The Growing Walnuts: Seattle Sights

Chan's left upper lateral incisor came through this week and he also had another ear infection, this time a double one. Sounds like a recipe for disaster but thankfully by the end of the week he was doing much better and has even slept through the night for us a few times! We're hoping this is a new trend that he keeps up with. Ha ha! He loves rubbing his tongue over all 5 of his teeth and his favorite word right now is "bee-duh." He's sporadically been signing "milk" but otherwise that's it. He's bound to get a few more teeth in the next few weeks as so many of them are almost poking through his gums right now.

Ms Faye recently told me that Chan's been participating in circle time each day for awhile now. Ms Faye usually sits against a wall and the children sit in a half circle around her on the carpet. At the beginning Ms Faye goes around the circle and says hello to each of the children in Mandarin and bows to them. The children then repeat this greeting and bow back to her. Apparently whenever it's Chan's turn Esme goes up behind him and pushes his back down to help him bow to Ms Faye. Little miss bossy! Esme's been talking a lot more in Mandarin lately which is neat to see. She's even trying to teach me words.

For the past few weeks we've been using a star/reward chart to help Esme with some things. One was getting out of bed in the morning. When she transferred to her big girl bed she used to always call us to come get her out of bed when she woke up. We put a stuffed animal in her room that lights up when it's "time to wake up" and it's set for 7am so that's when she usually called us. Well all of a sudden she realized that she could just get out bed by herself whenever she woke up, even if it was 4am! Yikes! We decided to use a reward system for her staying in her bed till her light alarm went off. The other issue was peeing in her bed at school during nap. She's so stubborn and was refusing to go to the bathroom before nap and so she was going pee about every other day even though she was dry at school for months before that. It was so frustrating for us because we had to wash her bedding all the time and send it back the next day. And since we started the reward system she hasn't done it once!

We told her she could get a prize if she collected lots of stars for her chart but she had no clue what that meant and was just happy to get the stars to put on her chart. Regardless we took a trip to the Space Needle this weekend as part of her reward and also because it's been in some of her books lately and she always like to find it in the Seattle skyline when we're driving around. The funny thing is that after we got to the top Esme said "I want to go to the Space Needle." Because we were in it she couldn't see it and so she had no idea where we were. We could've just gone to Seattle Center to hang out below the Space Needle and she would have been fine. Sheesh!