Kimberly is 17 months old, and she is growing so quickly. I know it is cliche, but they really do grow up so fast. She has been saying a whole host of words now, and is able to identify all the parts of her head and face as well as differentiating between her nose, and daddy's nose and mommy's nose. Really, cute! I'm trying to get her to learn the name, Ankhesenpa'aten, who was the wife of King Tutankhamun. How cool would that be? I can say daddy, mommy, kitty, doggy, ruf ruf, meow, and Ankhesenpaaten.
I think the picture pretty much explains the title.
Yesterday, Katrina took Kimberly to get a blood test. She has been a bit anemic and we have been giving her iron supplements, so she was just getting tested. She was brave little trooper, so after the doctor appointment, Katrina took her to the balloon store and then to the picture place at the mall. Of course I see her every day, but when I look at these pictures, I really see how much she has grown. And I also realize that I am indeed the luckiest guy in the world. Click here to view the rest of the photos from the shoot.
This past weekend, Katrina, KImberly and I took a drive with our good friends Leimomi and Steven to Anza Borrego to check out the wildflowers. It has been a decent year for the wildflowers, and we were treated to a wonderful display of oranges, yellows, reds, blues, purples and a number of other colors that this color-blind blogger can't distinguish.
We only did a couple of rather short hikes, but we had a great time taking Kimberly hiking. We had really great weather on saturday, and we didn't know how lucky we were with the weather until sunday when there were 60 mile/hour gusts blowing in the high desert, destroying the fragile wildflowers (don't worry they come back) and kicking up so much sand and dust, the trip would have been miserable.
Kimberly is now 15 months old, and she is becoming more expressive every day. I was just taking a video of her making baby noises, when she decided to ham it up about half way through the video.
I apologize to those who have been checking this blog regularly for updates only to find that there weren't any updates, at least for a while. Things have been pretty busy for me at work, and school was taking up what remaining free time I had between work and Kimberly. And well, because of all that, I was running on about 3-4 hours of sleep per day, and got a flu/cold bug that I couldn't kick for about 2.5 months. I finally got some medications and am on the mend, just in time to study for my final. Anyway, I finished my finals today, and hope to get some updates uploaded here.
Kimberly is now 14 months old now, and seems to be at a point of rapid development. She has been walking just over a week now, and recently she has been very "huggy". She wants to hug her stuffed animals, Nani, Oscar and of course Mom and Dad. It really is quite endearing. What's more amazing, is that Nani and Oscar are incredibly patient with her, and she with them. And we really never had to be overly protective of the dogs or Kimberly and how they treat each other, nor have we had to ever reprimand them for being too rough, just some periodic coaching. And keep in mind, Kimberly tosses and bangs her toys about with reckless abandon, but she seems to be very gentle with the dogs, as you can see in the video.
Yesterday, Katrina ran the Surf City USA Marathon in Huntington Beach, CA, and achieved one of her life goals; to qualify for the Boston Marathon. 3:45 qualifies for Boston for her age group, and as you can see from her certificate she was at 3:44:39. Kimberly and I were able to greet her at the finish line. Congratulations Katrina, we are so proud of you!
Congratulations to Lindsey Hayes (made her personal best), Sara Bennett (also qualified for Boston), Adam Bennett, Lorraine Johannes and Krista Carlson as well for finishing the marathon and half-marathons (pictured: Lindsey, Lorraine, and Katrina).
Well, sort of. We just bought a new Toyota Prius last night. My lease on my Audi A4 was up and I needed a new car. We still haven't decided what to do about replacing Katrina's Xterra that was totaled in an accident over the holidays (see previous post), but in the search process we both decided that we needed to have a Prius in the household. We talk about being "green" and we try to be as much as we can, and we thought getting a Prius to replace the Audi was a good move. The 47 mpg isn't too shabby as well. Oddly enough, what finally sold me on the car was how big the interior is. The car is deceptively large. And the beautiful Spectra Blue Mica (new in 2009) was a huge selling point for me as well. Here's a pic from Toyota:
It's been a while since my last blog, so this one might seem a little rambling. Suffice to say we had a very memorable holiday season.
It all started out a little off balance. Katrina and I are having dinner on the evening of December 18, thinking we were going to get a phone call from my mom. You know those, "hey, are you guys ready for me to come visit!?" Right around 8:50pm, Katrina calls my parents house and my dad answers the phone. Katrina asks if mom is around, and my dad responds that she is in Los Angeles already. I over hear them talking and already I'm getting my sweater and shoes on and head to the airport. Katrina and I had made the reservations and we mistakenly thought she was coming in on the 19th. As luck would have it, we called right about the time that mom was landing. I was driving into LAX when my cell phone rang with a strange number. It was my mom who had borrowed a fellow passenger's cell phone. After I finally found her, she was a little shaken, but doing fine. I should have known at this point we were in for some trip.
After a couple of days of relaxing, we packed up the Xterra and headed to Vegas. We spent a couple of days at the Luxor hotel, and while we had a good time since we all enjoy going to Vegas, I will say now, in hindsight, it was the smoothest as the trip was going to be.
Monday morning, I packed up the Xterra, and I do mean PACKED. We had Thule soft roof rack and a net that had a bunch of stuff on the roof of the truck and the interior cargo space was completely solid. I'll explain later why my mentioning the packing of the truck is noteworthy. And we headed to Salt Lake City. This was going to be one of the longer drives of the trip so it was important that we got on the road as quickly as possible.
There were storms moving in, and Salt Lake was scheduled to get a bunch of snow over the next few days, so we were definitely trying to get to Katrina's parents house as quickly as possible before things got too sketchy. As luck would have it, we were able to avoid most of the weather heading up there, and got to Salt Lake at about 8pm. But it was cold, and the weather definitely looked like snow was coming.
We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Katrina's immediate and extended family, and we all had a wonderful time. It was fun for my mom to meet all of Katrina's family that she hadn't met before.
As much fun as we were having we were really looking forward to the day after Christmas because we were going to drive down to Matt and Steph's (Katrina's sister and brother in law) house and see the dinosaur museum together and then get together for movie night at their house. Well, we didn't get very far because we hit some horrible road conditions driving there, and with my mom, Katrina and Kimberly in the car, we lost control of the Xterra on some ice and slush, and smashed into the median wall. Both air bags deployed, but we all walked away shaken, but not injured. The picture doesn't seem that bad, but the brush guard in the front of the car took a lot of damage, and it's bolted to the frame, hence there was also frame damage. Factor a number of other things in, the car is a total loss. AAA came to tow the car to a collision center, but unfortunately the place we took it wasn't open on friday, and wasn't going to be open until monday, and we were scheduled to leave Salt Lake on sunday. But, again, no one got hurt, and there was no other cars involved, so there was a lot to be thankful for.
After dropping the car off at the collision center, Matt picked me up, and we headed back to their house, since we had movie night planned there that night. This was definitely the highlight of the day. Over the past 12-18 months, Matt has been talking about, planning and doing a bit of work here and there on a home theatre in the basement of their home. Now, many people have "home theatres" in their house, but it's a little more than a TV and a stereo system with 5 speakers or something like that. Matt has definitely taken it to another level...scratch that, another planet. Many movie stars and professional athletes don't have what Matt built in their homes. It really is something to behold. But what was even more fun was that my mom was just thrilled in the theatre. Matt had Planet Earth in high definition running for her, and she was commenting that she could live in there.
With the evening ending on a bit of a high note at the Johnston's, we headed back to Katrina's parent's house and were looking forward to saturday when we were going sledding, Kimberly and my mom's first time! Saturday turned out to be a beautiful day in terms of the weather and when we got to the park, it was a perfect size for everyone.
Kimberly seemed to really enjoy herself, but of course she couldn't really tell us. Someone that could tell us that they were enjoying the sledding was my mom. She was having the time of her life. My mom is 72, and after a couple of runs down the hill and slogging back up with the sled, I thought she might be getting a little tired. She decided to wait down at the bottom of the hill until everyone else was done. After talking to her later, she was telling us how much fun she was having at that she wanted to go down more times. We said that we understood that she must have been getting tired, and she looked at me and said, "no, I could have gone up more times. My hands were just frozen." Coming from Hawaii, my mom wasn't exactly prepared for the cold and had a pair of cotton gloves that would have served her fine on a chilly day in Hawaii, not a cold day in Utah.
After sledding, we all headed to Katrina's grandparents house for hot chocolate and to figure out where to go for dinner. There seems to be an unwritten rule that once you get to be 70, the only option for dinner in Utah is a buffet. There are two fairly popular places, one called the Golden Corral and the other is called (and I'm not joking) Chuck-o-Rama. Of course, there are running jokes for both places, but I'll try not to offend those who love them. Anyway, after some discussion, we decided to go to Chuck-o-Rama, since we had about 16 people, and buffet places like that accomodate larger groups a lot easier than other "sit down" restaurants. And besides, it's a buffet, I'm sure everyone can find something that they will like. Well, as expected, they were able to seat all of us together, and the food was pretty tasty. At this point it seemed that going to Chuck-o-Bucket, I mean, Chuck-o-Rama, was a good idea. When we got home, Katrina asked if I could take care of Kimberly until her bedtime because she wasn't feeling that well, and wanted to lay down. I told her no problem, although, I wasn't feeling all that great either, but coming from an all you can eat place, I expected to feel a little lousy. Well, to cut to the chase, Kimberly, Katrina and I all got food poisoning...bad. In the bathroom constantly, bad. Nice follow up to totaling your vehicle out of state on vacation.
24 hours of in and out of the bathroom, all three of us were better. Oddly enough, my mom or any of the other 16 people that joined us got sick. At this point, I was glad that we weren't leaving on sunday, since there's only one thing worse than having food poisoning...it's having food poisoning while driving long distances.
After finally finding a rental agency that would rent us an SUV (keep in mind that it is dumping snow in one of the world ski capitals, so SUVs are in high demand), we packed up on monday, and headed down to Kanab, on our way to the Grand Canyon. We had decided that the only option was to leave our Xterra in Utah, and have the body repair shop and AAA work out the details. We tried to leave as early as we could on monday, but we were still an hour away from Kanab in the dark on icy roads. I was driving really slowly for obvious reasons, and semi-trucks and the snow drifts were passing me on either side.
After a day visiting Katrina's other brother and his family in Kanab, we drove to the Grand Canyon, and it was beautiful day. I really wanted to show my mom the Grand Canyon on this trip since she spoke about it a number of times over the years. My mom is still in relatively good health but at 72, you really want to take advantage of the opportunities you have.
From the Grand Canyon, we drove to Sedona and spent New Years there, browsing the shops and admiring the incredible scenary there. If you've never been, it's definitely worth a weekend trip there. Upon leaving Sedona, we decided to stop at an ancient Indian cliff dwelling called Montezuma's Castle. It was built and inhabited by the Sinagua Indians around 1100 AD. We were all glad that we stopped because 1) it's an incredible archaeological site and 2) it is very accessable. My mom had no problems getting around the 1/3 mile loop trail with her walker.
We finally got back to Los Angeles on friday, January 2. But to add insult to injury, I wasn't able to rent the SUV one way to Los Angeles. The Jeep needed to be back in Salt Lake City on sunday. Earlier in the week, I had made arrangements for Katrina's sister and boyfriend to fly to Las Vegas, and I was going to drive there and hand off the car to them to drive back the following day. I got them a room for a couple of nights, so hopefully they didn't think the drive back to Salt Lake from Vegas was a bad trade for a weekend in Vegas. In any case, I'm very, very grateful to them for helping me out. And given everything that happened, we are grateful to everyone in Katrina's family for helping us out when we needed it. And we needed it often.
One last note, about the packing of the Xterra that I had mentioned. The reason I made a point of it was that when we rented to the Jeep Liberty, we were astonished at how much LESS storage capacity the Jeep had compared to the Xterra. We had to leave a number of things in Salt Lake simply because there was no room to put it.
Well, thanks for bearing with me on the rambling "catch up" post to the blog. Happy New Year everyone!
Many of you know that Katrina loves to run, and has completed a number of marathons. Since having Kimberly, she has been working on getting back into marathon form. This past weekend, she ran the City of Angels Half Marathon, and had her best half-marathon time ever! Congratulations Katrina! (I don't have any pictures of her from this half-marathon, so the picture you see above is of her and her friend Cindy Young finishing the Death Valley Marathon a couple of years ago).
UPDATE. Now there are photos from the event, and you can see pics of Katrina here.
Once again, I would like to thank Gilbert Yu for taking a wonderful set of photos for us. Like me, he is an avid photographer, but unlike me, Gilbert possesses a skill, patience and passion for capturing such wonderful portraits. Shots that, while they seem "candid", in that the capture such a natural smiles and expressions, are incredibly complicated (in terms of lighting and exposure) and challenging because you're dealing with so many variables with your subject (movement and expression). With children, it is even more arduous, but it is particularly with children that Gilbert excels. If you live in the Los Angeles area, and are in need of a photographer, I can suggest no one better then Gilbert (you can contact him via his website).
Hapa is Hawaiian term meaning someone of mixed Asian decent, like me, and by definition, Kimberly.
Kimberly has very long hair, and we have been reluctant to have it cut because she looks so cute in pigtails and pony tails. However, it has now gotten to the point where her bangs hang below her chin, and she seems to pull off the rubber bands and/or clips that we put in her hair, which often end up in her mouth. So, this friday, we are taking her to a salon that specializes in infant and toddler hair cuts.
The other day, when I picked her up from day care, I need to stop by the super market, and found an old Japanese wood block "do-rag" in my car that I had forgotten about. So rather than people thinking that I was raising some feral animal (that only had a small body and a huge mess of hair), I put the do-rag on Kimberly...instant cuteness!
Another big milestone fell yesterday, unfortunately no body saw it actually happen.
Yesterday, Katrina was out running some errands and I was home with Kimberly. She usually goes down for a nap around 9:30am. At around 10am, she was still wide awake, and having fun (i.e.: she wasn't fussing or rubbing her eyes). Around 10:30, I gave her a bottle, and she finally started showing signs that she might fall asleep.
After the bottle, I carried her to her crib, and put her down with her favorite blanket, turned the lights down, and closed the blinds. She has been able to get up to a sitting position from lying down for quite sometime now, but she does it much more frequently lately. After a couple of minutes, I came back to the room to check on her and found her sitting up playing with a stuff animal in the crib. I laughed, and played with her for another 20 minutes or so, hoping to tire her out even more. She was tired, but seemed to be more enamored by the fact that she could get up so easily into a "play" position.
11:15am rolls around, and I think she surely is going to fall asleep now. She's yawning and rubbing her eyes. I carry her back to her crib, give her her blanket, and tip toe out of the room. About 10 minutes later, I sneak a peak into the room, and I see her, staring back at me, STANDING UP in her crib! She has gotten close to standing with my or Katrina's help, but she has not done it by herself before. The minute she saw me she started doing her little pattycakes and smiled. While I was so proud that she was standing, I realized that I needed to lower the crib so that she wouldn't fall out if she was to stand up again.
I lifted her out of the crib, and set up some of her toys on the floor, and got the tools to lower the crib. About 20 minutes later, the crib was lowered, and I finally got her back into the crib. She still wasn't that interested in sleeping, but I stayed there and gently stroked her hair, and she eventually fell asleep. 5 minutes later, so was I.
Our little Kimberly is growing so fast, which is what any parent tells other new parents. But I suppose until you actually have a little one of your own, you never realize how time flies. You're so busy taking care of little things and big things, and your whole world revolves around her, that time seems to just fly by. Kimberly is now 11 months old, she's started crawling, she's been chatting up a storm, and has 8 teeth (you can see a few of them here). It seems like only yesterday, when Katrina and I were living at Torrance Memorial for a week. But as folks say, it is the best thing that you'll ever do, so enjoy it. And enjoying it we are. We have been blessed with a daughter with such a wonderful disposition. I have joked that she is perhaps the re-incarnation of a very high lama, since she seems to be at such peace with her surroundings that really belies her age. And as fast as she is growing, I am in awe of her future. I only hope that I can be as supportive to her as she has inspired me.
I am, and have always been, a proud American. However, I am more hopeful today than I have been in a very long time. Whether you supported Sen. Obama or not, it is my most profound hope that we can come together as one nation and heal this bitter divide that has split families, split friends, and split the nation. For those of you that know me and my family well, know that this election has been fraught with tragedy and difficulty for me personally. But also, for those that know me, know that while it is no secret who I supported, tried (not always successfully) to be compassionate and to listen to everyone's point of view.
While it may be cliche at this point, it is worth mentioning, because it is something that President-elect Obama has said many times, although I know we are not there yet...."we are not a collection of red states and blue states, we are the United States of America."
I also wanted to share the clip below of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice reacting to last nights election. Secretary Rice has held political views vastly different from mine, but I have always respected her, for her abilities and her personal story. I found it very moving to hear her reaction to the election.
