Hannah's First Birthday!

Hannah is officially 1 year old! Where has the time gone?

Bill and I can't believe that it's already been a year since our beautiful girl was born. It really seems like just yesterday she was born and she was this tiny (ok, maybe not that tiny) bundle of joy. It's been a great year having Hannah in our lives.

Hannah was sick on her birthday so she wasn't the party animal I was hoping she would be. Instead, she was rather clingy and ended up sleeping with grandpa on a chair. Hannah celebrated her birthday with all of her friends and we played games and just hung out.

Her birthday theme was Care Bears (we call her Hannah Bear all the time). We had a traditional Korean first birthday where she wore the traditional Korean dress (hanbok) and we had a table full of rice cakes, fruit, and candy. It was a wonderful day to celebrate her first year.

For more pics, please check out the album. Hannah's 1st Birthday!

Bye Bye Wings..

On February 4, 2009, Hannah got her first haircut! Bill and I wanted to wait until she was 1 and since that is quickly approaching, we thought the time was right. Not to mention that she's got pictures coming up and I wanted a "do" that wasn't pigtails.

Hannah was a trooper in the little yellow car as the lady was cutting her hair. Leading up to this day, I had envisioned a little girl crying at the top of her lungs and lunging towards me to get out of her chair, but I got none of that. Obviously, my first experience with Jae was not as smooth as with Hannah, hence the apprehension I had going into this experience! I just have to say that Hannah has proven to be the opposite in many things from Jae. She sat so still and was so cooperative while they were cutting her hair, I was wondering who's child was sitting in the chair.

For those of you who have seen Miss Hannah, you know that she's got these "wings" growing at the back of her head. They two long pieces of hair that have grown faster than the rest of her hair. Well, we had those cut and now she's got a cut bob cut. We think it's cute. We think she likes it too.

Here are some pics..

A January of birthdays!

January is a big month for birthday's for my side of the family. Jinny's b-day is on the 10th, my brother's birthday is on the 24th, and Anthony and Catherine's b-day is on the 26th!

We went to Olympia last weekend and celebrated all four b-days! It's nice that we can celebrate together. My brother is going to be 40 next year! What??

We been enjoying these trips more and mores b/c as Jae gets older, he really enjoys playing with his cousins, and boy do they play!

We bought it, now what??

Happy New Year! What's your resolution for 2009? Well, since you asked, it's to get in shape. Who's isn't in the month of January?

So, with much coercion from my mother, we bought an exercise machine, a Schwinn Fitness 431 Elliptical to be exact. We bought it in the beginning of January and so far, I've used it once. ONCE! Bill has used it twice. I/we can give you all the excuses in the book about why I/we haven't been on it more, but it's mainly because I'm/we are tired. And then you're probably saying "well, if you used the elliptical, you wouldn't be so tired, yadda, yadda yadda" much easier said than done. After a full day of work, dinner, getting two kids ready for bed and then cleaning up the mess from dinner, relaxation time is around 9:30-10pm. Who wants to exercise then? I'd much rather be sleeping or reading or doing something crafty, too bad all of those things don't really help you lose weight. LOL.

Well, we will defy the odds and not be a fairweather exerciser just because it's the New Year. We will overcome the stereotype and use our elliptical as if we were a customer at Circuit City during their closeout sale! Hopefully by summer we will be in bathing suit shape..HA!

I've attached some images of our new best friend. LOL!




















Bill working hard to put this together.















The finished product!

Jae Quote of the Day!

When I was in Daddy's belly, I growed into a baby. LOL!

Jae Quote of the Day

... I'm going to cuddle with my fire truck ...

Danish pancakes (Ebelskivers)

Ebleskiver's are traditional Danish pancakes. They are made in a special pan called a monk's pan (see adjacent image).

For Christmas, Barb and Jake gave me an Ebelskiver maker. It all came about because Barb was looking for a gift for someone else and asked to get mine and Stacey's opinion about it. I told her that I would want one because it just looked cool and who doesn't like pastries with fillings inside?

So when I opened up my gift, surprise, it was the Ebelskiver maker!!! Everyone thought that it was an egg poacher, but no, it's supposed to make yummy breakfast pancakes with filling or nothing at all. I thought this would be great for Jae to a) help make since it's pretty much just pancake batter, b) insert the middle filling, c) have fun eating! Well, he didn't really do any of these three, this time.

With all things, practice makes perfect. Bill and I attempted to make the recipe that came with the pan and there was enough for about a couple dozen. We forgot to cut the recipe in half or quarters, so we had a whole big bowl of batter. Since it was our first time, we limited the help that we would need from Chef Jae, which didn't really make him happy. We just needed to focus and make sure we were doing it right. We followed the instructions that came with the pan and it started out really well, but once we put the filling in, that's when it started to fall apart.

For our first attempt, we tried chocolate, jam, and peanut butter. The chocolate was good, but we didn't have any morsels in the house, so we ended up using some dove chocolate pieces. It was dark chocolate and didn't melt that well and we ended up burning one side b/c we hadn't quite mastered the temperature. The jam was a disaster. We put the filling in and added more batter on top and then flipped it over when it was ready, but the jam had gotten too hot and oozed out of the other side, so it made a mess in the pan and started burning. The peanut butter just never warmed up. So needless to say, we didn't really have ourselves an Ebelskiver breakfast.

We decided to stop making these after the second batch and instead made regular pancakes with the batter. Luckily we had some m&m's in the house, so Jae got pancakes with m&m's in them.

We will try making these again until we have perfected them! Wish us luck.



This is what they look like.