Mommy does my hair every morning. You may have noticed some of her creations in various pictures. I always feel so beautiful when she does my hair. She’s really good at it.
Daddy, on the other hand, is not as good at it. And, unfortunately, when Mommy goes away (like she did last week to New York), I’m subject to Daddy doing my hair. Let’s just say, the kids at school know when Mommy is out of town.
On Day #1, Daddy went with the pig tails. Not totally balanced, but passable...
On Day #2, he just simply forgot to do anything to my hair - yeah, in my face all day long. Thanks Dad.
On Day #3, he tried a few pig tails, but then resorted to the ol' pony tail. I think it stayed in for about 5 minutes when I got to school.
On Day #4, he added some clips to try to get things to stay put for longer. Let's just say those clips didn't come home with me.
On Day #5 - looking good, right? Yeah, Mommy came home that day.
Things got a bit more exciting for Lauren around meal time on Friday PM – we started her with some solids, specifically a very un-solid rice cereal!
I've been watching you all eat for so long now, it's a pleasure to finally be joining the world of solids!
She took right to it – in fact, on night #2 she practically licked the bowl clean! She eats like a champ and has a very willing helper in Maile Girl…
(Now this is pretty weird, I went back to find when we gave Maile her first solids and it turns out we did it around the exact same time and also during a series of blog posts titled “Weekend of Firsts” – I guess lots starts to happen once the rice cereal is introduced. Here’s the blog post about us feeding Maile for the first time.)
(For some reason a bunch of things came together this past week and it ended up being full of milestones for both Maile and Lauren. We’ll cover them here over the next couple of days…)
Saturday was Maile’s very first ballet recital! She and her Tutu School classmates performed a recital at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco (a beautiful venue btw).
To say Maile was very, very excited is definitely an understatement. Maile absolutely loved her red tutu that was special for the performance (and especially the heart tiara that went along with it!)
Maile Girl, the Ballerina
They organized the show expertly – our session was 1 hour long and Maile’s group was the last one to go. It was a finely oiled machine with one group waiting while the other group went. Maile loved watching all the other dancers and when it was her turn, she ran right up with her friend Sophie and got right in line without a second though – our girl was ready to get on that stage!
On stage and ready to rock!
I’m including two videos of the performance – one from the actual performance and one from a practice session the week before – it wasn’t so easy to capture the video the day of (plus I was more focused on watching than recording π
Here’s the actual recital:
And here’s the practice session:
(Click here for the first video.)
(Click here for the second video.)
We received a fun email from one of Maile’s teachers today – it had about a week’s worth of pictures of Maile’s school journal. Last week the teachers gave some of the kids a journal that they could draw and write in every day. Apparently, Maile has really taken to the idea. You can see her entries below – Maile’s teacher wrote:
Attached are Maile’s journal entries since last week. Her first one was on princess. She has been showing interest to write in her book everyday. We have been encouraging children to take that responsibility on their own, so we don’t have to remind them everyday. Starting this week, I noticed she is adding Chinese dates on her entries. She would write ε ζεζ₯ζζδΊ (liu yue si ri xing qi er) June 4th, Tuesday.
Very cool to see the combined English and Chinese writing. Chris and I have seen her getting more and more comfortable with the Chinese. She still mainly speaks it at school, but she’s been using it at home a bit more. Most nights we ask her to teach us a new Chinese word at dinner and she always has something to share. It’s also clear that she is quite comfortable now conversing with her teachers in Chinese and is starting to take to writing the characters – my guess is that is the artistic side of her, since they are fun pictures to draw.
Maile's first journal entry - May 28th, 2013
Notice how she is starting to add the date in English...
May 30th journal entry
June 3rd she has the date in English and Chinese...
Daddy went to Las Vegas with some friends last Thursday. He was only there for one night and was home to see us for dinner on Friday. Unfortunately for us, he wasn’t so much fun when he got home… I’ll have to look more into what this Vegas place is all about because it sure wiped out my Daddy!
Daddy wasn't so fun when he got home from Las Vegas...
