First, we celebrated 5 years married on Friday the 8th. We were originally planning to get away but everything sorta fell through, so we decided to take the girls and do Festival of Lights where we got married. I tried to explain to Sophie what was special about the day but even "it's kinda like the birthday of me and daddy being together" didn't make sense to her, so we gave up.
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| Our wedding venue! |
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| Where AJ and I did our first look |
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| Don't ask how much that baby shark balloon was :/ |
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| Isn't this the sweetest photo of Sophie?? |
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| It was a jar year! See you in another 5 years |
Then of course Saturday the 9th was the family Christmas, and I definitely have mixed emotions as I recall balancing a toddler and infant and losing out the high rollers LRC by one dumb roll wahhhhh!
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| The moment I lost |
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| Our miserably failed attempt at getting "all the kids together" |
In the meantime we've been enjoying Christmas joy around the house with the pets and our weekly evening walk which has become a highlight for Sophie with the annual light tunnel in the neighborhood. I went to the American Ballet Theater's rendition of The Nutcracker at Segerstrom with Iris, and we've been enjoying having Kiwi join us on our walks and trips to the park.
On Tuesday the 12th, Kiwi both turned 1 and Summer turned 4 months! It really as been the fastest month with her, and she has been seeming to get older so much faster than Sophie, but I really think that's because Summer has just been a chill dream and we get good sleep and get to get things done, which wasn't exactly the case the first time around.
On Saturday the 16th, I hit a new level of parenting... or something. I had feels I had never felt before. Firstly, the wait was over. Since I found out I was pregnant with a girl I couldn't wait to take her to dance classes if she would allow it. (For the record, I won't force her to do them or keep it up if she doesn't want to, but I couldn't resist introducing her to it all at least). I was coercing her years ago, but truly all on her own she started talking about dancing, wanting to wear twirly ballerina skirts, turn around, hold her leg up, and imitate the Rockettes from TV, so it was very exciting to tell her we could finally go to dance class!
The class for her age is an hour long combination of tap, ballet and tumbling and despite being in daycare and going to French class, she's never really had a very organized class structure experience so I was quite nervous... but she ended up doing amazing! She didn't quite understand standing in a line, and she is definitely the youngest kid there, but oh, watching her stealthily from the window, both follow instructions in a class, and experience joy in her sloppily innocent dancing made me squirmy with love and excitement.
She is obsessed with the tapping so, sucker that I am... I went out and bought her a pair of tap shoes, which is pretty unnecessary since the school has boxes of them in all sizes that you can borrow and she'll just grow out of them way too fast, but I wanted her to be able to practice at home inbetween classes and I could help show her some things too. (On Saturday evening after her class she started crying because it was "too dark to go to dance class" and she is already asking when she'll be going back.) She'll be getting the tap shoes Christmas morning and my goodness this kid is going to have a Christmas to remember and she better remember it too because we've gotten her a lotttt of stuff!
