The Zhao Family

Oh it was a great day to see the Cherry Blossoms. I took a day off from work to take everyone down to DC. The sun was out, the sky was blue, a slight breeze and the temperature hovered around 65ish-70. There was music and just enough people to enjoy the sights all around the Jefferson memorial basin. Just a great day!



First stop to see the Cherry Blossom was the Jefferson Memorial where a live band was playing some rock music. It was so beautiful that time of the day, we busted out our cooler and Abbey's kitchen was opened for business serving some mean roast beef sandwiches, chicken wings, yummy veggies, and delicious soy sauce eggs-just delicious!!


Made to order food on the basin! Our personal cater: Chef Abbey!! Oh the food was so good!


The Kaneyuki's met us on the mall and we had a blast!! So to make it official, we took pictures of us together. And the boys were so cooperative that only Michelle is looking at the camera.


We even brought bubbles too in case they get bored! It was just great!


It's cool to see a policeman on a horse at the basin.


One of the many great attractions for the boys was the park ranger on the horse. They loved the policeman sitting up high on the horse and wanting to pet the horse but was not allowed. So you see Clayton's reaction to that comment and Brennan looks so mature.


Caught red handed!! I don't think Clayton took the flowers off the tree, he just touched them ;)


Some cooperation of the boys with mom..it was really nice.


I am not sure why they had a beaver mascot at the Cherry Blossom, maybe because they want people to be aware that there are lots of beavers around the basin chewing up trees. But on the funnier note, you noticed the stroller on the lower right of the photo? --well that's because Brennan fell off the stroller. He was sitting on top of the stroller (see below where Clayton's sitting) and because of Brennan's weight, the stroller became top heavy. No worries, he fell feet first, nothing happened hence we've decided that it's more weight distributed if Clayton sits on the very top.



Brennan's already made some friends and playing ball with them while the three of them enjoyed each other's company.


I think this is a great photo.


We've got some photo so mama and Cayleigh at the Cherry Blossoms! yeah


Here's our kid-mobile trailer. Just bare shy of a refrigerator, oven, and a dining table, we've managed a way to sit all three kids, fit two grocery bags full of food, a cooler with more food inside, hang a backpack, and three jackets all into a double stroller. We've definitely become part of the sight-seeing attraction.


We decided to be brave and walked all the around the basin, it was a lot longer than it looked. So in order to save Abbey's back, our double stroller became a 3 person vehicle! But we did manage to get some nice photos from the other side of the basin.



After a four hour walk around the basin to see the Cherry Blossoms, I decided to take the boys to Gravelly Park next to the DC airport for them to see the planes really close just right before they land. I thought it would be a fun experience but they boys complained they it was too loud!!

After seeing the plane, the Kaneyuki's invited us to their home to play with the boys and treated us to a pizza dinner! Thank you Kaneyuki family!!

Just want to say thanks for all the notes, comments, emails. The boys are finally well now.

After 5 days of vomiting and diarrhea, lost 2-3 lbs., Clayton is well and regains his appetite. He woke up today asking for crackers and apple juice. (we gave him pedialyte.) So he got his mini saltines and asked for more. Mama gave him half piece of bread and he asked for another one. At lunch time, he ate two bowl of chicken congee and still wanted some more crackers. After nap he ate another two pieces of bread. At dinner time, he ate a quarter of chicken, corns, and some more bread. So he is all happy and eats well again.

Brennan just throw up once on Sunday night. We played safe on his diet. He is eating fine as always. We are happy to have our "eating well and happy" boys again.

Cayleigh had her two months checked up on Monday while the brother had their sick office visit. She is now 11lb 6oz. She got two shots and an oral vaccine. She was a sleeping head yesterday and lost her appetite. Mama was worried and she just slept too much without eating much. But of course, in order to catch up the feeding, Cayleigh cleared her 4 oz bottle everytime today.

We are happy to have healthy kids again. Abbey is relieved and Da is more relaxed at work. Thank you for your prayers and your love. We will post more pic as the weather gets nicer and we go out more =)

Here are some older photos from a couple weeks back.

Spring's here and we got a small peak of the wonderful weather and went to the park!! Clayton got a chance to try his scooter that he got for Christmas!


From the looks of him, I'll say he like it.


Already going pro with the thing...






Some of you asks how the boys are liking their new sister. Both of them are actually loving her a lot, they treat her like a normal child but we stop them from jumping with her, holding her from the back and playing wrestle-like play with her....just hugs, kisses, and sitting next to them for now.

Starting Wednesday Clayton didn't feel well complaining that his stomach hurts. Later that night he had diarrhea. In the middle of the night he was crying complaining he stomach hurt really bad and then vomited.

So on Thursday I took the day off to help out since he was not well and Cayleigh had a stuffy nose and was crying throughout the night. Cayleigh just wanted mom to nurse her to sleep. I figured that one day was enough for everyone to recover. Throughout the day he seemed better and he was more alert and interactive, in fact we went out to dinner with my mom that night.

Friday I went to work and home became a total disaster. Clayton's diarrhea and vomiting had worsen. Cayleigh still did not sleep well just wanted to be nursed and Clayton was puking more and throwing up more. Abbey tried to give Clayton water but that wasn't holding down either.
Abbey was home alone to care for the two so she pretty much let Brennan watched TV the whole day.

Saturday Clayton was not much better, Cayleigh slept a bit better. Clayton was very weak and just lay around home all day long. He is not eating nor drinking much of anything. He looked very pale, whined and cried the whole day. We just stayed home all day and small amounts of Pedialyte starting to help.

Sunday Clayton's still whiny, Cayleigh's a bit better, Abbey's super tired, Brennan's super energized not having been anywhere, and I'm just pulling of the little hair I have left not knowing what to do. So Abbey took Cayleigh and Brennan to church while I try to stayed home with Clayton since he's gotten really attached to me the last couple days. The whole day he just drank Pedialyte, lay on the sofa, whine, and took a couple naps. He finally looked and feel a little better around dinner time. He ate some light soft foods.

We're not sure what caused Clayton to be so sick (poss.-stomach virus?). Abbey did a lot of research online and the way Clayton's symptoms were, he seem to react only to whatever he ate and everything else seemed OK, so a hospital visit was not necessary and they have not been able to give him any medications anyways. He's off to bed now so hopefully he won't puke it out tonight. However, we might have another storm brewing in the works: Brennan's complaining his stomach hurts.

*3/23 Update - As we feared, last night around 11:30PM, "Baba Baba I threw up!" was what I heard and jumped out of bed to see Brennan vomited all over his bed. He was a little scared that he did something wrong and was apologizing. We told him it's OK, changed his whole bed, and let him go back to sleep. Hopefully today will be a smoother day since Abbey's home with the three.

Today Cayleigh is two months old! Yeah! Here are some milestones: she can cry louder by the day, she is about to sleep through 5 hours at night, she is about to coo with us(esp with baba-mom's jealous), she smiles and interacts more, she drinks more than 3oz of milk, and she does #2 less often but when it does happen it's an explosion of large proportions!

So our extremely nice cousin let us borrow his Wii to play b/c he doesn't play it as much. So how can we take advantage of this? We get Brennan to do his home work!! yes, Brennan has to complete his 30 mins of writing words before he can play 30 mins of Wii. So far so good because this incentive has helped him to learn to read a lot of words from books as well as doing very good with his math skills(addition, subtraction, and even some multiplication) So kudos to our cousin, David, for lending us your Wii.


Look at Brenna's pitch.


And his batting.


The fun stuff.


That's some seriously intense game.

Sorry everyone that we've been slacking on the blog front. Our last post was just an diversion excuse not to post any photos. Though we do need a new camera, we have another camera to take photos as well. Here are some older photos that was take a couple weeks ago. Hope you find it interesting.


These strollers are actually play strollers but apparently Clayton and Cayleigh got some other ideas.


Bet'u your kid can't join my kids gang...hahaha. I love the way she looked at me while holding her gangster symbols.


One word: "Gonnabespoiledrotten"


Awwwwwwwwwww


She's got a great smile when she wants to do it...hehehe

It's been an amazing 10 days since our last post and we seem to have lost touch with the rest of the bloggersphere community. Actually there have been several causes to this absence. For one, girls are such more handful than boys that we can only spend more time to love her more than to post anything, secondly with the help of our lovely boys our little camera is seeing the end of the tunnel for its life which has a snowball effect into other things, third we much rather spend time sleeping or resting whenever we get a chance for these are the times when sleep is a hot commodity(most of you understand).

The snowball effect would be our lack of photo posts; which I much rather do than to write long lengthy run-on blog spot about nonsense. But with the slow torture that we've put our little camera through, it has finally given up on us, at least we feel. Through dropping it on concrete, spilling liquids, breaking doors for the battery, jamming the lens while opening, cracking the screen, and many other abuses we're very surprised the camera has lasted this long and took so many wonderful pictures throughout the years. I mean by all means it still takes wonderful pictures, when it works, but now it has a personality of its own. It won't focus, the battery can only take like 20 photos, and I personally feel that it has had enough of us. The snowball effect continues since the small camera don't work, Abbey dont' know how to use the big camera to take photos nor record videos and I am not home to take them, and when I am home it's dark or the kids are asleep, so pictures have not been taken. On top of that, our last 3 weekends have been just going here and there all over town to birthday parties. As much fun as they are, after getting home, we are just exhausted to do anything. And with that, the last couple weeks Cayleigh has had growth spurts where she'll eat and cry and eat more so often that it tires me out too. She also went through a period of baby acne so you didn't miss out much on posting. The next few weeks should be better.

Okay now onto better and more important news. I need all of your input as to which point and shoot to buy. I would like everyone who read our blog to input their 2 cents. I've read all kinds of reviews from all over and they vary so much that I've given up. First here's my 2 cents. We've used the Nikon Coolpix 5900 for years and it was like the best PS we've used b/c the pictures were pretty good white balanced, when flashed is used indoors the people skin color were quite good and not off tone/saturated/yellowish, it has zoom video recording, and focused fairly quick. We're looking into replaced our 5900. Abbey will use it mainly for our kids, so skin tones are important along with good video quality. Needs to be as simple as possible. Budget to be around $200. Here's a couple things I have against some major brands:Canon-when flash is used-skin tones are very yellows, Sony-proprietary memory cards, Nikon-optics aren't as good as older models, Casio-slow focus, and Kodak-color tinting/focus. Tell us what PS you're using and what you like and dislike about your camera and what you would recommend if you were to buy a camera soon. And any sales/good deals going on as of 3/16/09. (Please look for quality of photo and not megapixel of the camera; MP not a big deal since I only print about 1% or less of all my photos and I rather keep the MP down so it wont' kill all my storage and upload speed)

Hope to hear everyone's input!!

So you got it...it will inevitably happen: photos get deleted by accident. We were going to post some pictures this week but instead I spent the time trying to salvage anything left in a memory card. It appears to be a lot harder to retrieve data from flash memory than hard drives. From my experience I've had pretty good luck retrieving data deleted from hard drives but from these flash memory cards, and the way they are setup, it doesn't really 'write' or 'mark' anything inside the card like the platters inside a hard drive; it just kind of places data in 'pockets' of memory --think of lots of water buckets.

So as my lovely son was playing with the camera, he must of have gotten really curious. Though he have played with the camera before to take picture but never really knew how to delete anything but I guess he learns really fast. So with the press of a couple buttons-viola! all 2gbs of photos and videos wiped in less than 10 seconds. Well these 2gbs of memories (which are being typed here) are photos of Cayleigh in her early weeks of life, the boys playing in the only snow storm we have for 2009, videos of Clayton and Brennan reading and singing to Cayleigh, and we don't remember the rest.

Though we will try to recreate certain moments but they'll never be the same again. Oh well, good thing that only two weeks of photos/videos are lost and the rest have been backed-up prior. So as a lesson from us to you: backup and transfer photos at least each week or more often if you can. Just remember the bigger the card, the more likelihood that you'll be more lazy to transfer and might loose even more memories that you probably don't remember.

WoW(word of wisdom) by us - "It never hurts to make extra copies/backups but its painful when those special moments are gone forever"

Guess what Mr. Clayton is doing? just be very imaginative and you're probably right.


If you didn't get the first photo, try this one...maybe this photos will help you a little better. (Hint: He's only trying to help)

Yeah and kudos to mom that she have survived the first month of Cayleigh's life. Though Abbey's done it for both boys, somehow this one month that Abbey stayed home seemed a lot longer than previously. As most of you may or may not know, by tradition and custom, the mom and baby stays home for the first month so both can recover and get adapted to each other in the comfort and safety of their own home. Many older generation folks insist that the mom and baby stay home and not shower, bath, eat certain foods, and do certain things. Though the intentions are good but modern day advancements have made such things irrelavant however because we still know many older generation folks, Abbey was a good soldier and stayed home for one whole month. As for not showering or other things, "what happens in the house, stays in the house". And a very big thank you to Abbey's parents staying with us for 3 whole months in our house to help out despite what some may think otherwise.

So finally the month is over! what do we normally do? -of course celebrate! Just like both of our two boys, we invite family and go out to feast ! I posted lots of photos on picasaweb. Some photos you may or may not understand what is going on, others you may think its cool, but mostly just enjoy the photos. (Hopefully this would make up for all the posts we've skimmed out on the last several weeks).

BTW- did I mention we got our house back? just the way we like it?-messy, disorganized, littered with toys all over the floor, civil, liberated, private, nuclear, and most importantly just the five of us!! (just a smal fyi-nothing to celebrate about)

Click here to see the pictures
or go to
http://picasaweb.google.com/dazhao/20090221CayleighSOneMonthCelebration#




The boys are so willing to take this photo.


Dont' you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?


Doesn't she want to make you smile?


Your heart melt yet?


Come over and be like mom, just hold her..hehehe


This is one of the things we do after she's one month old, her older brother is supposed to carry her around in this red 'pouch' and show her off to everybody.


Both take turns showing their sister around.


Also the baby is supposed to get a 'haircut'/'shave head' after the first month as well.


You'll see more photos of Mister 'Pimp" showing off his video game talent to all his 'friends' and of course which happens to be all girls from the link above. If this keeps on going, I'll be broke by the time he reaches 7!

Last night around 10PM Abbey was feeling a little tired and wanted to take a half hour nap before the night shift. She goes to her bedroom and left me with Cayleigh. And of course mom fed her well before nap so next thing you know it..Cayleigh goes and does a #2, a really really long and excessive one. We normally wait because she has more in stored. Ten minutes has passed and part 2 of #2 has arrived and Cayleigh can't wait anymore so she starts screaming at the top of her lungs as she normally does. To prevent her from screaming and mom not hearing her, I gave her a pacifier. I placed her on the crib and start changing her which calmed her down b/c she likes being clean and dry. After cleaning her she is all calm and content. Then not a moment too soon she screamed at the top of her lungs again. I tried to feed her, cuddle her, walk her, put her in the crib and etc: nothing worked. Afte several minutes it was too late, she has already woken up mom. By then I was exhausted and crashed into bed myself. It took Abbey no time to figure out the problem. Cayleigh wanted her pacifier and I was not successful at finding it for because apparently when I changed her, I wrapped the pacifier inside her clothes so it was poking Cayleigh the whole time.

So there you so, the success of me chaning my daughter in no time to come to find out that I left an important item inside her. Don't ever let me be a surgeon. ;)

Yeah we've made it through three weeks and so far so good. Mama's doing good and have just enough sleep taking care of Cayleigh. The grands are doing an excellent job of feeding their daughter and the rest of the family. The boys are active as ever and love their sister a lot. Baba is getting poked every where in the middle of the night to keep up with mama.

For all you folks looking for some photos of the 3 of them together, good luck. However here are some individuals that actually turn out OK. Enjoy.

It has been a while since I write a post on this blog. Da does a great job writing posts and taking wondeful professional pictures. He has been really busy with the boys these days when I focused on feeding and taking care of Cayleigh.

I just want to thank Heavenly Father for such a miracle in my life again. I love to have a girl in our family and HE has made it happen. My pregnancy with Cayleigh is harder than my first two and it had been hard for me physically (alot of throw up and lying on the bed).

We dreamed about how she looked, how heavy she would be, how much hair. But later in the pregnancy, we found out I have alot of fluid, which might bring complications to the pregnancy. As the time went by, my level of fluid was "way higher" than normal and she was breech until 38wks, which was shown in 3 ulrasounds.

I prayed so hard, not about how she looks, not about her weight, but to have a healthy baby and a normal (no complication) labor. I did all kind of exercises, use frozen peas, music, lying on iron broad, on my knees, anything you can name hoping she would move her head down.

Miracle happened, she turned her head down the week I had to induce. My water broke in the hospital and after 3+ hours, she came out 7lb 8oz just like her brothers. Dr. Laurin described my water broke like a stream. The vaccum sucked more than 1/2 gallon fluid from my bed.

Cayleigh is healthy, with alot of black hair, with dimples. We can't ask for more. I am truly grateful for what Heavenly Father gives us. He entrusted us with another child of God. We will do our best to raise her in the Gospel.

Cayleigh is 2 weeks old today, sorry the pics are not the best quality. But as for now, enjoy the pics.