you probably know that i like to make music.  i love playing any kind of musical instrument and i like to sing, too.  but did you know that i write my own songs?

this is my latest.  it’s called “from the day, from the night”.

here is the clean version.

and here is the original unrated version. watch responsibly.

which version do you like better?

one of the first things that we bought for our new house was a new tv. it’s not humongous, but it’s almost as big as our projection screen. it doesn’t make sense to have a projection screen that’s only a little bit bigger than the tv, so naturally, daddy wanted to get a bigger screen, too. i guess he never thought about just projecting movies onto our neighbor’s house. but apparently, that’s how they do in our new ‘hood.

tonight was movie night. i was looking forward to it all day, and i kept saying “i am so very excited about the show.”  i think daddy was excited too.  he even bought special kiddie-sized canvas folding chairs for me and sienna.

“ponyo” was projected onto the side of a big white house, and folding chairs were set up in the middle of the street. there were tables covered with pizza, popcorn, lemonade, adult beverages, and lots of other snacks. someone even brought out a fire pit so we could make our own s’mores! now i know why mommy and auntie mimi like to roast marshmallows on everything. they are so fun to roast and so yummy to eat!  i am hooked.

sienna started to get tired at around 9:30pm, so daddy took her home. i stayed until the end of the movie because i am a big boy. my eyes were glued to the screen through most of the movie, but i have no idea what it was about. it doesn’t matter. i love movie night and i can’t wait ’til the next one! 🙂

today, mommy and sienna went to a party for my cousin, brodie.  he hasn’t been born yet.  mommy seems to go to lots of parties for babies who aren’t born yet.  they’re called baby showers.  mommy said that at baby showers, there are no boys allowed.  that’s why she brought sienna and not me.  i don’t know what she was talking about though, because i’ve been to baby showers before.  there was logan’s, edison’s, kaylen’s… that’s all i can think of right now.  plus, i gave baby brodie all of my old clothes, so don’t you think that i earned the right to go to his party?

anyway, sienna and mommy went to the party, and they had fun eating food and playing games.  sienna had her first sip of wine.  she didn’t like it.  i am kind of surprised, because she likes lots of things that normal kids do not like (like coffee, hot sauce, and sucking on lemons).  they had a good time talking with new friends and hanging out with our aunties.  in the photo, that’s auntie jelin on the left (gung-gung’s cousin) and auntie devin in the middle (mommy’s cousin).  oh, and that’s baby brodie on the bottom. 😉  i can’t wait to meet him!

it was starting to feel like we were never going to move to our new house, but we finally did it!  thank you, auntie mimi, for helping us pack.   and thank you, uncle henry, for bringing dinner over on move day.  what a nice surprise!

bye bye old house, hello new house!  we are now officially residents of contra costa county.

we still have a ton of stuff to sort through at our old house, but we have all of our essentials to live in our new house.  that means beds, TVs, and laptops.  oh, and clothes.

there are so many things that we love about our new house and our new neighborhood (including the lower sales tax rate!), but here are the top 10 things we will miss the  most about living in our old house:

10)  great asian food nearby (especially our recently-discovered favorite cambodian restaurant)

9)  close proximity to daddy’s office

8)  close proximity to people and things we love (grandma and grandpa, friends, volleyball, sharks games)

7)  our big kitchen with more than enough storage and counter space for all of our bazillion appliances (pie maker, stand mixer, ice cream maker, crock pot, pasta maker, panini grill pan, electric bbq grills, etc.)

that pretty much covers it.  but the number one thing that we will miss, by far, is…

1)  miss denise, our nanny

miss denise is like part of our family, and mommy gets sad whenever she thinks about not having her around any more.  but this is definitely not goodbye.  i know we will see her again soon and we will definitely keep in touch. 🙂

okay, gotta go now.  time to start unpacking!

(we were so busy packing and moving, that i forgot to post this last thursday!)

daddy’s work had another “kids @ work” day today.  i was looking forward to the cotton candy and games, just like last year.  but this time, when went got daddy’s office, i actually had to do work.  daddy got the time wrong, so we arrived an hour before all of the kid activities began.  so i got right to work, whiteboarding the architecture for his next project.  what do you think?

i got pretty restless during that hour (who can sit still and work for a whole hour?) but once the festivities began, i had a blast.  daddy and i ate hamburgers, spaghetti, and popcorn, i bounced around in the jumpy house, i won prizes playing carnival games, and i got lots of free schwag — just for being a kid.  i even got my own kyden badge with my picture on it!  pretty awesome.

after work, daddy and i went straight to the gym for my gym class.  mommy and sienna were planning to meet us there.  well, i was so exhausted from my long day at work that i passed out in the car and refused to wake up for class.  i don’t know how mommy and daddy can stay up so late after a whole day of work.

i can’t wait for next year’s “kids @ work” day.  mommy suggested that daddy bring both me and sienna next time.  he doesn’t think that’s a good idea.  but who thinks that daddy will still be working at ebay this time next year, anyway?  that would be a record for him!

mommy doesn’t use recipes to cook, and she rarely makes fancy dishes that have names.  (coq au vin?  what’s that?)  mommy’s super power is her ability to make complete, healthy meals out of the random things that we have in our fridge.  but since we are moving soon, we intentionally haven’t bought any food.  this is our current fridge inventory:

• 5 eggs
• 3 shriveled mushrooms
• 1 stalk of lemongrass
• 1 green onion
• 1 english cucumber
• 2 sad-looking strawberries
• 1 piece of gluten-free bread
• 1/4 jar of almond butter
• a variety of sauces and condiments

keep in mind that sienna is allergic to egg.  the bread and almond butter will be her morning snack tomorrow.  the mushrooms and strawberries don’t look fit for human consumption.  mommy couldn’t throw together a meal for us — she was stumped.  so for dinner tonight, we ordered takeout from our recently-discovered favorite cambodian restaurant.

one of the dishes we ordered was lemongrass chicken.  it had peanuts in it.  mommy was going to let sienna try some just to see if she really is allergic to peanuts.  (she tested off-the-charts positive, but she’s never actually eaten a peanut before.)  but instead, mommy rubbed a tiny piece of peanut on sienna’s forearm.  within a minute, she had broken out in hives and started scratching.  the scratching caused the hives to spread across her entire arm, and she must have touched her face because she had hives all around her mouth too.

well, i guess that confirms it.  sienna really is allergic to peanuts.  i hope her epi pen doesn’t get lost in the move to our new house.

things she likes:

• talking.  she talks so much.  she knows a lot of words and often speaks in complete sentences.  and she’s not just babbling — she uses the words/phrases in correct context.  like today, she said “mommy, lie down” (as she pushed mommy’s head to the ground).
• picking out her own clothes.  she usually asks for “flower”, so it’s a good thing that she has a lot of shirts with flowers on them.  if she sees her bunny (“bunny”) or minnie mouse (“mimi”) shirts, she might ask for those instead.
• hair accessories.  before going out in public, sienna always says “bow” or “flower” so that mommy will put one in her hair.
• spicy foods.  she wants to put hot sauce on everything.
• trainspotting.  i think she might like trains as much as i do!  whenever she sees one, she yells out “train!”  sometimes she incorrectly identifies buses as trains, too.
• giving eskimo kisses.  one time, sienna put her face right up to mommy’s, so mommy gave her a kiss.  but sienna didn’t pull away.  she leaned in closer and slowly moved her head side to side.  it looked like she was trying to make out with mommy, but she was just trying to give her an eskimo kiss.
• skating and bike riding!  yay!  i wonder when she’ll be big enough to try out my run bike!
• flouride.  we used to take flouride supplements in liquid drop form.  now, we take chewable tablets.  we love them.  sienna gets so excited when we are getting ready for bed because she knows they are coming.  “fouride!  fouride!”

things she doesn’t like:

• soy milk.  when we visited our new house over the weekend, mommy brought a carton of soy milk to refill our drink cups.  sienna didn’t like it.  she actually took one sip, made a face, and said “yucky”.
• pooping in the potty. she’s still doing great peeing in the potty, and when she wakes up in the morning, her pull-up is usually dry.  but she still doesn’t like to poop in the potty.
• wearing socks on both feet.  sienna starts out the day with two socks, but she almost always ends up wearing just one.  she leaves the other one laying around in random places (in between couch cushions, under my train table, in mommy and daddy’s room), only to be discovered days or weeks later.  this is why she has so many single socks with no mate.

we are moving to our new house next week. i know you don’t believe me, but mommy already scheduled our u-verse transfer. u-verse is phone, internet, and tv — you know that we can’t live without all of that. so yup, it’s really happening. the moving guys are coming on friday.

today, mommy and daddy started packing some of our stuff into boxes.  since they were busy packing, lunch was a bit later than usual.  so  i went and got some grapes from the fridge, washed the grapes, set out some bowls on the table, divided the grapes between the two bowls, got our drinks from the fridge, then called sienna over for a snack.  sienna sat down next to me, and i showed her how to line up grapes in the shape of letters.  sienna wasn’t interested in making J’s — she just wanted to eat the grapes.

while i was getting our snack ready, i noticed mommy staring at me.  i asked her “what?”.  she told me that she is so proud of me for being such a good big brother.  i said, very matter-of-factly, “i know.  i am a big boy.”

after lunch, sienna and i helped with the packing by looking through the boxes and rediscovering toys that we haven’t played with in a long time. for every two boxes that got packed, sienna and i unpacked one. i guess that wasn’t mommy and daddy’s idea of “helping”. so to speed up the progress a bit, daddy let us watch old videos of ourselves on youtube. we love doing that.

one of the videos that we watched was the one of me skating.  i guess sienna thought it looked fun because she wanted to try skating this evening.  even though my skates are adjustable, they are way too big for her even in their smallest setting.  mommy let her try anyway.

so i went out on my run bike while sienna took a spin on my over-sized skates.  she was a little slow — you can hear me in the video telling her “let’s go go go”.  but mommy reminded me that when you are learning something, you have to take it slow, just like rintoo when he was learning to skate in the “roller rintoo” episode of ni hao, kai-lan.  sienna did a great job for her first time out.  she even managed to avoid squishing the snail that was in her path. 🙂

remember how i wouldn’t say “dada” for the longest time?  when i finally started saying it, dada made a video.  i was 20 months old.

now that sienna is about the same age that i was then, we thought it would be fun to make a similar video of her.  she has been saying “dada” for a really long time, and she says lots of other words, too.  she even makes short 2-3 word sentences likes “scone ready!” and “(apri)cot p(l)ease, mommy.” and “kai-lan funny.”  she talks a lot. i hear that’s just how girls are.

but she won’t say my name.  she can, but she won’t.  she refuses.  she calls me “kai-kai” even though i keep telling her that i don’t like it.  i guess this is payback for all those months that i wouldn’t say “dada”.

last summer, sienna went to gym classes at the little gym near my swim class.  but when fall rolled around, i stopped swimming, so sienna stopped gymming.  it was too far to go just for a gym class, and the time didn’t really work for her anyway.  at least, that’s what mommy and daddy said.  i think the real reason why she stopped going is because it was a sunday class, and in the fall, sundays are football days in our house. 😛

sienna never signed up for classes at my little gym because there weren’t any weekday evening classes and the weekend classes didn’t fit our schedule.  but now that she’s older, there are classes for her.  sienna is now a beast!  tonight was her first beast class.  (remember my first beast class?)

sienna hasn’t had the benefit of many months of continuous classes, like i did, but she’s having fun.  she loves the parachute and balls, and she especially loves the bubbles.  she has fun exploring the gym apparatuses, too.  sienna likes walking between and hanging from the parallel bars, but she doesn’t like monkey walking on them.  she likes the balance beam, but hasn’t made it all the way across yet.  she tries to do a forward roll down the “cheese”, but ends up army-crawling all the way down.  sienna loves gym class.  i’m sure it helps that she has a crush on her gym teacher.

while sienna was in gym class (with mommy) tonight, daddy wanted to go grocery shopping and wanted to take me with him.  i refused.  i wanted to stay and support my sister, just like she does for me every week.  i watched closely through the window throughout the entire class, and i clapped for her when she tried new skills.  good job sienna!