Another several months whizz by...

Life with three kids is busy and the months keep whizzing by.  Here's a quick wrap up of the quirky things the kids have been doing the past several months.

We celebrated Elvin's birthday in February.  He can't eat wheat or gluten anymore, so celebrated his birthday with a big bowl of ice cream.  The kids were just fine with that.

Gabriel keeps on growing and developing.  He is still the most active member of our family and always on the go.  He is always looking for new things to do.  Here he is trying to spin round and round on a plastic chair we have.

His expression on this picture says it all.  Karina wanted to play chess with Daddy (she can't really play chess, but enjoys moving the pieces around) and it was all going fine until Gabriel came wandering by. Take a wild guess as to what happened next...

He is also getting more and more adept with the iPad.  We use the iPad when we need to bribe him or when we need him to be quiet. 

Gabriel also does a fair amount of looking at books and flipping through them.  Here he is showing Grandpa a book he likes.

Because Gabey is good at standing on his tippy toes, he can look into and reach into all of our drawers--at least all the drawers that don't have child-proof locks.  So every once in a while we will find 16 forks strewn on the ground.  Not sure what's going on in his head…  Just beware if you walk around our kitchen barefoot!

He also likes laying out plates.  Setting the table for lots of guests?

Because Gabriel can reach into our drawers, he can grab a hold of our roll of saran wrap.  So he went through a phase where he was using yards of it per day.  He would scrunch it up, then stretch it back out again, then ball it up again.  Fun stuff apparently.  Thank goodness that we have a humungous roll from Costco.

And he likes to play with the toy train that belongs to Karina.  He can snap the different cars together and can usually snap the tracks together.  

And it's inevitable…  Since he has two older sisters, he finds himself doing things where the photographic evidence will be used later in his life to humiliate him.  Here he is after having put on Karina's Hello Kitty sparkly shoes.

This picture is not so bad.  He likes to get inside the baby doll crib that Karina has for her doll.  It's a wonder that it doesn't fall apart under his abuse.  The boy weighs 33 pounds and we are quite sure that the company did not have a 33 pound doll in mind when it designed the crib.

Speaking of shoes…We got some shelves for our living room so that the kids toys could be more organized.  One shelf has three large steps and Gabriel now loves to sit perched on the lower one.  Sometimes that's where he sits when he (tries to) put on his shoes.

That's not to say that our house is always organized.  On the contrary, more often than not, it can look like this...

Gabriel will sometimes help clean up the living room.  And sometimes, he just feels like cleaning...

When it's night time, Gabriel always takes one of his many stuffed animals to bed with him.  The rest he will cover with his little blankets and puts them to bed.  He will say "nigh nigh" to them.

And bath time can be just as fun for him.  What is he often doing?  Of course….cooking.  You can also see Eliana being goofy in the background.  She got new goggles and likes wearing them.  Also she is getting her hair wet from the water coming out of the spout.  

Of course Karina has to copy her older sister.

The two have lots of fun together still.  Especially when it involves turning Daddy into a beast of burden.  This is one of their all-time favorite activities, but Elvin doesn't do this very often any more.

Recently, Eliana finished one of her workbooks that she does for home school.  Because these take months of work for her, she gets to pick a reward, which this time was was a trip to Chuck-E-Cheese.

They always go during the day, when it opens, so that they can be home later for Gabriel's nap.  The advantage of this is that usually they are the only kids in the whole store and also sometimes get free tokens from the workers.

Every once in a while, Chuck comes out to dance, hug the kids, and give out free tickets.  With only the girls there, they got all the tickets that were given out, which ended up being hundreds of tickets.  They each came home with cotton candy; usually they never get enough tickets to buy a cotton candy there (which, by the way, is probably the most expensive way to buy cotton candy.)

We might have mentioned this before…Eliana gets allowance every week--$1 per week.  Some time ago, she started saving up her money because she got it in her head that she needed to buy this one type of doll.  Once she had all her money saved up, she had Mommy order it from Amazon and then started the interminable wait for it to arrive at our house.

FINALLY…one day it came!

Eliana was super duper excited.  Gabriel was excited about the packing material.

Here she is with her doll.  She had a similar doll with blonde hair which she generously bequeathed to Karina.  (Karina has a weird look on her face because Elvin asked her to smile for the picture and Karina is trying NOT to smile.)

Eliana's doll will no doubt find a resting place on Eliana's bed, which has an eclectic assortment of dolls, toys, books, teapots, purses, and other things which Eliana has accumulated over the years and treasures.  She was born in the Chinese Year of the Rat and we also joke that she is a pack rat.  Once, when cleaning out her bed, we found a toothbrush and about 60 scrunched up kleenex tissues in her bed too.  

The kids all get along well together.  Here is Karina and Gabriel playing with play dough together.  These two especially love play dough and will do this for 30 minutes or more.

With the weather warming up and the rain giving way to no rain, we go to the park more often now.  Gabriel is learning how to go down the slide by himself.

He also thinks its fun to go underneath the slide.

And of course, to go up the slide the wrong way--just like his sisters.  Monkey see, monkey do.

Eliana's been busy too.  She participated in a sports competition through her Awana's club.  It consisted of various relay races with her church's team.  Her team, unfortunately, got last place overall.  But the event was really well run and everyone got medals.  She was happy with the outcome.

Just this past week was the last week of Awana's for this year.  So we attended Eliana's Awana's graduation ceremony.  She's wearing the red vest of a Sparky.

 All the kids go to the front to receive recognition for their hard work.  Eliana got a green ribbon for finishing her workbook.

 Here she is after the ceremony.  She's posing next to Sparky himself.

When she's not at Awana's, the one thing that Eliana really enjoys is listening to books on tape, which Emily downloads to her phone.  If we let her, Eliana will happily sit somewhere curled up into a ball, listening to her book on tape for hours and hours and hours.  When she eventually learns how to read books by herself, we have a feeling that she will be a true bookworm.

Karina also enjoys books...

As we mentioned before, Karina enjoys doing her schoolwork as well.

Her artistic skills have advanced this year.  Here is a rainbow that she painted.

And she's been learning her letters, and they are starting to "stick".  Although the order of the letters are a little jumbled up here, she can pretty much write her name by herself now.

So there you have it….life in the Yuen household for the past several months.  We are blessed because the kids are healthy and happy and enjoy each other's company.  Here they are playing Ring Around the Rosie.  Enjoy!

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day!

Leading up to Mother's Day, Eliana drew a card for Nai-Nai, Elvin's mom.  She wanted to include a picture of herself and the kids, so asked Elvin to print out pictures on our color printer.  We had a photo of the girls with Nai-Nai and a separate photo of Nai-Nai with Gabriel.  Eliana cut out Gabriel from one photo and pasted it onto the other.  So you can see in the picture below that Gabriel is the size of a toy teddy bear compared to her sisters.

 Here is the other side of the card.  A purple castle.

On the day before Mother's Day, Elvin took the kids out to buy a Mother's Day gift.  The lamp on the Emily's nightstand was broken so the girls picked out a new one.  On the morning of, the girls were downstairs and when Emily came down, the put the gift on the ground and got in front of them to "cover it up" so that it'd be a surprise for Emily.

 And then on Eliana's command, they yelled "Surprise!"

 Emily read through the card, signed by each of the three kids.

 Emily is now the proud owner of a new lamp!  The girls did a great job in picking one out!

 After that, we ate breakfast and had bacon, which is one of Emily's favorites.  Gabriel likes it, too.

 In the evening, Emily's family came over for dinner.  The kids played with their cousins.

After dinner, Grandma opened the cards the kids made for her.

And soon it was time for folks to leave.  But not before a family picture with Charles (Emily's brother) and his family, with the addition of two of our kids!  (For some reason, Gabriel will only let pictures be taken of him if they are candid shots.  He does NOT like posing for pictures and that is why he is squirming his way out of his cousin Millie's arms.)  

Hope you had a good Mother's Day too!

Sweet Karina

Karina is the classic middle child.  She is laid-back and plays well by herself, probably because her older sister (who is very vocal) and little brother (who is very active) command a lot of attention from her parents.  We have to constantly remind ourselves to make at point of spending one-on-one time with her, as she is content to entertain herself and doesn't necessarily ask that from us.

One of the favorite activities right now is riding the horse that is in the living room.  She uses a cowboy hat when riding her (her name is Pink Rainbow Horse or something) or put the hat on the horse.  She's also figured out how to ride the horse side saddle (like princesses) and even sitting backwards.  Quite creative.

She used to be a pretty adventurous eater but has recently declared that she no longer likes oatmeal (which she used to eat almost every day) and other things.  She says that she only wants to eat pizza or macaroni and cheese.  Despite the posturing, she is still willing to eat things like dumplings and noodles, which is probably her favorite food.

She still enjoys doing school work--if it's at home.  She enjoys being at home and would probably stay at home all day, every day, if she had her way.  She goes to pre-school because she has to, although seems to have fun there once she is there.  She is our home body.

And Karina is very good natured.  She is happy to help Eliana with Eliana's chore of setting the table every night.  Eliana moans and whines every time she has to set the table; in contrast, Karina runs over to help.

Karina and Eliana play together a lot.  When doing imaginative play, Eliana is often playing the dominant role and Karina the submissive role.  Here, Eliana is the mommy putting the baby to bed.

 Here's "Baby Karina" pretending to sleep.

Speaking of imaginative play, Karina is our child that can be engrossed in her own little universe for literally hours.  Emily recently got a Noah's Ark set of Playmobil from Craigslist and set it in the middle of the living room.  Karina played with it for 3 hours straight.

Below, Karina is playing with a little Angelina Ballerina doll by herself in her room.

Elvin snuck up behind her to record what she was saying...

As you can probably tell, Karina's speech is still a little hard to understand.  Although her grammar is excellent, she says funny things like "Daddy am going to work now?" instead of "Daddy is going to work now?"  Also, although she has made strides in the number of consonants that she can say, she still has trouble saying the K sound, as well as G, R,  S and SH sounds.  We can understand most of what she says, but there are times when we can't for the life of us figure it out.  We recently took her to get evaluated by speech therapists and she was borderline delayed in her speech.  The therapists said that if she was a boy, she would be considered still within the "normal" range.  So we are checking out our options of whether she needs to start speech therapy.

Otherwise, our Karina continues to grow and blossom with her sweet personality.

School work!

As you know, Eliana is home schooled and every morning, Emily prepares a few worksheets for Eliana to work on.  The routine is for Eliana to come downstairs, pick up a clipboard with worksheets and fill them out. 

Many times, though, Eliana resists doing the work because…well we're not totally sure why.  This past week, she was in one of those moods and made it very clear how she was feeling about being "forced" to do school work.

Karina, on the other hand, looooooves doing schoolwork.  She thinks it's fun and often asks for it!

Sometimes we marvel at how different our two girls are.

Happy Easter!

We had a very eventful Easter weekend.  On Friday evening, instead of an Easter service, our church set up various stations you would pass through that re-enacted Good Friday.  All the activities were kid friendly, which was great for us.  The first station we passed through was a low table that re-created the Passover Feast.

The kids enjoyed eating slices of apples, grapes, and pita bread.

There was another station where the kids were invited to wash their hands in a bowl, just like Pilate washed his hands...

And they set up a fake tomb outside, which was heavy plastic spray painted in grey hung over camping tent poles.  The kids (but not Gabriel) got to carry candles.  It was a good learning experience for all of us.

Saturday morning was our church Easter Egg hunt.  They divide the grounds into three sections, and the kids hunt by age.  The youngest crowd is the 0 -3 year olds, so Gabriel and Karina were together.  It was fun to see Karina as one of the biggest and on the top of the food chain, and she did quite well.  =)

You'll notice our kids are carrying Halloween plastic trick or treat buckets.  When we got the Easter baskets (natural wooden ones) out of the closet, the neon plastic Halloween baskets were sighted.  For Karina and Gabriel, it was no contest, they had to use the Halloween ones.  Eliana went with the Easter basket.  Gabriel found quite a few eggs too.

Eliana was in the 4 - 8 year old range, and they were out in a huge field.  The church purposely does not cut the grass before the hunt, so a lot of eggs are invisible until you are standing right on top of them.  The church put out over 4,500 eggs!  But there were a lot of kids too, so you had to really run!

Found one!

Once it was over, the girls gathered with some friends to check out the contents of the eggs.  Candy!!

Later that afternoon, we dyed Easter eggs.  Here the girls are watching the dye tablets fizz in the vinegar.  Pretty cool!

 Emily is demonstrating how it's done.

Gabriel woke up and decided to join in on the action.

He was more interested in peeling the freshly dyed eggs.

And chopping…and stirring…and mashing…  He eventually poured some of his milk into that measuring cup and came up with a concoction that was surprisingly similar to deviled eggs.

All the Easter baskets and eggs are ready for Sunday morning.  We traditionally do an Easter egg hunt inside our house on Sunday morning.  You'll notice that the girls have a book and a toy, and some Peeps and the like in their baskets.  Gabriel has…a new set of nylon kitchen knives that really cut food, but not fingers!  He was delighted!  Emily got a big canister of cotton candy, which the girls demanded she share.

Sunday morning they got their Easter baskets, got dressed, and then it was time for our Easter egg hunt.  It was funny watching them, they didn't just focus on finding eggs, they called each other to each new stash.  It was neat to see how they worked together.  Gabriel was designated the blue and green eggs, but was very slow, as he would stop to open each plastic egg when he found it.  In the end, the girls just started delivering all the blue and green ones to him.

 Found one!

By half way through the hunt, Gabriel was done with that activity, and decided to crack and peel some more hard boiled eggs.

Finding eggs never gets old...

After the hunt was over, the girls emptied out the contents of the eggs…more candy!  Karina basically ate candy for breakfast...

After church, and Gabey's nap, we went to a local tulip festival, and explored the grounds a bit.  Karina was quite impressed by how tall these tulips were.

And Gabriel was just running everywhere.  They had a nice path to walk through this garden, and all the children were walking on it…and Gabriel was off IN the garden.  We had to hover over him as his first instinct is to snap off all the flowers with one inch of stem.  It took all our vigilance and every ounce of willpower on his part to keep himself from doing that.

They had various varieties of flowers.  This variety was amazing…the colors were so vivid they seemed to be glowing.

They had a U-pick field, that the girls really enjoyed.  We did not let Gabriel see them picking the flowers, though!

 We let each girl pick five tulips.

Their "bouquets" from the U-pick field…Karina gave hers to Grandma, and Eliana gave hers to Abby and Millie!  Pretty generous, we thought!

We then went to Emily's parents house for dinner.  Emily's brother, Charles and his family were there, which means that the girl's favorite cousins, Abby and Millie were there.  So, they of course had to sit with them at dinner.

Abby and Gabriel…for some reason, Gabriel always lets these girls hold him.

 And, one MORE egg hunt, in Grandma and Grandpa's backyard!

The kids had a very fun weekend filled with eggs hunts and candy.  Here they are as our day draws to a close.  They are in their jammies (except for Gabriel) ready to go home at the end of a busy weekend!  We hope you also had a Happy Easter!

Wedding Planning

Do all 3- and 5-year old girls start planning for their wedding this early?  Karina and Eliana do.  Today they were talking about Karina's wedding day and Eliana drew a picture showing how they dream it will be like…  It will be a sunny day (and the sun will have a big smile and long eyelashes), it will be at a church that has heart decorations with a heart window.  A car-like thing will deliver the bride, who will have long flowing hair and be wearing a tiara…