weekend chaos

esme latest

She is such a good eater. pumpkin, banana, brown rice, sweet potato and yogurt. She loves it all. Her new sound is "baa baa baa," and her squeals are getting louder. She's not crawling yet but she might as well be because she is so fast doing her scooting-army crawl maneuver that she can be anywhere she wants to be in a flash, especially on our wooden floor. And in fact, just this morning she pushed herself up onto all fours and started rocking back and forth, so I guess she could start crawling any day now. Looks like her 2 bottom teeth are on the verge of coming in. Both boys really love to make her laugh. Her ears perk up and she freezes when she hears their voices when they come in the door in the afternoons. Her eyes light up and she starts panting with excitement when they come around the corner and start their daily routine of bouncing and making silly noises to get her to laugh. As can be seen in the pictures, her new favorite toy is one of Kellan's birthday presents.

Happy birthday, Kellan

Kellan said he wanted a shishimai cake this year, the traditional Japanese lion-dragon creature. As it turned out Jolon's class was making them out of milk cartons. So Jolon made the head, Jan had the inspiration for the leggo legs and I made a triple-layer devils's food cake as the body. We celebrated on Sunday night with our good friends at our favorite Chinese restaurant. Suzie turns 30 the day after Kellan turns 3 so it was a lovely joint birthday party.

waffles, pancakes and a bonfire

Click to Play

I ended up having 3 Moms, one Dad, 3 five year olds, 3 three year olds, one baby and no Jan over for breakfast this morning. Really nice people and the kids were not too terribly crazy. I realized that having a "party" with 3 year olds and 5 year olds is WAY easier than a similar party we had last year at this time with 2 year olds and 4 year olds. The older kids ended up making a restaurant for the Lion class kids and inviting the adults to come as well. Very sweet and reminded me of times when I did this as a child with my friends for my parents. WEIRD. Then we went to Sorazaya park for their annual burning of the special goods from last year's festivals....arrows and other important New Year's decorations that technically shouldn't be thrown out in the normal trash. We watched the priest bless the fire and do his chanting and praying and then they poured kerosene all over the bamboo-framed pile of trees and goods from last year and torched it. Unsurprisingly, Kellan freaked, while Jolon was so taken with the scene that when I asked him what he thought about it, he could only come out with, "Atsui...atsu sugira," (It's hot.....it's way too hot).

Esme's first meal: pumpkin

Finally. She's been looking interested for awhile. Grabbing for our spoons and smacking those lips. I really expected her to react similarly to Jolon and Kellan when they first got food. Jolon liked the spoon better than the food and Kellan was extremely displeased with the whole idea of consuming anything other than his mommy's milk from what I remember. I'll post some of the video of Esme lapping up every bite she could get her hands on, laughing most of the time, trying to eat the spoon, licking the bowl. She put on a real performance. Boys loved it of course.

Grammy came to see us all, but especially, Esme.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

January 1st

Click to Play

We went to Sorazaya Shrine this morning, and bought the boys lucky arrows as well as good luck charms to ring in the new year. "Yoi otoshi o," is Happy New Year in Japanese.