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Coconut cake and first words!

What do you do when you are impossibly tired because your 10 month old is not sleeping AGAIN and you are having a hard day adjusting to the change of moving?! Bake a 3 layer coconut cream cake from scratch of course!
Oh man. Since we moved or is right before we moved that Kai started waking up 4, 5 or more times a night. It just seems too early for him to be getting his molars but all the signs are there- drooling, biting and now grinding his teeth and of course not sleeping. At first I was thinking it was just the move, and maybe it is that also.

Very sleepy but instead of going to sleep at 7 when I know I could get a few solid hours of sleep when Kai was sleeping, I baked. Who can really go to sleep at 7 anyways?!(Well I used to the first 5 1/2 months of life with Kai but I wanted to start doing other stuff). So this cake I wanted to try out for Kai's birthday party we are planning. We want to make luau themed food. Plus it was a great excuse to bake a cake! Kai won't be eating this cake though. I am going to make him a much lower sugar cake.
This cake was very sweet! but yummy too ( of course gluten free)

There is nothing like a cake baked from scratch. I used the emeril's recipe from the food network (minus the pecans) but substituted a gluten free flour mix I made from fine brown rice flour, potato starch, tapioca starch and xanthum gum. Here is where I found the flour mix recipe.

So big news is Kai said a couple words! So drumroll what was his first words?! (besides mama and dada which babies say very early on)..the word was- OWL
I didn't realize he was saying it at first because babies babble a lot and sometimes it sounds like they are saying words. What happened was I always read him this beautiful ABC book that we read often.

for N there is a picture of a nest with eggs and I always say nest. For O there is an illustration of an owl. I thought he said owl but not sure. Then I was wearing a dress with flowers and one of the middles of the flowers looked like a nest with eggs and Kai was pointing to it saying "owl" so then I started thinking he was really saying owl but confused it with the nest picture that is on the page before in the book. Then the same thing happened with another similar picture. Still I was unsure if he could be talking already until Wes' family brought over a wreath with flowers and when Kai saw it he pointed to the flower and said flower. His second word! I still wasn't sure of it so I kept testing both words and sure enough he keeps saying it!
It is not surprising that he said flower because when we walk once or twice a day I always point out the flowers and say flower. I can't believe owl was the first word though because I only say that when we read the book.

He also has stood for a couple seconds a couple times without holding on to anything! They grow so fast!

Today I also made a natural dishwasher detergent.
It's just 2 cups of borax, 2 cups of baking soda and 4 TB of citric acid. Then  1 or 2 tb of vinegar in the jet dry compartment. I haven't tried it yet.
I hope it works well. It is so cheap and natural! Next I am going to make all natural laundry detergent.

Settling in

We have lived in the house for just over a week. I think we are all getting used to it a little bit. It will take a while to really feel comfortable here.
It is so quiet! I'm not complaining but still it takes some getting used to.
There are so many lizards and even more spiders..a nightmare for Wes with his fear of spiders! I never thought of that. I guess because when I grew up near the woods it was on the east coast, here near the woods it is so hot so I think that means lots of spiders, and I don't mean your friendly daddy long legs I mean dark hairy looking creatures.

It is nice to sit out back and see the trees above and the quiet of nature
On the 4th we barbequed, that was fun. I also made brownies and haupia and ate mostly all of them myself..I justify it because for almost the last year I haven't been able to eat any chocolate. Also they were Betty Crocker GLUTEN FREE brownies!Wow! I had to substitute oil for butter and still they tasted great- very rich and not grainy at all. I also have the gluten free yellow cake mix to try, I am interested in how that is.

Here is Kai on the 4th

People keep mistaking him for a girl, I wonder if I should have his hair cut short, or leave it long and flowing like his dad.

He is just all over the place lately. His favorite thing is to pull himself and stand and sit down and  stand stand up and stand more.. crawling over things is a favorite also.Here is him standing

More soon!

Goodbye Santa Monica hello house..

How we loved living here for the past year.. It is a great place to live.
We saw the ocean nearly day, we walked all over town, enjoyed the cool weather, the amazing farmer's market, 3rd street promenade just a walk away and even saw a few celebrities. I didn't even tell anyone about some of these sitings.. Let's see I saw Ron Howard jogging right past us, Elijah Woods several times at Whole Foods and he checked out behind us (just as good looking in person!) I saw Kady Lang at the Farmer's market, also saw CJ from Top Chef there a couple times. Wes saw a couple other celebrity Chef's there but I can't remember their names. Also the old guy (sorry don't know his name) from CSI lives in our building and we rode the elevator with him a few times..That is fun. But the best is seeing the ocean everyday. We will miss it Ahh...
if only we had a several million we could buy a house here.

Things I won't miss:
Having neighbors above us and to every side
the noise!
having no space
everyone having nannies (I am hoping this isn't as prevalent where we are moving.)
sleeping on a mattress on the floor so Kai can have his own bedroom (we only have one)
Having to get the cart in the garage to take the groceries from the garage to the elevator and back again with baby in toe.
Having to get all prepared- baby in stroller or carrier and take the elevator down just to let the down out to pee
Having to go down the hall to do the laundry
Paying rent
never staying in one place or being able to decorate(I wonder what it will feel like to have some roots)
There being no where for guests to park
We are excited!

Yay! We have a house.

A day late in closing but everything worked out! Now I just have to figure out how to get everything packed without Kai getting into trouble!
Here are some recent pictures of us enjoying the park overlooking the big blue ocean before we move away!
 I started a blog for just pictures of Kai. I want to put pictures on it starting from birth and catch up to the present. I am not sure when I will get time among the millions of other things I want to do (like making prints on time for a show and making a page of photos for every month of Kai's first year on this digital scrapbook site http://www.howfasttheygrow.com/ ) Hopefully soon. I only got to his first day of birth! Here it is anyways

oops I had a bad link at first, here it is:
http://kaibodhi.blogspot.com/

Potty all the time..

After a mom who uses cloth diapers for her baby told me how she does "elimination communication" and puts her baby on the potty to poo, I decided to get a potty and try it with Kai. Guess what? It works so easily.
I don't don't really know his cues. I just put him on there after he eats breaksfast, lunch and dinner and like magic if he has to poo he does within a couple minutes. It's great! So much less messy then cleaning up diapers.
After we move I have been thinking about switching to cloth diapers. I think he likes it better that way also.

So here is Kai and the "magic" potty (magic because how he poos when we put him on it) As for the title of this post, that is pretty funny. I was singing that song to Kai when I put him on the potty and Wes asked me if I was singing an Eddie Murphy song. I had no idea but he looked it up on you tube. I guess  was! Oh man. I thought I woman sang that song...

Kai doesn't always read books or magazines when on the potty I just thought those were funny, especially the star one

Life with Bodhi baby

Ok I think I am just going to re-name my blog life with Kai. Might as well, I only put pictures of him on it. It's not that we don't do anything not related to Kai or have any other news. but I just feel like relatives and friends check the blog to see pictures of the cutie pie. So I put them up. To be honest this little cutie does dominate as our photos taken..
We went to the doctor yesterday. He hasn't gained much at all in the past few months. I thought he was weighing 20 lbs but yesterday it said 19lbs. He has grown taller though 30". So he is at the 93% for height.

On another note, I got mastitis. Me who never ever get sick.It wasn't fun, fever, achy all over. I am feeling better already though and my fever went away the second day. I think it is just from continued lack of sleep. I won't go into details about the sleep, except to say we will call this the year without sleep.
It is getting better though, I think Kai's 8th tooth was still bothering him a little and he was having a lot of separation anxiety. So we are just trying to be consistent. Here is the little cutie:

Big smile..

Kai is so funny doing the scrunchy nose smile but even more exaggerated, all the time now..
Look how good Sasha is, poor doggy. A dog is much better and more entertaining than any toy, that is for sure. Sasha has been so itchy for months. Always biting her paws. They are bright and raw..yesterday when we were walking another woman was saying her dog had the same problem and she ran into two other people with the same thing. There must be something in Santa Monica that hurts dogs paws or something..Hopefully when we move in a few weeks they will finally get better.

A day at the beach

Silent reflux- little to no symptoms.. but it is there.

Look at this cutie pie. It is hard to tell that his reflux has returned (did it ever really go away?) We thought Kai had outgrown reflux, as babies often do and we stopped giving him the medicine months ago. He didn't have any symptoms, well he never had many symptoms to begin with except frequent wakings and the time he lost his voice around 5 months. That is how we know it is back- he lost his voice again and has been coughing. I think why it became aggravated is because in an effort to help him with sleeping when he was cutting a tooth (also to help me get more sleep!) I was nursing him more at night and co-sleeping. So he was lying down flat after drinking. He was waking more but I thought it was the tooth..now we know it was the reflux. The night before he lost his voice he was waking practically every hour and I knew something was wrong. The thing is it must hurt his throat because when he has reflux the only way he will sleep is to nurse which aggravates the reflux. It is a vicious cycle. All this sheds so much light on his sleeping problems. Confirms that the reflux and nursing at night was the root of all of our sleeping issues! If only he could talk and tell us at 2 1/2 months that he had reflux and that lying flat aggravated it. It is just crazy that there were little symptoms besides frequent waking.
Well we still had the prevacid so we have been giving it to him and he seems to be doing better. He has been on it for 4 days now. His 8th tooth, which took forever to come through is finally through also. So soon we will work towards improving our sleep once again.