Lots of Stuff

Wow, I love this girl.
So I've been negligent in my posting this last month. We had a great, busy time and are still trying to recover. Emily turned 2 months and doubled her birth weight, John got a haircut, we all went to the beach & to Singapore, we had friends from the States come stay with us... there were over 100 pictures in my camera from last month, so I'm just going to do a brief review of the big things. I'll post the web album later with the whole caboodle if you feel so inclined to look at such a ridiculous number of our pics.

The many faces of Emily... she is definitely a growing girl.

John stuck his Shrek doll on Emily's changing pad and said "Shrek wet"... now if we could only get him to tell us when HE'S wet. Sigh... potty training will be harder than we thought.

Michael finally convinces me to let him buzz John's head. John looks great and he is SO much cooler. The clippers scare the bejeebies out of him, but we can usually sufficiently bribe him to sit still until it's over.

Moses parting the sea :) She slept like that for about 10 minutes one day.

Why is it we think our kids look SO much older when they're wearing pants? Probably because they never wear them... it's too darn hot.

Goodness, where did this child's neck go??? Cute chubber-head. This was on Emily's blessing day. Tracy Friend gave me a set of baby pearls on a necklace that we put on her for this special occasion. It almost disappeared in the folds of her neck.

John learning his alphabet... with goggles on. Of course.

We make another trip to Singapore... we love coming here for a breather because it's so clean and efficient, things often sorely lacking in Malaysia. This landmark statue is right at the waterfront.

We go to a Pakistani BBQ with our friends.

Good food, good conversation. Good times.

A rare pic of just us 2 lovebirds.

A family photo!

Just sittin' here... lookin' cute.

I caught her mid-sneeze :)

We spent an amazing week in this beautiful paradise... Redang Island off the northeastern coast of Malaysia. Michael perfectly summed up our first visit to the beach: It's like walking on powdered sugar. And everything was that perfect. Crystal blue pristine waters, soft sand, beautiful weather, abundant sea life, relaxed atmosphere... everything you want out of vacation. The 7 hour bus ride there & back is a different story (as is the ridiculously rocky boat ride out to the island... thankfully only one of us threw up) but looking back it was well worth the effort to get there. If we could manage it we'd love to take another trip to Redang.

Matching outfits. It was too cute, I couldn't resist. Besides, I have to do this now before John's old enough to know better & protest.

John & Zach, 2 peas in a pod.

Michael & I finish our SCUBA certification!!! We were so excited to go and had an awesome time diving. An ENORMOUS thanks goes out to our friends who watched our kids so we could do this together. You guys are all awesome, we can't even thank you enough. We also can't wait to go diving again, it was amazing!

The boys chillin' at lunch. One of the rare moments John actually ate something... poor kid was sick all week. Not sure what it is about this boy and vacation that they don't agree with each other, but he always seems to get sick right before we go to the beach.

The GORGEOUS view from our resort.

Changing diapers... she HATES being wet & will calm right down when I put her on the changing mat.

My mission comp. Amy & her husband come to visit Malaysia! Eating at Suzy's, one of our favorite places.

We FINALLY went up the Petronas Towers while Amy & Jimmy were here and got them to take a family pic of all of us (even though all you can see of Emily are her legs). It was fun to see the city from a bird's eye view!

This is the first time we've ever strapped Emily in her car seat to take her anywhere. She looked so huge to us we had to take a picture.

Man, I love close-ups of this girl's face. She is indescribably beautiful to me.

Oh, and I got a haircut! Michael's never seen me with short hair (except in old pictures) but he seems to like it. I'm still adjusting, but MAN it feels good to have short hair in this heat.
Phew! That seemed like a busy month. We have a nice lull for a few weeks and then we'll be ready to have Michael's family come visit us in May! Anyone is welcome to hop on a plane and drop in on us any time... we have an air mattress waiting for you. :)

an observation

Having a 2-year old means that when someone tells you that they're pregnant, instead of telling them congratulations, you just start laughing.

anyway... coming soon, a trip to the beach, a haircut, and some good friends.

grammar 4 kids

a few weeks ago john started saying something that sounded like "mice" all the time and we couldn't figure out what in the world he was talking about (which, of course, was infuriating to him and would usually end in a screaming fit). finally, we realized he would use it in a possessive sort of way, indicating that something belonged to him. it dawned on us one day when michael said that something was "daddy's" and john firmly corrected him, saying "no, mice!" that's when we realized he was duplicating his daddy and stating a possessive "my's". and although it's incorrect, i'm still astounded that little kids can be so brilliant to apply grammatical rules to their words like that.
seriously, i don't think it's possible to not enjoy watching kids grow up.

name that tune...

Fun diversion for the day:
LYRICS GAME
If you want to check your answers you don't need to actually click on the "Answer" link for each one, just hold your mouse over the word Answer and it will pop up. I thought this was totally fun although I have to admit to only getting 15 out of 50. yikes.

Boy 4 Sale

Literally from the day John turned 2 our home has become a war zone. He has several melt-downs a day, including major screaming fits that leave us so exasperated he ends up in his room half the day because we don't know how to deal with him. We're crossing our fingers that it can simply be attributed to his lack of ability to communicate yet...he's learning slowly about pronunciation of words, he's started stringing together words to make simple sentences...he's really getting there, but apparently it's too slow because he gets wildly frustrated with us when we can't understand him. Anyway, a result of all this hullaballoo is that I revoked movie-watching privileges, making him (heaven forbid) actually play with his mom and, oh i don't know, read and stuff. What a concept. We do, however, still let him watch video clips on YouTube and he especially loves Sesame Street. Michael & I have found the coolest clips that take us on a trip down nostalgia lane...Ladybug Picnic, Pinball counting, Rubber Ducky, C is for Cookie, etc. Anyway, we discovered this the other day and John requests we watch it at least 14 times in a row before I pull the plug because anything is obnoxious after 14 times. The sound is pretty bad and it's totally old school stop-animation, which looks completely primitive after getting used to digital animation. But it is pretty darn amazing when you think about how they accomplished it. So, for your viewing pleasure, here is...an Orange Singing Carmen.

Etched in Graphite

My friend Miow Lin is from Malaysia and she told me that when she went to vote in the national elections, they gave her a slip of paper with the candidate's names and...a pencil. I am totally not making that up. Indignantly she declared it to be ridiculous, that anyone could change her vote by simply erasing her marks. To which she received the reply, “but who would?” And it is that kind of forward thinking that has made Malaysia the super-power it is in the world today.

More birthday pics

I almost forgot to post some more pics from John's birthday. We wanted to plan a small play-date with John's friends for an informal birthday party and one of our friends that works at the US Embassy invited us to do it on the embassy grounds. There's a lap pool and a small kids pool where we gathered with 5 other kids and their moms for a lunch/swim party. A bunch of the embassy pics here were taken by Anne so thanks to her for sending me copies!

John 2nd Birthday

Happy Birthday to John

So last week was John's birthday (yay! Can anyone say 'terrible 2s?' That's kind of like saying World War II was a border skirmish) and he got some sweet presents from G&G Weist as well as Aunt Hilary. We've now got a couple more cool books to keep him quiet at church (something I'm sure the rest of the congregation will be thrilled at) and John had the grand experience of blowing out his own candles for the first time. (We had to re-enact that part over & over & over... sigh, I have to remember that he's a boy and will always think that fire is cool). And in return for the awesomeness that was his birthday (that's funny, my spellchecker didn't mark awesomeness as an incorrect word) John decided to show his appreciation by suddenly turning into a monkey and attempting to climb on every available surface in our apartment.

It started when he got a time-out and I put him screaming into his crib. After about 20 seconds the screaming stopped and I was mid-way through asking Michael, “Did that sound like a door opening?” when the plonking of 2-year-old feet was heard banging down the hall and a little head popped around the corner. We were so shocked we couldn't even be mad at him, and instead got the video camera and made him re-enact the escape.


Apparently he learned to pull himself up to the top rim, balance somewhat precariously while he swung his legs over, then slowly lower himself until he was low enough to plop down to the ground. The whole exercise took him about 8 seconds. I noted while watching this escapade that “he's going to topple over and fall right on his head” which is exactly what he did the next time he tried it during his afternoon nap. That's one major problem with having tile floors everywhere. Ouch.

Unfortunately the large purple goose-egg on his forehead did nothing to deter his enthusiasm for this endeavor because I woke that night at 2am to the pinging of DVDs on the ground next to our bed. The little goober had climbed out of his crib, retrieved a DVD from our room, taken it out to the living room to try to watch it, climbed up on a table and took a picture frame from a shelf on the wall, and who-knows-what-in-the-world-else-he-did or how long he had been awake at all!!!!! And because he was having so much fun climbing everywhere he decided the next day to climb on the kitchen counter to retrieve snacks from a shelf that's about parallel with my head.

Of course he didn't know how to get back in his crib or get down from the counter, so needless to say we've been a bit worried about the little monkey's safety. So, back to my main point at the beginning of this post, which was about John's birthday... the main present he got from mom & dad came 2 days after his birthday when we took a trip out to Ikea and bought him a big-boy bed.

He has been excited for naps and bedtime ever since and takes up chanting “new bed! new bed!” at regular intervals. He still gets up and plays for a while sometimes, but at least he can get himself back into bed when he gets tired (which, since he turned 2 is, basically, never).
Oh, and Emily is growing like a weed (6 weeks old and finally fitting in 0-3month clothes instead of just newborn stuff) and, of course, she is just as beautiful as ever.

Happy Presidents Day

Things have been more up-tempo lately as we've returned somewhat to normal life... I've started going back to teaching Institute with Michael on Friday nights and I'm also getting back in my Primary calling. On top of that, Emily decided she wanted to start getting enormous, so she eats about every hour of the day. Thankfully she gives me a respite at night when she sleeps 3 hours at a time like clockwork, but it still means that we have fallen behind on some of our usual routines. However, John has been remarkably adaptable to everything, taking it in stride when he has to wait for something because mom has to feed the baby. He still insists on kissing his sister at least a dozen times a day and has started sharing his toys, food, pacifier, etc. Anything he enjoys and thinks she would want as well. The other day I left Emily on her changing pad and went to get a diaper. When I came back, John had lined up all of his rubber ducks next to her so she could play with them.

Another relatively new development for John is his desire to talk on the phone. He sees us use our phones and, naturally, wants to copy what mommy & daddy are doing. However, he doesn't quite understand the concept of non-face-to-face communication so he will sit with the phone at his ear not saying a word for minutes at a time. However boring this may seem to me, if Michael is out somewhere and one of us happens to call the other, John will insist on “talking” to his daddy on the cell phone. And by “talk” I mean he wanders around the apartment with the phone up to his ear while he listens to Michael tell him about his day.

His affinity for this cell phone thing was emphasized by the following experience:
One song that I am requested to sing several dozen times a day is “The Daddy Song” from the Primary Children's Hymnbook (actually it's called “Daddy's Homecoming” but John has shortened it for easier reference-- the link for the song is HERE.) John loves to follow along, interjecting a word here and there and doing actions along with me: clap hands, climb on knees, hug, cheeks, kiss.
Anyway, I was getting tired of daddy always getting the forefront in the song department so I decided to throw in “The Mommy Song” from the same book (HERE) and subsequently made up some more actions for our mommy song. The first line begins “When my mother calls me,” at which point I put my hands up to my mouth to amplify the word, as if hollering out to someone in another room. The other night we were trying to entertain John and I began singing “the mommy song” with usual actions. At the end of that first line I had my hands up around my mouth “calling” out as usual and I asked a busy little John, who was happily running in circles around the room at the time, “John, can you 'call' with momma?” To which he stopped suddenly and put his hand up to his ear as if holding a cell phone and looked at me expectantly like, “ok, now what?” It was so unexpected that Michael & I just burst out laughing. John just realized we weren't singing anymore so he continued running happily in circles. Just one small way technology has changed the way we interact with each other.

OK, so here are a few more web albums:

More Jan 2008

Feb 2008

monkeys & more

And let me leave you with a parting thought... we had rented a car for 2 months (hallelujah, it has been heavenly!) but we are on our SECOND rental because the first one failed to live up to my standard of not containing any disgusting, filthy, disease-carrying vermin. That's right, we started finding little cockroaches IN THE CAR. And these suckers were FAST. We would try to kill them (OK, Michael would try to kill them, I would try to keep from squealing with horror) but they would dive UNDER the seat and hide somewhere in the nether regions of the "boot". Thankfully the rental company agreed that this was a less-than-desirable attribute for a car that someone actually wants to SIT in, so they brought us another one. Even now it gives me the complete willies just the think about it. And now I've shared it with you. You're welcome.

You know you're a parent when...

Ahhh remember when certain songs, smells or tastes could instantly take you back to a certain place in your life. For me when I smell nice and ripe peaches I can close my eyes and I'm transported to Okayama Japan where I tasted some of the best peaches I've ever tasted. Or when I listen to Bruce Springsteen sing Blood Brothers I am back in a tiny little apartment at BYU with my roommates. Imagine if you will an "oldie" on the radio, instead of taking you back to a memory of younger days (and I know we're new at this parenting thing), is switched to a new and.....uh different memory.

So Erin and I were driving to teach Institute on Friday night (Feb 8) and when we pulled into the parking lot an homage to the Spice Girls and their current reunion tour was playing on the radio, now what does the Spice Girls singing "Wannabe" bring to mind to you?

Is it this:


Or is it this:


If it is the second image, of Abby and Runt doing some karaoke then well you too watch WAY too many kids movies and have seen Chicken Little as many times as we have.

Here's to the memories, the ones that were associated with our pasts B.K. (Before Kids), and how quickly they're replaced......

GONG XI FA CAI!!!

Happy Chinese New Year everyone! We are celebrating today by sitting around in our pajamas, taking pictures, and eating Chinese food (stir-fry beef with snow peas... mmm...) Michael bought this adorable little dress for Emily and even though it sort of drowns her we couldn't resist putting it on her to celebrate Chinese New Year. The official holiday lasts 3 days, but really it's the whole month leading up to it, even afterwards. It like saying Christmas is celebrated on Dec. 25, but really it's the month leading up to it that we consider "Christmas".

We've learned about some fun Chinese traditions while we've been here but the most interesting have to be regarding post-partum traditions for new moms. They are not allowed to bathe or wash their hair for 30 days after giving birth... they also are encouraged not to consume cold drinks or food for 100 days. It all has to do with yin & yang, which, to be quite honest, I still really don't understand. But I actually found some illuminating websites that gave overall views of these post-partum traditions, referred to as the Confinement period, and they included avoiding excess sweating, staying out of the wind, etc. Personally, I find it too much to think about when you're already trying to adjust to having a new baby. Also, I'm afraid I would go stir-crazy staying in the house and have already found myself desperate to get out occasionally. When Emily was one week old, John went with friends to the zoo and Michael took Emily & I out for a $4 hot chocolate at Starbucks.
My internet connection isn't that great today, so I'm not going to post our web album just yet... but we did want to add some pics of our little cutie. She's eating a lot and starting to fill out her newborn clothes & diapers... she's also opening her eyes more than those first pictures so we thought you'd want to see them.

I know I'm biased, but MAN she's beautiful!

I also took some "point of reference" pictures so you could see how perfectly tiny she is... here's her next to my cell phone...

...and my tweezers...

...oh, and that's right, this is her projectile vomiting. Honestly I can't believe she did that RIGHT when I snapped the picture. Nice timing.

Finally... BABY PICTURES!

OK, so we're a little more updated now and I've finally got a good connection on my computer so I can post some pictures of our new baby girl! Emily Anne is doing very well and all the Weist family here are so happy. Without dragging out a long delivery story here are the basics: I woke up with contractions around midnight, we got to the hospital by 2:30am, we managed to wake up our friends the Rhees and Michael rushed John over there where he slept for the rest of the morning, I was still in labor by 4:45am (BAD contractions, no epidural again because we had no idea how long it would take, or if she would come super-quick like John did) so the doctor broke my water and 10 minutes later at 4:56am Emily was born! Phew! She pretty much slept for the first 24 hours of her life so most of these pictures show her with her eyes closed.

She is a tiny little thing that has filled up our hearts so quickly and easily. Even John adores his baby sister and he is having fun being a big brother. He helps me get diapers when we need to change her, and anytime he sits for more than 2 minutes next to her he has to give her a kiss on the forehead. :) It's really so adorable. We've also seen a new side to John since Emily came home with us. He always recognizes when a baby cries, if we hear one in our building somewhere or maybe one a church, and he'll say "Baby sad" looking all concerned, but not making much ado about it... but when he's in the room when his SISTER cries he'll get very quiet and still, put his head down and burst into great big heaving sobs with fat teardrops running down his cheeks. We were honestly astounded the first time he did that... he has NEVER cried like that about anything else. He is such a tender soul he simply can't stand to see his sister sad.

Thankfully, though, she is not a crier... in fact, she is a remarkably easy baby-- eating well, sleeping a lot (she's already got herself into a regular 4-hour schedule, which I think qualifies her as a certified genius), looking around at everything when she's awake, never making a peep... she's a nice change of pace after dealing with a whirling dervish of a son every day. :) SO... the first set of pictures are of her first day (JAN. 18) and our brief time at the hospital. I could only stand one night there after I realized the hospital bed was probably made with petite Asian women in mind... not only was it about 4 inches too short, it felt like I was sleeping on a board covered by a sheet-- NOT exactly the most comfortable way to spend your days after you've had an episiotomy.

The second set are from our friend Eric Oh... he and his family came to visit 2 days after she was born and he took a TON of pictures. Our branch here has been SO ridiculously good to us-- visiting, bringing us meals EVERY day (at one point we ran out of room in our tiny fridge because of all the leftovers), even taking John to the zoo so he could get out of the apartment for a while (and we could have some peace... we took the opportunity to take Emily on her first outing to the mall and got some hot chocolate at Starbucks.) There will be plenty more pictures to come, but this should give you a general idea of our beautiful little girl!

Emily Birthday

Emily (Eric Oh's pics)

New Years 2008

OK, so I know we need to post about the biggest thing to happen recently (I mean, a baby is a pretty big deal) but since this blog is the only form of scrapbook we have right now I feel this obsessive need to keep things in order. Thus, I'm entering a quick post about our visit to Singapore over New Years where we met Grandma & Grandpa Snow!!! We spent a lovely 10 days with them in KL and now almost 3 weeks later John is still asking for "Momma & Poppa Snow" (he can't say the "S" so it comes out like "Hnow"). I've sort of narrated our time with them by the captions on the pictures in the web album, so click on the link below for all the details.

G&G Snow Visit 2008