bonnie & jason

Compare and contrast Amanda and Ashley

As far as twins go, Amanda and Ashley are really very different. Not only do they look very different, but their personalities and preferences are very different as well.

First, in the looks department, Ashley is more substantial in almost every way. More hair, she’s longer and heavier, has bigger cheeks, fuller lips, chunkier thighs, etc. Amanda is catching up as her leg folds are becoming quite deep in their own right. But even so, there’s no denying that they look very different. I think in general, Amanda has more features from my side of the family whereas Ashley has more features from Bonnie’s side of the family.

As for personality and preferences, I don’t even know where to begin. It seems like there’s nothing they can agree on here. Ashley really likes to breast feed. Amanda never really breast fed and is just ok with bottle feeding. You would think that would translate to solid food as well, but it turns out that Ashley doesn’t really like solids whereas Amanda sits waiting with her mouth open. Ashley likes to crawl, but Amanda likes to roll.

(Here’s some video of Ashley sort of breast stroking her way toward some yummy Cheezits.)

2009 09 29 Ashley crawling from Jason Wang on Vimeo.

Ashley likes to sleep on her stomach, Amanda likes to sleep on her back. Ashley hates her high chair, Amanda loves her high chair.

When you put something over Amanda’s face, she immediately pulls it down. Ashley waits for you to pull it off.

They are both sort of adequate at sitting up but still need help maintaining. Here’s a short clip of what they’re capable of:

And an even shorter clip of what happens when they weeble, wobble a bit:

Hmm, what else… Amanda likes silicone pacifiers, Ashley likes latex ones. Amanda likes to pick things up with her hands and seems to have more dexterity at the moment. Amanda used to be more vocal experimenting with sounds but now they’ve kinda swapped. Amanda sleeps through the night consistently, Ashley gets away with an extra full feeding most nights.

You get the point. It will be interesting to see how things change as they get older. As it is, it may be hard to tell they’re sisters much less twins!

Blast from the past

I was looking at pictures of Alissa when she was about the same age as the twins are now. I have to say, these kinds of retrospective moments make keeping diligent about the blog totally worth it. (See http://www.bonnieandjason.com/2007/07/ if you’re curious.) Anyway, just wanted to share one of my favorite images from then:

Jackie’s Red Egg & Ginger party

Yes, I know, you’re tired of hearing about all these kid parties. Sorry, it’s just the stage of life we’re in at the moment. First it was pool parties and ski trips. Then it was bachelor parties and weddings. And now it’s baby parties. I think we’re beyond the peak of these things at this point, but still far from the end of them given baby showers and red egg & ginger parties turn into birthday parties, graduations, and so on.

Anyway, this past weekend we went to Jacqueline’s party. I hate to admit that I’m less diligent about taking pictures these days but it’s the truth. I did manage to snap a few though.
She totally looks like Kathy:

Ryan got his fill of junk food just like Alissa:

Whom he wasn’t interested in taking a picture with:

Even with the mom’s:

And now with Kathy, Aidan, and Jackie in the mix:

Baby party #umpteen

Edward and Nancy’s red egg and ginger party last weekend = another opportunity to put the girls in dresses.

Also, here’s a random video of Ashley:

Aidan’s pizza party

Aidan had a Thomas the Train bday party today:

Jacqueline is cuter and cuter every time we see her:

The girls were pretty well behaved:

Even after we got home:

Ruh roh…

I dropped our camcorder a couple days ago. I had bought it before Alissa was born to capture her in the glory of HD. It still plays video back ok, but when I try to record new stuff, I get this “effect.”

*sigh* I considered getting a new high end point and shoot camera but they’re expensive and frankly, do everything well, but nothing great. And since I’m good about carrying my SLR around, I wasn’t willing to compromise on the photo side of things. I also thought about getting a new SLR with video capability, but the handling and autofocus on those things is not so good. The image quality and ability to use my SLR lenses is really appealing, but given my subjects are uncooperative at best, that path got shut down. There’s also the possibility I could repair my current camcorder but my initial research showed that option to be good money chasing after bad, especially since the thing isn’t worth much money these days anyway. So I finally made the decision to just buy a new camcorder. I didn’t go super high end, but I didn’t go cheap either. So what did I get? You’ll just have to wait and see… I’ll put up a little first impressions post once it arrives and I get to play with it a bit.

A few random clips

Amanda is finally ok with being on her stomach and holding her head up for extended periods. Ashley, meanwhile, is almost ready to crawl. She’s able to hold her self in a “pushup” position and can sort of army crawl a little bit.

Trouble comes in threes:

Ashley looks really small in this picture:

Roly Poly:

First day of pre-school done!

Amanda wants to catch the balls:

Grandma and the kiddies:

New beds and a new farmer’s market

Alissa has been sleeping in her big girl bed the last few days. She actually made the transition with no fuss at all. As a matter of fact, she was quite excited to sleep in it. Funny thing was that she decided she wanted a new stuffed animal to go with her new bed. So Monkey has been cast aside in favor of Blueberry. Unfortunately, Blueberry has a rattle inside which is kinda annoying at 6:00 am when Alissa makes her own way out of her bed and into ours. Oh well… maybe we’ll be able to convince her to “upgrade.”

Ashley and Amanda will eventually end up in the cribs.

We also checked out farmer’s market #3 today. (#1 is the one off I-280 at Alemany and #2 is the one behind Target at Serramonte.) This one is behind Macy’s at Stonestown Mall and is probably our favorite due to the proximity and the variety of stuff. Alemany is still the king, but it’s harder to get to and too hard to park. In any case, we were happy with a lot of the food vendors at this new one. We tried some hard cheeses and ended up buying their vanilla bean cream cheese. I also tried some goat cheese from Healdsburg which was tasty but Bonnie wasn’t a big fan. There was also an olive guy who had some interesting stuff. I ended up with a small container of olives stuffed with cream cheese marinated in balsamic vinegar and fig reduction. Super tasty! We got Alissa kettle corn as we always do (she calls it copcorn) which she ate while walking around listening to the guitarist that was there. He even played her the rubber ducky song. And lastly, I ended up with a $1 Samosa (I thought it was fresh… it wasn’t, but for $1, can’t go wrong) while Bonnie got a really tasty Belgian waffle. Anyway, we were there for less than an hour, bought no produce, and yet somehow ended up spending nearly $20.

Making up for lost video time… and paying the price

I’ve been ok about taking pictures of the girls although admittedly, I have not been as prolific as when we only had one rug rat running around. The last few weeks, I’ve also made a concerted effort to take more HD video since Amanda and Ashley change so quickly and Alissa is in a fun stage of toddlerhood. So here’s a video from the last month that captures a few short clips of the kiddies. The first half goes fairly quickly. Be forewarned, the second half is mostly a conversation with Alissa about school and some of her random meanderings. Also, the last few seconds is some video I took after I dropped the friggin’ camcorder on the floor. I think it’s toast. Grr…

2009 08 01 – 2009 09 05 from Jason Wang on Vimeo.

What a week!

It’s been quite a week in the Wang household. First, Alissa started preschool:

You can see her all ready to go with her lunch box and everything. She’s going three days a week and so far so good. She had a few small issues, but for the most part, the teachers said she was doing fine… and talks a lot… and wants to help with ev.er.y.thing. I think Bonnie was probably the most effected by it. Her little girl is growing up! I have to admit that I did have some separation anxiety when I dropped her off each of the three days. But I stayed disciplined and didn’t even call to see how she was doing. (Instead, I relied on Bonnie’s phone calls and subsequent reports.)

In other Alissa news, she finally made some good progress with potty training. She had a couple accidents here and there, but nine times out of ten, she’s able to tell us that she needs to go potty and makes a successful, “deposit.”

With all the success, her crayon box has become quite full. (She gets a new crayon and an M&M with every successful attempt.) The cheapo plastic box that she uses to hoard all these crayons has pretty much been defective since day one so I used some scrap wood from my other projects and a hinge I stole from a binder to make her a nice wooden box. I still need to get a latch for the front, but it’s pretty much done.

It’s mostly 1×3 solid birch and 1/4″ birch plywood. I put a 1/4″ dado on the bottom to accept the bottom panel and made the lid with some 1×2 that I ripped to about 3/4″x3/4″ with a rabbet to accept the top panel. It’s just glued together since I’m lazy and didn’t want to fill in nail holes. Plus, I figure it’s only going to hold crayons so the not insignificant strength of wood glue should be plenty strong enough for this little box. Finally, I put a 1/4″ radius on most of the edges so if/when Alissa drops it, there’s less chance of her damaging our hardwood floors. Oh, and the finish is a couple coats of Minwax cherry stain with polyurethane. Fun little project. Learned a lot. Specifically that my woodworking skills still leave a lot to be desired.