Winter blues... and yellows and reds!

With the frigid cold weather, we've been having lots of indoor fun, and
the girls get more creative every day. They get artistic:




And they get downright silly:

We do everything in 2's

As we do every year, we had two Christmases, one in Chicago with Gramma, Opa, Uncle Mike, Aunt Irene, Cousins Olivia & Ariel, and GrandOmi & GrandOpi, then another on new year's eve with Ama, Akung, Aunt Jean, Uncle Aaron, Clay & Owen. The girls enjoyed both and were quick to learn how to open presents, even saying Tankoo by the end. During both holidays, they also stretched their culinary skills - cookies at Christmas (thanks Gramma!) and on New Year's they made sushi and pigs in a blanket (thanks Ama and Aunt Jean!). We've all been enjoying our new toys and books since the holidays which is good since it so COLD that we never play outside anymore. :)

Christmas Eve & Day - states represented: Illinois, Indiana, Idaho, & Missouri!

Gramma & Opa

Cookie Time!


New Years Eve - the presents continue...

...and so does the food. My fav meal of the year - Sukiaki! And this year, Clay and Owen added cheesecake. What more could we want.

Then Jack's fav day of the year - New Year's Day with family, football, and food. The girls' first sushi making day!

So that's the holiday wrap up. It's only taken a month to get posted. :)

Since then, the residents of Weiville have been working on potty training. The big phrase around here is "Special Treat" which is code for "I get an M&M when I pee-pee". We're no where near ready to get rid of diapers (we tried) but little by little, the girls are growing towards independence. I'm sure I'll post big exciting pictures when they finally get #2 into the pot. ;)
Stay warm everyone!
PS: Congrats, Lilie! The girls will try their best to give you the day of your dreams.

The Office

What you are about to see constitutes about 20-30 hours of Jack's free time. So it's a darn good thing that I'm in love with it! My new office/studio feels like the first real space I've had to do my work, rather than something cobbled together quickly and piecemeal. The desks are (xplane style) made from doors that he custom stained to match the trim and the shelves are hand picked as well. Only the white wire shelf above my drafting table is something we repurposed, but that fits in with everything and will look even better once we get the white blinds delivered. It's a fun, functional, high-crafted space and I'm super happy with it (and its creator). :)






Ahead you can see the current view from my drawing table. In the spring, it'll showcase our beautiful front yard pond which is frozen over right now. So the fish and I will get creative together! Actually, in the spring, I probably won't be sitting there much unless it's to nurse... maybe summer. ;)


Hmmm... it'd be fun to see all my past office views... I'll have to dig up some drawings from St. Louis someday. I was in the digital photo world for Philly... and my Tucson view showed the pool. 



Guess I've always been very very lucky no matter where I live! Enjoy your spaces, everyone. Home is wherever you stash your daily tools. :)

Stuff I should have posted in 2007

Happy 2008! Hard to believe the 90's are almost a full decade past now... they were such formative years for me. But now that our kids are around, the early 2000's seem more important. Life without the girls is hard to remember, and I'm sure we'll feel the same way about the new baby once he or she makes an appearance. (Thanks for the input Renee! I'm starting to feel more confident that I may know enough this time to keep it around longer than a few months... LOL!) Anyway, below are a few picks from December that should have made it onto this blog a long time ago. I'll show off holiday pics and MY NEW OFFICE in another entry as well as OUR NEW CAR! That's right, I'm a minivan mom now, but as Rachel said to me - it's a car even a "cool car guy" like her hubby appreciates, so maybe I'll maintain whatever small snibbles of coolness I had before kids... HA! Well, it is a very cool car; let's leave it at that. As is my office. BIG kudos to Jack for his late nights and hard work to get it done. 2 more rooms to go! Guest room is next - all you loved ones who come in 2008 (Please! Come!) will enjoy his expert paint choices. History has proven over and over (and over) that I stink at it.

Dani left, Alex right:

Alex:

Dani:



A true Daddy-driven snowman - m&m's for a mouth and girl scout cookies for eyes...


EDIT: I added names before pics above. I just realized I haven't been good about that lately.

Merry Christmas and (a belated) Happy Hannukkah!

Hello friends and family! I hope you've been enjoying preholiday preparations and, if you're like us, playing in some snow. It's been on my to do list to post pics of the girls' first snowman and family snow play day, and now we're up in Chicago with Gramma and Opa, so the pics will have to wait. But the merriment can't, soooo - HAPPY HOLIDAYS! The guest room is always open up in Carmel (even after our new "guest" comes in April. He/she won't eat it up) and we hope to see as many of you as possible in 2008. Peace, love, and happiness in the new year!!! Love, Dani, Alex, Jack and Alyssa

Laughing all the Wei Hahaha

Yes, I already have Christmas songs stuck in my head now. And since jingle bells may be useful for this year's holiday card, it was on the tip of my fingers as I titled this post. But it's true - the girls make us laugh every day. For example...

On Halloween, Dani was really into Clay and Owen's electric guitar that plays heavy metal riffs on its own. So much so that (I wish I had my video cam for this) she started head banging while playing! I have no idea where she got that idea - Laurie Berkner and Raffi are hardly teaching her to head bang...


And our little bookworm Alex was captured on film by Daddy last weekend. What else would a 20 month old want to read but some thrilling Tom Clancy?!?



Today's funny story goes along with the potty theme, too. Daddy was holding both girls when I asked, "Alex, are you stinky?" to which she replied, "No. Dani's poopy."

Another Wei on the Way!

Yep, that's right. This blog name may need to change to "Wei 3 Be" because we're expecting a singleton in April. We're excited and the baby is doing fine. Today was the big 18 week ultrasound, so I actually have pics to post. We had one other at 11 weeks, but it was a pretty mundane pic... 'Yep, it has a head and arms. Ok, back to life.' (funny how things change the second time around, eh? Last time the girls had had over 5 ultrasounds by now and I was excitedly posting every single one) So, here's Baby Wei, loner. We're not going to find out the sex of it until we meet him/her in person, so we have another 22 weeks to go until we can say, "It's a...."!

Not quite Siamese...

Happy day after Halloween! We had a great time yesterday with our little kitties. They marched in the parade at school (a few laps around the parking lot - thank goodness for sunny warm weather!)




Then we went over to trick-or-treat with "Ama", Ahkoh", "Ah Jee", "Ohnco", "Kay" and Owie". (For those of you who don't speak 19 month old, that's Ama, Akung, Aunt Jean, Uncle Aaron, Clay, and Owen.) The girls totally got it after the first few houses. They happily walked up the steps, opened their bags, and said "tankoo." Then it was off to the next house in the wagon. They discovered that taking candy out of their bags is a LOT of fun, because that's what candy is for, right? To crinkle and put in and out? That's Daddy story and he's sticking to it. ;)






Then back at Aunt Jean's, Alex decided to do a tribute to the drawings of my buddy Dan Zettwoch.

Chicago Bound

It's been too long since I posted, and I apologize for the silence. We've been battling more sickness around here - flu, ear infections, colds, you name it. But hopefully with some good new antibiotics, we'll be back to sleeping at night and having fun all day. We did actually have fun up at Grandma and Opa's house a few weeks ago, so here are a bunch of shots from our visit. The girls loved Grandma's toys this time - they played in the daycare space for hours and expanded their ride-on toy expertise to include motorcycles (Uncle Mikey would have been proud!).

munch munch crunch

We've been in a bit of a time crunch the last few weeks, between my trip to Philadelphia (working on my children's book with Chrissa) and the girls' recent double ear infection. So here's a quick video of them CRUNCHing on carrots for the first time.

We are family

We've been having lots of fun and I've snapped plenty of good pics that I need to upload here, but for now, since I have a deadline to meet on tuesday (Yikes! I haven't had one of THOSE in a while!) this new family shot will have to suffice. We braved a professional photo place again a few weeks ago and it's probably the last time. Not because they aren't good photographers, but the girls have some hang up with being there and burst into tears the minute we walk into the studio. So I'm back to taking my own pictures, which is a good challenge.
I'll post some cute shots of the girls "driving" when I get back from my big trip to Philly! Yeeha - Chrissa, here I come! Let's go to Monk's for a beer!!

Becoming...

Today was a very productive and fun day for me. The girls were enjoying their weekly visit with Ama, so I spent all day battling (and conquering) the weeds in my vegetable garden and then mulching to keep myself from having to do this again for awhile. While some may say, "That doesn't sound like much fun to me...", I know that Sarah and Tina will understand the simple joys I felt today while getting dusty, sweaty, and sunburnt, since they are what you might call "gardeners" while I am what you might call "a hack". I realized that when one has to weed an entire bed with a full size spade rather than a trowel, it's probably a sign that one is not the best gardener... But I had fun! And I got to do a lot of thinking while doing all that digging. Things always fly by while I'm taking care of the girls and it doesn't leave much time for really enjoying them at each stage. The baby manual I'm currently reading (Your One-Year-Old by Ames & Ilg - I highly recommend it Shan!) says this about kids their age:

"There is hardly anything in the world more exciting than something which is on the verge of becoming. When this something is a human being, a human personality on the verge of declaring itself, the excitement doubles...we as parents and grandparents see, or imagine that we see, the person emerging more clearly at about Eighteen months than at any succeeding age. Later on the child will have become. Right now he or she is becoming. When he is no longer a baby but is not yet a preschooler, his very in-betweeness on good days can be a delight to behold."

I invite the authors to see what my eldest daughter was "becoming" at Trader Joe's yesterday when she didn't want to give up the kid-sized cart... ;) But seriously, this really is an amazing time in their lives, and I keep trying to soak in as much of it as I can. Between doing endless dishes and changing diapers and picking up hundreds of small (and getting smaller) toys and wiping crayon off walls, I peek at them and wonder what their interests will be when they are my age... how will they choose to spend their lives? Who will accompany them in their adulthood? Current trends indicate that they will have each other to lean on, at the very least. They are both good at looking out for each other, bringing one another toys and giving hugs when one is crying. And we suspect Alex will enjoy something that requires movement and agility and a little bit of fearlessness, maybe dance or downhill skiing or synchronized swimming... And Dani loves to stir pots and pans with spoons, spatulas, whisks, sticks and she cracks herself up while going around pretending to feed people, so maybe she'll be a world-famous chef, or a kind-hearted nurse, or a scientist (perhaps the mad variety!). To my delight, they both love to read books and draw. :) So we'll see what our pumpkins become. For now, I've made a little compilation with mosaic maker... maybe these are clues as to what they'll become!



Let's hope Alex actually doesn't become the Hulk... (thank goodness for washable crayola finger paint!)

On a side note, it's been brought to my attention at a recent wedding (Thanks Allicia! Congrats on a great day!) that we have a few international friends who are following our little Indy life. I love that my goal of reaching out to my loved ones has become even lower maintenance than I ever dreamed! Being a lazy, bad friend doesn't always kick you in the butt, I guess. Yeeha! Visit again soon, dearies!

i THOUGHT it was awfully quiet down there...

Those 5 minutes I was upstairs yesterday morning were very productive for some little people...

I'm expanding...in the blogosphere that is

Ha ha, no - no new family members to announce. (unlike Shananalagins. Hooray Shannon and Brent! We're so happy for you! And TWINS - welcome to the club!!! See the links column for their blog) But I do have a new creative "baby" - an illustration blog. I figure that I've made my family a priority and lots of great things have happened, so now I'm going to make my drawing more of a priority too and see what happens. You can check out my first posted sketch here:

http://wei2draw.blogspot.com/

Check back often to keep me in line! (comments are much appreciated)