2 1/4 Korean Family: Silly kids

So every night, we play this game called, "Here comes daddy!" Alden and I (sometimes Ellie too) run downstairs to our room and hide under the covers, and Joe and Ellie come looking for us downstairs. It usually takes Joe "a few tries" before he finds us under the covers, but lately, he's gotten more clever. So today, I was hiding with both kids, and he walks into the room and says, "Alden's not here either! Where could he be? He must be in the other room." and shut the door. So Al out his guard down and listed up the covers to wait for Joe to come back into the room. And all of a sudden, Joe jumped out from behind the bed and yelled, "I found you!" It made all of us jump, and Al said, "Daddy! You scared all the family!!!" Joe and I were laughing so hard, we couldn't breathe. We are always so surprised at Al saying funny things, it always makes us laugh too.

The other day, Al and Ellie were sharing a juice box, and Ellie has a habit of biting down on the straw so hard that the juice down't come out anymore. She was doing it again, and Al couldn't drink, so we told her to stop biting down. She smiled, looked right at us, and started clenching her teeth so hard with her shoulders raised up that she was shaking. She kept doing that whenever we told her not to bite. al thought it was so funny.

Oh good news, Ellie can walk now. She can stand up on her own without any support. She gets on all fours first and slowly pushes herself up. She's taken quite a few steps to walk before she falls over. She's taken about 7 steps now, and we're waiting for her to start running around the house, chasing after Alden.

Ellie loves to share her food, even if it's already been in her mouth sometimes. She always gives me some to take a bite first and then puts it in her mouth (almost as if to see if the food is poisoned). Now when she hands me things (mostly toys and sometimes food), she says "자!" which means "Here you go" in Korean. Today she also said, "Ah~" while she was putting something in my mouth, and also said "boo!" to ask for a book. She also loves to "read" books, and she would turn pages while babbling so it sounds like she's reading the book. She also sings with me when I sing...

Alden's reading skills have been improved drastically, and he can also do simple addition and subtraction now with the help of his fingers and some pictures (1+3, 5-2, etc.). He can also read any number up to 100, and he also weighs himself every night and read the number out loud (thirty one point four!). Sometimes he can read a whole sentence, depending on the words, and one of the sentences he read today was "Two hippos, one rhino, and one piano on your trunk are very, very heavy" (I Broke My Trunk from the series Elepahnt and Piggie by Mo Williams). Although it's not the first time he's read the book, we still think it's pretty impressive for him to recognize the words enough to remember what the sentence was. If he was actually reciting what he memorized, then that would still be impressive cuz that would mean he memorized the whole 50+ pages of that book... Anyway, we are very proud of him. I need to tach him more Korean though. He knows about half the alphabet now...

Ellie and Alden still adore each other, and it's so cute to see each other give love. They are always giving each other hugs and kisses, and Ellie always likes to tough Al's face or head or lean into him and rest her head on him. Alden also loves to stroke Ellie's cheeks and says, "I love you!" or "Baby's so pretty!" (Sometimes, he tells me I'm pretty too. Hee Hee...)

This post is getting to be longer than I planned, but I keep remembering more stuff to write down so I don't forget in the future... This acts as the family journal a lot of the time so... Forgive me.. Ha ha.

The kids have been sick for a few weeks now, and Al had a fever for a couple days and he's now feeling better. Ellie's taking that course now, and she has really bad runny nose and fever at night. Last night, she wasn't feeling good at all and was crying on bed after we out her to sleep. She doesn't usually cry for longer than 2 minutes after we leave her but that day, she had been crying for more than 10 minutes. Al usually sings to calm her down or says "울지마" (don't cry) but last night, we started hearing him cry too. So we went into their room, and Al told me that Ellie was crying because of monsters in the room and that he was scared too... So we had to turn on the lights and go through the room and fight the monsters. Al loves to pretend to use the lasso (thanks to Diego) so I told him to grab the lasso and fight the monsters off. He got rid of the monsters under his and Ellie's bed, inside the closet, and behind the rocking chair, and after that, he was able to peacefully go to sleep.... (and the whole time, his Buzz plush doll was too scared of the monsters and was hiding in bed, according to Alden).

An update in the new baby. By the way, we call the baby, the new baby, because we keep calling Ellie the baby... Anyway, I went to see the OBGYN the other day, and he couldn't be sure of the "age" of the baby because I was breastfeeding when I got pregnant. So they did a quick ultrasound, and determined that the baby was at 13 weeks (it was 14 weeks according to my first day of last period). The new due date is July 12th. We'll keep updates coming!

P.s.: I'll add pictures when I get in the laptop later. It's taken me long enough to type this much on the iPad... And I still have to post about our Christmas vacation and Jamie's wedding too...

Here are the pictures that I promised!

Ellie on her birthday