Thankful Tuesdays: January's Joys

Junior J has started teething again.  At least I think he is, since he has all the symptoms (frequent night wakings, crankiness, lots of drool, lots of biting and gnawing).  And its making him lose his appetite again, going by the amount of solids he's eating these days.  Either that, or he's mastered a new skill (of spitting his food out with a loud "plbbbbtttt!") and is enjoying practicing the skill (especially when he gets all sorts of reactions from his Mama when he does that).  

We took over an hour to get him to eat his dinner when we went out yesterday, and that was after the boy got carried for the second half of the meal to be walked around the restaurant (while coming back to the table for mouthfuls of food in between).  He even managed to spill a cup of green tea on his Papa along the way.  SIGH.  And if it couldn't get worse, we ended up paying $4 for ERP because we went to town during the peak period.  And the icing on the cake was... klutzy me dropped our 17-55 mm lens when we were out, and the lens BROKE.  :(

So I must say truthfully I'm finding it a little difficult to be thankful today after such a terrible day yesterday.  But we are supposed to give thanks in all circumstances... So I guess we can at least give thanks for the stuff that's happened in January:

Sunrise at Alishan, Taiwan

1. Of course, topping of our list would be that very nice 2 weeks break, when we went to Taiwan and had a good time as a little family!  

2. Hubby's sister and brother-in-law visiting us just after our trip.  It was nice catching up with them over the weekend...

Photo by: Ampulets (Again, our friend Uncle Monster was nice enough to help us take all the birthday party shots!)

3. Baby J's birthday: We decided not to throw a big birthday bash for him, and opted to have small celebrations with different groups of friends instead. We wanted to spend more time hanging out with people instead of having to bounce between various groups friends while trying to entertain a large crowd, so we had a small party for the boy on the actual day, and dinner with my parents after that.  Since it was a small do, we ended up settling the menu on our own instead of catering, and it was pretty fun trying to get all the yummy stuff together, like the cheese platter and cakes (the godparents were a great help there!)... I also finally got to break out my fondue pot, and my mum made a huge doggy jelly instead of the usual birthday cake:

And we huff and we puff... (Photo by: Ampulets)

The boy also had fun playing with his new playmate Z (who's 3 months younger than him), whose parents are back from Australia!  Its really nice to have another mother in our bible study group (all the other mothers are overseas due to work or studies... )!

Baby J with his new-found friend... (Photo by: Ampulets)

4. My permit for catching crabs for my dissertation has been approved, so I can finally go ahead with my experiments!

5. We just attended a first month celebration for my friend's baby, J.E, and it was nice meeting up with my friend after such a long time (the last time we met, both of us were not pregnant yet!).

6. We're headed back to Penang for Chinese New Year, and one of our friends kindly agreed to take care of our doggy! Thank God... 

Yup, I must say you always feel better after counting your blessings. :)  Hope everyone has had a better week than us so far!