Helloooo World, I've arrived!

After 9 1/2 hours of labor and 45 mins of pushing, little Ella Penelope Young joined our family on April 20th, 2009 at 4:30 am. She debuted at 7 lbs 8oz, 21 inches, and with a full healthy set of lungs. She was also very curious of her new surroundings and starting looking around right away.


This was the next 24 hours. Mostly sleeping and the occasional dirty diapers.


At 3 days old, Ella was eating more and spent a little more time just looking around.

Herbs in a can

I got these coffee from Cafe Du Monde last year in New Orleans, and had wanted to use them for herb planting ever since. Finally, all of the coffee have been consumed (or dumped in my flowerbed). We now have basil, pepermint, and cilantro at our fingertips.

Baby Cakes

Recently I've received 2 very special cakes for welcoming Ella. Both are made by extremely creative individuals and are very original and unique.

This Beautiful cake is made from all diapers! It was given to me by my friend Shirley. A very impressive creation for a first timer!! Thanks! We love it :)


This little garden themed cake was made by a very talented co-worker, Angie. Her hobby is to make cupcakes and boy is she GOOD! I thought it was fake at first glance. I brought it home to share with some friends and family after dinner that night and everyone were equally amazed by the appearance and the taste!

New toys for parents to be

Besides busy preparing for the baby, we've also been searching for new toys for ourselves. Didn't want all the toys to just go to Ella.

We purchased a new camera to capture all those upcoming special moments. It was a toss up between the Canon G10 (which Martha swears by) and this beautifully made Panasonic Lumix. We decided on this camera because of its ability to take beautiful photos in low light conditions, which is perfect for a newborn, and its compactness. We've always had somewhat bulky cameras, but now with the baby coming, it'll be much easier to toss this into the bag and go. Of course, it's beautiful retro design (classic rangefinder cameras of the 40's -60's) and the Leica case that happens to be compatible was a huge deciding factor. Afterall, who can escape vanity?? The big plus is that it takes wide angle lenses, which is a big plus when shooting indoors.


Another toy we've been keeping an eye on is a turntable. Our last one broke down a couple of years ago, and we haven't been able to listen to all our vinyls since. Tim found this used Bang & Olufsen on Craigslist for a really really good bargain, so we had to have it. This timeless design of clean and simple lines of brushed aluminum and wood accents is appropriate today as it was in the early 80's.


Now that we're both satiated with our new toys, we can focus on being selfless parents (or parents to be) at least for a while.

home improvement projects

Tim's been busy working on a few home improvement projects before the arrival of our little one. Here are just a couple.

We decided to change our front door to a full glass door to bring in more light into our hallway. It really made a huge impact! I couldn't get used to it at first. I kept wanting to go and close the front door. The amount of light that comes through now is very refreshing. We love it! Here's what the door looked like originally. As you can see, it's really dark inside.


We can now see the plants on the shelfs in the tunnel entrance.


And Sherbu gets to welcome us home.


Another challenging project was retiling the fireplace. This was how the original fireplace looked. Very 1980s.


We wanted to take away the eye sore of a screen and revamp the tiles.

Voila! The new tiles have a slate like texture and we think the mosaic adds a little more interest than the original square tiles. We were also very lucky that our friends who are moving to Hong Kong have been kind enough to give us their fireplace screen.