Happy Halloween! This year marks our first Halloween together as a family of three! Halloween is one of my favorite festivities of the year, and I love thinking of creative costumes every time. I especially like costumes that go together in some sort of a theme and last Halloween, I was just at the beginning of my second trimester so I was pregnant Quinn and Dan was Finn from the TV show Glee. This year, Dan was Mario from Super Mario Brothers, I was Princess Peach, and Mio was… ::drumroll please:: Toad (the toadstool mushroom)! Dan and I had actually thought of the idea of being Mario and Peach for Halloween and had prepared our costumes two years ago, but I got deathly sick that Halloween and so we hadn’t been able to use them! But I suppose it was for the better, because our costume idea was made exponentially better with the addition of Toad Mio!
We had a busy Halloween weekend — on Saturday, Dan and his coworker friend co-hosted a baby-friendly Halloween party in the neighborhood, and on Sunday we drove into the city for an evening of Halloween bowling in the Presidio with our friends from Nakayoshi! Check out all the photos of the Halloween fun from this past weekend…
Mio and I as Toad and Princess Peach.
Cedar was an alligator, and Cristina was the alligator tamer.
Mio looking up to Cedar.
Toad Mio with Mario Daddy.
Standing with some help from Daddy.
She was a little overwhelmed by all the people...
Jasmine and Emme, the older girls at the party.
Pocahontas Sofia pointing... adorable!
Going after Mario's fireball.
Kayo and Jinwoo.
S & S!
Gorgeous view of the skyline and San Francisco city lights, taken from the balcony.
A family picture at the end of the night.
Bowling at the Presidio Bowling Center with Nakayoshi. (I believe this is the first time we’ve taken Mio into the city!)
The Toad mushroom hat we had originally bought for Mio.
The hat was ginormous and way too big on her, so we opted for a different one that was a little more manageable...
...much better!
Jamie lives in San Francisco now! She's my dear friend from Virginia Tech. I'm so thrilled that she's in the area now!
Mio got lots of lovin' from her Nakayoshi aunties and uncles.
Mio's first time meeting Graig... and she loves him already!
Wow, look at that chin. Fat angle much? hahaha*
My happy mushroom, aglow under the black lights.
Graig was so good with her!
The masked men: army man, wolf, and storm trooper.
Basketball star Graig and Little Red Riding Hood Aileen (with mushroom hat)
My new friend Hisae-san! Loved her hat!
With lovely Sam... so glad we got to see her!
With Haruka and Aileen! Mio has known them since she was one month old! 😀
Standing around.
"There's a smile!"
She looks like she's about to break into a dance.
Mio's first encounter with a bowling ball.
Jason took this cool picture of Mio in front of the bowling lanes!
She's loving it! She is as round as a bowling ball.
There she goes, scrunching her face again in an all-out smile...
Mio loves Auntie Jamie!
Couldn't resist putting the giant mushroom hat on her one last time...
Hope everyone has a fun Halloween! Perhaps next year Mio can go trick-or-treating!!! I’m already thinking of more family costume ideas….
Yesterday, when Dan and I came home from a rainy afternoon of grocery shopping, we pulled into our driveway and found three wild turkeys nonchalantly hanging around like they owned the place. I’d heard of turkey spottings in Berkeley before, but this was my first time seeing turkey that was not being served up on a Thanksgiving platter. It was really random and at the same time bizarre….
Here are some photos that we took as the turkeys hung around with us for a while.
This post is almost a month late because uploading all the Hawaii photos was slowing me down, but I had to post some of these adorable photos from when the Jubbs were in town! I’ve known Nancy since we were kids in middle school, and I have a lot of memories with her — it was through her that I got my first part-time job (working as an accountant’s assistant at a law firm), and with her that we got our first cell phones! Not to mention all the sticker photos we took together after school in Annandale… 🙂
We’ve both come a long way since — we are both now married, and Nancy has been happily living with her English husband Matthew in London for a few years now! They just had their first child in March of this year, and they were in Sacramento visiting family and stopped by for a day in the East Bay. I not only got to meet Matthew for the first time, but 3-1/2-month old Eleanor, too! I hadn’t seen Nancy herself in over four years, so we had a lot of catching up to do. 🙂 We went to have lunch together in El Cerrito, followed by some gelato in Berkeley, and then came back and just relaxed at our humble abode for a while.
Such a beautiful family!
After lunch at Pasta Pomodoro. Look at Ellie...!
I couldn't get enough of baby Eleanor. She is just the cutest! A quarter Korean, she's going to be a knockout when she grows up! I'm jealous of her good genes.
She was so well-behaved, too! Someday, when I have kids, I can only hope they are half as sweet as this girl is!
This must be the first time I've ever seen Dan hold a baby. He is so awkward with babies! hahaha* But I am too...
Baby Ellie... so adorable!
Thank you so much to Nancy and Matthew for taking time in your busy schedule to meet up with us! We hope you had a great time visiting the East Coast afterwards. We will definitely have to visit you in London someday!
This update is long overdue, but two weeks ago, we moved from our small one bedroom apartment in Berkeley to a two bedroom duplex in El Cerrito. We’re still renting and it will likely be a while before we’re able to buy (let alone afford) our own house, but for now, we’re just grateful to have a little more space.
The move went pretty smoothly — before the big moving day, we slowly took a bunch of boxes over to the new place everyday, and then on moving day we moved the rest of our belongings as well as all heavy furniture in a moving truck within half a day. We went back to the Berkeley apartment last weekend to scrub and sweep to make sure everything was in good shape to turn back over to our previous landlord.
Our old apartment building in Berkeley. The building itself was almost 100 years old, but the inside has recently been remodeled. Goodbye Berkeley! Thank you for the fun times.
Berkeley had been fun to live in for a while — there’s definitely a lot to do and so many good places to eat, and it was fun to be in a college town again. I’m going to miss having three movie theaters within walking distance and all the delicious ethnic restaurants that were in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, since we were on a main road and very close to Berkeley High School, it was always pretty loud and over the course of the year, we outgrew the place and decided that we needed a more spacious living space.
El Cerrito is only the next town over from Berkeley, so we didn’t move very far. It’s definitely a more residential area compared to the rowdy semi-urban college town of Berkeley, and so it’s a lot quieter. We live right by a huge shopping center that has a Bed, Bath and Beyond, Lucky’s, Barnes & Noble, JoAnn Fabrics, CVS Pharmacy, a handful of restaurants, and… ::drumroll please:: Trader Joe’s! I love grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s, so it’s exciting that we have one only two blocks away now. Dan, being Mr. Fix-It, loves that there is a big Ace Hardware and TAP Plastics nearby. haha* We are also lucky enough to have the El Cerrito Plaza BART station within less than two blocks — so much closer than we were to Downtown Berkeley BART when we lived at our previous apartment. The post office, UPS, and bank are also within walking distance — I walk everywhere because I gave up my car last year, so it makes life so much easier to have those so close by. 99 Ranch and the small Japanese grocery store we shop at (Yaoya-san) is also very close, so we can always be fully stocked with our Asian food.
Although there are still a few boxes lying around, we’ve pretty much settled in to our new place and we are really enjoying it so far. Here are some photos!
View from outside. House number has been blurred for privacy purposes.
The living room (front entrance area)
Futon sofa and coffee table in our living room. (Please excuse the mess of boxes and Dan's bike - they will be going in the garage once they finish working on it.)
Opposite view of living room, with our bookcases, TV, and chinchilla cage.
the kitchen
The dining table in the kitchen. (As you can see, I have no shortage of aprons! There are six of them hanging there... gotta put them to good use!)
The lovely bathroom. The photo doesn't do it justice. The huge mirror cabinets are my favorite part.
Another photo of the the bathroom.
Last shot of the bathroom.
The bedroom.
We are in the process of fixing up this antique vintage dresser. (Notice some of the knobs are missing.) I've got all my jewelry and hair/skincare products sprawling across the top.
My vanity stand, where I get ready in the morning. If you haven't noticed, I love the Shabby Chic style.
We are using the second bedroom as an office.
I finally have room to have my own desk! Yes, that's right -- in the two and a half years since moving out to California, I didn't have my own desk. Can you believe it? I was always marginalized at the corner of Dan's ginormous desk, occasionally roaming with my laptop over to the coffee table or dining table. But now that we have the space, I bought myself my own desk and chair. Exciting!
So nice to have my very own workspace! My at-home workflow is so much better now.
Storage area above and beside my desk for all my craft and art supplies. The storage shelves and drawers are all new, too. Can't wait to put everything to good use!
There’s still a lot of things I’d like to do to help prettify the place, but right now I’m just happy to be moved in. It’s difficult to invest a lot of time and effort when you know that the place you’re living is temporary and I keep dreaming of the day I’ll be able to decorate and furnish my very own forever home. I am happy with the way we are set up for now, though, and now that we have more space, we will also be able to comfortably host visiting friends and family. For our local friends, please feel free to visit us, and for those who are farther way, it may just be time to start planning those vacations out to the Bay Area… 😉
