Winter Fun

Here is the summary of our January:

• Emily is potty trained!! Yay! We are so proud of her. It took about 10 days. We went straight from diapers to big kid underwears. For the first day, we changed eight pairs of pants. For the second day, four. For the third day, two ... But we had accidents on and off for the whole week although she used the toilet successfully at Alice's house as well as church. Ten days later, she never had any accidents (of course, we still put the diapers on her at night). The day when my mom left, she went to the toilets unassisted. After that, when I followed her to the bathroom, she would shut me out and wave bye-bye ... For the first several times when we went out, I always brought a spare pants just in case. But we never used it. Our little girl suddenly grew up! It was amazing to see how fast she progressed each day.


• My mom went back to China on January 21. She had a great time and she will miss many people she met here. She is looking for a group of Christians to meet at home. I pray that she will find one that can feed her spiritual hunger soon. As soon as my mom left, our two kids were on the same nap schedules in the afternoons: from two to four. That gave me some time to clean, to prepare for the dinner, or to rest. While my mom was here, Emily learned quite a few Chinese. I'm glad that she still speaks most of them to me after my mom left.


• David and I celebrated our third anniversary. We had dinner at Bob's and had dessert at Cheesecakefactory. Thank you Sweetheart for walking with me for these memorable three years! How time flies and how things have changed! We were interviewed for our church Life-long Love class right before our anniversary. That brought back so many fond memories before we were married. I can't wait to see where God brings us to three years later!


• Andy is rolling and moving. He is also a content independent player. He can sit on the floor playing for half an hour before he looks up and gives you a sweet smile. His eyes continue following his sister wherever she is. Emily always wins his smiles. Emily on the other hand loves teaching her little brother. She picked up the coaster on the dining table and pointed to the cow:"Andy, Andy, this is a COW!" She took a birthday candle to Andy's exersaucer:"Andy, look! this is a candle!" ... She talks to Andy and sings to Andy. She also pretended to read to Andy. One day I caught her reading Jesus' story to Andy while she was holding a BabyBug magazine! When Andy grabs her blanket or her hair, she told me:" Andy doesn't know not to grab my blanket (hair)." Whenever I fed her something, she would ask me:" Does Andy want some also?"


• Emily loves singing, dancing and watching the kids videos. Her favorite songs this month are: Jesus Loves Me; B-I-B-L-E; This Is My Commandment. She is very sensitive and helpful. Most of time all we needed to stop her or bring her to tears was a stern look or a firm No. When David picked up the clean clothes from the dryer to put them in the draw, Emily brought the rest of the clothes to him as soon as she saw some of them still in the dryer. One day when I was praying before the meal without holding Emily's hand (since she already started eating and got her hands dirty), she reached out her hand to me:" Mommy, can I pray also?" One night David prayed with her before bed:" Dear God, thank you for Mommy, Daddy, Andy, Puppydog, ..." After prayer, Emily said, "Daddy, pray for Emily also!" This morning the first thing out of Emily's mouth when David picked her up was "Daddy, Jesus loves me!" She says "please" "sorry" all the time now. She says "thank you" many times without prompt too.


• David gave a presentation to recruit people to do LST in China this summer. It had a great turnout. Hopefully a few teams will be formed after this.


• The coldest part of the winter has come. We had two icy weather in one month. We were almost house bond. But we managed to have some winter fun. We bought a climber slide to put in the backyard. Emily loves it.


• We had to hire a foundation company to repair the foundation. It ended up costing more than we had expected. But they did a good job and we had peace of mind.
  

Today it's freezing outside. Here is what our neighbors were doing: The kids set up a hocky goal and played ice-hocky right in front of our house. See one kid was holding a snowboard. He had fun sliding down the front yard. I took a picture from our window.

David stayed at home because of the icy weather. Emily got to watch video with Daddy.

But most of time, she had to watch videos by herself

Here is a snowman that we built from the previous snow. The red flower was from Andy's Baby Blessing on Jan. 9th.

Emily learned a new vocabulary: Icycle





Playing with snow





I couldn't find Emily's gloves. She put mine on.







When the weather was nice, we did have some outdoor fun: slides, stroller walks, etc. Here are some pictures of Emily on her slide. We also put up a tunnel for her with the empty box. She loves it!































David joined in the fun after work.

Emily is showing Andy how to walk "Look, Andy!"


Emily is "reading" to Andy and me:

Emily normally was scared of the airplane noises. But every time after the airplane left, she waved bye-bye to it. "Bye-bye, airplane!"

Emily is helping Daddy to feed Andy

Emily said "Yay, I got the potty power!"


Here are the treats we used for her potty training (the smallest bottle has the flint vitamins):

Here is the Potty stickers. We put one on every time she had a success.

Here is a picture of her sitting on the potty for the first couple of times. Now she goes so fast that she never needs to read a book.

Emily loved riding on Grandma's back

Having fun making the butterflies out of the playdough

Here is Andy in the stroller:

Where did Emily go? There she was: in the basket under Andy's stroller seat:

Can you tell that Andy is a good player?

This is what it looked like for a week in our backyard with the foundation repairs:

We took Emily to visit a Chinese school. David and I went to another room with the principle. When we went back to Emily's classroom, she got a new hair-do! Isn't she cute?

Emily played with the new toys from Gayla (Can you see the chocolate on her face? She just looked so grown-up in this hair):

Here is our Andy. He has six teeth now. Because of the weather, we haven't had his 9 months old checkup yet. We'll update his data once we have it.

Today is the Chinese New Year. We wish all our Chinese friends and family a very Happy Chinese New Year!