Joaquin's Birthday Week

It's been a very busy two weeks! We were in Taiwan for 10 days and it was just too short.
Last week was Joaquin's special 1st birthday week. Sunday we took him to Da-an Park and the Flower Market where he was fascinated by kids and countless flowers. Monday, we went to the Taipei Zoo and Joaquin immediately fell in love with the giant pandas and the lionesses that he was so convinced to be dogs (he kept saying "go go go" -meaning "dogs" in Mandarin). Tuesday, he spent his entire afternoon at this huge playground--all by himself (and Dadu)! Wednesday was his birthday so we celebrated with Grandpa. He was able to blow his own candles! Thursday, we flew back to Hong Kong. Friday was a resting day and the day we spent the whole day looking at the sky, hoping it would not rain on Saturday.

Saturday, we woke up in thunderstorms but had a lot of fun at the party nonetheless (will have another blog entry on this special event). Sunday, Joaquin took his first step without any hand holding or help!

What a busy week for all of us and lots of progress for Chamu!

Progress Update

This week is Mamu's first week of being a housewife and she just cannot get used to the fact that she has no emails to check, no conference calls to get on and no meetings to attend. She is still constantly thumbing her blackberry but most of the time, she is just putting schedules on her empty calendar because she is not used to seeing empty spots (she cannot live without a schedule). Poor Dadu already got yelled at multiple times because Mamu is not used having no plans or structure to her life. Well, at least today went just as perfectly as she would have planned. We got to the airport three hours early, had a nice lunch (and even some time to sip wine), got upgraded to business class (and left Chamu behind in the economy class with our helper -- yes, I know I am going to hear an earful of complaints about how it is possible that parents can leave their baby with the helper in the econ class but we redeemed econ miles tickets and were upgraded involuntarily), and got a table at Dingtaifeng without even having to wait!
Chamu will be celebrating his first birthday next week. Lately, he has started to show a very keen interest in walking. He also started to show a distaste in eating his food but he will never say no whenever we feed him "adult food". He even licked his finger twice when he accidentally got some bitter mustard on it. Today he had yogurt, grilled cod, xiaolungbao, and Shanghai beancurd. Dadu even fed him some vanilla ice cream! But he is really a good behaving kid (as long as we keep his mouth full).

First Mother's Day

It was a bad start to this day since Jaime and I stayed up until 4am tagging faces in iPhoto09 (it's really addictive so please think twice before you want to start tagging your photo album). We spent our morning taking care of him half asleep. We had a nice dim sum at noon with my good friend and her mommy (visiting HK to help her move, what a nice mom!).

After lunch we came home so all three of can take a nap (parents were exhausted). When I gave him bath after his swim, Joaquin started babbling "baba mama" which was the sweetest thing I have ever heard. He had beening saving it up for this special occasion, I thought! But pretty soon, I realized that he was just babbling...

For dinner, we went to a nice tonkatsu place and poor joaquin could only eat rice while we chowed down the tasty pork chops!

Chamu's 1st Birthday Party

Please RSVP by May 16th

No more excuses...

I have to admit that with me still working part time this week, I still had the excuse to escape a little bit from living a desperate housewife life.  I had two full day of sailing lessons on Monday and Tuesday.  I had a full day of work on Wednesday.  I had half of work today.  Tomorrow is another full day of work.  After that, I will most likely be a 100% stay-at-home mom.  How would I do? Last Friday, our helper was on holiday and Jaime was in the dragon boat race.  I had to spend a lot of time (alone) with Joaquin and I found that I ran out of things to do with him (pretty quickly). 

Today, I finally started thinking about planning for his birthday (coming up in less than 2 weeks) and only to figure out that all moms actually do plan way ahead and most venues are already booked.  I like to do thing last minute because with my old job, I never got to dictate my own free time so I could only plan my life the very last minute when I know for sure that I would be free.  I guess with kids, I've got to change this habit of not being able to commit until last minute...hmmm

Still Working

JoJomami hasn't had any chance to plan the big trip. No flights is booked except for the trip to Taipei next week. Two nights of hotel is confirmed out of 120 nights we need. No confirmed itinerary but already decided to leave the Southern hemisphere out of the scope for now. No storage or new flat found. And no birthday party planned for Joaquin.