February begins with Erin’s birthday, followed by Valentine’s Day and while we do celebrate birthdays, we have historically not celebrated Valentine’s Day because of it’s Hallmark overtones (we celebrate Bastille Day instead – a joke). With the girls getting older though Albert took it upon them to pick out presents for Erin and pick out flowers for her as well. The kids were so excited about the birthday and Valentines. Along with 1 800 Flowers’s mishaps we ended up with two dozen roses for Erin’s birthday, and four dozen roses for Erin and the girls for Valentine’s day.
The girls are totally into dresses now. Not too long ago, Albert went to Target and bought many character dresses when they had their post holiday clearance and so now the weekends are character dresses. Curie’s favorites for school are a black Minnie gown and a purple Shopkins gown and the Elsa dress at home.
She loves to sing to the Moana soundtrack and play with her sister. We have seen her learn lyrics to songs that we only just hear and revisit songs like the Duck Song that she once new but now forgot she knew. It is interesting to see what she does not remember from the past five years. Curie and Elia love to play mommy and baby together and often we will hear Elia call for “Mommy” only to find that she is calling for Curie as Mommy.
We found out that she loves bunnies, something we didn’t know ourselves but she said one day that she does love them. She also is very much into her drawing taking the time to draw members of the family. Kindergarten has improved her art skills immensely and she makes it a point to make us pose for our portraits, which take a few minutes to draw. She works on her martial arts working to get her black tip which will allow her to get to the next belt level, and she chose not to swim at our staycation because of how cold it is to get out of the pool (Albert dunked her as a baby which probably has something to do with it).
We have had play dates with pre-school friends and kindergarten friends, sometimes going to dinner, like we did with Etta and her father, having Natalie over, or running into Isabella at Flight (where Elia had had Robbie from Skyline. Like all kids, when she is tired though she can become irritated and we have been working with her to take care of her guests. In general we have been working on frustration and crying when she doesn’t get what she wants. Albert has been working on asking what the size of the problem is, and Curie responds by putting her hand above or below her head and telling us if it is a small problem or a big problem. Partly because of the novelty and partly because it gives her some control it works most of the time curtailing the crying almost immediately and refocusing her. Parenting continues to be a lot of learning and adapting, and we are always feeling like people are doing it better than we are, but we realize we can just do the best we can and make the effort not to miss each day and each moment.