The Restaurant

The day of Hannah’s fifteenth birthday, we head, at her request, to the Shang Simlan restaurant that has recently opened in the Spice District.

It’s actually on top of the karaoke bar Hugo and Shanna fought to save. And it worked! The first floor was renovated and turned into this beautiful place that Hugo and I have also been able to try.

Hannah’s request to go eat there is not motivated by Spice Market nostalgia: she just wants to discover tastes from another side of the world. She’s super excited to try dumplings — and not the kind you can find in food stalls Uptown. She saw Lily Feng try them out and recoil once, and ever since she’s want to get the authentic taste.

They did an incredible renovation here. This used to be a sad, empty space.

The hostess receives us with a warm smile. We’ve made the opening, and apparently we’re the very first clients!

Hannah is thrilled that she’ll now have the same birthday as what she is sure will become her favorite place to eat. She chats with the host about every possible simlan food-related thing she can think of, while the rest of us are already going through the menu.

It all looks so appetizing! We agree on a big family meal with a bit of everything.

And then we wait for the food to come, taking in the beautiful atmosphere of this new Spice Market spot.

Home

The summer ends, and we head back home. The first thing we do is remodeling the twins’ bedroom, to their grown-up tastes.

Somehow they manage to make it a mess in less than a day.

No other room in the apartment has changed nearly as much as this one over the years, not even the guest bedroom that is now Hannah’s.

But some things don’t change.

We still love playing in this room, all of us together.

And the kids feel safe and comfortable here, which is all that matters.

They do wake up in the middle of the night, screaming about monsters under the bed, but I just suspect Hannah is making them watch scary movies when we’re not looking.

The Deep Forest

Hannah is older now, so we finally let her live out her dream of going exploring in the deep woods.

And she makes the most of it. With the circumspection and care of an archeologist, she extracts rocks and fossils from stone, gathers odd plants and insects, and writes about all of them in the pretty notebook she got for her last birthday.

What she finds, she brings to the groundkeepers as soon as we get home. They pat her back and tell her she found wonders, and that she can keep them. To us, they whisper that though the fossils she found were genuine, they’re not exactly rare around the forest.

There is one mystery she leaves unexplored, and that’s only because she knows getting into a mysterious hole in the trees as night is about to fall would earn her the punishment of a lifetime from us.

But she swears she’ll be back.

Night

Now that they’re older, the twins are allowed to join our marshmallow-roasting.

The kids insisted to share a bedroom. We hear them chatter and shout until midnight (yet somehow they think they’re sneaky), and then nothing but snoring. They spend enough of their energy during the day.

That’s the time when Nounou gets all the cuddles.

Twin Birthdays!

Cyril and Cleo are no longer babies. They celebrate their seventh birthday during our time in Granite Falls. Hugo and I spent the morning preparing two huge cakes for our babies, and Hannah helped decorate the yard.

Everything is ready for the party!

It’s a peaceful day. All the other tourists have gon hiking, so we have the place to ourselves, as a private little family.

Cyril is not all too sure about this whole situation, but he was born a full ten minutes before his sister, so we make him blow the candles first.

His sister dances in the background, happy that it’s almost her turn.

I do help him a little with the blowing. He still has tiny lungs.

Yay! You’re a big boy now!

I blow a celebratory horn — everybody has started eating the cake and no one really cares. Oh well, I still will.

Hannah is not eating, though. There are other candles to blow after all.

“Cleo?” she calls. “Mom, where is Cleo?”

“It’s fine, Hugo says. She says she wanted to tell her stuffed animals that she was getting older. I’ll go get her.”

“There’s the little gremlin”

Happy birthday, darlings!

Afternoon

The chimney had an issue that prevented it from lighting up. We’re in the middle of summer, but we’re also very high up in the mountains, and everything is more comfy with crackling flames.

Around snack time for Cyril and Cleo, they each get a slice of the pie I baked this morning.

And I read by the fire.

Hannah said she was too old for snack time, now. Instead she went outside to fish with her dad.

She’s getting really good at it! We heard for days about the “treasure chest” she reeled in. It had three apples in it, but it was an absolute win anyway.

Learning to Fish

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Hugo continues the work he started a few years earlier of teaching Hannah how to catch fish.

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She’s now mostly able to throw the line on her own — and she even reels one in!

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Later that night, Hugo spends a full hour before sleep telling me about her fishing exploits.

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I’m pretty sure that’s Hugo’s idea of a perfect day.