Happy 4th Birthday Christian!

Happy 4th Birthday Christian! We love you very, very much!!!!!

Spudnut Birthday Breakfast

Christian's 4th Birthday, #1

We celebrated Christian's 4th birthday a little early on Monday since I am taking the kids to Seattle and Portland this weekend. So on Monday we had a little mini-party at Chuck E. Cheese (I knew the day was inevitable that we'd have to venture in there) with two other families and let the kids run loose. That place is a total and complete zoo - confirmed!

(BTW I've been a blogging maniac these days.)

Well, it seems most of the photos have disappeared into thin air. I tried to upload them from my (real) camera and cannot find them anywhere. Oh well, at least he's got two more birthday celebrations coming up, in Seattle and Portland!

Operation...successful!

Adrienne in the Ticket Blaster.

Me and the kids in the ticket blaster.

Loaded semi truck!

Some more photos from the past couple of days:

Leelee said he wanted to write daddy, and then proceeded to write Dae. I didn't even know he knew what "Dae" was, or how to spell it. He wrote it backwards...so funny.

Typical evening these days. Me and the kids relaxing on the driveway and waiting for Baba to get home.

Leelee was really into helping me with my pedi.

Dae as a Tot

This photo is absolutely classic. It's a copy of a copy, but you get the overall idea. I think it is one of the funniest photos I have ever seen in my life. The bowl cut! The round face! The suit! The random unsupervised boy climbing stairs in the background! Dae's mom said he was chubby until about 5 years old, although Dae disagrees and says it was only during year 2.

I was going through our box of photos today to find some earlier photos of Christian for his birthday celebration at school and came across it. I had to get it on digital record in case I should lose my one precious copy...

Belated Portland photos, March 1

Love that pot belly!

We love Sushiland in Portland!

1) Didi: eyes closed 2) Mal: Can't see face 3) Olin: doing who knows what 4) Leelee: Engrossed in something random

Sunday Events

1. Today I cut the kids' hair and then vacuumed their heads with the brush attachment for our Dyson. I think they both liked it. And it was very effective clean-up!

2. Olin's hair is so fuzzy and fine, and Leelee's hair is so course and wavy.

3. We had teacher's conferences last week at Sagebrush Montessori and (for the second time) there were no areas of concern and no problems. I asked "does he ever get mad at school?". Answer was no. I asked if he is ever disrespectful of teacher and the answer was no. The teacher Karin said he has a large vocabulary, talks a lot (haha!), points out other things that are happening in class, and causes no problems at all. I repeatedly asked "are you sure?" and she repeatedly said yes. For that, I am very very happy. (For all of the rascally things that happen at home, he seems to be able to really turn that off in public!)

4. Dae's work schedule is really picking up at Kadlec. This is good and bad news because we definitely want him to be busy (and keep his job!) but part of me always worries about whether or not it will get worse and we will never see him. He's been at the hospital both yesterday and today during the days, but funny enough, this is still nothing compared to how little he was home during fellowship. I guess in a way that was good preparation! So we visited him both days in his office while he was catching up with notes. We brought him some gummy grapefruits yesterday and Dae gave Leelee 5 gummies, which is 4 more than the allotment I was intending to give him.

5. Yesterday at 6pm when Dae got home, we rode 4 1/2 miles with the kids to Panda Express for dinner. It was a lot of fun! We were a little afraid we'd be riding in the pitch black on the way home and  we had a little snafu with the toddler seat rubbing my wheel so I felt like I couldn't pedal without major resistance, but we ended up safely home at 7:50pm.

Post-nap smiles

You can expect a Target bag in the background in pretty much any room in the house.

Gummies at Dad's office

Me and the babe

Funny, Too

Two funny things LL has said the past two days:

1) 'Tu' means throw up in Chinese. Leelee threw up a couple days ago and then yesterday informed us that "Tu mean I spit brown things onto the bed". Indeed, true!

2) LL has been sleeping in our room on the floor because my mom is here. He talks out loud in his sleep, just like me, and last night in the middle of the night I heard him stir a little bit and then shout out "Look at me!" and then roll right over and fall asleep again. Funny little thing.

Funny

My mom is here for 3-4 days and always takes the best photos. I am just laughing to myself over all these assorted photos, so here goes:

In case you doubted how frequently he shows off the Face...often.

The Face at Granny's (now Old Country Buffet - or OCB). This photo makes me laugh SO hard!

Dae and Olin demonstrating their faces

Leelee's favorite pasttime. Making coffee for assorted guests. Olin observing intently.

Morning funtimes.

 

Lunch with my mom and some of their old time family friends, along with my uncle (second from right)

 

Grubby-faced kids and empty buffet plates in the foreground. What could be classier? We're thinking of making this our 2013 Christmas card photo. ha!

 

This is why they love buffets.

Olin's dirty face is slightly out of control. He hates having it wiped. So it's rarely 100% clean.

It'll take me 5 minutes...

I had been secretly hatching a plan for weeks to buy two new bikes from Target, load them in my car, and set them up for Dae as a fun surprise, so I investigated the bikes, took out the carseats Thursday night, and asked the nanny to stay an extra 45 minutes after work on Friday as I went over to Target on my way home from work.  The purchase was successful and I picked up two extra helmets and another toddler seat.

Sometimes Dae is super non-excited for things I think he should be excited about, and sometimes he surprises me with his enthusiasm. Yesterday, he surprised me with his enthusiasm and was so excited he went out to the garage immediately to set up the toddler seats and said "let's go riding tonight!". It was 6:30pm and I knew it was getting dark, so I asked him how long it would take him to get the seats set up. He said "it'll take about 5 minutes!"

Fast forward from 6:30 til 9:00pm....Dae has moved his mechanic shop into the dining room and is slaving away at the toddler seats, having transferred them back and forth in various configurations between the bikes for about 2 1/2 hours. He repeatedly said "these are not easy to set up" and I believe him - he's good at that kind of stuff.

Anyway, set up was eventually a success and we went on a quick ride first thing this morning. I am so excited to ride around once it's consistently warmer! I think the boys really liked it although Olin had a pretty confused look on his face the entire ride.

Today was the 1-mile Leprechaun Dash for Leelee. We signed up for it since all the kids from Sagebrush do it every year. I'll be honest, I had my apprehensions since Leelee has never shown a remarkable interest in running. Well, as Dae and I agreed upon 100%, it was an epic fail. haha. From the get go, I could tell Leelee was just not in the mood (you can see his face from the group photo) and he wanted to be held, or piggybacked, or walk the entire distance. I wanted to finish the entire mile so we did it, but it wasn't altogether pleasant. Olin seemed to have more fun running than Christian. Dae did persuade him to run the last little leg so he looks like he's zooming here at the end, with his finish time of 21 minutes :) He said he had a good time, so that's all that matters.

Christian was excited to see Nel & Adrienne, who ran the entire time!

So on today's agenda was the Leprechaun Dash and two back-to-back barbecues and by 5pm we agreed that it was a little much. We are so tired! I guess we are just not meant to be that social. ha!

Some other notes: Olin now tries to put on shoes or socks himself and seems pretty adept at it, although he has yet to successfully complete either task.

Also, Leelee has been drawing a lot lately. He draws little trains, or clouds and rain, and today he drew "mom and dad, leelee and Olin", but what he really did was just draw in the letters. I find it really interesting that he labeled it M for mom, D for dad, C for Christian and O for Olin. He always does the letters backward (like the D) and he also did the M, D, C, and O in backward order (from right to left).

Gap Sunglasses on Clearance

Got these little beauties for the boys for $3 and $7. Can't argue with that price!

the spudnut shop

As a special treat (there seem to be a lot of those these days) I took the kids to get a spudnut at the Spudnut Shop today. They got to share one, and enjoyed the green sprinkles for St. Patty's Day. The Spudnut shop is a Richland staple and a lot of older folks congregate there. Sure enough this morning there was a group of old fellas sipping coffee and talking, loudly, about the difference between LaCrosse (Wisconsin) and Lucerne (Switzerland). Then one guy says "I don't even know what you're talking about". haha!

Olin had his first speech assessment today at our house. I guess it went ok, but I couldn't really tell. The woman was nice and she asked him to do a few things like stack 3 blocks together (he passed) or turn over a bottle to get a cheerio out (he didn't pass) and asked us a few questions about what he likes and activities we do as a family.  He's got another "real" assessment that we had already set up for Wednesday afternoon. Anyway, earlier in the afternoon, Leelee was pretending like he was holding a microphone and said "Everybody! Mama's taking a shower, and then a guest is coming over to teach our baby to talk!"

Olin is such a funny guy. He copies a lot of stuff, like when he accidentally hit my chin with his head, I was rubbing it a little bit and he came over and rubbed it too. He also likes to wipe up spills with a towel.

Also, Leelee loves bananas right now. He can eat 2-3 a day. We have been going through bananas like nobody's business. He nicely leaves the banana peels all over the house.