ACK! I'm such a terrible blogger. Just a few posts down is LAST YEAR'S New Year's post! hahaha. I keep making a mental note to start blogging again. Doro recently started a blog so that gave me my final push to start again. The funny thing was I had totally forgotten I had THIS blog and was looking into blogger vs. wordpress. ha!

Remi is growing up so quickly and while we had Xanga to record Noah's daily activities (and every single milestone) I've been doing a terrible job at recording Remi's. I've just been using FB to record stats here and there and for pics. I seriously doubt I'll post many pictures here since I can barely remember/have time to post them on FB but I'll try. I'll just use this blog to capture fun family memories and random thoughts and reflections.

Some tidbits about Remi I'd like to record:

*Currently age 3y 2m.
*On Monday, used the words "actually" and "probably" for the first time.
*Sleeps 13 hours a night (9:30am-10:30pm) and I'm SO LUCKY for her late mornings as I'm usually up until the wee hours of the morning and have to draaaaag myself out of bed.
*Calls her trampoline her "jumpolene" and bathing suit "baby suit" -the latter is my absolute favorite.
*Her (current) favorite shows are: Oobi, Arthur, Big Time Rush (thanks to big brother)
*Her favorite foods are anything that grandma makes and she is particularly addicted to korean instant bowl noodles (really)
*She is affectionate but also coy and shy around strangers.
*At bedtime we read a story and turn out the lights. We play the "Do You Love" game where I ask her if she loves someone and she answers "yes." It's always in this order "Do you love obba? daddy? mommy? your cousin? (then I ask her what her cousin's name is and she says 'emmaline!'), your emo? your boo? your halmoni? your halabuji? your gomo-halmoni? your friends? your church? God? Jesus? Then we say "good night" and she sleeps!

Last week as we were driving home from Korean school Noah said, "Mommy, when I think of halmoni and halabuhji, I feel so proud." I asked him why and he said "Because I have such good grandparents." He is such a sweet boy. And indeed, he does have good grandparents. What other grandparents would give their grandson $5 for each korean sweet potato he will eat?!

Remi's favorite part of the day is the drive home after picking Noah up from school. As we're leaving the house I have her repeat after me, "Obba! I coming for you!" and she squeals his name as soon as he gets in the car. Then, on the 20 minute drive home they are non-stop talking and laughing with each other. Today, they kept looking at each other and smiling. Noah asked me, "WHY IS REMI SO CUTE?!"

Ack. I really need to keep better track of this blog. I was such a spaz about keeping Noah's blog updated with every single new milestone but now I find it hard to find a quiet moment to reflect, log on then write in coherent sentences. Anytime I get anywhere near the computer the kids are on me. Noah wants to play on Club Penguin or Lego dot com and Remi wants to see pictures of "online" or watch Alvin or Charlie Brown.

Yesterday we finally bought Remi a potty. She was so excited. We also bought her some pull ups. My mom had been NAGGING me for MONTHS to hurry up and start potty training her but I knew we needed to wait for a more settled time. We had so many events during the holidays and we've been so busy until now. I remember being so stressed about potty training Noah. We had the charts and rewards and everything. Thankfully it went rather smoothly. I wanted to take a laid back approach to Remi. I notice that she was telling us when she pooped but not when she peed so I wasn't quite sure if she was ready. But she surprised us all when we got home, we opened the potty and she peed in it just a few minutes later! We peed probably 4-5 more times the rest of the night. I guess she likes to surprise us. hahaha.

Other memorable Remi facts (age 26 months)

• Has finally started saying "Noah" instead of "woah wuh" but doesn't do it all the time. She'll also look at me coyly and call me "yooni."

• Will sometimes refuse to kiss you but if you act sad, she'll come back and say, "ok" and kiss you then try to make you smile.

• Takes one daily nap around 2pm. Most days she naps in the car on the way to picking Noah up from school. Almost like clockwork she is asleep by 2:20pm. I usually have a coffee and paper and read in the parked car. It's a pretty nice routine!
  

Happy New Year!

My sister, Jason and Emmaline have come for a visit and we've all been busy! We've had a packed house since Wednesday as that's when my parents, aunt and sister's family came to spend the night. They came just in time since we had been without daddy since Monday. Tuesday night was the hardest for Noah and he was crying for daddy.

He came back from his OneThing conference on Thursday and we were able to have our make-up Christmas dinner then. We weren't in too much of a festive mood on Christmas since my sister wasn't in town not to mention Remi's little toe. ouch.

Friday (today) was spent celebrating New Year's with the family. Noah was SUPER excited to bow to his grandparents so he could make some bank! But Remi ABSOLUTELY did not want to wear her hanbok and cried the whole time.

SO miserable but SO CUTE!

She finally did it but only because we told her she could take off her hanbok right away. We had Noah stay in position so she could see what to do.

She was still upset after we took her hanbok off. She was still crying and fussing then my mom asked if she wanted gum and she perked right up! Then we told her she had to bow if she wanted gum and she was on the floor in an instant!
Will bow for gum.

Get that gum ready!

Afterwards we went to visit WS's parents at their store. The kids bowed to them and got paid -AGAIN! Then the kids and I met Mrs. Kim/John/Danielle at Cheesecake Factory. Mrs. Kim is a total angel. She always treats me out to lunch because she wants me to have some time for myself away from the kids. As a mother of four, she really understands. She wanted to get our kids together for lunch so we met them there. The food was so good and Remi was happy to have the company. Noah was excited too because Mrs. Kim was spoiling him. He showed John/Danielle how to bow (right there in the restaurant) and Mrs. Kim was so impressed that she handed Noah a big wad of cash. Then to my horror, he started to count it right there. oy. He's received so much cash over the holiday season! We usually take it away from him and give him a small amount to spend but now I'm not sure how we're going to pry the cash away since he seems to be more aware of it now. He's thinking of saving up for something big.

Thankfully, my sister/jason/emmaline will be here for a couple of weeks but unfortunately, WS will be leaving again for another retreat from Sunday-Tuesday. Noah is so much more aware of when WS leaves and sometimes gets really sad. Poor kid. When you ask Remi where dad is, she always says "yo mama!"

Cousins!

Our Christmas!

(sorry for the awkward formatting. I'm still learning how to use Blogger and can't seem to add pictures correctly. No matter what layout I choose, the picture automatically goes to the top of the page...)

I ended up having to wake WS up to set Remi's playhouse up! I had a ton of presents to wrap. I thought about wrapping them ahead of time but I'm always worried that Noah will find them. Plus, I'm doing lots of returning and switching out especially if items I've already purchased go on sale! And I have a tendency to forget what I bought since I'm always hiding them in different parts of the house. I'm super paranoid about ruining the whole Santa myth with Noah so I have to make sure to use special wrapping paper he's never seen and get rid of any trace of it!


Here is the tree with all the presents underneath. The green paper is what Santa used for his gifts. The white paper in the back are the presents from mom and dad. Noah wrote his Christmas list a few weeks ago and Santa tried his hardest to get what he could. It was a list of about 10? things. He got about 8 of those and some additional toys from Santa. He asked for: 2 different Nerf guns, 2 different bakugan (Santa TRIED to find the exact 2 he wanted but who can tell those things apart? They ended up not being the right ones but Noah didn't mind), 1 webkinz, legos, k'nex and a happy sac. I had no idea what a happy sac was. He tried to explain to me. It seems as though they used to sell them at the school store and it seems like some combination of a hackey sack/stress ball. This is what he REALLY wanted but Santa couldn't find it!


Cookies for Santa!

Luckily, Noah slept in until about 9am (which is late for him). We came and woke us up telling us Santa had come, that he had taken the card he made for him, eaten 2 cookies and he could actually see a footprint in the carpet! (I think it was from Wonsuk's slippers). We started opening presents right away. We were excited for Remi to open her's too but she didn't quite "get" the unwrapping yet. She didn't like the tearing sound of the paper! WS ended up opening her gifts for her but she was happy once the wrapping paper was off!

Remi is a trip. She put half of the zhu zhu hamster ball on her head with Noah's glasses from his Nerf Dart Tag set. She wasn't even like, "Look at my funny outfit hahahaha." She would just play, stop, put on hamster ball and glasses, then keep playing." We were chuckling at her all day.

Oh, and she kept on putting that Zhu Zhu pet into her play oven -and the pet had to be on. We kept taking it out but she'd get mad at us and put it back in. hahaha.

As you can see, she was finally getting herself off of the couch. Her toes are taped together and she would refuse to walk. The grandparents came over later and lo and behold, once she saw that scooter (from my aunt) she was UP. She made WS ride her around the house and even tried to ride the tricycle from my parents. Sorry there are no pics of my parents. hahaha. We had a pretty low key Christmas this year since my sis and her family weren't here to celebrate with us. When my parents came over, the kids opened their toys from them. Well, actually, from them and bought by me. They get nervous trying to pick toys out for the kids. hahaha

I was able to take a nap since I had been up until about 4am. Then, instead of a regular Christmas dinner we went to a Japanese buffet! I had planned on cooking but the night I was supposed to go shopping we were in the ER with Remi's dislocated toe. I decided then and there I had not the energy nor the interest in shopping for a big meal and cooking. We've postponed our big Christmas meal for when my sis, jason and baby e come later in the week!

So this is the mess that I've been cleaning up for the past 2 days. Not just this pile but finding space for the toys in an already maxed out playroom. Noah and I went through his toys yesterday and purged a TON. We boxed a lot of things up and put them in the attic since Remi might want to play with them later. We threw some away that had missing parts and put a box together to give away.

Told you she loved her hamster ball hat...

Remi's Owie

Yesterday Remi was playing and slipped on the tile floor of the dining room. It seemed like a simple slip because when I turned and saw her she was kind of sitting on her knees. Her back was to me and I could see that her shoulders were heaving as if she was crying but she was not making a sound (you know how kids do that sometimes). I immediately went to her, picked her up and she started to cry pretty hysterically. Something told me to look down at her foot and there I could see her baby toe on her right foot pointing away from the other toes. It didn't look good.

I immediately woke WS up (he had dozed off on the couch) and told him, "We have to go to the ER. I think Remi's toe is broken" and then told Noah to put on his shoes and coat. WS was still a bit out of it so he was frantically running around (yeah, later in the night as we were reflecting on the entire incident we both came to the realization that he is totally useless in an emergency situation). He DID make sure to find his jacket and put it on which meant that he was now dressed in three layers of clothing. I told him to put shoes on and he's scurrying around looking for shoes and says, "But she won't want to wear them!" and I'm all, "Not HER shoes! YOUR SHOES!!!"

Thankfully, we are less than a mile from an ER and we got there very quickly. WS just held Remi with a blanket in the back seat. One thing I'll always remember is how hard she was crying. She was so upset and scared but she kept calling for her big brother. She kept saying, "woah wuh! woah wuh! woah wuh! I huht woah wuh. I huhting." She calls 'Noah, woah-wuh'. I thought it was so heartbreaking how she kept calling for him of all people. Noah was really scared because everything was happening so quickly and you could really hear that she was in a lot of pain. But he managed to console her as much as he could.

We get there and amazingly they make us go through the entire registration and check in process while we are holding a very distraught and hurting two year old in our arms. We finally get seen by someone only to have them sit us down and ask us a bunch of questions about allergies, get her weight and her heartbeat. Ummm hello, do you happen to notice I'm holding a screaming two year old? We get back to the room and we wait AGAIN to see someone. Another registration person comes in. Wait 10 minutes. X-ray tech comes in. Wait 15 minutes while doc reads x-ray. doc comes in. It's a dislocation. Let me get my attending. Wait 10 minutes. Remi finally gets some Tylenol with codeine but she's still in serious pain. Her toe is pretty much perpendicular from her foot. The doc says the attending will re-align her toe and she'll be administered something to numb her. Wait 10 minutes. Attending comes in, takes a look at her toe and says, "yup, that's a dislocation" and proceeds to PULL HER PINKY TOE right then and there. No numbing. Remi is SCRA-REEMING at this point and her whole face turns red. Keep in mind that she had been crying for about an hour non-stop by this point. They tape 3 of her toes together and send us off. But of course not before waiting for another 15 minutes while they are getting her discharge papers. And she's still in a lot of pain by this point.

We get home and she's ok once we plant her on the couch. She won't let us touch her foot and keeps reminding us, "Don toucha feet. Don toucha feet." She slept okay last night but still woke up earlier than usual. She even hollered for Woah Wuh and as soon as he came in the room she told him, "Don toucha feet woah wuh. kay? Don toucha feet." She really didn't want me to get her out of bed this morning and cried when I moved her to the couch but she's doing fine now. She's hasn't walked or moved from the couch which is so unlike her.

Poor thing. This is her 2nd ER visit in 2 months. Last month she fell from the dining room chair and we just took her in as a precaution. Last year in December she was at the Children's Hospital with her MRSA infection!

So here is our little princess. She has been on the couch all day and even took her nap there. She's been watching Hi-5 and Oobi.

Hello, blogging world!

I've FINALLY decided to start another blog. I still have babynoah's xanga site that I started when he was about 4 months old! He's now 7.5 years old and in second grade but I can't tell you how many times I've looked back at those posts to remember his baby days and toddlerhood. Noah was a 100% charming, magical little baby boy and I'm so glad that I meticulously recorded every detail. I've also referred to it more than several times since Remi has been born to determine milestones or decipher baby needs.

Once I was pregnant with Remi, I decided to start my own xanga as babynoahmama since I wanted Remi and I to have our own little place but then it got so hard to maintain both. Life is so much busier with two! I AM a bit worried about losing all of our 6+ years of posts on Xanga. Not to mention the fact that our old computer had a serious meltdown and we lost all of Noah's stored pictures so THE ONLY pictures we have are the ones we have uploaded on Xanga! yikes. I know there are sites out there that will print and bind your blog so maybe we'll look into that later...

Now that Remi is a bit older and much more independent, I'd like to start blogging again to record family events and have my own place to ramble...