Juliet's first day at school

On Juliet's first day at her new school, she ran into the Dramatic Play area, donned a doctor's smock (there was a nice reflector headband, but it's not on in the photo), and picked up a baby doll:




So I'm thinking: pediatrician.

Boarding school at 3?

Juliet's last day at Bright Horizons (her daycare center for the last two years) is tomorrow. She starts at her new school, the Weekday School at Riverside Church, on Monday. Starting a couple of weeks ago, she started seeming a bit more insecure and skittish than usual, and I figured it was the upcoming school transition. So I asked her about it:

C: Juliet, are you looking forward to going to your new school?
J: Yeah, I'm going to miss you.

Which made her insecurities seem much more real. I quickly reassured her that mommy and daddy weren't going anywhere, that Heather and Erica would still be babysitting her, that she would still get to see Shawna, her teacher at Bright Horizons, and that we'd be staying in touch with her friends. She brightened up immediately, and has been much better ever since.

Outmaneuvering

Occasionally Juliet asks for some of the junk food that we imperfectly allow in the house. Up until now we've been able to ask her how many she wants, and since she never asks for more than five, it's not such a big deal. Sunday, though, she asked for five yuppie cheese puffs and then I watched her counting the fingers of her right hand with the fingers of her left hand. Failing to make it come out to any number higher than five, she gave up and cut to the chase. "I want the whole bag."

Only the first time this will happen

Juliet finished her dinner and dashed to the living room to look over her new library books. I asked whether she wanted more shepherd's pie and was met with silence. I asked again, a little exasperated, and she said "Yes. Sorry, I was reading my book."

She's definitely my daughter

On Juliet's day sheet today (the report from her daycare teacher, Shawna), the report was: "Juliet was excited about our science project this morning. She ran over and said, 'yay! science!'"

O frabjous day!

Of Course, She'll Always Be Our Baby

Juliet has been imitating a baby lately, crawling over to me making babbling sounds, pulling herself up on my legs and holding her arms up to be picked up and snuggled. I'll ask her whether she's being a baby and she'll nod, but sort of parenthetically so that it doesn't disrupt the flow of her performance. She's pretty convincing, and I have no idea what is on her mind when she's doing it.

Eggs and Bunnies

Juliet found many, many eggs this Easter, enlisting the help of her friend Sammy from Vermont to reach the higher ones and Sammy's mother Beth to open the eggs. (Sammy also did an excellent job of standing casually next to the harder-to-find eggs, sometimes with game show hostess-style hand gestures, so that Juliet cried out "I found it!" every time).

But the best part was on Friday, putting little candy bars in eggs for her friends at school and separating out the ones in the gold wrappers, which had peanuts. "These are for the elephants," she told me.

Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet...

Juliet came into the living room wearing Cliff's headlamp (correctly worn and turn on) and announced, "I'm going to find the crocodiles."

Life imitates Knuffle Bunny

If you haven't seen Mo Willem's books Knuffle Bunny and Knuffle Bunny Too, we highly recommend them--they capture fundamental truths of parenting and urban life. Without spoiling the stories, KB2 has aspects of the terrible young-adult plotline where the heroine and her nemesis show up at the prom wearing the same dress.

For Christmas, Juliet received a baby doll with Asian features. Upon opening the present, she exclaimed, "It's my baby, it's my sister!" And proceeded to name the doll "Baby Lala". On the 9th of January, she insisted on carrying Baby Lala to daycare with her. Juliet entered her daycare room (Toddler 3 at Bright Horizons), saw her buddy Mei, and Mei turned out to have brought exactly the same doll (I sharpie'd a "J" onto Juliet's doll to avoid embarrassing confusions). This video was shot just a little bit after that first encounter; they don't seem to have internalized the social opprobrium of bringing the same dolls to school.

More videos of Juliet!

Well, that seems to have worked. Here's a bunch more:

Uncle Michael visited from Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago. We took Juliet and Michael to an FCC (Families with Children from China) event at the Harlem Meer activities center; here's a video from that day.

This is Juliet swinging at a playground in Central Park, 12/28/07.

Joyce's friend Tyler Ochoa, and his daughter Elizabeth introduce Juliet to how to stomp in the mud on January 6.

From our Oregon trip in January, here's Grampy demonstrating his sock-puppet skills (a Farnsworth family core competence), much to Juliet's delight.

Juliet stomps through the snow

Let's see if this video link works:

Photos from MK Wong

MK Wong forwarded a photo set from a visit with her and our families (not just the Wongs, but the Woos, and Kirstin Ho) in 2006.

Pictures from the West Coast Family Deathmarch^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HGoodwill Tour!

Here are a few photosets that my mom, Matilda, snapped at Fung Lum, the SFO noodle joint with surprisingly good noodles:

first set
second set
third set

Truly our daughter she is!

I turned on HBO's hi-def broadcast of Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith last night and ended up sitting through the last third of it. Either Juliet wasn't sleeping well because she's teething, or the bass rumble from our subwoofer kept her from falling asleep. In any case, Joyce eventually took Juliet out of her room and brought her out to watch the movie. Which she watched raptly for the last 20 minutes, especially the swordfighting bits.

At the climactic scene, right after Anakin/Darth made his ill-advised flying leap over Obi-Wan, and got his legs cut off Black Knight-style, Juliet blurted out "Bye bye!" and waved goodbye to the projection screen.

Some pointers to photos

It occurred to me that I could just post the URL's of friend's (and our own) photo collections, without all the fancy uploading of stuff.

So, here's our friend Jason's holiday visit: http://flickr.com/photos/jasoncrawford/sets

I'll keep doing this, as I run into things in the archives.

Linda in Boston

I forgot to show that we saw Auntie Linda in Boston on our trip there last weekend! We got her a pearl necklace in honor (and gratitude) for her going along with us to China, and helping out so much in our first couple of weeks with Juliet.

First US doctor's visit

Today (Tuesday) we walked across town to the offices of Dr. Jane Aronson, who is known as "the orphan doctor" in the media. Her practice specializes in adopted children. We had gotten very good advice, instructions, and prescriptions from her colleague, Dr. Laura Feldman, before heading off to China (including the Tobradex which quickly cured my conjunctivitis).

The worst part of the visit was extracting blood samples from Juliet. Our darling is still a bit chubby, and since she's a baby, she has extremely tiny veins. Dr. Aronson started with the right side of Juliet's neck, moved to her left arm, then moved to her right arm, and was finally able to score a vein on the left side of Juliet's neck. Needless to say, Juliet did not enjoy these proceedings. Personally, I found some of the rooting around with needles to be unsettling, as many different angles were tried.

Here's Juliet after all the trauma, and after a couple of bottles of milk to settle her back down.


Other stats seem pretty normal--Juliet is around the 15th or 18th percentile for her age in both height and weight. She's at only the 3rd percentile for head circumference, which might be of concern, but we also observed that her head is somewhat flattened on the back (possibly from sleeping patterns), and also her skull hasn't sealed, so she has time to catch up. Dr. Aronson thinks that Juliet wouldn't need Head Start and wouldn't qualify given her current set of responses. So we'll just go back to making her life miserable with broccoli, baths, and walks through the park.


On the vaccination front, everything is as it should be; apparently the Chinese records were quite thorough, including instructions about the next round of vaccines that ought to be administered. Juliet had to get four vaccinations, about which she was not at all happy, but at least they were over with quickly.

Baby Containment Technology

Yesterday, at Joyce's request, I ventured to "Buy Buy Baby" (what a crass name for a store!) and returned with a Superyard XT, or, more colloquially, the baby fence. My colleague Mike likened it to a sheep pen, and he made fun of all the pictures of happy three-year-olds playing inside their pen. As if!

Juliet doesn't seem to realize yet that it's actually a baby cage. She seems to enjoy the technical challenge of using it to climb.


Uncle Bill and Aunt Evelyn very kindly gave us the high chair that they had used for my cousins Bob and Leslie when they were growing up. Which makes this a vintage baby chair, in case you can't tell from the metal frame and vinyl seats (you can't get this stuff anymore!). Auntie Evelyn warned us, however, to make sure to install a strap to prevent submarining. She also told us that my cousin Bob had climbed out of the chair, lost his balance, and fallen head-first into a nearby garbage can, apparently to much hilarity. After these stories, we've begun affectionately referring to the high chair as "The Death Trap".


Luckily for us, our friend David was willing to give us a few pieces of general-purpose webbing, which we have configured (a) to prevent submarining and secure the tray and (b) as a seat belt. Juliet seems to enjoy eating food off the tray, and flung broccoli all over the kitchen, the tray, and herself. She even got broccoli up the sleeves of her clothes; we're still finding little broccoli bits in improbable places in the apartment.

Quilt Show in Watertown

On Sunday, we headed to a quilt show in Watertown, at which we met up with more friends.

Trevor Blackwell came over on Sunday morning to meet Juliet, and then decided to come along to the quilt show. In typical nerd fashion, I think he and I talked as much about machinery and mechanical engineering (which is to say that Trevor, as usual, taught me about such things) as we discussed the quilts at the show.


I couldn't resist taking this shot of this quilt.


Trevor appears in this photo with Keith Smith, Joyce, and Juliet. Keith's wife Jackie is also a quilter; unfortunately, we didn't get any photos of Jackie or their daughter Maddie. Which is perhaps just as well, since Maddie will give anyone a run for their money in the "cuteness" department, and this is, after all, Juliet's blog.

Visiting the Sandstrom/Smalls

After the conference, we stayed at the home of Chris Small and Carol Sandstrom, friends of ours (originally my friends from grad school, but Joyce and I now feel that we share them) who live in Cambridge.

Here's Chris with Juliet:


And Carol, during a moment I missed, sledding with Juliet:


Their delightful daughter Harriet (who was one of Joyce's and my flowergirls at our wedding), dispensing big sister advice:


And lastly, Juliet considers her career options:


Interestingly, I find that I keep on typing "Harriet" instead of "Juliet". It probably helps that both of their names end in "et", but I suspect that there might be a tiny bit of Freudian slippage in my brain. Joyce and I had long thought that it would be wonderful to be parents of a child such as Harriet, who was preternaturally articulate as a child and remains thoughtful, wonderfully sharp, and painfully direct. I'm sure that Juliet will surprise us in her own ways. Actually, she already has.