THANKSGIVING PART 2: HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHARON!

having my sisters over for thanksgiving break also meant that we could celebrate my middle sister, sharon's, birthday together.we all got to spend the day together, went to Stella's for dinner, and then came home to celebrate with a tres leches cake from La Sabrosita Bakery.

 this little lady is super special, and if you are lucky enough to know her, you know i'm right. i always feel lucky to have her as my sister and friend!  we love you sharon! 

dad skyped in from korea!

THANKSGIVING PART I

I think I’ve said this here before, but truly an unexpected perk/blessing of having a baby is seeing our families get excited about the baby. It's neat seeing them interact because it’s like hey! you two are related! You guys are going to know each other forever! We were pretty excited for the Thanksgiving holiday because it meant more time with family and more time to be around people who are somehow almost more excited about the baby than we are. Almost.

We spent the first part of the break with K.’s family and I have spent – count ‘em, 1,2,3,4,5, yes FIVE, Thanksgivings with the Lu’s, but this was the first one with a baby! Sloane also hit her four month mark and she is more interactive than ever, grabby with her hands, and the cutest chub baby I have ever seen. We had our Thanksgiving Day meal with my sister-in-law’s bf’s parents, who welcomed us with open arms and were super sweet. Also, there was turducken involved. Yes, a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. I still can't wrap my head around this.  Afterwards we had a nap to end all naps, and then we did as the crazies do and went out to the mall at 12AM.  I was tickled cause I had chick-fil-a at the mall’s food court at 12:30AM. We scored some socks and we stumbled home, back into bed. (If you're wondering,, the baby was not with us for this expedition.)  The next morning, we ran some errands, did some more shopping (I know!) and came back home to have hot pot for lunch – a Lu family tradition. If you don’t know what hot pot is, it’s kind of like shabu shabu,, and if you don’t know what that is, it’s like fondue.  The Chinese style is to have it with soy sauce, bbq paste, green onion mixture, and you cook thinly sliced meats, seafood, and all sorts of vegetables in the hot broth. SO good.

One last thing of note before I proceed on to the photos: K’s grandmother doesn’t speak English, but she speaks Mandarin to Sloane, and even though I can’t understand a thing she is saying, it is kind of the best. Sloane responds to it just as much as when we are talking to her in English and it makes me happy to see K’s grandmother so happily and enthusiastically interacting with Sloane in her own language. It is going to be so interesting to see the effect of Sloane’s language abilities as she is exposed to Mandarin, Korean and English!

VISITORS, IN SQUARE LITTLE BOXES

So... I finally started using this app on my iPhone called Diptic which allows you to make collages with several of your photos, and now I can’t stop won’t stop. Here are a few photos of such shenanigans capturing some visitors that Sloane has had over the past week and what she did with them:

 nibbling on fingers with hilz

riding a dog with sharon and paul

that time sloane laid down a big one while sitting on laura

Other photo editing apps that I use often: VSCO CAM, Camera+, Phonto, Squareready, Afterglow, Over, and of course, Instagram.

SISTERS

I took so many photos this past weekend that it’s taking me a while to wade through. But here one here is one of my favorites, for obvious reasons. My sisters and my bebe all together in one frame: happiness.  

WHEN IT'S WORTH IT, IT'S WORTH IT

Today is Monday, which means it’s been four days since Thanksgiving, but it feels like it’s been a month! A month of awesomeness, to be sure, especially because it was also filled to the brim with activities that involved family. But I would really love another weekend to recover from this past one. This is how the holidays go, though, and you just gotta dive in, knowing that you will probably come up exhausted at the other end...because the time you get to spend with those loved ones is worth it.

We went down to Virginia Beach for a couple of days to visit with K’s family, and then we came back up to Richmond to meet my sisters and celebrate a birthday. I will probably share a few photos from what went down this past weekend over the next few days, but for now, I leave you with a photo of our little dragon.  She slept wonderfully when we were in VA Beach, but when we came back home, she decided that she would stay up all night, two nights in a row, getting herself all worked up. It was rough, and my body may or may not have tried to shut itself down at one point, but the morning after the second night, she fell asleep in our bed with my hand on her stomach. We lay there like that for about an hour. She would wake up suddenly to make sure my hand was there and then fall asleep again. It was sweet, soothed my weariness, and somehow, made those long nights totally worth it.

VISITING THE ROBINSONS

it stinks when good friends move away. but you know what's awesome? when they don't move that far away, and you can visit them in their new situation, their new lives, and see that they are doing more than just dandy. we did such a thing this past weekend with our good friends martha and ian when we were in their area, and boy was it good to see little simone running around (on her two little legs! all by herself!). we picked up dimsum for lunch and marveled at how big (simone) and chub (sloane) were getting.  

HI!

dino baby 

you gotta love the faces

peeks of martha's beautiful home

i could have pored over that atlas all day 

the little lady

she's on trend with her monochrome outfit

that face! and sloane's double-chin face

group hug 

the gals 

tending.

rockin the side swept look

THAT TIME A BABY WENT TO GO WATCH AN NBA GAME....

...she was pretty impressed. 

a baby (15 weeks!!) fan

she stayed up during the entire game! and then passed out afterwards. 

our little trooper.

TO KICK OFF THE WEEKEND.....

hello from the lu family, 

and from sloane's cheeks. 

because they are an entity of their own. 

we are going out of town this weekend - 

i am looking forward to hanging out with friends, and taking sloane to her first basketball game.!

hope you all enjoy your pre-short-week-at-work-cause-of-thanksgiving weekend!

and some more, cause they are just that delicious..