love this!
One of my favorite artist is holding a contest. I love her print and would love to win it!
http://happydoodleland.blogspot.com/2010/03/print-give-away-alert.html
Wish me luck!
One of my favorite artist is holding a contest. I love her print and would love to win it!
One of Aria's favorite craft products is a bag of pipe cleaners. She loves them and she's very creative with them. I've gone through 3 bags in 2 months. She has free reign to them and will make random things throughout the day when she feels creative. This also means that there are pipe cleaner creations throughout the house. I was in the bathroom the other day, looked down and there was an Aria creation on the counter. I don't have the heart to thrown any of them out so they'll just slowly grow in numbers lie tribbles from a Star Trek episode.
Happy Chinese New Year! I decided to treat Aria and myself to some dim sum for lunch. I ordered way too much and now we're stuffed. Aria's favorite dim sum are Ha Gow (shrimp dumplings) and steamed b.b.q. pork buns.
I've been preoccupied for the last 3 days doing a freelance illustration for my friend's magazine. She's a senior editor for an Asian magazine. It's very sweet of her to ask me to do this since I've been so out of the graphic loop since I've became a stay-at-home mom. The art is to accompany a poem on a two page spread. That's why the middle is blank. I'm not too thrilled with the left side of the art but I do like the right. So glad I finished it within before the deadline. The artwork has been fedex and will hopefully arrive at her office tomorrow morning. Hope they like it.
Long time no blog. So much has happened since my last post. The most impactful event was a death in the family. I don't want to go into details but I happened very unexpectedly and Aria and I flew up north to deal for the funeral. I was surprise by how much Aria understands death. I guess that's not surprising since she has seem the passing of her Great Grandfather on A.'s side and her baby brother in the recent years. She understands that death means that the individual is gone from our present lives but not from our hearts. She believes in a heaven where all people and animals go after live. She explained everything to me so clearly too.
We're cruel parents. Even though Aria's still sick we took her out for dim sum on Sat. with our friends and their children. The sad part was, Aria slept through the whole meal and ate nothing. We headed off to the mall afterwards so the kids can play together. We got there a little before our friends and while Al was carrying Aria around, she threw up on him. He had to do a makeshift cleanup job. My poor daughter is still not feeling well. She pepped up after that and played with Alicia for alittle bit. We headed home soon afterwards where Aria threw up some more.
I guess Aria caught a bug something and we were not prepared for the outcome. Friday night, right as A. and I were tiptoeing out Aria's room, I heard a gurgling sound coming from Aria and I knew, knew, knew, knew, that she was vomiting. I didn't understand how she could be sleeping one sec. and the next be vomiting every ounce of food that she ate that day up. I was endless and I, like an idiot, stood there and watch. My reflexes failed me. The cleanup was very disgusting. I love my daughter but the stench made me want to hurl. A. had the unpleasant job of cleaning the vomit off of her. I had the even worst job of cleaning the vomit from her bed, clothes, and bed sheets. Sign.
Yes, we hit Skirball for their Noah's Ark exhibit after not going for 2 weeks. This time I took my friend's daughter Isabelle with us. Isabelle is a year older than Aria and Aria really enjoys playing with her. They had a blast at the exhibit and we left after a couple of hours. I took them home where they played for another 4 hours.
If you're in our shoes, you'll call up Alice and have her and her kids meet up at Ikea! Well, we met up at a bookstore, read some books and them strolled across the street to Ikea to have lunch. The place was packed. Guess everyone had the same idea that we did. Afterward, we hung out at the kids' area where the kids played. Alice, Cassidy and Michael soon left us. We purchased a few things (sheepskin rug, pink frames and some cards) and capped off our visit with vanilla ice cream cones. Yum!
I met up with some of my friends for a potluck the day after Christmas. I wanted to avoid the whole shopping madness and just mellow with good friends. My friend Lina hosted the event at her house. Unfortunately, I was unable to cook any food (long story, something to do with a gas leak) and just purchase some Chinese noodles at my local Chinese food place. Lina, being the great cook that she is, made yummy chicken curry. Alice brought lasagna, Patrice made her famous coconut cake, Marylou brought mac & cheese, Keiko made pasta salad. God, what a feast.
We had a pretty mellow Christmas this year. It consisted of alot of eating and having a lovely time with the people we love most. We had a few dinners with A.'s family and had lunch with Alice and her family on Christmas day.
One of the planned highlights for the end of this year was to take Aria to see Disney's Princesses on Ice. I wasn't sure if Aria could handle sitting through over 2 hours of this but since she loves the princesses so much I decided to take her. Photos were prohibited but everyone was using their cameras so I jumped into it too and snapped away. Aria had an okay time but I think we're going to skip it next year and do it the following year. She was still very antsy in her seat some of the times. She also said that the show was 'bad' because of the fireworks at the end and that they 'always forget about Pocahontas'. She's a tough one to please.