Today we had a playdate with Yosei’s NICU girlfriend Yui.  They live in the same town as us and Yui and Yosei were hospitalized together in the same NICU, which is two hours away from our town.  What a coincidence huh?   We’ve been trying to set up time for them to play together, but I always forget to bring a camera.  But today I remembered ^^

The Pirate in Training puts on his best pirate face - aaaarrrrrrgggghhhh!

sharing snacks in the park

playing with tickle me cookie monster ^^

Also a bit of a blow to my ego I’m afraid.  Last night Yosei gave us a sign that he may just be taking this talking thing at his own pace and we don’t need to worry too much as he started calling our cat, Riri ( or Lili depending on how you prefer to romanize Japanese), by name. Most of the time it was more like ‘e e’ but a few times he also got the actualy name out.  He would walk up to her pet her and say ‘ e e’.   As anyone who has read my blog before might recall he also says ‘awweee’ his pronunciation of WALL-E. 

So now he can call our cat and WALL-E each by name,  but still in his eyes neither me or his papa have names quite yet.  I’ve been outranked by a robot and a cat o_O 

Soo happy, I worked extra hard this week. ^^

-26 lbs

Last week Yosei had his 1 year 6 month check up.  Gave me alot of things to think about, which is why this post is so much later than the checkup itself.  Mostly everything was pretty good, motor skills, teeth, height and weight.  Unofrtunately one thing that didn’t go well for him was the language part.  They asked him to point to the picture of a puppy and he wasnt able to do it.  However being a preemie he’s got a 3 and a half month handicap (minimum) on the other kids and he’s being raised bilingual; hence we don’t use the Japanese word for puppy (wan wan) we call it a puppy.  So I’m sure that also confused him.  But they made a big deal about it and made me go talk to a speech therapist who told me I should stop using English with him and speak only Japanese because ’some kids just arent able to handle two languages and Yosei is probably one of those.’  Yeah right fat chance of that happening.  If anything it would make more sense to drop Japanese and let him pick that language up when he gets to preschool.  But I don’t plan to do that either.

In any case after I thouht about it I realized the therapist is like 60+ years old and seems to have a very old way of thinking.  There was another couple we were waiting with to see the therapist, the mom sounded to be Korean but spoke only Japanese to her son (and this wasnt their first visit to this therapist). So this leads me to believe she tells every bilingual child thats a little behind to stop and use only Japanese. 

Fortunately,  I’ve gotten some advice from other preemie moms, and also speech pathologists in the US too.  So for now I’m going to do what I can to help him and if by 2 years old he’s not any better  I’ll be seeking out a therapist that specializes in bilingual kids

So if you find I’m making myself scarce in game and on the blog  its because I’m doing my best to help my little guy

This weeks update - nearly lost all the baby weight from 1 1/2 years ago - now time to start on a the pre-baby weight too

-23.1 lbs

This last weekend we took our first family trip to DisneySea, it was so much fun.  Right now they’re doing their Halloween Celebration so I made Yosei a costume just for the occasion.  They don’t do trick or treating or Halloween parties here in Japan  so really this was my only chance for some Halloween fun. 

The costume I made was kind of a punk rock demon sort of thing.  I made some wings, punk rock pants with a fuzzy tail on the back, and got him a cute hat.  Unfortunately the wings didnt last a very long time (maybe an hour or so), and oddly enough it wasnt Yosei that broke them but my husband.  He says it was an accident and he didnt even realize he broke them, but I’m pretty sure he thought they were in the way and kinda tried to ‘accidentally’ break them >< Oh well.  So without the wings his costume became more of a punk rock puppy  but it was still pretty cute.

We were only able to go on a few of the rides since Yosei is still so small (no roller coasters this time around ><)  And with the exception of Sindbads’ Storybook Theatre, and the steamboat tour of the park he was afraid of all of them, even the carousel :\   Though I think his favorite thing was probably the playground inside Mermaid Lagoon,  they had a water play area for kids where water would squrit up fro the floor  and from various charcter statues too.  He was soaked by the time we had to make him stop running through the water ^^;

water play at Mermaid Lagoon

 

end of the day family photo