Playing Catch-Up

I am determined to catch up with my blogging so surprise! surprise! back-to-back posts. Don't let the dates fool ya, the last posts was just 26 hours before this one.
Anyway, I have a bunch of pictures from the last 2 months which I haven't posted cuz...well just becuz!!
As you know, Jackie's parents were in town for almost two months and Ryder had a blast with them. Grandma and grandpa love to work out every morning and they are quite fit. Well sometimes we don't always have time to drive everyone into town to go to the gym or the yoga studio so we must make do with whatever we have at home. Grandma was working out with the resistance ropes one day and Ryder decided to work on his muscles. Here he is working on his triceps pushing the rope to the sky!!"C'mon!! Just one more baby! Push it! Push it! You can do it! That a boy!"Next we move onto shoulders and back. C'mon pumpkin PULL!! His mommy would yell. Pull PUMPKIN Pull!!!Wow that was a full workout. Usually grandpa works out too and today he was working out so much he was drained. Grandpa was soooo tired he decided to just lay there and rest after the session. C'mon grandpa, we have one more set to go. Snore Snore. I guess not, grandpa is out cold. When we weren't at home, we were out eating, trying new restaurants all over town. Grandpa and grandma are big food aficionados so we had great meals everywhere we went. Here we are a restaurant called Non-Zero which specializes in organic foods, specially imported products from all over the world, and US$15 bottles of water. You did not read that incorrectly. US$15 for a bottle! Supposedly people all over New Zealand are drinking it cuz it has dietary effects. If you drink it, you will lose weight...cuz your wallet will feel a lot lighter:) Ryder and Mommy are saluting all the people in the world who eat organic foods, recycle, and are going green. But does it really need to be that expensive??!? And to all my friends back home who complain about the price of gas, PLEASE! It's been US$ 4 here for a long time now. Google the price of gas all over the world and you will be shocked that you have it good. Over $9/gallon in some European cities. We also got to go to a few more places out of Taipei with grandpa and grandma. It really helps that we finally bought a car after living in Taipei for 12 years without one. We have been taxi lovers for so long but moving out to the suburbs is just too costly and difficult without a set of wheels. Another justification for not having a car was the previous statement about $4/gallon gas. Just an hour out of Taipei is a tourist town called Jiu Fen. It use to be a jam packed mining town nestled in the mountains. Just like the 49ers in California, everyone came here with dreams of striking it rich. Now the gold is gone but the town has turned into quite a tourist attraction with great views, beautiful little tea houses, and lots of scrumptuous food filling the narrow cobblestone streets. Here's the view, I ain't lying. There are so many stalls selling so many different food items but walking around all day in the hills sure made us all very thirsty. Here's a great pic of grandpa and Ryder sucking down some kumquat juice.
Of course with all this eating we have to go back and do some more exercise or we are going to get fat very quickly. Ryder decided that he wanted to try his hand, or rather his foot, at the world's most popular game, soccer. My friend runs a little soccer class every week and we decided to take him one weekend.
As you can see, the little smurf is very good at soccer. Yup, he's very good at SITTING ON the ball. We decided that we might come back after six months or so since it doesn't really look like he's very interested in kicking the ball around with the older kids. Just likes watching.
Ok, the last thing I'm going to leave you all with is a great video of us at the park. I'm carrying Ryder around and pointing to random things and asking if he knows what they are. He's doing fantastic answering with "bird bird", "turtle", and "dog dog". We read a lot to him and are always pointing things out to him so he's picking up quickly. Then we point to something and he says...

Maybe one day, he'll sail across the "OCEAN" and get to the other side of Taipei city!!!