made hummus to bring it to a little get together for the new year's eve tonight.
i forgot to buy the toasted pine nuts to garnish on top! next time...

walked over to the park with the whole fam on sunday. surprisingly it was nice weather (about 55 F/13 C) and daniel haven't been to this park so we decided to go with the basketball. i think we see a future basketball star!

the ball is as big as his torso but he was having fun carrying it around the court.

he even grabbed the ball on the swing too. such a funny baby!

hope you guys had very merry xmas this year! kai sure did have a good one. of course he got the most presents from friends + families. he ripped some wrapping paper out and moving presents around on the floor, took forever to open all his presents but i think he was having a blast! on the other hand, he wasn't very ok with the moose head band thing i put on his head...he immediately took it off every time i put it on his head :P

cont. reading for more pics.

ohhh yes, he had this "crazy professor" hair today. i tried to fix it but didn't do much...

i made some vanilla cupcakes with cream cheese frosting for the xmas family gathering today. i'm not so happy with my frosting job today, they are kinda messy! yes, i did do the same decoration thing like kai's cupcakes, i just put snowflakes with different colors on them. makes them a bit festive, right?

maybe i'll put cute pink + red hearts on the valentine cupcakes...if i make them anyways...

i actually did this art project few weeks ago, i've been kinda busy (kai's b-day) and i guess kinda lazy to take some pictures until today. anyhoo, i watched the finale of bravo top design and the winner, nathan made this awesome painting by just pouring the paint on canvas. well, i totally "borrowed" his idea and did mine with my color schemes.

i just bought dark grey and orange quart of regular house paint from home depot, and used my "oops, wrong color" paint of blue from painting kai's room (the blue was by behr and was very thick and totally made the chunky spots on canvas, can you see that?).

it was easy art project but took me like 3 days to finish it (believe it or not!). i did this in the cold garage, and had to wait until the paint was dry to put another coat, so that they don't mix together. overall, think came out ok. i know some of you have see it already and gave me a good feedback. but what do you think? do you think it's kinda cool? fun? interesting? odd? or weird?

we've been kinda teaching him to do this hand gesture when he is done eating or when the food is all gone. this morning, i showed him the empty baby yogurt container that he just ate and he did "all gone." it's so cute when he does that :)

we finally decided to buy the keuring coffee maker. my friend, trish bought it a while back and she's been recommending me ever since ;) i tried it at her house once and i loved it!

i was actually getting tired of wasting the coffee in a pot at the end of day or having to re-heat the coffee in the mid-afternoon (i guess i was a bit lazy). but no more of that now! i can get the fresh hot coffee at all times!

i do love those "k-cups" coffee/tea but i drink coffee a lot and i know that will add up $$$ in the the long run. so to avoid it, i've been experimenting to get my perfect cup by using the reusable filter that came with the set. after tons of grinding, packing, and brewing, think i finally got it, yay! would anyone like to join me for some afternoon coffee?

so this is what i did to the sad mantle but now i think it's a festive mantle ;) i did take vanessa's idea for putting the ornaments in the cylinder vases. it definitely worked out very nicely and i put touch of nature (pine cones) in between. also i put holiday dunnies that daniel requested on the stocking hanger and i got my reindeer in there too! i think this will do for this year and probably add more stuff next year since kai won't be eating (hopefully) the ornaments by then.

i've been into drinking nice hot green tea everyday. i guess my "japanese-ness" is coming out this winter ;) altho, i'm not drinking in very traditional cup and tea pot :P i actually don't have one besides this one... so i decided to have green tea for my snack time with kai and i had some green tea kit kat i got from japan. yummy!

just in case, if you are wondering what the green tea kit kat looks like... it's green! just have the green tea flavored chocolate and inside is the same old wafers.

i found this fun chalk mat at target. it's a place mat but on the other side, it's a black, chalk mat. i think it's a pretty cool idea so that you can bring it on-the-go and your kids can have some creative fun. i also love the sans serif typography design (also had yellow with cute pink and lime green owls for girls) and that's pretty much what got me :P i guess my only concern would be the chalk dust on the table...ugh, that might make me go nuts!

we got our xmas tree a day after kai's b-day (so that kai's b-day doesn't get mixed up with xmas). it was raining on sunday when we got the tree, so we decided to let it dry in the garage over night. finally when daniel got home, we put the tree inside and put some lights on (don't you think that xmas lights are making the walls look like some kind of textured faux finish? kinda crazy looking).

i'm debating if i should put ornaments on it, i mean i really want to but if kai's gonna get into them, maybe i shouldn't. i thought about putting ornaments kinda higher up so that kai can't get them but maybe that wouldn't look as good...so we might go pretty simple, minimalist style this year. anyhoo, our house smells good and i'm definitely getting the holiday sprits now.

btw, i need some kind of cute decorations on the mantle...it's looking pretty sad with stockings and nothing else...any suggestions? maybe a reindeer?

we totally forgot to take pictures with snoopy, so this is actually a day after his birthday. as i mentioned before, he does not sit with snoopy anymore so just took pics with him playing with snoopy.

the blue cup is one of his present, the stackable cup toy thing. for some reason he likes to pick one of the cup at a time and "drink" out of it. looking so proper using both of his hands :)

cont. reading for old pics.

11 months

10 months

9 months

8 months

7 months

6 months

5 months

4 months

3 months

2 months

1 month

just a little sign i made for the front door (sorry, can't see well, huh).

birthday cake that our friend, sue made for kai.

cupcakes that trisha and i made (trisha frosted all the cupcakes, thank you for that!).

kai and cupcakes.

after that, we gave him his cake, but he didn't really know what to do, so i helped him get started :)

hmmmm, yummy!

nice blue beard, ha ha. oh yes, it was fun cleaning him up and his high chair!

the damage he did to his first cake. his first time eating this much sugar all at once!

overall, his birthday party turned out great, lots of guests came over to wish him happy birthday and he got tons of toys! he'll be pre-occupied for a while now while i'm on the computer ;) only thing i regret is that i didn't take many pictures, well there's a few reasons why but i should've taken more pics with friends & families and things, ya know. thank you everyone for coming, for the fun gifts, and those of you who came early to set up the party!

sorry for the lack of post in the past few days. i've been kinda busy making some stuff for kai's b-day party. i wrapped his presents in this cute red dotted paper (bought it at target, probably for xmas? but fit the theme perfectly) i made birthday banner (has subtle grey dotted pattern like the ones on cupcake toppers but can't really see them), a little sign for his high chair, and cupcake toppers for ones that don't get candles (i'm planning on making close to 40 cupcakes tomorrow).

i know it looks totally easy but you know, they always take more time than it looks and of course, i make mistakes too...so that doesn't help. decorating the "party area" was one of my main thing to do and this is what i got so far. stay tuned for tomorrow's actual party pics ;)

made my mom's recipe, dry curry last night. this was my first time actually making it and i think it turned out well. daniel likes to eat it with garlic nann but of course, i like it with rice ;)

went to the city with trisha on sunday and we did lots of shopping. one of the thing i really wanted to do was to have kai take his first pic with santa, so we did it. he was okay in the beginning but he started crying after a bit and sliding off of santa's lap. he definitely does look very unsure about this whole thing... oh well, i'll do better next year!

some xmas light decorations in the city. it was so pretty. that tree was so huuuuuge inside of neiman marcus, about 4 floor height. the little kitten was in one of the display in the macy's windows, they decorated each as a little "house" and had kitten on each. most of them were sleeping but some were playing, they were so cute.

we put up xmas lights today, nothing gorgeous or fancy with moving santa & deer and all that, just decided to do pretty minimal and one color. i wanted to put some lights up to keep up with the festive holiday spirits ;) the icicle lights are still bunched up at the top, hope it comes down a bit over time...

went to another neighborhood park, this one is about 10 min. walk from our house and it was our first time going there. the other, bigger park don't have the baby swings so i was so happy to find the baby swings here (thanks to michelle + mike for telling us). another good thing was that this park is pretty empty because it's located in the newly developed area (maybe there's only 20 houses around), so we'll be coming here a lot now! anyhoo, i accidentally over exposed this photo when i was taking pictures but i kinda like it, it's kinda fun, no?

he looks is very complicated, wonder what he was thinking...

he was bouncing around and exploring the park too.

you know, it's getting "soup kinda weather" these days so i decided to make taco soup for the first time. it got thickened overnight so it almost work as dip too. but either way it's yummy with tortilla chips.

just took this right out side of the front door. it's been really foggy in the morning and at night. it was still foggy until almost about noon today and star getting foggy around 5 pm. i think it's kinda creepy like halloween everyday lol.