Hong Kong comings and goings

I still need to post about Boracay-the second part of our Philippines trip, Easter, and Conner’s birthday, but I was feeling a Hong Kong post. I can whip up a post in a few minutes, but the picture uploading! Hong Kong has some of the fastest internet speeds in the world, but we live on an island outside the city and its unbearably slooooww! We can’t even all use it at the same time. It drives Jarrett nuts to be so close to super-speed internet, but be just a teeny bit outside the zone. So here’s what we’ve been up to around Hong Kong and our house the last couple months.

Vesper has started eating more food. Considering she is almost 2 (just 2 weeks until her birthday!), its about time-haha. Peyton was a great eater from 6 months on, he would eat a meat/veggie baby food jar, and then a fruit one, I had a lot of fun feeding him. But Conner was not. He breastfed a long time and has a really bad dairy allergy, so he nursed a lot through his toddler years. I figured Vesper was on the same path. She still nurses a lot, but I am pretty sure my milk is very low or even gone from this pregnancy, so she’s been hungry (even though she has not let up nursing one bit-haha!). I think she may be our first baby that does not have a dairy allergy. It’s a little early to tell, the boys were able to drink milk until about 2 years when they started getting sick from it. Conner started vomiting dairy around 18 months, but before could drink it without a problem. It makes Peyton feel really sick and emotional. She asks for milk and will drink it from a cup and loves yogurt.

Peyton and Vesper

It has been nice for her to eat food, so I can leave her for a few hours and Jarrett can feed her. It will also be handy when we have to be at the hospital for the new baby, so my mom can keep her happy with all her favorite foods. I was worried that she would still be getting most of her nurtrition from my milk when I went into labor, and would be hungry while I gave birth. I’m so glad it all worked out.

cooking with baby #5

I have been feeling great this pregnancy. I have had high blood pressure with every pregnancy, and it never went away after I had Trek. I have been on breastfeeding/pregnancy safe medicine ever since. I am up to quite a large dosage this pregnancy since my blood pressure rises every few weeks, but I’m seeing a cardiologist and he assured me I have much more room I can go up on the medicine.

baby bump in January

I have had almost no other pregnancy problems and just feel content and physically great. I don’t even have indigestion, which was horrible with all the others. I think b/c there is little fried Chinese food, and we hardly eat out for lack of desirable options, so that has been a bonus. I don’t even want to know how much we spend on fruit here in Hong Kong. There are not a lot of snack options (crackers, chips, etc.), so we snack on fruit all day. With the crazy high prices of fruit in Hong Kong, in addition to all of us eating it all day, I think we are spending almost $20 a day on fruit. Just to make our daily mango smoothies is $10 worth of mangoes! I can’t imagine how much groceries will be when the girls will be eating as much as the boys-haha:)

baby bump this week at 27 weeks! Getting excited to meet baby girl:)

Jarrett got a new laptop, so I got his old one, and Conner is getting mine. Peyton got one for his birthday a couple years ago, so now we all have one. Conner is waiting patiently for me to clear off my laptop so he can load it up with his things. I have soo many pictures and by this time in our lives, with 10 years of baby pictures and multiple laptops, the picture situation is a mess! I have been very good at labeling each photo group, but our pictures are spread out over a hard drive, CD’s, 2 laptops, and Snapfish (an online photo storage). I have been extra good about uploading all our photos from the last 10 years onto Snapfish as soon as I take them. But sadly, a couple months ago, they redid their website and the photos take soo long to upload and my albums are no longer organized, but you have to search by date. Which how can I remember the date that Conner ate his first baby foods?! I’m still trying to get over it. So I ordered an external hard drive and I am organizing all the pictures in very organized folders. So I will still have all the photos in the above mentioned places, but they will be organized and safe in one hard drive (which I can also copy to Jarrett’s hard drive). This project is actually going much faster than I thought, I hope to finish by the time the baby comes b/c the photo-taking craziness will start all over again:)

she looooves her pink cowgirl boots;)

Vesper is unfolding into her own person. I only have Peyton and Conner to really glean from on toddlerhood, since Trek sadly never got to be one. So its been so interesting and fun to watch her become her growing up self. She is not quite as messy as the boys, she prefers to not have sand, dirt, or anything on her hands. She does not even like to play with shaving cream as the boys loved too. We live just minutes walk from the beach and she is becoming more and more comfortable. We went just this morning and she hesitated only a moment before started to dig in the sand.

Vesper’s 1st skinny jeans:)

some cute handmade shoes I got from a Chinese shop in town

I was so used to messes and sand living in Maui when Peyton and Conner were small. There was a period where sand in the bed didn’t even bother me! I can scarcely imagine that now, but we lived just a 30 second walk from our apartment to a beautiful Maui beach with a playground steps from the sand. We would wake in the morning and I would take the boys out of their diapers, and put them in swim trunks, not even bothering to put another diaper on. I would feed us breakfast, put on my bikini and we’d walk across to the beach. At least one of our friends would be there, and every morning was exactly the same. I didn’t have a car, Jarrett had taken our only one to work, but I’m not sure I would have gone anywhere anyways. People flew thousands of miles to go to this beach and it was in my backyard. The boys would run wild and swim and slide and swing and then it was time for a nap. We would walk back home, rinse off, eat lunch and all 3 crawl into bed and sleep. Inevitably doing this day in and day out there was sand in our bed. Because as soon as we woke up, we’d go right back to the beach and stay until dinner. I never cared about that sand in the sheets, it was a beautiful time in my life and I loved every minute.

So with Vesper I get to experience a more aware outdoor experience, thinking more about what she is wearing or not wearing. Or how she would perceive or feel about an outdoor activity. It was rainy and I thought, she might love puddles. So out we went and she was in heaven. She now she will go out of her way to jump in every single puddle she finds! I loved this day seeing a glimmer of how Peyton and Conner were at her age.

she loved it and it was extra fun b/c she has an amazing Conner brother to play with her

The boys school is going great. We are to the point I can teach them peacefully and keep Vesper happy at the same time. It has been a great few months. I am taking advantage since I know we will have to find a whole other routine once baby girl #2 comes.

Vesper helping me cook

out to eat at our favorite sushi restaurant

We found some amazing friends last month, with 2 boys homeschooling the same age as ours, but sadly they are moving back to the US. We are still attending our homeschool group and hope to find another family we really click with, its fun to have friends!

a new outfit came in the mail, so I asked Vesper if I could do a mini photo shoot with her:)

Conner and Vesper playing

After much talk and thinking (Jarrett said it was completely up to me since I’m home all day), I decided to try to make our teeny apartment work. To upgrade to a 3 bedroom apartment would triple our rent. For now, I decided I enjoy the freedom of having that extra money. It’s enough to go on one vacation a month! I am hoping I will feel the same after baby comes, but I’m also leaving myself some room to be ok with it if I really want the extra space.

Vesper started Mommy and Me ballet-cutest thing ever!

We are heading to Ikea (again) this month to make the apartment even more functional and buy the baby a piece of furniture to store all her baby things. I have been thinking really hard about what baby items are worth the space they will take up, and will order all her baby things from Amazon soon. I googled the other day “family in 700 square feet house” and laughed so hard at the results. They were posts about how a couple and a baby make it in a 2 bedroom, or a family of 4 in 800 sq feet. I was like, people help me! We will have 6! Plus the pictures they posted looked like photos from a hoarder and were not very encouraging-haha!

awe, I have soo many pictures like this of the boys and Trek. Jarrett was in Dubai, and this is the only good thing about him being gone-we get to all snuggle in the king size together:)

If I had all 80 boxes of our personal items currently stored in Texas (Christmas ornaments, baby keepsakes, Trek’s things, etc) here, this would not work. But we have only the few boxes of things we brought from America, and the things we have accumulated in the last 6 months, which is not a lot, so I think it might work. The boys are almost completely over toys, but Vesper is really getting into them, so her toys are getting some Ikea organization in the next shopping trip. So we shall see how project tiny house goes in the next few months.