Happy 9th - Part 1

It's become a tradition now. We can't even remember when it started, but by now it's expected. The night before a birthday (of a child, that is) mommy and daddy sit down to get started with the "numbers" which must be creative - or at least as creative as we can be - and form a pathway between the bed of the birthday girl and the place of her present(s). The idea is that in the morning she will wake up and follow the numbers to her present.  The second part of the same event is that we have a pancake breakfast, with the birthday girl enjoying a pancake in the shape of the number of years she is celebrating. Well, this time it was the last of the single digits for Irini, who is growing faster than we are comfortable with. Day by day she becomes more sophisticated and mature, and we're finding ourselves hanging on, trying to maximize the child time we have with her. 

This day she woke up but bypassed the numbers to head straight to mommy and daddy. She jumped into their bed to cuddle for a while, chatting a bit, and followed shortly by her sister doing the same. Then, with a sudden jump she got right up (just like she had joined us) and announced "time for my presents!". And so it was that she marched out to the sofa, and opened the bag. The joy for the day began as simply as that.... breakfast followed with Amalia insisting that she needed to help out with the preparation of the pancakes. Yummy ones too!

Home Work

But houses, like people, are never quite "complete". They need a little change here, or a fix up there, or a little adjustment further over. In our case the place came with its own back yard soon-to-be-turned-into-a-back-yard desert. :-)  Apart from the technicians, the electricians, the plumbers and the supervisors, there was a crew charged with fixing up the outside areas of the place. And it was here that our girls found the most value in the move. Apart from the people being very friendly they also brought cool tools - like a spade and rake - to do whatever it was they were going to do. The girls found themselves taking wanders outside, then sitting down to watch, and then, bit by bit, taking part in the work. Before they knew it they were mixing cement to keep the bricks together. On the job training is a great life skill. So, not quite the homework most kids participate in, but so much more engaging!  For three days they helped out, until school called us back. Then, one day, we left our mini desert in the morning only to return at the end of the day to a grass lawn. Things move fast around here. :-)

A Walk in the Park.

Getting to know the new town is getting easier now. As we become acquainted with the place, and as we find our way the labyrinth of freeways intersecting the city we are taking the time to think about other things too... namely finding fun places to go, especially child-friendly ones!  With this in mind we were thrilled to find a park not so far away (about 10 minute drive) that features a nice lake, a few playgrounds and a reasonably good coffee with outdoor seating... all the essentials!  It was one one weekend afternoon that we decided to head that way once again, to bike around, to climb and swing and run and shout. There, daddy took his camera out and took pictures of his beautiful growing girls. They tell us such moments will come to an end one day (though hopefully not), so we're trying to maximize on them now as much as we can. Carpe diem, every day. We love you girls, from the bottom of our hearts!!

(Not so) Fun Run Practice!

Irini has taken a liking to running. So much so that she wants to run on the cross country team. But there isn't one of them here, so we have to find alternative options. One such option is to run at formal "fun runs", so the other day Irini and daddy went out to jog around the neighborhood. Amalia, hearing that this was in preparation for a fun run, decided to join us. Super!

The girls went up stairs to get ready, and appeared with t-shirts and shorts and socks and put on their shoes. We walked out the door and discussed the plan. Everyone agreed and off we went.... Irini led the group around the corner of the block, with daddy and Amalia shortly behind. But around the second bend, Amalia slowed down. Daddy had to do the same. Irini ran on, leading daddy to have to ask her to wait for them.

Over the next few blocks Amalia started, then stopped, then started again. She looked around. Then asked if there was some other way to do this. She asked if she could skip. "You can do whatever you want, as long as we're moving" was the directive from daddy. So she skipped, then did some cart wheels, then ran a bit more before going back to skipping. She stopped again, looked around. Started a bit more. Then stopped.

Irini was running and stopping too, to wait for everyone else. Finally daddy went over to Amalia and explained that we needed to keep running, even at a slow pace. To that Amalia announced that "what kind of a fun run is this?  There is no one else running and, besides, this is more of a boring run than a fun run!". Daddy couldn't help but smile but explained that we needed to go one and that she was holding everyone back.

Later on, when they had met up with mommy for lunch, Amalia announced she had a plan... "you can all go to the boring run and I can go on a play date at Eva's house!"  Solution oriented thinking. That's our girl!  :-)

Fist Visitors in the New Place

 

Within a day of moving in we had our first gang of visitors! Truth be told they had arrived a couple days earlier and did us the favor of waiting while we moved from one place to the next. But by our second night at the new location we had friends from out of town. How cool is that!  Unfortunately the pictures above, though somewhat indicative of the fun that was had, are limited. Put part of that was because we're getting places! The top picture is one from our sunset beach visit, filled with little games of "avoid the next wave" and watching the sun set. The lower picture is a short visit to our girls' favorite spot at school. The tour would not have been complete without a picture at the location of the world famous Crocodile game*. It was obvious that we're starting to get our bearings here and we seem to need electronic devices to get places less and less and rely on memory or intuition just a bit more. Stetson and Cecilia, visitors from our Malaysian chapter, were the perfect guests... just enough low maintenance and just enough "we'll do whatever you want", allowing us to deal with life just so...  Thank you for the visit and certainly looking forward to more of that kind of reconnections!

PS. *Crocodile Game rules:  

• One person is it. 
• Other people can stand on the little round "things" in the picture
• The "it" person has to close his/her eyes and then spin around several times before trying to move to the play area, still with eyes closed. 
• The other players can move around that area to get away from the crocodile but are not allowed to touch the floor. 
• The first person to either touch the floor or who is tagged by the crocodile is "it" the next round. 

PPS. Stetson, to avoid being tagged, claimed all the way on top of the overhead horizontal bar. In our extensive research we found no rule indicating if this behavior was legal or not. :-)