February: Naked Trees and Sunburned Cheeks

For Valentine's Day this year, we visited Gong Gong (XW's dad) in Blacksburg and were happily joined by Mei-Lun (+family) and Michael (+kids). We just wished we could have also seen Jimo, Vincent, Janie and the Chicago kids.

Max had a blast with his cousins and it was quite special to be in Blacksburg for Valentine's Day. He met many of Gong Gong's friends (of all ages) and also sat through his first college-level lecture given by....Daddy! Alan was invited to give a presentation to the Industrial Design students at Virginia Tech.

Following our visit in the mountains of Virginia, we head down to the sunny beaches of Amelia Island, Florida. We were totally spoiled and pampered at the Ritz-Carlton and Max had a blast with his sweet "Texas cousin," London.

We realized on this trip that need to keep up our travel routine so that Max continues to experience different climates and seasons. While we were in Blacksburg, he commented several times, "the trees are naked!" And, on Amelia Island, it was the first time Max was exposed to a warm beach and able to dip his toes in the ocean. The downside were the very strong and sneaky sunrays. Fortunately, with the world's largest sandbox at his disposal, he hardly noticed his sunburned cheeks.

Number Theory

Now that Max has the alphabet down, we've been working on our numbers. We have a number poster on our refridgerator and we'll call out the number (in Chinese) and ask him to place a magnet on the number.

When we take walks, we look for numbers on fire hydrants (a favorite sidewalk attraction), license plates (hello, cars) and street signs (we've certainly seen enough real estate signs). There's something exciting to Max about seeing numbers "in the wild."

Recently, he has started to point to numbers and enthusiastically call each one out...but it usually goes something like this:

1 One

2 "S"

3 三

4 Cuatro

5 五

6 六

7 七

8 Ocho

9 九

Learning numbers has been a much greater challenge. It could be because unlike "A, B, C", he is learning "Yi, er, san" at home, but "One, two, three" and "Uno, dos, tres" at school.

I was trying to find a photo of Max and his number chart and this was the only one I seemed to have. Let it be known that this outburst was not related to numbers, but a plea for mac n cheese.