Camille and Elijah

Facebook post for 1-11-12

Her days as a Crawler are slowly becoming history while she joins the realm of the Walkers.

Friday - Jan 13, 2012

Yes, at fourteen months plus, Camille has started walking! And everyone's ecstatic! Today, Donna is cooking some arroz caldo to celebrate this milestone! Come on over and celebrate it with us! Sorry, the picture below doesn't show it.

Three years ago today, Camille's older brother Elijah, at a little over 5 months, was born. That's why everyone went to Forest Lawn to celebrate it. Rachel created a crown and a nice 'flower cake' (from flowers that Rose and Jun picked up from the downtown LA flower market early this morning) and they got a wonderful red velvet cake as well. While Rose and Jun got a beautiful wreath.

On the way to the park, Camille fell asleep in her car seat but a few minutes after we arrived, she woke up and took advantage of the wide space and practiced walking, a lot!

Here are all the pictures I took.

Major Updates 2, Mariko and Lani

Yesterday I posted the following on Facebook:

"First thing tomorrow I'll finish a post in my blog and I'M NOT GOING TO LOGIN TO FB."

You see I blame Facebook as one of the reasons that I've been lagging on my blog posts. As I've replied on my post above, once I login to FB, I get stuck there and can't or won't do anything else. That's how addictive Facebook is for me. But I'm proud of myself since I finished my blog post before this, as promised. And I'm now starting on this one!

WooHoo!

Mariko's 2nd US Visit, Jan 2010

My first cousin, Atching Nida, has a daughter, Mariko, from her Japanese ex-husband and she lives in Japan. In January of 2010, she made her 2nd visit to California. She previously visited several years ago when she was much younger. It just feels sort of strange to have a Japanese relative somehow. But then again, I have a Japanese daughter-in-law so I should just get used to it.

Here is Mariko at Cong Raf's place in Bellflower.



Click here for the rest of her pictures in the set.

Lani's Visit, June 2010

My niece Lani, (Cong Romy's oldest daughter) who lives with her family in Missouri somewhere took some time off in June of 2010 to meet us here in California for the first time. She stayed at Cong Mansing's place and the pictures below were taken when we met her at Homer's house in Downey and the day Atching Lori treated us for lunch.



Lance, Roland's younger son, was still a baby then.


You can check out the rest of Lani's pictures here.

That's two blog posts in a row. Now I can take a break and visit Facebook!
Yay!

Major Updates 1, Asian Cruise

Thank goodness for Flickr.com, I can go back to my pictures and try to discern which event or activity I haven't blogged about. It's really helpful because I noticed that pictures there have some sort of ID; what camera was used, what date the picture was taken, etc.

And so I start from a couple of years ago..

ASIAN CRUISE, JANUARY 2010

Pat, our friend from Guagua called and said she and a bunch of friends are going on a cruise and there are still a couple of spots left and would we want to go? Donna and I have been talking about going on a 2nd cruise so we told her yes we do.

We flew from the DMIA in Clark to Singapore, and we stayed overnight there in a hotel booked ahead of time by the agency who arranged for the whole thing.


After we checked in, Donna and I ran around and checked the place out. It was indeed clean, like everyone, who's visited it has been saying.

At the time, my niece Myla, her husband Alex and their son were living in Singapore. He was working for some computer company. After we checked in, they picked us up and showed us around a bit after taking us out to dinner. For some reason I couldn't find the pictures in Flickr which I took with them.

The next day, a tourist bus took us to the port where we started our cruise aboard the Super Star Virgo.





Click here for more pictures taken on the ship.


The next day, our Star Cruiser sailed towards Penang in Malaysia.



And here are more pictures in Malaysia.

Next stop - Phuket, Thailand. I need to mention that the owner of the travel agency accompanied us to this cruise and whenever we pulled into port she arranged for the tour vans and the guides who showed us around.

In Thailand we had a choice of two tours; shopping or sightseeing. People in the group who've previously visited Thailand chose the former and first time visitors, the latter. And since Donna and I don't really have cash flowing out of our pockets, we opted to sightsee as well. We even went to an elephant sanctuary type place where we rode on the backs of an elephant.



Check out more pictures of Thailand here.