Oh, baby! – Page 32 – C. Buddha's Hasty Musings

Good Morning.

Mina wakes up smiling every morning (note her little baby teef).

We finished finals a couple of weeks ago, which signaled the beginning of three things: Our mid-year (academic year) one-month break, the second term for weekend (BA and MA) classes, and some special conversation/TOEFL night courses for university staff offered for free at our university’s Language Center. I am teaching all of the above so my weekends are very busy – from early morning to 8PM or so. Nam stays at home with the babies and our nanny comes all Saturday and a half day on Sunday.

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Max’s conversation reached a tipping point a few weeks back, and he uses new words that he learns independently, in Thai and English, everyday. He must be picking up a lot at school and from the TV.

People that say not to use the TV for children younger than three simply have no idea how to use it. Television can be a useful tool, and like anything else, can be used in excess. That’s the big secret. Those that would dictate what’s best for your child and your home, however, do not think you are smart enough to realize that.

max’s wittle bitty

Just about a month ago, we had a big storm come in at night due to a typhoon battering Taiwan. It rained a lot more than normal, even for rainy season, and the pond in front of our house must have flowed over onto the road at some point during the night. I say must have because I didn’t actually see it happen, but found some evidence to that effect including washed up debris on our curb and a half-dead pla salit (Snakeskin Gourami). Upon poking with my finger, he wiggled a bit, so I decided to try reviving him in a spare six liter PET water bottle I had in the yard.

I filled it with water from the pond and slipped him in through the top, and after performing carefully measured agitation to stimulate oxygen transport over the gills (read: shaking it for a while), Mr. Gourami “turned that frown upside down” and started swimming around.

Thus was born the Ghettoquarium in all its polyethylene terephthalatiffic glory:

20100912bitty0005 — Snakeskin Gourami (Trichogaster pectoralis) aka Siamese Gourami aka Bitty

Max was delighted and immediately dubbed the fish “Bitty” (it was not until later that I realized he was trying to say “fishy,” but by then I had gotten used to calling him Bitty as well).

Bitty received due adulation from his attending 2.5 year old host, including being assaulted with long cooking chopsticks and drinking straws joined end-to-end (which daddy was using to occasionally blow air into the bottle just for the hell of it). But as cool as this fish was, and as much as Max loved him, I decided to let him go at the end of the day because I wanted him to go live with his friends in the pond. Also, I had no desire to find out which aquatic plants he could eat by trial and error – I knew he ate plants because that’s what it said in my go-to SE Asian fish book, Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos by Alan Davidson.

In addition, Max gets bored with new toys almost instantly, so we thought we could get away with Bitty just suddenly disappearing… This is how we ended up going out as a family to buy a small aquarium less than two hours after I threw Bitty back in the pond, but that’s another story.

For now, I choose only to commemorate a boy and his fish:

crybaby, crybaby, happy babies

Baby Updates 9/26/2010

Max is 2 years and 5 months old and can identify around forty animals in English and Thai (we’re holding back on teaching him Japanese so far)
He can sing the ABC song and did so on stage with thirty kids at least twice his age this morning (at a strange baby TV expo at a local hotel [Takasila #2] I still don’t really understand)
He is going through a crybaby phase (please let it be a short one) and goes to mommy when he really wants something
He is currently getting over a serious cough that’s spread around schools all over Thailand

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Mina is nine months old and can stand unsupported for 7-8 second stretches
She wakes up smiling and can shake her head no
She can scream louder and higher than humanly possible (this usually happens when you’ve wronged her by taking foreign objects out of her mouth or wiping her face clean)
She fights dirty and has recently added a new move – Super Baby Razor Tooth Chomp
She is currently coming down with a serious cough that’s spread around schools all over Thailand

dominant eye

Max can play with his legos and blocks all day when he’s in the mood. He actually prefers clay sculpting, drawing, and painting, but legos are great once in a while. Unfortunately, all he has is a cheapo set that doesn’t fit together too well (too loose), but I’m saving up to buy him a big bucket of the real thing.