Maya and her favorite book

DSC_0238
Originally uploaded by MattiasC

Maya has been so much fun the last two days. She is talking non-stop and demanding constant interaction. She loves to stand up "on her own" (meaning you hold her under her armpits but she carries her own weight). She is even sitting up with just a little help to keep her balance. Maya smiles constantly and has figured out that it excites mom/dad a lot when she does it.

Her eye/hand coordination is improving and yesterday she managed to not only hit daddy's glasses but also get a hold of them and rip them off.

Her absolut favorite toy right now is her little book that you can see next to her on the picture. She loves looking at the pictures and having mom/dad describe it to her. The poor girl must be getting confused as the same thing has three different names such as ladybug=nyckelpiga= ? in Chinese. Her favorite page is the ladybug picture and she talks a lot when we show it to her.

She is sleeping a lot less during the day now and stays awake most of the time. The great flip-side of this is that she now sleeps for about 5 hours straight most nights. Just 5 hours of straight sleep is enough to feel like a human being again. :)

Getting dressed for a walk in the park

DSC_0252
Originally uploaded by MattiasC

Mommy was off on Christmas lunch and shopping the other day so daddy was home alone with Maya all day. I decided to venture out for a walk in the park on my own with Maya.

This is what she looked like when I was done. I know...the hat doesn't match the dress but I couldn't find the outfits on my own. The main concern was to keep her warm in the cold California winter.

We took a long walk and Maya behaved like an angel. I had planned to spend some time taking pictures of the autumn leaves etc in the park but the noisy ducks by the pond woke up Maya so I had to move on to get her to stop crying again. Only managed to snap one quick picture.

Christmas Family Picture

Family
Originally uploaded by MattiasC

Thanks to our dear friend Swati we finally got a semi focused picture where all three of us have our eyes open.

We had a great Christmas eve with our friends Swati, Bernice and Yu-Ling. We had a decent Swedish Christmas dinner with Janssons frestelse, three types of herring, gravad lax, meatballs, snaps and julmust. This year I was the only Swede so I didn't manage to do the full Christmas table with all the dishes.

My wonderful wife bought me a new camera for Christmas...a Nikon D90. I'm still debating if we should keep it or get a much cheaper D80 instead. I'm not that good of a photographer that the equipment is any type of limitation to my photos.

Cindy got shoes, two shirts, some face creams from a company I can't spell the name of and beautiful saphire ear rings.

Maya got a new play mat, tons of clothes, really cute shoes from Swati and a really cool Mozart music cube from Yu-Ling and Bernice.

I was completely outnumbered, all girls, even our cat is female. To be honest that's not a bad way to spend Christmas eve :)

Merry Christmas from Kaiser.....

Kaiser (our medical insurance) decided to send us a Merry Christmas letter today as well. Wonderful timing for the Christmas celebrations.....guess what it was??

It was the bill for Cindy and Maya's hospital stay. It came to a grand total of $225,315.00. We already knew Maya was priceless but now we have it in black and white too. Thank god for having medical insurance as we only have to pay a small fraction of the cost.

I'm going to save this bill for when Maya is a teenager and doesn't listen to her parents. At that point I will pull out the bill, recalculate it to current value factoring in inflation and tell her to start paying it off if she doesn't listen to me....Think that will help? Me neither, but I'll keep it anyway just to be able to show her when she is older.

GOD JUL!

Merry Christmas from the Cedergren/Wu family.

We will work on a Christmas family portrait where all three of us are in focus tonight.

This weeks theme: Smiles

smile
Originally uploaded by MattiasC

This last week it's been a lot of smiles. Very hard to catch on pictures since Maya hasn't learned to smile on command yet(not sure we'll ever be succesful with that). Most of our pictures are taken too late or become completely blurry.

This is the best we could do so far.

The real Superhero

Now that last nights heroic effort has faded some in the bright sunlight of this morning, I want to set the record straight and state that the real Superhero is mommy, who feed, sooth, love, hug, kiss and take care of Maya 99% of the time. Mommy also has to regularly calm down paranoid dad in regards to Maya's temperature, poop color, breathing pattern, crying etc etc so she has no easy task. Mommy REALLY is a superhero!

Superhero

speed
Originally uploaded by MattiasC

Sometimes it's all a blur. It seems like no matter what you do it doesn't help. To be honest, most of the time Maya knows exactly what she wants but mommy and daddy just doesn't get it. You would think by now that we had this pretty much figured out.....but when she's been fed three times within a three hour span the first thing that comes to mind isn't more milk.

Tonight though, for the first time, daddy felt like a superhero. Maya was crying inconsolably and mommy's usual tricks did not work at all. Daddy threw down the dish washing brush and rushed to the rescue. Picked Maya up and tried to calm her down. In less than ten steps (on my way out of the bed room to give mommy a rest from all the crying) Maya falls asleep in daddy's arms and was out like a light. Daddy walked around for a few minutes in the living room to make it seem like it took a bit more work than that to calm her down,. then triumphantly returned to the bedroom, put down a sleeping Maya in her crib to mommy's surprise. First time that daddy could do something for Maya that mommy couldn't. I felt like a super hero, albeit more like the daddy in The Incredibles, slightly overweight, too tight spandex outfit type of hero.

Turns out that tonight, what Maya wanted was daddy's arms and chest and not milk. :)

Superhero daddy is off to the kitchen to finish up the dishes, mix formula and prepare milk bottles for the coming nights super hero missions....

Videos captured and mommy is nominated to the Pushcart Prize.

I guess my video-boot-camp yesterday worked. Mommy did a great job today and we have lots of new videos but no time to download, edit and upload it yet. Hopefully daddy will get home early from work tomorrow (dream on dude!) so he can get this done and posted.

Some non-Maya related news:
Mommy got nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Redivider Journal. This is apparently a very prestigious American award for literary works. Daddy and Maya are very proud! Just being nominated is an honor in itself.

Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, a German publisher, bought another of mommy's short stories this week for translation to German and it will be included in their "New Dreams of the Red Chamber" anthology.

Daddy is not nominated for any prizes and his writing is not likely to be sold to anyone anytime soon but he is extremely proud of mommy's accomplishments. You would think mommy would be writing this blog huh? Maybe she will be doing a guest appearance here soon and raise the literary level of the blog?

Talkative

I had a long talk with Maya on the bed today. She is getting very interactive and loves to talk to us. She is especially talkative while on the changing table (just like Heather and Peter's Lucia!). Anyway, I called Cindy over to record this wonderful moment on our video camera which was purchased for just this type of occasion. Maya and I talked back and forth, discussed the weather, diapers, the benefit of milk vs formula etc for probably a good 20 min while mommy "recorded" us. After about 20 min the camera beeps. Cindy says "Why does it say auto powersaving mode?". Turns out, Cindy wasn't actually recording us at all, she had just turned on the camera and then thought it was recording. To but it mildly...I'm having a very thorough video camera class tonight with my dear wife......and it will be punishable by death to miss another camera moment like this in the future!! Sorry, no video post today.

I did manage to buy a Christmas tree all by myself. It only took three calls to Cindy before I managed to decide on the tree. Daddy wanted to buy the nice Christmas trees but mommy thought it was madness to spend more than $35 for a tree....guess what tree I ended up with?

Big girl

Maya has been setting new eating records every day this week. Tonight when daddy logged the feedings in his nerdy Excel sheet, we discovered that she has now broken the 1000ml/day barrier. Amazing progress from a little girl that was struggling to process 10ml per day in the NICU.

Maya had her hip hop head thing on tonight which inspired daddy to play with Photoshop. She looks pretty tough if you ask me :)

Maya Graffiti
Originally uploaded by MattiasC

Maya video

Maya4
Originally uploaded by MattiasC

First video posting of Maya with our new video camera. Managed to capture a little smile, a sneeze and a little cooing.