The tradition continues...

Here is Kira enjoying The Price Is Right. There is a tear of pride in my eye, and I think that Auntie Christina would be impressed too.

This is Kira practicing her "no" when Daddy tries to steal her food. Ha.

And she seems to enjoy using her belly to open and close drawers and doors lately. Just after we turned the video off, she closed the drawer so hard, she fell backwards on her bum.

Photos

Kira found this balloon in her room; it was given to her the day we brought her home from the hospital and is still inflated! She loves it because it's attached to a stick, she is waving it all over the house. Thanks Dusit + Kim!

She really loves playing with Daddy's toques. They are a source of endless entertainment for her.

Looking adorable in her Christmas dress, accessorized with Mommy's purse.

Looks like we may get a Christmas at home this year! It's been a full year since I "tried to burn the house down" (as Jon says). Here is our place decked out for the holidays...

Our new tree, all the gifts underneath are for Kira, she is spoiled rotten by friends and family. We didn't buy her anything...

That is an ornament that Kira made at the Radical kid's party this year, they are stickers that she stuck on. You can still see the backing of the sticker just under the gingerbread man.

Long time, no post

Merry Christmas everyone! Sorry for the lack of posts, I have been very lazy lately and thought that maybe Jon may step up and write something...guess not. Heh.

Kira updates; she is adding more words and phrases every day, I think that we may be close to her communicating (couple more months-ish). She says Oh boy, oh yeah, and is very good with "no". I have a great video, will try to post later this week. We recently hid her bottles from her in an effort to get her to drink milk from a sippy cup or cup; but my darling child is incredibly stubborn, and has instead stopped drinking milk altogether. She can drink from cups, bottles (water, juice etc) and sippy cups, but she chooses not to drink milk from these. She only wants it from her bottle. It's been almost a month now and we don't seem any closer to a solution. We have been supplementing with lots of yogurt, cheese and other dairy rich items. We had a mini-breakthrough yesterday when she requested cereal in her milk; she typically likes her cereal dry. We'll see how things progress. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Kira went for her quarterly check up this week, and her prescription was amended to something slightly stronger. Her eye is starting to turn in more so the doctor is trying to strengthen the muscles. She is now at +5.00 and +5.25. Jon and I have noticed her eye turning in when she is not wearing her glasses, hopefully the new prescription will help. Poor kid.

Otherwise, things here have been the same old. We have a few videos to post of Kira and I'll try to get those up tomorrow or later this week.

More pictures + videos too!

Grandpa and Isabel

Kira and Mommy at our friends housewarming party

Kira's cousin Marcus came by for a visit on Friday night, they had a great time as you can see in this video.

This is Isabel having a chat with our tv. Apologies for the commentary that comes along with the video...

Pictures!

She drew a picture for Daddy

Go Suns Go!

Before....(drinking her yogurt)

....After! (don't know why she looks so angry)

Sitting on Mommy's stomach - she is smiling because she's jumping up and down on my stomach

This one is for everyone that knew me when I was Kira's age. Apparently, I used to lick the butter off of buns, which resulted in butter all over my glasses. Kira does the same, except she does it with Nutella. Sigh.

This is Kira putting the DVD into the playstation and then taking it out again. It's a great game for her, but she won't get to play it again - Daddy wasn't too impressed. Hee.

The week that was...

I won't lie, this week sucked. Kira is teething, sick, and seeing things in her room. This has resulted in very little sleep for Kira, Dad, and Mom. Poor little thing, she is not sleeping well but she is very happy while she is awake. She had a great playdate with her friend, Kieren. He is such a cute little man, he and Kira had a great time playing with her toys. I was a little concerned as she has entered the stage of not wanting to share her toys, but there were no problems.

To try and cure her fear of the shadows in her room, we moved her bed 90 degrees, so it is against a different wall. We also changed out her guard rail so that she can see out from her bed, tonight it seemed to work - hopefully this trend will continue.

She continues to grow and I'm fairly certain she is going to be a very clever girl when she gets older. On Wednesday she found a cd on the floor by Jon's computer. She picked it up and ran into the living room, where she proceeded to put the cd into the playstation, and then eject it. She was very proud of herself and kept exclaiming "oh yeah" and "oh wow!" I was shocked, I have no idea how she learned this as we don't ever use the playstation when she is around. Jon reminded me of one time where we had left a dvd in the playstation which ejected when she hit the button. That happened a while ago, so how she remembered that is beyond me. I have a great video of it which I will post soon.

This coming weekend we will be heading to Victoria to go meet Kira's newest cousin, Conner. He was born on Wednesday weighing in at a little over 7lbs. It's funny, a few years ago I was wondering when people in my family were going to start having kids, there was a serious shortage of young ones after all, and now we have 3 nephews, 1 niece, and, of course, 1 daughter.

Heading towards "terrible two's"

Recently Kira has developed a bit of an attitude. Ok, so this isn't really recent, but she is much more expressive with the attitude lately. If something does not go her way, she says "no no no no no", and sometimes she will shake her finger at you simultaneously. Lovely. We are doing our best to take care of these little outbursts, but it will be a long uphill battle I'm sure. This one is a stubborn little thing. Today, she wanted to get something out of her stroller, but I would not let her. She started pouting and pointing at the stroller trying to win me over that way. When that didn't work, she turned to full out crying. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, then continued on with the tantrum while staring at herself in the mirror. It was so funny, I had to laugh - which only made her cry harder when she snuck a peek at me.

Anyhow, here is a picture of Kira from the aquarium on Saturday.

This week my sister will be having her baby boy, she is scheduled for a section on Wednesday. We are all very excited to meet the newest addition to the family, and I'm sure my sister will be excited to have this pregnancy over with.

Videos!

In the video above, Kira is "tickling" Jon. She loves to make people laugh. You can also see at the beginning of the video that she likes to tap on the chair seats to indicate that she wants you to sit there. It's hilarious. If you try to sit in the chair opposite the one she has chosen for you, she will start saying "no no no no no".

This is Kira's new kitchen that she got from Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Tracy. It's an early Christmas gift, and she loves it. She has one of these at daycare and she takes things out from the bottom and puts them in the top cabinets and then back again all day long. She now likes the "pour" water for Jon and I to drink and will bring us cups. We taught her 'cheers', though she doesn't say it quite yet.

Kira had her H1N1 shot on Tuesday, she barely even noticed it. She will have the follow up booster on the 1st, hopefully things will go just as smooth then too. This week we will be going to Eliana's 2nd birthday partyl she is the daughter of my friend Wendy. Eliana had the privilege of being born on the greatest day of the year, Nov 17. We missed her birthday party last year as we were in Malaysia, but I am very much looking forward to seeing Kira play with Eliana again.

As you can see, Kira was a darn cute penguin for Halloween this year. We went over to our friends place, they have their house all decked out for halloween, it was amazing! I wish we had taken photos of the place - lots of people on the street were! Kira wasn't overly thrilled with the whole concept of halloween this year. She was clinging to Jon and I like her life depended on it. After a short while she warmed up a little and went up and down the stairs of the house most of the night. I have accepted now that she doesn't like chocolate (honestly, is she even my kid??) but it appears that she has some love for the salty; she devoured a small bag of chips yesterday and then a small bag of cheezies today! That said, she'd still take fruit over the junk and I guess I'll be ok with that.

Jon took Kira in for her 18 month vaccinations last week, she did very well. She apparently barely cried and was happy as anything for the rest of the day. Just when I was thinking how wonderful it was that the shots were finally over, the doctor tells us to come back next week for her H1N1 vaccination. D'oh. Oh well, it's for her own good, we'd be very upset if she got sick and we could have prevented it. And yes, I'll be getting mine then too - the doctor didn't give me a choice either. I'm curious to find out of everyone will be taking their kids for the shots...

Happy Halloween!

Halloween 2008

Halloween 2009

She's started to close her eyes in anticipation of the flash...

More Pictures!

Mmmmm, Nutella

Practicing her tunnel that she learned in gymnastics class

Kira continues to grow and change into a little girl. She is starting to pull temper tantrums (joy), is beginning to put 2 words together (bye mama, oh yeah, etc) and is speaking in baby talk sentences. Overall, she's a pretty happy go lucky kid, we are just enjoying the ride. This stage in her life is a lot of fun. Tuesday, Jon will be taking her for her 18 month shots...I've managed to get out of this one tee hee. I'm sure that they will both do just fine, thankfully these are the last shots until she is in school. Next weekend is Halloween, I'll be taking Kira out to Grandma Tracy's house so that she can go trick or treating at a couple of family friends houses, she'll be dressed up as a Penguin. Hopefully this years costume will go over better than last years...

Peez

Happy belated Thanksgiving! Hope that everyone had a great long weekend. We were able to host our first Thanksgiving dinner this year since we finally got our first dining set! It still seems odd that after all these years, we never had a proper table and chairs to eat at. Anyhow, we had my Mom, Step-Dad, Step-Brother, Brother, and 2 sisters in law over for dinner, Kira had a blast with all the company, obviously they were all here to see her only! Here's a photo of Uncle Jeffy playing with Kira at her little table...

Way to drink your wine while colouring...

Kira has been doing very well, she is still battling a cough and runny nose, she has been for about a month now. Poor little thing. Doesn't seem to be bothering her though. She will usually fall right back to sleep at night if she wakes up with a coughing fit.

She has started to mimic our every move now too, and while she can't always say what she wants, she has gotten very good at telling us what she wants. While I was away last week, Jon was trying to get Kira off the bottle, so he was giving her milk in a sippy cup - she did not like that one bit. She kept pushing the sippy cup away with an aggressive head shake, then she'd get up and march to the sink (where the bottles were drying) and point to the bottles! This continued all week, she actually didn't have any milk at home all week because Jon refused to give her a bottle and she refused to take anything but a bottle. Of course, I gave her the bottle when I got home on Saturday. I'm so weak. She's added a couple more words now too, including meow, hello ("o"), and good bye.

Here are a couple more pictures of Kira. Jon found my camera, so I'll start taking some videos of Kira again and get them up so you can see her saying please (peez).

Some pictures from the new place

Kira loves to help clean, here she is with the swifer dusting the floor.

...and helping to turn on the washing machine

Looking so angelic here...

...and like a little devil here.
She loves to flash her belly, I don't know why, but it's pretty darn funny.

This week Kira has been fighting a pretty nasty cold. She's been coughing a lot and is struggling to sleep properly. She seems to be beating it now, we kept her out of gymnastics and swimming this week to help her recover quicker.

She is starting to get much better with her abc's. Sure, it's still not really easy to understand what she's saying, but she can pronounce a few more letters now - like A, D, E, O etc. She also has started to say "Elaine", which is the name of the lady at daycare.

This week I will be heading to California without Jon and Kira. I am excited to be going away, but am sad that I'll be going without them. That said, I know that they are going to have so much fun. Kira gets so excited when Jon gets home from work and always has so much fun with him. This week he taught her how to flop onto her pillow, so the two of them will sit on the bed, then Jon will count to three, and they both dive face first onto the pillows. It's hilarious.

The past couple of weeks have been quite eventful. Kira returned to her gymnastics, got sick, started saying "please", and started her swim lessons.

She still loves going to her gymnastics every Saturday morning with Daddy. She gets to sing and run around without fear of hurting herself. She is getting better at walking across the balance beam, and jumping by herself. It's also helping to boost her social interaction with other kids.

Thursday night we drove out to Maple Ridge to go celebrate my Uncle's 70th birthday. I picked up Kira at daycare and we began the long trek out to Maple Ridge. I'm not certain as to what happened exactly, but all of a sudden Kira began to "expel" everything that she had eaten. After a quick clean up, I determined that she was indeed fine and that she had likely just gulped too much water too quickly. We were just crossing the new Golden Ears bridge when the rest of the dinner made its way out. It was horrible, the poor kid just sat there while I struggled to figure out where I was and how the quickly get to my cousin's place. Thankfully my Aunt met us in the driveway and kindly cleaned up the car while I ran Kira up to the bath. Kira was totally fine after that, she ate more dinner and played with her cousins all night, and has been fine since. I hope that she isn't developing car sickness...

Today, Kira had her first swimming lesson. I had been dragging my feet in signing her up because everytime she goes near a pool she screams and cries, but I don't want her to turn out like me (who can't swim much at all and has developed a fear of swimming), so I dragged her out there - kicking and screaming - through her first swim lesson. She calmed down when there was singing and liked moving her free arm around in the water (the other was tightly wrapped around the back of my neck). We are going to keep taking her there, I'm hopeful that in a few weeks she'll be very comfortable there. I'm going to try to take her to drop-in swimming on Friday so that come Sunday she's got that one extra trip under her belt, and hopefully she won't disrupt everyone else.

Finally, Kira has started to say the word that Jon and I have been waiting for - Please. Of course, she says "peez", but whatever, it's close enough. It only took her about a day to realize that saying "peez" would get her most anything (within reason). She uses it a lot now, even with her grandparents. Now we just have to get her saying thank you...

Settling in...

We have unpacked the last of the boxes now and are feeling much more at home now. Today we ordered the last piece of the puzzle, our dinette set. I am so excited to finally be able to have a table with chairs in my house. It's sad that we have never had enough room in our condo's before. The table we ordered seats 6, but has a built-in leaf that will extend the table to 8, so there is enough room for us to host Thanksgiving dinner this year! Hooray! My mom is going to come over and (hopefully) let me help her cook. I think that she is excited to have 2 ovens to use.

Kira is doing very well in the new house, she has found lots of places that she can play in and around. She is growing and adding more words to her vocabulary. New additions include oh dear, no, papa, poo-poo (ha!) and ta-da. This evening she also began to attempt singing her abc's. The only way I knew this was because she was trying to sing along with me and then finished by saying "yay" like I do. It was pretty darn cute. I'll try to grab a video of it one day, but have to do it when I'm not singing, cause no one needs to hear that!

She hasn't gotten any new teeth yet, she still has the 12. I thought that she was getting her canine teeth last week, but it turns out she was only getting a cold. Poor little thing. There were a couple of sleepless nights, but she seems to have kicked the worst of it now.

Kira is back at her gymnastics on Saturday mornings again, she really does love it. This week she figured out how to jump up on her own, she does this a lot during the day - especially when she is walking from one side of the house to the other. And she has discovered her love of dancing, unfortunately, she has inherited her mom's sense of rhythm...none. Hopefully she'll improve on that as she gets older.

Here are some pictures of Kira...

Playing peek-a-boo with Mommy + the camera

Testing out Daddy's computer

Singing at the gate...

Dragging Daddy's PS3 box around the house. She pretends that it's her bag, she takes it to the front door, and then back to the TV room. I wonder where she gets her ideas...

Nap time with Daddy. She is sleeping next to her bed, on the floor. She was playing with the books, then just fell asleep. So cute.

Moved out!

We have officially moved out of our old condo, and into the basement suite. The move went very well, I think...Kira and I were over on the Island visiting family while Jon stayed home and took care of the move. On the Island, we visited with a bunch of family members. Kira had a blast visiting with her cousin Nicholas, playing on the beach at Grandpa's, and running around her Grantie Ann's place in Naniamo. Many thanks to everyone for putting us up during the weekend, and an extra special thanks to Auntie Erin for taking care of Kira pretty much the entire weekend. 

We came home and Kira made herself at home here pretty darn quickly. She has a lot more space to run around in here, and she covers every inch of it daily. She has also started sleeping in her "big girl" bed. So far she has only fallen out of it once, and she slept right through it.

We have registered Kira for gymnastics and swimming lessons for the fall. I'm sure that she will enjoy both. Kira has added a couple more words to her vocabulary, including no and diaper. Tooth #12 has almost cut through.

Pictures will be posted as soon as we can.

Fun Kira pictures

Kira has started to play hide and seek in our house. Some of her favorite places to hide include the kitchen, shower, and closet. Here are a couple of pictures...

Now you see me...

...now you don't!

Ha! I'm so funny!

Hiding in the shower

Blowing kisses on the door

Hiding in the pots + pans cupboard

Hiding in Daddy's scotch + cigar cupboard, recently cleaned out in preparation for the move next weekend.

She's starting to learn what pointing means too...

This week Kira has added uh-huh, and oh-no to her vocabulary. She is trying to say puppy and diaper as well. She has also cut 2 more teeth, bringing her total count to 12. She finally got more bottom teeth!! She's now even at the top + bottom for the first time ever.

This past week Kira was kept very busy with our trip to Harrison, then visits from her cousins Marcus and Isabelle, and wrapping with her gymnastics and a birthday party for her friend Balin.

Kissing her new cousin, Isabelle

This week it's just Kira and I as Daddy has to go back to work. We will be visiting our friends Wendy and Eliana, then Grandma Tracy, my work, Grandma Rose + Grandpa Eric, and then off to the Island for the weekend to visit Grandpa Randy, Grandma Pam, Grauntie Ann and Uncle Les, and hopefully Auntie Christina, Uncle Clinton, and cousin Nicholas. Phew. She will likely be exhausted, but it will be another fun week!

Also, we have successfully gotten her off the soother! Hooray!

Peek a Boo Kira

This is a funny video Jon took of Kira. Notice how she plays peek a boo with herself...

Warning - this is loud!!

Road Trip

We have just returned back from our first family road trip. We were supposed to go camping this week, but, the weather finally decided to change, and the rain forced us indoors. We headed up to Harrison with some friends and their 2 children. 

On the way there, we decided to stop off at the Vancouver Aquarium. Kira had never been there before, so it was fun to see her reactions to some of the exhibits. She was a little bit young for many of the items, but she really enjoyed the jellyfish. She kept saying "oh wow!", too cute. It was incredibly busy at the aquarium, so we didn't stick around too long. We headed out and went up to Harrison. Kira borrowed a pair of rubber boots from her new friend, Paulina, and discovered a new love - jumping in puddles. She was SOAKED! And she loved every minute of it. 

On the way home we stopped off at the Vancouver Zoo, it was our first time there (all 3 of us). We enjoyed it for sure, it was a good day weather-wise, not too hot, not too cold. Kira kept saying hi to everyone and calling all the animals baby. I think that we will take her back there again when she is a little bit older.

All and all, it was an incredible couple of days. Kira is exhausted and will hopefully sleep well. Now, it's back to reality and time to begin packing for the move next weekend. 

I have added a new feature to the blog, I copied it from Maya's blog. It allows you to leave thoughts, without making a comment. And like she said, I do like comments and I do read them! Feel free to leave thoughts and comments, it's always nice to know that I'm not just writing this for myself.

Packing up + moving out!

We managed to find a great rental place in East Vancouver, much further West than we currently are. It's in the Kensington Park area, very close to a huge park and community centre, plus the house is right on a bike road, so it's quiet and easy for us to take Kira out on bike rides. We'll be moving in August 22, I'm very much looking forward to it. We decided to rent for at least the next 12 - 15 months, in that time we'll keep saving our pennies and hope that the market comes back down again, and with any luck, we'll be able to get our dream house.

Today is the first day of our mini-vacation. Daycare is closed for 2 weeks, so we are looking forward to spending the next two weeks with Kira, it will be a lot of fun. We will be heading up to Harrison Hot Springs on Monday for an overnight trip with some friends and their two children; we were originally going to go camping, but mother nature had other plans for us. No worries, the mini-getaway will be nice.

Yesterday, we decided to stop giving Kira her soother. We had previously taken it away from her during the day with great success, so we thought now would be a good time to take it away at night too --- especially since she still has a short-term memory. Last night had 2 very tough moments of her screaming and grabbing for it, but she fell back asleep after about 10 minutes and slept through to 6:15. She actually woke up and started chatting with her stuffies in the crib, she hasn't done that in a while. She's down for her first nap without it now, she went down without any troubles. Hopefully the transition is quick and easy!

Kira is almost done with her gymnastics for the summer, she has been enjoying it a lot, so we decided to sign her up again for the fall. She started jumping this week and is still attempting to figure out how to push her body forward to somersault. It's pretty cute. She's added a few more words to her vocabulary - uh-oh, hello, bye-bye, and baby. She can say these words very clearly now. Yesterday, we were walkign to the park and we passed a mom with a stroller, Kira pointed and said "baaay-bee" and then "hi!", when they walked past she said "bye!". Too cute. I was very proud as she said these things without any encouragement from me.

Flower Girl

Here are a couple of photos of Kira when she was the flower girl at Jeff + Erin's wedding last month. She clapped and giggled her way up the aisle. Seems she isn't as shy as we first thought...

Oh yeah!

Kira has started gymnastics on Saturday mornings. It's pretty much a free-for-all, the kids (1 - 2 years old) run around on the gymnastics equipment. They learn how to jump, balance (ha!), climb, and somersaults. Kira LOVES somersaults! They also sing songs and dance. She has a blast and is good and tired when we are done. It's hard to get her to stay still to take a photo, but we'll try. She always has a huge smile when she's there. It's nice to have an outlet for all of her energy!

We also discovered today that Kira is cutting more teeth (hooray!) This time she is getting 2 on the bottom, but not the two that I thought would come next. These are the two teeth next to the eye teeth, towards the molars. They are also pretty close to cutting on the top as well. I hope that her two bottom teeth, the ones that should have come by now, do indeed come in. Hopefully she didn't inherit my missing teeth gene...I can feel a large orthodontic bill coming on already.

Here are a couple of pictures I took today of Kira's first Nutella sandwich...