On Vacation :)

We're in the Gulf on vacation right now :) The girls are having a great time :) We're staying in a great house and it even has a bathtub! The girls are loving the bathtub :) We bought some bubbles and they think they're awesome :) haha! We're going to see a movie in a few minutes - fun ;)

Christmas Day!

We had a great Christmas :) The girls had a lot of fun with food and friends :)

Diya was only a month old last Christmas so this one really felt more like her first Christmas :) She had a lot of fun :)

Aashini really had fun :) She was cute :)

She got a fun new soft elephant :)

Diya was mesmerized by her glow worm.

Aashini had fun playing :)

Diya hugging her glow worm :) I love those things (they came in handy tonight when the power was out and our inverter - battery back-up - stopped working :))

Diya was exhausted and took a long morning nap :)

Aashini had a yearbook photo shoot on Christmas morning, so it worked out that we could go over there before we did other things. Here's Diya with Aashini's main teacher - Jaspreet.

For the photo shoot they did the whole family, the girls with me, the girls with Adam and just the girls... it was pretty funny :)

They were cute :)

More pics on the other blog :) Check it out!

We're leaving tomorrow for the Middle East for a couple of weeks. I still have some Christmas posts, but they'll have to wait a few weeks... see you in the Gulf!

Christmas :)

Christmas is almost here! Our city has decked itself out a lot more than normal this year, so it's felt a lot more like Christmas. Aashini is a lot more interested in Christmas this year. I'm excited to see how she continues to experience Christmas this year :) Fun!

An Aashini Post :)

This post is all about Aashini :)

She likes to make pretend food a lot now. The other day she lined up a few stuffed animals and fed them - I thought it was cute :)

She likes tea parties (with juice :) - the girl loves juice!).

Aashini loves getting dressed up and dancing. Here she is dancing to "Go Tell it on the Mountain" haha! (if you can't see it, click here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-TcsAa10g8)

She loves to dress up!! She goes back and forth from wanting to be a princess and wanting to be a superhero/pirate :) This day she had a combo (check out the shoes) :) In this picture she's showing us the picture she just took on her camera :) haha!

Aashini still loves doing puzzles. Here she is at school one day when we went to pick her up... she wanted to show Diya her puzzles at school: )

Aashini LOVES being a pirate!! Here she is "playing pirate" with Adam and Joe. The newspaper is the pirate map :)

Here's another video. If you can't view it, then you can go here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R-zSNt91uQ) to view it. This was the other night. Aashini was cracking me up! We were getting her dressed warm for sleeping (marble floors and cement walls make for a really cold house!) and she started dancing on the bathroom counter. She calls herself a "Dancer-lina" (She confused a ballerina and dancer) :) It's pretty repetitive but funny (to me anyway :))

A Diya Post!

Here's a post all about Diya :)

Diya says "Happy" now. It's cute. She says it all day long! It's hilarious! Here's a video (if you can't view it, click here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glhoa5rG3mE)

One day this week we were in a steel shop and Diya was having fun sitting on a stool :)

She has fun shopping :)

Diya loves to pick Aashini up from school. She likes to sit at the desk at school and be big :)

And here is a random video of Diya chasing a toy and cracking up :) haha! (if you can't view it, click here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F0pZqOwfww)

Diya is fun a giggly :) She's super fun :)

Christmas DRAMA!

So last Sunday Aashini was in a Christmas Drama/Musical at Chrch. Aashini LOVES the microphone and stage, so we weren't sure how it would go... Before it started, Aashini and her friend Evie seemed to be excited about the mic :)

They got all lined up on the stage. Aashini was excited to get started :)

They told all of the kids to sit down. Aashini stood in front of the mic...

Then the drama begins... no, not the musical drama, but Aashini's drama.... Her and Evie started fighting over the microphone... oh yeah, I was embarrassed...

... Evie won... and Aashini pitched a fit!

She stayed on the sidelines for the first song. At the 2nd song she wanted to go back to the stage... so she stood in the very front of the stage and sort-of pouted...

Then Evie left the stage to sit with her parents and Aashini took over the microphone...

She was super happy to have the microphone in her control...

...then she realized that the mic was turned off. She started tapping the microphone and motioning to let people know it was off...

She had fun at the end. It was quite the experience - haha! First Drama performance was full of Drama.... You can see for yourself :)

Here's a little bit of video of the performance/drama :) (if the video doesn't work, click here)

Artwork :)

Aashini loves coloring and drawing! She's recently started turning her smiley faces into people - I love it :)

The other day she decided to draw Adam. She was really into it...

The blue colored-in parts are his clothes :) She finished and said:

"This is daddy. Isn't he cute?!"

So fun :)

Random Post & Videos :)

Here are a few random pictures... some good, some not-so-good :) Here's Aashini dancing in her birthday tap shoes :)

Here's a video of Aashini. She has a funny thing she likes to do... she likes to look sad and when you ask her what's wrong she'll give a big smile... so that's what's going on at the beginning of the video... then she does a Hindi poem, then she talks a little bit. At school if they are studying something, they usually write it on the kid's hands (I know... nice :))... so on this day it's special shapes... Cone & Rhombus - made me laugh :) Anyway, enjoy... if you can't see it, then you can go here to see it.

Here's Diya with one of her new birthday toys :)

This is what Diya looks like when she's super excited and trying to talk :)

Here's a video of Diya playing Peekaboo :) I love her giggles :) If you can't see it then click here to see it.

I got some boots for Aashini from another mother who's kid outgrew them. Aashini wore them for the first time the other day and she thought she was awesome :)

Here's Aashini at church with two of her little buddies :)

Here's Aashini at school (after school) with her super hyper friend Alina. I've never seen a kid with as much energy as she has! I'm trying to get it on video - one day I'll get it :)

At the end of a long day - the girls were exhausted!

Retreat! - Last Stuff :)

Here are a few last pictures from the retreat :) The girls took baths in the bucket in our room. I thought they were so cute in the bucket :) This is a true bucket-bath :)

I love that Aashini can still fit in a bucket :)

On one of the last days, a baby horse was running around the camp. It was super cute and fluffy. It definitely had some attitude though :)

Aashini had fun feeding the horse :)

One time she didn't feed him right and he bit her finger and wouldn't let go, we had to open the horse's mouth to get her hand out. Thankfully her hand was totally fine, but she cried a little and said: "Why did that cute horse bite me?" (see her face in the picture below - this is when she realized that her hand was stuck)...

My girls playing with the rocks :)

Aashini looking at the water - she loved looking at the water!

It was an awesome retreat!!!