Some notes from me so we remember all the things we did... we went to miniature Holland - Madurodam - where there happened to be a Dutch Sesame Street exhibit and Felix boogied to Dutch Elmo (with much gratitude to Diane Weber, Funky's mom, for filming this):


We had wonderful visits with my aunties Mariette (& Bert) in the eastern part of Holland and Heleen (& Sylvain) in Baarn, a super fun time visiting the bunnies at the kinderboerderij (petting zoo) in Belgium with Oma, and Ella played on cousin Annick's slide WHHHEeeee!


There were also several visits to the beach with Opa and Alex The Dog, mostly by the restaurant-on-the-beach where Tante Eva works, De Kwartel, just a short walk through the dunes; some days the weather was not so great and sometimes it was very nice, especially the day the kids went to Scheveningen with Oma and OpaJon.




Click HERE for the visit from Céline's POV with more pictures of us.

Hurray for May

First of all an update... we are very excited to be going to Holland next week to meet our brand new baby niece Céline Leonore and to visit everybody and have lots of fun. Hopefully the kids will come back speaking fluent Dutch.

Second - our little monkey (Felix) is starting to show his sense of humor. While we were all in the living room yesterday evening watching the Lakers lose at basketball (they won by 4 points in the end!), I said "Dada is grumpy" and immediately, Felix ran into the kitchen on his little toddler legs, then insisted on having the cat-shaped tea cosy from the top of the fridge, stuck it on his head and toddled back into the room to make Jim laugh (it worked). He is such a little toddler and is pretend playing quite a bit - pushing toy cars around (brumbrum), feeding the dolls and cats milk (namnam) and walking the toy dog (DOGGIE!) around. He also likes to dress up in different people's clothes quite a bit...



He also loves having his hair spiked up when he takes a bath, and somehow knows that he looks funny.



Third - Ella will be graduating from Pre-Kindergarten next month and will be starting Kindergarten in the fall. We're not quite sure if she'll be staying at her pre-school to do that or moving to a new school - a proper big kid school but she is such a smart cookie and is always surprising me with what she knows. Last night she all of a sudden burst into song (quietly because she doesn't want us to pay attention) but distinctly heard her singing "The sun'll come out tomorrow... Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya!" etc. I didn't even know she knew that song but one of her friends at pre-school is quite the singer so she must have heard it from her. She also knows numbers higher than 20 as I found out when we were playing with the tape measure and she wanted to see how tall we all were. She correctly identified the double-digit numbers. Of course little bro got into the action too and wanted to measure the cats too.



We try to tell Felix to be gentle with the cats, since his tendency is to pet them a little too hard, and when we do he puts his head and listens to them purr.

Felix 18 months

At 18 months old today, Felix is now a very active, chatty toddler. A couple of months ago he wasn't even walking and now he is almost running, he wants to walk all over the place and loves his "TUE" (shoes) actually Ella's old Dora shoes that light up. And he can "jump" (bounce) and runs when we pretend to go catch him. He likes to look at his class picture and point out his friends at school (Adah = Adam, Tee = Anthony, Mah = Marcel, Dah = Dashaun, yes most of the kiddies in his room are boys). He loves to go on the swing, the regular big-kid swing and one, two, TEEEE! down the slide. His favorite breakfast is eggie with cakey (pancake) and whenever we pass the freezer, he tries to take out oko (yogurt).

We are all excitedly anticipating the arrival of Ella & Felix's new cousin in Holland.

Happy Birthday Emile!

Compare and Contrast

Here we have two photos, both taken at Easter, at my Mom's house, and both kids the same age. You think there's some hereditary excitement about eating yogurt?

By Myself

Ella can do a lot of things by herself...when she wants to. She can get dressed, go to the bathroom, go swinging, all by herself, but chooses not to. When she's in front of her friends at school, she will do all of these without assistance, but with us she wants us to always help her. I'm not sure if this is an early manifestation of peer pressure or not.

She'll show us something that she can do by herself if we encourage her:



There's some who say that preschoolers' personalities, when they relate to what they want, are like cavemen in their impulsiveness. I hope not. If you weren't a self-sufficient caveman you would get eaten, so that analogy really doesn't work.

Maybe she doesn't want to everything by herself right now, I'm proud that she's becoming a little girl right before my eyes.

Felix's words: He can say the word "three", but it comes out like "tee". No, he's not a math genius who's already counting at 17 months. We hold him over the bed by his arms and legs and swing him onto his back. "One, two...".

Felix is Walking