..SouthAsiaRocks..

Well, we're back from Tennessee and getting ready to start packing... yikes!!! We had a great Christmas... on the way up to Tennessee, we passed through my favorite county in Georgia... Our Christmas was good... a lot more fun than last Christmas: Aashini spent her first Christmas in the hospital... Kari & Emily came by and brought us some Christmas decorations to make our hospital room more Christmassy... (is that a word?) So, last Christmas was memorable... but not the best :) This Christmas we were in America! Here's Aashini when she was coming into the room to open presents on Christmas morning... I think she's making a really funny face in this picture! haha! She was excited about her "stick horse"... She got some books for Christmas too, and her Masi (Alison, my sister) read her a few :) I'll post some more pictures later :)

This weekend we went and visited Adam's family! It was our last time to see them before heading back to South Asia, so that was sad, but we had fun :) Here's a pic of Aashini with Adam's mom. Adam's mom is a belly dancer . It's cool :) On Thursday night we went to Cafe' TuTu Tango where she dances. We got to enjoy great food and watch her show. It was fun :) She did a cool dance with this plate full of candles - talk about having good balance!! We went to a local spring too and got to see some Manatee :) Here's Adam's brother Sean :) Here's his dad. They played some racket ball (as well as a bunch of other fun stuff) :) Aashini thought it was cool :) We had a lot of fun :) Hope you guys have a GREAT Christmas!

I got a fun new 50 mm fixed lens for my camera and so I've been playing with it the last couple of days! Some ladies asked for some pics of our feet (you know... "how beautiful are the feet...") so I got a little carried away taking feet pictures :) You can see Aashini's cute little anklets (on her cute chubby feet!) :) In our area of South Asia, they give kids these anklets when they start walking (I think so that they can hear where they are) :) So, we bought some before we left to give her when she starting walking... she thinks they're cool :) My cool friend Lea has almost the same lens that I do and taught me a fun trick tonight - so I had to try it out! I was too lazy to pull out the tripod (and make it look even cooler) but this still looks really cool :) These are the lights on our tree - I made them look like stars! Fun hunh?

This past weekend was my favorite Tallahassee event :) We've been gone almost every weekend, but we were planning on being in town for this weekend - it's my favorite! It was the Tallahassee Winter Festival. During the festival is the JINGLE BELL RUN! The run is really fun! Everyone wears the run shirt, a santa hat (well, most people wear that) and jingle bells on your shoes... this year there was a new addition - fun light up necklaces! It's a 3k, - not a long race, so a lot of people come out to run. There were about 65,000 people at the festival, and a LOT of those people run... not sure how many there were, but there were a lot! There are so many people, that if you stop to tie your shoe, you'll get trampled :) haha! Here's my best attempt at a picture before the race :) Here's Adam & I before the race with our cool light-up necklaces :) So I want to know what your favorite Christmas songs are? It would be fun to hear your favorites :) I hav...

OK, so I LOVE any kind of sweet yummy coffee drink... BUT the caffeine in coffee makes me crazy hyper and then I come crashing down -- so I tend to be a decaf person :) Anyway, on a friend's blog the other day, they posted a recipe for Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes - so I thought I'd pass it along it is super yummy!! :) Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes 2 cups milk 1 cup strong coffee (I used 3 T of grounds to make 1 cup) 2 T canned pumpkin (or maybe 3 T of South Asian Pumpkin) 2 t vanilla Sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves to taste Mix all ingredients in pot, cook over low heat until steaming. Onto another favorite of mine... PIZZA!! Our South Asian friends think that Americans only eat Pizza & Burgers :) haha ! We do eat our share of pizza :) I was trying to figure out an easy way to make pizza... check this out! OK, all you need is a can of those pop biscuits (you know the can that pop when you open them?)... Get just the plain biscuits, the sweet ones make it taste kinda...

Our friends Annie & Rahul and their awesome kids were in town after Thanksgiving and we got the chance to see them for a little bit! It was so great seeing them! It was hilarious to try to take a groupl picture together with 4 kids and 4 adults! haha! It was funny! :) Here's a pic of Annie & I... Annie made that awesome Baby Shower Blog for us before Aashini was born and is a photographer - Annie Agarwal Photography - she's awesome! The other night we met this really fun South Asian family! One of our friends in South Asia is friends with them too, so it was fun to meet up with them :)

We visited New Orleans when we went for our visit to Slidell last weekend. We hadn't been to that area since Katrina, so it was pretty crazy to see how different it was. We spent some time driving around the 9 th Ward. It was the hardest hit area and the area we used to live in (and I used to work in). We drove down street after street of houses that were still destroyed and unlivable . We could still see the spray paint on people's houses. You can see the "X" in the picture above (and the guy doing one in the pic below). They used those Xs as a way to communicate during the search and rescue time after Katrina. Different search organizations had different methods (and the animal search groups really confused things), but this is basically what they did: When a team goes into the house, they paint one diagonal of the X, and where the northern quadrant would be, they put the date, and in the western quadrant, they put some indication of who searched it. After th...

This weekend was awesome!!! We went to Slidell & New Orleans :) I'll write about New Orleans later, but right now, I'm writing about our awesome trip to Slidell . We went to grad school in New Orleans and lived there for the first year, but then moved to Slidell after that for the next couple of years as we finished school. We love our church family out there!!! First stop were our old jobs! First we went to my old job at Crossgates Athletic Club - they have re-modeled in the last 3 years, so it was cool to see all of the changes and see some fun people I used to work with. Next, we went to the Wal -Mart Pharmacy where Adam used to work. It was really great getting to see everyone there. It rocked! On Friday night a bunch of people from our church (Northshore) all got together and we ate and hung out :) It rocked! Here is my friend Alicia . She lived in Slidell pre -Katrina and now lives in Texas, but drove in with her awesome kids for the weekend :) It was...

Here's a couple of random pics from the things I've been doing lately :) My mom teaches ESL (English as a Second Language) at FBC in Tally, so when I'm in town, I go with her to her class and help out. We have the very beginners that don't really speak any English at all. It's a very fun class! Anyway, this past Tuesday night, we had a Thanksgiving banquet with the Students and their friends. We met some new South Asian friends and had a lot of fun! :) At the end, some of the students played instruments and some sang. One lady from Russia played the accordian and sang - it was so fun! The picture below is of my friend from Japan playing the Sanshin and singing - it was really neat! Aashini loved all the music :) The pic below is of me and my friend Nisay. She's from Cambodia. She's really cool and has a really cool story. Right now she's at school at Florida State. Adam & I want to visit her in Cambodia when she's back there in a few yea...