cricket hunting

So last night, as I was peacefully lying in bed with my husband and was in the very beginning stages of my very blissful, precious sleep when I hear a cricket! No, not a cricket outside of my house, but one inside! The noise of the chirping cricket had me fully awake. So Josh and I made some noise to see if it would stop because last time we had a cricket thats all we had to do to go back to sleep and then I found the cricket the next morning when it jumped at me from my laundry pile! But noise did not work! It did quiet down the darn thing for 15 minutes, enough for me to start to fall asleep again, but then it woke me up with its ever so annoying chirping! 

So about an hour after Josh and I had gone to bed we both got up and were sneaking around our apartment to find this damn cricket! Ugh! We ended up finding it close to out bathroom snugged up between the wall and a shoe, so Josh just pushed the shoe up against the wall in hopes to kill the thing... but it did not work! No, the darn cricket had to jump away into our bedroom. Ugh. So my hubby takes another shoe and throws it at the bug but again it did not work. So I was annoyed, I wanted to go back to sleep, so I took the shoe and got nice and close to the evil bug and gave it three good whacks on the head. R.I.P. damn cricket! 

Ah... back to my peaceful sweet slumber... 

Not quite. No, not at all. I got woken up again at 4:30AM by another damn cricket! Ugh! This time it did not wake up my husband so I had to go cricket huntin' all by myself. This time the bug was in our entry way and this one was not so easy to kill... it kept jumping around and freaking me out! But alas... R.I.P. damn cricket #2.

and he's off!

Today Gabriel took his very first independent steps and started walking! YAY!!!! We were so excited and had a big commotion when it happened! Gabriel had been very daring all day long, so when Josh came home I said lets try this walking thing again. So I held onto Gabriel until his got his balance and off he walked over to where Josh was! It was so cute! 

I knew this day was close. Gabriel has been wanting to walk for awhile. He would push off of things and see how long he could stand without holding on to anything. He also has been looking at things that he wants that are out of his reach and you could tell that he was just contemplating how to get there! So now he's walking!

Unfortunately we didn't get it on camera and Gabriel was too crabby to do it too many times (he's teething AGAIN)! But we're working on it, we're going to try again before bedtime! 

Video's

These two video's are just a few minutes of our every day lives! One of them is just when Josh took Gabriel out and the other is when both of us took him out! We didn't do much but this is our little test run. If you can actually watch these then I'll probably be putting more up over time!Enjoy!

Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns

So I recently bought the book A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. 

The book is about two women born and raised in Afghanistan and it goes through their lives over a period of 30 years. I have to say that the book is rather depressing. If you want a book that gives you a true look into what some women go through in Afghanistan and in the Muslim world then this is a good book. If you want a book that will give you a brief overview of the history of Afghanistan over the past thirty years and what the people had to go through with all the invasions, then this is a good book. If you don't want to be slightly depressed and you don't want to sit there and yell at some of the characters then this is not your book. The writer also has a very unique style of writing. I've never read a book quite like his before. He does make it work for him but a lot of his writing is almost like he is stating facts instead of telling a story. The first 2/3 of the book he was able to state facts in a story telling way, but the last 1/3 of the book I felt like he just wanted to be finished and was throwing stuff on the page.

Overall I think that it is a good book, but I don't think that it is for everybody. It was good enough for me to finish in two days and I still think about the characters and the things that they went through... but I personally wouldn't go buy it again. It might be one of those books that you borrow from the library, but not to spend $20 on. 

Sunday

I almost forgot to tell you what we did on Sunday! We went to Seoul! 

Gabriel and I woke up on Sunday morning and ate our breakfast and got going. We let Josh sleep in a bit as it was his day off. I ended up putting Gabriel down for his morning nap early because we wanted to take the 10:30 train and I knew there was a chance that Gabriel wouldn't sleep very well while we were out so I wanted him to get as much as he could before we left! I did end up having to wake Josh up and we both got ready to leave for Seoul. Poor little Gabriel had to be woken up from his nap before we left and get his diaper and clothes changed before we threw him in the backpack and headed out the door.

We were cutting it close when we left the house and hoped that we wouldn't be late catching the train. We had to wait for our taxi as usual and then the driver drove us to the train and told us that we had two minutes to catch the train. We were freaking out a little and when I ran up to the ticket booth I heard the faint sound of the train and the announcer stating that the train was now approaching. I told Josh to run for the train while I finished paying for the ticket. It's kind of a long way to run for the train. They are doing construction at our train station so the place that we have to hop on the train is down a long path way, over some wooden planks serving as floor boards, over three train tracks, and down the long platform. We ended up hopping on the very last train car just before the train pulled away and then we walked from car to car before we found our seats and relaxed (as much as you can with a baby) the rest of the way to Seoul.

When we got to Seoul we had to hop on the subway and made our way to Samseong so we could check out a place called COEX Mall. The subway can be very crowded sometimes, to the point of where you are standing shoulder to shoulder, face to face and it can be very hot, other times it's like this and you actually have a chance to sit down or at least have something to hold on too. If you ever forget which subway ling you are on, all you have to do is look at the floor and see what color the line is that runs through, this is the green line #2! Oh, and if you looks closely you can see what I was talking about when I said Koreans can sleep anywhere, there is a few in this picture!

We had never been to COEX before but we had heard about it from a few different people and we were told it was a good place to shop. Before we went shopping though we had to get a bite to eat so we could feed Gabriel. We stopped at the first food place we saw which happened to be KFC and sat down. They didn't have high chairs so Gabriel got to sit on one of the cushioned seats next to the wall and got his own table, he thought it was pretty fun and was happy as a peach!

We then went into COEX. It was just like any other really big mall. They had a lot of stores with nice clothes but we found most of it to be really expensive. We did find a HUGE bookstore though! We were pretty excited about that! It was bigger then any Barnes and Nobles that I've ever seen! They had a huge foreign children's section where we got Gabriel a few books for his birthday and a rather large foreign adult section too where I was able to get a book for myself! I think I could have spent a couple of hours in there but I forced myself to leave after picking out my book.

We then made our way to Gangnam station where there is an underground shopping center. They had much cheaper clothes there and I was able to get a cute dress and a shirt/dress (Koreans would probably where it as a dress, I wear it as a shirt). Underground shopping is kind of weird because most places don't have a place for you to try stuff on and it's just kind of subway tunnels with people setting up shops on the side. Next time I'll have to take a picture, I forgot this time. But they did sell shoes, clothes, food, purses, earrings, really anything you wanted. 

After we went to Gangnam we were pretty tired and decided to head home. When we got back to the train station we found out that we had to run down to catch that train as well. It wasn't cutting it as close as the first time, I think we had five minutes to catch that train but it was also a lot further to walk then the station in Yongmun! Oh well!

Gabriel never ended up taking a nap that day except the morning one. He found looking around far more interesting... but he did look like this most of the day...

... aimlessly staring off into space because he was tired. I have to say that he did pretty well even without an afternoon nap. He did get crabby after we got home, he found a lot of stuff to cry about. If he dropped his toy, he cried. If he fell over, he cried. If mama said 'no', he cried. It was kind of sad! Usually he does sleep when we go out, even if it's just in the backpack, but for some reason he did not feel the need for it on Sunday. Poor little guy!

Anyway, that was our Sunday! We're hoping that Josh doesn't have to work this weekend but we think he may have to. If he does then that means that I have to go into Seoul by myself with some people at the school and go to Costco by myself since we are in need of a few things... it's not a very fun trip with Gabriel! I did it once before and said I would never do it again... we'll see about that I guess, I hope I don't have to!