i was planning to try out for american idol, but i found out that the minimum age requirement is 15. i’m only 2. lucky for me, x-factor came along! that show has a category for boys under 30, right? i’m a boy. i’m under 30. hollywood, here i come!
check out my audition video. baby sister said that she’ll vote for me. will you?
since mommy and dada took vacation from work last week, we have spent the past 10 days together doing fun stuff. today was our last day of vacation, so we made the most of it by going to pump it up jr. with matthew and his family. matthew had a groupon for that place. how cool! i wish i had one, too.
| it was matthew’s first time there. and like my first time, he wasn’t so sure about the jumpy houses. but he eventually warmed up and we had a blast chasing each other through the maze and going down the slide. i was having so much fun that i didn’t bother waiting for mommy or dada — i went on the slides by myself — even the really big super slide! they couldn’t believe that i could climb up there by myself. it’s really steep, and you slide down really fast. each time i climbed up, i wouldn’t slide down until both mommy and dada were watching. mommy said that i didn’t meet the minimum height requirement posted on the slide, but how was i supposed to know? i can’t read yet. thanks for the day out at pump it up junior, matthew. it was so much fun! tomorrow, back to the grind… |
i am 2 1/4 years old. here what i’ve been up to these days.
daily schedule:
things i’m good at:
things i’m working on:
things that make me laugh:
things i do that do NOT make mommy and dada laugh:
favorite indoor activities:
favorite outdoor activities:
favorite book: “brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?” did you know that you can make the story into a song?
favorite song: “the wheels on the bus”. in mommy’s car, i make her play the song (on CD) on repeat. in dada’s car, mama and dada sing it. and i make everyone in the car do all the hand motions with me.
favorite iphone app: youtube (to watch videos of myself or trains), hanging with friends (more on this in a future post)
favorite sayings: “uh-oh”, “no no no”
favorite foods that i’m only allowed one bite of: brownies, meringues
favorite characters: thomas the train, elmo
2011 was a good year for us. i continued my summertime swim lessons. i continued my weekly gym classes. we spent a lot of time (and i mean a lot) at CDM and gilroy gardens. we saw elmo and his friends live on stage. we took a family trip to san diego (including a visit to sea world). i got a baby sister! i had an awesome train party for my 2nd birthday. we celebrated baby sister’s 100th day. i dressed up like superman and went trick-or-treating around our neighborhood. we fostered a puppy — just for a day, but it was fun! we went to see thomas the tank engine and rode on a passenger car that he pulled through santa cruz.
we didn’t really do anything special to bring in 2012. in fact, baby and i were fast asleep by midnight. mommy and dada stayed up and toasted with sparkling cider. they are party animals.
but in keeping with japanese tradition, grandma cooked up a mountain of food because cooking is not allowed during the first three days of the new year. she packed a special plate of food just for me — and i really mean just for me. none for baby sister. none for mommy. none for dada. grandma loves me 
can’t want to see what 2012 has in store for us. HAPPY NEW YEAR!
everyone said that christmas had passed, but we found it again in the park. we went to christmas in the park after christmas this year because we wanted to wait for auntie mimi to get back from vacation so she could go with us.
just like last year, i had a blast looking at all of the colorful lights and decorations. even baby sister was wide-eyed with excitement, trying to take it all in. it was so cool to see people skating in the ice rink. we stopped to watch them for a little while. i have skates, but theirs looked different than mine. mommy said that i could go skating when i am big enough to fit into the rental ice skates. i wonder when that will be.
the best part of christmas in the park was the train. at first, i just watched it pass by. so cool! but then i realized that it wasn’t a real passenger train — it was just for decoration — so if i ran really fast, i could get in front of it and watch it go by again. so i ran. really fast. i ran after the train, and mommy and dada ran after me. it was like a scene out of the movies when a little kid runs into a crowd of people and disappears in and out of view because he’s so little and the crowd is so big.
i can’t wait to go again! last year, auntie barbara went with us. this year, auntie mimi. i think we should make it a tradition to bring my favorite aunties with us to christmas in the park every year. who wants to join us next year?
since baby sister was already in palo alto for her ultrasound, we decided to check out the palo alto junior museum and zoo. a museum and a zoo all in one? cool! and no admission fee? super cool! we’d been wanting to check out that place for awhile, so we were happy to finally have a chance to go there.
when we arrived, we were pretty disappointed. the place is SMALL. we were expecting something like the children’s discovery museum in san jose, but the entire place is about the size of the wonder cabinet (the small section of CDM dedicated to toddlers). mommy figured that we would be in and out of there in half an hour.
inside the junior museum, there were a series of clean green energy machines. they are supposed to help visitors investigate wind, solar, water, and kid-power — creating connections between the choices we make and our environment. whatever. i didn’t really understand it. all i knew was that i got to press buttons, flip switches, turn wheels, and stuff happened. it was really cool. mommy and dada were really surprised at how much fun i was having with all those machines.
my favorite exhibit in the museum was the bugs. there were a bunch of different insects in clear blocks. i put the blocks on the glass shelf and used a magnifying glass to make them really big. big bugs are awesome. i kept going back to that exhibit over and over again. mommy told me not to get any ideas about using magnifying glasses and bugs and sunlight for entertainment. she says it’s a boy thing, but i have no idea what she’s talking about… yet.
there was also a small area just for babies. baby sister went inside there for a little while, but got bored quickly. it was about the size of the closet in mommy and dada’s room, and aside from one fake butterfly, there wasn’t a whole lot for her to do in there.
just outside of the museum is a small zoo. i saw bunny rabbits, a giant goose, a snake, bobcats, rats, and a few other animals. the bunny rabbits were hilarious. they were making me laugh because they clean themselves like koda does. so silly — they aren’t dogs! i don’t know why there was a fence around them, but i just climbed over it. i wanted to pet them like i did with the goats and sheep at other zoos. mommy wouldn’t let me. my favorite animals were the rats. i liked watching them run and run and run in the wheel. i wanted to stay and watch them and give them high fives. i kept calling them “baby”. mommy thought i was calling them babies because they are small, but actually, there were a bunch of baby rats sleeping in there.
mommy was definitely wrong about being in and out of there in 30 minutes. even though the museum is small, i had so much fun that we stayed for over 3 hours. i could have stayed all day, but we had to get home because auntie mimi was coming over to go to christmas in the park with us (see next entry). and even though the admission was free, i made a donation on our way out.
today, i went with matthew to the bay area discovery museum (BADM) in sausalito. it was matthew’s first time. i had been there before, but today was a whole new experience for me. for one thing, some of the exhibits had been updated since my last visit (last april). and, i didn’t even go into the tot spot at all — that’s for kids who are little (like i was earlier this year). i’m a big kid now.
we started the day in bay hall, i had fun crawling under the pier, climbing up to the wharf, and of course, playing with the ginormous train set. those trains will never get old.
then we walked through the wave workshop. eh. not much for us there. although, we did happen to be there just in time for story time. matthew and i actually sat through an entire story. can you believe it?
then we moved on to the art studio. we made stamp art masterpieces and painted the windows. i still think that’s so cool. where else do you get to paint on windows? mommy thought i would like the sculpting clay since i love playing with play-doh, but i wasn’t all that into it. baby sister got in on some fun, playing with toys in the mirrored crawl area of the art studio.
after lunch we checked out discovery hall, which had a new exhibition: “out on a limb: adventures with nature and art”. there was this awesome treehouse that was fun to climb up. inside it was this talking tube that mommy talked into while she was on the ground, and her voice came out of the tube all the way up in the treehouse! how cool! i also liked banging on the drumheads with big sticks in the forest jam exhibit. they were supposed to make forest sounds, but it all just sounded like banging to me.
we finished off the afternoon in lookout cove. i showed matthew the fishing boat, then i brought him to to the shipwreck to dig for artifacts. we took turns shoveling sand into the sifters, then we tried to “shake shake shake” the sand out to see what cool things we found. turns out that we ended up dumping all the sand out instead of sifting it. oh well. the shoveling with the best part of it, anyway.
by 3pm, matthew was ready for his nap. i wanted to stay longer, but i think mommy and dada wanted to go home and take a nap too. party poopers.
i never understood why everyone says that christmas is the best holiday. sure, i like seeing all my family. sure, i like staying up past my bedtime. sure, i like eating “special occasion” foods (like a bite of pie or a few crumbs of a cookie). but those things happen on lots of holidays, right? well, i finally get it. on christmas, i get presents! opening presents is SO FUN.
last year, i needed a lot of encouragement (and a little help) to open my gifts. this year, i figured out how to do it all by myself. i take off the bow and ribbon, find the seams of the wrapping paper, then rip the paper off. if the paper is taped to the box, i make sure to remove every single scrap of paper before opening the box. i was going to help baby sister with her gifts, but i was taking so long to open my own that mommy had to help her instead. unwrapping presents is so fun — it doesn’t even matter what’s inside. although, i do love (and appreciate) all the gifts that i got. and i got a LOT.
we hosted christmas at our house this year. we had 24 people over for dinner. there would have been 26, but uncle mike and auntie z couldn’t make it. uncle mike was nice enough to send along the tri-tip that he cooked as well as some mystery goodies in a little plastic bag. mommy asked auntie cindy to try the goodies to see what they were. auntie cindy passed them off to auntie barbara, who thought they weren’t half bad… until we realized that they were crickets! crickets!!! *gahhh* auntie barbara gagged. everyone else laughed.
we all had a really fun time. and i totally get christmas now. although, i’m still not sure about the santa guy that i heard my cousins talking about. i think that’s the guy i saw on the train ride last weekend. it seems like everyone knows him except for me. i wonder if i’ll see him next year.
merry christmas everyone!
for the past few years, we’ve been celebrating christmas twice — once with dada’s family, and once with mommy’s family. this year, we decided to invite everyone over to our house for once big giant celebration. i can’t wait!
our house is almost ready. the lights are strung around the outside of the house, the stockings are hung above the fireplace, the tree is up and lit, and our christmas decorations are on display. i trimmed the tree today. what do you think? (baby sister didn’t help out at all.)
i like to count ten ornaments on the tree. that’s right, ten. there are actually more than that, but i only count to ten because that’s my favorite number (and also because i don’t know what number comes after ten). even if there were fewer ornaments, i would count some of them twice so that i could say “TEN!” very enthusiastically.
this is the time of year when mama and dada go to lots of parties, drag me (and baby sister) along, and make me stay up past my bedtime. we went to two holiday parties this weekend, and mama took baby sister to a cookie exchange. the cookie party was for girls only, so mama brought baby sister along while dada and i went christmas shopping. what a busy weekend! luckily, matthew planned a day out just for us kids. matthew, logan, and i went to see thomas the train as he chugged through santa cruz.
if you think that thomas is an imaginary train, you are wrong. he is a real, life-size engine. he pulled a passenger car that we rode through the town. the whole train was decorated with pretty christmas lights and wreaths. however, our train car has one fewer light now — i leaned over the side of the moving train car, unscrewed the bulb, and dropped it to the ground. i could only get to one before dada stopped me.
on the train, there was an old guy with a white beard, red suit, and black boots. everyone called him santa. i gave him a high five, but i didn’t want to take a photo with him. why would i? matthew and logan seemed to recognize him, but it was the first time i ever saw him.
in addition to the train ride, there were lots of other “thomas & friends” activities — train tables, ornament-making, face-painting, and lots more. thomas & friends took over the entire santa cruz boardwalk. matthew, logan, and i ran all around the place wearing our thomas conductors hats. i refused to wear my hat forward, so everyone else switched theirs around too. mama said we looked like thomas-the-train gang members. good thing we didn’t get kicked off the boardwalk — there’s a sign that says no gangs allowed. (really, there is.)
what a fun day. i wonder when thomas is going to chug past our house.
