bonnie & jason

Happy Halloween

We took some pictures in front of our sheet. Amanda didn’t want to wear the hood part of Eeyore but did want to wear the Pooh shoes.

Alissa picked out the design for the pumpkin and we put her to work gutting the insides.

I’ve been delinquent…

With the job being so busy and just trying to stay above water with everything else, the blog has been a bit neglected. Here are a few random pictures from the last several weeks to try to make amends.

(Ashley had some chocolate chip pancakes.)

Random things about Ashley and Amanda

Just before the twins were born, I had written a blog post title, “25 random things about Alissa.” Now that the twins themselves have been around for more than a little while, Bonnie thought I should repeat the exercise for them. The dynamic is a bit different now since a lot of my observations are about their relationships with each other and their sister as opposed to Alissa who had the benefit of being the only child. So, as it goes with most second (and third) children, Ashley and Amanda are going to get the short end of the stick and will have to share a post with not only each other, but also with Alissa to some extent. Without further ado, here is the list.

1-10. It would be difficult to pick two girls who are more different from each other. From physical characteristics to personalities, there is so little that they have in common. I’m not sure if I feel this way because it’s easier to see differences sometimes than similarities, but here’s just a short list to demonstrate my point.
1. Amanda likes to spin to the left when she dances. Ashley, of course, spins to the right.
2. Ashley has a mullet with lots of hair in the back and not as much in the front. Amanda has super long bangs that go down past her nose but her hair barely covers the back of her neck.
3. Amanda likes veggies isn’t as big a fan of meats. Ashley is the other way around.
4. Ashley has huge eyes (for a Chinese girl) and Amanda has relatively small eyes.
5. Amanda has skinny little legs and Ashley has chunky monkey legs.
6. Amanda seems to like things in order and will make an effort to clean up and organize. Ashley has zero interest in anything resembling cleaning up.
7. Ashley is a mommy’s girl. Amanda is a daddy’s girl.
8. Ashley took just fine to breastfeeding. Amanda would only take a bottle. (Not sure if this is a cause or an effect of #7)
9. Ashley likes to shove her food in her mouth by the fistful. Amanda is more dainty about putting bite size pieces in her mouth with her thumb and forefinger.
10. Ashley is a morning person. Amanda is most certainly not a morning person.

11. Amanda has fine, brown hair. For now. My mom says that her hair was quite brown as a small child so I guess this comes from her.
12. Amanda is very nurturing. She likes to wrap up her animals in a blanket and shush and rock them to sleep.
13. Ashley has this strange thing where she likes to put fuzzy stuff under her nose. We first noticed it with her elephant. She used to hold it up with the trunk under her own nose. And then it was the elephant’s tail. Then we started noticing she would find dust bunnies and put them between under her nose behind her pacifier. It’s very strange. And kinda yucky. Hopefully she outgrows it soon.
14. Ashley get frustrated fairly easily. If she can’t figure out a toy in the first few seconds, she throws it away and cries.
15. Ashley likes to sing. I think. She kinda hums the melody to various songs that she’s heard us sing.
16. Amanda may be an engineer. She’s very curious and analytical. A few months ago, she examined the cooktop of the play kitchen very closely until she figure out what was triggering the boiling water noise that started whenever a certain pot was placed over the burner.
17. Amanda also pays close attention to what’s going around her and likes to emulate. She goes “shopping” with her stroller and finds a bag to hook on the handle just like we do when we go out.
18. Amanda seems to get bloody noses fairly easily. Not sure if it’s from having delicate arteries in her nose because she had a feeding tube in there for several weeks or if she just falls down a lot.
19. Ashley likes to watch TV. More so than Amanda anyway.
20. Ashley and Amanda both like bath time. But if you mention the word poop, they start frantically looking around for a floater and want to come out immediately.
21. Ashley is pretty easy going. Will go with the flow.
22. Amanda likes to stick to a routine.
23. Until recently, Ashley would wake up in the middle of the night and end up sleeping in our bed.
24. Amanda has had a number of sleep items. First it was a little yellow duck. Then a small blanket with a satin trim. The latest is a monkey. Not the same as Alissa’s monkey though.
25. Ashley has only had her elephant as her sleep item.

And there you have it.

Amanda’s other twin?

Kathy saw this picture randomly on the internet somewhere and thought it looked a lot like Amanda. What do you think?

They have a lot of similar features. Amanda’s eyes aren’t quite as big, but she has kinda the same fine, brown hair and seems to share a lot of facial features.

Blast from the past – video from our wedding reception

I’ve been trying to do some cleaning of all the electronic data we have across multiple external and internal hard drives recently and rediscovered the video that we showed during our wedding reception. For those of you who were at the wedding (and weren’t totally wasted) you might remember bits and pieces. The most interesting thing to me is to look at the baby pictures of us and compare them to Ashley, Amanda, and Alissa. Definitely some similarities in certain pictures. It’s kind of a long video, but hopefully you’ll enjoy it. At the very least, there will be several pictures that you can make fun of us about. I certainly have some doozies in there.

2005 07 30 video showed at our wedding from Jason Wang on Vimeo.