February Festivities

Getting back to East Asia and back to our place has been good. Right when we returned we had a conference at a nearby hot springs resort. We had been there before, and it's a pretty nice place. Callie is warming up to the idea of swimming, especially since to her it's similar to baths, which she loves. After playing in one of the springs one day, we put these little kiddie towels on the kids and Callie wasn't too impressed, but Zane was lovin' it.

On Superbowl Monday (13 hour time difference), Callie went with Mommy to a local play place with ball pit and lots of other fun things for children while Zane and Daddy stayed home trying to watch the game on the internet with little success (Daddy was sick with a 24-hour bug). Here's a picture of Callie enjoying the play place.
On Valentine's Day there was the lunar new year, a.k.a. the 'how about 1 billion people all set off very serious fireworks at the same time' festival. On new year's eve some of us got together for a potluck and then set off a few small time fireworks, the type safe for the kiddos, including sparklers, which Callie enjoyed holding in this picture here. She kind of looks like she's telling you to back off.

About the 1 billion people all setting off fireworks at once, check out this video from our kitchen window of our city of 4 million, with fireworks going off everywhere at the stroke of midnight. The video is a bit shaky (it was way past my bedtime), and most of what you see is not professional yet quite large. There is one professionally done show going off quite close to our apt that is bigger than the rest but when you see that one, look below it and along the horizon at all the other ones going off much further away. In fact, many of them were exploding about 20 feet away from our 11th story windows. It honestly sounded like a war zone, complete with car alarms going off, but I guess that's part of the cultural experience.



In order to keep the kids asleep that night, Jeremy built a sound barrier of couch cushions and pillows in their big bay window. Below is a picture of that. Last year in our old apt we put Callie's crib in our half bathroom which had no windows, and that worked well but this year we have no such rooms and another child in the mix, so this is the best we could do:

Below is just a really cute recent picture of Callie. She's holding a tiny baby doll from her Fisher Price dollhouse. Lately she loves to carry around her "babies". We've also been telling her that Mommy has a baby in her 'tummy' and that we have to wait for the baby. In the Bible lessons we do with Callie & Zane, one of the stories is about Mary and the emphasis is on the fact that Mary had to wait for her baby. Also, it talks about Abraham waiting for Isaac. The emphasis is on the fact that we treasure Jesus, and we had to wait for his coming and we are so excited because we love him and good things are always worth waiting for. Then today she made her 1st and 2nd complete sentences ever. The first was "I wanna walk" when I was about to put her in the stroller, but the second one was when she pointed to Anita's tummy and said, "Come on, baby." That may sound funny, but her only definition of "come on" is when you are beckoning someone to hurry up and get there or come along, so we were so touched that she desired the baby to hurry up. Anyway, here she is with her current "baby", who she placed in an old camera film case.

This last picture is one we took today of Jeremy with Zane, daddy & his boy. Since they were wearing the same outfit, Anita thought pictures were in order. Aren't they handsome?!