I Heart Faces / Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes...

This week's challenge is Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes...basically a picture of a subject where the focus is not on his face.

This picture was taken on our vacation to Phuket.  We were on an elephant ride and the Mahout was demonstrating on himself how he guides the elephant - by gently tapping near the back of their ears with the pole.

Grocery Shopping and Barricades

Whenever we go grocery shopping in at our north plaza Ethan always wants to monkey around with the barricade they set up in the parking lot.  He likes to climb them and walk along the top (holding our hand of course!).  This parking lot has been in construction for almost a year now.  They do one design then keep changing the layout and since the parking spaces are built into the brick pattern that involves tearing up and relaying down the bricks.  It's like the Big Dig of Discovery Bay.

At the store E now helps out by pushing our cart for us.  Child labor alert! 

 

I posted the last picture before but I love how he lights up when sees the barricades.  It's the simple things in life that make us happy.

I Heart Faces Fix-It-Friday #87

I haven't done one of these in a while but this image was too cute. It's such a precious moment to hold a newborn in your arms!

Original Image:

Color Edit via Lightroom:

I cropped slightly, increased exposure, increased blacks, decreased red saturation.  Used preset PHSoftandDreamy by Preset Heaven.  Cloned out parts of t-shirt still visible.  Evened out exposure by increasing exposure on the left arm.  That was it!  On second view I think I should have turned down the redness a bit more.  Oh well.

B&W Edit:

Converted to grayscale.

Sneak Attack!

Looks so innocent.  Just a boy with his dad and a happy yellow balloon.

Until....

he nonchalantly attacks you with it!

 

Going in for another one - this time with serious intent!  Poor unsuspecting Dad.

Valentine's Day

Bob and I went out to eat last night for V-day.  I think it is a bigger holiday here in HK than in USA.  It was really hard to find a place for dinner.  Most restaurants have special set menus for the day and are booked way in advance.  They also require you to pre-purchase a voucher for dinner in person or if you use credit card you have to fax and sign back a form.  That was too much hassle for us so we just ate here in DB since it was easy to pre-pay in person.  There were sooo many people who ferried it over to DB from HK Island.  All the couples were carrying around huge bouquets of flowers that were trimmed with fur and feathers. 

We had dinner at Zak's.  The food was okay, but nothing really special. We had a fun night out though!

Smoked salmon on naan.

Mushroom soup with a pesto heart.

Norwegian salmon.

Beef tenderloin.

Chocolate cake with ice cream.

Being goofy with our drinks.

Tai Pak beach had a heart display made of candles.  It was pretty to see and nice to stroll on the beach among the candles.

As a promotion those who had dinner out got free ferry tickets back to HK island and also this heart stuffed animal which is also like a hand muff.  We might have also stopped by for a midnight snack at McD.

All in all it was a fun night out!

I Heart Faces / Red

He makes my heart happy.



Needle Felting, Ducks, Kisses and V-Day

nee∙dle felt∙ing \ne-dl fel-tin\:  The art of making objects out of wool roving and a needle.

For V-day I thought I would try my hand at crafting a duck for Ethan since he loves all things duck.  It turned out okay I think.  I'm not too sure how to attach the parts together so I just tried to needle felt the head to the body.  We will see how that will hold up.  Ethan liked it at least!

Cuddle Time!  Bob sneak attacked E while we were taking pictures.

Vintage scrunchie face.  And yes, E is wearing my down jacket.

And kisses.  It's hard to tell from the video but E stopped making the 'Muah' noise when kissing and now makes this vacuuming noise instead.  He cracks me up.

And this is what I woke up to this morning!  A cute note from my sweet guys.  Bob says E was insistent on using brown for the heart.

Happy Valentine's Everyone!

Our weekend

We had three days off last week for CNY, so it was like a 5 day weekend.  Yay!  Here is what we did.

We toured the decorations that were displayed in our neighborhood. 

 We played dress-up:

Ethan wearing Mommy's shoes.

And scarf.


We went to Inspiration Lake (Recreational park that is part of Disneyland):
 

To get there we rode the MTR.  Which is Ethan's favorite activity.  He LOVES riding public transportation.

We played at the playground at Inspiration Lake.

We were going to rent either the paddle boats or a bike to ride around the lake but ran out of time.  Instead we had a nice picnic on the grassy hills.  Side note: Ethan loves smoked salmon and brie.  Just like Daddy.

We went on a trip to Mui Wo, which is a rustic town on the eastern coast of Lantau Island:

To get there we rode the ferry.


View of Discovery Bay from the boat.

Alternatively you can hike there from Discovery Bay.  It's a hilly 2 hour hike (which in my opinion is 2 hours too long  =).  Bob on the other hand likes to run there as part of his long runs.  Crazy!) and along the way you pass the Trappist Haven Monastery. You can see the steeple in the hills.  The Trappist Monastery is known for making the cream rich Trappist milk, although the farms no longer are located here and have been relocated within the New Territories.

Modeling for mommy.

Love the colorful bikes you can rent here.

Part of Silver River flows down this canal.  We spent the better part of an hour running back and forth along one of the bridges crossing the canal as Ethan sang 'London Bridge'.  It was like a dream come true for him.

They have a wet market here where you can purchase fresh local produce and seafood.

Dragon boats along Silvermine Beach.

The real reason we went to Mui Wo.  All our friends raved about Bahce, a Turkish restaurant, which we had to try.  We had a mix of hot and cold mezze and some beef kofta.  It was pretty yummy.

Although he was willing to try the a lot of the food, Ethan really only liked the olives and slices of lemon.  He preferred to just color.

I only took this picture since it features Turkish Delight, which I've only heard about since it is mentioned in The Chronicles of Narnia.  Alas, we were too stuffed to try any of the desserts.

Waiting for the ferry back to DB.  Uh-oh.  Bob decided to snack on Ethan's head.

Goofing off on the boat ride back.  Ethan likes to make funny faces.

This picture cracks me up.  It reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where George takes those racy pictures in that velvet chaise.