Our Karina is four going on five and keeps herself busy every day. She is really interested in arts and crafts and asks to do projects every day. Here is a lion that she put together. It's especially challenging because you have to use needle and thread.
She also enjoys spending time in the kitchen, especially if Elvin is baking something. Whereas in the past, she used to totally be Mommy's girl, she is seeking Elvin out more and more. Here she is helping Elvin make pumpkin muffins.
Recently, Karina has taken an interest in letters, words, reading and writing. She sees her big sister writing words and wants to do the same. So she put together a notebook using cardboard for the covers and computer paper for the pages, and then had Daddy bind it together using yarn. And then she started writing "stories" in it.
Here is Karina explaining what the book is about. Sorry about the background noise. Also, Elvin is interviewing her in Portuguese but we did not put in subtitles...sorry!
She has learned all the sounds that each letter makes and a couple of weeks ago, was able to sound out a couple of simple words. Good job, Karina!
Her mastery of English has also reached a new level. She says phrases (correctly) and sometime we wonder where she picks them up. The other day she said: "I'll be back in a flash!"
As we have mentioned before, she is definitely the engineer of the family. She likes building things, especially structures. As she was building the pyramids below, she encountered a problem--she wanted the tips of the pyramids to connect together with the curvy pieces, but they weren't long enough to reach each other.
So she solved the problem by building an extra pyramid (for symmetry's sake) and using extra curvy pieces to connect all the pyramids to a center ball!
In the bathtub, we recently inherited these toys from friends that are chutes you can suction cup to the side of the bathtub. If you line them up right, then the water will run from one onto another in a cascade--which is exactly what she did.
Karina also has a very silly side. Here she is making a funny face.
And here's another silly thing that she did...we were playing hide-and-seek and she decided to hide outside. In a way where she thought no one could see her!
She also enjoys jumping on the little trampoline that we got for Xiao Yu. In fact, all the "big" kids probably use it more than Xiao Yu does.
Even before we got the swing set, Karina had been asking Daddy to build her a rope ladder. We are not sure where she got the idea for this but was persistent for many weeks.
So Daddy got some wooden dowels and rope at Home Depot and was able to put something together after an internet search.
We hung it off of our swing set and Karina plays on it almost every day.
We also want to mention that Karina is still the sleepyhead of the family. She needs the most amount of sleep out of all of our kids and when very tired, she will BEG Mommy or Daddy to go to sleep.
Karina's year in pre-school ended and so there was a graduation ceremony. There was a banner up where all the kids signed their names. Karina signed hers next to the purple hand prints. It's ok if you can't make out her name--she wrote it backwards!
Here are all the kids in her class.
Here is a close up shot of her wearing her graduation cap.
At the end of the ceremony, each kid went up to shake Mrs. Walker's hand. Mrs. Walker is a great teacher and role model for her kids. We really like her.
And here is Karina holding up her graduation certificate.
We've taken many pictures in front of this sign for their preschool and will continue to do so. This is because not only will the boys attend this preschool sometime in the future, also Karina will be attending it as well. We have decided that because she is young for her grade, we will hold her back for a year, before starting kindergarten.
Regardless, it feels like our little girl is growing up fast!
Our Eliana is six, almost seven years old. She is growing up quickly and here is a re-cap on the past several months.
The picture above shows a new gap in her smile. She recently lost another tooth on the bottom, after she bit into an apple with her loose tooth.
Earlier this year, Eliana again participated in the Awana games. It's a competition where Awana teams from around the region come together to compete in relay type games. They do various events, such as run together while the whole team is holding onto a pool noodle...
Karina and Gabriel went along to watch. We sat on the sidelines to cheer on Eliana.
Gabriel enjoyed snacking and then snacking some more.
After about an hour of competition, they added up the score and it turns out that Eliana's team won first place! We couldn't believe it especially since last year, they placed last! They all received medals...
And then posed for pictures.
Here is Eliana with her first place medal.
Eliana also took a theater/acting class in the evenings for a while. Unlike the other members of her family, Eliana absolutely loves being on stage performing in front of people and does not suffer from stage fright in the slightest. At the end of the class, the kids put on a performance. In this skit, she was a bunny rabbit.
Here she is saying her lines...
And more of her skit with her classmates...
And here she is with her certificate of completion!
In her school, she also takes a drama class and that class also had a performance at the end of the school year. In this performance, she is a sloth in a jungle.
Here is a little snippet of her singing a song along with some classmates.
So as you can see, Eliana is the artistic one in our family. Not only does she enjoy acting, but also drawing. She spends quite a bit of her time drawing pictures and has gotten quite good at it.
Here is a picture she drew recently. It's about a book-on-tape that she has been listening to recently about a girl that wants to fly across the ocean like Amelia Earhart. So here is the airplane being piloted by the girl...
Here is Eliana's sidewalk (or rather--driveway) art using chalk. She drew a beach landscape, with a dolphin in blue, a couple of palm trees, a crab, and a flamingo. Pretty good, we thought!
Eliana also applies her art skills to non-traditional modalities...such as drawing a smiley face on her spoon using A1 steak sauce.
She is quite proud of herself.
So listening to books-on-tape is what Eliana loves doing, even more than watching videos. She can listen for hours and hours, even the same books over and over. One of the easiest ways to motivate her to do her chores is to tell her that she can listen while she works.
Here she is lounging in our backyard while eating her post-dinner dessert. She also loves being outside more than any of our other kids. So listening, while being outside and eating ice cream--Eliana is in heaven!
And here is Eliana just about to jet out the door on her last day of school for this year. We can't believe that our baby girl is almost seven years old!
Xiao Yu is about 2 years and 4 months old now and has changed quite a bit in the past couple of months.
He has grown a bit since we first met him. He's gained a couple of pounds and also we feel like he has started to stretch out as some of his pants are too short for him now. He visited our local pediatrician (as opposed to the adoption specialist pediatrician that he also sees in Seattle) and had a general check up.
So what does he spend his time doing? Well, a lot of his day consists of copying whatever his older siblings are doing...even though if the activity itself actually doesn't interest him. When the kids are watching a video on the computer, he will climb up the chair and plop himself down next to them. But as you can see from the photo below, he actually is not really interested in videos yet.
Xiao Yu is still very much interested in shoes and footwear and will try on other people's especially. Last night he put on Eliana's tap shoes and enjoyed making the clicking sounds on the ground. Below, he is trying on Eliana's boots. He actually got them on himself and zipped them up himself, which is actually not that easy.
Walking in them, however, is another matter.
With the dry weather that we have been having, we have gone to the park a bit. He loves climbing on the structures and wishes that he could climb on all of them. With all this practice, he is becoming more coordinated and his muscles are getting stronger. His physical therapist said that he especially needs to work on getting his leg muscles stronger.
He can also walk on a narrow bar, with some help.
He has come a long way since we first met him. The other day, we saw him on Gabriel's tricycle and he can basically pedal now, and would be able to pedal forward if only his legs were a little bit longer. This is great, considering that initially when we got him, he wasn't even crawling.
But with his extra mobility, he sometimes gets himself into a bind.
Oops, sometimes chairs can be so vexing!
And with his extra mobility, he tries to do different things in his high chair. Even though he was strapped in, he managed to get his leg out. The problem was that then he was stuck and couldn't tuck it back in! We thought this was funny but he did not.
If you remember earlier, when we fed him ice cream, he would make a face because he was not used to the cold. Well, we've cured him of that. He loves Go-gurts; we serve them frozen in our house (less messy). He also likes to chew on ice and eats frozen blueberries like Gabriel.
And he has realized that ice cream is tasty after all.
Here is a longish video of him devouring his ice cream.
And the resulting ice cream beard.
As far as "real food", we try to feed him Chinese food as often as possible, since that's what he is used to. He loves the won tons we get from the Chinese market.
The only thing is that Xiao Yu is not very good at taking bites. So the whole won ton goes into his mouth all at ones. He will also stuff entire slices of watermelon or a 1/2 slice of bread into his mouth at once. We are working with him on this and trying to show him how to take bites of his food.
Xiao Yu loves his noodles and he still slurps them with lots of slurping noises. For a period of time, Xiao Yu was going through a phase where he would not let us feed him any food. At the same time, he is easily distracted and if there are people around, he won't remember to feed himself. So it was a frustrating several weeks where every meal was a battle to get him to eat enough. Thankfully, he has snapped out of that and is letting us feed him again.
Since he doesn't seem to like meat that much, we've been trying different foods that are high in protein and found out that he likes tofu. So he will eat cubes of tofu drizzled with soy sauce and a little bit of sesame oil.
And when one of his siblings gets close to his food, he does this. He must have had food snatched from him before by other kids. Little does he know that in this household, none of his siblings will touch tofu with a ten foot pole. His tofu is safe.
Xiao Yu also happens to like raisins, which are great because they are such an easy and healthy snack to keep in stock. But he still needs to work on how to get the raisins from the little box to his mouth without having them all spill on the floor.
No worries, he is good at vacuuming them up from the floor.
All in all, he is a very adventurous eater and is willing to try anything. He loves veggies such as broccoli, artichoke, and tomatoes (although is that a fruit?). He also likes ranch dressing, BBQ sauce, and A1 sauce. Once Elvin put pesto on a spoon and gave it to Xiao Yu. Xiao Yu looked at the spoon to see what was on it, but then asked for more pesto, straight from the jar. We stopped after he ate the fourth spoonful.
As far as his talking, Xiao Yu has largely transitioned from signs to words. But, he can only say just a few consonant sounds, so most of his words are just the vowels. And when all else fails, he just yells "EH!" and points to get his point across. We are trying to get him to stop treating us like his servants, but to ask politely, with a "please" (or "eeeeeeeh" is how he says it) and a nice tone of voice.
Amongst other things, he can say "here" ("eeeh-yo"), "water" ("wah wah"), "eat" ("eeeeeh"), and "all done" ("ay yon"). As you can probably tell, without consonants it can get a little confusing as to what he is trying to say. Lots of things that Xiao Yu says to us gets a response of: "Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say."
Xiao Yu also has picked up the habit from his siblings to ask "why" even though he doesn't really understand what that means. So we will say: "Xiao Yu, please don't go into the street." Response: "Whyyyyy?". Or "Xiao Yu, please don't drink the bath water." "Whyyyy?"
Even though he has been evaluated by a speech pathologist already (who says he is largely on track for his age--which we disagree with), we are taking him to a different pathologist recommended by Elvin's co-worker. Also, we are getting him to do things to strengthen the muscles around his mouth and throat. One of those things is drinking liquids through a straw; and if you get a straw with lots of loops, then he has to work harder at it and it's more fun at the same time!
When not eating, he likes to poke around the house, opening drawers to see what he can find. Here he is trying to put on head phones. And yes, he is wearing his socks on his hands.
He also loves spending time outside, especially on the swing.
The higher the better... He loves speed and we are afraid that when he grows up, he will be into skydiving or other extreme sports.
And he also loves water. Whenever we are in the backyard, he is always asking for "wah wah" ("water.")
He likes spraying things with the hose, and he also likes drinking from the hose.
His love for water translated into a love for bath time. He enjoys bath time a lot and unlike our other kids, does not mind getting this face wet.
He will even pour water onto his own face!
Xiao Yu still takes a nap every day. It is a must in order for him to remain a happy camper. When he starts rubbing his eyes like this, we know that he is getting tired.
His naps are about 1 to 2 hours a day. He could really use two hours but he is one of those kids that is not very good at self soothing. If he is the slightest bit awake, he will force himself to wake up and get out of bed. We hope that he will start learning to recognize when he needs to sleep more instead of waking up and then being grumpy for the rest of the day.
Xiao Yu is a goofy kid and likes to try on different accessories. Here he is wearing Eliana's winter vest. Attractive huh?
Here are some goggles he wanted to try on.
And we have a veterinarian costume that Eliana got a long time ago. The girls recently found it and dressed up Xiao Yu. He, of course, went along with it...
And there you have it...Xiao Yu is slowly adjusting to us as we are adjusting to him. The past five months have passed by really quickly and he has changed a lot. It is hard to imagine what he will be like five months from now!
