the sounds of every donkey, chicken and cat he sees, then laughing when Mom and Dad remind him where he was born. I wonder if he wandered around seemingly unsupervised like the two-year-old in the shop downstairs did last winter, while her parents worked. Or maybe, when Joseph was working with wood and Mary was doing some chore, his grandparents followed closely behind him, forgetting the shame and doubts they had once had about her untimely pregnancy, wondering if her insistence that it was a miraculous conception may have been true.
I wonder if, perhaps, he was like Juliana was this morning -- giddy with uncontainable excitement -- when the Magi came to bring him strange gifts (after all, we don't really know how old he was at that time -- Could have been a newborn. Could have been two -- after all, Herod killed all the kids 2 and under after learning from the Magi that the King of the Jews had been born ). I picture how some Chinese two-year-olds look at a rare foreign face like they've seen a ghost. Would Jesus have been startled if those Magi from the East were Chinese? Persian? Blonde? Or would he have smiled and welcomed them like other two-year-olds, who haven't yet learned to divide people by race. (as a side note - The possibility that they could have been Chinese, which a teammate mentioned reading about, fascinates me. It's for another time, but in Brent Landau's book (which just went on my reading list) Revelation of the Magi: The Lost Tale of the Wise Men's Journey to Bethlehem a Harvard scholar apparently proposed that a recently-translated 8th century Syriac texts suggests they came from China.)
But more than anything, I'm just as blown away that God would confine himself to the limits of a two-year-old's little body as I am amazed by the fact that he was once a newborn. Maybe it's because I never thought of him as a two-year old before. My mind has followed the Biblical narrative and hop-skipped through his life from the the baby in the manger, to the young boy him lagging behind in Jerusalem making his parents frantic. Then boom, he's about my brother's age, healing the blind and telling people that "blessed are the poor in spirit for they shall inherit the kingdom of God." Then, at my age, he takes the sin of the world upon himself on the cross and days later comes back to life.
I desperately want to fill in those gaps. Not just out of idle curiosity. But because He matters. For the same reason I want to know the stories of what Ruth was like before I knew her. Because those stories shaped who she is. Trying to imagine him at Juliana's age each step of the way is helping me to see all the holes of my knowledge of Him. I pray that He can fill my imagination to give me a fuller picture of who He really is through the eyes of our two-year-old.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
2 Years Old!
Juliana likes to hide behind the water machine. She also things the big bag of rice (beneath her) makes a great seat. |
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Loss of face (and our Ayi)
As I pulled on my jacket and prepared to head out for our weekly team meeting, Juliana clung to my leg and cried, using babgyhua to plead for me to stay with her. Ayi's face crinkled and she joined the chorus, replacing babyspeak with rapid-fire Chinese, which – with the right combination of unfamiliar vocabulary – often manages to carry nearly the same meaning from my ears to my brain. What I could understand was that she too wanted me to stay behind. "As long as you are here, AnAn is OK," I understood. "When you leave, she just cries.”
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Silencing the airport noise
After a few bad experiences with poorly designed Chinese airports, last week we finally found something good about one of the worst. Flying through the Guangzhou airport -- where you often have to leave the secure area and run completely across the airport if connecting from a domestic to international flight -- we discovered the nursery.
We arrived from Bankok with almost four hours to kill until our next flight (we had just missed the cutoff to use a special "layover lounge" offered for those with layovers of more than four hours). We weren't looking forward to the prospect of trying to entertain Juliana for that entire time. Just yesterday, Juliana kept an entire crowd of waiting passengers entertained as she threw her little ball across the floor and chased it, tossing out gleeful squeals of delight or "ut ohs" with every toss. Then I spent some time trying to divert her from the trash can and evoking pained screams when I blockaded her from following mommy into the dingy bathroom. By the time we got onto the plane, we were probably more tired than she was.
So, at the Guangzhou airport, when I noted the nearly empty baby nursery, I figured it was worth a try. Ruth seemed apprenhesive: "do you think they would just let us hang out in there?"
The answer is yes.
When we walked into the carpeted room, which is lined on three sides with 18 comfy plush chairs--the kind airports only supply in some posh first-class lounge--a pair of Chinese grandparents were changing their newborn granddaughter's diaper while her baby's parents quietly looked on. The restrooms were spotless -- better than anything I've ever seen in a public place in China.
And in another corner of the room, an airport employee had pulled a chair cushion onto an armrest, propped up a newspaper, and settled in for at least an hourlong xiuxi in spite of the noisy squelches eminating from her walklie-talkie every few minutes.
We fed Juliana some yogurt and she excitedly imitated the newborn's coos. When the family and walkie-talkie toting napper left, we decided to close the doors and try giving Juliana a nap.
It was like shoving cottin into our weary ears. Immediately, the hustle and bustle of the airport was muffled. Flight announcements disappeared, squeaking luggage wheels faded. We were left with near silence.
Within a few minutes of rocking her in my arms, Juliana was asleep. And Ruth closed her eyes to rest. For a good 20 minutes, the silence remained.
Until another airport worker arrived. Pushing a wheelchair-bound passenger, she thrust the doors wide. Airport noise rushed in like water from behind a dam. Seemilngly oblivious to the napping baby in my arms, she made no attempt to quiet her walkie-talkie, which blared incessantly while she smugly clanked tea cups and scrawled something into a log book. I scoweled at her and scrambled to turn on Juliana's white noise ocean sounds to drown out the clatter. Thankfully, she kept on sleeping. Then, as suddenly as she arrived, the worker hurriedly left the nursery, leaving the doors ajar.
Ruth got up and shut them and the quiet returned. Ten minutes later she returned, now with three young children in tow.She again propped the doors wide. I scowled and again worked to drown out the noise, which clung to her like a shadow. When she left, Ruth again shut the doors. But again she returned ten minutes later and again she smugly propped the doors wide and sat down to sip her tea and chat with another airport employee who had come in moments before.
Soon, a mother with an infant wrapped in several layers of thick clothing joined us. Juliana finally succumbed to the clammor and woke up, but boarding time was approaching, so it was OK. As I changed her daiper, the doors stood open.
But everything changed the moment the Chinese mother started peeling away the layers of her child's clothing. Suddenly, the smug door-flinger-opener became concerned about a draft coming into the room. "The baby will catch a cold," she exclaimed as she hurried to close the doors. Again the room grew quiet as we walked to the gate to begin boarding our plane. Still, I think it was the quietest place we've ever found in an airport -- certainly the first time since Juliana hit six months that she's taken a decent nap in one.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Juliana goes for her first walk in the snow
It snowed a few days ago here, so Juliana had her first chance to walk in (a little bit of) snow. Enjoy...
Monday, July 4, 2011
Juliana the Crawler
Monday, February 21, 2011
Juliana's Thailand swim
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Baby Swimming in China (with better music)
Or, if you're seeing this imported to Facebook rather than at http://ruvin2007.blogspot.com, here's a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXUCfLy92C0
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Swimming video
Here is video of Juliana's swimming debut. Enjoy...
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Bobbing baby goes for a swim
By Kevin
Today we did the unthinkable. We took Juliana swimming. As we noted a few weeks ago, a student was telling us about the latest rage among parents in China – baby swimming. Since Juliana loves taking baths, we decided to give it a try, so we gave the student a call and asked her to come with us.
As we waited 20-30 minutes for the waist-high infant pool to fill with warm water, we watched one baby boy bobbling up and down in the water, supported only by a specially-designed innertube. In spite of warnings that you should wait 12 minutes after a bath before feeding a baby (I don't know why they were so precise), the boy sucked down an entire bottle of formula as he bobbed in the pool. Several more babies screamed at the top of their lungs during their after-swimming baths. Several of the parents whose children were bathing stopped to take a peek at the foreign baby. As we waited for Juliana's tub to fill, she napped.
Once we got into the pool room, they began by giving Juliana a personal exercise routine. The helper served as personal trainer, rotating her arms and legs in circles, stretching them back and forth, and moving them in a swimming motion. They said that we could have this personal trainer service every time as well if we liked (for an additional fee).
When her time came, we put Juliana's head into a specially designed infant inner-tube that wraps around her neck to hold her head above water. Then, we gently lowered her into the warm tub. She was a bit perplexed at first, but soon, she was wiggling her way in tiny circles, supported only by the head floatation device. Really it was more like wading in with a life preserver around her neck, but they still called it swimming. Thankfully, her head never even came close to getting wet. Eyes wide, Juliana slowly spun in circles. Before you knew it, her 12 minutes were up, so the helpers scooped her out and whisked her off to her bath. They scrubbed her and cleaned her and she smiled, seemingly unaware of the sensation she was causing. Undoubtedly, her photos will soon appear on billboards for baby swimming.
The room was like a sauna. Washcloths were spread over the radiators. Chinese people are terrified of the cold, so thankfully they made the room warm for the naked babies, but this was beyond warm. Unfortunately, Chinese people don't wear short sleeves ever in the winter, so the faces of most people in the room were glistening with sweat. Beads of sweat built on the nose of the helpers. Parents who insisted on leaving their coats on were wet. Ruth and I immediately whisked off our coats. I was wearing short sleeves underneath, to the astonishment of everyone in the room. A few minutes later, a 50-day old was unwrapped from two quilts, plus three layers of thick clothing, the helpers scolded us for allowing Juliana to come out in one thick layer of clothing plus a thick “baby bag.” “You should wrap her in a quilt too,” they insisted.
“It's good for their IQ and EQ,” our student interpreter said as she got into the water, weighing the benefits of weekly “swimming” sessions. I presume the latter is her equilibrium. Apparently a recent Norwegian study has linked infant swimming with improved balance. However, it seems that the infants in this study actually swam. Their heads weren't placed in flotation devices.
The helpers suggested that we'd nearly waited “too long” for Juliana's first trip to the pool. The babies who begin their weekly visits around seven days are better swimmers, according to the workers. Since Chinese babies aren't supposed to leave the house for the first couple months, I'd imagine that bringing your newborn to take a swim on a cold winter day might be frowned upon.
That said, apparently it's popular. In spite of a price tag of 50 RMB ($7.50) per session (you can also buy 6 sessions for 200 RMB or 13 for 400 RMB), a line of parents with tiny ones waited for their chance to take them swimming. It's a bit expensive for China. Granted, we did see one family pull up to the store in an Audi, so maybe this attracts a wealthier clientele. Our friend got them to knock 10 RMB off the price tag since it was our first time.
For more photos, go to www.flickr.com/kevsunblush. We hope to post a few videos soon as well.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Chinese Grannies
They touched her cheeks, plucked at her clothes, tugged curiously on the wrap, removed her pacifier, and pulled up her hat to examine the foreign baby's hair. They smiled and exclaimed and talked excitedly about this strange little foreign baby.
And they criticized. "Tai leng le!" (Too cold!) The baby could probably be so layered she looked like a ball and they would still say she wasn't wearing enough layers. When they heard she was only a month and a half old, they exclaimed, horrified, "Tai shao le!" (Too small!). In Chinese tradition, babies don't go out until they are three months old. They expressed their concern that the baby should not be curled up in the wrap. They said a bunch of other stuff we didn't understand, but tongue clicking and head shaking seem to be universal signs of disapproval.
Sometimes it's hard to receive continual criticism, but I have to remember that giving advice and being critical is a cultural way of showing you care about others. You could say that criticism is a Chinese love language. And the grannies weren't mean about it - they smiled despite their disapproval. We smiled, accepting the criticism, and continued on our walk. It's hard to argue with a billion people and thousands of years of tradition. Some battles you're just never going to win. So we smile and nod and keep being the crazy foreigners that we are.