9/5 - 9/11/2022

 9/5 - Monday

In the morning, I had a cuddly Mimi come in bed first, followed by a cuddly Ella. Truly cuddly and soft. I cheecked each a lot. My parents said they will stay another day, for there is too much to fix :') 姥爷 is almost done with the deck! Jam and I headed out ourselves and spend the day in kirkland. 

We came home early in the afternoon. I finished my GAR changes, then took the girls and grandma in search of wild blackberries. Lao lao was so diligent picking berries, she really did not want to leave any behind. I ended up hurrying lao lao, not the kids XD I was finally able to steer lao lao home a little under 2 hours.

Bloating was much better today. I was able to cut jam's hair in the evening, discuss Ella's seal fish and fairy stories, and most importantly, have my before bed snacks. The girls came down to give me hair stuff they found in their beds, and I decided to do their hair. Lao ye came by to check on why kids are still not asleep, and started sniffing. 姥爷: 什么烤糊了么？ I answered it was my toast. Lao ye said aah. Mimi said "hmm? hmm?", and gave me her down mouth. I promised her there're lots of pieces of toasts left for her and Ella.

After 3 days of lao lao lao ye, the girls are speaking Chinese to each other again. Ella just chanted "两个大馒头砸向你“ while skipping upstairs with Mimi.

9/6 - Tuesday

The deck is done! Google popped up some photos for me from 3 years ago, of Mimi playing on the old deck and lao ye patching it XD Fixing deck is annual labour day 姥爷 task. Lao ye spent last night studying videos of how to make chair with leftover wood. Alas he forgot his good ruler at home. It'll be his task for next year. 

I was able to plow through some blot and webview issues today. Kudos to myself for digging through the webview code and server logs to find the issues. Not all solved, but enough for today :')

Lao and ye fixed, cleaned, cut, and wiped for a whole day. They waited till the kids are home, bid them goodbye, and left. Ella only reluctantly hugged them goodbye. But after door closed, she hugged me and whimpered that she didn't want姥姥姥爷 to leave. She recovered soon after. 

Lao lao left about 20 dumplings and the girls ate about 15. They then devoured 3-4 oranges each. 

I was too full and laid down to play some Pikmin. Ella took my phone while I managed my 2nd account. She came back and said something happened to my pot. I explained to her about walking to grow Pikmins, and the step counter on the pot. I wondered aloud how much she could grow by running around the room. She immediately ran around 4 times, she came back with 100 steps added :O I encouraged the girls to run around and they hatched a Pikmin each for Jam and me <3

We had NNAT, 85c bread, and I did Mimi's homework. She gave me a coloring sheet filled with boxes and letters. She asked me to fill the boxes with words and colors. We had fun discussing the words. Ella got mad that "you two only love each other." I offered to do her homework afterwards, and asked if she could wait. She said ok, calmed down, and suggested k for kumon. 

After coloring, I asked Ella which homework I should do, since she gave me two and I only had time for one. She picked a walk to grow Pikmin instead. We walked one loop around, both Jam and I leveled up! The girls said many cute things, in addition to wishing different ways of death to moth. There were many encouragement for the moth to go to the moon. Mimi: "I think midnight cookie is open." Ella: "I think they are not open because they open at midnight." Mimi: "oh yes they're not open." My question about what's midnight cookie was met with silence. Then Mimi asked: "In your memory, was Lily awake now?" ToT She usually was. 

9/7 - Wednesday

Work was pleasant with scroll problem figured out. So I spent some time upgrading gradle and java for the id portal embed project. Then at 5pm I was hit by a shared login request.

I picked up the girls from the Y and left Jam to attend curriculum night. The girls ate well. Ella was picking corn off the cob one by one. I commented that she might not finish before Jam comes back, which was my rule for getting dessert. She got whiny, but calmed down after some hugs. I picked off all the corn for her. The girls asked for tofu pudding for dessert. I gladly gave. 

When Jam came back I left the girls to him, and crammed on the shared login request. Luckily the app name code was not hard to find, although I still can't run the darn sample. I just did enough to show some progress. After many slack chats I finally found out from Eric Q the official name of POW is World of Hereos. I was still not sure why it didn't have a Marvel prefix in the name, but felt too bad asking Eric again at night, World of heroes it is.  

Jam got the homework instructions from jiang lao shi. Her Chinese homework is the same 马力平 homework as Ruyi, from last year XD

I watched $1 piano with Jam and the kids for the night. The video of demon slayer played on cat piano was too good!

Finished Ella's draw Edward homework.

9/8 - Thursday

Last night Ella came into our bedroom and yelled something like "I'm too scared there's no Amelia". Jam yelled "Amelia is here". While I tried to get Ella in the bed, I realized the bed was already crowded. I asked Ella if she'd like to cuddle in her room, she seemed to agree and started going away from the bed. I followed. I tucked her in, and laid on the bigger bed. She hugged 鲸 and 豚 together, and tucked them all inside the blanket. When Jam came to woke us in the morning, Ella grabbed my head and laid on my cheek. It was hard, but warm. She laid there for a while until Jam moved her downstairs. I followed soon after.

No calls from SRM. Can't stop thinking about which fertility clinic to go to next. In an effort to stop planning for something I might not need to plan for, I messaged on the portal. I got a call soon after. Turned out my nurse is out. I guess she's the only one responsible for communicating with me, with no backup. I have 4 embryos, which is one more than I ever had in a cycle. So far so good. Thanked Sabrina for the chicken essence and good thoughts :)

The girls loved my Edward. They kept asking me why is my Edward so cute. Later when managing my second account, I found a Pikmin named Edward. I seem to recall one time after I let the girls run around with Jam's phone and pluck whatever can be plucked, a girl asked "does he look like a Edward". And there was much laughter. 

The girls fought over who gets to do Chinese homework first because they both wanted to see the cartoon. They remembered the words and finished the homework so fast. Good job 姥爷 and 如意!

I found a drawing of Ella using 拼音 and depicting jiang lao shi's class. A few days ago I colored Rapunzel while she did NNAT. She asked why I didn't color Rapunzel's skin. I said I don't have the skin color pencils. She said 我们有。And wrote "you/" on my Rapunzel page. I decided to not be picky on the tones, it's good enough she's interested! Then after every few NNAT questions she tried to write some 拼音 for 有皮肤颜色.  

At night Mimi ran downstairs and asked if I'd like to see a full moon. I ran upstairs with her. It was almost a full moon. 姥爷 messaged me earlier that it'll be 中秋 on Saturday. Mimi: "look at the moon! It's behind the tree! It's like a cheese! I think there's a little planet on the side!" I squeezed Ella for a while on the bed while she puffed me. As I left the room Mimi said: "I think I'm literally in love with Sophie because she's so cute." Aww. Earlier I helped the girls each write a note to ask a friend over to a playdate. They both picked Sophie. All for the best, I'm sure a note will be lost. Ella wrote down "tell my mom", and my email. When it was Mimi's turn she asked "shouldn't it be tell your mom?!" I explained it's more like "tell your mom to tell my mom when you're coming over". She decided to just write a huge "tell your mom".  

9/9 - Friday

Ventured into installing and debugging Venus. Took ~3 minutes trying to shoot one ball in the night for the tutorial. As I was almost giving up, I got it in. Then took many more minutes ducking and dunking  and figuring out the app to finally be able to load my Niantic profile. Am impressed by the animation and art. Games these days are so well made. There is no female character though?! I guess makes sense cause it's NBA, but just figured it would somehow be made gender neutral, oh well.

We went to 10 seconds to celebrate the end of the week. Jam spent most of the time calming a trantrumy Mimi. 

I needed to get more panties and socks for the girls, so we hit up Target. The girls were wild. Jam splurged on a weapon in preparation to spray Arman. 

We did NNAT. Then I took a walk to see the moon with Ella, as Mimi said no to going with us. Ella said she saw a shooting star. I saw a streak too, but not sure if it was Ella running her flashlight through my eyes, or shooting star. Ella was super excited and we hug puffed. Ella excitedly told Mimi after, which triggered some anger, but she calmed down quickly and both went up to play.

I made Jam demonstrate his strong muscles, and bring down a bookcase. I organized kids's books. We congratulated ourselves with a video of key and peele eating hot wings.  

I spend the rest of the night trying futilely to prune my todo list to a realistic length. Right after 12:30 I got an oncall alert for GAR, for the first time :O It got resolved immediately by the tool. I decided to abandon my pruning and go to bed.

9/10 - Saturday

Ran into Aisha's dad at the dentist. He said hi to me first, despite looking shy when we meet on school walks. We had a brief chat about the kids. Sounds like Aisha's doing well in new class :)  

I took some time at the library playing pokemon, thinking I'd go to The third place in person to order, since their online order wasn't working. After my just shy of an hour (:O) poke craze, I realized the restaurant might be gone. So pivoted to order from spicy city. Jam immediately got a confirmation message since his phone is the one associated with my ordertogo account, and messaged me his excitement :) I refreshed, and the wait time showed 45min :') I went to Yifang first. Turned out I got the Yifang open time wrong too. Somehow I thought they had moved back to opening at 11:30a. No they still open at noon. I drove to spicy city hoping to talk to someone about speeding up the order, found no parking. I headed back to Yifang, they're open and have boba yay. The tea and boba was great and I headed back to Spicy city. A space opened up! The food was ready soon after and I headed back to the car. By then two cars had blocked me on the very narrow road of the parking lot. One had only a kid in the backseat, the other had the driver walking loops around his big van. I worried as I looked for a stable places to pin the takeout in the car. After I put away the food safely, managed my pokemon and pikmin, took a couple sips of bubble tea, started to sweat in the heat, the car with the kid moved away. I did not see if it was by the kid. I managed to back up and squeeze through the crack between the van and other parked cars. The van driver peeked at me from the head bumper (afraid I'd hit his meat body?). I got home and found two kids who've apparently been fed by Ruyi and been ignoring Jam since coming home. And a Jam who thankfully isn't starved, and had made rice. We feasted. I didn't realize the dry pot had buttholes (大肠) and both dishes I ordered was spicy. Regardless we feasted until we were exploding.     

The kids had a great time at Ruyi's learning Chinese and making oreo mooncakes.

We had barely half an hour to digest, before heading to Jumanji at Sunrise. It was so hot. We were all drenched in sweat by the time we got to the school. The girls were shy, but seemed to have fun and got all their activity stamps. We couldn't find the Cheetah at the playground to complete one of the tasks and it caused some stress for the girls, they really wanted to get their stamps. The chattiful Jam was able to find out from xiao xiao's friend that "there's something about the Cheetah" and "just talk to the person at the table". We did and found out the Cheetah was poached. By some kid.  

The reptile man's show was a lot of fun. We aren't sure if the reptile man was the same man we met at a MSFT party few years ago, but the reptiles are definitely the same reptiles. The MSFT party had no show though. His show was fun and he's a good presenter. The girls had been asking me if I knew that Mrs Brie's sister got peed on by the reptile man's crocodile (sometimes "did you know Mrs Brie's sister got peed on by the reptile man?"). Of course I didn't, and couldn't recall from the MSFT party about his crocodile peeing. As soon as the reptile man pulled out Lucy the crocodile, she peed. And despite the reptile man insisting the pee "had no germs, you don't have to disinfect it", the PTA staff disinfected the floor at least 3 times. I found a chance after Lucy took another pee on a boy and got some photos.

I got new full metal and one piece books from the library. The girls settled by the bookshelf and flipped and flipped. They told me Luffy is "so rude" because he told chopper to "shut up and join us." I was able to peel them away to do NNAT eventually. 

We attempted to find the moon at night, no luck. Today was so smokey, Jam was getting sick from it. Ella: "we can still have mooncake if there is no moon. Don't be sad I can draw a moon for you." it is true, We still had a lot of fun eating mooncake and watching 鼻妹 at night. And she drew me moon and mooncake.

Update: Mimi's recount from school small moment

9/11 - Sunday

We went to E's for my birthday party! After getting a coffee as usual from E and looking around for oreo for a bit. Mimi pulled me close and whispered to me "mom your birthday party is boring". I encouraged her to find something fun, referring to oreo. There were many balloons, girls happily kicked, but Jam was anxious and yelled at them to stop. Which was righteous since E's home had many nice things, but made the girls grumpy. We quickly finished our caffeine and went to discover park to burn off some energy. The park is beautiful as usual. The girls picked and ate many blackberries. I had some too, couple sweet, many deceptively soft but so sour. Jam discovered a nice tree spot to rest and take some photos.

After coming back we had movie, sparkles, cake, and celebration. So grateful to have E & R as friends! After we got home, the girls both told me separately that my bday party was really fun. Being tickled by E and watching King Triton stumble on parenting was hard on Jam, but he survived :')

We did Chinese homework in the evening. At one point Mimi gave me the pad, I thought she said it was Ella's turn. I was confused why there was no checkmark on her homework, so I pushed the video to the end and finished it. Mimi was distraught, she only meant for me to call Ella to watch together. I apologized. Mimi cried "you always leave me behind and go with Ella, I never saw the shooting star and the nurse log." I reminded her she was the one who didn't want to go. She yelled "No!" Ella passed by and said cutely "remember you said you didn't want to come with us." Mimi yelled "No!" I reiterated that she was the one who decided. She got more teary and turned silent. I asked her if she wanted to watch the video. She said no. I asked Ella to watch without her. Ella said "no that's not fair, Mimi missed it so she has to watch with me." I asked Ella to ask Mimi. Mimi said no. Ella said "ok", and went to the couch to watch the video. I started doing Mimi's hair, then felt bad, and pushed her to watch the video with Ella. Mimi didn't need much pushing and walked quickly to the pad. The girls ended up watching the video twice because it took a long time for me to do their hair. Both girls were very happy afterwards. I apologized for not realizing Mimi didn't mean "I didn't want to watch video", but "I didn't want to watch video when mama's mean". I asked her to remind me if it happens again. She can use code word "nurse log".

My finished homework

At night Mimi came down, said: "we have a thing in our bedroom". "hint, it's made of paper." Ella: "don't tell her". They eventually came down after midnight and gave me a little pocket. I found out Monday that it was birthday cards. They asked Jam for paper and made him do one too :O