Leaving soon!

We leave tomorrow to go on vacation! We are soooo excited to go to a warmer climate and see some dear friends. I may or may not have time/a good connection to post while we're gone. I will say that the last two days Reister has been sleeping a little later (i.e. almost 7am). Hopefully this will continue for the next 3 weeks, as we'll be in the same room with him in the pack'n'play.

Some cute things Reister's been doing lately:
- still "cooking" with plastic bowls and spoons
- when we try to get him to say his name by asking him "What's your name?", he replies "Name"
- he's saying mess, and can identify one when he sees one (no matter who made it)
- he's giving his sippy cups to his stuffed animals
- he says "ma dadda", which we interpret to mean "my daddy"; alternately he could be starting to say mama but realize he's talking to dadda and change mid syllable
- he says "a yi" in the local language which means "aunt" and is the appropriate way to address other women about my age and older. One time this past week on the bus he started saying "a yi, a yi", trying to get the woman opposite him to look at him. The local women love it that he can say it and he really does say it to almost every woman he sees. He can also say "jie jie" which is big sister and he has a real affiinity for little girls - they normally give him plenty of attention. He does not discriminate skin colors, because he likes local little girls and our American friends' daughters. Of course he enjoys little boys like his buddy Micah as well, he just doesn't say "ge ge" (older brother) quite as often.

Well, hope you are all doing well and blessings on you - whether you're back into the daily groove of work and school or about to travel like we are!

Daddy's sweater

Reister found Micah's sweater and wanted to put it on - how cute is he?

My Friend "Ba-daow"

Reister tries to say his buddy Micah's name but it comes out sounding something like "Ba-daow". Actually he's getting better and better at it but initially it sounded really funny. But it's definitely him trying to say "Micah" because every time he sees him or a picture of him he says it. A couple of weeks ago Micah's family moved to a new apartment and we kept Micah that morning so his parents could focus on getting all their stuff moved from one place to another without chasing kids around. Here's Micah and Reister enjoying playing inside our coffee table/toy box. Reister had never gotten in before but when Micah wanted to play inside it, Reister thought it was a good idea!

Correction

I just wanted to make a correction to my last post. Somehow I had a lapse in my thinking and thought Reister's "regular" time to wake up was 7:30am. I want to say that his actual "regular" waking time is between 6am and 6:30am. That day was a fluke. It has become a very frusterating thing for me that he wakes up so early because I try my best to get up at 6am to have my own time of peace and quiet for about an hour (assuming he'll be content in his crib until 7am even if he wakes up before that); BUT normally he still starts to cry and is VERY ready to get out by 6:30-6:45 at the latest (so much for peace & quiet). We've tried altering his day time sleep in order to get him to sleep later; we've also tried putting him to bed a little later at night (normally he goes to sleep around 7:30-8pm). But nothing seems to work. I guess this is the struggle of every mom of young kids. But if any one has any tips, I'd love to hear them.

Happy New Year!

I just realized that I should take advantage of the time difference and say that 2008 is great so far! (it's 9:15am on January 1 here in the Shining City) I guess we're officially OLD in that we didn't make it until midnight last night. We put Reister to bed at his normal time (7:30pm) and stayed up until 10:45pm or so but I was falling asleep watching a show from about 9:30pm on... Ha! Anyway, I was glad we didn't stay up too late when Reister woke up at his normal time (7am) and I wasn't exhausted. I hope you all had a wonderful New Years Eve, whatever you did, however late you stayed up. We have plans to go to my local b.f.f.'s home for lunch and to Casa Mia for one of our American friend's birthday. Hey, that means I don't have to cook at all today! :)

I thought I'd leave you with this cute smiling boy....

Christmas Post 2

Here's our family's Christmas picture - a little late. This is not at our house, it's at our local Italian Bistro, Casa Mia.


Here's part of our group gathering on Christmas day. We didn't get many pictures so I thought I'd just post this one. We went our friends' home and had a gift exchange (we had each drawn names a couple months earlier), visited & ate lots of good food.


Here's Reister opening one of his gifts. We had already helped him open a couple others and after that he went on his own initiative and found this one and started peeling off the paper.

Christmas Post 1

Reister had fun with one of our friends last week during a small party we threw - he loved "feeding" him sugar cookies. He also enjoyed eating them himself!

We let Reister open his presents in stages (to keep things interesting). This is the tool bench we found here for him. He thought it was pretty cool.

More Dai Pics

Okay - finally, our internet connection is getting back to normal... Here we are in the Dai village. This lady was happy to pose with her son (?) and me and Reister.

Here is a Dai house - this is the typical Dai architecture. I thought they were really neat, so different than the concrete block apartment buildings found in the cities here.

the group pic

This is getting a little late to be posting Thanksgiving pictures but hey, I still have lots to post but our internet is too slow to do too many at a time... so I'll keep posting. (probably until Christmas when I'll need to start posting those pics)
Below is the group that we spent Thanksgiving with. A lot of them are single friends, our friends Mark & Kim are in orange, with their boys on the bottom right (Josiah, Josh, & Jordan). I thought this was a pretty good picture - everyone is looking and smiling as far as I can tell, EVEN Reister! he's getting pretty good at that - smiling for the camera.


It was quite a crowd - everyone pitched in by cooking or bringing something and it was all tasty! We participated in the Moore family tradition of writing what you were thankful for on a paper leaf and taping it to the "Thanksgiving Tree" after you shared it with the group. That was really neat. We ended the day with some P&W led by Jerod. It was a really special day. Thanks to our Father that gives us all things!

Center of Attention

Here's Reister with some Ai Ni minority girls that worked at the Rainforest Park we visited. They LOVED him, especially when he started giving kisses on the cheek away. We really enjoyed seeing these different minority groups, even if they were in a "tourist" park. :)

Big Brother!?

Is Reister ready to be a big brother? Well, he may not be now, but he's got till the beginning of next July to get ready. That's right, we're expecting again - you can see our baby ticker on the right to see how many days left and what the baby probably looks like. We did go to a local hospital on Monday and get an ultrasound but it wasn't quite the high tech experience that we got last time with Reister at about this stage, but it was still nice to see a little baby. I've had worse nausea this time around but it seems like it's possibly getting better. What's fun is that it seems like a lot of friends I have (around the world) are expecting their babies around the same time we are. We hope to find out the gender of the baby while we're on vacation in Thailand in February. We'll keep you posted via this blog! Once my belly starts showing, I'll post some belly pics.

Village

Well, I guess I can only upload one picture at a time. I try for more and always fail. So here's another picture from our trip. We visited a Dai cultural village and this was a pumpkin field with the Mekong River in the background on the outskirts of the village. It was a really neat time and we really liked the Dai people. Hopefully I'll be able to post a cute one of Reister with a Dai baby.

Trip Pics

I plan to add photos as the internet allows...

This was in a cool rainforest park that we visited - they had this swing on a LONG rope that went out over a small pond or something. I did it first and two of the Moore boys went after me. I thought it was lots of fun, especially when they spun you. (Each time you swung back to the platform, they would swing you out again with more momentum)

Trip Con't

Well, i've been trying to post pictures but our internet is just TOO slow... Maybe next year... ha ha

Trip

We went on a trip to a small city in the southwest part of our country - we went to see our friends the Moores for Thanksgiving. It was a lot of fun and we took a lot of pictures that I need to download to the computer and post.... But our internet has been pretty slow lately so it might take me a while to get that done. I just wanted to post a quick one to say what we've been up to!