California Academy of Sciences..oooo

Kevin and I are not ashamed to be called nerds. We actually like museums, classical music, opera, etc. I also like the Malaysian classical cultural activities too, thought I should put that in before someone thinks I'm only into mat salleh stuff. :)

I think we both started to fall in love in one of Malaysia's nature center actually, the Malaysia Bird Park in Lake Gardens. He thought it was cute that I was so excited over the peacocks running around, and I was so glad he enjoyed learning about the animals even though we went in the middle of the day and he was wearing a velour long sleeve shirt, sweating like crazy.

Back to the present time, we decided to become members of the California Academy of Sciences. The building underwent a 10 year renovation for USD 500 million and re-opened its doors in 2008. I actually remembered when it was closed down in 1999 coz I went there as a student. They started again from scratch! Well, it's now a smart green building with a living roof! I don't mind going there to just admire the architecture.

Anyway, enough chit chat coz as you know, I don't have much time nowdays. I am actually making Nurilham's baby food myself! Friends who know me, totally knows I'm NOT a Martha Stewart kind. ha ha!

We arrived about 10 minutes before the doors opened coz we heard the crowd can be crazy.

This is bones of a T-Rex.

An albino alligator. It's alive, just don't move much to conserve energy.

Gar Fish. It's big! Maybe 3 feet long.

Phillipine coral tank with tropical fishes.

Nurilham is just fascinated by the fish zooming past her. She kept quiet during the whole trip until her nap time.

Rock fish lying on the stones just resting, too lazy to swim I guess. :)

OMG, this one scares me half to death. I saw it coming towards me and kept calm but then the size and scary look just makes me jump up. Kev thought it was very funny. It's one of the many species of giant catfish from the Amazon.

This is the Amazon flooded river (fresh water) exhibit and there's a tunnel for us to see. The fishes are HUGE! I don't think I can swim in a river again!! I have a fear of big fish.

Electric eel. (also can be found in rivers)

Anaconda - biggest snake in the world. I couldn't see it at first coz I was too close and thought it was part of the tree roots.

Aaah...now we go to cute animals like butterflies. :) They have a rainforest exhibition. It wasn't that humid but we were sweating at the end of the walk. There's three levels, the first one is the Borneo rainforest, second and third are from the Costa Rica and Amazon. It was my favorite exhibition by far. There were bats from Borneo (yay!) and there's this HUGE black frog (as you can probably tell by now, I'm fascinated by HUGE animals or scared like hell). But the butterflies are so sweet and they fly free with the birds around the compound. There's so many things to see there. Above is the butterfly feeder.

Miss Diva here gave me pose after pose when I took its picture.

Do you see the frogs? They look like crabs!

The rainforest exhibition starts from the Amazon Flooded River (underground) all the way to the top of the trees. They want to show that each level has a different ecosystem and animals.

Two of my most favourite people enjoying the exhibition. I hope Nurilham won't mind being a nerd too! :)

6 months old and lots of catching up to do.

Brigitta Nurilham is now 6 months old. She turned 6 months on July 9th, 09. She's doing so many different things in the last two weeks, it's just amazing to see. She has learnt to turn and twist her body so that every time I tried to change her diaper, she would twist herself and reach at the back of her head where all the lotions, shampoo, bodywash bottles are and knock them off. I got a feeling that she finds this funny, of course I don't. She could also sit longer day by day on her own but there were some times which she fell down flat on her face, which also means she's learning about gravity. My heart jumps out whenever she does that but she doesn't cry which is such a relief. Her hands are getting more nimble and she's better at grasping things. One of my favorite things now is when she nurses, she curls her fingers on one of mine. Still all these are eclipsed by some really major development : she has grown two bottom front teeth, am saying "da da da" very clearly..so learning how to form words, recognizing people and actions (has a killer smile when she does so), eating solid foods and learning how to potty. Potty you might say? At 6 months? Actually, I started when she was 4+ months. I just learnt about it recently from one parents group online and heard that it's easier to learn about infant potty training (for parents and baby) before they're 6 months so I did a crash course - bought a video and book and studied like crazy. As much as I can before she interrupts me. It seems that even in America, in the early 1900's potty training starts in 3 months and the kids are usually trained by 1 year or 2 the most. Nowdays, due to the convenience of diapers, kids are getting potty trained later and later. So, one of the reasons I was so quiet was that I was sooo busy learning about this and solid foods (which is a major step too). Here's some photos of my girl :

Taking a bath with her Haba mermaid squirter.

Flashing her gorgeous smile.

Wearing her first sunglasses. Anis is holding her. We are at Sheilla's son's birthday party.

Celebrating her first Father's Day with her dad. She got him a digital frame.

Learning how to stand. She's pretty good at it, she's just leaning on Kev's fingers.

Kev got me some opera tickets for my birthday this year coz he knew I really wanted to attend one badly. I love to hear operettas and thought it would be awesome to go to a full feature. He surprised me with the tickets in March but the show is in July coz Brigitta will be nearly 6 months and he figured she'll be easy enough to babysat for. Our friends, Jo and Kyle helped out, they're great with kids and their daughter is adorable who likes to have Brigitta around. But, it was really difficult for me to leave her coz I somehow now she would be so upset. Jo and Kyle were the most patient souls and tried to appease her as she cried through the night, they didn't even call us. When we arrived, she was sleeping on Jo, exhausted. The opera was really wonderful, going out with Kevin on a date night was just a welcome relief but I was so glad to pick up Brigitta again. She was a bit traumatized by us leaving her I think. We went back to Jo's place for dinner on another day and immediately she started crying and didn't want us to put her down. As long as we're holding her, she's fine. It was obvious she remembered being without us and being left behind. That's another major step too for both of us. :)

And somewhere in there, we had some time to go to Yosemite. It was absolutely gorgeous, we were lucky that there were some snowfall recently so the falls are just swollen and majestic. We rented a private house with two other families so we didn't use the one with the telescopes coz that's a smaller house. We got a 3 bedroom 2 bath home, with a game room and a hammock at the deck. It was still 20 mins away from Yosemite park but do-able. Kev and I are the tour guides as we've been to Yosemite a couple of times but we never got to check out the Sequoia grove but this time we made sure we did. It was a bit far away but to me, it's worth the trip. The trees are just massive, the biggest one was called Grizzly, and one of the branches is 6 ft in diameter -it's like seeing trees coming out of the side of a huge mass of tree trunk. The height is about a 27 floor building. I could just go on and on about Yosemite...god, listen to me, I used to be a city girl! Now, I'm into nature?

The house we rented.

We went with two other families. Shahril, Amida and their kids, Shasha and Harith. Azam, Sheilla and their son, Adil.

The house was cool, it had a fully equipped kitchen, a big living room, washer dryer, hammock outside, a jet tub and a game room. And just 20-30 mins away from the park.

Bridalveil Falls - one of my favs to stand at the base.

I think this is Bridalveil Falls too. It looks longer from another angle.

Sentinel Falls

Picnic lunch at Wawona. Changing diapers.

Grizzly, the largest sequoia tree in the park. See how big it is amongst the mature pine trees.

To get to the grove, we had to take a bus from Wawona coz the parking gets full really fast.

Then we went to Glacier Point. Taking a photo with the ranger.

Half Dome draped by low clouds. It was rainy that day and we have never seen it like this before. A unique view. You can see the Half Dome from our other photos without the clouds in my previous blog posts.

Hope you enjoy this post...and sorry for the long silence. Hopefully, I could do update this more often from now on.