Our New Changster

We are happy to announce Princess

Sydney Xin-Rong Chang (張忻融) to our family.

She is one loud, strong baby, arriving in at 7lbs 4oz, and 20 inches long. She probably would've come earlier (like around August 4th), but her mommy was too happy celebrating her own birthday and totally ignored the fact that her membrane had ruptured...oops! (I actually did call our on-call Dr. and left a message about my situation; she just never called me back.)
After 48 hours of irregular contractions and fluid leakage, mommy couldn't handle the contractions anymore. On August 6th at 4:30am, we finally decided to go to the hospital. Six hours later and after four big pushes, this little princess was born.

Her chinese name means joy and harmony. If you say it in mandarin, it sounds like 心融(熔)-- a melted heart. Daddy and mommy wishes she will always have a kind and sweet heart. We wish she can find joy and be Christ-like; hearts may be touched by her example.

Japan day1-3 : Sagamihara 相模原巿& Machida町田巿, Tokyo

We spend the first days with families in Sagamihara, Tokyo where David's brother lives. Aiko and Kevin drove 8 hours from Kyoto to spend 24 hrs with us, we are so happy to see them again!!! Can u imagine how's a house with 7 kids would be like??? If u think getting 1 kids to smile at the camera is hard, try 7 at the same time! Mark and Bev took us to a bazaar ( flea market) on base where I spotted a cute yakata and later realize it has some minor easy fixed tores, so I bargained it down to USD4 from USD15. I am pretty proud of myself because you can't really haggles in Japan.












We also visited the Cup Noodles Museum.I also got to make my own cup noodles!!!!!




My favorite- spicy seafood favor!!!!!












I asked them to make silly faces, they looks more like annoyed than silly :).




This ramen shop is so good!!!!




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Macau

We had some free nights to use at the Westin Hotel in Macau so we decided to take mom on an early birthday trip :). It was pretty tiring but very fun and fulfilling (i.e. for my stomach). Charlotte was ecstatic when butterflies landed on her fingers; she felt like was a real fairy :).
Special thanks to Melanie & Pan, Cherry & Jeff, and of course Amber. Pan, it really nice to meet you and thank you for taking us around!!! Also, please forgive my forgetfulness. I am totally blaming it on Lulu and crappy free wifi @ 新馬路 this time (you know what I mean :)). More pics are coming...

Location:Kwun Tsing Rd,,Hong Kong

Pre baby# 2 Asia Tour - Hong Kong

We wanted to go on another family trip before baby #2 Lulu (Charlotte picked this name) comes. We will be traveling to Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, and Singapore for six weeks. Hong Kong is our first stop. Charlotte was only 2 years old when we came here last time. It's so funny to see her eat all my childhood favorite foods and she's lovin' it!!!! Cocktail buns, Yakult, and 大腳板雪條. Her favorites are 利賓納 & 紫菜. She asks for them everyday. We will be staying in HK for another week, and I still need to take XX to 許留山:).

It has been a year since my last post, and due to my swollen feet and huge belly (7 months prego), I have to stay home and rest a day or two. With my iPad andnothing else to do at my mom's house, I decided to give photo stream and blogger app another try. It's really easy to use; I only wish they had an iPad blogger app in addition to the iPhone app.

XX and her new Compaq

David's old HP laptop died (several times) over three years ago and he decided never to buy another HP. Recently though, he found out that all of the problems that the laptop had were because of a defective video chip and that there was a Class Action lawsuit against nVidia (the chip maker) involving thousands of laptops that were built with the defective chip. David signed on and, long story short, we won. As part of the settlement we received a new Compaq laptop, which isn't truly fair considering what we lost.

David and I already changed to using Macbook Pros, and since our new laptop isn't really worth anything (it's a single core budget laptop selling for $299), Dave decided to set it up for XX to watch PBSkids.

Well, at least someone is excited about it :)!

We are still here....

This time I am going to blame my new photoshop guidebooks for my lack of blogging. A few months ago, I decided to learn how to use photoshop on my own so we bought 2 books and I was determined to conquer them. Don't get me wrong, I love reading those books and am amazed at how much I can do with my pics. However, the more I read, the more I wanted to edit my photos; so I ended up spending hours on a single picture. As a result, I only posted the pictures that I took from my phone on Facebook.

We actually did quite a bit since my last post. We tagged along for David conference in Whistler, Canada, visited ah-Ma in Seattle, saw the Cherry Blossom Festival in DC, witnessed XX graduate from her Tot 2 ice skating class, and of course celebrated Easter.

Back in March, David had a conference to attend in Whistler, which is the ski resort known for hosting the recent Winter Olympics. Dave had been talking about this conference for months because most of the meetings were scheduled for the early morning or late afternoon, so he would have plenty of time to ski. We also invited the Vuongs to come join our "conference/ski" trip. Despite the fact the United Airlines lost our luggage, causing David to have no clean underwear for 2 days, and him catching a stomach flu virus that would eventually get us all sick, our trip was wonderful.

Charlotte and her best best bud Jacob. They always talk about each other.

Us in the Gondola on our way to go tubing 

First real dog sled ride, smelled like dog poop afterwards

XX fell asleep half way through the sled ride. It was a good experience but won't do it again.

Charlotte 3.0

This past year Boo Boo has really grown up. She hit many milestones including: starting preschool, becoming fully potty-trained, and graduating from her toddler bed to a big girl bed. She also moved up from nursery and officially joined the primary at church. She is very independent, in fact, she even wanted to drive herself to school with her pink car :). She grew half a foot (6 inches) in the past year. She knows most of the upper and lower case letters now. Although her first language is English, her Cantonese and Mandarin have improved a lot as well. Her memory is sharp - she remembers everything from car and animal names to past conversations and even the freeway exit that we take to go home.

Her favorite cartoon characters are princesses, but she also loves playing with all kinds of cars and Thomas the train.

She loves to sing, dance, draw, and do homework. She recently started going ice skating and has been taking skating lessons once a week. She doesn't think of herself as a baby anymore, and neither do we. We have enjoyed watching her grow up and often smile when we look back at her younger pictures.
click here to watch on youtube : Charlotte can skate