Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Paela loves her feet. She loves her toes, in particular.

Two Sundays ago, I took her with me into a church meeting and a little toddler boy kept running up to her, grabbing those toes and shouting "toooess!" at her. While his father was embarrassed for this child's actions, Paela was mesmerized by the sudden interest in her body. What are toes, she seemed to inquire of herself.

Since that day, she's been obsessed with those little toes. She loves them so much, everytime she's on her back she grabs at her feet and holds on tightly.

We turned around for one moment tonight and she reached for her toes and flipped onto her tummy to get a toy. Fluke? We have video proof she can do it over and over again now. Fast learner. Well, she also likes to play piano. So that's pretty cool, too.

Despite my premonitions from earlier in the week, we conjoined our efforts with Karl and Angela to celebrate Chinese New Years on Thursday -- the day of Chinese New Years -- instead of on Wednesday: the traditional celebratory eve. While there was a part of me which doubted that any Chinese restaurant would close to celebrate the holiday, there was a much smaller part of me which warned that it was as good as any excuse to close the restaurant. Unfortunately, I didn't listen to that smaller, wiser part. Our favorite local eatery was closed and instead of the Wonton's great Chinese food, we ate the mediocre China Stix's Chinese.

I think I need to make an aside here and explain that I'm not sure that China Stix's food is all that bad. I have realized that China, like America, has different types of "traditional" food according to region. While this is an obvious statement, it is helping me realize why I love some Chinese so much more than others. At any rate, I complained about the food too much Thursday night in an effort to subside my heartbroken week-long desire to eat tasty Wonton food -- and then we watched Lost and took Paela home way too late at night.

We're quite grateful at how well Paela does at adjusting to our lifestyle, dragging her everywhere and altering her bedtime each night. Yet we've had her sleep for a minimum of 5 hours each night and up to 8 hours (with additional two to three hour naps until it's been about 10 hours total). Granted, that comes at the cost of me putting her back to bed without food if she wakes up before then, but it's well worth it.

Friday evening, after putting Paela down, Rebecca and I curled up and watched Across the Universe. While the music was stunning and beautiful, the one-trick pony of running a plot according to Beatles songs did little to flush out a provocative story. I quickly got over the transliterality of the piece, but was more distrubed by the lack of feeling in portraying the disturbing time the 60s were. Or was this supposed to only be a love story? It was overly romantacizing everything.... At any rate, the potential for a great film was squelched by a lack of a good screenplay and an overplaying of Beatles' music.

Saturday morning, Paela wanted to come with us shopping for clothes and enjoyed seeing the world from a stroller's viewpoint. After a good nap, we took her to Kelly park and played in the Japanese gardens. Sorry to say this, but the San Jose Japanese gardens have hordes more koi than the infamous San Francisco gardens. If it wasn't for the 6$ parking fee, we'd be going down to Kelly park more, but we'll find ways of circumventing that.