forget the money, babysitting these kids are priceless.

so my job this summer is babysitting these adorables for several hours for many many days. and oh man, has it been a huge blessing. the kids are samuel (4yrs) & isaiah (20mnths) tsai, who also have an older brother named joshua (7yrs), but i haven't babysat him yet because he's still been in school.

talking with auntie karen tsai, their mom, has been pretty awesome. we've been talking about a lot of different things that really made me admire their family all the more, especially how dedicated to God they are.
and their family is sooo cute! she was sharing with me how she and uncle john met, how they both love singing and how her kids love music. i thought it was cute how she said her kids love to sing but don't like singing in public. samuel (in the picture above) is kind of quirky to strangers. he's really really quiet. his mom told me how during his first time at pre-school his teacher said that he was really quiet and wouldn't say a word, only nodding yes or shaking his head no and saying nothing else to his teacher or anyone else in his class for...drum roll please...SEVEN MONTHS! unbelievable. it took him a while to warm up to them. it took me a day :]

now this one, isaiah, is such a cute one. he's a pretty good baby, too. auntie karen said that he's usually very clingy to her when around strangers, but as soon as i walked into their house, he was fine with me! i guess he and i clicked. he didn't cry or whine or anything at all when i first took him away from his mom to the park. today was my third time babysitting them and he was a bit crabby but he eventually warmed up again. and when his mom left he only cried for like, five minutes. then i carried him around for a bit and he stayed quiet in my arms. i think he likes me :]

and he speaks pretty well for an almost-two-year-old. he can definitely say 'mommy' really well, as well as 'ball' and 'please' (although it sounds more like 'bees'!), and on the first day i babysat them, samuel and i were playing this matching cards game of pictures from the Museum of Modern Art (i know, such a cultured kid :P), and isaiah was putting our cards back into the box every time we put our pairs down for go fish, when i totally thought i heard him say, "MoMa." i'm so serious. and then today, my phone rang while auntie karen was feeding isaiah his lunch (yogurt & oatmeal mixed together. [insert sarcastic "yum" here]), and auntie karen said, "oh, that's your ringtone?" and isaiah shouts, "ringtone!" and starts wiggling and bopping to my ringtone music. sooooo cute!

auntie karen was telling me in the car on the way to my house how predictable isaiah's sleep time is. once you put him on his bed, he'll have his hands all ready to pray (so cute), and then right after they pray, uncle john or auntie karen will usually try to sing to him, but he's so tired so he just rolls onto his stomach, lifts his head up, and waves goodbye. isn't that so adorable?

okay okay i've ranted enough about these awesome kids and their awesome family. here i'll tell you something about today. i babysat from 9-4 and came home and helped pam make dinner and afterwards i helped pam pack at least seven garbage bags into our car, full of STUFF from our closet. and believe me, people. this was a HUGE breakthrough. if you know my mom and if you've seen my house, you know that my mom is a huge pack-rat. and for YEARS she'll keep stuff and claim that she'll get around to cleaning it out and blah blah blah but NEVER does. so pam and i last week got fed up with our messy house and decided to do our own extreme house makeover, especially since some of the navajos will be staying with us in our house. we started with the living room, since for father's day everyone from both sides of our family were going to be there. we tossed everything into my parents' room (because we cleaned up all of our stuff...the mess was all of my mom's stuff) and she pretty much had to go through all the stuff. the living room was so different! and then today, pam took a stab at one of our closets and pulled out EVERYTHING in it and dumped our stuff into our room and mom's stuff into the living room so that the pile was so big that we could not avoid it before going to sleep. want to get a picture of how much stuff my mom keeps? pam didn't take a before picture of the closet, but here, i'll give you an idea. here's just some highlights of what we packed away into the car to give away:

• the stroller that carried all three of us chan girls when we were babies
• my graduation dress...from my kindergarten graduation
• my $5 denim hat that i asked my parents to get for me at a street fair (that actually started my love for hats)...when i was about 11 years old
• the chan girls' yellow booster seat
• my lamb chops playground figurines set
• the orange capri pants that i couldn't fit into anymore in the eighth grade

yeah. i know. just add tons of clothes and other stuff and there you have it: all the contents of one of our closets. and guess what? i thought we had given all of this stuff away like, years ago. it's pretty sad. but today, today was a happy day. my mom is making progress and not getting mad at us for doing this. that's good. she always gets a little ticked off in the beginning but then warms up to it. i take orders from pam like a dog. it's her who took charge, so she definitely deserves all the credit for this extreme makeover. i'm so proud of her and glad she got this going. i was tired of all this mess and looking at other people's houses and saying things like, "i wish my house was as clean as this."

now i can go to sleep smiling :D