Fernandezlopez Family

Hannah at 9 months

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:55:00 +0000

Hannah had her 9 month checkup in December.

Height: 29"; 90%
Weight: 18 lbs, 10 oz; 50%

She's doing great! LOVES to eat ;-)

Hannah at 6 months

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:03:00 +0000

Hannah had her 6 month checkup in September.

Height: 27"; 90%
Weight: 16 lbs, 10.5 oz; 60%

For Santa

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 05:00:00 +0000

A carrot for Rudolf. Milk and cookies for Santa. Oh, and night vision goggles. Isaac's idea in case it's hard for Santa to see in our dark house.

Drawing the Line

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 01:25:00 +0000

Me: "We need to leave milk and cookies for Santa!"
Isaac: "oh yeah!"
Me: "And a carrot for Rudolf!"
Isaac: "What? Rudolf isn't even really real."

Thanksgiving 2010

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 23:12:00 +0000

I find it absolutely hysterical that Poppi has no hair and everyone is
peach except for Hanabagi who's dark brown ;-)

Isaac - 6 yr Checkup

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:55:00 +0000

Isaac had his 6 yr checkup last month. Still looking like his Daddy! Tall and thin!

Height: 3' 11"; 75%
Weight: 46 lbs; 50%

Our World Citizen

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 02:37:00 +0000

Today I received this email from Isaac's school:

"We are very pleased to announce that Isaac has earned “The World Citizenship Award” for this month. Isaac has strived to be a model member of the class and we would like to recognize his effort.

Every month we pick a student who has followed the attributes of the Keys of Excellence and has also done his/her best in all academic curriculum related matters. Our goal is to make character building one of the priorities of our school and these important lessons for life will help students of the Montessori School of Downtown make excellent choices wherever they go.

We are very proud of Isaac and congratulate him. We understand that this wouldn’t have been possible without your help and commend you on doing such a good job."

I believe this is the first month of the program (they announced it late in September). I am very proud of Isaac and was so suprised that he would be honored in this way! But not at all suprised that he distinguished himself. Isaac has always been, above all else, a caring, sensative, and empathetic child.

A Bit of Nostalgia

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 18:04:00 +0000

This is the post-it I used to track contractions on Friday March 12th. This was before I was really convinced they even WERE contractions (thus all the ??). We also debated various ways of spelling Hannahs middle name. We ended up settling on Jihae.

Letter From Isaac

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:21:00 +0000

Hannah at 4 months

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:12:00 +0000

Hannah had her 4 month checkup this morning, and all is well!

Height: 26"; 90%
Weight: 14 lbs, 14 oz; 75%
Head: 16.5"; 75%

Still tall! And proportional ;-)

Bathtime Ritual

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:27:00 +0000

I think it's so cute that EVERY TIME Esteban wraps the baby in a hooded towel, he looks at her and says: "You must learn the ways of the Force, if you're to come with me to Alderaan". Every time. And I remember him saying that same thing when Isaac was a baby :-)

Love you honey!

First Laugh

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:20:00 +0000

This weekend marked Hannah's first laugh! She's been so close many times - letting out a little happy squawk.

Her first laugh was when Esteban was tickling her:

A few days later was her first non-tickling laugh (the "I'm just so amused I'm laughing" laugh):

Esteban is preening like a peacock at being the one who makes her laugh. :-)

Movie Mania

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:46:00 +0000

We have been to ALOT of movies lately. And I mean ALOT. While I was on leave, we would often sneak away to a movie while Isaac was in school and take Hannah with us. She would sleep or nurse through the movie.

Here are all the movies we've seen (that I can remember) just since she was born:
She's Out Of My League
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
How To Train Your Dragon (twice)
Date Night
Iron Man 2
Robin Hood
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
Killers
The Karate Kid (w/o Hannah - The only one)
The A-Team
Toy Story 3
Knight and Day

We usually only see a movie every few weeks (if that often). But we had a combination of time, inability to do much with the baby, and lots of movies we wanted to see :-)

First Permanent Tooth!

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:01:00 +0000

Isaac has been brushing his own teeth lately - so when I helped him a few nights ago, I was surprised to discover a new tooth!!! A little googling determined that this is his first permanent tooth: the 6 year molar!

"Between the ages of two-and-a-half and six, the permanent teeth continue to develop within the jaw. The first permanent teeth, the six-year-molars that become the first permanent molars, erupt behind each of the four second baby molars, usually between the ages of five and six. If the baby teeth are properly positioned and aligned, the six-year-molars usually erupt properly. If the baby teeth are pushed too close together, the six-year-molars will be too far forward, crowding the permanent teeth that erupt in front of them. However if the six-year-molars erupt properly and if the jaw is large enough, the permanent teeth have a good chance of coming in correctly."

Well whatdaya know!

Question

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 01:27:00 +0000

Isaac just asked:
A baby is made from one cell from the mommy and one cell from the daddy. But how does the cell get from the daddy into the mommy?

Daddy's answer:
Oh, we'll tell you tomorrow. Right now we're watching the Finals!

5 Year Old Stats

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:38:00 +0000

Once again - cleaning off my desk and came across Isaac's 5 year checkup report:

Weight: 41.5 lbs (50th percentile)
Height: 44 1/2" (75th percentile)
BMI: 14.7

Vision: 20/25

Hannah at 2 months

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:29:00 +0000

Hannah had her 2 month checkup on 5/4/2010, and boy has she grown like a weed!

Height: 24 1/2"; 97% (!!!)
Weight: 11 lbs, 3.5 oz; 50-75%
Head: 15", 50%

The doctor took a look and declared she was going to be tall like big brother!!! :-)

Hannah at 2 wks

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:31:00 +0000

I keep putting off posting because I never got around to my account of Hannah's birth. But rather than fall behind, I'll plow ahead and come back to that story :-)

Hannah was born 3/13/2010 weighing 7 lbs 3 oz and measuring 20 inches! At her two week checkup (3/25/2010) she had passed up her birthweight (yeah!) and came in at:

Height: 21"; 75%
Weight: 7 lbs, 7 oz; 25%
Head: 13 3/4"; 50%

These are actually the EXACT same percentiles that Isaac trended along at. Tall and thin!

Stereotypes Strike Again!!!

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:02:00 +0000

Ugg. It can be really hard raising kids who look past stereotypes. And the hardest stereotypes are those that are statistically valid.

Last night, I told Esteban "I have a question, Doctor".

***Sidenote: Ever since he diagnosed me with CBS (cry baby syndrome) in a moment of what HE would consider comedic genius, I address Esteban as Doctor when I want not only his opinion as a doctor, but also his professionalism.***

Isaac thought this was very funny, "Doctor Daddy". He then told me "Mommy, I know what a girl doctor is called".

Me: "Oh?"

Isaac: "A nurse"

Yikes. I explained to Isaac that a nurse is just another kind of job. There are girl nurses and boy nurses and girl doctors and boy doctors. He accepted this as just a bit more information to store, a slight correction to his accumulated knowledge, like when he was trying to read and I explained that a 't' and an 'h' together make 'th' (the sound) rather than 'ta-hu' as you would sound it out. But as I thought about it, I realized how hard it can be to fight stereotypes that appear to be correct - at least from observation and statistics.

So today I looked it up. Men account for 5.8% of the entire nursing population. Isaac has probably never encountered a male nurse in his limited (actually - not so limited) medical experience. He is categorizing the world to try and figure out the rules. And when you think about it, probably once of the first distinctions children make is that your parent that is a girl is a mommy, your parent that is a boy is a daddy. Boys cannot be Mommy's and girls cannot be Daddy's. It's the first pattern we set! And then suddenly we don't want to use sex to distinguish people anymore. No wonder it's confusing!

Kids and Race

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:32:00 +0000

I've been mulling over this post for awhile, but I find it so interesting to see how a child's mind works and what their perceptions are. Perhaps I should have entitled it "My Kid and Race", but I have enough friends of different races to see similarities in how their kids perceive the concept. Especially in multi-race households like ours.

And here is what I have observed. Kids see color. Without a doubt. But kids don't necessarily see race. To a young child, the color of someone's skin is just that - a color. Just like the color of their hair or eyes. In our house it's very interesting, because you have me and my family (plain old white), you have Esteban and his sister (half-hispanic, half-korean), and you have Esteban's parents (obviously Hispanic (grandfather) and Korean (grandmother)). But to Isaac, since it's about COLOR not race, me and my family and his korean grandmother are all 'peach'. Isaac is mostly peach mixed with a little brown. Esteban is brown and peach mixed together, and Esteban's father is brown. Isaac also says he has 'black hair and black eyes' - though I would call them dark brown :-)

Thanks to things like 'black history month' - Isaac is aware that their are 'black people', but he told me their were none at his school. I know that some of his classmates are African-American, so this puzzled me for a few moments. We were at the grocery store, so I asked him what color people were. Every 'black' person we met was labeled 'brown' by Isaac. So once again, kids are LITERAL. To Isaac, there is little difference between a black person and his own hispanic grandfather.

As adults, if you are forced to think about it (because you have a 5 year old ;-), you realize that Race and Color and really not that closely related at all. I suppose it's a short-hand with fairly agreed upon meaning. But it's not intuitive to a child. That's not to say he is oblivious to similarities and differences between races. When he sees an older asian women - Isaac will often say that she looks like Halmoni (what he calls his Korean grandmother). When we were behind a hispanic guy with a mustache, Isaac said he looked a little bit like Daddy (probably having MUCH more to do with the mustache than with the hispanic part ;-)

Isaac and I have talked about race/color as well. We talked about how you can decide to be someone's friend or not because they act nice or act mean. But you shouldn't decide to be someone's friend or not because of how they look, the same or different. Our extended family is very close, so it's easy to point out that if I decided I didn't want to be friends with Daddy because he was brown mixed with peach and I was all peach, then mommy and daddy wouldn't have found each other. That's a pretty horrible thought! And we extend the 'thought experiment' out past race (or color) to include thoughts like "what if Poppi and Lula (my parents) never became friends because Poppi has green eyes and Lula has brown eyes".

At any rate, I guess I have no grand concluding thoughts. It's just something that I have found very interesting in observing our little boy grow up. And for him, it's a somewhat more unique experience have so many races and relationships to observe in his own family.

Valentine's Day Pictures

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:38:00 +0000

Yesterday, Isaac grabbed his Diego Camera and told us he wanted to take our picture. He posed us for each one, told us to say "Happy Valentine's Day" on the count of three, took the picture, then said things like "Beautiful" and "Perfect" when he looked at the picture. He was so serious!

First he wanted Daddy to kiss Mommy on the cheek - but to be careful not to mess up my hair.

Then he wanted Mommy to snuggle into Daddy's chest.

Then he wanted one of baby Hannah (aka - my big tummy).

His cameras is super cute, but you can see the quality isn't great. Though now that I look at the specs - it has an auto flash. Maybe mommy needs to RTM (Read the Manual). But it might be time to get him a real digital camera. He loves taking pictures - just like his mommy!

Famous!

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:12:00 +0000

Ok - not really - but can you believe that I just got this message through YouTube?

"I am writing to request the permission to feature your You Tube video titled "Issac Counts Down till Baby Sister is Born" on a talk show titled "The Bonnie Hunt Show." Our staff really enjoyed watching your video on You Tube and I would like the opportunity to discuss possibly including it in one of our upcoming episodes. As the clip features a minor child, we will first need to obtain parental permission prior to including the clip in our program. I also want to mention that there is a chance that your video may not be featured in our program even after permission is granted due to scheduling issues."

Here is the video in question, which I uploaded just 2 days ago.

Countdown

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:55:00 +0000

Isaac is so excited about his baby sister. A few days ago, he asked when she was coming. So I made him a calendar where he can mark off each day and see how many more days until baby Hannah is born.

Tricked!

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:21:00 +0000

Isaac just asked me "What sound does a dog make?"

"Woof Woof", I said.

He pat me on the head and said "Good dog!"

HA! I asked him if he made that up. Apparently Komo (my sister-in-law, his Aunt) - pulled that joke on him back in August asking him what sound a cat makes. He's certainly been biding his time!

Palindrome

noreply@blogger.com (nightowl) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:51:00 +0000

This morning, Isaac was looking at a calendar where we had marked Hannah's due date. I was explaining how long until his baby sister is due. Suddenly, Isaac said "Hannah is a palindrome". Wow. The kid is 5! I mean - clearly someone pointed this out to him (almost certainly his teacher at school), but he remembered it. He went on to say that Isaac isn't a palindrome and demonstrated by spelling his own name backwards, in and of itself, a somewhat impressive feat for a 5 year old!