Trip out to the Blue Bell Creamery & Bluebonnets

The state flower of Texas is bluebonnets.  And they are in season!!  We saw fields and patches of these on our trip out to… the Blue Bell Creamery!  It was spring break week so we didn’t realize that there would be a LOT of people!

The moms chatted.

This is the line accentuated with green color.

Max seemed like he was born & ready for Navy!

And they had their own moonwalks!!  But it was too hot to jump in them!!

And the family picture… wish I could’ve taken pictures of the inside… but 1) it wasn’t permitted and 2) there wouldn’t have been anything inside worth shooting.  The entire tour was a rather disappointing half hour or so.  I was hoping for more up-close-and-personal but oh well.  It wasn’t a total loss because …

These yellow flowers were EVERYWHERE!!  About 4 miles south of Brenham on 290 was this vast HUGE field of yellow flowers!!!  They were wild!!

And now onto the … bluebonnets!

And let us end with this shot of Soojin “trying” to jump into the air!  😀

Strawberry Picking Fun

I originally hoped to take the family up to Dallas to see friends and sightsee… but with the Shuttle mission of STS-119 being delayed and launching on Sunday, that had to be canceled.. or at least postponed.  So I started looking into things you can do around Houston area.  You’d be quite surprised at how many things there are to do!  One of those is fruit picking!  It just so turns out that there are lots of farms around the greater area of Houston that let’s you PYO (Pick Your Own).  Great website to look into that is PickYourOwn.org and it lists by counties and/or metropolitan areas!  For Houston area, look here.  It turned out that only one nearby farm offered PYO strawberry:  Froberg Vegetable & Fruit Farm.


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At $1.50 per pound, you can’t beat that!  So off we went.  Younhe’s kids, Pastor Shawn’s kids, and Alison’s family all went!  And here are the pictures to prove it!  Kids sure seemed to have fun.  It was great to get out.  Starting in May, blueberries go in season!  😉  ’nuff talking.  Here are the pictures.

JJ enjoying the picking…

And the group picture to finish it off…  🙂

Father to Son Bonding Time Ritual

As some of you know, my wife is a leader at Bible Study Fellowship and once a month, they have a fellowship time.  This means I have to pick up our son and spend the time with him.  Well, somehow, we have made it into a bonding ritual of sorts.

You see, he knows AND expects me to take him to THE best pho place in town (quite possibly in the US!), Pho Binh.  We drive there and I get the large pho tai with extra noodles and meat and JJ gets a large with noodles only!  Let me tell you, we both enjoy it!  Immensely!  I now realize that he really looks forward to just the two of us (yeah, go ahead and sing that song from the Austin Powers) spending the time together.  When you have more than one child, I think it becomes very important to have one-on-one time with each child.

Sure it’s become a repetitive ritual but it’s a good kind of ritual.  He knows that I will be with him and we both get to enjoy our favorite meal!  Together!  Now, that means I need to make time to go to Anna’s lunch hour at her school and spend the time with her.

Here’s to more great rituals in the family!

Flight Scare with Anna

So we got on the flight to DFW (Dallas Fort Worth) and half hour into the flight, Anna comlained of sharp pain in her side.  It was bad enough that she started to cry.  Soojin got scared… her mom had appendicitis and the symptoms seemed to be similar…. pain coming and going.

When we landed, Soojin asked ME what we should do.  Let me just say, it’s freakin’ huge responsibility to be responsible for one life, let alone three!  I wasn’t sure of what to do… but with a child traveling and less than an hour to our connecting flight, I figured it’s better safe than sorry.

So I asked for the paramedics.  They came and started to look at Anna.  She was still complaining of pain.  They didn’t think it was appendicitis and when they had asked me if we wanted Anna taken to hospital, I decided that we’d try to wait it out as our flight now was gone and had to get on a different flight.

At that point, I had missed a call from Paul Minifee.  When I had called back, his father Dr. Paul Minifee, was next to him.  You see, he’s a senior doctor at Children’s Hospital in Houston!  So with such awesome knowledge available, I laid the concerns to him.  He then asked if Anna’s appetite was gone.  She said she was hungry.  He then asked if Anna could touch her toes quickly without bending her knees.  And she could.  Dr. Minifee said that if she had appendicitis, she wouldn’t have appetite nor be able to bend and touch toes w/o pain in the side.  Whew.

Got off the phone.  I held Anna and started rubbing her back… felt bit of knots on her left spine so I massaged that away.  Then everyone (except me) wanted pizza for lunch so we ate that. Anna felt better by this point and when we walked over to the other gate for our new connecting flight, I was worried that we wouldn’t get on…  but I guess the other agent had left note on our case and reason for missing the previous flight ’cause the new one called me as Mr. Jang and asked me about how Anna was doing, and that they’d get us seats soon.

Though they had charged us $60 for luggage ($15 X 4), at least their service didn’t suck.  We finally flew into La Guardia airport and we were welcomed with NYC’s finest drivers and 2 hour traffic.  But we are home.  Thank God.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Soojin’s Accident Yesterday

So as many of you know by now, Soojin was in an accident on the way to BSF leaders’ meeting. Usually, JJ would be riding with her but since it was a holiday week for Anna, Soojin asked her co-worker to watch them in the morning. Thus we are so thankful that neither of the kids were in the car.

Though I do not know the entire details, here are what is known about the accident. Soojin was on Pineloch left lane and a landscaping truck was on the right and there was a contact that made her veer off the road into the median and hit the big lamp post. The car was totaled in my opinion. The entire front was gone along with radiator, the wheels, and both of the airbags that went off. The other vehicle and 3 people were fine. I only saw a dent on the side of the drivers door. They didn’t seem to speak English or worse, didn’t have insurance and thus didn’t say anything. I felt bad for them but at the same time mad.

Soojin was bleeding badly in the eye but turned out to be due to a small gash between the eyes. My current hero(ine) is a woman named Ginger. She is the good Samaritan who saw Soojin crash and pulled over to help her get out of the car and stayed with her until I got there. Ginger is now my current favorite name of the decade!

Soojin complained of large pain in the right abdominal side and was rushed to ER. I had asked Pastor Shawn to pray for Soojin but he ended up coming out to the hospital (after I gave him the wrong hospital name! – Southwest Memorial Hermann when it should’ve been Southeast). Her CAT scan came back negative for internal damages, so we are thankful for that as well.

And Younhe with her two kids came by to see Soojin at home. This does not include all the family and friends that prayed for Soojin and gave all the kind words. So I wanted to thank everyone who took part in caring for Soojin in this difficult times.

Please pray for the car that the insurance would file it as totaled and not try to have it fixed, and that the amount for the car would be favorable. After that, we will have to shop for a replacement car. That Lincoln Continental was named as “admiral” since it felt like a boat. It served faithfully to the end protecting the driver to its end. 🙁 Now that I have to say goodbye to it, it’s a bit saddening having developed “?” (jung that means emotional bond) for it.

I don’t know why the accident happened nor will I likely find out, but since God was with her, we are trying not to question it, and just being thankful for all that came out of it… 1) no kids were involved and 2) Soojin didn’t incur any serious damage. “God is good all the time. All the time, God is good.”

Kids’ First Joke

Ok, I don’t know if it’s an original one… but on the way to Anna’s piano lesson, JJ started off the conversation that soon turned into a [repeating] joke.

JJ: Y-E-S spells ‘yes’.
Anna: Yes, it does spell ‘yes’.

And they kept on repeating and then soon laughter ensued. Rather endlessly. It was rather a cute occurrence really. I guess you just had to be there. 😀

Growing into Transition

Last year when Anna started school as a Kindergartener, I had the privilege of taking her to school more or less everyday. After weaning from separation anxiety, each morning she’d go to her class but as she walked away, she’d look back several times to me and wave goodbye. Even a teacher who stood in the area eventually picked up on Anna’s habit and would predict on when she’d turn back to look at me and wave one last time. Naturally, I stood to see her off until she wasn’t in my sight anymore.

This year as a first grader, I guess she’s getting into it much more. Now when she walks to her class, there has been increasing number of times when she just would wave without looking back. 🙁 At first, I thought she was in a hurry or something… or maybe I just wished so. She did it again several times this week… and honestly, it’s sad. I can only imagine how things would change when she’s older… Ah the growing pains…