Fifteen Months

Dear Zachary,

Once you turned a year old, updating monthly seemed 1) unnecessary, and 2) impossible. Now that you are a full-fledged toddler, there's no leaving you alone! It continually amazes me how much you can get into in the fifteen seconds that my back is turned. You can always move a little faster, reach a little farther, and eat a little more than I expect or prepare for.

As I mentioned before, when you were first born we called you Baby Guy, but that shortly turned into Bebbers Guy, then Bebbers, and now just Bebs. Your nickname has also been adjectivized by us: bebberous is how we describe your personality. When you are especially extroverted (grin and wave at ALL the people!), when you insist on a certain order of food (carbs first, then fruit, then meat and veg), when you get crumple-faced over not doing Barnyard Dance fifty times more, when you gleefully pull all books off your bookshelf, you are being bebberous. Most of the time bebberousness is just funny, but sometimes it gets to be a bit much (like when you would rather run around your room naked instead of putting a diaper on post-bath). I guess there comes a point in every parent's journey where one must start thinking about discipline philosophies.

Crumple-faced over not wanting to put on your seatbelt.

Sometimes when you are being extra bebberous (or when I'm at school working with teenagers), I think about you becoming a Terrible Two or a Threenager, and one day a sulky adolescent, and I get scared. You're pretty dang fun now, but already showing your stubborn personality. Does it only go downhill from here? But then I think back to pre-parenthood, when I was afraid it was going to be all dreary responsibility and grim-faced sleep deprivation, and how pleasantly surprised I was by how fun a baby could be. I'm going to assume that the same principle holds true (and other parents further along the journey assure me it does) regarding your continued maturation, and that while I may look ahead and be afraid of what is to come (ridiculous reasons why my child is crying! tween sass! learning cuss words! rebellion!), there will be joy and delight to match and exceed my expectations.

love,
Mommy

Maturation = developing your brain (hat).

New this quarter:

• Walking, and almost running, has been the default for about two months now. Well-meaning people told us before that once you started walking, you would sleep better because you would tire yourself out. This has not proven true. Maybe I need to enroll you in baby marathon training? 
• You used to hate wearing shoes, immediately collapsing into a puddle every time I tried to put them on you. Thankfully, that changed once you realized that shoes = going out = so excite, much fun, very people to see (because, you know, extrovert). Now, when you've been home too long and are getting bored, you go grab your shoes and hold them out to me, like hello, we should go somewhere now. 

You also try to put on everyone else's shoes. 

• You understand directions now! Whether you choose to follow them, though, is another story. You like going out well enough that you obey when I ask you to fetch your shoes, and 80% of the time you lift your arms up when I say "over your head" so that you can undress at bath time. But if I'm asking you to stay still so I can change your diaper, forget it. 
• Decided book preferences: we are reaching the dreaded stage where you only want the same five books over and over again. Thankfully, none of them are too annoying: Barnyard Dance, Perfect Piggies, Polar Bear Polar Bear What Do You Hear, How Do Dinosaurs Love Their Cats, and Kittens. Two of them are by Sandra Boynton, whom I love, and two are about cats, and one is from our dear friend Shayna, so all in all I'm pretty okay with these choices. 
• Two way communication! You learned to sign "milk" at about ten months, but ironically you don't sign that anymore. You have, however, learned "please" and "more," plus pointing, which you use with great vehemence anytime you want something. You can also sign "all done" and "where," and actually say 貓貓, 包 , 奶 奶, "nana" for banana, and ball, but somehow have still not managed Mama. 

You were in heaven at IKEA when you discovered the huge bin of stuffed basketballs. 

• Sometimes I worry that I'm not teaching you enough normal vocabulary. Because of the toys you have available to play with, you recognize the words lobster, Mr. Frodo, Frankie the Hankie Whale, yardstick, and Android Babo. None of which are really useful, per se. 
• You have a well-developed "What is the most dangerous thing that I can touch right now?" radar. Given an entire dishwasher full of plastic Tupperware and rounded spoons, you will inevitably reach for the one knife. Standing on your tippytoes looking at the things on my sewing table, you will bypass the sleeve roll, the lint tray, the fabric, and the pattern paper, and make a swipe for the pin holder or the seam ripper. When you are extra clingy and insist on following me to the bathroom, you ignore the table of books (which normally you would be super into) go straight for the toilet plunger. Confronted with an entire living room floor covered with toys and books, you will find the one teeny tiny clump of cat hair and try to eat that. I think that falls under the category of Worst Superpower Ever.
• Evidence of the development of a schema (albeit imperfect) for the concept of cat. You know Walnut, of course, and (most endearingly) start every morning with running through the house looking for your adored older brother, yelling  "貓貓貓貓貓貓貓貓!" while holding up your hands in a "where" motion. When you find him, you get really excited and point at him (while yelling some more). It took a little longer for you to generalize that Walnut is not the only 貓 in the world; other cats are also 貓貓. Then you went overboard and started assuming that all fuzzy things were 貓貓, so dogs and faux fur pillows also got labeled as 貓貓. It took a little longer, but just recently you've learned how to recognize illustrated cats as 1) also 貓貓, and 2) different from other illustrated animals, which I think is pretty incredible. Crowning moment: I put on a sweatshirt with a stylized cat face on it and you pointed at it and yelled "貓貓!" I had never shown you that shirt before, so the fact that you recognized it as a cat was pretty awesome. 

You very much enjoyed Gemma Corell's cat doodling book.

• You are a big fan of garbage trucks, birds, being held upside down, balls of all kinds, looking at artwork up on walls, the fake elephant trumpeting noise that I make, watching live basketball, belly blasting Daddy, and being at school. You are deathly afraid of horseflies, mildly afraid of the giant bears at Costco, and hate getting out of the bath, wearing socks while eating,wearing hats, teeth brushing, and washing your face after meals. 

Trying to get a normal, non-blurry picture of you wearing a fedora is nigh impossible. 

• Favorite foods: cheese, Cuties, noodles of all ethnicities (Italian pasta, ramen, udon, jap chae, chow mein), cheese, berries of all kinds, cheese, jellyfish (!) and豆苗 (we discovered this at a Chinese wedding banquet), pinto beans, cheese, and oh, did I mention cheese? 

You are not a fan of meat in general. One time you discovered that Walnut likes turkey, so you fed him and laughed like crazy when he ate out of your hand. 

Bebberous idiosyncracies:

• Ever since you learned how to safely get down off of the couch by scooting on your tummy to land feet first on the floor, you've sporadically employed this method of getting "off" of texture changes, e.g. scooting off the edge of the rug onto the laminate flooring, scooting off of a piece of fabric onto the carpet, etc. It's ridiculously cute. 
• You like being carried up and down stairs. Maybe it's the novelty of stairs, because we don't have any at home, but once you discover that a place has stairs, you will, despite many attempts at distraction, keep returning to them and insisting on going up and down ad nauseum. This has happened at friends' houses, at school, at the industrial park where Daddy plays basketball, and at church. 
• You like comparing the cereal that you're eating to the picture on the box. It's for people like you that cereal companies need to add the disclaimer "enlarged to show texture."

• When you get ahold of something you really like (e.g. a phone, the remote control, Walnut's feather-on-a-stick toy, etc.), you like to bring it over to my side of the bed, climb up, and lie on your back while holding your prize in the air, admiring it and savoring your possession of it.
• Not an idiosyncrasy, but still worth noting: people always say you look just like your daddy. Strangers have come up to say this to us. We have memorialized this with side by side pictures:

Goodbye, 嫲嫲

Dear Zachary,

One of the major reasons why we moved back to the Bay Area from SoCal was so that you could spend more time with your grandparents. Because our grandparents were in Hong Kong, we didn't get to enjoy a close relationship with them, so we had hopes that your childhood would be different. Alas, you will probably not remember the time you spent with your 嫲嫲. Tragically, she passed away unexpectedly when you were not yet fifteen months old. However, we are so incredibly grateful for the time you did have with her.

Your 嫲嫲 loved you so much; even though she spent a lot of the year in Philly, the times she did spend with you were special. When you were first born, she spent hours holding you while you napped, a happy baby burrito in her arms. When you were awake, you loved lying in her lap, kicking her tummy. When she came back for a long visit when you were half a year old, she spent so much time trying to cook and feed you nutritious first foods. You loved the pork and Chinese veggies that she made. When you got a little older, you refused to eat the specially set aside curried pumpkin sans curry; you demanded the full experience of her flavorful cooking. I'm so glad you got to taste all of her nuanced sauces, nutritionally recommended sodium levels be hanged.

In between visits, you Facetimed regularly with her and she delighted in each new skill -- rolling over, sitting up, banging on the piano, crawling, and pulling up to stand -- even if the development meant that most of the call was spent trying to keep you from grabbing the iPad. As you got older, you definitely recognized her voice and when she finally came back to see you in person, you greeted her with a big toothy grin.

During her last visit, besides savoring her cooking, you also got to spend lots of quality time reading with her. While you are usually an incredibly active baby, always on the go and never content to sit still, it was different with her. Because of her bad knee, she couldn't run around with you, but it was as if you understood. She was the only one you were happy to snuggle with. She patiently sat with you and made noises for all the animals in your picture books. TBPH, even though I'm your mother, I didn't have as much patience as she did for humoring your desire to hear continuous mooing for thirty minutes.

Grandmothers are stereotypically portrayed as loving women who knit blankets and sweaters for their grandchildren and cook delicious, comforting meals. The secret to their handiwork, of course, is the love in every stitch of the blanket, the love stirred for hours into the simmering pots. Nobody ever talks, though, about the love vocalized in every moo, baa, and oink.

I know you won't remember these times with her, but I hope one day you can read this and know without a doubt that she loved you so very much. I wish you could have had the experience of growing up with her presence in your life, as she was a generous, compassionate, feisty woman who loved God and people. Her legacy lives on in your father, and hopefully will continue in you one day.

See that yellow blanket? She knit that for you!