Seaweed Green Pringles...Yumm

Seaweed Flavor

Poster at KB's Gym

This was on a poster at KB's gym:

At a theater, perform was ongoing.

An audience stood up and walked along a row of seat to washroom.

Few minutes late,

he walked back and asked the one who was at the No. 1 seat,

"Excuse me, have I trampled you just several minutes?"

"Yes, but never mind. I feel it's ok now."

"No, no. I don't mean to apologize to you...

I just make sure whether my seat is in this row."

A Few Random Thoughs

My daughter has a wonderful collection of cute clothes. Thanks to friends and family she has a great balance of dresses, onsies, sleepers, pants with matching shirts, and skirts. In fact as my clothes grow older, more out of date and no longer fit the same, I have become a bit envious of her ever-changing wardrobe. I realize this is primarily because she is a brand new person and thus needs clothes so she will not be naked. Also, she is constantly growing and can no longer use her barely worn stuff and moves onto her new brand-new stuff...that will soon become too small, barely worn stuff. I am sure I can't be alone in this, I love the thrill of getting new clothes, so I will have to live vicariously through her until I get can get to a store that carries my size in a price that I can afford...basically when I return to the US and can go to outlet malls or Target.

I do have another thought though, I have also wondered why we, adults, don't wear more clothes like our kids (I am not talking about onsies). I have spent hours watching my little girl, and I love her little red striped pants with red polka-dot top that has a cute little watermelon embroidered on the leg. Plus it is made out of super comfy material. Who would not want to wear something like that? However though, after mentally putting my head in place of her head when looking at a picture of her in this super cute outfit I realized I do have clothes almost just like hers - pajamas. I was so bummed when I realized this and once again I was a little jealous of my baby girl's clothes and that she can essentially wear pajamas in public and look so darn cute.

Happy Birthday Gigi!!!

Today is my mom's birthday. I hope you have good one. We love you!

Thanks Maybins!!!

About a month ago a friend I have known all my life, Emily Maybin, saw my post mentioning that AB had ezcema. Her little boy has had issues with eczema, and she wanted to share with AB the goodies that has help him along the way. We are always excited to receive a box from home, and I was especially excited to get things to help AB's nasty skin condition. So, thank you Maybin family!!!

As excited as I was about getting skin care products and medications for my little girl, she was more excited about the boxes. I have heard this will be a trend for many years to come - the kid liking the boxes more than what is in them. Hopefully she will eventually prefer to just play with the boxes rather than eat them, yumm.

Meal Time

I do not know why, but we seem to be drawn to document our mealtimes. I can understand why we take pictures of AB eating, especially when it is her first time to eat certain foods. Why do we take picture of us adults eating? Here is the truth. I am actually a good cook, but I am a bit of a lazy cook. I know how to make many good things to eat, but I just don't make them. I can give you the list why I don't go through the effort to cook the all the things I can make (it is a 5 step process to prepare any food that will be eaten raw, most foods are made entirely from scratch, my oven is the size of a loaf of bread & cooks as slow as an Easy Bake Oven...you get the idea), but I will spare you my excuses.

Essentially it is a big deal for us when I do go through the effort to make something that is not just chicken and rice or chicken and pasta.

This first photo is of AB at Pizza Hut...the nicest restaurant in town. I wanted to share it because AB is using her high chair/shopping cart cover made by Margaret Lee. AB was the envy of all the other parents there, and I loved that she was not touching the sticky high chair.

This is AB getting her first bites of Cherrios. She was not too sure what to do with them.

Here I am eating the mashed potatoes and chicken breast (that is supposed to be like chicken fried steak, minus the fried and the steak - we don't eat the beef here). I am also drinking a Coke Zero. When you cannot get Dr. Pepper, this is an okay substitution.

This one was KB's favorite, crepes with fresh blueberries and confectioners sugar. This is the first time we have ever gotten blueberries in our city. It was quite a treat!

Diaper Rash

Although AB was exclusively breast-fed until she started solids last month, she has always had a problem with diaper rash. The primary reason for the rash has been an annoying little infection that just WON'T GO AWAY. Regardless, one of the best ways, other than meds, to beat the annoying little rash is some light and air.

Since she is always on the go now it is almost impossible to get her to stay still, so recently I decided to just let her crawl around in the buff for a little bit each day. Fortunately for us, our entire apartment is tile - easy to clean up...or so I thought. This may seem bizarre to us who live in the US, or maybe not, but here the babies AB's age spend their entire days in a shirt and nothing else. The kids here do not have a problem with diaper rash. So I say she was just trying to fit in with the locals.

Since she is crawling I still had to put on her babylegs. AB loved getting to go naked. She like the cold tile. However, the day after I took this photo AB decided to poop while going sans diaper. It was so awful that I decided to abandon this idea all together. Let's just say that KB and I were unable to get to her before she crawled through it. It was SO awful.

Our Top Ten Favorite Ways to Get a Stomachache in East Asia

This is just for fun. The other day as KB was recovering from a stomach ache caused by item # 10, we began making a mental list of all the ways we or other people we know have gotten a stomach ache. It got kind of long so we decided to write it down. Below is what we came up with.

There are countless methods for achieving a stomachache in East Asia, but the following list contains our personal favorites. LB has experienced one of these; KB has dealt with a few others. All the rest happened to other people we know.

1. Drink the water and get a friendly little sickness called Giardia. Brushing your teeth, showering with your mouth open, using wet dishes, cups or utensils, and/or sticking anything in your mouth with your wet hands falls into this category. This one usually happens to visitors who either forget or think it just won't happen to them.
2. Not washing your hands after touching anything outside of your home then touching anything that goes into your mouth and get Giardia – It is everywhere. This happens to everyone who has a habit of not washing their hands like their mamma taught them.
3. Not washing fresh food in bleach water to kill the parasites and get Giardia or pretty much anything else. We only used salt water in the beginning and after a couple little "episodes" we began using bleach water. The trick is to the use purified water to clean off the bleach water, not the local water like one of our friends did.
4. Eat the street food during the summer…this one is for those who either like to live on the edge or did not realize that developing countries don’t have food handling safety laws like refrigerating meat and other raw foods. Once again this is usually carried out by visitors; us locals call the streets with outside vendors "Hepatitis" street.
5. Swimming in the local water. This just makes my stomach turn thinking about it.
6. Eating spicy food knowing your stomach cannot handle spicy food. KB did this more than once, but in his defense each time he only ate it because someone else ordered it for us and felt obligated. We have to leave dinner early every time that happens.
7. Walk into almost any public rest room, particularly the hospital bathroom while pregnant and the smell will make your stomach ache. It was the one and only time LB was relieved to smell cigarette smoke.
8. A virus, they happen.
9. Food Poisoning. How was KB to know that the noodles of all things had been sitting out too long at the restaurant? They must have been days old.
10. Eat raw pig ear and raw pig intestine. Once again poor KB had to eat it since someone else ordered it for him. Strangely the scorpions, salted silkworms, and several days-old sun-dried fish settled fine.

Internet Woes

Living in this country poses some internet challenges. Without getting into specifics, let's just say at times doing anything that we would consider necessary on the internet is impossible. Right now using the internet is not impossible, but it is almost impossible. For 4 days now we have been unable to even send out an attachment through our e-mail. It took 3 hours to download all of our 9 text e-mails yesterday. I am currently trying to upload 1 photo with this post, so we will see if that even happens. Nevertheless I am grateful for what internet we get. Communicating to our friends and family would be too costly (phone calls) or take too long (snail mail) without it.

AB likes to find the tags on all of her toys and carry the toys by the tag in her mouth when she crawls. We are not sure if she learned this from the dog or if she figured out the practicality on her own. Either way, it is cute.

AB's Links

I love these links! I did not know that they were so multi-functional. I have always used them to attach things to AB's lay and play, but recently I have noticed that I can use them to attach her doll to her stroller (so when she ultimately drops the doll it won't land on the ground and get dirty or lost), her mirror to her bed and they are just fun for her to play with them. She played with them (here they are attached to her bed) for at least 30 minutes. At times she seem a little violent with them, but I have seen other kids do the same thing, so I am hoping it is just a normal stage of development.

Eventually she got bored and started eating the blanket she was sitting on.

Some of What We Do

If you know us personally, you know what we like to spend most of our time doing. However, most of you don't know about our job. KB will end his language study soon, and we need a visa to stay in this country. People get visas various different ways, but we are taking the job route. Therefore since last year we have been working for a U.S. based trading company. Our division does baskets. We go to factories, look at their products, and when our boss comes from the U.S. we take him to our favorite factories to order. Then we work with getting the order completed in a timely and accurate manner - this can be very difficult and frustrating!

Anyways, we often go visit the new factories to look for something fresh and new to take our boss to. These photos were from one such recent visit. We actually do not search out for these factories. Somehow the owners find us, one way or another. All the baskets we purchase are handmade and are good quality. We took this photo of me holding the basket to get an idea of the size of the basket. AB goes with us to all visits, but she and I skip the parts of the factory where the baskets are painted and fumigated.

By the way, that is real child labor going on behind me. The boy is probably 13 or 14 years old. This may be their summer part-time job, but some of these kids are really young. However, if it is between their family starving and everyone pitching in, then I guess child labor wins. KB and I do have a moral conflict over recommending this factory because of it though. We will probably ask about it before we make any decisions.

The baskets in this warehouse are typical of what we find most factories making in mass - not extremely exciting. However, all the factories have a sample room full of baskets that they can make. These are usually really interesting baskets. One of the factories we regularly visit makes baskets for Target. These baskets were probably custom designed by Target, but copyright laws here are a bit nonexistent. The factory was willing to make those same baskets for us. We declined knowing that it was wrong, but they were cute, and are probably in a Target store near you.

More 7th Month Photos

Here are a few extra that we took while playing around.

AB's 7th Month Photos

AB turned 7 months on Sunday. I take a photo of her each month with her Boppy and the Thai Silk Elephant that her daddy gave her to gage her progress. This month she was more concerned with eating the elephant's ribbon than staying still. It was a challenge.

AB Sitting

I mentioned last week that my little girl was crawling but not sitting. She is sitting now...sort of. If I "sit" her down she will stay that way until she ultimately folds herself in half after a couple minutes of reaching too far. However, when crawling she cannot put herself into a sitting position. Instead when she gets tired she just lays on her tummy.

This is her "rarrr" face. I call it that because that is the exact sound she was making when I took some of these photos. Rarrr!

AB and Daddy

Carport

Mommy Woes

As are all first time moms, I am new to being a mommy. Things happen with my daughter that I think I understand, that I have read about, that I am pretty sure I know about, but not really. I have the disadvantage of not living around anyone I can communicate with in my first language about mommy stuff. My friends and family are just one international phone call away, but somehow it is not the same. I often think back to our gathering in Arlington and with all the people who had kids before us, how I feel all my questions would be answered if I was there. I also wish I could be around my sister and her kids, so I could see what was "normal," so I did not assume that AB was either a genius or behind all of the time. I read every book I was sent on pregnancy and motherhood, but in the end they are just references to me. They do not replace the interactions that we are missing out on.

Anyways, to my point. AB has been crying a lot. Since she was about 2 months old, AB has been such a trooper when it came to nap time. I just swaddled her in her blanket, turned on the AC, turned on the air purifier, closed the curtains, and kissed her on the cheek. She was usually out cold in a couple of minutes. Not recently though. She has been crawling all over her bed, crying big tears. In the beginning it was so strange for her to cry that I felt something must be wrong. I just picked her up and she immediately feel a sleep. She was wanting to be held. As we traveled with my parents I thought she was crying because she was in a strange place. Holding her was the only way to get her to sleep. When we came back home I decided that I was going to start mommy bootcamp and work to get AB back to the wonderful sleep pattern we were in before. It did not work. After the exhaustion of the trip wore off AB refused to sleep. Once again the only way my daughter would sleep was in my arms.

On Saturday I noticed that two little teeth were starting to poke through her gums. I thought, "oh those must hurt a little." I gave her a cold teething ring and did not think about it anymore. Last night, after AB did not sleep even one wink the entire day, I called my sister. I told her the situation, and the first thing she asked was, "is she teething?" I immediately felt stupid and mean. My little girl was in pain. That is why she could not sleep. This morning I gave her some Tylenol about 20 minutes before her nap. When I put her down, she did not make a peep. I thought there was no way that her teeth could hurt that bad. I gave her a little more before her next nap, not a peep. I skipped giving her more for her third nap to see if she actually needed it that often, not a peep. Then tonight when she when down for the evening I gave her some more, not a peep. Oh the guilt I have had today! My baby was in pain, and since I had not given her Tylenol, the only source of comfort was me holding her...and I withheld that from her too! No wonder she did not take a nap for an entire day.

I wish I was around mothers all of the time. I also wish I had not waited so many days to ask someone what to do.

Our Favorites

This one is KB's favorite.

This one is my favorite. Since I have brown eyes I am amazed by her deep blue eyes.

AB Playing Around

This first picture totally explains why AB has a nasty blister on her right big toe that just won't heal.