When people ask me about raising our girls in a big city like San Francisco, I always tell them that its been wonderful, much better and easier than I expected, with one big BUT. And the big BUT has been that I’ve felt that its been a lot harder to teach the girls (and Maile in particular) how to ride her bike. Can’t really just head right out the door as the streets are quite busy. And so I’ve felt like I’ve been failing in one of my “father duties” in making sure Maile could ride her bike.
This all changed a few weeks ago – Maile started asking directly for me to help her learn so we made a concerted effort to take the bike out, take the training wheels off, and go find a place nearby that we could practice on. Turns out there is a big church right diagonal from us that has a pretty big open space that is perfect.
Very tentative early attempts... (look at the concentration though!)
Maile was very nervous, but to her credit despite the fear and the tears, she kept working at it. I’m proud of her often, but I was particularly proud of her through this effort. It was really hard. We went out a couple weekends in a row and all of a sudden on the fourth outing, it all just clicked and she’s now a full-fledged no training wheel rider!
Pretty cool place to learn how to ride your bike...
Here’s a video of our first outing…
And here she is on Saturday…
As for Lauren, she is incredible on her little scoot bike – she whips around on that thing like crazy. Since Maile was learning something new, I taught Lauren how to ride and lift her feet up so she could glide a bit. She too nailed it pretty quick and was gliding all over in no time. I have a feeling she’ll be on the pedal bike soon enough chasing after her big sister.
Maile Girl, No Training Wheel Bike Rider
Lauren, Gliding Maniac
(Click here for the first video.)
(Click here for the second video.)
A new toy for the house arrived today, an Amazon Echo. If you haven’t heard of it, Echo is a speaker that responds to voice control and can do all sorts of cool things. It’s kind of like Siri, but for your home. The voice control is activated by saying “Alexa” – so Alexa is a new friend for the girls.
They had quite a good time this evening getting to know her – they think she is hilarious…
Of course, we tried to see if we could teach her Chinese, but didn’t have much luck with that one…
One thing that is cool, is that Alexa is programmable – so looking forward to seeing what tricks I can teach “her”…
(Click here for the first video.)
(Click here for the second video.)
For the past couple of weeks, Lauren has gone kicking and screaming to swim class. But once she arrives, she crushes it.
And today she was rewarded for her hard work (even though she seemed a little clueless as to what was going on) – she received her Level 1 ribbon!
Christine caught a very short video of her swimming all by herself last week:
And I caught the awarding of the ribbon today:
Very proud of our little girl 🙂
Bam! Level 1 Ribbon! You said I get ice cream with this, right?
(Click here for the first video.)
(Click here for the second video.)
After exploring Hollywood for a bit, it was finally time to head over to the show for the taping. We arrived around 3 PM and were whisked through with our tickets. The live taping wasn’t until 5 PM, but we needed to arrive early and they also did a pre-taped performance with Keith Urban. They actually had him play his song twice – which Maile got a total kick out of – growing up in a DVR world the whole concept of live TV and the fact that they were taping this and it was then going out over the TV was pretty wild for her.
Of course, Maile made friends with all of our nearby seat mates – lots of moms and grandmas that all got a kick out of Maile Girl and her La’Porsha sign. The area in front of the stage was filled with teenagers and Maile was very intrigued by everything going on down there and the “hype man” who came out to get the crowd “rowdy” – “what’s rowdy, daddy?”
The hype man instructed us to clap over our heads during the fast songs and just sway a bit during the slow ones – Maile took down his instructions to a tee.
It was a long afternoon – the show is two hours so we didn’t leave until 7 PM – but Maile did great – she screamed her little heart out for La’Porsha – and probably just because of that her favorite made it to the finale 🙂
Putting the finishing touches on her sign for La'Porsha with glitter glue...
Oh yeah, let's get ready to rock!
One more selfie on the way in - we are very excited!
We made it!
Maile and her sign were very popular with the people we met...
An awesome experience with Maile Girl 🙂
Maile was in a pretty goofy mood after the show, but here’s her quick recap…
(Click here for the video.)
As I mentioned last week, last year, we started watching American Idol with Maile – we were looking for a show Christine and I could watch with her that wasn’t some mind-numbing cartoon. American Idol fit the bill pretty well – she loved the singing, its a “family” show – it led us to some interesting conversations with her when different things would come up – and its kind of inspiring to see these kids work hard to achieve their goals.
With this season being the last, a few months back I had the idea that it would be really cool if I could figure out a way to get us to a taping of the show before it ended. I realized I actually had a college friend that worked at Fox and a few emails later he agreed to help me out – which was totally awesome of him!
So Thursday, Maile and I boarded a plane and headed down to LA!
Before we could go to the show though, we needed to set the stage – so we took in some of the sites around the hotel. We were staying at the W Hollywood – which was right in a pretty seedy part of Hollywood – but I wanted Maile to have the full experience so we headed out…
(NOTE: Some of these pictures are from Thursday before we went to the show and some are from Friday AM when we had some more time to kill before heading back to SF.)
Selfie in the Lyft - we have arrived and are ready to rock!
Maile doing her best fancy hotel pose in our fancy hotel...
To say Maile was excited is an understatement...
Incredibly, the very first star we saw right outside the hotel was J. Lo's!
Maile was very impressed that my feet and hands matched up with Matt Damon's - and we shared a first name to boot 🙂
Roof top pool. So. Cool.
Julia Roberts was kind enough to take a picture with Maile Girl!
Taylor Swift and Lady Gage too 🙂
Yep, Maile has her Beyonce nailed!
More to come…
On Thursday, Maile and I are jumping on a plane and headed down to Hollywood to watch a live taping of American Idol! We’ve been watching the show for a few seasons now and its something we really enjoy doing together (you might recall last year we went to see the tour when it came around). This is the final season of American Idol, so I thought it might be fun to try to get tickets to a taping. Long story short, a friend works at Fox Sports and was able to help out. Leading to a very cool Daddy and Maile adventure.
Maile is very excited. As of last night her bag is already packed (and tonight she asked if we could review everything again to make sure we didn’t forget anything). Her outfit is all picked out, but she’s still deciding on what Daddy should wear – stay tuned.
In the meantime, the other big project this weekend was to create a poster for Maile’s favorite contestant, La’Porsha. She went through quite a process over both Saturday and Sunday to get it together, but I think you’ll find that it came out amazing…
Maile started on a 8x11 sheet of paper and got the basic design together - I then showed her how to use a ruler to space out the words nicely...
We then headed down to the store and picked up some poster board and Maile set to work translating her design to the poster board in pencil...
... and the finished poster! All colored in and ready to rock!
Stay tuned for more
We hope everyone who was celebrating had a nice Easter today. We ended up having a really nice day with the girls.
The morning started with a mini Easter egg hunt in the house that Mommy setup before she went to bed last night. The girls discovered their Easter baskets when they woke up and then went off to find some eggs hidden around our living room. A fun start to the morning.
Nothing like starting the morning with an egg hunt in your PJ's...
The hunt is on!
Success!
Also successful, but still refuses to look at the camera for me 🙂
One of Christine’s co-workers invited us to her church’s festivities so we headed down to the nearby park and they had all types of awesome activities for the girls – from decorating eggs to cookies to making bunny ears to making a candy bracelet … and, of course, an easter egg hunt (which we kind of messed up and missed, but one of the organizers gave the girls some eggs so they were happy). It was a beautiful day and the girls had fun with all the activities.
Painting some eggs...
Quite proud of her Easter cookie...
... the goofball wants to eat it all up!
She could have decorated cookies all day - we pulled her away after two...
Recently, Lauren has been really enjoying this wood marble run set we got her for Christmas. She builds these super elaborate contraptions (which she is always fearful that clumsy Daddy will end up breaking). She’s not done yet, at the end of the video, you can catch her asking Mommy for a Lego set – so I have a feeling a lot more building is coming!
And the best part is that Christine captured probably my favorite picture of Lauren in quite some time:
So cute! So proud!
(Click here for the video.)
On Saturday we headed down to Palo Alto to visit with some friends. We went over to our friend’s house who have two boys. I think its fair to say that the types of toys they had over there were quite a bit different from what we have at home. The girls had a blast trying them on for size…
Spider Lauren - ready to save the day!
Teenage Mutant Ninja Maile!
The outfits were fun, but the swords were even better! (Until Daddy got rapped pretty good on the knuckles by little Lauren…)
(Click here for the video.)
