This kind of moment

I was going over some pictures the other day and I just fell in love with this one.  It was right after our family nap. Yes, Family nap! hehehehe. It doesn't really happen often when everyone falls asleep at the same time and wake up at the same time. And when we wake up from our naps we all are soooooo happy.

Except daddy. Daddy is still a sleepy bear!

12+1

Baby SJ is 13 months old!

He is actively involved/engaged/interested with EVERYTHING we do. At restaurants, he would feed himself and end up breaking cups, he would pretend putting lotion or make up on and squeeze lotion onto the floor and have fun while mommy is getting ready to go out. He would pretend to be cooking by taking out all the pots and pans while mommy is cooking. When we go grocery shopping, he would take all the things in his reach off the shelves. He sure keeps mommy and daddy busy ;)

He loves playing hide and seek and peek-a-boo! We can play that game all day all night and he won't get bored. He has so much facial expressions too. My favorite is him being guilty.

He is obsessed with anything round or spherical and mini toy cars; just like his daddy. That means they are best friends now. He gets really sad when daddy goes to work and gets really excited when he comes home.

It is so amazing to see this baby grow and even more amazing that my capacity to love him keeps expanding; especially because each day I wonder how I could love him more than I do now. I have decided that I would stop being sad that time is going by too fast. As he gets older, I feel like I am getting closer to him and love him more. He brings such great happiness to our life, and teaches us what is most important.

St. Jacobs Market

I love shopping, my husband loves eating, and my baby SJ is happy as long as he is with mommy so he goes where I go. The best place for our family to be enjoying a weekend would be St. Jacobs farmers market. They have fresh of everything and delicious of everything! I surely was busy spending, my husband was surly busy eating and baby SJ was busy looking around.

What's your family's weekend fun?

Spring, spring! Come, come...

We still have snow in our backyard, still wearing a heavy coat, and still turning on our fireplace. We need some warm weather, and flowers over here! So we went to the farmers market and grabbed some tulips! So beautiful! Makes me feel a lot better. My husband was complaining why anyone would invest in flowers.. Listen! We need flowers in our life!

Chocolate

One thing I noticed while living in Canada is that the chocolate tastes much better than in the States; I don't know why, but it really does. I remember when I was dating my husband back in the day, he would bring tons of chocolate, I mean boxes of chocolate and I thought, "why does a GUY love chocolate so much?" But now I understand, after trying Canadian chocolate, you can't eat anything else. So.. I heard there was a Lindt Chocolate Factory near by where we live that sold Lindt much cheaper. Oh my gosh... I was there the next day!  :) Have you tried Lindt chocolate? My favorite ones are the small truffles. And I found new and more flavors I have never heard of before. I was in heaven. I had a great excuse to get chocolate since Easter is coming up sooooon! It was perfect timing!

Blessing

My baby turned one. It is such a blessing to be a mom to learn about love, sacrifice, patience, and true happiness. There have been a lot of sleepless nights and constant stress from worrying every single day of every little moment. I remember when he first slept through the night without waking up for 7 hours, I was worried if something happened to him, I woke up every hour to check if he was all right. Looking back at the last few years of my life, I couldn't be more grateful to my Heavenly Father for the amount of blessings I received from him. We often focus on what is wrong and why it’s wrong in our daily life instead of focusing on what is right and how much we are blessed from standing up for the right. Ironically enough, when we compare our lives with others or our past; we focus on what and why of our situation. I could also get stuck thinking of my past and could be very miserable and sad for my life now. With a little baby, I can’t go place-to-place like I used to or I can’t spend my day doing what I like to do. I could look at my friends who pursued careers and made a lot of money and feel jealous how much she could spend on herself and live comfortably without worrying about anything. But once I start counting my blessings from the very little things, I begin to recognize the bigger and greater blessings as well. I am grateful for families and friends who I love the most, scriptures and temple for keeping me close to God, missionaries who share the Gospel so that people around the world would get the chance to be completely happy, a car that I can get around from place to place, food that keeps me healthy. I am also grateful for laundry machines, dishwashers and all the things that make my day easier so I could focus on more and important things. I can literally go on and on about what I am grateful for. When I start counting my blessings I noticed, my blessing list has far more items than my list of what I am lacking.

The opportunity to be a blessing to others can come unexpectedly. In that reason, we often don’t recognize blessings. When my husband graduated from BYU and was looking for a full-time teaching job in Washington DC, we found out that there were no place of employment that could give the proper visa to a Canadian due to sudden policy changes that had just taken place with Canada and the US. He contacted every district from the State of Massachusetts down to Texas and all the way to California. The timing couldn't be better; we were beyond stressed with the job situation and me being pregnant with a baby on the way. The baby would be born in two months and the only way for my husband to get a job would be to extend his US visa. After getting the visa extension, the only job he was able to find at that moment was a temporary one. We were very disappointed and worried that we couldn’t meet our ends need. We prayed really hard to get a “good job” to support our baby and growing family comfortably. It was a few months after the baby was born and that my husband was working full time that I realized it was a huge blessing in disguise that my husband was in that situation. Since we didn’t have family nearby, it was extremely difficult going through the pregnancy and birth on our own. Having my husband at home helped me get through the day a lot easier and faster. We learned to live within a tight budget. We always thought we would need more money to take care of our family. But by cutting out the things that we wanted for what we need, we were still able to live comfortably.

I hope when you go to bed tonight, you can go to bed counting all your blessings that you have. Blessings are gifts from Heavenly Father to keep us happy and keep learning. 

Those of you who are patient enough to read this far, Thank you. I just wanted to share my blessing and help you realize your blessings as well.

The 1st birthday

Okay.. It took forever for me to post my baby SJ's birthday. Because we had to run to the hospital again. He had an infection in his "secret" (private) area and my husband insisted to go to the BEST hospital in town for that. We had to stay few nights at my in-laws because the hospital was a little too far from our house. While we were there, we found an amazing pediatrician for baby SJ so we stayed one more night so that he would be up to date with his immunizations. And... it took me almost two weeks to import all my picture from my SD card to my computer.. yeah.. I needed some rest after the party. 

Baby SJ's first birthday was a huge success. Everything went really well... except our house was too small or maybe we invited too many people? But everyone loved the party and enjoyed baby SJ's cuteness very much!

We had Korean traditional clothes on with traditional decorations. Even though my baby was born in the States, he is Korean before American and I want him to know and feel that way.

In the Korean culture, there is one thing that they do for the baby's first birthday. They lay out items and let the baby pick one item. Each item represents something and the item the baby picks will tell us what the baby will do when they grow up.

 And my baby picked the mallet! He will become a judge! Well.. my hubby thinks it's a hammer and he will go into construction! 

We got him a birthday cake of course!

We all thought he would jump into the cake and start destroying it but he was so delicate with the cake.

So, my mother-in-law pushed his head into the cake and he got soooooooo upset!

He was like, "my caaaaaaaaakkkkeeeeeee" hahahahahaha

Little dragon, representing the year of his birth.

 Wall of his first 100 days

His first gold ring. Another Korean tradition. We get babies who turn 1 gold of something. It can be a ring, necklace, bracelet or pig pendant.

Well! He IS one! As much as I want to deny it, he is one. From now on, I am not going to blink my eyes because another blink of an eye, he will turn two.