Friday, August 25, 2006

Evan Update

Just watching Evan is all the entertainment we'll ever need. It blows me away at what he understands. I try asking him to do things that I think are out of his understanding, and he always seems to comprehend it or part of it.
So what is he doing these days?
I taught him to hold up his index finger when I asked him "How old are you, Evan?" "One!!!"
He folds his arms and sometimes bows his head when he thinks its time to eat. I could be moving things around on the dinning table and he'll fold his arms!
He sits patiently on a chair outside the kitchen baby gate waiting for his milk. I taught him to sign "drink" while we waited for the microwave. One day he walked up to the kitchen baby gate when I was in the kitchen and he signed it to me without any coaching. It's so nice to know what he wants now!
He loves doing hand signs to nursery rhymes, and we're working on getting him to put his hands together for 'itsy bitsy spider". He just wiggles his fingers with his hands apart. Just cute.
I put new shoes on him and it was like he knew they were new and was happy to try them on. He walked around the living room for 20mins non-stop. He'd walk to a corner and turn around really quick and head off to another corner! So silly!
He loves to blow raspberries on Mark.
He'll collect toys and put them in the basket of his tricycle and hop on his bike and wait there until you push him around the livingroom on it. The other day I pushed him on the bike into Mark lying on the ground. Mark reacted silly, and Evan just erupted into laughter!
He'll start waving "bye bye" if you walk to the door with keys in your hand. And sometimes he'll want you to pick him up to take him with you.
His new thing is stacking blocks and clapping his hands when he's done. Then he knocks them over and claps some more.
On some days he just doesn't like anything on our couches and he will go around pulling all the pillows off the couches.
He loves to talk. A lot and loud.He still loves to take my cell phone when Mark's on speaker phone and walk around the house talking to daddy.

There's one thing that's been worrying me. He's hitting his head on things lately. Like the walls, the stairs, the ground, the couch, and on his toys. He'll even hit his face and head with is own hands. I've read up on it, and it's supposed to be normal, its a self soothing thing... but how's it soothing if he cries cause he just smacked his own face with his hands? Maybe there's nothing wrong with him, and maybe he's imitating behavior he's seen somewhere. I don't know...

We've finally got him back on schedule with sleeping. He'll go to bed at 9 and wake up at 8 or 9 and take naps at 12 and 4. It took a lot longer than before to get him to sleep on schedule. Most likely because he's so much more mobile and taking time out for sleep isn't on the top of his list. Now we're going to Boston and Maine for Labor Day weekend, and I have a feeling we're going to have a lot of work to do when we get back.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

your own pollock

Now, you can create your own Jackson Pollock masterpiece without the mess!http://www.jacksonpollock.org/ *hint: click to change colors. Happy Painting!

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

before & after

Oct 2005
Aug 2006


*Oct picture taken by Brian

Monday, August 14, 2006

Virtual Earth + Real Estate = The Best Website EVER

You've got to check out www.zillow.com. Look up your house value if you have one, and find out comparable prices in your neighborhood. If you're thinking about moving, you can check out where the more affordable houses are in potential areas of interest.

...Or check out your the value of your friends' houses to see how much money they have :) Yep, you know it, Jerin!

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Evening Parade at the Marine Barracks


A beautiful evening to watch "The President's Own" and "The Commandant's Own" in the Evening Parade at the Marine Barracks. Can't forget the Silent Drill Platoon, with their mad rifle throwing skillz. Those things are 10.5 pounds each! How do you practice for that?! Watching the Marines was like watching It's a Small World at Disneyland--so mechanical and synchronized. And punctual. Marines always start on time, end on time. Exactly 8:45 start, 10:00 end. Amazing. Wish I could say that about the other components! I kid, I kid.

Friday, August 11, 2006

What the Heo!?

First Season "Last Comic Standing" Winner Dat Phan. He's frickin hilarious!

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Button Happy

Sorry for the delay in updating... even Jerin was heckling me about it. So I started writing this really long update, and who comes along to press the bright green power button on the cpu? yep. Its his next favorite button to press besides the dvd drive. He likes the dvd drive because you can put things in it and pull yourself up with it from a sitting to standing position. The masking tape I put on it was a bit of a deterrent, but when he's determined, its as good as a wet noodle.

It's SO hot outside. DC has even declared it a code Red with ozone alert because of the poor air quality. It may be 100 degrees but with the humidity the heat index is saying it feels like 110 degrees. eckh... There's an excessive heat warning till 6pm tonight. So they're handing out free water and free bus rides all over the place. Yesssss, I feel SO much better...

Mark's sister Rose spent part of the weekend with us. It was nice to have her here so Evan could have someone else to play with and I'm sure Lucy loved the extra pampering attention. I took Rose downtown to catch the chinatown bus back to NY. That was the first time its ever taken me only 20 mins to get into DC! I don't make it downtown too often because of traffic, so I figured I'd spend some time there. I didn't know it was going to get so hot, so I took Evan to the National Museum of American Art for some culture and AC. He's in a new stage where he likes to test out the noises he can make with his voice. His latest noise, sounds very much like a police siren. Lets just say I got tired of getting looks.
Next stop, the zoo. I figured Evan was old enough to start appreciating the animals at the zoo. He was so cute! Every time he saw an animal he'd say "da!" or "aah!" That started out being his imitation of the whimpering Lucy does, then it evolved to the noises he'd make for anything on four legs. He especially got excited seeing animals that moved around a lot, made noises, and went up close to him. Its so much fun to see him excited about new things. We had a good time even though we both were so hot and sweating bullets and had to pay $16 for parking!

Andrew Liew and Andersen stopped by for a visit as well on their way to Baltimore. It was so good to finally see and hold little Andersen! I was so jealous that Mark was there when Andersen was just a few hours old.
They got Evan this really cute blue robe for his birthday. I was so busy admiring how cute it was I nearly missed seeing that Liew had even embroidered Evan's name on it! They also gave me a turtle! And not just any turtle. Its one that's solar powered and lights up at night! hehehe ok so its not a real turtle. Its meant to light up your yard, but I thought it was too cool to put outside with the dog poop. So its sitting on the table in my pink room. (the pink room is the room that was painted bright pink by the previous owners, but I've kept it pink cause its my crafty room. Mark thinks its hideous and always tries to convince me to repaint it.)

Our New Pet: One thing I don't like about Virginia is the HUGE bugs here, and the mass quantities there are. They all seem to find there way into our house every summer. This is one of them. We had to go online to find out it's a wheel bug. We found out first had that it likes to eat blood when it killed and ate the other bugs in the jar! Or perhaps it was so hungry it resorted to eating the other bugs?
In our basement we've caught creatures that look like huge spiders, about the size of your thumb, but jump about 3 ft in the air when you try to squish them. Everyday, guaranteed, we come across silverfish, ants, and flies. There's little bugs that look like grains of sand that run around our sinks. And there are the daddy long leg spiders that try to spin webs in the worst locations. They're not too smart, but I sometimes leave them alone if they're in a hard to reach place hoping they'll eat the other bugs. Anyway, I've learned to toughen up and deal with them, but the one thing that I can't deal with are ticks. I've found them on Lucy, on me, and even on Evan. That was the last straw because ticks can carry Lyme disease. So I spent an afternoon laying pesticide granules all around our house and covering every inch of our lawn. I hope it works. Any other ideas? I'm SO open to them.

In Evan News:
He said his first cuss word the other day. Mark was sitting on the stairs eating a plum, Evan saw it and came waddling over. "MUM! Mum mum mum mum!" Sorry not for Evans, and Mark quickly finished it and popped it in his mouth. Evan was so let down after anticipating food. "Aaaahhhhh, Dam!" I heard it all the way from the kitchen. "WHAT did you say?!" We were rolling in laughter, but poor Evan still had a look of disappointment on his face. "Mum!"
We think it was a cross of him saying "da" (his way of saying dad) and "mum". Well, glad it was just a fluke and not a word he likes to repeat.
Our friend's kid, Abe, used to say "see it!" all the times he saw something he recognized. You can understand that a little 1.5 yr isn't going to enunciate. So little Abe just slurred it out as "sheit!" Repeating it anywhere, anytime. You can't help but laugh.

We also 'celebrated' Evan's first birthday again. We went back to watch the video from NY of him going at his vegan cake and the video was all screwed up. We taped over an old tape and something went wrong and we got big horizontal stripes of death of the old and new video and mixed audio on the screen! So we have a video of cute little Evan eating his first cake to strobe lights, to disco bowling, and to the not so cute tune of the Humpy Dance.
So for our own peace of mind, we redeemed our "free birthday cake" coupon from Safeway and staged the whole thing over again.

Meanwhile, back on the Chang Ranch... We painted our living room this Sat. We've been going back and forth on colors since we moved in the place 2 yrs ago! I wanted a color that was sophisticated and modern but not too out there. We'd like it to help up the visual value of the house when we decide to sell. So, its light french grey. It actually turned out more blue than gray, and I was a bit disappointed, but we finished painting anyway. Now its starting to grow on me. We painted 3 walls and we thought about doing something dramatic and different on the fourth wall to transition to the dinning room. I'm thinking maybe some really mod wall paper. Or big square panels of shellacked wood or really textured silk fabric. For a while I really wanted to try decoupaging a wall with a couple shades of copper colored pieces of paper because of the great shine and texture it would create. Anyone with other ideas? Winner gets an all expense paid stay at the Chang Hotel to admire their creation! ;)

I guess that's about it for now. We have a busy Monday ahead of us. Evan's got a play date with George Washington University, where they want to hook him up to machines and see how he responds. :) I wonder if these tests are really a ploy to determine if he's up to par to be admitted to GWU when he's older? The new early admission registration, your DNA sample please.