It was picture day at Eliana's preschool a little while ago and we just got the pictures back. We can't believe that our little baby has grown up so fast into a little girl!
And we're amazed that she seems so composed in the picture, with a nice, normal smile (not the Calvin and Hobbes faces that she usually makes when it's us taking pictures.)
Here is her little class. We really like Eliana's teacher, Mrs. Walker. Because Eliana already knows her letters and can count fairly well, Mrs. Walker modifies the activities and assignments for Eliana a little bit to keep things challenging for her. Needless to say, Eliana loves going to preschool.
What's been going on in the Yuen household lately?
After Halloween, Eliana has been eating down her stash of candy. She's allowed to have one treat after lunch and another after dinner. She's been opting for a halloween candy instead of her normal choice of ice cream with sprinkles on top.
Here, Eliana is trying to eat a pixie stick (paper straw with flavored sugar inside.) She has a hard time getting anything to come out, though, because she licks the paper straw, which makes it close shut.
So we used scissors to give her a fresh start. This time, however, the rush of sugar coming out went down her shirt.
So Mommy helps out. This reminds Elvin of when people give their pet cats medicine.
Meanwhile, Karina innocently looks on.
A couple of weekends ago, the girls' cousins were visiting. They love playing with Karina and Eliana. Apparently, they also like teaching Karina new skills.
One of Eliana's favorite games to play right now is hide-and-seek. One of her favorite places is under the end table. Other places are under the coffee table or under a blanket in the middle of the room. If the seeker does not immediately find Eliana, she will give you a clue by yelling out, "I'm HEEEEERE!"
A little while ago, Eliana had fallen asleep in the afternoon for a couple of hours. She does not take a nap anymore, because all it does is push her bedtime to a later time. Because of this, Elaina was not going to fall asleep until 10pm that night. To help kill time, Daddy proposed a night out "camping." In a darkened room, on their sleeping bags and using a lantern, the two of them hung out and read books together. It was a very fun night.
Eliana is a very girly girl. She only wears dresses or skirts. Likes necklaces and rings and wands too. One thing that she has been asking for is to get her nails painted. Daddy feels like she is a little too young for that, so Eliana takes matters into her own hands. When there is no nail polish available, then red markers are a good stand in. At least she's creative!
Recently, Eliana's bicycling skills have really improved! Whereas before, she would always need a shove forward to get going, Grandpa worked with her and now she can start pedaling from a standstill. Whenever Eliana goes out on her bicycle, Karina follows pushing her baby-sized stroller (on which she puts rocks or dirt.)
And Eliana has turned out to be our little extroverted, social butterfly. She loves being around people. At the park, she is always searching out for new kids to play with.
In the mornings, if she hears talking outside of her room, she drags herself out of bed so that she doesn't miss out on the action. And we mean drag in the most literal sense of the word.
Karina is getting better and better at climbing things. She can now seat herself on these little kid chairs. But then, she kicks it up a notch by climbing up and standing on it. But this can be a little nerve wracking as she is not 100% stable on her feet still.
And Karina's always building things, trying to put things together, or trying to figure out how things work. Emily calls her our little engineer. Here she is playing with a bunch of packages of shampoo samples that she found in a drawer. She is also learning new signs every week; in this video she uses the sign for "help."
And one very exciting thing that happened is that Eliana got pajamas that match Mommy's! She wanted to wear them right away so that they could match together!
And that is what's going on in the Yuen household these days.
The day before Halloween, we all sat down to decorate pumpkins (or "pumkim" as Eliana calls them). The girls used pens to draw on theirs.
Eliana got to use a Sharpie, which she loooves using because she knows usually only grown ups get to use Sharpie pens. (For good reason: the other day she accidentally drew on our dining table. Anyone have ideas on how to get Sharpie marks off of wood?)
Daddy's pumpkin was a little bigger and got a face carved into it. Karina helped out.
On Halloween Night, Eliana was super excited. She ate dinner really quickly and changed into her princess costume right away (with a dress, pearl necklace, and sparkly pink shoes). Then kept asking every 30 seconds if it was time to start trick-or-treating yet.
After dinner, we put Karina into her costume. This bumble bee costume kept her really warm.
Before going out, we wanted to have the girls take a posed picture with the jack-o-lantern. No such luck; they would not hold still. The only one that was cooperating that night and smiled for the camera was the pumpkin.
"I loooove the Halloween!" exclaimed Eliana as we were tromping through the neighborhood collecting more and more candy. There seems to be a correlation between her love of certain holidays and the amount of sugar that the holiday produces. Although we actually visited only about twenty or so houses, it still took a while to do that. This was partly because midway through trick or treating, Eliana started doing the potty dance and we had to run back home. (Yes, rookie parent mistake: not forcing your kid to go potty before heading out.) Also, if a house featured scary decorations, Eliana would freeze about 15 feet from the door and we would have to retreat and head to another house. But overall Eliana and Karina enjoyed themselves.
After getting back home, Eliana had fun checking out her loot while Karina took swigs of water. (She really enjoys drinking water out of any container that is NOT her sippy cup.) Eliana got to choose and eat three pieces of candy. Eliana raided a Reese's peanut butter cup out of Karina's stash and let her have a couple bites of that.
And this picture shows the goodies that we were passing out at our house. Yes, that's right, bottled water. Before you start scoffing... In the beginning of the night, the kids were interested only in the candy. But as the night wore on, more and more kids took the water instead. And by the end of the night (presumably after some kids had been eating handfuls of candy and were dying of thirst), lots of kids were downright excited about seeing water. "Look, Mom! They have water!" And one parent gave us a thumbs up to us and yelled, "Way to go!"
Karina's personality has started coming out more and more in the past several weeks. She is a very easy going girl and pretty laid back. Karina is very generous with her cute smiles, to both family and strangers alike. She likes to wander around the house and get into things, and is communicating more and more. She knows a few words, like Daddy, Mama, Jie-Jie (big sister in Chinese), bao bao (hold me in Chinese), Go-Go (the neighbor's cat), ball, book, etc. She also signs a bit, too. Even though her spoken/signing vocabulary isn't very big yet, she clearly understands a LOT of what we say, and is able to follow lots of directions, as well as figuring out when we are going to the park, or the car, or wherever. Her favorite thing to do is shadow Eliana, which 50% of the time Ellie enjoys, and 50% of the time she finds rather annoying.
Karina often adopts an item, whether a pen, spoon, or small toy, for an hour or so, and carries that around everywhere she goes, forcing her to play with other toys with one hand! So we'll often find kitchen utensils upstairs in our bedroom or a tube of toothpaste downstairs. In the picture below, she's adopted an apple as her favorite object, and would nibble on it every once in a while. The apple also left a huge wet mark on her shirt from all the hugging it got.
Karina has recently learned how to shake her head. She likes doing it, maybe because it feels funny. We don't think she knows that it means "no", because sometimes we'll ask her, Do you want some food? She'll shake her head "no" and then reach for the food. Here she is practicing this new skill...
Karina also likes to invent new variations of old games. With peekaboo, she recently started playing this version at the dinner table. With one hand, she'll cover her face and with the other, she'll do the sign for "Where?"
And our poor Karina has had a runny nose or cough for the past several weeks. But then this past Friday, she took a turn for the worse, crying a LOT and even more congested than she had been, and the doctor at urgent care diagnosed her with a sinus infection. That explained why she had been so fussy. She's been on antibiotics ever since. The only silver lining is that she LOOVES the stuff. Every time she sees the syringe filled with the pink stuff, she goes bananas!
And here is a picture that big sister took of Karina. She was eating a post-dinner dessert of frozen Gogurt, which she loves. As you can see, Karina's hair has really grown. We've had to trim her bangs several times now and the sides and back are quite long. She is growing and learning more every day!
A couple weekends ago, we had a fortuitous break in the rainy weather. We couldn't have planned it better because we were going to meet family at the local pumpkin patch (or "pumkim patch" as Eliana calls it). We got there in the morning and the first thing we did is go on a hay ride to head out to the pumpkin fields.
There were thousands of pumpkins to choose from.
So pushing wheelbarrows, we head on out.
Eliana's girl cousins decide to strike a pose. Eliana LOOOOVES her cousins and the feeling is mutual. She looks up to them and copies things that they say. Eliana's cousin, Lena (2nd from the right), lives in Seattle and has been taking Chinese language classes for a while. Later on when hanging out, the two girls counted from 1 to 10 in Chinese together just for fun.
Eliana obediently smiles for the camera.
Karina is less sure about posing for the camera. Although Karina is walking very well now, she needed to hold someone's hand while walking on the uneven terrain.
We were allowed to bring home one pumpkin per person. With Grandma's help, Eliana picked out the one that she wanted.
We brought the pumpkins back to the main area and cleaned them up at the washing station. Eliana helped to pump the water.
There was another station where you can launch softball sized pumpkins into the air. If your pumpkin makes it into the white 55-gallon drums in the distance, you win a prize. Despite many close calls, we didn't actually make it in.
There was a section where one can feed and pet farm animals. Eliana liked the bunnies the best. Not sure if they liked her.
You can also climb the pyramid of hay (pictured in the background) or ride on the tractor/bicycle. Eliana's still learning about steering, so Elvin had to help her along so that she wouldn't run into unsuspecting bystanders.
We put Karina onto the hay stack. But she didn't like it at all--too prickly I guess.
And for $3, kids could ride a pony. Eliana spotted this as soon as we walked onto the farm grounds.
And that was our 2011 pumpkin patch experience! We'll be carving the pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns pretty soon. For Halloween, at first Eliana wanted to be a princess. Then she wanted to be Emily Elizabeth (from the book Clifford the Big Red Dog). Then when Emily brought out some costumes from out of storage, Eliana wanted to wear a Tigger costume she found. But now she's back to the princess, or maybe a fairy princess, or a ballerina princess.
Karina is rapidly transitioning from baby to toddler/little girl! It is kind of hard to believe, as this year has flown by, especially compared to Eliana's first year. All of a sudden, she knows how to play games, and is signing more, and understands a LOT of what we tell her (go get your shoes, time to eat, time to pray -- she reaches out to hold hands at the dinner table, say good-bye, go get your blanket, etc). Karina and Eliana are learning to play together more and more, and most of the time really enjoy each other's company...until they don't anymore. =) The following video is clips from the past month, when she was 13 months old. Karina is now actually 14 months old...so this is a tiny look back. Enjoy!
With her young age and young brain, Eliana has an impeccable memory. She has memorized many songs and books and nursery rhymes. We are always amazed when we will say a word that will trigger her to break out in song, even weeks after we had last talked about that particular song.
Mommy and Daddy were mentioning something about "will he" and our little eavesdropper, out of the blue, started reciting the Wee Willie Winkie nursery rhyme. Here are the lines in case you need a refresher:
Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town,
Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown,
Tapping at the window and crying through the lock,
Are all the children in their beds, for now it's eight o'clock?
