Mother's Day

I had a wonderful Mother’s Day this year with my family. We first went out to breakfast at a restaurant filled with playground equipment and a petting zoo. Justin and the girls had a nice time playing while I sat back and relaxed. Then we were off to the mall for a Winnie the Pooh extravaganza. The girls LOVED this part of the day. The Hundred Acre Wood was set up next to the food court where a lady came out and read Pooh Bear stories to the crowd and then Pooh and Tigger came out to meet everyone. Kaelia was intrigued just to see so many other kids and crawled around them all during the performance. Taelyn instantly darted to the front of the crowd to be a part of the action. Then when the lady started reading the stories, Taelyn would not sit down with all of the other kids and insisted on standing right next to the lady so she could see the book too. After quite a bit of bouncing to the Tigger song, Taelyn was ready to meet Pooh and Tigger. She got up on stage with them after the show and gave them each a hug; and she fit in very well while wearing her Eeyore jacket. To finish the fun, Kaelia and Taelyn sat at a table together to color an Eeyore coloring sheet.

The second half of my Mother's Day was quite a change from the first half. The girls stayed behind with our nanny while Justin and I went out with some friends to an And-1 basketball tournament in Soweto. We first hung out at a shebeen (a bar that preserves much of the South African cultural heritage) for a local experience and then headed over to the game. It was a lot of fun, and it brought about some South African culture that I was reminded that I am living in a foreign country as this is so easy to forget in our day-to-day lives.

The day was a perfect mixture of time with family and friends, and I am so fortunate to have wonderful people in my life!

Kaelia - 11 Months

Kaelia is now 11 months and has jumped up quite a bit in her measurements. She weighs 20.3 lbs., is 33.1 inches tall, and has a head circumference of 17.5 inches. This puts her in the 50th percentile for her weight and head measurements and the 95th percentile for her height.

Developmentally, Kaelia has made some physical and mental leaps as well. She has been perfecting her walking and attempts to walk at every chance she can get. She has made it about halfway across a room so far before either falling or choosing to crawl the rest of the way. Each time she takes a step, though, she is so proud of herself. And when she does crawl around the house, it is usually a bear crawl where her legs are straight so that her knees do not touch the ground. This type of crawl is just another indicator that she would rather walk than crawl.

This month has been quite the verbose month too. Kaelia loves to talk and has picked up more words. She will repeat words that we say such as “cat,” “cow,” and “cool,” and she definitely knows the word “dog.” Whenever we see a dog at the playground, she shouts out “dog” followed by “ooooh” (that’s what she says when she gets really excited about something). And Kaelia loves to “read” books with dogs in them. She will often sit alone and flip through her books for a little independent time. But we whenever she comes across a dog in her books, she slaps the page and says “daw” for “dog.”

Another milestone that Kaelia has recently reached is pointing and waving. While we read books to her, she likes to point at items on each page for us to say out loud to her. And when we ask her where something is on the page (like the dog), she will point to it. One day we were reading a book together that had a dog in it, and she first pointed to the dog on the page. Then she looked up at the bookshelf and pointed to another book with a dog on the cover and said “daw.” I really can’t reiterate enough how much our little pumpkin loves dogs! Kaelia also waves any time we say “bye bye” now. She has been waving for several months, but this is the first time it has occurred in context; she used to just wave for fun, but now she waves to say good-bye. Kaelia was playing with my wallet one day and found a picture of Justin in it. She pointed to him and said “da.” Then when I put the wallet a way, I saw “bye bye daddy,” and she waved good-bye to the picture.

Kaelia is such a sweetheart, and it is so fun to see her personality coming out more and more. She loves to be around her family, play outside in the sand box, climb up anything she can, swing and go down the slide at the playground, look at birds (and of course dogs!), wrestle, and give kisses.

Here is a cute little video we took of Kaelia this past month where she tries to put an object on her head.

Happy Easter!

The girls had a very nice Easter celebration this year as we got together with some friends for a potluck brunch, Easter egg decorating, and an Easter egg hunt. We started with the decorating; it’s funny how Taelyn seemed to completely understand what she was doing without having any prior experience of the activity before. She did great. She dropped a few eggs in to different bowls of colors and waited patiently for the dye to set in. She was, however, more eager to eat the hard boiled eggs than she was to color them. The task was a lot more exciting for her when the colored was complete and she got to put stickers on the eggs. While all of this was going on, Kaelia had her first experience with Easter eggs as she tried to figure out what to do with a plastic egg.

After brunch, the egg hunt began. Some of the older girls hid the plastic eggs around the yard for the younger girls to find. This task was not very easy for them, though, because Taelyn wanted to be a part of the action too, so she kept following them around as they hid the eggs. The girls eventually figured out that Taelyn was not trying to peek in on the hiding places and they continued on. During the hunt, both girls had a blast. Kaelia was still very interested in finding out more about the mysterious plastic eggs, so she did more inspecting than finding. She especially liked to pull all of the eggs out of the basket that Taelyn had already found. And Taelyn loved searching for the eggs throughout the yard. She went from place to place while the older girls followed her and carried her basket.

Once we made it home later that day, Taelyn brought back one of her decorated Easter eggs (she insisted on the “eddo” [yellow] one). This egg had to go everywhere with her; she had to hold it in her car seat during the ride home, it had to sit next to her on the couch, and she had to take a nap with it! Then when she woke up from her nap, she couldn’t find the egg and ran to us in a panic. We found it intact under her pillow, and life was good again. We topped off the day by peeling the egg for Taelyn and Kaelia to eat. Taelyn did most of the peeling herself and then enjoyed finally getting to eat her Easter egg. We’re pretty sure this is all she wanted to do the entire day, so she ended the day completely content and happy.