bonnie & jason

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:

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.

Twin pin

Ashley and Amanda spend a lot of time together. And now that they’re able to roll over, they’re often in each other’s space, on purpose or not. I’m sure the words, “stop fighting” will be uttered from my lips more than I care to know, but I didn’t think it would start this soon!

Ashley trying to eat her way free:

Amanda, already practicing the eye gouge:

Alissa the photographer/videographer

Alissa is really talking a lot these days. I don’t have a frame of reference to know where she lies in the continuum of 2 and half year old little girls, but it seems like she’s non-stop some times. Anyway, here’s some video that she inadvertently took as a random sample of her verbosity:

Pretty in pink + Poor polka dots + Purple playing

Pretty in pink:

Alissa all dressed up for a party with a bunch of family at the Wong’s house in Fremont.

Poor polka dots:

Ashley’s first foray into “solids.” It’s mostly milk, but there’s some oatmeal in there.

Purple playing:

Amanda gets tickled.

Flowers or appliances?

Apparently, the traditional and contemporary fourth anniversary gifts are flowers and appliances respectively. I understand flowers. Who doesn’t like flowers? But appliances? Isn’t that kind of like giving your wife a vacuum cleaner for her birthday? So instead, I’m being uber-contemporary and giving my wife an HD-video for our anniversary. Actually, Bonnie did most of the work for the video by selecting the images. I just did the iMovie part of it and picked the sound track. So to celebrate, we’re actually just planning on going to dinner and a movie (by ourselves). Anyway, enjoy the movie. (The song is “Just You and Me” by Zee Avi.)

2009 07 30 anniversary video from Jason Wang on Vimeo.

Lots of estrogen around these parts…

I’m sure it’s just going to get worse from here on out, but I think I’m already compensating for having to live with four girls. I redid the closet in the bedroom this weekend. Also, I’m planning another small shelf project in order to prove my carpentry skills to Bonnie so she’ll let me tackle a bigger project in the breakfast nook. And of course, I’m spending lots of money on tools and spending lots of time at Home Depot. (Insert Tim the Tool Man Taylor grunt here.)

Here are some recent pictures and videos of those of the fairer sex.

Watching Wimbledon:

Alissa the big sister:

Tickling Amanda:

Amanda and Ashley both looking chubby:

Trip back east

Our annual pilgrimage back east almost didn’t happen this year. First, we weren’t sure we wanted to schlep everyone cross country to begin with. Second, with Amanda being susceptible to viruses, and the whole swine flu thing, traveling seemed a bit risky. And finally, after we had made arrangements to go after all, Alissa ended up with a fever the night before we were scheduled to leave. In the end, we decided that the trip wasn’t going to get any easier, Amanda would be fine and they do have doctors in New Jersey anyway, and Alissa’s fever broke before we had to leave for the airport so off we went.

All in all, it was a great trip. For the first half of the trip, the plan was to stay with Vin, Denise, Henry, and Gunther. While we were there, Jenny visited with her daughter Maddie. Last time we were in town, Jenny was just a few days short of giving birth, Denise was pregnant with Henry, and we just had Alissa. So lunch was a pretty straight forward affair with all the adults and just one baby. How things have changed! Here’s a pic with the babies and most of the adults.

And here’s me with all the babies:

And Henry having his way with Ashley:

Good times.

Part two of the trip was to attend Mary’s wedding. We hadn’t seen Mary in a while and were excited to witness her happy day and to meet her now husband. This is the first trip where I didn’t bring my big camera gear but here are a few pics I took with our point and shoot:

From the wedding, we were supposed to go stay with my cousin Anna but Aidan was just getting over the flu and we didn’t want to risk the kids getting sick so we ended up staying with Geoff and Asha that night. They were very gracious hosts especially considering the last minute situation and the fact that it’s no small feat to accommodate all five of us. Kiran and Alissa got along fine even though he’s a little bit older.

The next day, we went to the Pepsi headquarter’s sculpture garden.

Then it was back to the Chao residence for the remainder of our stay (after a short visit with my cousin… poor Aidan was sequestered 100 feet away). Henry was happy to see us again. More specifically, he was happy to see Ashley and her feet.

That Henry is a character:

So all in all, even though it was a very demanding trip both physically and emotionally, it was well worth it to spend time with the friends and family we don’t get to see very often. Will we do it again next year. Hmm… we’ll see. I should have taken a picture of us trying to wrangle the two infant seats, two strollers, one car seat, three pieces of luggage, and of course, the three kids. Thankfully, we got help from random strangers on both the flight out and the flight back. On the flight out, the person sitting next to Bonnie was a mom to three kids, two of whom were twins. So she was both sympathetic and also took a stint holding Amanda for a while. On the way back, a nice man helped us with our luggage out to baggage claim. He was also a parent of twins. Anyway, like I said, we’ll see.

Spring 2009 video

Possibly the most boring video ever. Random clips over the last couple months of Amanda in her pack-n-play, Alissa playing in the backyard, bath time for the twins, and Alissa’s first try with chopsticks.

2009 05 02 from Jason Wang on Vimeo

Amanda and Ashley’s first video

We’re home from the hospital so I took a few minutes to throw together a quick video of the last few days (movie clips are from the Canon 5D mark 2 with a canon 24-105mm 4.0 IS lens). Director of music credits go to Dennis again. (First one is from blip.tv, second is from Vimeo… same video, I’m just experimenting with competing services. I think I like the blip.tv one better. It lets me embed as a quicktime video and I think the playback is higher quality. Let me know if you see things differently.) EDIT: removed quicktime version… it was making the blog load slowly.