Well.

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We are all jet lagged except for Vincent. We are all extra grouchy. Simple requests from the non-jet lagged party in our group sends the jet lagged members into tizzies.

We did manage to go to the park (at 7am!).

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We had squid ink risotto for lunch. Weird.

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Last day in the US.

I spent the last day in NY driving to Milan to the Morehouse Farm yarn shop. It’s about 15 minutes from my in-law’s house. I’ve passed it driving to the Taconic but I’ve never been inside. I have to say that purchasing yarn is the least interesting thing about knitting for me – I usually do it online and I don’t do it very often because I’m such a slow knitter. But this yarn shop is amazing! I could have browsed all morning. (What is with the weird expression on my face? Hmm..)

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In the afternoon, the whole family celebrated the 60 degree weather by going to Poet’s walk.

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I really wanted to find a geocache that I couldn’t find previously when I went alone with Edda, so we made it all the way to Summer House.

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Edda walked most of the 2 mile walk with an adult holding on to each hand. We weren’t expecting her to last the whole way, but she did!

Now we are back home in Singapore! The flight did involve some puking, low-grade fevers and a bad night of sleep, but nothing we couldn’t handle…

Date night and busy day.

Last night, Jeremy took me out on a date! We went to see Volver, the new Almodovar movie (it was great in many ways – go see it and we can talk about how Penelope Cruz’s boobs are just incredible).

We had some wine before the show, very romantic.

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Today I took the kids out all day so Jeremy could pack our suitcases in peace. He did all the laundry and sorted winter stuff out to leave in NY.

First we went to Bright Horizons – Vince’s old pre-school – to see Ms. Pat. Ms. Pat is my most faithful, non-email, total snail-mail pen pal.

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Then we saw my friend Ormere and her 3 adorable kids… The newest one, E. I hadn’t even met yet…

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And finally, we had dinner with Eileen and her family and saw their new house in the middle of the woods.

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It is 11:30 pm now, Edda is still awake and Vince just went to sleep, we should be OK for our midnight flight tomorrow!

Guangzhou, China

Well, it looks Mom is heading to Guangzhou, not Shenzhen as originally anticipated. By train to Hong Kong, it is about 1:45 minutes away and one way train ticket is about US$50.00. The trains are numerous and almost every hour has one.

Mom is taking a lot physical exams together with many shots for the vaccination. She is scheduled to leave for Boston from Augusta, GA on the 7th (Sunday) and heads to Hong Kong on the 11th (Thursday). She will be heading for work in Guangzhou from Hong Kong on the 15th.

New year!

Yesterday, we spent the day driving to Albany, NY to meet a family who has an eight year old daughter with Rett Syndrome. I got their name through the RETTNET – an online support group for parents.

They were wonderfully generous with their time and information – they’ve lived in Albany for decades and they had us over for lunch and then a babysitter came over to take care of their 4 year old and Vincent while we took Edda and their 8 year old on a drive all over Albany to look at the different neighborhoods. It was nice to get a tour from a native of the area and not a realtor. So we’ve found a neighborhood that we like with a good school system – we’ll just have to find a house there.

The special needs classes for Edda seem to be sprinkled around the area and not so specific to a specific school district. It sounds like it depends a lot on who is teaching the class and who is the child’s 1-on-1 aide.

Their daughter has never been able to walk, but she is able to read and do math on the 2nd grade level (only one year behind), which is so wonderful to see!

Back to Work.

Well, It was a fun time in NY. We crashed Times Square after midnight from Choon’s brother’s apartment. It was a mess, and crazy, but I can see how it would be a lot of fun – for maybe the last 2 hours, or at least drunk off your ass. 🙂 The cops were a bit nasty at times, but I can understand. We saw Carson Daly in the NBC booth. We tried to buy some pizza at a place at about 1:30am. It was cold, even tho they had put it in the oven. We didn’t wake up until 1pm. 🙂

Monday was a dreary day in the city. We didn’t do anything, but I had to catch my flight at LGA, which ended up being delayed a half hour due to the rain. This was not good since I had a connecting flight in DC at 9:30. My flight touched down in IAD at 9:18 and it took maybe 8 more minutes to dock the plane and deboard. I was freaking lucky that the SFO flight was the gate straight across the hall from the gate that I deboarded from. The door was closed, but there were a ton of people from Boston begging to be let on the flight. Sigh. So yeah I made it, but my bag didn’t. Hopefully they’ll get it FedExed to me today.

Oh also, there’s a slight possiblilty that I left my Oakleys in NY at Jeremy’s parent’s place. I need to get my bag back to rummage thru it, so don’t go all crazy or anything – it still might be in my bag. I just don’t remember seeing it when I repacked at Choon’s bro’s place…

New Year’s Resolutions!

Well, here are my new year’s resolutions:

1. Worry less.
2. Be less judgmental.
3. Live simply.
4. Give more.
5. Expect less.
6. Eat more fruits and vegetables.
7. Exercise more.

There you go, nothing too specific, but hopefully I’ll work on each thing a little bit each day.

Today we went into NYC to visit Arlinda, my cousin. I was taking the whole family into the city for a lunch date and it seemed so silly to go all the way to NYC for just a lunch date, but I hadn’t seen Arlinda in over 8 years and I’m glad that we did it because I had fun and it was a beautiful day and we all ran around Central Park.

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(Look at the previous entries – I added some photos to the entries now that I finally have a reliable internet connection.)

Happy new year to all!