Day care diary

(Lara likes to sit on her soft ball)

28/May
Lara was sick during the weekend but is feeling better today except having a running nose. I arrived at day care late (after 8:35) and the older kids were elsewhere (probably outside). The room felt so much quieter. Lucy was looking after the kidlings. Most of them have running noses or are sneezing. Lara looked the least sick there.... sign... no wonder she gets sick all the time. Is it the day care I wonder?

10/July
Yesterday was Lara's first day at day care after 2 weeks of absence. She was a little clingy at first, but happily ran over to the drawing table when the teacher called her. She didn't even notice when I left. We got to day care before toasts were serverd today (8am), the teachers were just putting the chairs down. Lara ran to the first available chair, sat down before anyone else and waited for her toast. She didn't care if I was there or not. Hayley told me Lara is very food-oriented. She whinges when she doesn't get her lunch first, afraid she will miss out!

23/July
I was told Lara hasn't been sleeping long at nap time. (She only has one sleep at home now, sometimes less than one hour). I glanced at the whiteboard when I picked her up toady, and it said Lara went to sleep just before 2 pm. When I enquired, Hayley told me all the babies (under 2s) had a "sleep party" today. They talked and played in their individual cots for ages. Lara apparently "started" the party and she was the last one to fall asleep. Hayley also said the kiddies started to talk a lot in bed. They talked to one another (it can be heard through the baby monitor) and all laughed at the same time as if they knew what others were saying. When Hayley knocked on the door or went inside, they all lain down quickly pretending they were sleeping! That's funny! I guess not so funny when you want them to go to sleep!

Four

Number of times I woke up by Lara's cry and got up on Monday morning
to check on her, comfort her or to give her milk, water and Panadol: Four
At 1am, 3am, 5am and 6am.

Number of appointments we had that day (Monday): Four
At 11am, 2.30pm, 3.30pm and 4.45pm.

It was a tiring day!

[1year 6 months] Mine

(Lara picking "apple" )

One of Lara's new words this month is "mine". She certainly seemed to understand what it meant, because she hugged the object that is "hers" and refused to give it up. She also says "mine" when she tries to have something you are holding. She understands many words and talks all the time! A work colleague reminded me to speak more Chinese to her, now is the perfect time!

Lara also starts to say "eyes", "hair" and "up". "baa-dgy" is bath. It also means swimming pool and beach. Bib is "bi bi", Orange is either "apple" or "ball". "a-ba a-ba" is frog. She also practice saying "umbrella", "shoes", "socks", "black sheep" (from ba ba black sheep). If you say "makka pakka" or "iggle piggle" (characters from "In the Night Garden"), Lara would point to the TV and want you to turn it on. Guiltily, I introduced "YouTube" to her the other day to cheer her up (I played the dance in "In the Night Garden"). Now when she passes my laptop, she wants to sit in front of it, whether it is turned on or not.

Other notable moments :

* During one of our supermarket visits, Lara said "haro" (hello) to everyone in the shop. She stalked one guy with hellos in front of us in the queue until he eventually turned around and said hello back.

* Lara loves to roll around in bed. When she hears the word "funny", she does a fake laugh.


(Happiest in the garden)

*Lara constantly challenges my authority. For example, she knows she's not allowed to open the second drawer in the kitchen (where all the sharp objects are). She will sometimes open the drawer slower and looks at me to see if I will stop her. Lara does not come into the kitchen at all when Hubbie is around (because she knows she gets 'removed sharply' the instance she comes in). She roams around the kitchen however when I am around.

*Lara came back from day care one day last week and started to hit her head on the floor when we stopped her from doing certain things!! She must have seen some other kids doing it and wanted to try that one on us!! I always walked away quickly and pretended I didn't see what happened. Hopefully these kind of behaviours won't continue!

* Height: 83cm Weight:12.9kg on the 23rd of June 2008.

* We had our first dental visit just recently. Early childhood centre nurse referred us to a dentist because we noticed and tried in vain to remove stain on two of Lara's bottom teeth. We try our best to brush her teeth every day. It's no easy task while we fight to open her mouth and push the tongue away. Luckily dentist didn't seem to worry about it.

* Had another hair cut. (thanks Grandma!)


(Lara pushing lawn mower)

His and Her dinners

This was my dinner a few nights ago.


And husband's dinner, on the same night.


We don't usually have different meals. I was going to do beef fillet steak with potato and veges that night. However, after I baked the pecan & oat bread (see below), I thought it would be nice to have freshly made bread while it was warm. I decided to turn the steak into beef salad instead. Hubbie objected - "That's rabbit food" he said. So he ended up having steak as is with left-over potato gratin and a small amount of salad while I had beef salad with bread.

I also experimented some new recipes recently:

Pecan & oat bread (yeast-free)

A caked bread. No yeast and no kneading and made with flour, oats, butter milk, honey and pecan. I probably baked it for too long as it was a little hard. It required a little "chewing" but I like the taste of it. Not sure if I will make this again because Hubbie didn't like it.

Sauerkraut

Apparently introduced to the English-speaking world by Captain Cook and saved many sailors from dying of scurvy, it has to be good for you! I had been looking for ways to use up the huge cabbage that came with my vegetable box and didn't want to have coleslaw any more! This was made with the frying method (not the salt in a jar method). As you can see, I made a huge amount of it. We just finished it. Not something to server when having guests around because of the undesirable side-effect (gas).

Lagoon Restaurant

We spent a nice and relaxing afternoon at Lagoon Seafood Restaurant in North Wollongong with Parents-in-law on the weekend. The restaurant is located at the grounds of Stuart Park with access to beach and water/lagoon view. Our plan was to entertain Lara on the beach between courses, but the day, though sunny, was too windy to be outdoors. Lara wasn't too bad and managed to sit until the end of main meals. We were all too full to have desserts so we took turns taking Lara for a walk around the restaurant lounge while drinking our coffee.


(I love this photo of Grandma and Lara sharing a drink of water - we were waiting for our entrees and garlic bread to arrive)

My entree of crab and ricotta ravioli was delicious! Husband decides he will have this dish as a main next time we come. Lara loved it too. The other entrees of ginger and shallot scallops and smoked salmon terrine were nice too I was told. All seafood was fresh and nice-tasting.

Here are photos of the mains we had (mainly for me to drool over when I'm hungry later:)

MIL's king island chicken.


FIL's lemon sole.


My John Dory and Scampi.


Si's tempura seafood

In the garden

Lara and I spent lots of fine afternoons in the garden during the two weeks she was sick.


We watched the birds chirping away in and out of the tree branches and followed Zebadee around the garden while soaking in the warmth of the winter sun. Lara even invented a couple of games to amuse herself - scattering cloth pegs all over the grass or sitting in the garden bed and rearranging the newly-laid mulch. Zeb was happy to have some company for a change.



On a different note about a garden, Lara loved to watch "In the night garden" after breakfast every morning (while she was at home). In fact, the only time during the day that I could have 30 minutes free time (besides nap time) was when "In the night garden" was on between 9-9:25am.

Something about this program just made her glued to the TV!

Birthday meals

Si celebrated a significant birhday this week.

(wagu beef was tender and nice just not enough)


We had dinner at Yoshii Japanese restaurant in The Rocks on Friday. It wasn't a meal worth $250. Besides food, mood, service, and surroundings also each play an important part in how good an eating experience is. We should probably cancel the dinner reservation as we both still had the cold then. The first impression wasn't great either when we asked to have the sushi omasake menu but was told we had to sit at the sushi bar for that. The setting was ordinary, plus it was the wrong style of restaurant to dine on a hungry Friday night. Food came out very slowly and the portion very small. Degustation didn't really suit us that night. Over half way through the meal, we were still very hungry. Hubbie saw that his next course had soba noodles. He was pleased that he would at last have some real food. We were looking for the soba noodles when the dish came out. Ha ha it was a couple of noodles chopped up and hidden inside 2 small scallops. It was the funniest part of the night. We wanted simple, tasty food on the night but we both found the food, though nice-tasting, to be too pretentious. I would prefer a smaller crab claw as a course than a spoonful of liquidised crab soup. It was decidedly very disappointing and we couldn't work out why it was a two-hatted restaurant. Sushi-e (a one-hatted restaurant) in our opinion is way superior. It might be different if we had the sushi menu, but unfortunately we won't be coming back to try that. We had nicer degustation meals and Japanese elsewhere.

(Sushi at the end (almost 3 hours into the meal) was nice and satisfied our hunger a little)


On the actual birthday night, Mother-in-law cooked a rolled pork fillet roast. It was delicious!! A nice satisfying winter meal. Thanks to them too for looking after Lara so we could go out.