Merry Christmas!!

The Littlest Engineer















Busy, Busy!!















A Hotel Christmas Tree

Merry Christmas Everybody!

We have had a very nice, but VERY quiet Christmas here in our hotel room. As most of you know I am on bedrest and have been since before Christmas (everything seems to be going fine!) so Steve had to take charge of everything. He did a fabulous job of shopping for us all. Steve and I have worried that we have started to share a brain. The one present I managed to get him before being incapacitated is the same present he bought himself for Christmas! And the one present I asked him for for myself is the one present he'd already bought for me! (For those who can't stand the suspense, it was a passport folder and a blowdryer, respectively!)

Fin was thrilled silly with his train table and has been working hard at keeping the trains running on time ever since Christmas morning. Fin had seen the box for the train table a few days before Christmas, as he had to go along on the shopping expedition, but had not seen it or heard a word about it since. On Christmas morning, when Steve got him out of bed, the first words out of Fin's mouth were, "Trains! Trains!!".

We spent the rest of the day relaxing and enjoying the train table. We had bought tickets to the buffet dinner in the hotel restaurant and the hotel was very accomodating in allowing Steve to go down and fill some plates, which the staff brought up for us. I literally didn't have to leave the couch for the entire day. We had a lovely Christmas, but are really looking forward to next year when it won't be in a hotel and I won't be on bedrest!

Best Wishes to All of you!! We miss you!

Our New Home!!

View from our Balcony


OK, we have a new apartment!! And it has an amazing view! The complex is called Bel Air and is on the South Side of Hong Kong Island in Pok Fu Lam, right next to a development called Cyberport. If you are Steve you will say this in a robotic voice every chance you get.

At the bottom of this post are pictures of the living room, master bedroom and one from the balcony featuring our real estate agent, Alice. She was terrific and has been a huge help. Totally different than any of the agents we dealt with in NYC!

We are moving in on January 1st if all goes well. Naturally, being us, we haven't contacted anybody to help with the move yet....... so we may have to wait a day or two.

The part of the island that our new place is has much fresher air than downtown, and has lots of flat, grassy space to play with Fin on. The complex has an outdoor pool and an indoor pool, a gym and a wonderful children's play area. I am SO looking forward to getting settled!


Top is the Master Bedroom, Bottom is the Living Room

Midnight Run to Macau

Argh! It' s been a tough 24 hours to be a Mac-Tak!

I woke up at 4am to discover that I was having quite a bit of bleeding and then I started cramping (and panicking!). I called Steve at work (which should tell you about the day he was having!) and like the gallant knight that he is he came home. On my Dr's advice I am now on complete bedrest for the next week or so. The good news is that both twins had strong heartbeats and were active during the ultrasound. My Dr feels that with rest all will be well. Everybody please cross your fingers en masse! On a kind of funny note: In the hospital waiting room there was a newspaper called "The Standard" and it's front page headline read "Thai Crisis Sends Region Tumbling". Now I don't know if the whole region actually tumbled but my crisis at least briefly rocked our family!

Steve is able to take a few days off work which is wonderful, but it will not be a restful few days! Everything looks hopeful for signing a lease tomorrow for the apartment that I saw (and loved) from yesterday. However Steve must also sign a contract with the nanny that I interviewed earlier this week. In order to process the nanny's visa Steve must have his worker's visa in place and have applied for a HK ID Card. All of this means that tonight, and I do mean night, Steve is making a run to Macau and back. He will then be up at the crack of dawn to stand in line for the several hours it takes to apply for an ID Card. Our real estate agent will be meeting him in the line-up so that he can sign the lease! Craaaazy! But that's not even the worst of it for the poor guy! As my bedrest is supposed to be complete, he will have Fin with him.

All in all, a lot of stress. However, if all of these contract signings and visa/immigration hassles work out then we will be completely set! A home, a helper and an ID Card!

Wish us luck!

PS - I have been talking to Fin about going to Macau because we had planned to go today as a family. Fin is under the impression that we are going to see a cow. I'm afraid he will be sorely disappointed when we do arrive and there are no cows to be seen!

Here we Are!

OK, so as all of you who may be reading this are aware NOBODY in the Mac-Tak family are much for writing, but we are going to give this a go!
We arrived in HK two weeks ago and are only now starting to feel kind of like ourselves again. Fin suffered from horrible jet-lag, which in reality meant we ALL suffered from horrible jet-lag! He's back to sleeping through the night and napping at a normal time, which means that I'm sleeping mostly through the night now too. There was never any real hope for Steve to sleep through the night with the crazy hours he's been working and the fact that football doesn't come on until 2-3 in the morning here!
Fin and I are going out to look at apartments tomorrow and I'm hoping that having lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn will have adequately prepared us for the small sized apartments that everybody has warned me about here.
I'll take the camera on it's inaugural HK outing tomorrow so expect photos soon! We've been extremely lazy photographers in the last couple of months. I feel like we should be excused however as it's been a pretty hectic time!
We had an ultrasound of the twins last Friday and they were incredibly cute and so babylike already! They are laying so close together that in one scan we could see both of them. In fact, they are so close that the left baby appears to already resent it and kept kicking the right one, who, in Steve's opinion, was taking up more than it's fair share of the space. Hopefully relations will improve!