For the record, this was us at H&M and the girls pulled the dresses on over their clothes and ran around while we were there, we didn’t buy them. The lighting is the store lighting which turned out remarkably well.
Burke Lake
Curie May 2017
Back in November, we wrote about Curie being the youngest in her class (and school) and that Bright Horizons in Skyline had not prepared her as well for kindergarten in Fairfax as it could have. Mrs. Best reassured Albert that Curie would be fine. Well, Mrs. Best called Erin yesterday to tell us that on Curie’s developmental reading test that Curie scored a 187/193, a huge jump from her score of 90 when she started. We are so proud of her. Note, this follows countless hours of parental worry, diligence from Mrs. Best and Mrs. Campbell and hard work on everyone’s part, especially Curie’s!
We are grateful to Curie’s teachers and proud of Curie’s hard work. We made a cake to celebrate, but the cake mix was expired, so Albert went out late at night to get another one so that Curie could have her cake.
Cure has taken to her Tsum tsum dress as much as Elia with her Belle dress. It is flattering on her, and lets her twirl, but we suspect there is more. It is red and reminds her of Wonder Woman, and oddly she has made it a point to say that it isn’t fair that Elia gets to be Belle all of the time (we have not bought a Belle dress for Curie yet, but we might just to make it fair).
We have seen Beauty and the Beast four times in the theater now. This most recent time, we had to sit in seats apart (amazing that the movie can be almost full right before it will release for purchase). Curie wanted to sit with Albert and the two of them had a little daddy and daughter date. When we left she was intent on telling Albert that he is her prince – the same way Elia says it to her and when Elia said “You are my Beast.”
This month too Erin took Curie to two field trips, one to the National Zoo, to which Albert met the with Elia. The whole district went and while the kids had blue t-shirts, so did their entire school. One of Curie’s classmates was good and listened, but the other two kept wandering off. Curie was hungry when we arrived and insisted on seeing the ponies first, as her parents we did it. There was only two hours, which was really not enough to do very much. Erin also chaperoned the trip to the Natural History Museum which was easier, with just the kindergarteners going and Erin’s group being much smaller.
We spent time on Burke Lake, with Curie and Albert in one boat and Erin and Elia in another. Curie did seem to get a little bored by the end, but she really wanted to row even though we had a motor. In the end we blew bubbles and had a nice time. Along the same lines, we went to Huntley meadows and saw the animals, with Elia and Curie each finding a snake, and both pretending the tower was a castle. This was the month we had live crawfish and the kids picked out all the dead ones before boiling them. We staycationed at the Sheraton, and somehow got Susie and Isabella to come along Curie’s friend Etta even came to swim! We went to Curie’s schools entertainment day, saw Bella’s play and much more. At the end of the month Albert went to Cambridge to attend a certificate program at Harvard and Erin’s mother came down to take care of everyone.
In the middle of the month we noted that Curie has been turning to crying again when things don’t go her way and we could see that it was correlated with needing more sleep and eating better. More to the end of the month though she seems to be better about it, hopefully that means she is getting more sleep and eating better.
Curie has been getting more and more thoughtful. She has always been a sensitive, conscious girl, but recently she has taken to offering massages when we say we are tired. Of course this also means she wants one too and loves to get her back rubbed saying “ah, what a nice massage.” With reading she has begun reading to Elia, especially reading Green Eggs and Ham to Elia (which they have both memorized). Curie is growing up but she is still a little girl in many ways, playing with dolls, wanting to have playdates with us, and being unable to say “ravioli (raviloli)” and laughing about it.
Curie is a joy, a wonderful big sister, a great student, friend and daughter. We are proud not just because we are parents, but because in many ways we can look up to her and let our child remind us as a role model for appreciating life.
Silly Pictures
So I find it funny that we do the same faces in our silly picture that we did in our last one, and the one with moose ears, even further back, still cracks me up with, just as we said back the, Elia looking at us like, “what have I gotten myself into?”
Curie’s Achievement
This will be in Curie’s blog post, but I wanted to say something now since we are grateful to Curie’s teachers and proud of Curie’s hard work:
Back in November, we wrote about Curie being the youngest in her class (and school) and that Bright Horizons in Skyline had not prepared her as well for kindergarten in Fairfax as it could have. Mrs. Best reassured Albert that Curie would be fine. Well, Mrs. Best called Erin yesterday to tell us that on Curie’s developmental reading test that Curie scored a 187/193, a huge jump from her score of 90 when she started. We are so proud of her. Note, this follows countless hours of parental worry, diligence from Mrs. Best and Mrs. Campbell, and hard work on everyone’s part, especially Curie’s!
Okay, I just edited this so that Curie would have a picture here, and Curie said “what am I flying around?” 
Elia May 2017
Every parent has stresses and many have more than we have, so it is not a complaint but an observation that juggling parenting with work, work travel, selling a house, dealing with finances, worrying about almost everything is very taxing on health, life, and relationships and it is taking the time to appreciate the little things, working on your relationships, and being present in the moment positively that gets you through the days.
When you are young parents you think that each year is the best and your favorite, and while there are arguments for each phase, advice that we received that yes, this is a great age, but every age is too (until teenage years I am sure, but the people giving advice did not have teenage children yet). Elia is in a remarkably cute phase, yes every phase seems to be cute, but you will have to bear with happy parents writing. She has been becoming more aware of her humor and her language, that what she says really makes people react and others, she says things that she doesn’t realize are amazing.
Once when we were getting ready for bed and one of us said “Elia, I love you.” Elia’s response was, “I know, I love Curie.” Her language development is coming along well, but she still says “t” for “c” and so it comes out “Turie.” She and Curie are also is really into “assage” meaning “massage” and they will proceed to rub your back. She is also processing words “duck, duckling, dog, dogling” in an adorable way.
Both kids sing a lot, either making up songs (Elia’s “my heart can sing and I will remember”), singing the ones they learned in school, or the classics, but as of late it has been Moana and Beauty and the Beast (the live movie edition). For Moana, Elia’s favorite song is “Away, away,” but she loves singing “Your Welcome even more. The best is when she sings “adowable,” and “the BOD!” If you know the song, you know what I mean. She also decided to no longer be scared of the crab song saying, “I brave,” even when, or because, Curie still doesn’t like it.
The kids have seen Beauty and the Beast three times in the theater now and we will buy it when it comes out. Elia was so proud that she was now brave to watch it. She knows most of the words and will sing it by herself, sing when we are singing it, and ask us to sing it. The most recent time we went the kids sang to the movie which was as entertaining for their aunt Julie as it was for them (Curie kept explaining plot points). Elia loves the song “Belle” but for her it is “Bonjour,” “you play Bonjour?” “No, I want Bonjour!” but the best is when we play it. She is obsessed with her Belle dress and insists on taking the part of Belle “no, no, I Belle, you be the bonjour.” “The bonjour,” we love it.
She wants to play Belle when we sing and wants Albert to be the Beast “you my Beast” and either Curie or Erin to be the prince (yes two roles). But the other character she wants to be is LeFou, which she pronounces “M’Fou” (in Elia’s Maui voice, “its adowable), and wants you to be Gaston. So she loves “Bonjour,” “our favorite song (Gaston)” but most recently she asks for “kill the Beast” over “Tale as Old as Time” or the one where Belle and Beast discover Stockholm syndrome…rather when they start feeling something for each other. She also likes the new song that Beast sings. So as much as we resisted the princess for Curie (who laments that she wants to be Belle sometimes), it is really cute when Elia says “you put on my Belle dress?
A couple of other things, Elia loved being on the boat and took control of the motor at one point when we went to Burke Lake. She was fearless about playing with crawfish (she was wearing her Belle dress at first and told Erin that “I the Belle crawfisher” when we had live crawfish at home, became very proud of peeling crawfish and now loves to eat them, a relief because she was the hold out on loving crawfish for a while.
It turns out the Tinkerbell movie and sequels are really good, yes, yes, we were those parents that didn’t want the kids obsessed, but it wasn’t until the kids learned the “everyone who smiles is pretty, and beauty is in your actions and comes from within” lesson that we have relented (given in, caved, and capitulated). We still are opposed to the broad commercialization of it all though.
Final cute thing, when Curie was younger and whining we would tell her she has to use a strong voice or a nice voice. That didn’t really work (parents could probably have told us), so we asked her instead to use a robot voice, which she thought was hilarious and took her out of her unhappiness to say things in that voice. Well, the other day we asked the same of Elia, where she had a moment of internal conflict where you could see her not wanting to do it but really wanting the thing she wanted. Here is how we knew, and it is adorable (yes you are thinking Elia in Maui’s voice), Elia can’t do the robot voice without using her hands too in a robot way, so she was starting the hand motion even before she could articulate anything, much less in the robot voice. Someone said that she is a method actor.
Two final things, during prayers she said “I thankful for the sun,” which is subtly pretty sophisticated, and something of a favorite, “I am a little bit small and a little bit tall” to explain that she is still little even though she wants to be tall. It is wonderful being a parent even if life feels hard. More later, take care.
The Spider in the Front of our House
Huntley Meadows 2017
We have been waiting until the girls were old enough to walk the boardwalk without worrying that they might fall in. They loved the walk, especially the look-out observation tower which they used as a castle. We saw a lot of animals, more than normal, even baby beavers though those pictures didn’t really come out.
We saw a number of different reptiles. Here are a lizard and three snakes.
Amphibians, three kinds of frogs and three kinds of turtles if you look carefully you can see the turtle’s whole head.
And insects, we don’t have a picture of the dragonfly and butterfly, but we saw a lot. The spider is in front of our house.
Birds, we didn’t get a great picture of the ducks.
Curie April 2016
We are staycationing again at the Tysons Sheraton, the kids are asleep, which gives us time to write on a weekend. It is almost as if we are always in recovery mode, catching up on sleep, trying to get healthy, recovering from stress, work, anxiety and exhaustion. Albert has been working on “disdain” lately: remembering that everyone has their own story and concerns and trying not to judge so quickly, nor so harshly. After all with all the work, anxiety, exhaustion, and stress, why add anger and frustration to the mix.
We recently read that searching for meaning is more important than searching for happiness and though some people would disagree, parenting holds a lot of meaning for us. In twenty years we will have to rediscover individual meaning, but it is such a short period of time that you have your kids that we happily accept these moments and this meaning.
Curie has been learning to read, and it has been remarkable as she does. With sight words, she largely memorizes right now, not yet sounding her words out, but she is moving along and her teacher guides the students well on their individual paths. Reading has become a bigger part of our lives too with Curie bringing three books a day from school to read at night, a library book, a comprehension book, and a sight reading book. Elia has wanted to read her books too, leading to all of us reading in bed before sleep. It is a nice regular thing we do now.
With our Ottawa trip for Erin’s conference, the kids were great and we had a good time hanging out with the cousins and at the hotel. Amazingly there was snow on the way up to Canada. We stopped in Syracuse on the way up and down. The kids love hotpot and we had a chance to have all you can eat Little Sheep Hotpot in the newly remodeled Ottawa location. On our return, we found out that ours will start all you can eat on Tuesdays. Curie loves fish cake and we ordered a lot of it and introduced it to Livi and Emi. The kids also loved to drive the cousins’ powered car with our finding out that neither Elia nor Curie can steer straight yet. Another thing to happily work on.
As mentioned in Elia’s blog, both kids were so well behaved and we rewarded them with a present. They wanted Belle dolls (Albert and the girls saw the movie with Taylor and the cousins again) at first but after a trip to Walmart, Curie wanted a Wonder Woman movie doll. When it came time to buy them, Curie chose Wonder Woman’s mother and her horse, likely because she looks like She-ra, which Curie has been watching, and Elia chose her yellow Belle dress.
Our crawfish day was fantastic with both kids fearless and Curie, a crawfish connoisseur, learning how to shell her own crawfish, though at some point because she is just beginning resorted to asking us to peel them for her. Elia was hesitant, but both kids love crawfish now.
Curie continues to mature and will behave simply to be in contrast to Elia when Elia is frustrated. She works on getting her emotions under control and we talk about how big her problem is, and remind her, not that she is the big sister, but that she is Elia’s protector and is Elia’s hero, which works a lot better.
She is a five year old and when we play she tells us what to pretend. “Pretend you are Shining Armor, and pretend you say you are hungry,” or something like that. She determines how you will play rather than just playing. But she needs time with us, some part wanting single parent time, some part reacting to attention to Elia, but quality time for each child has become important. Curie still makes it a point to take care of Elia, giving her toys when she is not tired and remembers to “be beautiful,” but she is particular about whether or not it is fair. Curie is tired a lot, not eating enough, not eating enough of the right things, and with no nap and martial arts after school, she is tired each morning.
She is still a five year old; when we went to the turf at National Harbor, she made it a point to dance all around the space. She is drawn to little children and loves to hold their hands and dance and wants to take care of them. When we went to Pinstripes for Easter, she loved to play bocce and spend time, but when a baby came by she would cock her head and say “aww.” She still loves to pretend to tap dance and will tell us how to do it. We love all spontaneously tapping in elevators. Something we forget to write about. When she eats she loves to ask us to feel her tummy to see if she is full. We tell her if she can still fit more and she will eat a bit more. She does take small bites though.
Curie loves best to wake up with both parents in bed, she still loves to be in the middle of both of us which is a challenge with four of us and Elia also wants to be in the middle. But you can see Curie’s pleasure when she wakes next to us or has time to be with us either alone or both of us. Curie grinds her teeth when she sleeps, and we have found that when Albert gets back into bed with them that she stops grinding, leading us to suspect that she find comfort that we are next to her even as she sleeps.
Elia April 2017
Life seems to go faster and faster these days. Blink, and we have been in our new house for a year already, blink and Curie is almost done with kindergarten. Blink, and Elia is a little girl and no longer a toddler. Try as we may, and we have many a staring contests to prove it, even if you try, eventually you blink.
The secret is to cherish each and every day, and kids, if you are reading this years from now saying, that we have already written this, I am sorry, we will likely write it again and again.
This month was hard, Albert had a Board meeting, we went to Erin’s conference in Ottawa, and in general haven’t gotten enough rest or had time to relax, but in between the busy things we have had a great time.
Elia has been saying great things. When we go to sleep we try to get the kids with heads on pillows and feet facing toward the other end, but things don’t always end up that way. We tell them that they need to be crayons in a box and Elia will say “I the yellow crayon,” Curie will say “I am the purple crayon,” and they will tell Erin she is the blue crayon and Albert the black crayon. Then Elia will say “I the yellow crayon, good night blue crayon, goodnight, purple crayon, good night black crayon!” And even before this we had said we are a sandwich with mommy and daddy being the bread and Elia the cheese, and Curie the meat. Afterward Elia said “I love you bread,” to which we replied, “I love you cheese.”
Elia loves to drink carbonated drinks and not just the sugar (diet) sodas, she loves sparkling water even though we tell her it is bad for her teeth (Curie loved sparkling water too). The other night we asked if she was drinking seltzer, she said “no, I drink Perrier, I the Perrier monster.” So brand is important too (she can tell Perrier has littler bubbles.”
We saw the live-action Beauty and the Beast twice in the theater with 3D glasses, and the kids left them on both times. Elia in particular has been captivated by the movie insisting on wearing her Belle dress, a tutu with Belle and Phillpe on the front. She used to run around telling Curie or Albert “you my prince,” nowadays, she tells Albert “you my Beast.” When it came time to reward the kids for their behavior in Ottawa, Curie wanted a Belle doll which then became a Wonder Woman doll that she saw in the store. Elia initially also wanted a Belle doll, but when it came time to buy it, she changed her mind and wanted a costume instead and for days now has been wearing the yellow Belle dress. Oh my how far we have come since Curie wanted an Elsa dress.
Here is the thing, Curie is older now and understands the “anyone who smiles is pretty” lesson pretty well, and lo and behold, her little sister has been listening this whole time and absorbing everything, because one day she says to Albert from the back of the car, “I beautiful, look, I smiling,” capturing the essence of “anyone who smiles is pretty.” Now they understand that “beauty comes from your actions,” but they don’t always get there, especially if they are tired.
At school, she plays with her new friend Eva every day and they play mommy and baby or plays soccer with her, even though they don’t have Soccer Shots there. She and Eva get along so well, Elia will say “E like Elia, Eva, and Mommy!” She also is ready to do martial arts and tells us she will join Tiger Tots when she is four. She is willful and adorable, especially if we forget and let her have chocolate before bed time. She wants to play all the games we do and will play twenty questions and can even do the alphabet game a little when driving in the car. She is wonderful and fantastic and very considerate, even when she wants what Curie wants. When Curie wanted to be Elsa, Elia said, “I Lego Elsa, Curie is Big Elsa, I Lego Elsa.” We are biased, but we have the greatest kids and we are so proud of them. Elia the other night was so cute, we were playing with her Harry the Bunny and pretending to save him. She said, “you save Harry?” to which we replied “yes.” She thought a moment and said “you save me too?” Makes you want to smile, laugh, cry, all at the same time. “Of course we will darling, always!”