Another week...

It's been another normal week in the Yuen household.  Gabriel is getting more and more comfortable on his hands and knees.  He can go from sitting to lying on his tummy to sitting no problem.  While on his tummy, he can pivot around with his hands in any and every direction.  Just the other day, he was on his knees and did a couple of shuffles forward to reach something.  We think that by this weekend, he'll be crawling.

 

 

He has also been trying to pull himself up.  Gabriel will pull himself up on the coffee table, piano bench, or anything that he can get a hold of.  But he is still very unsteady on his feet and will fall if we don't go rescue him. 

 

Gabriel's four teeth on top are coming in very quickly.  It totally changes the way he looks.

 

And he is now a big fan of solid food.  His favorite mushy-type food is oatmeal.  He also likes eating pureed sweet potato.  Here he got a hold of the bowl and went at it.

And the aftermath of that is obvious to see.  One can almost call it modern art.

Gabriel likes being read to now.  He will sit and listen as you read a story, and coo at the pictures. 

 

Karina has been changing a lot recently too.  Her speaking abilities have improved dramatically in the past month.  While her pronounciation is still rough, she has mastered using words like "both" and "either."  She asks alot of "why" questions now, such as "Mommy, why Jay-bioh ky-ing?"  [Why is Gabriel crying?]  She also uses "yesterday", but to her, it just means, sometime in the past, as in, if we ask her to go potty before leaving the house, she'll answer: "I no need to go potty!  I go potty yesterday!"

 

She also has a "walking stick" (or "wah-ee jih" as she calls it) that she loves.  The two are inseparable and early on she even wanted to sleep with it on her bed.  For some reason, she is really drawn to it and it goes wherever she goes.



The other day, Karina was running at the park and took a tumble.  Both knees got scratched and one was even bleeding.  This was her first time and she was wondering why there was red on her knees. 

Putting a band-aid on it made it feel much better.

  

She still likes to build towers out of various objects.  Here is a tower-o-baby food that she put together, right after we came back from the store.

 Karina is probably going through a growth spurt right now because she was eating non-stop.  She all all of the food in the picture below, then asked for seconds.  It doesn't hurt that she loves the Trader Joe's orange chicken.

 

And Eliana did this once--drink out of two sippy cups at the same time.  So Karina likes to do it, too.

 

And both girls really, really like pasta, or "noodles" as they call it.  A little bit of pasta, mixed with butter and parmesan cheese is a regular meal at our house.  They also like using the little kid chopsticks, which are basically like tongs or tweezers in the shape of chopsticks.

 

Eliana is growing up, too.  Emily has been going through a curriculum that teaches you how to read by sounding out the letters that make up a word.  Eliana has been at it for weeks and is finally getting pretty good at reading words.  Since she is a bookworm, once she learns how to read, we have no doubt that she will start devouring books left and right.