Pictures of a Weekend

Having the time of his life at Kruger Farms :)

This will be a picture-filled post. I could have also titled this post "the many facial expressions of Leelee" or " immobilized Leelee" or "Corn". We've had a really eventful weekend and still have two birthday parties to go today (Didi turns 2, and friend Emma turns 5). My mom is in town so we hit up the outdoor Kruger Farms concert on Thursday. Friday I worked while my sister and mom went over to the beach to check out Ev's new beach house in Gearhart (yahoo! Can't wait to see it!). According to them, Leelee was scared stiff of the sand and would cry and be immobilized whenever his feet touched it. He was also, as you will see below, immobilized on a raised concrete patio outside Ev's beach house (didn't have the nerve to climb off). That guy!

So, in a small moment of free time I am uploading some of my mom and sister's photos before we leave for Party #1. More to come!

Corn...

Corn...

Corn...

Corn...

More Corn...He barreled through 3 cobs this evening.

Can barely tell, but he's crying

Unwilling to leave the raised concrete platform

Sleeping with new best friend "Ching Wa" (frog) on his head. Seahorse in foreground.

Mom

We're Going to Iceland!

We booked our tickets to Iceland! I've been dreaming about going to such a remote place, and wouldn't you know there's a direct flight from Seattle to Reykjavik? 7 hours and $400...you really can't beat that! Icelandair has pretty cool flight deals, so we tacked on a little side trip to Paris (my true love).

It will be interesting to see who else is nuts enough to go to Iceland in February. My North Face gear will definitely be making a cameo!

One, Two, Five, Eight

I can't seem to fall asleep although I am tired, so I thought I would update a few of Christian's funny words.

He loves the word Butterfly, but when he repeats it, he says "Buh - wer - whyyyyy"...he loves to elongate that last syllable.

Numbers are coming along (I keep convincing myself, but in reality I am sure he doesn't have much of a clue what the concept of numbers actually is). We start out by having him repeat 1 and 2. He always skips ahead at this point to saying the specific numbers 5 and 8 (in that order). Sometimes, he sticks in a 7. Mind you, this is not in English - much too difficult! This is all in simple, single syllable, Chinese words.

We've also got this new bedtime routine that we look forward to every night. We read a book with milk, brush teeth (insert lots of fussing here), recite the animals and vehicles on his mobile (butterfly, dinosaur, bee, bus, plane), lay him down, put his stuffed frog in his arms which he then hugs, say "Night Night" (he repeats) and tonight when I said "love you" he said "uh you" back to me! (I immediately scampered out to call Dae in Sacramento and recount the evening's events, word for word). Very exciting stuff over here!

Begging for Brownies

My dad visited this past weekend and bought all three cousins their own little roll-on suitcase. Leelee loves using his as a walker.

We also had a mom's potluck/barbecue at Lori's house today. Christian spotted chocolate brownies a mile away and was begging and pleading for some all afternoon (this is after the three half cobs of corn he ate, half a gardenburger, a chicken-kabob, and berries by the mouthful). After I gave him a couple of small bites, he proceeded to make the rounds to two of the other mothers and plead his case for more brownie. Embarrassing! After speaking with my parents, I am pretty sure he inherited the shameless food-begging from me and not Dae.

Meanwhile, I am tired and very overfed. I worked Saturday, where we also had a potluck, so this weekend has been gluttonous to say the least and I am pretty sure Christian ate more today than he has all last week combined. So he is in his crib crying now as we speak, probably due to a stomachache. Hopefully tomorrow will be better...

Oh, one more addition. This photo is from a couple of weeks ago. Leelee fell asleep in Ev's van with one of her facepainting books over his face. The funniest part was, he was sitting there for a while, awake, with the book over his head until he fell asleep a while later (we had snuck a little peak underneath the book a few times to determine his level of consciousness).

Happy Birthday to an Old Guy

Happy Birthday Dae!

Dae said yesterday "I'm turning 35, right?". The fact that he was wrong (34) and that he had to ask were indeed indications that he is an old-ish geezer.

We rang in 34 with Korean food and Baskin Robbins (Strawberry ice cream, chocolate cake) festivities. And now we're winding down the evening in our favorite ways: me with a book and Dae playing a video game. So I guess he's still young at heart. :)

Updates

I sent Leelee over to Ev's a couple nights ago with a broken-zippered pajama suit (unknowingly). So this is how he spent the night, with a sleep sack over him. hehe

Here are the latest and greatest:

1) He wails like crazy for milk and cereal. Only milk and cereal, and ALL the time.

2) He detests most foods, and will eat a mouthful, then pull out all the chunks and fling them onto the floor. Every night when I am throwing away the food from the floor I cringe, imagining how many mouths the wasted food could feed.

3) Dae has been on crazy call lately. He got home at 5am Friday morning from the hospital, and has already been at the hospital today (Saturday) from 6am until now. Poor guy!

4) I have some sort of irritating mixture of sore throat, sinus congestion and dizzy feeling.

5) Leelee loves sitting on my lap and reading now. It's so gratifying, I cannot even express. He used to hate reading, and would squirm and wriggle and flip the book to the back cover. Now he nestles into my lap, points and says words (and looks up at me from time to time for approval! haha). It's a dream!

6) Leelee has a duck-toed and flat-footed walk. I am wondering if it is going to self-correct, or if he will always be duck-toed and flat-footed. Oh well. Not too stressed.

So, we're missing Dae this morning but we had a really productive day so far. We took a stroll to Whole Foods, coffee and the park and then went to Winco for the gummy grapefruit slices Dae and I are addicted to. I went crazy a month ago and bought 4 pounds of it, finished it off, took a little one week break, then jumped back on the wagon today. Oops!

Tooth #N Finally Makes an Appearance

Tooth #N (lower left lateral incisor) finally erupted! I'm trying to keep accurate logs of which teeth erupt when. His grand tooth total is up to 8.

Soft Star Shoes Competition

If you have some downtime, feel free to check out our video. Professional it is not, but we had fun!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaIC9gUfZbc

(Notice Christian is wearing Mal's hand-me-down purple and pink Soft Stars.)

Leelee's D's

In a wagon, at the Farmer's Market, with makeshift bib and a whole lotta berries!

Leelee has a whole slew of new words. He will pretty much copy most words that we say, but he puts his own flair on a lot of them. That flair usually involves substituting a "D" for whatever the first consonant is supposed to be.

For example:

"go go" = "do do" (dog)

"kai kai" = "dai dai" (open)

"Gong Gong" = "do do" (grandpa) Yes, exactly the same as Dog in leelee's world!

He has pretty much transitioned into one nap per day, which is really nice because we can actually go out for a good length of time during the day. He usually naps for around 1 to 1 1/2 hours. I wish it were longer!

My dad was in town this weekend so we went to the concert at Washington Park last night (an opera performance of Verdi's - it was wonderful!) and went to the Saturday Farmer's Market and lunch at Elephant's Deli today. It was a great weekend with the exception of the following: 1) Leelee woke up at midnight, 2am, 4am, and 5:45am last night. Now instead of crying and screaming incessantly, he wails a very pathetic "mama" over and over until I take major pity on him and fetch him. Dae thinks I should be stronger, but I think if he were wailing "dada" it would be an entirely different story! 2) After a series of pages, Dae was called in this morning at 3:30am to the hospital. So he pretty much missed out on all the Bian festivities, including Baskin Robbins cake for Ev's birthday celebration! Darn!

Lastly, Ev and I spent the past few days as videographers and we're thoroughly exhausted. A local Oregon shoe company is having a competition where people submit videos of their shoes being worn out and about, so we subjected the kids to our video camera all of Thursday and a little bit of today. The winner takes home "shoes for life"! (well, one pair per year for 20 years, which is pretty good if you ask me) We fully expect to lose the competition, but at least we will have some cute video footage that we wouldn't have otherwise taken.

Below, a few photos from the weekend:

Full house at Rose Garden Ampitheater

The only shot where Mal's head wasn't covering Gong Gong's

Doing 'fish lips' at Ev on command

Christian behaved himself very well and seemed to enjoy the opera (note the Richland Public Library tote that Leelee took charge of)

Mom's Visit (Second Post in One night!)

My mom just sent me a few photos from her visit down to Portland on Thursday so here they are! We spent the day like we usually spend my Thursdays off, but this time dragged my mom around to our regular haunts: Getting coffee and pastries at Petite Provence, driving to the Adidas employee store (while the 50% off coupon was still effective), wreaking havoc at the Adidas store, coming home for an afternoon nap, and other various afternoon activities which usually revolve around heavy internetting.

On the way home from breakfast we stopped by a local park.

Love that Richland!

Richland in July is usually pretty toasty and this past weekend was no exception at an average of around 90-99 degrees. We passed the time by:

1) Face painting (Ev is bound and determined to become a bona fide facepainter by the time Didi's birthday party rolls around end of this month. Crazy Ev.)

2) Meeting Grayson, the newest great-grandson of my grandma. He's the son of our cousin Andrew and his wife Linda and is super cute!

3) Going to the snazzy new Richland Public Library.

4) Dragging the kids to both the Richland and Kennewick Bookworm to try to get our hands on the cute Bookworm tote (Unsuccessful. Settled for the Richland public library tote.)

5) Strolling around the Koi Pond by my dad's house and feeding the fish as well as, reluctantly, the ducks.

6) Watching Leelee blindly stuff peas and corn into his mouth in a daze, as if he were vegging out in front of the TV eating Doritos (or something actually delicious)!

7) Keeping the kids from fighting and touching each other in the car. This was nearly an impossible challenge since we took my car and had the kids 3-wide in the backseat. Below was a rare moment of silence captured at good old Granny's buffet parking lot!

8) Taking a group photo