Another month in the Yuen household...

The weeks are passing by and as such as are getting warmer weather with less rain.  So the kids have enjoyed playing in the backyard more.

They all helped out refilling the bird feeder with sunflower seeds.

Xiao Yu found a sunflower seed on the ground and was about to shove it in his mouth when Elvin stopped him.  When in China, maybe he had seen people eat these before?

Xiao Yu still very much enjoys going on the swings.  He can hold on by himself while someone else pushes him.

With the good weather, we went out for a hike with some friends.  Xiao Yu wanted to walk, but that meant walking at a snail's pace.  So sometimes he was carried.

 Gabriel enjoyed the hike very much.

He found branches to wave, pine cones to throw, and rocks to kick.

 Here is a rare moment of silence and contemplation from Eliana.

Towards the end of our hike, she found a newt lying on the trail.  It looked lost and was several dozen feet from the nearest stream, so we decided to help it along.

 Elvin scooped it up and put it in the stream, and then had to keep the kids at bay--they wanted to poke at it with a stick to "help" it get into the water.

Meal times are still interesting in our household.  Xiao Yu went from being not picky with what we serve him to being semi-picky now.  He still eats a fairly wide range of food but will now reject certain foods, especially if he's not very hungry.  Oatmeal is not his favorite and he doesn't seem to care for pizza either.  His pediatrician said that this is actually very common with adopted kids; once they learn that they can have food on demand and not have be hungry, then they don't feel compelled to eat everything put in front of them.

One of Xiao Yu's favorite things is yogurt.  Here he is trying to drink his yogurt, because he's still not that good at scraping the last bits out of the bottom of the cup...

Yogurt moustache!

He also went crazy on his noodles and got some on his face.  

Xiao Yu tries to drink and slurp EVERYTHING, even if they are not slurpable, such as a spoonful of steamed rice.  Old habits die hard...  

Xiao Yu is very observant and copies everything his siblings do.  Karina was picking her nose which she occasionally does.

Monkey see, monkey do.  Except, judging from his expression, maybe he was a little bit too aggressive?  Also, he is not actually picking his nose to get at boogers, he is just copying Karina.

And Xiao Yu is not the only one who does goofy things during mealtimes.  Here is Gabriel eating a slice of watermelon (which he loves and eats about 8 slices of each meal.)  Yes, in case you have eagle eyes and were wondering, Gabriel did slather his lasagna on top of his watermelon and is eating both at the same time.  

Emily makes home-made play-doh every once in a while and Xiao Yu spent some time investigating this new substance.  Is it food or is it a toy?  

Eventually he got the hang of it.

He does other silly things.  Pink sunglasses anyone?

Gabriel and Karina still do a lot of things together.  A while ago, they stopped calling each other by their names and just refer to each other as "Honey" (which is what Mommy and Daddy call each other.)   Here they are playing with doll stickers that you can dress up by overlaying more stickers on top.

Here is Karina's 'masterpiece.'

And here is Honey whispering a secret to Honey.

And Honey is whispering another secret back.  They are great friends and we hope that their friendship lasts through the teenage years.

Karina has also taken an interest in writing.  She's been carrying around this little notebook and will every once in a while, flip to a page and start writing or scribbling.

 Practicing her letters...

 And just "writing"...

And since she is our little engineer...whenever Elvin is making tea, she likes to help and watch the water turn brown.

 And that's the update for our family!

Reading skillz...

Something amazing happened in our household recently.  Mommy has been working with Eliana on her reading skills and while we were in China, all of a sudden, Eliana went from needing to sound out all the letters in a word to being able to read words and sentences all of a sudden.

But this is not the amazing part... What is amazing is that now Eliana is reading books to her siblings, which is so nice now that we are a little busier with another little one in the house.

The kids love it and Eliana enjoys it as well.  Here she is reading a book...

Fun With Glasses...

Though none of our kids need to wear glasses (for now), they sure like trying them on as a fashion statement if nothing else.  And what better place to do this at than at Costco's Vision Center.

There is a little stand with kids glasses and they enjoyed trying various ones...

So Gabey started the whole thing by grabbing a pair of green glasses.  His favorite color is green, partly because the word green and his name Gabriel start with the same letter.  So on go the green glasses.

Then Eliana jumped into the fray.  

 Karina wanted to try on a pair.  We think she looks pretty sophisticated in these.

 And Xiao Yu tried on a pair too; pretty classy huh?

Xiao Yu's baby pictures...

We feel pretty lucky...  While we were in China, one of the guides in the city of ZhengZhou, where Xiao Yu was born, said she took a special liking to Xiao Yu when he was a baby.  So she ended up taking pictures of him with her cell phone.  These were pictures in the orphanage where he spent the first 9 months of his life.

She recently sent us the pictures via email.  So we are lucky that we have pictures of him when he was a baby...

Here he is in his crib.  It's good to know that he seemed happy and well taken care of...

Holding our guide's hand...  Maybe even back then he was very social.

His whole body, all stretched out!

And here is a smile, with his little teeth showing...

We think he was a pretty cute baby!

Gabey is growing up...

Our little Gabey is more than 2 and a half years old now.  However, something interesting has happened since our trip to China...  In some ways, he is still the same little boy and in some ways he has changed a lot.  

For example, the before-China Gabey only wore sweatpants made out of cotton or fleece.  Sometimes we could convince him to wear pants made out of nylon.  After we returned from China, however, he will ONLY wear jeans and sometimes corduroys (which he calls "cordu-boys"... more on his language later).  In fact, he only owned two pairs of jeans and Mommy has had to go out and buy more jeans because two pairs will not take him till laundry day.

And because he only wears jeans, we feel like he looks more grown up somehow.  These pants, as opposed to sweat pants, make him look slimmer and also older we feel like.

His interests have also expanded.  He still likes to cook things, but in addition to that, he likes to read and look through books.  He now has the attention span to sit through a whole book (or many many books!) while read to.  He also like to play with blocks and Legos now.

Before China, he never really showed any interest in cars or trucks.  But now, he plays with them all the time around the house and sort of likes to watch Thomas the Train videos.  This is a new development for him.  He always connects it to the airplanes, busses, trains, taxis and shuttles we took in China.

He still likes playing his guitar and singing.

And he likes playing on the iPad of course.

Here he is being goofy a pair of plastic glasses.

After China, and this may have to do with all the changes going on in our household, he has become more independent and also less likely to follow our requests and commands, which can be a little frustrating at times.

When walking around the block, there is one area where a neighbor has put up a sign...Elvin thought it would make for a funny picture.

It seems like Gabriel's language has recently improved by leaps and bounds.  Because of this, we sometimes forget that he doesn't truly understand everything we are saying to him, and he is very literal in what he hears.

Here are some examples:

Elvin: [saying something complicated to Emily]
Gabriel:  what did you say, Daddy?
Elvin to Gabriel: never mind
Gabriel:  never yours?

Gabriel:  Mommy, are we going backwards?  (in the car)
Emily: No, we are going forwards
Gabriel:  Four words?  Or five words?

Gabriel:  Where is Erica? [our niece]
Emily: She is at her house in Boise.
Gabriel:  Two boys?  Or three boys?  At her house?

While Elvin is holding Gabriel, Gabriel looks into Daddy's nose and says: What's that?
Elvin: Nose hairs.
Gabriel: You mean yes hairs?

And when we went on our short trip to Seattle...

Gabriel:  Where are we going?
Emily: Seattle.
Gabriel: When are we going to pick up "Attle"?
Emily:  What?  We are going to the doctors!
Gabriel:  Are we going to see "Attle"?  When will we pick "Attle" up?

He is a very funny boy and keeps us entertained all day long.

And here is a video that shows some random things that Gabriel does.

Busy week for tooth fairy...

You might have noticed on some pictures that Eliana's two front teeth were extremely crooked and have been for a while.  This is because they were very loose and dangling by some (very stubborn) thin threads.  The teeth have actually been loose for months and we thought that they would have fallen out in China.  But 5 weeks later, they were still hanging on for dear life.

And then one day, Mommy was wiggling one of Eliana's teeth, like she regularly does to see how loose the tooth is.  And...it came off!  To everyone's surprise!

Everyone was astounded and wanted to look at the tooth and at the gap in her smile.

Here is her little stubborn tooth that wouldn't come off.  You can sort of see that Eliana is wearing a necklace that is a white thing in the shape of a tooth.  It's a little tooth-shaped container and that's where the tooth lives now.  

And then, a few days later, Eliana herself was wiggling the other tooth and out it came too!  This one was less of a shock, partly because she had been playing around with it so much that it was bleeding a little bit, so we knew that it was ready to go.

In the resulting gap, you can already see two permanent teeth coming in.  Also, we hear a little bit of a lisp when Eliana talks now.  =)

So the tooth fairy, or actually in our house, we call it the Tooth Fairy Mouse, has visited twice in one week.  Each time bestowing a dollar taped to a handwritten letter.  The girls claim that the handwriting on the letter looks EXACTLY like Daddy's handwriting, but he denies it...  Karina, our logical one, is convinced that there IS no fairy and that Daddy is creating this whole charade.  Eliana, on the other hand, has a wild imagination and is not so sure...