Season's Greetings

Season’s Greetings

Dear friends and families,

We hope this letter finds everyone high in holiday spirit and you and your family are in good health. Since the holidays are coming and we all want surprises, why not start our letter with an exciting news – we are expecting a sibling for Alvin in early summer! Every child is a gift and our family is so blessed.

In addition to the news, we want to give you a little bit update on our family whereabouts. Alvin continues to amaze his admiring parents everyday with his physical and intellectual achievements. He is now 17 months old and runs and climbs everywhere as you can imagine. He just started to learn how to stand on one foot and jump without landing on his soft bottom. Dancing with music is his favorite physical movement and crying without tears is his most powerful tool to gain parents sympathy. Alvin also loves to draw like an artist and plays hide-and-seek everywhere in the house with his daddy. His language acquisition is improving everyday. He can now speak 20-30 words and recognize about 80 names, including animals, foods, objects, some US states and of course, China and US on the maps. Quite impressive, um?

Alvin’s Dad continues to be a fulltime engineer at work, a fulltime babysitter in the house and a part-time student at Hopkins. How can he handle all these? We don’t really need to know as long as his boss is happy, Alvin is healthy, Alvin’s Mom is merry, and the grade reports are all As.

Alvin’s Mom continues to enjoy her motherhood with an extremely supportive hubby doing all the housework, a wonderful boy giving her free massage on demand and a cute little baby kicking her tummy every now and then. What a life!

That is all about it. We are just doing as well as you would expect. Our holiday wishes go to you and your family.

Alvin, baby-on-the-way, Hope & Yuelun

Jungle night

Alvin had a night out with Santa Claus (sort of)! In spite of the severe cold weather, the parents took Alvin to attend his first evening event at the Gaithersburg Concert Pavilion. The event featured Christmas Chorus, Santa Claus arriving on a Firetruck, free jungle-bell bands and free picture taken with Santa Claus!

In many of the pictures, you will see Alvin wasn't happy. But, don't read it wrong. He loves the night light scene but we had to squeeze his face because he was supposed to look at the camera so he couldn't turn around to see his favor lights !

The goods always come with the bads. The trade off for the fun night out is that Alvin got a bad cold. You would think we are crazy parents but we are not crazy enough like others to wait in line for a picture taken with Santa Claus. Maybe we should have done that ... :)

Dancing around the Christmas Tree

Daycare Halloween Party

It is Alvin's first Halloween Party in the Daycare. Since every baby is supposed to dress up in costume, Mom had no choice but bought a Little Lion Cub costume for Alvin. It turns out that he looks too cute in that costume and many people in the evening Trick-or-Treating thought he is a "she". Oops.. next year we will buy a superman!

Halloween Costume - $9.97
Daycare Tuition - $355 per week
Alvin's Lion show in the daycare - priceless
for everything else, we use Daddy's paycheck

Do you know how hard it is for our 23 pounds Alvin to make peace with these two 30 pounds babies everyday? j/k. Alan and Jena are wonderful companions for Alvin.

Here is the Hershey Kisses.

Harvest time for Alvin...

Seneca Park

Not to disappoint our readers, we are finally posting some recent pictures from Seneca State Park visit. There is a "Tire Playground" there, soft and kid-friendly.

Alvin loves ducks. He doesn't want to leave them.

Fatherly Loves...

Our Pumpkin Pie

On a gorgeous autumn morning, Alvin teamed up with his buddy Ben and swept the pumpkin field at Bulter Orchard farm in Germantown. We taught Alvin the word Pumpkin and showed him a picture of pumpkin beforehand and he seemed to recognize it

Here is our Pumpkin Pie picking up pumpkins.

Alvin is trying to protect his pumpkins.

ZOOoooo

Before the parents go hibernated with the animals, we visited the National Zoo the weekend before. At Alvin's age, he can only see what he can see, like big animals or animals move very fast, or playful animals like Apes who played "peek-a-poo" in front of us!

We first stopped at the Panda House. Guess what? Panda Tian Tian hibernates even on a hot Fall day! It was only 10 o'clock in the morning!

Panda Mei Xiang is the active one.

I guess they are comparing the size of their eyes.

We were lucky to see an elephant talent show. They first say Hi to us. Then, they show their friendships by doing "hand-in-hand".

*** Family Update ***

The lazy mom got tired of taking care of Alvin days and nights so she trained the Dad to do all the works. Every night after dinner, Daddy will play with Alvin, and then give him a warm bath, dress him up, wash his face, put lotion on, brush his teeth, wipe his gums (watch out for the mad bites from self-defense), read storybooks, feed him bottle and put him to bed. What the mom is doing in the meantime? Lay in bed watching TV or read a book or do nothing, you know, all that good stuff. And, of course, now and then, she would ensure the Dad that (doing all the works) is the new trend for modern time Daddies.

Then, the lazy Dad got tired of not having his personal time in the evening so he trained Alvin to sleep earlier and sleep on his own. He would put Alvin to bed before 8:30pm, let the toy Giraffe to play a melody from MusicBox, and say "night night" to Alvin. The good boy Alvin will just play on his own to sleep, sometimes within 5 minutes and sometimes takes almost an hour but he just stays quietly and talks to the animal (or himself) and comforts himself by mouthing the corner of his favor blanket.

The "not that lazy" Alvin lately falls in love with reading storybooks. He spends at least 1 or 2 hours everyday browsing through all the books, pointing to each figure and asks for their names. Also, he loves looking at the US Wall Map and the World Wall Map in our house. Looks like he got that from his Daddy.