Happy Halloween

On the Friday before Halloween, our church organized an indoor Harvest Fest for the kids. So after trying out three different costumes that she has inherited from her older cousins, Eliana chose to dress up as a bunny rabbit.

Karina, on the other hand, didn't have a choice in the matter and we dressed her up in a Yoda costume.
Here's a video of Eliana before heading out to the Harvest Fest. She's acting a little silly because she's very excited about being dressed up.

Here she is in the "Candyland room". In this room...you get candy.

We also carved pumpkins. Eliana wanted a "happy face". Papai carved an X-wing into his pumpkin. Eliana wanted to light the candles inside, but we didn't let her. She did get to blow out the candles at the end of the trick-or-treating time. She also liked having so many kids visit us all night long.

And Karina continues to grow and develop. Now, she holds her head up pretty well and is grabbing things with her hands. If you make eye contact with her from up close, she'll smile back and you, and talk to you. But, she still sleeps a lot too...

Visit to California

This past weekend, we flew down to California to visit Elvin's parents. For the first time, Eliana had her own seat on the plane. Karina got to spend some time with Nai-nai (grandma),

She also got to show off some of her rolls during bathtime.Eliana spent time with Yeh-yeh (grandpa).

We got Ellie some little dissolvable capsules with sea creature sponges inside. Yeh-Yeh helped her do her "experiment". In San Jose, there is a kiddie amusement park and zoo that Emily used to go to when she was little, called Happy Hollow. We decided to try it out with Eliana. She LOVED it, and went on lots of different rides. She looks totally bored, because she was exhausted from our very very late night the night before. Despite the looks, though, she really enjoyed it, and is still talking about the dragon train, the merry go round, and the cars. We'll definitely go back!



Elvin's parents put on a dinner for their friends, so they could have them "meet" Karina. Here she is, with all the food...

There was also a cake. Since Karina isn't much interested in blowing out candles, Eliana helped out...

Before leaving for the airport, we took a Yuen family photo. Karina was more interested in looking at Eliana rather than the camera.

And heading back home...Eliana with her backpack of course...

Fall is here...

Because the weather here is cooling off so quickly, Emily takes advantage of the sunny, rain-less days by going to the park. Both of the girls like riding on the stroller and they often come home in time to see Daddy pull into the drive way from work.

The sisterly love is still going strong. Whenever Karina is within reach, such as on the changing pad on the coffee table or on our bed, such as below, Eliana wants to touch and play with her. Eliana scales the bed like a little monkey and gives Karina a hug, a kiss, and pats on the head.
They happen to have matching PJs, which is sooooooooo exciting (for Ellie).

Whenever Karina has her "pink panda jammies" on, Eliana has to as well. Unless they are dirty because Eliana had a little accident, such as today.

Here they are posing together--pre-accident. This was the best picture out of the 50 taken. Thank goodness we don't use film cameras anymore.

In the same way that Eliana is learning to put on her clothes, she's also learning how to take them off. But in this case, you can see that she's put herself in a difficult situation. And this past weekemd, we visited a pumpkin ptach. She was excited because she has a book about it. Also, because of our trip to the farm last month, she also thought we were going to see goats. We tried tempering her expectations.

9 weeks old...

Karina is 9 weeks old and at her two month ckeck up last week, she came in at 14 pounds, 10 ounces. She has been gaining a whopping one pound a week. No one in the Yuen household has done that since our cruise to Alaska last summer and Elvin overate at the buffet lines.


We've started feeding her formula once a day. Emily is gone in the evenings once a week, so having the option of bottle feeding Karina let's Elvin stay home with the girls. Eliana likes to help.





Karina loves a mobile that friends originally gave to Eliana when she was a baby. Karina can be fussy, but when you put her down in the crib and turn the music on, she will be riveted by the movement.






This past week, Emily's sister visited from Seattle, so Karina got to see some of her cousins.

Eliana adores her cousine Lena. She followed her around like a shadow and copied everthing Lena did. Lena had a root beer float bar for dessert, so Eliana grabbed one too.

Eliana's other cousins also spent the night last week. Eliana pretended she was a baby and made herself comfortable in Karina's Moses basket while her cousin Millie read her a story. What service!Here is Eliana and Abby watching a Chinese language video together. The girls are in their PJs all ready for bed. No, they did not all sleep on the same bed.As Eliana exerts her independence, she wants to do more things herself. She buttered this piece of toast herself. There's about a tablespoon of it on there. And of course, only the part with butter gets eaten!

Visit to a farm

A couple weeks ago, several farms in the county organized tours where people could visit and hear about some of the behind the scenes stories about running a farm. Eliana was agreeable, and Karina didn't object so we made an excursion of it.

Last week, we also celebrated Emily's birthday. Eliana equates having a birthday to having a birthday party and didn't understand why we didn't throw a party for mommy. Instead, we celebrated by going to Cold Stones. This was Karina's first time and probably won't remember much of it.

Mommy and Daddy shared a large cup of sweet cream with peanut butter cups and peanut butter. Eliana wanted to have the "blue" ice cream (bubble gum flavored). But after sampling it, opted for her standard sweet cream with "candy" (sprinkles).

We also had angel food cake. Eliana helped to blow out the candles but really was interested in only one thing--the red candy letters on top.

And we went to Red Robin. They give you a free sundae for your birthday. But for every bite that Mommy took, it seemed like Eliana snuck in 4 bites...

Eliana's maternal instincts manifest themselves in new ways all the time. Here, she put her baby doll in the chair where Karina sometimes sleeps.

Here is Eliana, you guessed it, breastfeeding her doll.

But the most fun thing to do is to hold her little sister by herself. She requests this about 6 or more times a day. "I'm holding her all by self!" she'll say.

Karina definetely recognizes her sister. Eliana loves interacting with her and gets a kick out of seeing Karina smile back. Here is Eliana jumping for her sister.

Eliana is getting better at dressing herself. She practices every night with her PJs...

Now that our lives have settled into a routine, we started potty training Eliana. (Or as she calls it, "potty train", and she'll sign the sign for a choo-choo train.) She's actually done pretty well and gets one piece of (small) candy as reward. Also very exciting is that she gets to flush.

Also a sign that Eliana is growing up is that her 2nd 2-year molars have come in. They bother her, but only a little she says.

So that's the update from us. Hope you're doing well.

7 weeks old...

Karina is leaving the newborn phase and now turning into a "real" baby. She seems to recognize her mommy and daddy's faces, but really responds the most to Eliana. She really likes her big sister and doesn't seem to mind it if Eliana encroaches on her personal space.

Karina is starting to go longer between feedings at night and we hope that within the next several weeks she'll go through the whole night needing just one feeding.

If fussy, usually the following work to soothe her: rocking up and down, loud white noise, sitting on the swing on our front porch, and sucking on her pacifier. Here she is sucking vigorously on her Soothie.



Eliana continues to entertain us. We encourage her to eat her 5-a-day, but the only vegetable that she'll eat are cucumbers. And from the cucumbers, she'll actually only eat the seeds. It's her favorite part and she won't eat the fleshy part of it.

She's a resourceful little scavenger. The other day, dinnertime was approaching and she was getting hungry. So she pulled out a snack: 2 pounds of string cheese.

Eliana has been asking us for awhile to sign her up for a "sports" class that she has seen other children participating in at the local community center. We finally did; here she is getting ready to go to her first day of class, or "team" as she calls it. She is especially proud of her new running shoes!

Here you can see the extent of what goes on in a toddler sports class...combined with Ellie's distracted excitement to see Papai (Daddy) in the middle of the day.

Autumn is here...

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, the hot and sunny days have given way to cloudy and usually rainy ones. But before the rains arrived, we took full advantage of the last few days of summer.

A couple of weeks ago at the farmer's market we stumbled onto a booth run by the humane society where they were displaying kittens for adoption. We window shopped for a while.

At the local park in our neighborhood, Eliana loves going down the slide. It's made out of plastic and is charged with static electricity. Makes Eliana's hair stand on end!

Eliana has not yet mastered how to put her pants on, but is doing well with socks. Once she realized that they needed to go over ALL of her toes before they could be pulled up, she was able to consistently put them on. But sometimes her silly side wins out and she puts her socks on her nose.

Karina has settled into a pretty predictable pattern. She gets up around 6am or 7am to eat. She'll have some awake time (when usually she gets a bath) and then goes to sleep. She's a pretty good sleeper during the day and will even sleep on the couch by herself for a long stretch.
In the evenings, she has more awake time, especially during dinner and afterwards.
Then between 9pm and midnight, she'll finally fall asleep again for the night. She gets up to eat twice during the night, but usually goes back to sleep after eating.

Eliana continues to ham it up. She has three songs mastered: Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star; ABCs; and Old McDonald Had a Farm. However, with the last song, she confuses the words and melody with a different song about a farm that she learned from her video...