Nice!

When we used to take Kai to the soft play area at the mall, we had to work really hard to keep him corralled in the play area, but it seems that he's finally figured out how to stay in the play area and he's also learned to make friends with the other kids.

Amusingly, Kai has also started to say, "nice!" when he's happy or pleased with something. He must have picked that one up from Nik.

Like father, like son

Nik added li hing powder to Kai's rice the other day.. Kai loved it!

I took the kids to Costco yesterday and Kai really enjoyed having Sora sitting next to him in the double-wide shopping cart.

Sora still wakes up a lot during the night, so we've been trying to do some night training. Since Sora still sleeps in our room, we end up moving out to the couch in the family room when she's crying. I'm not sure if we're making progress yet (two hours of crying and screaming the other night) and Nik and I are debating whether or not we should throw in the towel.

Kicked out of our own room

Why doesn't she sleep like this during the night?

We're also still working on making sure Sora spends adequate time on her tummy. Watching Nik play video games this morning seemed to keep Sora on her tummy for longer than usual. :P

This past weekend was a busy one for us as we saw a lot of friends and family. On Saturday, we went to Jen and Lezra's baby shower.

Spiderman/Marvel family plus Sailor Moon

We also celebrated my mom's birthday and although I'm not sure if Kai understands the concept of "birthday" yet, he certainly understands the concept of "birthday cake". He was fascinated as we put candles on my mom's cake and lit the candles. He even knows how to blow out the candles now (which made lighting the candles tricky).

Happy birthday, Po Po!

On Sunday Kai also played with Milo, Luca and Juliette while we hung out with their parents. Kai had so much fun in Juliette's sand box that we may need to make one of our own. :)

Kai loves his little sister and Sora is fascinated by her big brother. Kai still attempts to hold or hug Sora, although Sora gets a little freaked out when this happens.

Kai: "Hug baby?"

Sora isn't feeling the love

Kai requires supervision when holding Sora...

... otherwise, this happens.

Since Sora started solids, Kai also likes to try to feed her. While we love the fact that he wants to help his sister, we have to make sure he doesn't end up gagging her with a spoon. Also, since Sora has been teething, she now puts everything in her mouth and ever the bossy older brother, Kai likes to say, "no, baby eat!"

Kai gave Sora a strawberry to eat. She liked it!

We love watching our kids play. Kai is always finding fun and novel ways to play with things and it's so much fun to watch Kai and Sora play with each other.

Kai with "David Totoro" :)

Exersaucer fun!

Flat tire

Today on the way to my parents' house, my car got a flat. Fortunately, I was close to my exit already and I drove slowly and carefully the rest of the way to my parents' house. After a quick call to roadside assistance, a tow truck arrived and switched out my flat tire. All this happened as the kids were napping the in car; Kai was excited/scared as he woke up from his nap to the sound on lug nuts being loosened and saw the tow truck.

When Kai takes a bath these days, he uses his bucket to slowly bail out pail after pail of water. He loves playing with water and Nik thought it would be good to give Kai a shower for the first time. Needless to say, he loved it (although showering Kai is probably not something that we'll be doing on a regular basis in the midst of a historic drought).

Self-censored

Kai is also back to saying "cheese" and hamming it up for the camera. I love it because it makes for some awesome pictures.

Sora is still working on her solids, but still no sign of teeth. The other day I gave her a piece of Chinese steamed bun (second child syndrome) and she sucked on it like a pacifier.

"Who needs a pacifier?"

On Wednesday, we took Kai and Sora to their respective two year and six month well pedi visits. It wasn't as difficult as I had feared it would be since both Nik and I were present and the kids both handled their shots like champs. :)

Our friend, Anne, also came to visit us yesterday. She met Sora for the first time and it was awesome to see her and catch up.

Sora still can't quite sit up unassisted although I managed to get this cute picture before she toppled over. She's always got her eyes on her big brother.

Sora also loves to look at the mirror and loves smiling at, babbling at and touching her reflection.

"I'm cute and I know it."

It's hard to do tummy time with Sora, these days when you put her on her tummy, she'll cry out in protest for a moment and then flip over to her back. It's also hard to have her on the mat since Kai always wants to see what his sister is up to and doesn't understand how to play gently with her.

If you take your eyes off of Kai for just one second..

.. the next second he's trying to flip over the mat AND baby (don't worry, I caught Sora in time).

We broke open the toy train set that Uncle Matthew got Kai for Christmas. He was scared of the train's movement and loud noise at first, but eventually warmed up to it and would ask Nik to turn it on by saying, "Go train, go!"

And two more pictures of the kids.. just because they're so cute and I can't resist. :)

Lounging...

U-C-L-A!

Rolling, rolling, rolling...

Kai has always liked cars, but now that he's two it seems that he's entered the inevitable "toddler train phase". He now demands that we play the theme song to Thomas and Friends incessantly, saying, "Train song, please." Thank goodness there are other parents out there who obviously feel our pain, because there's a YouTube video that basically loops the one minute long theme song over and over for 10 minutes. (What did parents do before the electronics and the internet?)

Cars AND trains

Kai loves the gigantic Totoro that David gave him and now wants Totoro to sleep in the crib with him which is all well and good except for the fact that Totoro takes up a third of Kai's bed. Nik and I are trying to be more strict about what Kai can and cannot take to bed with him because since Kai's crib was getting taken over by toys at bedtime.

Running out of room in the crib

Sora has been doing well, she's now able to consistently roll over from her tummy to her back, so whenever we place her on her tummy, she immediately rolls over.

"You can't torture me anymore, parents."

Daddy's girl

Sora is in the midst of teething and while she doesn't drool as much as her brother (yet), she puts everything in her mouth.

"Mmm.. hoodie string..."

The day right after his birthday, Kai caught a mild virus. It wasn't bad enough to keep him out of daycare and fortunately it came and went fairly quickly, although we're still contending with a snotty and runny nose. Unfortunately, all of us (except for Nik's mom) also caught the virus.

Since Kai was sick, his appetite was down, but he was still feeling well enough to eat birthday cake leftovers. Kai absolutely loved his birthday cake calling it "flower cake". He ate all the cute sugar decorations first and absolutely loved the frosting.

Happy 2nd birthday, Kai!

Today we celebrated Kai's second birthday. We just had a small celebration with family since we didn't have the time and energy to throw a big party. It was a lot of fun and Kai enjoyed all the special birthday activities (mostly involving special food). Kai also got a haircut today.. he did not enjoy that part of his birthday. And though I got special Thomas the Train party hats, Kai insisted that everyone wear them except for him. Bossy toddlers...

Because parties are more fun with silly hats...

Sora enjoyed playing with Kai's birthday balloon, although she had to play with it when Kai wasn't watching.

David got Kai a giant Totoro as a birthday gift. Surprisingly, he was scared of it at first. After a while he warmed up to it and started making a wide mouthed Totoro face.

It's hard to believe that Nik and I have only been parents for two years. Our lives have changed so dramatically and although there's been a lot of trade-offs and we're almost always exhausted, we wouldn't trade this experience or our kids for anything.

How we get our workouts in these days...

Happy Mother's Day!

Yesterday, we celebrated Mother's Day with my mom and Nik's mom over Korean food. Kai generally likes Korean food; he loves bulgogi and says, "Yau (Mandarin for 'want') meat!" But his favorite part of the meal was the green tea ice cream dessert.. he made sure he got every last drop.

Good to the last drop

Kai loves ice cream and the other day we gave him his first taste of chocolate ice cream.. he did a little "happy dance" with every spoonful he got.

Kai and Sora are not yet old enough to treat me to dinner yet, but hopefully they will one day. Though Nik did get me some nice flowers and surprised me with a little cake. :)

We took the kids to Happy Hollow last week, although Kai loved seeing the animals, he's still a little young for the rest of the park attractions.

Giant anteater!

We also took the kids to the Fremont Thai Temple since the mobile Thai consulate was there. Kai had fun running around the park-like temple grounds, but unfortunately there was no Thai food to be found since it wasn't a Sunday.

Sora likes to stand, so we've been putting Sora in the exersaucer lately and she seems to like it. Kai particularly likes to push Sora around while she's in it.

Kai is still running amok and likes to pull all of the couch cushions onto the floor these days. :P

It has been stressful to not have Sora be able to take a bottle while I'm at work and the other day, she was crying so much that Nik nearly drove her to the hospital so I could feed her during my break. But yesterday, Sora wished me a happy Mother's Day by finishing a whole bowl of rice cereal and apple sauce at Po Po's house. Today, Nik and his mom tried it again to make sure it wasn't just a fluke and she did it! Maybe things are starting to look up.

Six-seven?

Last weekend, Nik managed to get away for part of the weekend to go caving with some friends. He had a good time, but his pants and shoes were completely destroyed from climbing around in the mud. Of course that means that I stayed at home with Nik's mom and the kids, we managed to get through the weekend and we even took Kai to a birthday party for one of Kai's daycare friends. Kai had fun running around, playing with the friendly neighborhood cat and eating special party food (i.e., juice and cake.. he actually wanted juice over cake!).

Mmm.. cake!

We're already starting to see summer-like weather.. last Thursday was in the 90's! Though I'm not particularly fond of hot weather, we're enjoying the bounty of the summer. Kai continues to loves his berries. Blueberries are his favorite and we've been harvesting them off our blueberry bush in the backyard. Kai is also enjoying watermelon and tomato.

Nom nom..

I went back to work this past Tuesday. Even though Sora still hasn't taken to the bottle, the day wasn't a complete disaster as I had feared. Nik and Grandma Ben tried to feed her the bottle and solid foods, but she just wasn't having it. Even though she didn't eat, she was generally happy. But last night, I worked night shift and she actually drank an ounce from the bottle.. perhaps this is the start of something? (fingers crossed!)

I don't know about this, grandma...

Kai has been learning his numbers and when Nik gives him a treat, he'll ask him how many he wants. Kai usually replies calling out the highest number possible, starting with an enthusiastic, "three!" then "four!" and so forth. It's funny, when he counts, he skips over six and seven, so when he counts it's, "three, four, five, eight, nine."

Kai likes drinking the smoothies Nik makes and calls them, "shakes," the other day he insisted on drinking it without the lid and straw and ended up with a green mustache. :)

And.. a silly hat picture. Just because.

An outtake