Playing guitar and reading

Sterling was playing the guitar with Luke the other day. It was pretty cute, but I don't think Luke got too much practicing done.
This other picture was one day when he got his books out on his own and acted like he was reading them. It was funny- like he thought he was really big or something. The book was actually upside down :)

Sterling Is Standing!

Sterling just started to stand on his own in the last couple of days. Luke has really been trying to get him to take a step, but Sterling isn't at all interested in that yet. He's quite content to just stand there and feel really proud of himself for standing so well. His legs are like little tree trunks and it seems like it's going to take quite a bit of effort to move those things! It will probably only be a matter of time before he does start taking steps though!
The bottom picture is him in the laundry basket. It has wheels, so we have been pushing him around in it and he thinks it's great fun. I guess there is a benefit to these hard concrete floors after all! :)

Other pictures from their trip

This is us girls eating roasted duck. It was the girls' first time to try it and we all liked it! This was one of Kara's favorite restaurants. You cook your meat and veggies in a soup right in front of you. They have really funky things like pork intestine, pork knuckles, and lots of weird fish that you can put in the soup, but we stuck to crab, chicken and beef.

Here is Sterling trying on a fish hat at Ocean World. I think it was a dog fish. The only way we could get him to keep the hat on for a picture was to let him play with another one. It's still a pretty cute picture of him though :) Luke wouldn't let me buy it for him.

Luke, Kayla, Kara and I got to play soccer at the youth center with the kids on Wednesday. We had a lot of fun. Kyle stayed home with Sterling while he took a nap. Kyle is a good babysitter!

This is a fish we ate at a restaurant called S&P. This is a very common way to serve fish in Thailand, but Kara thought it was very weird that it still had it's eyes. It was sweet and sour flavoured and we all thought it was really tasty! As you can tell, Luke and I have definitely expanded our repertoire of eating over the last two years- it's been really good for us!

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

We had a really good Thanksgiving. It was a little out of the ordinary, but it was still a lot of fun. We went downtown again; ate Burger King for our big Thanksgiving lunch, visited the Siam Ocean World, and played with Sterling. We had a fun day and really enjoyed being together. We hope yours is as good as ours.

Another Day in Bangkok

Here is Kara having some major jet-lag. She fell asleep on the chairs at dinner last night :)

Here we are at Lumpini Park. The picture isn't that great because we had to set the timer so that we could all get in it. Lumpini is like the Central Park of Bangkok.

Here we are at Starbucks, enjoying our iced drinks because we were all SO hot from walking around and taking turns holding Sterling. He was really hot and a little grouchy as well.

This was at lunch yesterday. We were eating Kioutiaw, also known as street soup. Some of the missionary kids came out to eat with us. The soup has rice noodles, bean sprouts, ground pork and some spices. You can add whatever you want to the soup- fish sauce to make it salty, chili powder (kyle added a lot of that), sugar, peanuts (luke added a lot of that), and garlic flavoured vinegar. Each bowl of soup cost about 60 cents.

Here are the boys on the sky train. The sky train in Bangkok is really nice. Again, we were glad to ride on it because it has really good airconditioning.

Kayla, Kyle & Kara's Visit

Here we are on top of the Byoke Tower- the tallest building in Bangkok (the 28th in the world). We got free drinks after we toured the place and saw the city from the top of the building.

Here is Kyle eating at one of our favorite restaurants- Fuji. He got the seafood steak set and one of his jumbo shrimp still had it's eyes :)

This was at Pizza Hut last night. Sterling ate a broccoli and cheese dish, which he spread all over the table and all over himself. He was a sticky dirty mess by the time we were done.

After we ate dinner we took Sterling to ride on a car in the mall. He thought it was really fun to steer the car.

Skateboarding at the Center

Yesterday Sterling wore his Pacer's outfit

At first he was content to sit and watch the boys skateboard, but pretty soon he wanted to do it too. Luke helped him ride on the board and he thought it was so much fun. I think he thought he was pretty cool and like one of the older boys.

Packing Up

Sterling loves his dad, he wanted to give him a hand with packing. We have started to pack up some things for my brother and sisters to take back with them. Sterling was a big help :)

Sterling got really hot and sweaty downstairs while we were packing tonight and when he gets sweaty, his hair pretty much goes crazy.

The High Chair

When the Parsons left they gave us their high chair, so that was good news for us. Sterling does so well sitting in it. It is way better than sitting in his stroller to eat! He can now feed himself most of the time, while Luke and I can actually go back to enjoying dinner together!

Our Very Fun Day

Well, I messed this up, because this picture is the very end of our very fun day, but as you can tell, the fun day completely wore Sterling out. We decided to go out for lunch today and while we were out we decided to do some fun things for Sterling. So here are some pictures of the fun things he got to do.

This is a little elephant carousel that he thought was so much fun. He laughed and bounced the entire 30 seconds that it lasted :)

At the center of the mall there was this huge area set up full of Legos. There was a table where kids could come build things and all kinds of displays and stuff. We let Sterling crawl around and play with the Legos, but he was filthy afterwards. He had fun though, and that's what matters! You can tell he was very into checking out everything and was concentrating really hard on his Legos :)

Last Day with the Parsons

Friday was our last day to spend with the Parsons and we had a great day. They have been staying downtown for Dr.'s appointments, so we went down there to have lunch and hang out for the evening. This picture was taken at Outback Steakhouse where we ate dinner together. This is Sterling eating his very first french fry...I felt bad the entire time he was eating it because it's so bad for him, but it was the only thing we had for him to eat until the rest of the food got there. He loved them! The Parsons left Thailand yesterday to fly back home to America. We are really going to miss them!

Owen's Birthday Costume Party

Our teammates son, Owen, turned one on the 30th of October, so Rachel had a little halloween birthday party for him and all the little kids got to dress up. It was a monkey theme, so Sterling dressed up as Tarzan...He makes a pretty darn cute Tarzan! In the one picture, Sterling was trying to crawl up Owen's high chair so that he could get some of Owen's birthday muffin, the other pictures are of the kids at the party- Colette (the Parson's other child) and Owen were monkey's, and Asher Pennington (one of the missionary kids) was also a Tarzan. The three boys are pretty close in age- Asher and Sterling are around 8-9 months, Owen 12 months. They have fun playing together. For the party they put matresses on the floor and let the kids climb and bounce on them. It was tons of fun!