Category: Family

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.