I am away from my own stuff and in another part of the world discovering new stuff during this holiday with my hubby and kids. But I will update my post as soon as I return. I swear I will. Happy Holidays guys.
XOXO
HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE.
TRICK OR TREAT.
I have to admit that halloween is so much more fun when you have kids. This will be the first time for Milo to go trick or treating. His cousins are coming over and we shall attack our neighbors’ treats after pizza dinner and my homemade pumpkin cupcakes with my special made cupcake toppers! I hope most of the candies will be nut free (Milo is highly allergic to peanut).
Oh. I almost forgot. Milo decided to be Muno for Halloween this year. It took him about 15 other different costumes before coming to this decision. You don’t know who Muno is? Well, not many do for some reason. When people ask him who he is, this is how the conversation goes:
Person: “Who are you?”
Milo would quickly replied with his hands up in the air: “I am Muno, the one eye monster from Yo Gabba Gabba!”
Person: “Oh?!”
Milo always ends his descriptions by saying: ” It’s kind like dancing around in a movie theater.”
And with that, the Person who has no idea what Milo is dressed as gets even more confused and would just smile and slowly walks away.
Milo’s vision teacher at Early Start thinks his costume is too perfect for him because of the one eye. We love it and he is so proud!
Matilda was going to wear the pumpkin outfit that Milo had for his first halloween but then the day before her halloween parade at Early Start I realized that it was too small. I went and got her a bumble bee costume instead.
seriously guys. autumn is my most favorite season. its the perfect weather for fashion, at least in my book, its the beginning of all the wonderful holidays and the colors of autumn is pretty rocking too. i always miss living in the east coast around this time with the foliage and the sounds of my feet crunching the leaves. it all sounds so wonderful but guess what people, AUTUMN HAS NOT ARRIVED YET!!!! and this year i better get it because autumn cheated on me last year and i will never forget. i am ready for my boots-tights-wearing-and-much-layering-but not necessarily a winter coat wearing weather. this household has been ready for you since summer, SO get going and push that heat loving summer out of your way.
thank you very much.
in april and may, milo had tired a prosthesis scleral shell and they both failed horribly. the first time only lasted one day and the second time he had it for about a month but it was a bad month and he ended up with a bad cornea infection. you can go here and here and here and here for more detailed postings.
we recently went to meet with another ocularist to see if he would be a better match for milo after discussing the matters with milo’s opthamologist. just to clarify, our first ocularist was a super nice guy and i dont want to give the impression that he is bad in any way. he did come highly recommended to us but sometimes you are just not compatible. this new ocularist we saw was very nice as well and we told him about milo’s history of scleral shell and what our concerns are. we left feeling confident and milo will get his impression of his third trial of a prosthesis scleral shell in november. i am already anticipating the anxiousness of it all and also we were informed that we should take it out of milo’s eye every night or every other night. EEK!
to prepare him, i have been showing milo how i take out my contacts (or shells is the term i used for him) every night and how it tickles my eyeballs and its not scary at all. i remind him that a new big boy shell will have to be place back in his big boy’s eye. so far, his reactions has been positive. fingers crossed you guys, i really hope this will work out. i dont want to see my little milo to be suffering like last time.
if anyone out there would like to know more in details about my experiences with the ocularists and who they are, please email me and i will tell you as much as you want.
and to our first ocularist: thank you. you are nice but because we love our little milo, we have no choice but to try another ocularist because we cannot see him suffer again and maybe his eye and you are not meant to be. this is hard because its a small eye world and i am sure we will cross path again. all our best to you.
(i honestly believe that he kind of figure out that we will find someone else because of the bad experiences milo had from talking with him at milo’s recent EUA.)
p.s. i am always so thankful that we live in the awsum SF Bay Area because we actually have the choice to go see another top rocking ocularist.
i met this lady friend via my supergood friend a little bit ago and when we got to talking and liking one another, she had asked me to make her an illustration of her MR CAT. it took me awhile but i never forgot and i finally did it and pretty happy with it. i have never met MR CAT but this is what MR CAT looks to me based on his awsum rocking master (a.k.a my new lady friend).
i shall and am calling this piece of work, THIS IS A BEGINNING OF A BEAUTIFUL RELATIONSHIP VIA MR CAT.
MEOW TO YOU, MR.CAT.
milo and matilda’s ECE school had their annual BBQ this past week and everyone is asked to bring something to share. this year i decided to make Giada De Laurentiis’s chocolate chip and mascarpone cupcakes. i did not have time to do a test run and my theory is that its chocolate and you probably cant really tell if its too bad. i decided to make cute little cupcake toppers to go with it and if the cupcakes turn out to be bad, maybe the cuteness of the toppers would distract the people from the bad taste. but really, i have been trying to incorporate all my creativity and love of making and drawing into everyday things. i must admit that i was overly excited for this project and finally had an excuse to buy tons of circle and scallop punches . i went to Paper Source to get them but they had sold out on their last circle punch. i ended up going to Michaels and they were on sale so i got even more punches than planned. whenever i go to Michaels my head gets all crazee and my brain goes in all kind of directions because i get so many ideas and want to do a million zillion projects and want to buy all kinds of crazee sticker making/scrapbook making machines. i wish they would have a rent center for those things so i can actually try it out before making an actual purchase.i should call Michales and tell them to get on it.
milo and i did the cupcakes and the cupcake toppers and we had so much fun. instead of getting wooden picks for the cupcake holders i got these tiny bartender’s cocktail sippy straw things. they are just as thin as the wooden picks but i like how it has stripes on them and it goes with the stripe backgrounds on my illustration. the only thing i didnt care about and would like to figure out is to make some kind of pocket for the straw/wooden picks to avoid the little bump after putting on the illustration.
the cupcake actually turned out to be quiet delicious. everyone was pretty impressed when milo showed them what he had made. i kept thinking about how to transport my cupcakes the night before the BBQ and i ended up going to my local bakery asking for an empty cake box (thank you nice bakery lady!). i also got two disposable aluminum foil tray for the cupcakes to sit on and then placing that in the cake box. the aluminum foil tray worked well (even though it seems repetitive to have both) because without the foil tray the cake box is too flimsy and it was hard to balance the cupcake on someone’s lap or when carrying it.
p.s. – someone came up to me and told me that she really appreciate the i am nut free sign because she has a nut allergy. i told her that i appreciate her telling me and i like to announce it whenever i can since milo has a high nut allergy and its nice to know instead of asking or banning your child from the food. its just nice to make it known to the non nut allergy community because i was certainly not aware of this before milo.
p.p.s. – i enjoyed making the cupcakes and the toppers so much (well i really enjoyed toppers more and in order to make more i had to make more cupcakes) that i made more two days later for the friends we were visiting. this time i went to Whole Foods and they were kind enough to give me empty cupcakes holders to transport and i used Starbucks’s wooden stir (cut it in half) as the pick. thank you to the consuming world for letting me use your tools without even knowing.
and try the recipe people. its pretty darn good.
go outside tonight and look at the moon because its moon/mid autumn festival today. and if you like your mooncake, have one under the moon. i dont not like it nor do i really care for it. i have introduced the mooncake to friends before and out of all of them, theres only one that actually really likes them but she is under Berlin moon tonight. i think of her every mooncake day because i still cant believe she likes them.
XOXO.
summer has officially (kind of?)ended with the end of summer vacation and all the back to school sale being over. but weather wise, it is still summer warm here and i cannot wait for my favorite season to arrive. fall was a huge disappointment last year because it cheated on us and it never came. when fall does fall, it makes me miss living in the east coast with all the foliage and all the beautiful colors.
milo started his new preschool last week and it went off pretty well even if he missed his first day of school due to his scheduled EUA. speaking of his EUA, to our surprise and to his doctor, milo’s eye pressure was at 17 which is super good so he doesnt need surgery yet but as the doctor stated it wont be long before he grows out of his valve and need a replacement. at the same time, his occularist was there to take another impression of his left eye for his future sclera shell (so NOT looking forward to that again).
this is the second week of school for milo and he is there three times a week for about 4 hours each time and so far, he is liking his big boy school. his main teacher and his VI (vision impaired)teacher are super great. milo is doing pretty good with his potty training! a HUGE yeah.
matilda has her behavioral hearing test this friday and we will hopefully get a better idea as to how much hearing loss she has. she is sitting up very well on her own and is doing everything except for moving forward. she gets up on all fours all the time and i bet she will be crawling in no time.
as for stuff, this is all the update i have so far. i am just waiting for the weather to be fall so i can really look forward to the beginning of all the great holidays beginning with halloween. i am never a big fan of halloween but now that i have kids, i really do love it and its also a kick start to the upcoming wonderful holidays like turkey eating day and christmas. lets get it started people.
i was caught with the surprise visit of the flu last week. i had a fever for 4 straight days ranging nothing lower than 100.7 and as high as 105.5 people. it was golly awful, especially with the chill and the sweat. i went to the doctor on the evening of the third day and was told that i had the minor flu. i had no fever for one day and was so happy but then it came back for another full day. so, to this doctor of mine, this aint no minor flu because it is deadly serious and if this is minor, then i dont know what the hell is the flu because this totally kicks my ass and then some more.
i was trying to draw a picture of what i feel like after the worse part of my flu and this is what i came up with. i am pretty happy with it and for some reason, this IS what i feel like. i am still a bit congested and still has a sore throat but i think i send the big evil portion back to its home.
it was hard NOT to think about the kids when i was super sick but there were moments that i just had to let go and passed out. i was still nursing matilda since she refuses the bottles (she prefers her milk straight from her source). my mansomehandboy was great at being with the kids and taking care of me the whole time and doing all the errands that i usually do as well. i think it was harder for him to keep me in bed than anything since i was trying hard to find ways to do things and be with the kids. as of this moment, no one else has caught my awful not minor flu and it better stay that way.
i am going to do all the fun things i wanted to do last weekend this weekend. YIPPEEEE.
note to self: need to get my bangs trimmed.