Valentine's day...

... or: how dad and mom get an opportunity to go out and enjoy a romantic night together.

Yes indeed, our good friend Kula volunteered to babysit Marc on Valentine's night, what a nice detail! Being far from our families, these are the kind of things that mean the world to us.

The plan for the night? Dinner a Sura Thai Bistro and a movie. Again, it may not sound like much, but to us it is. One of the few things we really miss from our life pre-Marc are our weekly movie sessions.

Dinner was amazing, a festival of flavours and great presentations. Kudos to a creative special menu built around flowers with a total of 4 dishes each one of them equally impressive, I wish I remember the names of the plates, but there was a little bit of everything: roasted duck salad, ceviche, orchid tempura,... Following are a couple of shots we took:


After the nice dinner we enjoyed "Revolutionary Road", some may say "not the happiest movie for a Valentine's date", but what a great movie nevertheless, two great actors probably at the peak of their game, specially Kate Winslet who fills the screen with an unbelievable portrait of these woman trapped in a life she cannot stand.

Happy Valentine's (even if with a little delay) :)

2nd year wedding anniversary...

We've been married for 2 years! So many things have happened in this time: we looked for and found our first home, we decorated it, we've been together to Hawaii, Miami, New York, Spain and China, we got our green cards, and last, but definitely not least, we've had the most wonderful baby together.

Ours was a very unconventional wedding, we just knew we wanted to be together and we were willing to do anything to accomplish that goal, we did not want to risk being apart for long time again due to immigration aspects, we also knew that preparing a formal wedding with our families living in two different countries so far away as China and Spain was not a realistic option.

Therefore, we decided to just get married in the Chicago city hall on Feb 13th 2007, a Tuesday, in the middle of one of the worse snow blizzards of that winter. The judge joked that we would probably be the only couple getting married that day and that we should be really in love to marry that day.

It's funny, but I remember almost every second of the ceremony, I remember how nervous we were, how warm Chenli's hand felt while I was holding it.

We did not even have rings, the rings came later as a present of my family when my sisters (Ana and Mari Carmen) and my brother-in-law came to visit us. I've actually never been one who likes to wear any type of jewels and I thought wearing a ring would not work for me, but now, I love it, it reminds me of one of the most wonderful days of my life, it reminds me that I'm lucky to share my life with such an amazing woman and it reminds me that our families are always with us supporting us and loving us.

This posting is dedicated to my wonderful wife for the last 2 amazing years and for the many more that will follow... Love you more and more everyday.

Fun times indoor when is freezing outside...

Surviving the winter

It's been tough to find time to blog lately, specially since I joined facebook... Kind of difficult to keep both sites updated, specially during the winter when not much is happening. I just uploaded a few new pictures to Picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/macandchen

Some of them were from our last couple of days in Altea, the rest were taken the last couple of weeks capturing some major milestones:

- Marc has started to eat cereal, I can't say he's enjoying it much, but hey, he'll get there.


- Marc is trying to walk, yep, he's only 4 months and a half, but he's already decided that he can skip the sitting up and crawling stages. Therefore we bought a doorway jumper for him which he really digs, good stuff!

What else? Last week we were missing Spanish food so much that we placed an order in latienda.com. We got the shipment yesterday: Jamon Iberico, Lomo, Chorizo and Paella rice. It was awesome to try them out yesterday for dinner and remember the good times we spent back home in Altea.

We miss everybody tremendously! Love!

Vacation is over...

All right, it happened again.... after half and hour typing, $tupid blogger ate my post... Talking about frustration....

Anyways, just wanted to let everybody know that we made it back safe and almost on-time to Chicago, those of you reading the news about Madrid-Barajas airport know that this is already quite an accomplishment!

Vacation was GREAT, one of the best trips ever, what did we do, you may wonder. Next to nothing! We barely left Altea in the whole time we were in Spain, we just focused on relaxing and enjoying time with family and friends, that simple!

Now we are back in Chicago and missing family and friends every single second, missing the long walks by the sea, missing the awesome home cooked food, missing the long conversations over good coffee.

Marc and Lily had a great time and so did my family. Having Marc around illuminated the whole Christmas! They all love him and he got many many presents from family, friends, neighbors... he was a tiny little celebrity, everybody wanted to meet him, play with him...

May the new year bring only the best to all you guys! We love you and miss you a lot!

We will be writing individual posts for the highlights of the trip over the next few days.