Cassidy's One Month Dinner

Last night, after dropping Jeff off at the airport (sad - but I will blog about his trip home in the next post), we all went to Cassidy's One Month dinner in Chinatown. I can't believe how fast time flies - feels like just yesterday that I went to visit Ann and Dave at the hospital to see baby girl Tran for the first time.

She looked super cute in her summer dress last night and while I didn't get a chance to take a picture of her with our own camera, I'm sure I'll be getting an email with a link later. For now, we'll just have to "awww" at this pic of Jeff holding Cassidy at two weeks old.

Our first visit with Cassidy at home

-ange xx

Happy 25th Birthday Chris!

Yesterday, we celebrated LB's (aka lil' brother or lil' bird or Chris) 25th birthday. We had brunch at Boom and a delicious dinner at Loire, followed by a trek across the street to Dessert Trends where we picked up lots of mini-cakes! My favourite was the green tea creme brulee. Yum!!!!!!!

All of us looking ready for dessert!

-ange xx

A Good Friday

This morning, I found 3 mistakes in my thesis and thought I was going to lose it =( I accidently classified 3 companies incorrectly which means that I have to re-create over 25 spreadsheets, each taking about 20 minutes each. Needless to say, I'm frustrated. To keep my spirits up and to make sure this is still a "Good Friday", I went out to have a late lunch with mom at Mother Dumplings (delicious!) and then went to see Cassidy again. I don't think I've seen her with her eyes open yet (apparently, she sleeps during the day and is wide awake at night) but she is still cute and loves stretching while sleeping! Ann will hopefully be discharged from the hospital tomorrow!

Cassidy at three days old

After visiting the baby, I buckled down in front of my computer and began fixing my problems. Do you know how hard it is to do this when it is 23C outside on a holiday? *sigh* Oh well. My reward for the errors I've corrected is to blog followed by a 30 minute workout - which leads to an update on my knee.

Since coming back from San Jose in the beginning of March, I began seeing a chiropractor and acupuncturist as my knee is often quite stiff. Acupuncture is surprisingly effective in releasing the tension but the relief doesn't last longer than a few days. Yesterday, I met my new physiotherapist, Nitrel. Neena is now gone because she was only temporarily working at the clinic while someone was on maternity leave. Anyway, Nitrel told me that my range of motion is lacking because I have a knee joint capsule problem. He gave me a strict exercise running program to combat it. On a side note, my quads are strong but my hamstrings are weak so I have to work on that too. This injury/recovery never ends...

-ange xx

An Evening with Miss Chloe

I'm so glad that Denise shared Chloe tonight because Chloe is simply awesome. "Babysitting" should always be this easy. Chloe entertained me, my mom and Chris all evening. We made chocolate cupcakes with pink icing with my mom - Chloe helped by neatly laying out all the cupcake papers. Before getting into her "Little Miss Trouble" pajamas, she played basketball with Chris and wreaked havoc in my room haha

Teddy bear aftermath
Pooh bear is naked and Goofy is wearing 3 layers including Pooh's sweater

We tried watching Cinderella but it's actually quite a "scary" Disney movie that we had to stop. Come to think of it, I don't believe that old Disney movies like Cinderella, Snow White or Sleeping Beauty really cater to kids, compared to new movies like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, etc. In fact, when I was a kid, I was terrified by the witch in Sleeping Beauty. I thought she lived in the third floor of our old house (n.b. years later, I shared this information with Chris who slept on the third floor and he was not too pleased that I left him up there with a witch haha).

Anyway, time to clean up so that I can sleep in a bit tomorrow! Looking forward to going glasses shopping with Denise and Chloe (and Andrea) next Thursday.

-ange xx

C.P. Tran - Day 2

Honestly... such cuteness is just too much =)

Mr. Sun shining his rays on one day old Cassidy

Dave fed Cassidy this morning and baby girl can eat - 15mL in one sitting! From this picture, you can see how she feels with a satisfied tummy, taking a peaceful nap after breakfast!

-ange xx

Welcome Cassidy Payton Tran!

I have a new love! This morning, Ann and Dave welcomed their baby girl into the world and she is as beautiful as can be. And I absolutely love her name (n.b. middle name Payton is to honour this year's Superbowl winner!). All day, all I could think about was meeting Cassidy and was thrilled when my day was over so I could make the trek to the hospital. The pictures are a bit dark because 1. iPhone quality, and 2. it was 7.30pm.

Me with 12hr old Cassidy

Sleeping princess

I'm so looking forward to spoiling my niece!

-ange xx

Back from Hiatus - Wedding Updates Galore!

Last night, Cathy sent me a facebook message reminding me that I actually have a blog, and one that I used to be quite good at updating. I'm not sure why I haven't written in 3 months, especially since there have been many "developments" so I thought I would take a minute to jot down my thoughts before I spend a Sunday afternoon working on my thesis (side note: which I have been quite focused on in the past few weeks finally).

On finally picking a colour and bridesmaids dresses:
In January, I committed three full days to deciding what colour the girls would wear. My first trip was to Bridal and Beyond with Andrea and Maygan and was it ever overwhelming! I quickly learned that different designers define the same colour differently, and that it also varies by fabric. For example, a "royal blue" on tafetta in the Alfred Angelo collection is different when it is on chiffon. And it is different than a "royal blue" in Dessy, Jim Hjelm, etc. As an engineer, this is particularly frustrating: why can't all designers just follow the standard RGB characterization of colours? *sigh* So after learning this lesson, my second trip was with my cousin's wife, Ann on a cold winter day. Ann, 7 months preggors at that time, helped me go through 5-6 colour swatches across different designers and I finally decided that "Sailor" blue from the Dessy collection was the way to go! However, I was still uneasy because I was making a decision on a 2cm by 2cm piece of fabric since the stores that we had visited that day did not have a full dress sample. Which leads us to a third day of driving around the city with my mom to locate a full dress in Sailor. Long story short, we found the dress after 3 stores. Thank God for everyone's patience! What would I do without this support?

With the designer and colour now chosen, the girls have started to pick their dresses. I really believe in them showcasing their individuality (as I appreciated this when Andrea got married and I was her bridesmaid), so I'm encouraging them to pick their own styles. I don't think I'll post their choices - to leave them as a surprise but here's a photo of a dress that I had posted about earlier, in Sailor. The boys will have no choice: I'll order their ties in the same colour and they'll just have to be happy with it hehe

A Dessy bridesmaid dress in Sailor (from here)

On a theme:
Jeff and I have recruited a childhood friend of mine, Catherine Quach to make our invitations. She has her own business which is doing extremely well (visit her website here). Since she is expecting a baby girl in May, I met with her 2 weeks ago to start designing our invitations. The theme is inspired by a city skyline (see picture below, upper right and bottom left corners) as it will match with the Art Deco-ness of Arcadian and pays homage (barely/slightly) to our engineering background.

A city skyline invitation (from here)

We will also match this to our wedding cake with a similar design to this:

Mmmm cake! (from here)

We're going to borrow the idea of using bridges as a pattern, but that's all I'm going to say because I'd like to keep the rest a secret!

On DJs:
I have interviewed about 10 DJs (on the phone and in person) since January and we have still yet to pick a DJ. We have learned that LED uplights are a cool effect to have at Arcadian court (see picture below) so we are now trying to find a good package that incorporates great music and lightning. I feel that we've narrowed it down to 3 companies and when Jeff comes home in April, he'll be in charge of pulling the trigger. A question for everyone: does looks matter for a DJ?

LED uplights accentuate the pillars and can change colour to set the mood

On the Mother-of-the-Bride dress:
Last week, my Mom got her evening dress and it is absolutely gorgeous! It is a one-shoulder, cocktail-length dress in pink and violet with lots of ruching. I'm not sure she'll let me post a picture, but the search was well worth it even though it took almost as much effort as finding my dress hehe

On the Cheongsam:
Before Christmas, I went to visit my cousins Hang and Virginia in Markham and they suggested that I wear Hang's cheongsam (from her wedding over 10 years ago) which is quite traditional and beautiful though VERY red with lots of gold sequences handsewn to make a pheonix and dragon. It was a lovely gesture and I took them up on the offer - my aunt will have to bring in the waist a tiny bit and remove the shoulder pads (yes, shoulder pads haha). The dress will be my "something borrowed".

Now time to get back to work! There are so many other non-related things I'd like to write about - namely, my two trips to San Jose this year, thesis progress, knee recovery, seeing Dave Chapelle on Valentine's Day (yes, *second* best surprise from Jeff ever), etc., but that will have to wait. Maybe I will treat myself to more blogging when I finish writing a section on "Profitability, Industry and Life Cycle Analysis".

-angexx