relenting: the house that love built

I'm relenting, since holding out does me no good.

My friend Amy sent a spy to my house this morning to covertly take pictures of my gingerbread house.  If it's coming down to spying, I may as well just post the pictures on my blog.  Plus, certain maternal figures in my family are bugging me to see the pictures too... =)

So anyway, here goes - the proof that I am not martha and will never be:

Problem #1 - the house was too big.

Problem #2 - I needed a serious stash of icing. Even after bumming some powdered sugar off my house helper, I still didn't have enough. So we only iced the roof.

Problem #3 - I didn't want to use egg whites (since samantha is allergic to egg), so I just used powdered sugar with a little water. (I wasn't sure when we were going to eat it, and I was afraid the milk would go bad before then). You can see in the picture below, this was not icing that was meant to glue hard candies to gingerbread. It was literally creating icicles before our eyes! We couldn't get anything to stay on!!

But Emma enjoyed patterning, finding the red and green candies to use as tiles for the house. She also specifically picked out these shell marshmallow-things at the candy store, and she thought they'd be perfect on top of the house. Sounds good to me...

Mantha, on the other hand, just wanted to try some of everything on her side!  (Plus, josh was supervising her side, so she REALLY had free reign!)  She did wan to contribute to the shell-ness on the top of the house.
After a while, we coaxed the icing to stay put, and once it dried everything did actually stay.  Before bed, the girls took pictures with their side of the roof...

Emma wanted her name written on there, as well as new baby's name (but we blurred it out:  Did you think we were going to tell you so soon??  =)  She was proud...

Mantha was also proud of her work of art, even though it looks rather like she just threw up the candy shop.  Anyway, she also might have been so happy because she got to sit on top of the table for such a long period of time.  

One of samantha's special candies she chose was green frogs.  So this house has been plagued by an infestation of frogs...as if it didn't have enough problems... =)

Both girls with the big huge house:
Even daddy contributed, writing our asianese family name on the front - truly, the house that love built!  And five little hearts, representing all five of the hearts in our home!

bits and pieces

Today was just one of those days.  

One of those days where I wondered where all my energy went to. 

 One of those days where my children - who are old enough to know better - behaved very poorly in a situation where I needed them to behave well.  

One of those days where I couldn't shave my legs because my stomach was too big.  

One of those days where I remembered that I'm more than seven months pregnant and can't do everything I used to be able to.

One of those days where that bottle of coke was incredible refreshing and I could have gone for two more.  Good thing I don't drink alcohol.  

It wasn't a bad day necessairily.  Just one of those kind of days.  

Fortunately, we are the very beginning of strawberry season and tonight after dinner we had strawberries and whipped cream.  Samantha made me laugh hysterically when she called it "whoop cream".  You said it, girl.  

I painted the baby's bedroom one evening this week - rather out of the blue, but decided josh was doing something else so I just picked up a brush and got to work.  We're very close to choosing a name...we've never been so close so early before.  

We've got lots of fun christmas activities starting up this friday - it should be truly like the 12 days of christmas!  I'm trying to gear myself up for it. It's all stuff I want to do, I'm just trying to summon the energy to do it. Thank the Lord I have a house helper!  I'd never host anyone if she didn't help me...!

We made a gingerbread house last week.  Ummm, ok it was fun...but I probably will never do it again.  First of all, I think I'm willing to try lots of new things and lots of craft things, but I'm not particularly skilled in details.  Gingerbread houses are all about details - a minor reason why my detail-oriented friend Amy pulled off a gingerbread house I would be willing to live in.  I, however, am not so detail oriented. I'm more project-oriented, idea-oriented.  My gingerbread house was more like a gingerbread ghetto.  I'm not kidding.  

I'm not even brave enough to post the pictures on my blog, though I will say that early on I figured out the house was going to border on disaster, so when it came time for decorating, there were very few rules the girls had to follow.  They decorated to their hearts' content and had a great time.  They are very proud of their gingerbread house and the little special touches they added and came up with themselves.  Good for them, they can be proud of it.  I also videotaped part of the decorating ceremony as proof that at least one time in their lives, they got to decorate a g-bread house.  I think josh's mom is mailing me a g-bread kit. I'm sure that will go much better, because detail oriented people get it all ready and then idea-oriented people buy it.  That's one reason I really love America.  =)

We got our big fat christmas ham in a few days ago and have been gradually eating it, little by little.  I'd like to take a picture of it in comparison with my leg, just to show you how big it is, but that would be embarrassing.  Even my girls - the notoriously picky eaters - are eating third and fourth helpings.  It's so good.  It's funny to realize that my kids will grow up with so many things that I had as a child!  

What are you up to???

the view from the car

here are some cute pics josh's sister sent me the other day.

she took these in the car while we were back in the US, circa October 08...

things I bought in America, part 1

Have I mentioned that we took one suitcase to America?  It's true. We managed to pack all our clothes that we wanted to throw away in one suitcase, wore them for a few days in America, and then bought all new stuff.  Seven suitcases worth of new stuff.  

What can you fit in eight pieces of luggage? One of my purchases was some little foam hair rollers.  

My kids think these rollers are awesome.  And they actually work ok.  Not great, but they actually don't need any help making their hair any curlier - the rollers were bought just for fun.  Every bathtime, the rollers are requested.  After bath recently, I tried to get some pictures of my little rolled-up girls.  

Emma was happy to show off her rollers - she loves them and feels like a little princess running around. 

Samantha also loves them (especially...can you guess?...the yellow ones) but she was unwilling to let me take a picture.  

...was even annoyed that I kept trying..
...because she was too busy building a little train of blocks.  

But anyway, you get the idea.  They're cute, huh?  I'm telling you, you can buy some great stuff in America.  More to come...

flashback to America - aunt Kristen

Really, I'm trying to put all my America-trip photos on my blog...it's just taking forever.  

Our last weekend in America, we got to spend a lot of time with josh's sister, Kristen.   She doesn't live in okc anymore, so she made a special trip down to hang out with us.  She's only a little more than a year younger than me, but it amazed me how much more energy she had than I did!  

Kristen and Gigi play "airplane" with the kiddos...

And then she made a fast friend when she offered to paint samatha's fingernails!
And even brought yellow nail polish!  Samantha was in heaven!!



Is that the beginning of a pouty, flirty girl? I surely hope not!  

Later on, we discovered what happens when little girls want to play dress-up at a house that only has boys... 
Then one day, Kristen and Emma played outside in the lovely, green, wide-open-space of a backyard.  Kristen got these cute pics of them playing...

And we also got the special opportunity to celebrate Kristen's birthday with her this year!  Mantha had ice cream instead of the fabulously moist cake that was served, but I don't think she seemed to mind!
I think Kristen took this picture of Emma while she was eating cake (though there is mysteriously none on her face!). This is one of my most favorite pics of her recently.  Her hair was straightened that morning because we took family pictures that afternoon - doesn't she look all grown up when those little flyaways are missing??
Happy Birthday, Aunt Kristen!  We all loved spending time with you!

just like daddy

There are certain responsibilities parents have, like passing on traditions, culture and especially faith to our children.  Josh has taken this responsibility seriously, and I am glad.  I love that he is involved in making them the kind of people they need to be.  

One area where this is especially important is...Oreos.  There are certain ways that oreos need to be eaten, and it is critical that these pieces of information are passed down to them.  There's a certain amount of time the oreo needs to be dunked into the milk so that the right amount of milk is absorbed by the cookie.  The girls are happy to learn traditions like these!

When Daddy asks who wants cookies and milk, there are "Me!'s" all around...

thanksgiving, in review

If there's one thing we know how to do, it's throw a party!  We love get-togethers and especially love all the food that comes as a result of get-togethers!  Perhaps that's one reason why thanksgiving is such a great holiday.  Due to some scheduling issues, we did our thanksgiving a day late and we did it at my house this year (we didn't do it here last year).  I think it was quite a smashing success.   Here's pictures in review for you:

The day before, Samantha helped me paint a "football field" for an activity we were going to with the kiddos.  (pics later on in the blog)  She was a great helper and loved the freedom of painting anywhere on the paper!

We had loads of thanksgiving supplies, thanks to Josh's mom who bought me a box-full of stuff during last year's turkey day clearance.  All the cool decorations you see are from her!  Oh, wait...the cool little indian headdresses you will see in the pictures were made by yours truly - girls got braids, boys got feathers.  Last year, we went with pilgrim hats...this year was indians.

In an attempt to get them both to smile, we asked them to "show us your pumpkins"...and they did.  I didn't realize that wasn't a good way to get a good picture!

The whole indian family...
I made these cool little pilgrim hats from an idea in Family Fun magazine.  It was just big marshmallows dipped in chocolate, set upon a cookie, and then trimmed with icing.  Mine didn't look as cool as the ones in the magazines, but then again, nobody paid me to make mine.  
We also made no-bake football cookies.  As if we weren't going to have enough dessert options...
Here was the food spread.  Try to keep in mind that we are only feeding 6 adults and children.  We had an insane amount of food.  It's amazing the kind of food you can produce when you've lived out of the US long enough.  This year, we bought imported canned green beans for the green bean casserole, so that was probably my hubby's favorite dish. (However, I cannot claim credit for it - way to go, Amy!)  The turkey turned out nice and tender, as usual, thanks to annual turkey-maker, other-Rachel.  My major contributions this year were in the rolls and dessert categories, which makes sense considering how much I love eating foods from those two groups.  
There is no picture of the dessert table due to sheer embarrassment at the large amount of desserts that needed to feed those 6 adults and children.  I think we ended up with 7 dessert choices.  That's not such a bad thing...

Uncle John read one of our new Thankgiving books to all the kiddos in between activities...
And here are the three lovlies who made it all a fabulous day!
After lunch, we settled the kids down on the couch to watch a movie - on a HUGE projector - while we gathered around for a round of Settlers of Catan. I think Brad ended up pulling out the win this game...
Later that evening, the kids got to play the football game, which was a version of "pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey" except it was footballs going through a goalpost.  Each child's football had the logo of their family's most favorite mascot (well, in most cases anyway!  There was one case that was one family's favorite theologian...)

Samantha went first representing the eggrolls...
After Daddy spun her a few times, she was off!
Yay, Boomer Sooner!!
Emma, in her red Chinese dress-up dress, was next...
...and she represented us well!  Score!
All the kids together after the game.  There was one successful score from each family, so things ended up very nicely.  I've never noticed how hard it is to get 7 kids to smile at the same time!  This was the best one out of the group.
Anyway, we had a great turkey day, had lots of leftovers, and spent the day enjoying each other's company.  We feel so thankful for the many blessings we have received, and if we can't spend t-giving with our families back home, spending it with our family here is the next best thing!