Monday, April 09, 2007

The Scary Korean Easter Bunny

Happy Easter!
Spring has finally arrived here in Korea. The cherry trees are almost finished blossoming. I pretty much missed a chance at getting a picture of those at their prime. It came earlier than I remember it coming from the last time I lived here. Unfortunately, with the beautiful cherry blossoms, comes the Hwang-Sa, or Yellow Dust/Sand. This stuff gets blown over the East China Sea from the Gobi Desert to the Korean peninula. It carries pollutants and if it's over 300 parts per million or whatever, all young children and elderly should stay indoors and drink lots of water. Well, last Sunday it was at 1300!!! The city is so polluted anyhow, this exacerbated it and made my throat some discomfort. Nasty. Anyhow, now it's a crew drill for us to check the levels every morning to know whether or not the boys can go to the park that day.

Here is a pic of the boys (Jimmy left/Joey right) and I on Palm Sunday after mass. All dressed up and not much of a selection of places to go on such a high Yellow Dust day!


Here we are that same night sporting some new summer PJs. These guys are just so darn happy - wish we had more relatives to share them with! With every stage I think that I will miss something from the previous one, that this can't get better,. but they are learning so much now (like how to undo child-proof drawer latches...JOEY!) that it is amazing.

As promised, the scariest, most ghetto Easter Bunny you have ever seen! Oh well... I was shocked that they weren't afraid of him/it. The boy before us just screamed - I saw no reason to blame the child. This was the only Bunny in town!
Jimmy, who is apparently more urban than we'd prefer, keeping his hands as far from that prickly spring grass as possible --- ewwwwwwww! We will have to start exposing these boys to the grass more so as to not get them used to only asphalt, marble and hardwood surfaces. When we rotate back to the states, they will have to learn what wall-to-wall carpeting is, too.
Joey going from beginner toddler to intermediate toddler. This was his first exposure to uneven terrain. He also prefers to walk without shoes, so he's working on getting over these challenges!

We are looking forward to Jim's parents coming to visit the first two weeks of May. It will be awesome to share the boys with them, and it's great that they are willing to come half-way across the world to visit all of us over here. All six of us will go to China to see the Forbidden City (Beijing), the Great Wall, to buy a set of Callaway clubs for $100 and see what their Peking Duck is all about ... not in order of priority!!!