Day 228: The Little Guy Eats Real Food

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It has become painfully clear that now the little guy is not happy to eat puréed baby food anymore.  We didn’t do the “baby led feeding,” which is more hands on from the baby’s perspective.  Instead we went more traditional and worked our way up thru the puréed foods.

Now, the little guy will not eat a puréed food unless my wife or I sneak it into his mouth while he is eating something else.  For example, if we give him diced chicken or noodles, then we can also get some baby food in there between his bites.  He is ok with that, but will freak out on us if he is not feeding himself in some way.

Speaking of diced chicken, yesterday was the first time we gave him a significant amount of chicken.  He was not really eating so I though we would give it a shot.  Wow, he was so crazy about it that he ate all of it and stuck his face to the plate while eating to skip the step of bringing it up to his mouth with his hands.

Of course the new eating routine is extra messy – lots more post-dinner cleanup than before.  And it is then that you see how much he actually got into his mouth 😉

Day 227: Living Without a Sense of Smell and Taste

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The little guy was sick for about 3 weeks, but is now up and running full speed.  I, on the other hand, have had a really hard time getting over being sick.  I have had a cold for a few weeks now, and this is the mother of all colds.  It makes any other colds I have had before it look like training colds.

I think I am at the end of it, because I can now breathe through my nose, but I have one problem.  I cannot smell.  At all.  And that means I cannot taste either, and have not been able to for 5 days now.  Imagine the crime against humanity that I committed yesterday by going to Din Tai Fung with our visitors, while being unable to taste the wonderful food!

When you eat and cannot taste the food, you find other ways to “taste.”  You look more at the presentation, and you pay attention more to textures of the food in your mouth.  When you can taste it, maybe you skip all of that and just taste it when it’s in your mouth, but then I think you might miss these other elements that help you enjoy food.

There are benefits to not being able to smell.  For example when walking around Hong Kong with our visitors, there are a lot of places selling dried seafood (scallops, muscles, etc.).  It normally is not my favorite smell, but no big deal to me this week.  Also yesterday I was waiting on the street next to a stinky tofu vendor, and didn’t even notice.  Let’s hope that the sense of smell clears up in time for our next trip back to Sweden, where I long to smell the clean and crisp fall air.

Day 226: Hong Kong: City of Signs

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I have noticed that around Hong Kong, there are a lot of signs.  No, “a lot” is not the right word.  There are signs everywhere.  Go anywhere, do anything, and you will see multiple signs stating things you don’t care about, and things that you never knew were important.

Most of the signs are about things you cannot do.  After that there are warning signs, and then just the random signs for information.  I think it jumps out to me because there are of course signs in other places, but those signs are not always repeated so much, and they usually do not go up at the expense of good aesthetics.  But in Hong Kong I guess after a while, the signs just blend into the background and nobody cares or reads them, so they put more up – and then the cycle continues until you have the ridiculous situation that we now face.  Maybe I should make a sign to put up suggesting there are too many signs 😉

    
    
    

 

Day 225: The Little Guy Points

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Today we went out to the Hong Kong Park, as well as the Botanical and Zoological Gardens.  I have written about them before, but basically the park is awesome and has a great (and free!) aviary.  The botanical gardens and zoo are really cool if you are into orchids, monkeys and birds.

The greatest thing happened today – the little guy started pointing.  Not just with his fist as he had been, but now he has one tiny finger outstretched. And now he also has words (at least they are words to him) that he keeps repeating when pointing at a specific thing.  

Today when he pointed at the monkeys it was cool to see him saying something when he did it.  And also,when we said, “where are the monkeys?”, he did point at them.  Of course that may have been coincidence but it was still cool 🙂

It’s so cool to see this happening.  He is back to himself after being sick the last few weeks, and it seems like he has a few hidden developmental things up his sleeve now.  Exciting! 🙂

Day 224: 11 months old and communicating clearly

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Today the little guy is 11 months old.  I can’t believe that in only 1 more month, he will be 1 year old, and then soon I will be an old man and he will be getting married.  Ok, maybe I am getting ahead of myself.

Tonight it was about 1 hour before his normal dinner time, and we were playing around on the floor.  He crawled over to the dinner table, pulled himself up so he was standing, and started looking over the top of the table.  He started reaching for some things, and at that point I brought him away from the table.  Then, he crawled back over and did the same thing – and when I pulled him away he got annoyed with me.  I thought, “Is he telling me he is hungry?”

So, I strapped him into the height chair and got his food, and sure enough, he was ready to eat!  I was blown away that this little person, who is 11 months old, knows where we eat, and knew how to communicate that he wanted to eat – without crying.  This was very clear communication – and just like all communication, for it to be successful, it required both parties to understand what was being said.  Pretty cool 🙂

Day 223: Breakfast with “Penis and Vagina”

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How many times have you eaten breakfast while a Swedish children’s song played in the background?  And then, what if that song was animated?  And what if the animations were a penis and a vagina? If it has happened to you more than once, you hopefully have a Swedish child in your life.  If it has happened to you only once, you probably have Swedish visitors with a 4-year-old.

snoppen & snippan (penis and vagina)
snoppen & snippan
Barnkanalen, the Swedish children’s TV network, released this cartoon as a way to help in the education about these body parts.  Of course they educate about the whole body, not just these body parts, but this song has really taken off.  I think it has been viewed 6,5 million times on youtube – and the country only has 10 million people.

Swedes generally seem to think this song is the best thing in the world, while I am a little more hesitant to be so enthusiastic.  Especially when eating breakfast. 😉

Watch the Swedish version here if you want to see animated genitals with Swedish words.

Watch the English version here if you want to understand what they are saying.

Day 222: Fall Weather in Hong Kong and Sweden

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Now that it is the 2nd week of October, the weather is really starting to get nice.  In the mornings and late afternoons, it is balmy but nice, like you are in the South of France.  Yes, it’s still 95% humidity, and yes it’s still 30 degrees, but somehow the “spike” to the max temperature seems shorter, and the comfortable weather seems to want to linger.  You actually want to eat at the outdoor cafes all along the water in Discovery Bay, where we live.

If we contrast that to Sweden, where temperatures are in the 10’s if you are lucky right now, and there might even be frost on the ground, this feels like paradise.  Soon it will be the most depressing time of the year there, with rain and darkness descending on the country, as everyone hibernates and prepares for the winter, when at least the snow offers some light reflection and brightens the place up.  They say that in the fall is when there are the most depression cases in Sweden.  They say it’s because people are depressed because of the depression they are going to feel coming up.  😉

Back to Hong Kong – I hear that the weather in Hong Kong stays very nice thru November, with temperatures cooling down a little more and the rainy days becoming more frequent.  It is funny how there is always something in Hong Kong that makes you want to be inside – the heat in the summer, the rain in the fall, the bone-cold humid and misty winters.  But as it is now, I fight that natural urge to want to find my way inside and I stay outside as much as possible.  Although with it getting cooler I found myself saying it’s maybe not warm enough to swim – wow, that means it’s time for a trip back to Sweden to gain perspective 😉

Day 220: Discovery Land in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong

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Today we went with our visitors and their children to Discovery Land.  This is a massive play area in the North Plaza of Discovery Bay that has activities and play areas for kids from toddler-age until early teens.

There were the basics – slides, padded areas, and soft balls.  Then there were the things that set this place aside from your regular play place, like higher slides, trampolines, air guns to shoot the soft balls, basketball, mini golf, and a crazy obstacle course that looks like it is an American Gladiators set. 

 The little guy was maybe a bit too young to fully enjoy the place, but I enjoyed it.  It’s fun to have something more than just a few toys and screaming kids sometimes.

Regarding Discovery Land itself, it was really clean and well-kept.  We went during their “happy hour special,” which is between 9:30-11:30, and it only cost 80 HKD per child (about 85 sek, 10 usd). My only complaint was all the notices, warnings and rules posted on all the walls – but then again, that’s how it is everywhere in Hong Kong!

Day 219: A Long Loooong Night

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I wrote yesterday about the little guy having some sickness in the form of a very stuffed nose.  That is an understatement.  I think little elves crawled into his nose and setup a glue and/or cement factory.  And the production methods at this factory is super effective.

Since the little guy was not feeling well, we had him in our bed, and that went well until about 3:45.  Then his restlessness was too much, and he was unable to sleep.  Basically we had a few good hours where he was sleeping, and then he could not breathe, so he was moving around trying to find a position where he could breathe.

The little guy, in-between us in bed, was loud (imagine a really loud snoring old man, then make him a baby and make it cute – but still loud).  He also moved around a lot (therefore kicking both of us in the face a bunch of times).  Finally we thought we would suck out his nose, to which he responed with complete terror, as usual.  It didn’t matter how many times we tried to suck it out, there was more snot in his nose.  And of course he didn’t sit still to let us get all of it out anyway.  

Then we finally tried to give him a bottle and put some saline drops in his nose.  That seemed to do the trick.  But then my wife says, “hey, the bed is really wet.  Like really wet, it’s soaked.”  To this I responded, “ok I get it, wet is wet,” and we had to change his diaper and I put a towel down under the sheet that wrapped around (so it was sandwiching the wet sheet) to get us thru until the morning.  

Changing his diaper and pajamas was so funny because he was sleeping really heavily all the sudden.  At this point my wife and I had to just laugh – it was so ridiculous how horrible our night had been going.  

We could have laughed when he kicked us in the face repeatedly, we could have laughed when he kept moving into new positions, we could have laughed when he peed through his diaper onto our bed – but it was the diaper and pajama change that made us laugh.

When we finally got to morning, my wife and I both said, “wow, that sucked.”  But the little guy had a good day somehow – his appetite is back, and he played and laughed a lot today.  Laughing was the key to making today good instead of seeming like an eternity.  My wife said, “it’s good we laugh, it’s not the only long night we will have.”  To that I said, “are you sure?  I think after they turn 11 months (on Saturday), we get full easy nights from then on.” 😉