Happy 5th Birthday!

Time for one of my favorite kinds of posts- a look back at my favorite pictures of Leila taken over the course of the year. It's so hard to believe that she is turning FIVE! Too old! Stop growing so fast! 

Leila enjoying a cupcake on her fourth birthday. This is right after we picked up Uncle Linc.

With a grandma and an auntie at the Calgary Stampede.

Leila and Grandma Braun- July 2012

A day in Waterton- July, 2012

Even though her local school career was short-lived, she gave it an honest go, and sure looked cute in her uniform! 

I love the morning sunlight in this picture, and her bedhead. She can often be found playing at the window ledge with any number of her little toys.

Posing in a doorway in Shanghai

When you can't decide which hairband to wear, you may as well wear them all!

A few stats:
What Leila wants to be when she grows up: a mommy that's a doctor (Go Leila!)
Favorite color: Pink and purple
Favorite Show: Justin Time
Favorite Bible story: "When bread came down from the sky, and when there was a path through the water, and Pharaoh and his army sinked".
Most looking forward to this summer: being a flower girl and seeing Madeline's cast
Favorite food: ice cream and macaroni
New stamps in her passport (since this won't always be the case, I may as well include it while we can!): Macau, Philippines, and three trips to China

Getting a ride from Auntie Nett in Macau

 A few milestones this past year:
- getting her ears pierced
- she has a pretty good handle on printing uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers. Knowing how much printing homework she will get in kindergarten I haven't done much to work with her on it, I mostly just let her do her own thing and it's happened on it's own.
- swimming and skating is slowly coming along

Pretending it's cold for some Christmas-y pictures. 

Leila enjoyed it when a guest musician came to Sparkle and gave a concert. 

Looking cool in Cebu!

Keeping cool in Cebu

At the rice fields in Guilin. And looking mis-matched. We didn't bring enough warm clothes and also didn't account for how quickly we would go through them in the rainy weather!

Leila, I've had such a special year having just you at home with me. I was secretly glad that school didn't work out. We have spent hours together this past year traveling on the bus or MTR to wherever we are going, and I love that you still insist on cuddling on my lap. You make us laugh with your quirky sense of humor and always amaze us with your imagination and creativity. You are a wonderful daughter and a great little sister to Annika. We love you so much, and can't wait to see what your fifth year will bring! Happy Birthday! XOXO

camera obscura

 So, you know how in past posts I've said things like "these pictures aren't very good because we just took our little point-and-shoot instead of hauling our big camera with us", or "we didn't want to bring our valuable camera with us to China so we just took our light little point-and-shoot"? And then the pictures are all blurry and grainy and kangaroos have red eye?
Yeah, even though I love our Nikon dSLR, it really hasn't been working for us in Hong Kong. We just find that it is too heavy and cumbersome to carry with us, and it's one more valuable (but far less valuable than our two most important valuables!) that we have to keep track of. I almost never take it with me when I'm out and about in Hong Kong. Around Christmas, I even ordered myself a fun purse that's actually a camera bag, thinking that I would take it with me more if I had a cushioned space to keep it, but the camera bag is so heavy with it in it that it gives me a sore shoulder, so I've ended up just using my nice camera bag as a purse, and unfortunately I still usually leave my camera home. 
So we own a nice camera, yet have been taking pictures with our OLD little Canon that we bought in Korea in 2005?! That just doesn't make sense when you consider how much camera technology has improved and how inexpensive point-and-shoots are these days. 
We weren't sure if we should replace our point-and-shoot, or just get iPhones already (I think we're just waiting till we move back to Canada to do that) or what we should do, but a reallyreally good salesman who had ONE Lumix GF3 left at an INCREDIBLE price made the decision easy! 
Ha! We've actually been admiring all the cool mirrorless cameras out there for a while. They are so light and small compared to our beast of a camera, and the interchangeable lenses that they keep making to go with them is pretty great.
So, the point of all this, is we bought a new camera. I was actually very reluctant, and Mike and the salesman had to convince me, but I am coming around and admit that it is very cool. It's just hard to learn something new, but one of the neatest things is that you do everything with the touchscreen, including just pressing what you want the camera to focus on. So fun! We don't know if we'll sell our old one, but these are some of the pictures we've taken as we've been trying to figure out how to use it.

 On Saturday after I came home from tutoring and the rain finally stopped, we took a little trip out to Discovery Bay. 

 Having supper in one of our favorite restaurants. mmmm....chicken tikka and kebabs!

 That green space you can see out our window is Tsing Yi Park. Leila and I went for a little walk there this morning. We love going there, but unfortunately Hong Kong has nasty sand flies that love the two of us, but for some reason leave Mike and Annika alone. Anywhere "beach-y" or "park-y" is full of sandflies these days. Boo... 

 We really love this playground, though. It's so green with a lovely canopy of trees overhead. 

Even though I had to be convinced, I think we will really like this camera. It will definitely come in handy since it is so small to take with us. I know dSLR's are all the rage, but I think maybe these small mirrorless cameras are the way to go. But what do I know? Time will tell, I guess...

Mother's Day Tea and Gymnastics!

 I had a really nice Mother's Day on Sunday. But the best part of Mother's Day was actually on Thursday when I went to Annika's school for the Mother's Day tea. The reason it was so great is because Annika was sooooo excited for it. She was trying to keep everything a secret and was counting down the days, so her enthusiasm was very contagious. Each of the five grade 1 classes put on a little performance in the chapel, and her class did a play. Annika was assigned the part of "Girl", which meant that she had lots of lines to memorize. When she first brought the script home, she didn't think she could do it. But Mike worked on it with her all weekend, and by the time she returned to school, she pretty much had her lines AND all the other lines of the play memorized. She found it a bit frustrating that by Thursday, other kids (including "Boy" who is standing to her left) still needed their papers. And ended up using them for the play. Not Annika, though- she executed her part flawlessly.:)

 After the performances, the moms were escorted to their child's classrooms for some cookies and juice. 

Annika and her Grade 1 teacher

 Annika showed me her journal, and it was so fun to flip through it and see what she has worked on this year. I really liked these two entries. I think the beach one might actually be referring to last year, and she would have written it more at the beginning of the year. In the one about Leila, she told me that she drew Leila the way that Leila draws herself. 

 The girls have started taking gymnastics. Our clubhouse (like most clubhouses) offers lots of different classes. Even ones for adults such as cake-decorating and singing. The only thing is that they are typically in Cantonese, so I inquired about gymnastics and was told that it *probably* wouldn't be in English. I pressed the guy further (like is it? Or isn't it?), so he phoned up the instructor and got off the phone and told me "Good news! The instructor says that there are children from other countries in the class, so it is in English and Cantonese". Well, great! Sign us up!

 These are the "children from other countries" that the instructor must have been referring to. Funny how they do stick together! Annika and the older sister of this pair have hit it off and it turns out their school buses arrive at the same time, so they've been able to chat it up after school as we walk home together.

 So far, Leila only lasts for the beginning of the class and then runs to sit on our laps for the rest of it. I'm not sure what her problem is, but I'm hoping she'll participate soon, or I'm going to pull her out of the class. Annika, on the other hand, is having a blast! I think Leila would too if she'd give it a chance. Oh well... 

 She got to be demonstrator for each of the stations, which was pretty exciting. I am pleased that this instructor is very encouraging of all the kids- whether they are successful or not, he gives lots of praise and high 5's. There's always such an emphasis here on "results" and "performance" that extracurriculars aren't always very fun. But so far (for Annika), gymnastics is great fun, and we've already noticed that we recognize more kids in our complex, so that's another perk that we hadn't even considered!

Such balance!

A beach birthday

Well, as planned we decided to spend Hong Kong Labour Day/Sarah's birthday at the beach. The only problem was that all week long, the May 1 forecast was for cool and rainy weather. We decided that we could enjoy being at a beach regardless of the weather, and would carry on regardless.
Weather is weird. This year, January and February were much warmer than we remember last year being, but March and April have definitely been much cooler than last year. Hasn't that been the same in the prairies this year (mild winter/cold spring)? 
Anyway, I just dug up these pictures from Clearwater Bay a year ago, and it is obvious that 1. it was a much warmer day a year ago, and 2. the girls have definitely grown!

 So here we are this year at Silvermine beach and we are underdressed and cold. Annika still has her cold, and Leila is tired because Rachel slept over the night before, and the girls went to bed late and were up early. 

 The girls still had fun digging in the sand, but we didn't last too long because we were so cold so we packed up to have an early supper at a Turkish restaurant that we ate at the last time we visited this beach. Yum... I didn't take any pictures, but it was dee-licious! One thing we ordered was an appetizer platter with a variety of dips and feta-stuffed spring rolls and other delectable goodies and everything was soooo good! Their homemade pita bread was melt-in-your-mouth. 
While we were eating, I had a really great idea and suggested to Mike that roughly six years from now, we should celebrate our fortieth birthdays in a big way by going to Turkey. We could even start saving for it now. 
His response was "um... yeah... or we could just pretend we're in Turkey right now." Well, I guess it's a good thing I have six years to work on him!

We just had a recipe exchange at my mom's group on Tuesday where you bring a dish for everyone to try, and then email around the recipe. My friend Joanna had brought a no-bake cheesecake, and I realized that it would be a really great birthday present to myself to make it for my birthday! Of course these things are never that simple in Hong Kong... the recipe called for graham crumbs, which apparently you have hunt down at a specialty store. Luckily, I found a pre-made graham crust so I didn't have to travel across town. But the recipe also said to use a can of pie filling of your choice, but it turns out that blueberry pie filling at our grocery store costs $10 CDN/can! Now that's just crazy, so I found a recipe for homemade blueberry cheesecake sauce, and it was so quick and easy that I don't think it will be necessary to buy blueberry pie filling again!

 

(photo by Annie)
The cheesecake was yummy, and it was a nice, quiet birthday spent with the ones I love.