Isabel loves hide and seek

It is not all what you think. She does love it when we run around, hide away, and wait for her to find us. But what you don't know is she also love to hide everyone's stuff now that she can reach higher and open up drawers.

3 weeks ago, I realized that I can't find my MPS player. Agnes said she last saw it on our dinner table but also don't know what happened. I asked her to look everywhere with no success, so I thought I probably just lost it. We kinda gave up.

Well guess what, today while Agnes was not looking, Isabel came around holding my MPS player in her hand. I guess she gave up on us finding it, so she is like "okay, I guess I will just give it back to you. This way I can hide it again when you are not looking :-)" I couldn't believe it. I still don't know where she hid it. She apparently did the same thing to Agnes' MPS player a month ago, but we found it under the Wii Fit board after just a few days.

The morale of the story - visitors beware! All your stuff that you bring to the house is fair GAME for Isabel. She will eventually give it back I think, but we don't know when :-)

- Lei

We can all learn from a 1 year old!

I am amazed how relentless Isabel is at learning how to walk. Every day she would fall down many times and then get right back up again to try again. Her face is full of excitement as she takes more steps and now only after a few weeks, she has gone from only walking a few ginger steps slowly to practically running down the corridor.

Imagine what we adults can accomplish if we acted like a 1 year old - never giving a second thought to "falling down" but with every waking hours just keep trying and trying to reach our goals with enthusisam and vigor. There is no concept of failure or looking good to a 1 year old. There is no thoughts of regrets of the past or worry for the future to a 1 year old. Everything is the present and everything is just a journey to the next part of growing.

When and why did we "adults" lose that? Aren't we all growing still until the day we die? As we grow up to "adulthood," it seems that we have come up with many reasons to try less as well as have developed a habit of giving too much meaning to something meaningless. A bad interview or a mistake made on the job is the adult equivalent of "falling down" as we pursue our career dreams. To a 1 year old, these are just opportunities to learn how to do better next time. Many of us, however, would make it mean much more, something about our self worth or market worth, and it spirals from there.

Imagine if Isabel did the same as we adults do today. If everytime she falls down, she spends time analyzing what happened and what does it mean about herself, she may not walk until she is 5 years old.

It's up to us to recognize that in life we are sometimes the ones that actually stands in the way of our dreams. If we just try our best at every single moment and look at "falling down" as only opportunities to learn instead of failures, we can be unstoppable. Imagine what we can all accomplish!

- Lei

Isabel says "Grandma" in Chinese

Grandma in Chinese is "Laolao" for the mother's side. Agnes and I have been teaching Isabel the last month how to say it. I think she got it. :-)



- Lei

Star Trek Movie - only 3 stars

Jaime and I went to see this last night. It was entertaining but nowhere as good as I expected or as the reviews indicated. I give it a 3 star out of five
- 1 star for the action sequences which was great;
- 1 star for the clever way the story line was written to allow future sequels to be completely different from the TV series (you will know what I mean when you see it - very in the spirit of star trek fantasies)
- 1 star for the story of Spock was pretty good

On the other hand, I thought the story for Jim Kirk was too cliche and shallow. His character didn't really develop. He was a rebellious, maverick, cocky kid and he seem to still be at the end of the movie with a captain title. Also I thought the last 20 minutes of the movies was cheesy and so predictable. Lastly, (movie spoiler ahead - don't read if you don't want to know), there is no way they could have survived that last explosion since a dot of that red matter destroyed a whole planet and they detonated the entire red matter that was at least 100K times larger.

I guess I was just disappointed as I had high expectations after seeing the reviews everywhere. We still had a good time.

- Lei

Isabel photo story - what a first year!

The first one was made when she was 12 weeks old. Agnes and I made this second video last month for her first birthday. We had so much fun. Enjoy!


- Lei

Video Series - Isabel loves to Dance

As Isabel turned 1, Agnes and I are creating a series of videos from this past year. This first one is one of our favorite. She is very much like mama and papa - loves to move to music. enjoy!



- Lei

Isabel's Bday Party videos

Isabel's first birthday party

Isabel turned 1 on Sat, May 2, 2009. Wow, how time flies. We had a fabulous party for her at Grandma's clubhouse in redwood shores. Jaime's parents + tita Tusa cooked up a storm and also did all the decoration for the party. Thank you so much! We had about 30+ guest including 3 other babies (Lauren, Dash, Gavin) for Isabel to play with.

Isabel loved her gift from Jaime's parents which was a little princess push cart. She also got many fabulous clothes and gift cards from our friends. My parents gave her the ultimate practical gift which she will appreciate a lot when she grows up - set up money for her college fund plus her gorgeous cake below. Thank you mom and dad.

All in all, a great party. Thank you all for coming and help our little one celebrate.