Category: Curie

Curie will start kindergarten soon, the day after Labor Day (because of Virginia’s King’s Dominion Law we understand) and as a part of getting ready, we were asked to write a letter about her so that her teacher could get to know her before the start of the school year. Here is a draft of what we wrote:

“Dear Ms Best

We hope you are well.

Thank you for being Curie’s kindergarten teacher this year, and likely like all the parents of the class, we go into this new phase in Curie’s development with equal parts nervousness, hope, and pride.

If you were to ask Curie what her powers are, she would tell you that she is smart, brave, strong and fast. When you ask her what her superpower is, she is as likely as not to say that she can use her “smell” to find things.

We have done our best to instill certain values especially around concepts of beauty, and doing the right thing. We were the proto-typical anti-Disney princess parents (we have relented somewhat as she has gotten older, we are still resistant to Barbie though), when someone would call Curie princess when she was young we worked on her so that she would respond “no, I am the King.” At pre-school, that has since become “I am a Queen,” and “my Daddy doesn’t want me to be a princess, I am a Queen.”

This is not to say that she doesn’t love the princesses and My Little Pony, she loves her toys and pretending with them. We have worked with Curie to understand that anyone is pretty if they are smiling regardless of gender and physical appearance, but more importantly we have been instilling that beauty is in your actions, that you are beautiful if you do beautiful things. This has manifested in learning to do the right thing, protecting her sister or other little kids at the playground, giving up all of her shovels and pails at the sandbox to kids who might need them.

Curie will be four going into kindergarten and will turn five that Saturday. She will be among the younger ones in her class (a friend of hers, Layla, is eight months older than her), but she has been precocious from the beginning, Curie was small at birth, a peanut at four pounds seven ounces, but alert and ahead of almost all of her milestones growing up (at her two-year-old check-up, the one thing she didn’t hit ahead on milestones was jumping, but upon hearing the doctor say that, she spent the afternoon practicing until she could jump). Curie was also an early talker and her first “words” were “all done,” and was very articulate and verbal by one and a half. In fact, we missed some of the cute learning to speak until we had her sister Elia. Yes, she will be one of the youngest in the class, but we felt that she would have been bored if we had kept her one more year.

We are, as all parents should be, proud of Curie (and her sister) and have high expectations for them, but we are not so blind as to not see some of her short comings as a four-to-be-five year-old either. She has had a bit of the “gimmies” lately and will be upset if she feels slighted, or wronged, she is exploring her boundaries a bit. She responds well to calm and caring logical explanation if she is crying (it helps if you are holding her when explaining things) and is quick to learn from her mistakes.

Trying to encapsulate your child in a single letter is impossible of course, but we hope this is at least a little glimpse into Curie and how to connect with her. We have worked in various areas of education, (Albert works for in educational non-profits now, PDK International these days) and we know the importance and value of early childhood education and establishing a nurturing and strong foundation. We hope this letter will help you build that bond with our child and allow you to teach her and help her grow in your care. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Parents of Curie Chen, Albert and Erin”

A lot has happened this month including our vacation to Toronto and Niagara Falls, the girls’ first hair cut, and more. Curie has been sharing a lot more with Elia, going so far as to give her food or toys she has because Elia wants them (Elia is testing her boundaries these days and sometimes gets what she wants by bullying Curie, which we are trying to work on).

As we said in our last blog, the Olympics coincided with our vacation, and as we learned about being in another country (both Curie and Elia will say “that is our flag” when we see an American flag now, though Elia says “dat our flag.”), and discovering what is different between our countries, flags, Kinder eggs, signs etc… We of course wrote about our trip to Centreville at the Toronto Islands and after their trip there, when Albert asked Curie what they have in Canada that we don’t have in the U.S. Curie said pony rides, because she had her first pony ride there (Curie rode a big pony, Brandy and Elia rode a little pony, Merlin).

After watching the Olympics while in Toronto, the kids jumping on the bed chanting USA! USA! while the swimmers raced in the pool was one of the highlights of our trip. Curie can now recognize Michael Phelps on TV, and the Final Five on magazine covers without prompting. She loves to race in the pool with her floaties on paddling away. It is wonderful. After watching women’s Olympic gymnastics one night, Curie asked us to turn off the TV do we could all watch her “safe gymnastics.”

A lot of change right now, finishing pre-school and being one of the last kids in day care means she has seen most of her friends go on their last days. She instead plays with very little girl who she likes to take care of in her class. She is ready for kindergarten, even if we are not. She is proud of her after-school martial arts uniform, has gone on a playdate with one of her new classmates, and though we suspect she has some trepidation, has been focused on the new. It is hard to believe she is about to go to school and at the same time we are proud and know that she will do great. More next time, right now we are going to go cuddle with our daughters.

When your kids are the most important thing in the world, it is easy to lose our identity and only be the parents of your kids. At the same time, in times of trouble sometimes your kids are the only thing that get you through. At this age Curie is beyond some of the more simple milestones, but well into the more sophisticated realm of understanding and humor.

Curie loves to frame her caring and some of her self-worth in her connection to Elia. She is proud of when Elia can do something, “Mommy, its her first word (when it well is not)!” She feels loved when Elia holds her hand “Mommy, look, Elia is holding my hand!” And she cries when Elia is too busy to hug her. As we teach the kids about being beautiful from within, we shouldn’t be surprised when they do act in amazing ways, but we are.

Julie and Steve finally got engaged, and Erin mentioned that we would have to buy an engagement gift for them, at some point. Later in the day, when we were at the mall to have lunch, Curie insisted on going for a walk with Albert. Once away from the restaurant, Curie said to Albert, “we need to buy a present.” “For whom?” Albert asked. “For Julie and Steve!” And she did, she picked out a black insulated water bottle for Steve and a matching red water bottle for Julie, and gave it to Julie to open – note that she did want to see Julie open it, even before Steve was there.

Then Albert gave Curie money for her to buy her own prizes for herself and Elia at the toy store. Once there, she made it a point to buy everyone a present, because, in her words, “it wouldn’t be fair” if only Julie and Steve got gifts.

In recent days, as she gets tired and frustrated, she runs to the landing on the stairs to the basement and sits there to be by herself and cry for a while. Albert often sits with her and holds her until she calms down. It is a learning time for her as she learns to adjust to learning boundaries and dealing with her emotions. The reality is that she needs to get more sleep, but she doesn’t want to miss the fun.

She loves running “super-fast” and asks you to watch her. One of their favorite past times is when Curie and Elia “run around the kitchen” which entails running through the kitchen, through the dining room, and back around to the kitchen. They take off their socks to make sure they don’t slip and run pell mell through the house.

She is experimenting with mock surprise recently as well. She loves to cock her head and open her eyes and mouth wide and say “bah?” As if surprised for the first time at something. She will also say things like “what? I like” this or that. We are learning to do things other than watch TV and buy toys and have gone so far as to buy Plasticine clay to make our own figures. We made a family with a silicone clay mold, and she loved it. We made a little frog and worm after and Elia appropriated them and took them to school in plastic eggs. Since then we have made our own chocolates in the molds and made figures two more times, making them to look like superheroes.

Curie loves superheroes and loved to watch the Metroman parts of Megamind. She has also been watching the Incredibles and loves Mr. Incredible and Violet. When we went to sign her up for her martial arts class for after school, she watched the ongoing martial arts class in rapture.

In the last few days, she has wanted to spend time with Albert and Erin at different times, and has wanted to garden as one of the play dates. She remembers the times with Albert when he used to stay up with her to watch things, and when we were watching Annie with Elia, Curie spoke up to say that she used to spend time watching it with Albert.

Curie has started changing her tastes, re-engaged in water play, found new things smelly and gross, liked new foods, and stopped liking others. Grape flavored fluoride is okay now, and mint is not. She likes her noodles with the sauce now, but no longer likes green beans. She loves mashed potatoes and gravy from KFC and will drink the gravy, but does not like butter. She knows that she shouldn’t eat sugar, but loves that we give her sugarless treats.

Life is challenging and meant to be, and while having kids makes the stakes higher, they also give us reason to exist and persevere. As Curie, and Elia, grow, the interactions become more complex as they develop their personalities and identities. It is a challenge to understand that they must grow out of us, and a fleeting, aching, parental caring that they still love you unconditionally. It is almost not enough to to use the word “love” to talk about our kids, and at the same time the word “love” is impossibly big, know what we mean?

The challenges of daily life are softened a lot by having kids, in the past month, we have not rented our house, had our VW Bug go into the shop 3 times, had our American Express hacked, and gotten sick. But that is all made okay by having our kids to take our minds off of these worries and give us perspective.

As we said in Elia’s blog, we went to California this month and spent some time with Bernard and Agnes’s family. Curie loves Eleanor and Miranda, which we suspect is because she sees them as role models. We also blogged about Kula in Torrance, but if you think of it from Curie’s perspective, she loves “sushi choo-coo” restaurants, loves surprise eggs, and loves cartoons. This restaurant had it all. Never mind Uncle Luiz gave her (and Elia) a Shopkins play set!

Curie is precocious and very funny, one morning Curie put her legs on Erin’s in bed, and when Erin playfully told her to take them off, Curie took one off in a high pitched voice, then took the other off in a low pitched voice. Erin asked her what was going on, and Curie told her that one leg was a girl and one leg was a boy.

The Hoaglands have had us over to their local pool. Curie’s first pool experience was in this pool when Albert dunked her. It must have made an impression because she now does not like to have her face wet; so when we went back to the pool, Curie was a little tentative (Elia was a fish to water). Curie is older now and has outgrown the infant life-jackets, so she wore floaties for the first time. It turns out she can reach the bottom in the 3 ft end and loved the water and was learning to kick as long as we were holding her. The second time in the pool she found out that Elia was jumping in the pool and that Albert had let Elia float and swim by herself. This made her braver and soon she was also jumping and swimming by herself in the pool. We are thinking of swimming lessons for both of them.

Curie’s enamel in her teeth never formed properly being born early so has had some trouble with her teeth. We have begun to change our lifestyle to become more healthy. We need to for Curie, but we will all benefit from the change. What has resulted are some night terrors and a fear of brushing for a while. We are also applying fluoride, which only comes in three flavors, grape (Curie hates grape because it is the flavor of children’s Advil and reminds her of medicine), mint (she doesn’t like strong mint because it is too spicy), and bubble gum (which they were out of, and for toothpaste, she likes berry over bubble gum), so we got grape, and she screams at how disgusting it is every time we do it.

Curie is going to start kindergarten soon and it is amazing how fast it has gone. We will enroll her into an after school martial arts program and have her join some clubs. The upcoming change is so disconcerting; Albert’s job mainly deals with change management and part of that is understanding that when you are effecting change you are less afraid, but this is not our choice, it is just what is happening. At day care, changes are afoot as well. Julie is leaving Bright Horizons, and many of Curie’s classmates have had their last day. We intend on making a Facebook group of Curie’s closest friends as an alumni group for Bright Horizons so that we can stay in touch. An then there was the Pre-K graduation: because of a conference, Albert missed it, which really depressed him. Before it happened, he let Curie know that he was sorry and was sad that he would miss it. Curie in her wisdom said, “that’s all right, Daddy, I will remember the song for you.”

Reading the notes for this post, things on it seem so long ago.

Curie went to her first martial arts class to see if she would be comfortable there with if she did after school activities, and Albert had an empathetic conniption remembering the discomfort he had with anything new at that age; Curie is a much stronger soul apparently because though she was learning while she was participating, she loved it. Afterward, she wanted to play martial arts and be the teacher while showing us what we were supposed to do including when to stand and when to sit. She told all her friends she was going to learn to fight like Rey, and Albert’s emotional fragility aside, we will likely enroll her even if she doesn’t need it for after school.

In this time we have had a bit of a rough time while trying to rent out our old house. Albert was not getting enough sleep, had some vertigo and generally was not taking care of himself. Curie in her infinite and innocent caring told Albert: “Dada, get some rest okay?” And another time when he was so tired that he had his head in his hands, she asked “Dada, why are you sad?” What an amazing girl.

For the longest time we called Froot Loops vacation Cheerios and that is what Curie would call them but in this month she identified them as Froot Loops in the store making us feel a little sad that she was growing up; we want her to be everything she is supposed to be, but we can’t help feel that we want her as her little girl too. We need to enjoy each moment including the whining and a crying and embrace each step.

Curie loves My Little Pony but understands that the new over sexualized ponies as girls are bad, just like she knows we don’t like Barbie except for the doctor one. Well anyway, we indulge her quite a bit with blind bags (which Elia has picked up) and has been trying to get a Princess Celestia. Well, Albert being the softy realized that we were better off spending a little more on eBay or Amazon buying someone who already got Princess Celestia and bought it for her. Of course not thinking things through, he only bought one and when the package arrived, Elia wanted hers, leading Albert to have to buy another. Note, after getting it, Elia has not played with it – of course.

We started making our own surprise eggs which is just as good for Curie as she makes her own surprise eggs videos as well. We don’t post any, but we have a 12 minute video of her opening eggs and narrating. She is quite good and we think it is good for her self-esteem.

We went to California at the end of the month for Erin’s work and found that Curie fit in a booster seat with a high back, so it might be time soon to change car seats for her. She was amazing on the trip, and we were terrible parents having her get up so early and sleeping so little. She held it together pretty well though, and was so good pulling the large car seat bag in the airport.

We say it a lot, and we’ll say it a lot more we love our girls, and the girls love each other. This month Curie asked Elia if she loved her, and finally got the response she wanted. With hugs, with family pictures, with holding hands insisting on prayers at the table, insisting that we eat at the dinner table at all, resting on our shoulder, telling us she loves us, Curie continues to light up our lives and fills us with an almost overwhelming sense of caring for her.

Elia is at that phase in life where her growth is outpacing our story-telling. At the beginning of the month she had just started saying “yeas” instead of “ya” and we quickly jotted this down. As the month progressed she could identify the animals from our zoo trip: “a da da dur,” alligator, “tee ta”, cheeta, and “cow,” bison. Her sentences started with “Ji-ji, pay?” Jie-jie will you play? to “Dada, me poo-poo, hep peas,” Daddy, I need to poo-poo in the potty, help please.

She has gone from “Ya-ya,” to “Ee-ya,” to “Lia.” When she asks what is this she says “that is?” Especially when it comes to Star Wars cards, she asks us who is on the card, “that is?”

The sophistication in her understanding and diction has come out in her speech as well. She started the bad habit of needing to “wash ecks daddy ipah,” watch eggs on Daddy’s iPad, which in turn translates into watch kids YouTube on Albert’s iPad. The other day she woke Erin up by telling her she had a bug on her face, and then when Erin jumped up rubbing her face and saying where? Elia then laughed and said “nooo” in a just kidding way.

She not only understands, but processes complex ideas and remembers them. Curie had her plan of giving us time to go to the movies a month ago, but that was delayed because of a snow storm. Curie had wanted Poppup and Grandmom to watch them so that we could see Star Wars (actually not Star Wars, but Curie had assumed we would want to see Star Wars because we had gone to Udvar and did this two viewing exchange with the kids when it came out). So we didn’t do it then, but when Poppup and Grandmom were coming this time, Curie said, “we need to do the plan,” and Elia spoke up, mind you no one had said anything about Star Wars, “Mama, Daddy, Star Wars.”

At the beginning of the month we were impressed the Elia wanted to use the potty, now she will ask almost every time. Earlier, loved to play with her horse, now rides the back of the couch pretending it is a horse: a shift in imagination. She buckles her own car seat chest buckle now, and has her own opinion when it comes to surprises. Curie will want ponies, Elia will want “sopkins,” Shopkins, or Star Wars cards.

Other things have happened too, she spilled Albert’s semi-permanent blue-black fountain pen ink all over her hands and feet, she wanted to learn martial arts when Curie went to take her class, she called it Star Wars though since we had talked to Curie about learning to fight like Rey. When we went to Dave and Buster’s she loved the coin game; when it came time to spend her 5,000 tickets, her first choice was a foot high Superman doll from the Animated Adventures of Superman, though she calls it “batman.”

At the end of the month, (the 15th for the purposes of this blog), she finally got her own back pack from REI. Curie has had hers for so long now but only recently started wearing it. Part of this is getting ready for school, but it is good to carry her toys. Elia loves luggage, she loves to pull a carry on, push luggage, and as it turns out, wear a back pack. She had been wearing the carry-on because she did not have her own back pack. So Albert bought her her own REI back pack, pink with green zippers. She loves her “pak-pak” so much that she wears it into the car seat to be buckled together with it. She is so pleased with it and takes it everywhere, she loves it almost as much as Star Wars, but not quite.

While Grandmom and Poppup were visiting Elia fell while gardening and bit the front and back of her lower lip, we thought it might have gone through, or would leave a scar. Albert had gone to Home Depot but Erin says there was a lot of blood. Scary, and at the same time it showed how resilient they are. She was laughing and eating meat later that night. No stitches, just Neosporin and hydrogen peroxide, and now, a few weeks later, it looks like we might have gotten lucky and it won’t scar much. We say it a lot, parenting is hard and it can be stressful, but it is also amazing and we wouldn’t give it up for the world.