Our decorations around the house

Here are some photos right before Chinese New Year.  Cadence wore the Chinese dress for a mini performance at school.  The other photos were taken at the mall right down the street from our apartment.  Apparently all the malls around HK compete to see who has the best decorations and our mall wins quite a lot and I can see why. They do a great job with all the decorations for every occasion.

Above are some more photos we took around the mall the day before New Year’s.  Also there was an awesome acrobat show right in the mall to0.  I’m so glad we took the time to watch it.  It was like watching Cirque de Soleil, but at a mall!

Here are the girls all dressed up in their New Year gear.  I bought these new dresses/vests for them because the patterns were super cute!

We had a red envelope scavenger hunt and the girls had a blast looking for them.  We put two dollar coins and candies in them.  Here are the girls after they found all the red envelopes.

Yummy candy!

Money!

When Sienna napped, Cadence and I made “Chinese dumplings.”  We made them out of felt for her pretend kitchen. I think they look pretty realistic, don’t you?

Overall, a very relaxing holiday in Hong Kong.  We would have loved to be home with family in the States though, but it’s just not feasible with a 16 hour flight!

Sienna is now just a few days shy of 19 months.  She’s still a very happy toddler – loves to smile, very friendly, enjoys her food and most of all, makes us laugh all the time.  We took her for a quick 18 month check up a few weeks ago and besides her constant runny nose, she’s in great health.  She weighs in at about 11.2 kg (roughly 26 lbs) and 86 cm (not sure what it is in inches, but she’s huge).  So in HK, little kids need to start paying for the train once they are 100 cm, so if she still continues to grow at the rate she’s been growing, she’ll probably have to pay next year!

These days, Sienna loves to color and use stickers, pushing her babies around in the baby stroller, and of course playing with the toy kitchen.  She still enjoys playing restaurant with Cadence a lot.  Recently, Sienna is able to sit and enjoy the TV!  The girls don’t watch that much TV, but when I turn it on now, she runs and sits on the couch (I sense a couch potato in the making).  Just a few months ago, she wasn’t that interested in it .  We recently bought a Chinese karaoke DVD and she loves bopping to the music and watching the videos.

I know we’ve said it with Cadence a lot, but we love this toddler stage.  They are discovering the world and everything is so interesting to them.  The way they talk is just so super cute.  Sienna can now probably say over 25-30 words and is starting to put words together.  Her favorite is “go poopoo.”  A very important phrase, I might add   I know we can’t freeze time, but we’d like it to go a bit slower.  The kids are growing up way too fast!

On New Year’s Day we went into town to walk around since it was such a nice day out.  Since the girls have a lot of pretty dresses that they don’t many opportunities to wear, we dressed them up that day.  They loved wearing their puffy dresses.

In Central, there was a whole parade/lion dance.  It was great being able to see all the different lions, but unfortunately they took too long to start.  After waiting around for 30 minutes, we left.

Christmas Day – “Santa” paid a visit to our hotel.  Sienna was not very impressed and Cadence asked whether he was the real Santa.  I told her that he wasn’t the “real” one because the real one is in HK right now delivering their presents and he was just one of his helpers.  She believed me And yes, that is a Christmas tree made with Ferrero Rocher chocolates!

We took a day trip to Tamsui, a sea-side district in Taipei.  Sucheng was excited about visiting there since he read some good reviews about it.  Unfortunately we were not so impressed.  First it was super crowded.  Second, since we were tired of all the street food, we just wanted to sit down at a nice restaurant to eat, but it took us an hour to find one.  Finally, the scenery was just OK – nothing to brag about but I guess it was just kind of nice to be away from the city center for the day.

Our last day in Taipei, we hit up a few tourist spots: Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall and Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall.  We had a great time running around the open areas and the beautiful parks.

Overall, we had a great time in Taipei. We were really impressed with their train system and how kid friendly the city was.  People gave up their seats for the kids, there were handicap ramps and elevators in most areas and people were generally just very nice.  Thumbs up from us!

The day before our trip, we had the girls open up a few presents so that they could take it with them to Taiwan.  I found the cute polka dot backpack for Sienna and she would not take it off!  She loves it because Cadence wears a backpack to school and we find her putting it on sometimes but it’s way too big for her, so now she has her own little kiddie one – perfect!  Sucheng bought Cadence a Where’s Waldo? travel size book.  I secretly want it.  I love finding Waldo, don’t you?

We spent an entire day at the Taipei Zoo.  It was pleasantly quiet and a not a bad zoo at all.  The kids especially loved the elephants, panda bears and the butterflies.

Best part about the trip?  The yummy FOOD.  I didn’t bring the camera out the night we ventured out to the night market which Taiwan is famous for.  Wowsers, the amount of people out there was kind of overwhelming.  We went to the Shilin Night Market and basically ate everything we thought looked yummy.  The girls loved it as well!  I think we all gained a good 5 pounds on this trip but it was all worth it.  Sucheng and I said we would go back to Taiwan just to eat next time.

Well, about a month and a half ago, the Mandarin medium school called us and wanted Cadence to come in for an interview.  She must have done pretty well, since they accepted her!  We were ecstatic.  So now, fast forward a month and a half later, Cadence is doing extremely well there.  Her friends are very cute and were extremely friendly when she first arrived.  Even though she’s still having some trouble understanding everything in class, I think her Mandarin has improved quite a bit.  I think by the end of the school year, she’ll be pretty fluent and Sucheng has been pushing her a bit more as well.  It would be awesome for her to be trilingual and to be able to read and write Chinese.  I’m super jealous.

It was a hard decision to transfer her at the time since she just adjusted to her new school and we had to pull her out to, yet again, adjust to another school.  I’m glad we did it though.  She seems so much happier there and she’s back to being a kindergartener!

Holiday Performance Video

The woman at the top is Cadence’s teacher.  She’s pretty nice and worked the kids hard for their performance.  The little girl with Cadence, Yuan Yuan, is one of her closest friends here.  We actually knew her last year and we’ve become very close friends with her family.  Sienna joined in the fun as well!

This is Auntie Carol, Yuan Yuan’s mom.

Here’s Cadence’s class right before their performance!

Sienna really does get the idea though and imitates us quite well as we sip our cup of tea.  Like they say, monkey see monkey do, right?

I wonder why!