The mornings are the best time of the day in the Jee home.  Mimi and Isabella are fresh and happy from a good nights sleep.

They are two little silly gooses.

This year Mimi is in pre-school for three full days and two half days.  When she has a full day she eats her packed lunch at school with her classmates.  My mom raised Mimi pretty much the first two years of her life because I worked full time.  Mimi acts like my mom because they spent so much time together.  For example, my mom doesn’t like cucumber seeds and would cut them out everytime they would eat them together.  I think this is a silly habit and wanted to break it so one day I packed cucumbers with seeds in Mimi’s lunch so she could at least taste the seeds and realize they were fine to eat.  Each day, the teachers send back the lunch box with everything the child doesn’t eat so the parents can see.  This is how Mimi’s lunch box came back that day.

And this is how I have been packing the cucumbers ever since.

We love when Best Friend Avery and Auntie Anne come to visit.  Here, Avery and Mimi are holding their babies.  Can you tell which one is real?

Cruising the yard in the Mercedes.  Their Daddy’s better watch out.  They want a real one when they grow up.

Avery and Auntie Anne having so much fun on the jungle gym.

This should be the next Patagonia catalog cover.  Mimi loves her Best Friend Avery.

This summer Mimi took her first swimming lesson at a local indoor pool.  The lessons were twice a week for 5 weeks, 30 minutes, a total of 10 lessons.  As a parent, what can you expect from a 3 year old after 10 swimming lessons?  Will she be able to float?  Maybe even actually swim?  Well…neither, and after crying throughout her first five lessons, I was happy just to make it through a lesson tear-free.

This is Mimi’s report card from her swimming lesson.  She’s no Michael Phelps but she loves to play in the water and most importantly is comfortable in it. I think we might need cousin Cheryl to give her swimming lessons next time to help refine her skills.

A. Mimi loved jumping into the water.  There was something about splashing the instructor that was so fun.

B. Tickle-T-Push…no idea what this is but she was good at it.

C. She had good arm strokes.

D. Her kicking was good. Good arms and good kicking is a good start to swimming.

E. Comments text: Olivia has improved a lot (me: thank God).  She is a lot more comfortable in the water now which is very important.  She has an understanding of all the strokes.  Practice will allow her to swim on her own (me: how much practice?).

Isabella was born with jaundice, a yellow discoloration of the skin and eyes.  Very common in Asian babies, Olivia had it, so I was not worried.  The hardest part was leaving without her from the hospital because she had to stay an extra day for observation.  The jaundice is treated with a couple formula bottles during the day (breast milk slows down the liver getting rid of the bilirubin, yellow-colored pigment of red blood cells causing jaundice), ultraviolet light from the sun, and time.  It usually takes a few weeks for the jaundice to go away.

A bilirubin blood test is taken to get the level of jaundice.  Newborns get their blood taken from their heel.  As a mom, this is painful to watch, especially when they would take blood every six hours in the hospital.

Isabella loved the sun.  It just put her to sleep.  And of course because she can’t wear sun block, she only sun tanned before 10am or after 4pm for no more then 15 minutes.

We had a small scare when Isabella was three weeks old.  Her skin and eyes were getting more yellow and her bilibrubin count was increasing.  At her age, if the count continued to increase, there most likely was something wrong with her liver.  We doubled up on the formula bottles and increased the number of sun tanning sessions during the day.  Thank God her bilirubin started to decrease.  I’ve had many stressful days at school and work when there were big deadlines or presentations.  But nothing compares to the stress and worry you have when there is a possibility of something wrong with your child.

Olivia (Mimi) loves to (pretend) cook.  She has spent countless hours watching my mom and YouTube videos learning and perfecting cooking skills and terminology.  She practices her recipes and when they are ready, she will show you how to cook them.  When Mimi is outside, she cooks in her outdoor kitchen and uses anything in the yard and trees as ingredients.  Today she is showing me how to make one of her soup specialties.

Mimi adds a dollop of mud.  She learned the word “dollop” from how-to YouTube baking videos and loves to say the word.

Mimi is carefully adding the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients.  Look at that concentration.

A couple of teaspoons of pepper.

Now some commentary on serving the soup in this little bowl.

Finally finished…Grey (really more like grey-brown) soup.  Yes, Grey Soup really is the name.

In most households in America egg dying is an activity done once a year around Easter.  In our household egg dying and Easter egg hunts are done all year round.  We dye eggs when it’s warm, when it’s cold, when we need something to do.  This is the process we follow every time: (1) hard boil a dozen eggs (2) eat 1-2 eggs  (3) dye the eggs (4) eat another 1-2 eggs (5) take turns hiding and finding the eggs that have not been eaten multiple times a day.  If it’s warm out we’ll hide the eggs outside, if it’s cold, we’ll hide them inside.  When they crack from excessive hiding and finding, we throw them away.  We do not eat them because they have not been refrigerated.  Then when they are all gone, we dye another dozen.

Olivia loves this activity and it still amazes me that after months of doing this, she is still so excited as if it were her first time.  Her most favorite part of dying is squirting the drops of food coloring into the cups.  We make a dye for each color of the rainbow.  The food coloring package comes with red, yellow, green, and blue so Olivia gets to mix the colors to make orange and purple.  This is huge, the highlight of the whole process.  When she’s not dying eggs or hiding and finding eggs, she is watching egg dying “how to” videos on YouTube.  This is a real passion.

All of the colored eggs are stored in a green basket.  Olivia picks a favorite colored egg each time..this time it was red!

Egg dying tips
1. Perfect hard boiled eggs from Ina Garten (no green rim around yoke)

• Cover eggs with cold water
• Bring water to a boil
• Turn off heat and let sit for 15 mins
• Remove eggs from water, let sit for at least 2 mins

2. Dye mixture

• 1/2 cup boiling water
• 1 tsp white vinegar
• 12 drops of dye (orange = 8 yellow + 4 red, purple = 8 blue + 4 red)
• leave eggs in dye at least 5 mins