In the Yuen household...

We've had rain pretty much every day here for the past couple of weeks.  So it's a curl-up-on-a-sofa-with-a-book kind of weather.  The girls seems to agree.  One day, they decided to sit on the sofa together and read books. 

 

Or they play board games.  Eliana had never played with Candyland before but saw the box on our shelf and asked for the game "with the stripes on the letters".  She very much recognized the stripes as candy canes are one of her favorite food.  Eliana played with Mommy and was happy that Eliana won twice in a row.  Emily is not looking forward to the day when Eliana has to deal with defeat.

 

Another fun activity is...well, we're not sure what the name for this is.  You hang your feet on the coffee table and make your body as stiff as a board.  Maybe it's more fun than it looks.

When it's snack time, Karina tromps over to the refrigerator for a peek.  She started being able to open the refrigerator doors recently and takes full advantage of her new found skill.  In fact, she'll sometimes have both the refrigerator and freezer doors open, which does wonders for our electricity bill.

A favorite snack in our household is eating spoonfuls of peanut butter.  In this sitting, Karina ate about five spoonfuls.  She loves the stuff.

Then Eliana joined is for some too.  You'll notice that Eliana is holding Mommy's iPhone.  Emily has books on tape that Eliana likes (like the American Girl stories) and Eliana will sit with the phone, listening to the books for hours and hours on end.

 

Also in the kitchen, Karina, our little engineer, likes to figure out how things work. She likes seeing what it looks like when all the drawers are pulled out.

 

 A couple of weeks ago, Karina and Eliana got new pets.  We went to Petsmart and each girl got one cricket as a pet.  For $0.11, they're a lot cheaper than any other pet and also don't take up a lot of space.  Eliana paid for hers using her own money that she saved up doing chores.  We keep them in jars and Karina has named hers "Blue."  We're not sure why, because they're brown.  When Eliana named her cricket "Blue Gabriel,"  we were even more perplexed.

 

 Karina also like to pretend she's a baby every once in a while.  She'll play on Gabriel's mat and suck on the pacifier. 

Gabriel quite likes the mat and especially has a good time when he is sitting up, so he can reach more of the toys.  He is sitting up by himself pretty well, but will fall backwards every once in a while--so he's not reliable yet.

He still gets lots of love and attention from his sisters.  Here he is practicing sitting up by himself on the sofa, with Eliana lending a hand in case he starts to tilt.

But if she gets too close, she better watch out because he loooooves to grab hair and give it a good yank!

 During bath time, Eliana, who can sound out and read simple words now, tries to teach Karina how to read.  It's a tall order, since Karina only recognizes "O" right now and that's about it.



 And during bath, Gabriel patiently waits his turn.  Even when in a fussy mood, putting him down in the bathroom floor usually cheers him up because he knows that his turn will be coming up soon!