One

Today Audrina turns one. I can't believe it's been a year already! She's grown so much and learned so many new things in the past year. We love having her in our family!

 

2 days old

2 months - Atlanta, Georgia

She's full of personality and very intrigued with new things. She can stand very well by herself, but is hesitant to take any steps. I think to date, she's taken a few steps about two or three times. She's almost got it figured out. I think she's a bit nervous about falling. I don't think it will be much longer before she really starts to walk
though.

6 weeks - Hawaii

6 months - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

She loves to play peek-a-boo and wrestle on the bed. She says mom, baby, and boo. A lot of times she'll try to repeat a word I'm telling her, but none of those words are audible clear. She likes to dance/head bang to music. She's very interested in trying the food we're eating and wants to feed herself. She doesn't like to get her hands dirty though. We celebrated her birthday with some of the other families here and she wouldn't touch her piece of cake.

9 months - Koh Phi Phi, Thailand

10 months - Siem Reap, Cambodia

11 months - Singapore

We'll have celebrated her birthday four times this year by the time we see all of our families. I don't think she'll mind. We look forward to the next year and all of the new things she'll learn.

We love you Audrina!

Mom & Dad

almost 1 year

10 Months

Audrina is 10 months old! She's growing so fast and learning so many new things. She has five teeth now and is working on her sixth. She has her two front bottom teeth, one front middle, and the two next to those. It's pretty funny seeing her teeth since she has a big gap!

Look how silly her top teeth look!

She crawls super fast and is into everything! Sometimes she gets going too fast and her arms can't keep up with her legs so she face plants. She's pulling up on everything and even lets go when standing for a bit. I don't think we're too far from having a walker on our hands.

She walks by pushing her high chair around!

I made this dress! It's so fun to see it on her.

She loves to open the cabinets and pull everything out. If you leave anything electronic out she'll find it and chew on it. She loves to play hide and seek on our bed. We throw the blankets over her and let her pull them off. She loves the pool so we try to go swimming as often as possible. And she loves people. She stands out here with her blonde hair and blue eyes so everyone has to stop to touch and talk to her. (She's going to have a great immune system after this.) She's always giving them big smiles and pointing her finger at them. They think it's great!

She makes lots of sounds and can be quite loud, but the only word we understand is mama or mom. She also says ba or aba a lot but we haven't figured out what that means.

She was done with pictures by this point!

She's a lot of fun! I can't believe she's ten months already. Next thing I know we'll be celebrating her first birthday!

Malaysian Wet Market

This past weekend Damien, Audrina, and I ventured to Chow Kit to see the wet market where the local Malays shop for food. It was a very eye opening experience! Here are some picture of what we saw.

*Disclaimer: Don't continue reading/looking if you're grossed out easily.

Produce section

I see these beans everywhere here. I'm not sure what kind they are though or how they use them.

 I think these are a type of large legume. 

 They have a ton of different peppers here.

Damien and I always wonder what this is when we see it.

Long beans, they're very long. 

We picked these next two fruits up while we were there. This one is a mangosteen. They are one of my favorite fruits here. They have a dark purple skin on the outside that you have to pull away from the delicate white-fleshed fruit.

This is what they call snake fruit. You can see why they call it that. The skin of the fruit looks like snake skin. They grow on palm trees, according to Wikipedia. We got some to try since this was the first time we'd seen this fruit. I would say the taste reminds me of hairspray and the texture is unlike anything I've ever tasted before. It's kind of coarse and very firm and crispy.

Now onto the disgusting part, the meat and poultry section of the market. 

They're really into dried fish here. The smell is horrible.

Snails.

More fish.

I think this is a water snake or some sort. They were still alive and moving around in this bucket.

 These catfish were huge! This guy was trying to catch one for someone to take home.

 After they catch it, they kill it at this station with a large knife.

 

  

 

More dried fish. This time it was just the head.

 

The beef section. This part grossed me out the most. I think that's cowhide on the left and tongues on the right.

Rolls of lard.

Cow heads. 

Poultry

Quail eggs. They're kind of cute looking with all their spots and how small they are. I've never tried one though so I don't know what they taste like.

I think this chicken was cooked in some sort of yellow spice or maybe it was just brined. Not sure!

 Desserts

 This guy was frying up some kind of breaded food.

Nothing like a day under the tents at the food market.

Poop

Damien was watching Audrina last night but he wanted to get on the computer so he put her in her room to play. She was being very quiet and so he went to check on her. He got in there and discovered she had tipped her trash can over and pulled a poopy diaper out. She had opened the diaper and was chewing on a poopy wipe!

Apparently when she saw him she knew she wasn't supposed to be doing that so she threw the wipe down and tried to look innocent. It gave me a good laugh because I just let him deal with it and get her and the floor cleaned up!

Kuala Lumpur

We moved to Malaysia in the middle of September. I can't believe we've been here almost three and a half months! We're enjoying our time here even though it is so different from the US. We've been trying to explore this part of the world since living here and that's led to some fun adventures.

One weekend towards the end of October we got to visit an elephant sanctuary. It helps rehabilitate elephants from the wild who have been left behind by their herd, hurt, or are bothering local villages. It was about a two hour drive out of town from KL and our first adventure out of the city.

We got to watch them bathe the elephants in the river.

We watched from this covered platform made of wood part of the time, but since the sanctuary is funded by donations it's not up kept very well. (Although most things in Malaysia aren't kept up.) While we were standing on the wooden platform, this woman walked by and the slat below one of her feet broke and her leg fell through part way.

After bathing them, the elephant keepers rode them up on stage to perform for us.

 

This one could balance on two feet.

 

And this one laid down to show us how they sleep.  

Next they let us feed the elephants. Besides the big elephants that put on the show for us, there were some smaller elephants that we got to feed too.

Damien picked up some butterscotch bread on our way up to the sanctuary so we fed that to them.

It was super hot and there were mosquitoes buzzing around but we had a fun time!