We be Parents

A couple days ago Hazel crossed over the 13 month mark…and her 13th month was definitely a month of action. Hazel still isn’t walking on her own, but she is crawling, standing, walking while holding on to furniture, and her new favorite: walking while holding our hands. The month started off with a bang with our trip to Virginia for my brother’s wedding.

The weekend after we got back from the wedding we kept the momentum going by traveling to LA for a 4 day trip to see Yenari’s father who traveled from Korea for a business trip. Yenari’s father was quite busy with work, but we were still able to spend quite a bit of time with him. We met him at the airport on Sunday and spent just about the whole day with him.

Yenari’s father probably spent half his time with us watching Hazel while we ate – I wonder if he even had a chance to eat anything the whole time. We had a terrific Korean BBQ dinner at Chung Dam Korean BBQ and a reprise of the awesome spicy crab soup we’ve had on our last few trips to LA at Ondal 2.

Here’s a short video of Hazel ‘walking’ with her grandfather and Yenari:

Hazel walking with some help from Mom and Grandpa from Greg Neustaetter on Vimeo.

We had a great time seeing Yenari’s father again – Hazel definitely remembered him from our Korea trip and quickly rekindled her friendship with him. One of the things that Hazel started doing while we were in LA and that she’s continued doing every….few seconds, is to ask for things. She does this by putting her hands together:

She does this whenever she wants anything – food, toys, us, dogs, and even when she sees other kids out in public. It is totally cute but grows a little old when it happens every ten seconds or so. What doesn’t grow old is her bowing when she gets what she was asking for. Yenari taught her this when she was teaching her to ask for things, ‘Chusayo’ in Korean. Here’s a quick video of Hazel asking for something and bowing once she gets it:

The rest of the month was definitely more low-key…no more traveling for us, but we’ve still been busy trying to keep up with Hazel. Here are a couple other photos from the rest of the month:

Today Hazel passed the major 12 month milestone – we’ve got ourselves a one year old! It’s amazing how fast time flies. Yenari and I spent much of the day yesterday recounting everything about Yenari’s labor and the hours that led up to it – definitely didn’t seem like something that happened a whole year ago.

Hazel has changed a lot in the last few months. She’s standing – both pulling herself up on everything around her and standing up without holding onto things. She’s also started learning things really fast and has become particularly good at copying us – she’s clapping, waving hello/goodbye, blowing kisses, imitating hand motions, trying to say the words that we’re saying, and generally acting a lot more like a kid. She definitely understands a lot more now – if we say hi/bye she waves and if we say jusaeyo (Korean for ‘please give it to me’) she politely hands over whatever she is holding. It seems like she’s coming into a bit of a renaissance period now and changing so much each day.

Here are a couple photos of her today at the park:

This Saturday we had Hazel’s first birthday party. We had it at the same park where we took the photos above and had about 30 people. Korean’s take their first birthday’s very seriously and we didn’t have the time to do all of the decorations for Hazel’s Dol, so we hired a couple people who do it for a living. They did an awesome job setting everything up:

Hazel was a bit quiet and cautious because of all the people, but she seemed to have a good time. Here she is picking from an assortment of toys – a stethoscope, golf club, microphone, money bag, pencil, and thread:

Hazel ended up picking the golf club – so it’ll be a career of professional sports for her…don’t quite know which gene’s will help out with that, but the Dol doesn’t lie, so a professional athlete she will be. So spent more time picking runners up – the stethoscope and money bag…maybe a lucrative career in sports medicine?

and then…cake!

Hazel enjoyed a couple bites of her cake…strawberries and all. And then she returned to playing with her guests:

Thanks to everyone who came to the party to help us celebrate Hazel’s first 12 months and to give her their best wishes for the next 12 months and beyond.

The last 12 months have definitely been a major learning experience for all of us, but life with Hazel is just getting more and more fun everyday.

For those not able to quickly divide by 30, that would be about 9 months and 20 days – way too late for a 9 month update and not quite ready for the 10 monther. Hazel has definitely transformed quite a bit since the 8 month update – she’s moving around more (not quite fully crawling though), pulling herself up into a sitting position, clapping her hands, making lots of noise, and generally being a lot more active. Holding her is a lot more difficult than it used to be – now she just crawls all over us and doesn’t seem to want to sit still. She’s up to 4 teeth – two on the top and two on the bottom, and she’s eating a wider variety of food, including Cheerios and other ones that she needs gum away on before she can swallow them.

At her 9 month checkup a couple weeks ago she measured up well – she was ‘off the chart’ on height, coming in a just over the highest line on the growth chart at around 30 inches. She weighed in at just under 20 pounds (70th percentile) and her head circumference was around the 75th percentile.

One of her biggest changes in behavior has been her stranger anxiety. While she is cautious around just about anyone she doesn’t see on a regular basis she is much more weary of men…and the scariest of them all seems to be my dad! Last week he came for dinner and Hazel burst into tears before he even stepped in the house – the mere sight of him did it. After a while she (mostly) lets down her guard – here she is after a couple hours:

One of the big things we did was to go on a short road trip down to LA with the sole purpose of satisfying Yenari’s craving for Korean food. The Bay Area definitely has much better Korean food than most other areas of the country, but it is still no match for LA. This was a very similar trip to the one we took about a year earlier except this time we had little Hazel to keep us busy. She did great on the drive down to LA and was fairly well behaved in most of the restaurants we went to. Here’s the Korean food connoisseur and Hazel taking in the end of a crab feast at OnDal:

And a quick stop for ho dduk – a sugar-filled Korean dessert pancake. This was the first of many visits to this place and was inspiring enough to Yenari that she was talking about wanting to open up a ho dduk stand of her own!

Hazel had a blast in our hotel playing on the big king size bed:

On the way out of town after three days of gorging on Korean food and watching the Korean Olympic speed skaters kick some serious butt, we stopped by the house that my great grandfather build – the house where my grandmother grew up, my mom lived for many years, and the first house I lived in in the weeks after birth. Hazel didn’t seem very excited about any of this and slept through the visit:

On the way back home from LA we took a detour to Delano to see Carol, Yenari’s buddy from nursing school:

This trip to Korea town in LA was just practice for the real thing – this coming Thursday we’re flying to Korea for a two and a half week vacation. This will be the first time Hazel meets her grandfather, great grandmother, uncle, many other relatives, and Yenari’s friends. While we’re not looking forward too much to the 10 and 12 hour flights, we are excited about having the chance to take a long vacation and spend some time with Yenari’s family in Korea.

And now…more pictures:

On January 31st Hazel bumped up the month mark to 8 months…and to celebrate that we woke her up at 5 in the morning in order to hop on a 7am flight to New York.  I had a conference to attend in NYC and Yenari was able to rearrange her schedule so that she and Hazel could come too.  Because the flight was so early Hazel slept most of the time and made the flying experience a lot easier than it had been when she was 3 months old.  We only had two and a half days in the city, but it was an action packed couple of days.

My mom, Duncan, and my grandmother came down from Connecticut to spend about a day and a half with us.  I was at work during the day, so everyone hung out at the hotel, played with Hazel, and ate food.  My mom saw Hazel just a few weeks ago, but Nana hadn’t seen Hazel since she was about 3 months old, so the 8 month old Hazel was definitely a much different baby.  Hazel was in excellent behavior the whole trip and kept everyone laughing.  Here’s Hazel with her Meemaw and Nana:

The New York trip was also the first time Hazel got to meet her great aunt Janet, great uncle Bill, and their daughter Sarah.  Here are a couple photos of Hazel meeting them:

This trip was also Hazel’s first time meeting my good friend Michael Ross – we met him for a BBQ dinner.  The last time we’d seen him was when Yenari was pregnant and Michael was still living in Chicago – it was great to have the chance to see him now that he’s in NYC.

On the way back from dinner with Michael it started snowing – Hazel’s first snow! So we headed the block from our hotel to Times Square to take a couple late night snow photos:

The trip was definitely too short and we didn’t get to see all of the people we would have liked to have seen.  It was an exhausting couple of days and only got more tiring when we got back since our 6am flight back home brought both of us into full work days resulting in 24 hours of awake time!

Switching gears to the 8 month update…teeth are still coming in and she’s doing a lot of chewing, whether she’s eating or not.  She’s been a more adventurous eater, with a particular love of beef related food such as the beef broth from Korean gom tang soup and Gerber beef baby food.  Other things that she seems to like are yogurt, tomato, avocado, and chicken.  This newfound interest in ‘real food’ has made going out to dinner a lot trickier as she is no longer content to sit in her car seat and watch us eat – now she wants to be an active participant in the meal and also does her best to knock over drinks, pull table cloths, and reach for hot and sharp things.

Hazel is sitting like a champ – she started sitting on her own about a month ago, but now she can really do it without us spotting her.  She’s a big hand waver now – not actually waving goodbye to anyone, but just generally waving her hands and opening and closing her hand like she’s petting something.  She has much better hand eye coordination – she’s got the pincer grip down and she also is able to use both hands together to play around with things.

Here’s to the next month of new adventures and changes!

I’m a couple days late, but Hazel is now 7 months old.  Its hard to pinpoint individual things, but it seems like Hazel has made some major transformations in the last month.  Physically the smallest little changes are two teeth that are making their way up in the bottom middle of her mouth.  She’s seems to be somewhat annoyed by it, but it doesn’t seem to be bothering her too much – just a little extra drooling and gnawing on anything she can get her hands on.

She hasn’t started crawling yet, but she can spin around, roll, and scoot backwards.  She can also sit up now without support…though we keeping our hands close by to catch her from falling when she sees something interesting that she wants to lean out for.  She has a lot more fun playing now – studying all the little gadgets on her exersaucer, throwing toys onto the ground and waiting for us to pick them up, and playing peek-a-boo.  More noises and laughing and baby gibberish has come as well and is pretty fun to listen to – Yenari responds to just about any noise Hazel makes with the response ‘did she just say mommy?’.  No mommy yet, but I’m sure its on the way sometime soon.

She’s been doing a better job eating both solids and from the bottle…though she’s still a far way from eating full meals while I’m watching her.  Her favorite solids are carrots, squash, and prunes.  mmmm.  Luckily her digestive system has somewhat caught on to the solid foods, though she’s not quite regular yet.  The other funny thing is that she’s become obsessed with trying to drink water from a cup – she doesn’t quite know what the goal is, but she starts chewing at the edge of the cup and tilting it back.  When the water actually makes it to her mouth it surprises her and either rolls down her chin, causes her to cough, or miraculously gets swallowed properly.  We’ll have to get a video of it, it’s pretty funny.  Here is a photo of her messily eating some food, totally zoned out (she doesn’t normally look this ridiculous while eating):

We had a good and relaxed Christmas.  Yenari had to work Christmas Eve but had a remarkable 4 days off in a row starting on Christmas.  Here’s Hazel with some of her Christmas stash:

We think she enjoyed playing with the wrapping paper and ribbons more than the actual toys, but she’s grown to like them too.  She’s very entertained by her ‘Pal Violet’ (no not that Violet)…the first baby toy that has a USB jack to plug into a computer.  We got to pick her name, favorite food, color, and animal….we are endlessly entertained by doggie Violet mispronouncing bibimbap as her favorite food.  She liked the other presents we got too – here she is trying to eat a bacon wallet my mom got for me:

I think we’ll end it on that note, because what can really top eating a wallet made of (fake) bacon.  Well, maybe a couple more photos: