Family Time in CT

a few pictures from our trip to CT for Cameron's baptism:

Everyone!

Griff LOVED hanging out with James and Emmett.  They played a lot of football, and a game called "Sandwich", where basically Griffin lay on top of both of them.  

Hanging with Cam!

Griffin Sandwich

Giving goodbye hugs to Gma and Gpa

Griff, Mom and Dad

Taken in Enfield, CT 4/21/13.  Griff is 3.25 years old.  

I can't get over Griffin's sweet little face.

We couldn't get a proper smile out of him...

... so we made faces instead.  Note that Griff and I are matching. :)

Vera was asleep in her stroller...

The Small Daily Traditions

Vacations and milestones are awesome, but the daily rituals are what I think is really shaping the kids.  Here's a collection of some of the ones I want to remember when I'm 60.  OR just when I'm 32.

• Exiting the bath:   5 4 3 2 1 Blastoff - I hold Griff in a towel and lift him out of the tub and over my head.  He has to deploy his "wings" before I will commence the launch sequence.  For a while there was a rocket malfunction and I had to lift the disabled craft over the edge of the tub with the "service crane."  Thankfully that phase has passed.
• Pee in the middle of dinner.  I think because he doesn't stop very often this is the first time in a few hours each day that he actually considers bladder status.  And then we dismiss him from the table and he walks the long way around the house to get to the bathroom by himself.  Usually one of us will check on him a few minutes later to make sure he didn't fall in.
• Tightest tightest tightest tightest hug and kiss from Mom when he goes to bed
• Brushing teeth - gotta get all six spots!
• In the car seat "I wanna do the big buckle!"
• Before the bath:  to expedite undressing, the reward for doing so is the honor of dropping the colored bath tablets in the water.

We love you, three year old Griff.  So much.

Muse

Tom is on a man date tonight with "Uncle Dan"... it's a well deserved night out for our hard working Dad. They are currently in Boston at a Muse concert.  Tom said in a recent text that the show is "a w e s o m e". 

I held the fort down today solo and barely made it through.  I had one of those I-wonder-how-much-I-should-craigslist-my-tantruming-3-year-old-for kind of days.  Eek. I'm very much looking forward to my sleep and impending morning coffee(s).

Johnny/Griffin & Anna/Vera

Check out these pictures of Griffin and his buddy Johnny (taken July 2010, at 5-6 months old) and their baby sisters Vera and Anna (taken March 2013, at 5-7 months old).  Amazing!

Lunch

Griffin had a fresh 12 grain bread almond butter and honey sandwich cut into the shapes of dinosaurs, brachiosauruses to be exact- to go along with the theme of today's library story time where he decorated a baby stegasaurus named Dino-y who "hatched" from an oversized green Easter egg.  I had the ghetto sandwich crust for my lunch to go along with my 3rd cup of coffee.

Red's Mickey Mouse Pancake!

This morning we had a lovely family breakfast date with the Hales. Griffin ordered a Mickey Mouse pancake- quite a big pancake for a big boy, who unfortunately had a tiny appetite. Our dear Vera slept under the table during her trip to Red's.

Workbooks!

It must be the studious Asian in me coming out... I feel so responsible for Griffin's educational development (of course I should, I'm his mom!), and I'm always a little worried that I'm not working with him enough at home, especially now that my time is divided between he and Vera.  This morning I dusted off a few workbooks that I snatched from Target's dollar section ages ago and encouraged him to do a few pages.  We spent about 10 minutes on super basic math concepts, coloring, and the letter "A".  He earned 2 stickers that he stuck to his shirt- a dino and a basketball.  

My studious little Asian...

Griffin colored this flower brown and did an amazing job staying in the lines.  He usually scribbles all over things, but he concentrated really hard on this and it turned out awesome.

I have memories of my mom making me do similar math and reading workbooks when I was really young, that we used to buy at a store called The Paper Cutter.  It was the second store on the left in the old Mohawk Mall, diagonally across from the Northeast Bank, near Arby's and the Dream Machine arcade where my brother once had a birthday party and I got to play Skeeball for a straight hour, earning myself what seemed like a million tickets).  I loved that store and have a lot of blurry memories of shopping there with my mom.  It's where we used to do my annual school supplies trip, which I absolutely loved (5 star notebooks, trapper keepers, and .5mm mechanical pencils- oh my!!)  Once I accidentally walked right out of the store holding an unpaid-for item in my hands- I went across the hall to the bank to show my mom the 'thing' I had... I have no memory of what it actually was, but I really remember the feeling of immediate embarrassment when my mom yelled at me for accidentally taking the item out of the store. No real harm done.  (and what a wierd thing to remember!) 

Later in my childhood, I also remember having to work on these giant black and white photocopied reading comprehension & vocabulary binders that we used to get from Mrs. Ho, a family friend who had 3 kids that all went to Ivy League schools.  Did all Asian kids have to do these workbooks in addition to play piano and violin?  I do know now that all of the extra work I was forced to do as a kid did help me actually succeed academically- really makes me wonder how much worse my verbal SAT scores would have been without them...  All of this said, now that I'm a parent, I hope I'm able to balance the extra workbook type stuff we have Griffin & Vera do with their exposure real life experiences, which I think are even more valuable than what you can learn in a book.