Baby Mai

After some not so fruitful Black Friday shopping we relaxed around the house for a bit before heading out into the city. Phil made plans to hang out with his high school friends while I headed into Brooklyn to meet up with some college friends and meet Le's new baby, Mai!

I met up with my friends at a Peruvian restaurant in Brooklyn called Coco Roco. I'm not really an expert on Peruvian cuisine, but I thought the food was good. I had the Lomo Saltado, which was a beef stir fry with rice. Sorry, no pictures this time...

After dinner we headed back to Le's apartment to meet Mai. Here she is with uncle Kyle. At this point she was only 3 weeks old. Isn't she the cutest? And look at that full head of hair!


And here is baby Mai with her proud mama.

Thanksgiving

Usually Phil and I spend Thanksgiving with our respective families, but this year I decided to join Phil and his family. His family doesn't start their celebrations until early evening, so I stopped by my mom's house for a light lunch and some Trivial Pursuit with Mandy and Tam.


In the evening we arrived at Phil's Aunt's house in northern NJ. As soon as we arrived all the guys went straight to work on the Wii - staying far far away from the kitchen.

Meanwhile the girls were busy at the "juice bar" mixing up various fresh fruit drinks. There was even fresh pineapple and coconut to make pina coladas - a drink favorite for the Aunts.

We didn't really have a recipe for the pina coladas, so Lydia and Lea used trial and error. It took a couple tries, but they came up with a nice blend. And we discovered that finding a good balance is much easier if you use canned pineapples, but shhh don't tell anyone...The juice bar was so popular we tripped one of the circuit breakers in the house and temporarily lost electricity. Thankfully we were able to reset it, otherwise that could have been the end of Thanksgiving!

Here's the Thanksgiving turkey in all its glory, just waiting to be eaten.


Phil used to tell me how much food his family has for Thanksgiving dinner, but I don't think I was sufficiently prepared. There was shrimp cocktail, jelly fish, pumpkin muffins, biscuits, stuffed mushrooms, scallops, mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, steamed asparagus, meatloaf...
and lobster salad...a nice mix of your traditional Thanksgiving fare along with some Chinese dishes.


And then there was dessert...oh boy was there dessert. There were close to a dozen different desserts. First we had the baked apples stuffed with granola, which sadly I was too full to try, but they looked delicious.


The rest of the table was full of chocolate cake, pumpkin pie, Chinese bakery cake, strawberry poundcake, poundcake with strawberry sauce, mini cupcakes, 4 different flavors of homemade ice cream (coffee, tea with milk, mango chile, and cantaloupe), almond cookies, and fruit...I feel like I'm missing something, but yea, lots of dessert...


Here I am with Phil's mom and his cousin Lucia - the 3 birthday girls. Not all on the same day, but all close enough to Thanksgiving to celebrate.

After dinner we all hung out around the TV or played with the little kids that were there. And of course there was the customary post-dinner nap for Phil. Although I think he crashed harder than usual this time, probably partly from the massive amounts of food and partly because he was still getting over a cold. How he was able to fall asleep in that position I'm not entirely sure...


That was definitely some good Thanksgiving eating! I hope everyone else had a delicious Thanksgiving too. ^__^

Phil's New Toys

While May and Anthony were over Phil took Anthony shopping. Although, I guess that's not really a fair statement since Anthony didn't actually end up buying anything. It was mostly an excuse for Phil to buy some new toys. The first of his new toys was a new stereo. The old one we had was the same one Phil first brought to him with college. This was before mp3 players were really popular, so there were no audio outputs and no mp3 CD compatibility. It was still functional, but we were in need for an update. So, introducing the new Sony stereo.


But the real take home prize for Phil was his new sound system. Personally, I don't think we needed a sound system, but you know how Phil loves his electronics. He looks so happy he could pick up the whole box and hug it. And he probably would have too if he wasn't afraid of accidentally dropping it and breaking it.

Here's Anthony inspecting the sound bar for the new sound system.

And along with the sound bar came this giant subwoofer...They couldn't make it a little more inconspicuous?

Phil was playing with his new toys all week. It seems his favorite movie to test with is Transformers, which he plays every time he has a new gadget for the TV. Part of the reason for that, aside from him enjoying the movie, might be because it's one of the few blu-ray DVDs we actually have. So I've become very familiar with the Transformers movie. Here's the TV and the new sound bar in all its glory.

Hopefully this will satisfy Phil's new toy quota for a little while...

Visitors from Cleveland - Day 2

Having a baby around the house was fun but exhausting. I know, "thank you Captain Obvious", but knowing it and experiencing it are different. Su-Kyi was usually awake before we were and was ready to play. Phil's response to that was to squish her and pretend to fall asleep. Although that didn't really work for very long...



So instead we occupied her with Saturday morning cartoons. Look at the 2 kids watching TV together. I guess morning cartoons are good at distracting kids of all ages. ^__^

Then it was time to get ready to head out for lunch. After Su-Kyi go dressed I helped put her hair up into pigtails. Doesn't she look so cute?

For lunch we headed to a Chinese restaurant near our house called King's Chef to eat dim sum. The food there is decent. It's not as good as dim sum in New York, but it's a good alternative when you can't make it into the city. Su-Kyi was super hungry. Look at her grabbing for those chopsticks!

After dim sum it was back to the house for some more playing...

And more TV watching...Are we seeing a trend here?

Su-Kyi has been caught playing in the kitchen. This is Phil's "baby's shouldn't be playing in the kitchen!" face. Pretty scary, I know.

At night we headed into Flushing to have dinner with Phil's parents at Joe's Shanghai, so Anthony could have a taste of their famous soup dumplings. Surprisingly, when we sat down to eat Su-Kyi was glued to Phil's lap and had him in a death grip refusing to let go. It took a good 5 to 10 minutes to finally convince her to go to mommy. They did bond quite a bit with all the playing, but I think she was just sleepy and confused.

But she was back in her mommy's arms soon enough.

Phil's parents normally order a lot when treating people to dinner, but this time it was a lot of food even for them. We started out with some vegetarian duck (basically just tofu skin and mushrooms), fried dumplings and scallion pancakes.

2 orders of soup dumplings, of course.

An order of crispy noodles and rice noodles. Plus 2 bowls of noodle soup, which are in the background, but you can't really see them...

And a big old plate of pig fat. Ok, so it wasn't really pig fat, according to Phil's parents it was pig shoulder...As Asian people go, I'm not that adventurous with my food, so I passed on the pig shoulder, but everyone said it was delicious...

Visitors from Cleveland

The weekend before Thanksgiving we had some visitors from Cleveland. May and Anthony came by with their cute little daughter Su-Kyi. This was the first time we really had a kid in the house for a prolonged period of time, so I think it was a good test for us to see how kid-friendly our house is.

We thought it would take Su-Kyi longer to warm up to us, but she seemed to make herself at home very quickly. Here she is in one of her favorite spots in our house. She really seemed to like the Ikea chair. Phil and her had a constant game of "my chair" going all weekend.



Su-Kyi's second favorite spot in the house was in front of the TV. A girl after Phil's heart. Look at how mesmerized she is.

During their first full day at the house Su-Kyi did some exploring and she found a nice comfy spot in our papasan chair. It fits her perfectly.

She kept Phil busy all weekend. I think Su-Kyi liked playing with Phil because he always picked her up, swung her around and turned her upside down. Her she is flying - Super Su-Kyi!

And up she goes! Don't worry, in reality she's nowhere near that ceiling fan. It's a trick of the camera I tell you.

May had to drive down to Princeton to do some work, so we drove along with her to make sure she found her way. When we arrived we stopped by a little mall area that was hidden away. It looked more like a strip mall from the outside, but opened up into a decent sized mall once you entered the stores from the outside. Phil picked up a polar bear treat from Starbucks. Gotta love those scarf-wearing polar bears.

While I was exploring with Su-Kyi we found a baby store that had all kinds of toys, like an entire kitchen playset. But we're not talking about your run-of-the-mill Playskool kitchen playsets, these were the high-end, "almost cost as much as actual kitchen appliances" playsets. But that's why window shopping is so great. Su-Kyi seemed to have a good time playing with all the knobs on the play stove.

New Furniture Part 2

So it was back to work on the dresser for Phil. Here he is finishing up the rest of the drawers.


Next step, carefully apply the backing to the dresser.

Next, turn dresser upright and place dressers into drawer.

And Ta-Da!!! Isn't it pretty?

Good job, Phil! *clap clap clap*

New Furniture

We bought a new piece of furniture from IKEA. It was a dresser drawer for one of our extra bedrooms. After hauling it back in the car Phil set to work putting it together. He looks so prepared with his instruction manual and screw driver in hand, but the scared look on his face worries me...


It's time to get to work. It seems like something in the instruction manual has Phil confused.

After half an hour I went back to check on Phil and it looks like he has the frame almost done.

When I checked on Phil again he was already working on the drawers. But it was getting late so I guess the rest of the dresser assembly will have to wait.

Salsa @ The View

My last night in Cleveland I took a trip out to a place called The View, a night club in downtown Cleveland, for some much needed salsa dancing.
I actually managed to drag Phil to this club once while we were still living in Cleveland.

I'm a big fan of salsa - really any kind of dancing, but I don't get many chances to go out on the town anymore. So some of my friends took pity on me and joined me in a night of non-stop latin dancing after a long work week.

The 3 amigos: Jaime, Luisa and Ioana


Jaime and me looking tough. Don't mess with us! (Maybe I should have gone for a more intimidating look...)

My dance partners: Markeeta and Jessica. Taking a little break from all the dancing.

And me and the girls (Ioana and Heidi). Who says you have to dance with a boy?

By the end of the night my feet were so tired, but it was worth it. My dance cravings have been satisfied...for now... ^__~