Did I mention we moved to California.

Year 2012 was all about "HOME." We moved back HOME with my parents while Jerry returned to school, Baby Ro gave us the HOMEbirth of our dreams, and we made our HOME in four different states (Ohio, Idaho, Texas, back to Idaho, and finally ending up in California). All within the year 2012. Our main goal for 2013 is to NOT move. But this latest move has been remarkable in many ways. My cousin Lillie lives near us now, and she has watched over our little family for the past couple weeks like a guardian angel. More details to follow in a later post. But for now, here's our first week in California, photo style:

Spent New Year's at the Carmel beach house.

Cousin Lillie, practically perfect in every way. 

Sums up the feeling at Carmel.

Why yes I am the only one in this hot tub who is over the age of 7.  Pretty sure the younger kids all nearly drowned a few times each, but I pulled them up again and again...

We kept trying for a family photo at China Cove, but Mr. Lo was TERRIFIED of the kelp that had washed ashore so he wasn't being very cooperative in the photo effort. 

Monterey Bay Aquarium. 

Nursing on the trails.  Sweet baby girl is shaping up to be just as chubby as her older brother was. 

My mom spent her 50th with us!  She was a huge help getting us there and settled. 

Sorry for the lack of posting lately...

Just busy being pregnant and raising a 2-year-old. Also, have internet/computer inconveniences in our current apartment, so I have a hard time motivating myself to get online much. Love you all!

Nomads

We moved. Again. About 12 months ago, we moved from one town in Ohio to another. Then, 8 months ago we moved from Ohio to Idaho. 4 months ago, we had a move from Idaho to Texas. And now here we are in Idaho again, moving into yet another new apartment. All the transitions have been rough on Mr. Lo (FOUR moves in one year!!), so I started praying for God to give my poor child some compensatory blessings. Enter: the Tender Mercy Kangaroo. The day we drove out of Texas about a month ago, we dropped by the library to return our twenty-some-odd books. During our 5 minutes dropping by the library, we walked into the room where a gal was doing the end-o-summer reading party grand prize drawing. Lo Lo walked into the room literally as his name got drawn from the hat--he won a prize! I said, "Oh, he's here!" and my excited toddler bounded up to receive his gift of kangaroo and book. He hugged and kissed the kangaroo all the way back to the car, and it has proved to be a true comfort to him ever since then. He's cuddling it in his sleep right at this moment. :)

LoLo's new train set 1

Good Times

Mr. Lo has been known to comment countless times, "I'm a funny guy. I make people laugh."

Yes, yes you do, sweet child. And we love how you make YOURSELF laugh. :)

Little Gymnast

Normally our child seems to fall into the top percentile ranking of toddler energy. He loves to push his body to its physical limits, has a daring attitude, and seems overall a bit gifted in the athletics department (ahem, slightly biased mother speaking, I'll admit). Anyway, it was a huge concern for me when he sat quietly in my lap during the entire library storytime yesterday morning. Atypical to say the least. Sure enough, he came home from the library and crashed for an early nap, which he woke from just a little over an hour in, vomiting all over himself. His hair and neck, pillows, sheets, special blankie, etc. were covered in lovely stomach juices mixed with morning oatmeal breakfast. I put him in the bathtub (yes, he was wailing about it, just wanted cuddled)while I tried to clean up the bed mess. Once I had the tub nicely filled with soothing water and he'd calmed down a bit, he vomited again. I rinsed him off and dried him, dressed him, put him on the couch watching a DVD, and attempted to keep laundering the bedding. But of course he vomited again. So I changed his clothes again, gave him some water to sip, and this time set him on a towel on the couch watching the DVD while I laundered the other couch cushion that was saturated in vomit. Yes, we are renting this furniture. Well, the cycle of cleaning, vomiting, cleaning, vomiting, etc. continued all day long even after Jerry came home from work. Of course, we are healthy eaters who had nothing like saltine crackers, carbonated beverages, or even fruit juice or apple sauce on hand. So poor sickie Mr. Lo got to ride in the stroller as I walked to the store to purchase some stomach-soothing groceries. (Jerry had taken the car to work that day of course).

But what does all this have to do with gymnastics, you may be asking. Well, this morning Lo woke up as his usual bouncy self, so I opted to go ahead and let him attend the Little Gym class we'd scheduled. I think he had food poisoning instead of a stomach bug anyway (the night before he threw up, he insisted he wanted the piece of pizza that sat out in the car for over an hour and I'd let him eat it), so I rationalized it wasn't likely he'd pass on sickness to the other kids. He once again seemed to have more energy than just about any kid in the gymnastics class, so it reassured me he was feeling back to normal. And I felt so pleased at the way he figured out how to use the equipment. Observing his sheer joy at tumbling around on the mats, swinging on the bars, etc. brought me true parental pride. The photo above is just him doing a forward roll at a random fast food playplace, by the way--didn't bring my camera to the gym, but you get the idea.

Flashback to Hong Kong More than a Decade Ago...

So behind on blogging, I am tempted to commit to one of those "blog daily for a month" challenges just to make sure I get all the backlogged info posted. But we are moving this month. Sort of moving twice, in fact. So we'll see how much blogging gets done. Anyway, a few days ago we had the unexpected joy of having Jerry's missionary and his family stop by our home on their drive through town. This is the missionary that taught Jerry when he got baptized those many years ago in Hong Kong. Small world that they both find themselves now living in Texas!

Ben & Jerry. Yes, those are really their names, how awesome is that. We should have had some Ben & Jerry ice cream, but instead just ate generic brand ice cream...lol. We had Ben get video-recorded saying his memories of what it was like teaching Jerry. Such a special time to reminisce. I also enjoyed some great conversation with Ben's wife, Helen. After the visit ended, I commented to Jerry how energized I felt having such good socializing. Thanks for stopping by, Ben & fam!

Asian-mix kids are so darling! Clearly my favorite variety of child. These boys all have 2-syllable names that start with "L" so I kept accidentally calling the wrong child the wrong name all morning. :)

Mr. Lo had such a ball playing with these two boys.

Especially with Logan, the older boy. Lo kept saying, "Logan is a nice boy. He plays nice." These days Lo is very aware of "playing nice," and often coaches himself through rules of sharing and caring (though still has plenty of moments where his 2-year-old emotions get the better of him).

Independence Day part 2

I forgot to mention in the last post about the 4th of July that those photos only showed our "morning activities." Post naptime, here is what we did:

Ate festival foods, rode carnival rides (actually just Mr. Lo did the carnival, and he stayed pretty tame about it--jump house and large slidey thing), and the highlight...

Pony rides! Jerry loved that he got to be the one leading the pony around. Lo kept saying, "I riding a real horsie!" and it took some coaxing to get him to dismount. Also, it should be mentioned that we almost bought a tank of baby turtles from one of the vendors at this festival. Jerry and I are sort of really pet-people, and it drives us crazy to move so often we don't feel ready to buy another pet right now. But seriously, these turtles were adorable. Palm-sized swimmers that reminded Jerry of turtles he'd kept in a bowl when he was a boy. We have an official goal to get some turtles as soon as our abode stabilizes a bit. :)

Fans of Chick-Fil-A

Cow Appreciation Day was last Friday at our favorite restaurant. What's not to love about Chick-Fil-A, I ask you? We have THREE of them within a 10 min. drive of our apartment, so we got free combos for breakfast, lunch and dinner, visiting location #1, #2, and lastly #3 for each respective meal. Mr. Lo refused to wear his costume during the lunch hour (he kept insisting he wanted to be a monster for Halloween, not a cow), but the nice manager still gave him a free kid's meal. Because that's how Chick-Fil-A is.

Our costumes were pretty simple, mostly just wore white clothes and stuck on cow spots using the famous vinyl left over from Jerry's work in Ohio. Yes, we did take a roll of vinyl with us to Texas. Never know when it might come in handy...

Jerry would not naturally participate in this type of silliness, but he's such a sweet, supportive husband he just goes along with my ideas and is a good sport. We really did have a lot of fun participating! It was cool to see all the other creative costumes people came up with as well.

At one of the locations the actual Chick-Fil-A cow mascots were wandering around and Mr. Lo LOVED them! I never knew he liked that sort of thing, sort of has ignored large costumed mascots in the past. Must be developmentally his right stage now. He kept saying, "Here comes the cow!" Every time one of them came near our table. Wildly pointing and grinning with excitement. When those same cows did not appear at our visit to location #3, he just about broke down in tears, he was so disappointed and kept asking about it. So the Chick-Fil-A employee gave Lo a free plush cow to cheer him up. Have I mentioned how much I adore this restaurant chain.

Mr. Lo loved his tail. I kept laughing about how it swung back and forth when he walked.

Jerry changed out of his costume while he was in the office, and Lo could barely be convinced to keep his donned for the few minutes we showed him off at the restaurant, but I wore mine all. day. long. Including the the playground, library, Wal-Mart, etc. Really I was just too busy to change--we had a lot of errands to run. And it was a tad embarrassing, but most people either seemed to get it, "Oh, yeah, Chick-Fil-A cow appreciation day!" or else just raised their eyebrows a bit and smiled. My pregnant belly really accentuated the "cow look." :)

Independence Day 2012

We celebrated "small town style" on this past Independence Day. It was one of those serendipitous days when everything seems to go perfectly.

We attended a small community parade and party in the park. Everything was free. They had this little train that gave free rides (I think the combination of Lo and me was pushing the posted weight limit--oops).

Unlimited watermelon--we ate a couple wedges each. Did I mention this was all free??

One of our favorite floats from the parade because it had "Curious George" on it (Lo loves those books).

Mr. Lo, as he is wont to do, making friends with random strangers. His glasses were 3-D glasses, the closest thing we had to patriotic apparel for him. That, and the army pajama shirt. Yeah, I need to make a visit to Old Navy next year for a few America tees.

Jerry was proud of his parking job. I was proud of finding this little celebration, because parking was pretty smooth overall--we got nice shady spots at both the parade route and the park, without even arriving early. Ah, the benefits of a small community event vs. the huge crowded city parties.

And one more reason to love Texas: people are overwhelmingly friendly! The group near our parade spot just embraced us, handing Lo a flag to wave, gave us chairs to sit on, gave Lo a bag to store his candy (he got more than a Halloween haul) and were just generally the sweetest people. By the way, the candy was such a distraction to Mr. Lo, I don't think he noticed much of the parade floats--he was too busy darting all over with his eyes glued to the ground, picking up a never-ending supply of candy that got thrown at him.