Pictures, pictures..

Okay.. Here are some pictures that are sooooooooooo overdue... The reason why my last few posts didn't have pictures was because I thought it'd be better to have something at all than nothing at all. (I was posting in bed on the iPad).

Alden made this pizza for all of us. (Cheese slices are for him, of course.) He puts it all together, bakes it in an oven (one of many empty moving boxes we have sitting around the house), then slices it up to deliver it to everyone in the family. Ellie helps, of course.

Ellie was eating breakfast, and Al said, "I'm going to help Ellie!" Then he started spoon feeding her. :)

Ellie loves to sit in the little doll stroller. Ha ha. And Al loves to push it for her. :)

Al's biggest catch. :)

Ellie saying "Cheese~"

Catching up with the kids

The kids are growing so fast, and just lately, Ellie has picked up a lot of words. She's always been a chatterbox, but she's started to actually say words somewhat understandably. I remembered today, with Al, I used to blog almost every time he learned a new word, so I decided to write a little about Ellie's developments.

Let's see.. It's always so hard to remember all of them when I'm actually determined to think of all the words... She can say most of the basic words like 엄마 (mommy), 아빠 (daddy) and Daddy, 오빠 (older brother), 물 (water), 불 (light), bye-bye, hi, and 밥 (food). She learned to say 엄마꺼, 아빠꺼, 오빠꺼 (meaning, mommy's, daddy's and Alden's). This comes handy when she's helping with sorting the laundry or sharing treats. She can also say Amen after a prayer. Yesterday, she surprised me by saying 다시 (again), and she can also say 더 (more). She can say 까까 (snack) and 아오 (ouch). Today she said, "Uh-oh." she can say 발 (foot), which she interchangeably uses with shoes. She's really good at saying 안아 (hold me). She says 붕붕 (vroom vroom) when she plays with toy cars or wants to go out. Today she also said 주세요 (please) instead of just holding her hands out or mumbling three random syllables. She says Go! as she goes down the slides. She can say 딸기 (strawberries) and cheese. She can also say 붕 (sound of fart) to make us laugh. I am surprised everyday to see how much she understands.

I talk to her almost exclusively in Korean,and her understanding of Korean is comparatively better than English. Sometimes Joe has to translate what he said and repeat it in Korean to get her to do things. She's such a joy to have around, and she has such a mischievous personality that we sometimes wonder where it came from. She likes to tease and fool around, and she never lets her brother boss her around or win. She's really stubborn too and sometimes holds grudges. But she's mostly good and puts up with her brother when he purposely makes her trip or squeeze her cheeks really hard.

Alden is growing so fast too, and Joe and I can't believe he's already three and a half. It's hard to believe that he's not a baby anymore, even though he keeps reminding us that he's a "big boy." Today, in sacrament meeting, I gave him a copy of the friends magazine. He opened it to a page that had an article called "Lost in the trail." he started reading on his own, "Lost in the..." I was so surprised because I had never taugh him how to read the word, lost. Then we found another article and started to read it together. He was reading probably 70-80 percent of the words on the article without help, and I was so impressed by how much he knew! I'm starting to worry how I'm going to keep up with his fast learning curve. I might be teaching him calculus in two years at this rate!

I'm the ward librarian, and I was talking to the the other librarian today about the importance of the mother being home for the children. Her major was in early childhood education, and she was telling me about the research she had done in college about young children being left at daycare everyday. She said that when little babies and toddlers get left at daycare by their parents before they are old enought to understand the concept of them having to leave to privde for the family or going to work, the children only think that they are being left by the parents and do not learn to trust or love. They only see that their mother or father is leaving them woth strangers. They cry the ehole tome their parents are gone, and when their parents come back to pick them up, they resent their parents and are upset at them for leaving. This has an enormous effect on their lives, even whe they are older.

Earlier today, as I was trying to put Ellie down for a nap during sacrament, I was thinking about my kids and how grateful I am to be able to stay home with them to be able to witness them grow and notice the development they go through. After the talk with the other librarian, I was even more grateful for this chance to spend time with my kids and learn so much from them. I need to really keep up with them and teach them all I can so I can make this moment of our lives worthwhile. Speaking of being a stay home mom, Joe is going back to work starting tomorrow. It has been really wonderful to have him home for the last few months, and we had so much fun together as a family. It will be hard on the kids, and especially me, to have him gone during the day now, but that'll make the time spent with Daddy much more meaningful when he comes home from work.

Garage Sale adventrues

I guess I should write a little about the garage sale before I forget...

My mom is moving to Chicago, and she's hardly taking anything there since my dad already has a house and furniture. So she decided to have a garage sale to sell off a lot of her stuff that she's collected in the last 11 years she's lived in Provo. And oh boy, were there a lot of stuff!

Joe and I helped her get the garage sale together, and we were piling stuff on bookshelves, in the garage, and in the living room to get ready three weeks before the garage sale. We had actually planned to have the garage sale a while ago, but it had been forecasted to rain and be super cold for the last two saturdays (weather turned out to be great, by the way). So we finally had our garage sale last Saturday. We advertised it on KSL and put some signs on the streets the night before. We were a little worried that we wouldn't have a good turnout or sell a lot of stuff and only make a couple hundred dollars after working so hard to get everything ready.

We were up until midnight the night before, getting everything organized and pricing most things so they'd be ready to go out to the driveway the next morning. Saturday, Joe and I woke up at 6 am to get ready. The garage sale was supposed to start at 9 am, and we still had a lot of work to do. We had everything that was sitting in the living room, plus in the garage that had to be reorganized and priced. We also had a lot of small pieces of furniture around the house that had to be emptied and brought out. We thought 3 hours would give us enough time to get ready.

Well, at 7:15 am, the first two groups came. (sigh). We only had half the stuff out, but I had to start giving them prices and negotiate, while Joe was trying to figure out where to put stuff (I was supposed to help him with that). Anyway, the day started way earlier than we thought, and we had constant stream of people until almost 1 pm! (The garage sale was supposed to be from 9 to noon).

Thankfully, Joe's mom was there to help with the children, and babysitters came from 9 to noon as well to play with the kids. As for my mom, we purposely told her to get as far away from the house because I knew that she would just try to give away as much as possible. (She has a hard time trying to make money from people. She had already given away probably the most expensive tool we had in the garage for free to her friend).

We really were hoping to make about 3 to 400 dollars tops from the garage sale. We had a lot more people come than we thought (thank goodness for the warm weather and KSL), and even though I was giving a lot of discounts and bargains (for example, a man offered me $1 for a mallet, and I gave it to him for 50 cents), we ended up making almost $1000! Joe had to remind my mom and me about how much money had already invested into buy all that stuff in the first place, but I also reminded him that it was sunk cost and couldn't be redeemed any other way.. Anyway, it was hard but rewarding, and somewhat fun as well (Joe didn't think so. His body was aching all over the next day).

On a side note, we used the Square app on our iPad to take credit cards. A lot of older people thought we were joking and didn't take it seriously, but we didn't accept three credit card purchases. Ha ha. This one guys (looked like a BYU student) said that this was the most high-tech garage sale he'd ever been to. :D

Unfortunately, I was too busy to take any pictures, so no pictures.. sorry.

Big boy, small boy.

Alden is very proud of the fact that he is a big boy now. Going to the bathroom, helping with cleaning, reading big books, and all... A lot of times, he would compare himself to Ellie and say, "Alden doesn't do that. I'm a big boy."

Lately, we've been pushing for him to go pee all by himself, flushing the toilet and washing his hands. Today, he went in by himself, and 30 seconds later, he yelled out,

"I'm not very good at this this time! I'm a small boy again."

Ha ha ha. He always forgets to turn on the light, and I guess he didn't aim very well this time... Ha ha.

Let the fishing season begin!

Yesterday was a beautiful day! (So was today) We've been trying to think of fun things to do while Joe gets to spend more time with us now. Yesterday morning, Joe was checking the Utah fishing stock report, and he saw that Vivian Park was stocked with 200+ fish just a couple weeks ago. We decided to go on a spontaneous fishing trip, and started getting ready for the day. We were out the door in half an hour. :D We dropped by the bank to drop off the cash from the yard sale, picked up lunch, and drove to Vivian Park. It was so nice and sunny with occasional clouds and nice breeze.

Al's been practicing the whole Winter inside the house casting his fishing pole. He was so excited to go fishing. He's not usually too excited to go out, wish all the fun toys at the house and everything, but as soon as we mentioned fishing, he started to dress himself. :D Anyway, the whole time Joe and I were eating, Al kept saying he wanted to catch fish. As soon as we got done with food, I prepped his fishing pole with a hook and some power bait. He went off to cast while Joe and I were busy taking care of Ellie and getting her fishing pole ready. While we were still working on her pole, we noticed that Al was acting funny and was saying something about a fish. Then we realized that he actually had a fish at the end of the line! We were so surprised because we didn't think that he would be patient enough to actually cast and wait for a fish to bite! (And we hadn't told him that he needed to do that either). He was so excited to reel it in, and we got some pictures with Joe's phone (of course, I forgot to take my camera on the day that Al caught his first fish!). The fish were biting pretty well, and we had a lot of fun. For the next two hours, Al was constantly casting and and enjoying the day. Ellie, on the other hand, got tired pretty quickly, and was long overdue for her nap. She got really hot in the sun, so I walked around with her a little and sat in the shade to enjoy the breeze. Joe and Al (being the boys) were fishing and fishing, and they were just having so much fun. :) After two hours, we had 5 fish in our bucket, and we had let go a couple of small ones. Overall, it was a good day to start of the fishing season again, and we'll probably go very often this summer until the fish run out. :D

When we got home, Joe cleaned and filleted the fish, and the kids enjoyed the fresh fish for dinner. It tasted really good, being fresh and all. Ha ha.

 

We admit, we have pretty cool kids...

Okay.. I spent like 40 minutes last night typing up this post on the iPad, and @#(*$@# anyway... it all got deleted.. so here we go again... (safely on the laptop).

Everyday, Joe and I talk about how blessed we are to have such awesome kids. Alden and Ellie are so great to each other and to others around them. We are so grateful that we have the honor and the opportunity to be their parents. They are pretty neat kids, and I wanted to write some things that they do/did before I forgot.

The other night, we read the story of Daniel in the lion's den as part of our scripture study. We talked about how the lions didn't bite Daniel because God was protecting him. The next morning, we were eating cereal, and there was a picture of a great white shark on the back of the cereal box. I pretended to be scared and talked about how the shark could bite people. Alden said, "엄마 괜찮아. Shark 안먹어요. 하나님이 보호해주니까. (It's okay mommy. The shark won't eat us because God will protect us.)" I was so surprised that what we talked about scripture studies actually stuck with Al.

Speaking of scripture studies, last Christmas season, we watched the series of New Testament videos that the Church produced as a part of FHE lessons every week. They are about 2-3 minutes long. The kids seemed really bored and didn't seem to pay any attention to it. One day, Alden was playing with Ellie's blanket, and he pulled it over his head like a shawl and said, "유선이 Jesus 엄마야. (Alden is Jesus's mom.)" That was another time we were so surprised that he had paid attention during FHE lessons. (Another time, he drew an oval inside another oval and told me it was Baby Jesus).

Yesterday morning, Joe went home teaching, and his home teachees told him about how impressed they were with Alden when they went to substitute for his Sumbeam class. They had a lesson on being grateful for water and fish. They were playing a fish game, and Alden made sure that each of the teacher got a turn even though he was the only student. Joe was talking about how proud he was and that he understood a little bit of when his dad would talk about him being proud of his kids when other people would compliment his children.

Last Saturday, we had a huge garage sale (saved for another post). We had the baby sitters come for three hours, and my friend, Kyra's mom visited and gave Alden twenty dollars. When the garage sale ended and I finally saw Al a couple hours later, he was still holding the twenty dollar bill in his hands. I told him he could put it in his pocket. Later that day, I traded his twenty dollar bill with one 10 dollar bill, one 5 dollar bill, and five 1 dollar bill so he could pay tithing the next day. We put all of his money in an envelop and Al wrote his name on it. Next morning, we got his tithing ready, and Ellie kept pulling on Al's envelop and wanted to play with it. So I gave her another envelop with her name on it. Alden saw that Ellie didn't have any money in her envelop, and he actually gave her his 5 dollar bill! I was so surprised and impressed that he was so willing to share with his little sister, especially after we talked about how he could spend his money on treats and buying presents for himself. I was so proud of him.

Actually this morning, Ellie wanted to eat some Krispy Kreme donuts after breakfast. We only had two left, so I gave her one, and Al said he'd eat his later. And of course, when he started eating his donut later, Ellie wanted more. I was prepared for a war, and Alden shared his donut with his little sister. :D


Now to Ellie...

She's been getting more and more talkative (although most of her words are still unrecognizable). She is starting to say more words and is willing to repeat after me when I try to teach her how to say things. So lately, we've been having her take turns saying the night time prayers. She repeats after every single word (even if they don't sound alike at all), and confidently says "Ah~~~ Men!" at the end. She's still having a hard time focusing during long prayers, but she knows to put her hands together and sit up straight (at least when we start the prayer).

Since Ellie's not in nursery yet, we spend a lot of our Sundays walking around the halls during Church. We look at the paintings on the wall, and they are mostly of Jesus. She likes to point out Jesus in the paintings, and actually started saying "Jesus" last Sunday. :D

Ellie is so good at sharing (most things). Whenever she eats something, she makes sure that other people get a bite too. If I give her a fork, she will actually walk around and give Al, Joe, and I a bite after each bite she gets. My mom always complains that she's gaining weight because of Ellie since Ellie's always trying to get my mom to eat whenever she eats. A lot of times, she won't take a bite if other people haven't gotten a turn yet.

Ellie is really patient, too. Alden likes to tease her a lot (being a brother), but she is really patient with him and puts up with him when he takes things for fun and bumps and knocks her down on purpose. She knows to take things lightly (when she's not super tired), and sometimes teases Al back too.

Anyway... we are really grateful that Alden and Ellie are our kids. We can't wait to find out what our next one will be like. (Supposed to be the best because he'll be our third child... lol)

April is here!

Well.. I guess I ended skipping all of March. Ha ha. Half of that month was spent in Chicago, and I guess I should do a post about our Chicago trip... I keep saying Chicago, but I really mean Beach Park, Illinois, where my dad lives. It's about 40 minutes up north of downtown Chicago. But it's still in the greater Chicago area, so whatever..

Originally, Yeagi and Jonathan were planning to go visit my dad in Chicago during their spring break. So we decided to go with them, and Joe was going to drive there with them to save money, and the kids and I were gonna fly there. Well, Yeagi and Jonathan decided not to go, so all of us got to fly there. It turns out to be a good thing because I don't know how I would've handled the flight with the kids all by myself... :P We booked a flight out from Provo, and it was actually pretty nice. The line was really short, the people were very nice, and they didn't even have that special x-ray machine that everyone used to talk about. The plane was really small, but the kids did really well, and Al got to play on the ds. I bought him a spider man pull-a-long backpack, and he loved having his ds, his buddy Buzz, and snacks in there. Keep Ellie was a little more difficult since she gets really frustrated with electronics (she hasn't full learned to appreciate the wonderfulness of ipads and such), but we kept her entertained enough with books, pictures from the safety instruction manual, and food. We had an hour layover in Denver, but our departure gate was all the way at the other side of the airport, so we were the last ones to board the next plane. The kids did wonderfully again, but I was so glad when the 2.5 hour ride was over, and we finally arrived in Milwaukee.

Ellie's first plane ride. And Al's first (as far as he can remember).

We were getting our bags and carseats from baggage claim, and we could see my parents sprinting down the airport. They were so happy to see our kids, and they ran to give them hugs and kisses! Everyone in the area looked at us and smiled. :D

We got our rental car and drove down to my dad's house in Beach Park, Illinois. It is a three bedroom house, and my mom had done a wonderful job of decorating and making it roomy. It was so clean when they were giving us a tour, I kept regretting not taking any pictures! Because after half an hour of us being there, it looked like our house... Ha ha ha. (Not clean and orderly anymore)

Kids playing in front of the house

With their toys

We went out to dinner at a Chinese buffet, and the waiter and the waitresses kept wanting to play with Ellie and we even found one of them holding her! Ha ha. Putting the kids to sleep was a challenge that night because Ellie refused to go to sleep (she was so worked up from playing with my parents) and my parents kept wanting to dash into the kids' room to get the crying baby..

Well, that was our first day, and I honestly don't remember what we did for the rest of our trip on each day. I will just try to point out the highlights of the trip...

1. Korean stores - I just loved going to the Korean markets.. There were a couple of huge Korean markets, about the size of a normal grocery store. They had everything! (well, almost everything) I just kept drooling and Joe had to kinda put a limit on what I wanted to buy. But he mostly let me buy whatever I wanted. Ha ha. We got to eat a lot of fresh fish and Korean snacks. Our favorite was the food court and the bakery. We got to eat authentic 양념치킨 (sweet and spicy chicken). It was soooo good, we went back a second time to eat it before we came back home. Al just loved the break style bread, and we actually found one that didn't use any nuts (a lot of the korean bakeries in Vegas or even here put walnuts and almonds in their bread because Koreans are health-nuts and they just love putting extras on). We went to the bakery to buy bread everytime we were in the area, so the clerk recognized us and gave us free bread and smoothies! :D

2. Brookfield Zoo - While we were in Chicago, they were having a really weird weather. Chicago actually had a record high temperature in the 80's on the day that we went to the Zoo. The kids had a lot of fun looking at different animals and also being able to spend time with their grandparents. I got to take a lot of fun pictures of them together. We didn't really prepare for the hot weather and were worried about Ellie being in the sun. So we decided to rent a double stroller (we only took an unbrella stroller that hardly has any shade) even with the high cost. We were standing in a line when the the person standing behind us and I happened to complain about them combining lines for renting and returning. They were about to leave and had to wait in line with 20 people in front of them to get their $10 deposit back. So I offered them $10, and they were glad to leave the stroller with us! (We actually returned it at the end of the day - no line - and got the deposit back). We were so glad we got the stroller because Al wouldn't have survived walking the whole way.

3. Thrift stores - My mom kept talking about the thrift stores she would visit EVERYDAY while dad was at work, so we went to visit as well. We love going to the DI, and it was actually pretty fun to look around. My mom bought a whole bunch of toys (to be used for the two weeks we were there!), and I found some books (The Cat in the Hat for 88 cents!) and some long sleeve shirts for Ellie.

4. Gurnee Mall - We decided to go shopping at the mall because I wanted to get a light jacket for Joe (he had a lot of sweatshirts but no zip-up jackets - lost them all) and some tennis shooes for Ellie. I'm glad to say that our trip was successful and we found both of those items for good price. Al got to go on the carousel with my dad (yes they were being spoiled the whole time), and we even saw a crocodile and a snake (Alden was brave enough to touch it!) IN the mall! I read somewhere that the mall is like 2 miles long, and it really was long.... which made the trip back to the car very dreadful but it was still fun to look around at different stores (most of them I didn't recognize). We actually saw this donut vendor, who was selling mini donuts. He had a miniature version of the Krispy Kreme donut fryer, that spewed out the dough on one end and cooked the donuts while they traveled down the stream of hot oil. It even did the flipping thing automatically! They tasted really good, and Al ate half the bag.. Joe kept saying, "Honey, this is what I want you to make at home!" We'll see if that happens..

5. DIY projects - My dad wanted to paint the outside of his house, and Joe offered to help. We also heard that there was a crack in the foundation and leakage into the basement when it rained, so we asked around at Home Depot to find ways to fix it. We spent the first week doing research, trying to pick paint, and looking around at different options of buying/renting a ladder. This was a wrong idea because the rest of the next week rained the whole time! Ha ha. Fortunately, Joe and my dad got to the cracks on a nice evening with cement and concrete. However, the only sunny day for painting was the sunday before we left, so we had to paint the house the day before we left (the only sunny day but windy and cold in the 40's). I went outside to help for a couple hours, and it was freezing cold! We didn't even get to finish but we managed getting three sides of the house done and about half of the back side. I wanted to have the kids come out and help paint the mailbox or something (thought it'd make good memories) but it was too cold for them to come out. Anyway, we were glad to get at least that much done to help my dad. Oh, they also had a leak in their shower. Joe tried to repair it and found that we would have to replace some parts. We looked at replacement parts (which happened to be a rare type) and the price was $40 to upwards of $70! I called Moen, and they said they'd be glad to send a replacement part for free! :D (The parts got there after we left, and my dad says there's no leak anymore. Ha ha.)

Kids helping with filling the hole Joe dug up to fix the crack.

6. Dad's work - We got to visit Dad at work and look around his office and lab. It was cool to see where the action was. It was even cooler to see his name on the wall and his hand writing all over the place! :D Al slept through the whole thing, but Ellie enjoyed looking around and my dad even attempted to teach her some anatomy. lol.

7. Chicago temple - We went to visit the temple with dad. He's an ordinance worker there, and we just went to visit the temple grounds on a day he was free. It reminded me of the Seoul temple, and the kids were having fun walking around the temple grounds and being out of the car. :D I took some awesome pictures.

It was a really fun trip, and it went by so quickly! I can't believe we were there for whole two weeks! I wish the weather had been nice for the second week as well, but I guess I should feel lucky that it was even nice for the first week since it was really unusual for it to be above 60 and even 70 in March. Not sure when our next visit would be but we can't wait to go back!