We just celebrated the Lantern Festival at the end of last week. This is a time where families get together, go to the beach with lanterns (some with real candles & some light bulbs) and spend time together.  We got Peter an airplane lantern & I got a Hello Kitty one which he seemed to like more than his own!  The pictures didn't really turn out well of his lanterns but we did manage to get some with his glow ears on. He was so tired at this point, he didn't even try to take them off.

We also watched people bring lanterns that they had painted messages & pictures on to be lit and allowed to go a short distance in the sky.

These girls are waiting for it to heat up and then sending it into the sky.

When it goes very wrong....

You have a lantern in flames over the heads of onlookers.

It comes crashing down in a ball of flames to be put out by a nervous security guard with a fire extinguisher.

We have been offline for a while with some blog issues but are back and trying to play catch up. In the past month, Peter has become very steady on his feet although not yet walking without holding on to something. Sometimes the things he does hold don’t actually provide any stability for him so we know he can do it!

Mr Serious...

We upgraded Peter to a forward facing big boy car seat as he was no longer fitting in the other one and desperately wanted to be in the sitting position. Here is a cute one of a recent car outing.

Peter with his many local girlfriends =)

We celebrated my birthday at the end of September. Tom made a great chocolate cake for me and we had a great breakfast at the beach with our friends. This is a tube of glue - he said I am the glue that holds things together. =)

Petey Update

It has been a while since we've done a full update on the family. Over the last couple of weeks Petey has crawled, been to hospital, fallen in love with bananas and started to take his first semi-assisted steps.

Crawling

Petey has developed his own crawling style. It's a bit of a two limbed commando crawl. He reserves one arm and leg for pushing himself along on his tummy, one hand for carrying and the remaining leg is stuck straight up in the air!

Hospital

A couple of weeks ago Petey got very sick with a viral infection and eventually ended up in hospital. Sadly it turned into quite a traumatic experience for both Peter and parents, but he has since recovered and developed a...

Banana Obsession!

A couple of weeks ago we introduced Petey to a variety of fruit, including bananas. He is now up to eating three to five a day! We were even able to find special bananas called "Little Petey's"! (Read the bag carefully)

Walking

We gave Petey a walker for his first birthday, he has been busily doing laps of the lounge room. It is truly amazing how fast he had developed!

Busy Lives

Thought we'd give a few pictures of what we are up to most days of the week.

Christy manages the fair trade cafe on site. The Fair Trade movement has been set up throughout the world to ensure that every person along the supply chain is paid a fair wage for their products and work. Companies that meet the criteria for this have a little symbol on their products that say "fair trade certified." Our cafe aims to support this process through fair trade coffee, chocolate, sugars, juices & other items. Christy's main jobs are ordering all the supplies, training new staff and helping with any issues that arise. It is a great place for young mothers to meet and the babies love coming to play.

Here are a few photos of the cafe:

She also helps out in the accounts department doing a variety of behind the scenes paperwork & reconciliation. Most of this work can be done from home while Peter sleeps.

Tom spends his week looking after everything IT related on the site; the computers, phones and most importantly Facebook! Below is a photo of his lair, amazingly almost everything in here has been donated or bought as the result of a specific donation:

Our Server Room

One of the nice things that Tom gets to do is to make the old new. Most of our site was built in the 1960's and so it starting to show its' age. Recently we had a fire in one of our buildings which was caused by, of all things, a rat jumping into one of our main switchboards. Whilst tragic, it was a fantastic opportunity to take what was on the edge of collapse and make it suitable for many years of use to come.

Before	After (the walls are still a bit scorched)

Tom is also the manager of the computer department which is truly a fantastic job. He has two great interns working for him who run the day to day of the department.

The view down the computer department.	A shipment ready to go to Angola

So that is a quick overview of our lives in a few pictures; computers, children, rats and coffee!

9 years ago I (Christy) moved to Hong Kong with every intention of moving back to the US after 2 years. Obviously that hasn't happened and we don't have a plan to live the US (or Australia) in the foreseeable future.

It has been a great but challenging 9 years with wonderful things learned and achieved. I am so thankful I made the step to move here and to be involved in the work we are doing.

We have had some amazing, clear days here recently. Not sure why but we all take the chance to take photos when there is blue sky!

This is Lantau island which at times we cannot even see!

Fancy apartments & the shopping centre close to where we live.

Our normal walk to the dolphins.

With ever earlier mornings we have begun watching Madagascar... repeatedly. Over and over again we watch the adventures of these four animals. Luckily there is a sequel which does add variety. For those who have seen it you will know about the "sad little head" which Petey is demonstrating below. He has also taken to liking donkeys and he looks just like Eeyore.

Christy has continued to make cakes this year. Thought it was time to post a few more pictures of them. Each cake generally takes 5-6 hours to complete. They are fun to do although about half way through we wonder "why are we doing this again?" Tom is also involved in the process. Often doing the needed measurements and structural placement of the cakes as some require several layers to be stacked.

This is supposed to be a camera lens. We tried using melted chocolate to make the entire lens as well as the film strips around the outside. Learned a valuable lesson that in such a hot & humid climate it doesn't work very well. So in the end the lens was made out of foil:

This is a Tiramisu Gateaux made for a birthday celebration.

This is the most recent cake for our friend's baby shower. This was made from chocolate & yellow cakes cut down & stacked to make the right block shape. We coloured the fondant and cut out the shapes to let dry a day ahead. All edible.

It was time for a hair cut so I ventured into a local area called Yan Oi to look for a place that I hoped would know how to cut "western" hair.

I came across a place with a nice looking sign and big chandeliers and a reasonable price of about 12USD.  I walked in and of course hear a silent gasp as all the staff look at me and try to decide what to do. Yan Oi isn't really filled with any foreigners and I rarely see another when I go shopping in this place.  I try to explain how I want a hair cut (on the inside I was really hoping that this was the right decision and I would come out looking ok when finished).

The lady pointed at a price list by each stylists name:

They all charge different amounts! I must have looked a little surprised because one of the hairdressers came up and told me her price, I agreed and off we went.

While I was sitting there still hoping she was doing a good job, the older man next to me was getting his hair dyed. One moment the hair dresser is applying the dye and then next she comes out the backroom with a huge piece of saran/cling wrap which she wraps around his head! I was trying not to laugh.

The guy on the other side had his hair up in clips (it was already short hair and in any other place, an electric hair cutter would have been used). The hairdresser was doing it all with scissors bit by bit. In the end, he was there longer than me.

I was relieved to be finished and to actually have a pretty good hair cut out of it. I will definitely be going back to this place again.

Granted our weather here has taken a turn towards a hot, humid summer, (without our air cons, it is close to 30c/87f in the room at night) but that wasn't what I was referring to when I said the above comment.

We have not had good luck with fridges in the past year. Today our 4th fridge decided to end its cooling and turn more to the warm side of life. I thought that things felt a bit warmer yesterday but thought it was just me being silly.  Today I opened the freezer to find our ice cream, premade baby food and everything else defrosted or in a liquid state. It is discouraging and sad to have to throw out to much food.  last time we lost a huge frozen lamb roast that we had brought back from Oz as well as more baby food.  Thankfully we were able to get another donated fridge in today, but found that it actually doesn't freeze as well.

So, within a year, we have had 5 fridges and and must now look for #6. I would love to go out and actually buy a really good, new fridge that has a long warranty. Come to think of it, a walk in fridge would be fantastic right about now!

Can anyone guess what this is? If you have ever visited, you may have seen it before. This is a dog stroller. No, not a baby one with a dog in it but an actual stroller made for dogs!  Sadly we missed the front view but there are 2 poodles being pushed around in here. Reasoning? Hmm... well some are afraid the dogs might get their paws dirty.

We did see a dog with tennis shoes on a few weeks ago too.

Oh and to top it all off, I saw a Dog Bjorn last week! (for those not up on their baby accessory lingo this is a front baby carrier pack. This one was again made specifically for dogs!)

I went to a huge Food Expo on Thursday to look for some new fair trade items for our cafe as well as some other things we were after. The place was amazing! Huge halls filled with incredible food, coffee, catering equipment and so much more. It was free to get in as long as you had a business card and each stall was giving out free stuff in exchange for the card.   Granted most visitors were for larger groups than our cafe such as supermarkets, large restaurant chains & hotels but I was welcomed just the same.

I wandered around, ate some ice cream, had some coffee, and more coffee and some that I had to take straight to the toilet to put down the drain! The last one was from a group from Macau that just started roasting beans in November. They had a very flash display and I thought I would try them out. The woman asked me what kind of coffee I wanted and I said "latte" and she says "ok, one cappuccino please," to the barista. I should have walked away as I soon discovered this woman was not a barista. They had the fancy machine but she ground the beans and then put them in this instant coffee machine (like what 7-11 has in the US) and out comes a "scary" coffee. It was truly undrinkable!

I also met the Italian company that owns the rights to sell Hello Kitty food products here. The only catch is that it has to be real Italian food! So, wonderful olive oil, pasta and many more items have a big pink kitty on the front for packaging! amazing!

It was such a fun time. I did succeed in finding everything I was after for our cafe and hope to be getting some new products soon. I also really enjoyed seeing displays of products from the US & Australia including incredible amounts of meat that you just dont see here. It was good to hear their accents and to see some familiar things including that scary fake cheese dip that you get with hot pretzels in the US. Despite it being so gross, somehow I was happy to see it!

If you are reading this you will have noticed that our website is back online. Thanks to Jays for bringing us back. We've been offline due to a blackouts in Sydney, but we're back now.

 We have many people to be thankful for who have responded to our email or this website by donating towards our support. It has been very encouraging and we are deeply grateful for those who have replied. In addition to the funding that has come in, we were also given a lot of baby food today for Peter. Another need responded to “in kind.”

Tom is kept very busy on site looking after all the IT needs for the organisation.  Here is a recent photo of his desk covered in lap tops that need fixing.  Oh and yes he uses all those screens attached to the wall in addition to his desk monitor!

When our friends Riba & Pablo asked me to make their wedding cake I was a little afraid as I had never made that scale of cake before. After months of practice cakes, the wedding cake was made for Monday 8th Dec and turned out great.

Have put in some of the cakes along the way.  It takes at least 7 hours to complete to give you an idea of time it takes to make one of these.

This was my first cake with fondant. Birthday cake with world theme:

The theme of this cake was "light" showing the light of the world as seen from space.

The wedding cake!

Penguins also made out of fondant.

Tonight Tom went to the pinnacle of culture, so much culture some would say it was chockers. Tom went to the Speed Way tonight, it was a beautiful thing for the two qualifying races we watched before the hail arrived. It was a fantastic night...

Tom's Dinner
Litre Cars Rounding the first corner.
And then the hail came...

I (Christy) have been seeing amazing photos of the autumn colours in the US at the moment as well as photos of families going to the pumpkin patch** to choose out a pumpkin.  I must admit I am a little jealous and wish we could take Peter to a pumpkin patch although he wouldn't really remember it this year. The colours look beautiful and I can picture the cool air this time of year. 

Of course, I did walk outside today and it was down to 29c and maybe 80% humidity and I thought "what a nice cool day!"

I am scheming as to how to get Peter by a pumpkin. They are selling them (small ones) at our supermarket for about $10USD!

**A pumpkin patch is more than a kid's clothing store in Australia. It is a farm where kids are allowed to come and choose out a pumpkin from the field, pet some baby animals and generally have a good time. I did it many years ago when I was little.

Was wandering through the supermarket yesterday admiring some imported food items that I would buy if living in the US. However, here they cost a bit more.

Here's a few examples of items that cost about $10USD here:

• 1 box Honey Nut or Regular Cheerios
• 1 pack of 8 hot dogs
• 1 tub of Yogurt
• 1 pack of sliced sandwich meat (12 slices)
• 1 bag of 3 type shredded cheese
• 1 pack of Bacon

So, what would you be willing to pay?

At the end of the day, we look at them on the shelf and pass them by for cheaper options.

We are watching the weather this week as another typhoon/tropical storm is headed straight for Hong Kong. This is about the 5th or 6th since the end of July. These storms aren't as intense as a hurricane but they bring a lot of wind & rain for a day or two. So far they haven't actually "hit" us but come very close. 

Click on this link to see the tracker: http://www.hko.gov.hk/wxinfo/currwx/tc_pos.htm

For the past couple of weeks we've had Tom's parents here in Hong Kong. The other weekend we went out to Lantau to see the old houses where we used to live, below are the photos of our houses; buildings 16, 20 and 69:

We also walked around the village where we lived:

We also did a bit of sight seeing around Hong Kong:

Mum and Dad also had time with baby: