The Kwongs, or All About Amelia and Gabriel Too: March 2008

bessie, again

i know that there's been an awful lot of bess on the blog recently, but bess's mom just sent me a bunch of gorgeous photos that she took of the two girls the weekend before we left. here are a few of my favorites:

winter wonderland

we thought we left new york for warmer climes, but apparently not. the weather here in washington has been decidedly NOT spring-like. great big snowflakes came down from the sky last night, and we woke up this morning to some (though not much) snow on the ground. amelia had a blast stomping around in the snow, making snowballs, throwing snowballs--the types of winter activities that we somehow never got around to doing in new york. check out the snowballs getting progressively bigger:

the longest goodbye

we are homeless now. we've cleared out of new york, and we're just waiting for our stuff to get driven across the country before we move in. i've got a backlog of photos, though, from our final weeks in new york, and after receiving numerous complaints, i realize it's time to finally post.

last week we had a party for eve, amelia's nanny, her nanny friends and their charges. having eight kids ranging from 7 months to 6 years old in a small new york apartment is quite a challenge. though nothing is really more challenging than trying to get them all to look at the camera.

this is amelia and one of her two best friends, kate. kate is little older than amelia, and thus, receives deferential treatment from our little bossy bear.

this here is bess, her other best friend, who is a couple months younger, and quite a bit smaller. as a result, she gets a whole lot of "No, Bessie, no!!!" from amelia. i wonder for how long she'll remember them. i guess i'll just keep showing her pictures of them, and hope for the best.

we also had a lovely easter brunch at clio's, but no photodocumentation sadly, other than what is posted on clio's blog (clioconfidential.blogspot.com). amelia has been surprisingly unfazed by the big changes--despite our concerns, she was totally blase when the movers cleared out the apartment. she walked around the boxes saying, "no more books, no more books." but not like she was upset, more like she was just commenting on fact that the books were gone.

final portrait in front of our old new york apartment:

final hours at the airport with poppa:

Countdown: 7 days to go

it's hard to believe that after nearly twelve years here, we're going to pack it up and go. but we are. and it's a week from today that the packers will load up the truck with all our stuff. we are in a bit of denial about it all, as anyone who has seen our apartment in the last week can attest--we have done very little, if not nothing, to prepare for this move. but i'm assured that the movers/packers will take care of it all. so instead, we're concentrating on seeing what people we can, which is far fewer than we wish we could, and eating things will miss and things we've always wanted to have.

for example, this last weekend we had the smith/koises over for brunch. it wasn't a completely out of control situation here with three girls under the age of 3 running/crawling around. but i just thought this photo was hilarious--check out lyra licking her sister in the background, with amelia diving off the couch to get away from the craziness:

here's amelia at my place of work. she kept walking around saying, momma work? momma work? i think she was astounded to actually be at the place that momma claims to be going every weekday morning.

and here we are at the infamous pig picking of 08. daisy may's bbq serves half a suckling pig, supposedly serves 6, really serves closer to 12. if you are of the queasy sort, don't look so closely at the bottom half of the photo--that really is half a pig, head, tail and everything in between.

we're back!

i know, i know, it's been a really long time, but first there was amelia's ear infection, and of course, there's the all-consuming sale of the home, moving cross-country business. that said, we did have a lovely visit from nancy yi-yi last week. amelia glared at her suspiciously when she first walked in, but after a couple minutes, starting yelling "yi-yi, yi-yi!!!" here are pics from nancy's visit:

then this weekend we were house-hunting in sf. (and yes, we were successful!) we hit the ferry terminal on the first day--here's amelia enjoying a yummy pastry from frog hollow farms.