Spotlight on: Alex!

It's really easy to always think about "The Girls" because we pretty much do everything TOGETHER. But the girls have such different personalities! So I'm taking time the next 2 posts to give each girl the showcase she deserves. We'll go alphabetically, to keep me from feeling guilty about who to choose first.

Personality: Our super smiley socialite likes meeting new people and trying new foods (just like her mama) and can be, at times (usually 2am), a drama-queen. She's a roller coaster kid and LOVES to be thrown around, jump, and to 'surf' in her carseat (standing up and rocking). Here she is with her friend Logan and riding the "Daddy Coaster."




Favorite Food: Right now, it's bananas (just like her grampa!) and as you can see, she's very good at feeding herself like a monkey.



Quirks: With eyes like a detail freek (hmmm, who does she take after there...) Alex is able to pick up and eat the smallest bits of whatever she finds on the floor. And she loves to drink her bathwater.




Favorite toy: Her sister. She is constantly giving Dani "hugs" and tackling and tickling her, which Dani seems to put up with lately better than in the past. It's cute and it's hard not to run over and break it up because Dani is usually giggling until a sharp nail or pointy elbow gives her reason to cry. (Dani is actually on top in this pic, which is unusal. But it was too cute to leave out!)




Skills: Alex has been fearless in learning many physical things (rolling over, stairclimbing, jumping in the jumper) but has also excelled at using her hands and feet. She quickly picked up the sippy cup and could drink by herself. She's great at stacking the stacking cups inside one another and putting blocks into the bin. And when she holds your hand to walk, she always tries to kick a toy along as she goes. Our future soccer player! But it's not all moving and shaking around here. Both she and Dani love soft pillows and will fling their faces into them with gusto. Alex especially likes lounging on her back (Like her daddy!).




So that's our younger daughter in a nutshell. Next post: Dani!

See how they run

Despite being sick for 4 days, the girls have made amazing strides (pun somewhat intended) in their walking! And I was excited to be able to catch it on video since they were compelled to show off their new skills to Ama on Tuesday. To put it all in perspective, I've decided to post an old video that hasn't seen the light of day yet to show how far they've come in only 10 months. Here's the first day they ever had "floor time", which was April 5, 2006:



And here's this week's walking extravaganza:



Amazing what a difference 9 months can make!

We're 10 months old!

We've had some beautiful winter days this week - sun and snow bring plenty of smiles around here. And luckily, the photog at Picture People was able to extract a few smiles (albeit, not from both babies at once!) last friday when the girls turned 10 months old (despite the chill at home caused by our out-of-commission furnace... it's fixed now, thank goodness!).

We've had plenty of fun since my last post - Alex has figured out how to stand up without holding onto anything, and we've had playdates with our twin friends, the Jents, and visits with Ama and Akung. But one of my favorite things to do is go to the grocery store and let the girls ride in the cart. They love it! Especially when it's a neato keen race car cart. (insert joke here about the OTHER Danica...)

Today I made a quick card for the Milligans, who welcomed Anna Margaret into the world recently, and in doing so, I realized that I had made my first real drawing of the girls. Nothing big, but it made me feel so... normal! I'm sure there will be many more. They'll find their way into all my work, I suspect. Right now they just like to teethe on them, but soon they'll star in many books, if life goes as planned. :)

See if you can figure out which doodle is which girl.
Stay warm, all you friends out there!

Walking is the new crawling...

...and crackers are the new Cheerios! (The girls will consume them like fish food - they'll eat as many as you give them until they explode.) Our big news of the week: Dani has successfully taken her first 2-3 steps, as of Saturday January 6. But we have yet to catch it fully on video. However, this video will show you how well she stands up and how excited we are about her accomplishments:


You can also see what happens after a few days of "working hard" on a new skill by watching THIS video, taken this evening at 7:30pm (you'll need to turn up your sound):



G'nite!

Illustrator's Workshop: Night Babies

A lot of people have been asking how I created the Christmas card image, so I made a little animated gif that should clear it all up. 

You can type in this address to see my photoshop prowess as an animated gif:

http://www.alyssawei.com/docs/blogstuff/xmas_pic_01.gif

(ha ha... everything I know, I learned from Dan Z. From whom, by the way, I stole the concept of an Illustrator's Workshop. Thanks!) The mystery of the night babies has now been... REVEALED!

Happy 2007

Wow, 2006 is coming to a close. It was the biggest year ever for Jack and I, and at times it feels like the longest, even when the girls seem to be growing FAST and when most days fly by without anything getting done except baby fun. I'm thankful for the love, support, and laughs that our families and friends have given us this year. I'm thankful for a new home filled with my favorite people, both big and small. Well, ok, none of us are really BIG around here, but you get the picture. Thanks Jack, for the best year of my life. Thanks Shu, Tsong, Jean, Aaron, Clay, and O! Thanks Mom, Dad, Mike, Omi and Opi! Thanks Chrissa, Kris, Kathy, and all our loving friends who made this year easier and more enjoyable. Thanks blogger, for helping me reach out to everyone! ;)

Before the year closes, gotta post a few more pics. We had a great Christmas in Chicago with my parents, brother, grandparents, and friends. Dani and Alex ate some Christmas dinner straight from our plates. (Thanks Edita and August for a fun evening!) And they had fun with Gramma's push toys all weekend. We'll ALL be walking into the New Year, I suspect.

Well, back to bed. Happy 2007 to you all!!!

Hooray! Here's the 2006 Wei Family Xmas Card

Blogger.com's "known issues" page has saved the day. I just needed to allow pop-up windows for blogger.com and now I can post pictures again. Yeeha! Ok, here's our card. Hopefully the real thing will go out by mid-week.



I'd like to thank Jack for standing outside the window to get both girls looking in the same direction, and I'd like to thank the developers of Photoshop for making such a cool program.

Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah, Joyous Kwanzaa, and a Wonderful Winter Solstice to you all!!!

Technical Difficulties - Please Stand By

Hi everyone! Sorry I haven't posted in a long while. You can blame the second season of Veronica Mars on DVD for my lack of "free time". AND you can blame Blogger, for convincing me to update to the new beta version, which has now denied me the ability to post pictures or do a lot of things that help keep this blog running. :( So I'll try to update everyone soon with more cute pics (I was even going to give you all a sneak peek at the 2006 Wei family xmas card, but alas...). In the meantime, here's what's new around here:
- Both Dani and Alex are cruising, and Dani can stand up without holding onto anything, but then she sits right down again.
- Alex got her first teeth! Two on the bottom, just like Dani. It's hard to get them to show them off unless they are crying, but I'll try to snap a pic.
- The girls love to "dance" to music - they rock on their bottoms or bend their knees if they are standing whenever we turn on some tunes!
- We are almost ready for Christmas, which we'll be spending up in Chicago with "Gramma and Grampa". I hope you all are having a lovely season and are having fun. I look forward to seeing a few people in the coming weeks!
Over and out for now. Hope to be back with pics soon.

Happy 70th, Ama!

Today our beloved Ama turns 70 (going on 55). She makes everyone's life a little better, and the girls adore her (as you can see). Thanks for being our Ama, Ama!

Swing Kids

Ok, I STILL haven't taken pictures of the playroom. We've been busy having fun, trying new foods, and stretching our "crusing" legs... Here's a pic of the girls' first ride in a big kid swing. Everything is easier when you do it together, right? ;)

We know what we stand for - Standing!

Here's a really long video of the girls interacting with each other and with their favorite carnival ride - the car seat. They protest when you put them in there for traveling purposes, but the minute they're out, it's all play. Watch how nicely they have learned to sit down after standing - thank goodness for fewer bonked heads! And note Dani's new favorite sound - the pterodactyl.

Our little fishes

One of the girls' new favorite activities is swim class. They've gone to 6 classes now and are very comfy in the water. Both like to kick their legs and splash their hands. Alex loves to float on her back (with help, of course) and Dani loves to keep a death grip on her rubber ducky all through class. They are pisces, so I should have guessed they'd be natural born swimmers. Perhaps their new underwater nursery mural helps too. Even at home, they're swimmin' with the fishes!

Click here to see a poorly tiled panorama of my mural in the nursery. It was fun to remember all the nifty stuff Jack and I saw while scuba diving last year in Bonaire. (and to make up a few fish here and there too...) For the next post, I'll take some pictures of the girls' "forest of flowers" playroom. These little kiddos of ours have provided a great excuse to break out the paintbrushes and dust off my creative brain for a few days. :)

LOL

The girls have a really cute new habit - when left alone (or when they think they are alone) they start to giggle when they see each other. We caught a short snippet on video, which can't do justice to the cuteness of these moments.
Thanks to Dan Z for teaching me how to post this via You Tube! Check it out:

A picture is worth a thousand words...

...So I'll let the pics do the updating! So much time has passed, and I'd just ramble on about how cute the girls are when they laugh at each other or pull to a stand or rub bananas in their hair. So here's the mega-picture update, brought to you from our new home in Carmel, IN:

Let's take it outside

The girls had their first day in the sun since they've been able to sit on their own. The grass was green, the sky was blue, and everyone had fun. It was almost like being back in Tucson!

I made a little animated gif of these two photos at http://www.alyssawei.com/docs/blogstuff/outside_smiles.gif

Sit Baby Sit! Good Baby. (Wah.)

Anyone remember that Ubu thing at the end of Cheers? No, ok I guess it's just me. So...yeah. The girls are sitting without support! It was amazing - one day they needed my help to sit without falling for more than a few seconds, and the next day they decided to balance themselves and could sit on their own for 10 minutes or more. And they automatically started falling in a graceful way, rolling to their stomachs and then happily picking up where they left off. (...for the most part. We still have those times when they fall backward and really thump their heads, and then tears flow. Theirs mostly. But sometimes mine, if they happen to be holding my hair or neck skin at the time of the fall.) They are also beginning to crawl and can make quite a bit of forward progress. Alex is still rolling to get places, for the most part, but when she sees the dog, it's army crawling time. He's so oblivious until the fur starts to tug...

Their new fav toys are their Bumper Jumper and Exersaucer. These are also my new favorite toys, as they give me a little break to do something other than introducing toys or keeping crawling babies from sucking on the dogs icky paws.




I'm going to experiment and try to post a movie to my website and link to it here. Let me know if you can get it to work. Be warned, it's a pretty big file. Give a minute to load.

Click here to see Alex bounce in Chicago.

We all, including Daddy, went for a walk in our new jogging stroller (thanks for the handme down, Wrights!). I'm not sure why they seemed so unhappy to be in there, but it cracks me up.


We're going to Chicago again this weekend, and the girls will meet their Uncle Mike! I can't wait to snap a few shots of him serenading them on guitar... with my new SLR digital camera! Yeeha. Thanks Jack. :) I'm one happy mommy.

One last note, this one goes out to preggers women everywhere... or anyone with teeth for that matter: Though time and energy are slim, always find time to FLOSS. Going for 18 months without a professional teeth cleaning is bad enough, but add to that the late night snacks that pregnancy tends to bring, and the fact that it's hard to remember what day it is when you're sleep deprived, let alone whether you've brushed, and you're well on your way to a mouth full 'o decay. I finally went to the dentist today and while the drill is not in my immediate future, it will be if I don't change my ways. (but not my wei's. I'm really very happy with all my Wei's... tee hee.)

Who Loves Ya? Everyone does!

We went on a 10 day trip to Chicago recently, and then closed on our new house right after that. It's been a whirlwind month for the Wei's, and a really good one. It became even more clear to me in Chicago that the girls and Jack and I are loved by so many people! We're incredibly lucky. Thank you to everyone who took time out of your busy lives to visit with us in Chicago! In celebration of all the people who have touched the girls' lives in their short 6 months on planet Earth, I've made a poster of "20 great hugs". Many many more people have been influential to them, but there's only so much space on a 16 x 20 page! And I don't have photos of everyone who has sent gifts and well wishes. This poster will get printed and put in the playroom, so the girls can see how many people loved them before they were even half a year old. :)


If I were cool like my buddy Dan Z, I would have made outlines of each person in the key rather than just write their names. But I have two babies, so I'd rather get the extra sleep.
Speaking of sleep, the girls have been sleeping very well ever since we moved to Indy, and so I'm now spoiled with over 7 hours sleep each night! It's still not uninterrupted, but from what I've seen of my nephews, we shouldn't expect uninterrupted sleep until the girls go off to college. I'll take what I can get! Their big milestone the last few weeks is that they are both pushing up to their knees when they are doing tummy time. And Dani is actually making forward progress (aka, CRAWLING!) rather than just rolling and doing push ups!! I'm excited and scared at the same time. I'm sure in my next post I'll tell y'all about my new "herding" skills. Maybe Plato will step up and become a baby-herding dog.

Feeding Cereal 101

As I mentioned in the last post, our latest news is that the girls are beginning their journey towards becoming foodies. They've moved onto Oatmeal this week and have taken to it very well. I'd like to commemorate this achievement by looking back at their humble beginnings - the first taste of cereal. I'll let the pictures do the talking by posting what I like to think of as "Cereal for Beginners - a photo montage."


Since these photos were taken, the girls have done considerably better. But they still get it all over their mouths. A few more photos to illustrate why bibs rule the roost at mealtime.