End of May Miscellanea

Husky Mariners in Target

The kids trying to re-create the spray paint artist we saw in Seattle

Family Tree per Christian. He got stumped when trying to figure out Halmoni and Haraboji's real names

Christian still loves building 3-D things. This is some sort of rocket vehicle.

The free baseball cards given out at the Mariners game have made a big impact on Olin. He loves spreading them out and playing with them.

He also loves his now-enormous collection of Who Would Win books

Memorial Day 2018

It's nice to have a place to stay in Seattle at any time. Kids didn't have school Friday or Monday so we headed up (with Kelly and kids!) and spent Friday night with them in the condo. We also met up with them and a few of Alex's siblings for a nice and sunny Mariner's Game on Sunday.

First up: Olin does a nice high backbend. He finally learned how to do them and he loves doing them.

This spray paint artist was pretty awesome. He made these pictures in about 15-20 minutes with spray paint. We were really impressed when we watched him. 

Cool coffee art at Moore Coffee in Seattle

We made two pool trips....

Adults' night out at Elliott's Oyster House! The oysters were good.

Mariner's Game! We won, against the Twins. Turns out Ichiro no longer plays even though he's "on" the Mariners. And I think the other Dae Lee (baseball player) no longer plays with the Mariners.

Weekend in Portland for Mallory's Birthday

Olin has been looking forward to their annual Plant Sale for weeks. He has been studying up on how to make change.  Here they are with teacher Terri.

With teacher Karin

Mal was Mrs. Potts in her school play "Beauty & the Beast"

Dinner at Life of Pie pizza. Izzes for all.

Outside Pip's donuts - made a stop both days. Mal got a free dozen for her (12th) birthday on Sunday!

Hilarious thank you note for chaperoning. I especially l like how I was the favorite (and only) chaperone.

Goodbye to Tai Puo

My grandma passed away this morning in Taiwan. Still was the prettiest person I had ever known. We will miss you Tai Puo!

At 80 years old

Getting air at our Family Reunion in 2013 

Teeth Updates

Olin's 6 year molars (19 and 30) started erupting about a week ago.

Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day Mom! (Half the world away in Asia and then Europe)

We had a really nice weekend. The boys, all 3 of them, treated me really well.

7am wake-up call. The kids wanted me to open my gifts while in the bathroom, but Dae thought it might be nicer to take photos with gift once out of the bathroom. :) Here I am wearing my new air-pods. Can't wait to use them!

1pm brunch at LuLu. Nice day for outdoor dining.

Ace Hardware. Dae got this wild idea to go fishing by our house. I got this wild idea to purchase a pressure washer at Costco, so we needed to get a gas can at Ace, too.

Luckily the river is a very short walk away.

Fishing was so funny. Dae lost a lot of hooks and those floaty ball things and such when they got caught in the tree or brush and the line broke. We didn't catch any fish but Olin is strongly convinced he got 10 bites.

Oh goodness. Mom's Day (my last, of 6 straight years). This is the Maypole dance. They practice a LOT because it requires a lot of coordination for them to weave over and under, and then reverse and weave over and under and emerge with none of the strings tangled. Poor Olin's class got messed up and they had to end the Maypole Dance early. I felt bad for them. I could tell Olin was really disappointed when he came up to me afterward to eat his lunch. He was like "I just want to eat my lunch" and was hanging his head a little. He perked up when he remembered he got to hand out the chocolate-covered strawberries (below)

Waiter duties

My Mom's Day gift - this cute bookmark.

I turned it over, and the first thing I thought of was....

Air Jordan! Just an ever-so-slightly less graceful version. hahahaha.

Date night at Wine O Clock in Prosser followed by Target for Ben & Jerry's.

Dae and Christian went golfing last week.

An Education

I would say that besides school, the main source of education for our kids come not through us, but through "Outrageous Acts of Science" (Christian) and teacher Terri (Olin). haha

Olin has learned an enormous wealth of information about plant life and animal life through Terri. Every time I ask him "How did you know that?" we know the answer will be teacher Terri.

Christian has learned an enormous wealth of information about science through his show. He was trying to explain to Olin and me about: 1) how lightning works (positive and negative ions in a cloud move really far apart?) and 2) how spoilers on cars work. Both Olin and I were like uhhh.....okay.

Sayings

Christian: "Mom guess what? Burger King has a new sourdough hamburger!" He thought I'd be excited about the sourdough aspect. And I would be, minus the BK part...

Christian: "I think one thing that isn't fun about being 40 is that you can't get in to small spaces like we can" I won't tell him the ongoing list of things that aren't fun about being 40 :)

Olin uses the word "well" in the funniest places. Usually in the middle of something he's saying. He will be telling a story and will insert "well...". Like "Guess what, I know why Terri's class is called the Garden Room. Well it's because we're closer to the garden than Karin's class".

Piano Guild

Guild adjudications happened yesterday where the kids play a minimum of 8 memorized pieces. I had been nervous about this. Up until a couple weeks ago the kids were nowhere near ready, and up until a couple of days ago Olin was still trying to memorize one of his pieces. The problem was that we would get home around 8pm from various activities and that didn't provide enough time to practice well. Not to mention I had been lackadaisical on monitoring their practices in any way, so I didn't even know what they were practicing. So the past two weeks I have been on top of the kids every practice and making sure they actually learned the pieces rather than play random stuff and stuff they already knew. 

As it turned out, they did well! Onnie said that Christian got one of the highest scores...a score she said usually comes when you're in high school. Not to say he plays high school pieces, but that he played his pieces well. I have to say, when I listened to him play yesterday, I was amazed at how expressively he played! haha. He slowed down some of the endings and played some of the notes so softly, deliberately, I was like 'where did this come from'? I know I certainly wasn't expressive like that when I was his age. I think I had zero expression.

We went to Bangkok Thai for pad thai for dinner to reward them for their performances. And they get a week off of piano practice. Thank goodness.

They were really excited to wear their pins to school so their friends could see. At the end of the day, Olin told me "well, it got kind of annoying when a lot of people asked me about it". (eye roll from me) I was like why didn't you just take it off then?

He looks like his Hawaiian cousins here.

Mom Turns 70! (on May 15)

Happy early 70th mom!!! We had a fun filled girls' weekend in San Diego. The main event was a surprise, and we had even surprised mom with the destination up until about a day before when we did the reveal. That night we didn't tell her what we were doing but we had purchased VIP tickets to see Maks, Val and Peta from DWTS perform in their show. The tickets included pictures and a chance to meet the stars, which was really fun. 

Pedis on Day 1

HouseParty while pedi-ing

Decorating the hotel room - Westin Gaslamp

Poke lunch on Day 1

Surprised my mom! It was a lot of fun.

Hotel squad

We went to the Mission for breakfast and then walked along Mission Beach

We got 2 free drinks per day at our hotel bar so of course capitalized on it.

Yummy Mexican food at the Harbor downtown

Opening up her birthday gift of La Mer

Never order a cake from the downtown San Diego Baskin Robbins. haha. It was a comedy of errors right up until the pick-up when there was a huge cake ready for us that said "Happy 70th Mom" but it was the wrong cake...

Karaoke

Crater Lake on the airplane ride home

Offensive MVP of last week's game! He batted 3-3.

Dae took the kids to all their regular places and says they gorged themselves.

Also took them to Traxx in Lynnwood for some racing which they were very excited about.