Weekend 96 of 52+

Lotte World for Lunar New Year

Lunar New Year provided Dan with what, I think, will be his last vacation from his current job. Then we'll be back in America for 6 weeks, and then we'll be back in Korea for a couple more years. I guess I haven't mentioned that here, but everyone already knows anyhow. We'll be south of the city for that, though, so we'll no longer be weekending in Seoul.

We spent the vacation Tuesday making our last visit to Lotte World with our free passes.

Our baby is being his insane, little self, which is normal (for him) and cute, but it is distracting for blog writing, so I am just going to caption the pictures.

Sink or Swim

Like people without a bathtub, we bathe our baby in the sink. Like people without a bathroom sink, we bathe our baby in the kitchen. Like people with no boundaries, we take a video of him kicking around and put it online for our parents to see.


Is it okay to put this here? I can't even tell. Well, for now it will be here, anyway, so watch it promptly, parents, in case I change my mind.

In other news, we lost our kid's passport, and, because we're about to take him out of the country, we had to replace it before serendipitously finding it around the house. So back to the Embassy we went with a picture that doesn't even look like him anymore. We tried to do a quick retake at one of those photobooth machines in the subway. The quality of displayed pictures is incredibly misleading, maybe criminally so, and we just ended up wasting 10 minutes and seven dollars. We even left before the pictures developed, so we could run to the Kodak print shop and burn 20 more minutes and six more dollars. That made us 30 minutes late for our appointment, but the nice thing about appointments in Korea is that everything is run by one of those deli number machines anyway, and they were all none-the-wiser. New passport in two weeks, and we will bind it to ourselves like a Phylactery.

Bonus: our crappy pictures were waiting for us in the machine when we got back home. Anybody want a terrible 2x2 snapshot of the right side of our kid's face?

Today we went to our first movie since Super 8. This time I wasn't comfortably pregnant but uncomfortably hot. We saw We Bought a Zoo, which was the second time this year we've watched a movie because Dan first loved the soundtrack. We forgot how loudly they blast the movies in Korea, but Joah still managed to sleep through some (at decibel) lion roars and monkey gags. And then he projectile spit-up all over my hand and leg and shirt and possibly my hair, though that could just have been wet from drool, or, let's be honest, tears, because anytime anyone even mentions a mother and a son, I openly weep. I liked the movie. It made me want to come home and knit (lots of good sweaters on zookeepers), but, instead I was confronted with a ramen-like mess of tangled yarn from an abandoned project. Such an occupational hazard.

Hobbies

I keep getting distracted by other hobbies during my baby-free time. I just got a box of yarn in the mail, and I have some time-sensitive knitting orders to fill. And some of it is for a baby girl, and I never get to knit dresses and bows, so I'm excited about it.

But I have taken some pictures of my non-napper during some of his non-naps. Yesterday morning, I chatted Dan, talking about Mr. Naps taking a 2-hour morning nap, and then he didn't sleep again, but for 20 minute segments, pretty much until 10 o'clock. Mr. No-Naps. Because when you have a baby, you start saying kitschy things.

Our Conservative Laugher

We have been trying to figure out how to make Joash laugh. He is a generous smiler, but he has only ever laughed once at a time. Until tonight. He's been needing breaks during his dinner feed for the last couple of days, and during one of those breaks, I started saying, "yo, yo, yo!" and it is, somewhat unfortunately, what made him finally sort of laugh on command. Hooray! but also, I hope I don't have to go around saying "yo, yo, yo!" all the time now.

And here are his first pictures as a 5-month old:

My favorite thing about this picture of him chatting with Dan is that you can see his mullet. He has a tuft of extra long hairs behind each ear, and I will never cut it away, never!


He really, really loves his dad. He likes to see what he's doing and listen to what he's saying and notice when he comes home.


These guys!

JejuDeo (language pun!)

Jessica was a great documenter of our trip to Jeju, especially of our son on our trip, so I wanted to post some of her pictures here, too.

But, before that, on the occasion of my son's fifth month, four pictures from his fourth.


Wearing a very Korean jumper.


By now, he is just itching to start crawling. He's started doing push-ups and knocking his head around.


He is also starting to really figure out his feet. He obviously has the strongest abs of anyone in this family.


And here's his little leg of gooseflesh. And then I got him some pants to wear.


Also, this is the size of the pizza Dan ate in 7 minutes. Seven minutes in heaven if heaven's activities include scalding your mouth with boiling cheese.

On Raspberries

Joash has learned some new words, still none of them English.