Diya had a photoshoot at school this past weekend. The family was supposed to be in a few pictures too :) I grabbed a couple of pictures too :) This isn't a great one... but I thought it was cute :)
Diya smiling sweetly for the camera :)
Diya got home and dressed up the way she thought she should be dressed up :) haha!
Aashini loves stories and telling stories! She also loves princesses, so the the other day we let her watch Ella Enchanted (another twist on the Cinderella story). This is her re-telling ("reading") that story the next morning (and singing the closing song .. haha!).
On Tuesday morning Diya had her first speaking competition and class presentation. It was super cute! Diya is in Pre-Nursery and is now 2 1/2 years old :)
It started with all of the kids on stage showing some of their opening exercises/activities they do every morning. Diya was a little nervous but not really. She did good :)
Then it was the time for the speaking competition! Diya had to go on state by herself and say her "introduction" and a Hindi poem. When it was her turn to go she freaked out and made this face:
Diya is a lot more shy than Aashini, but once she got up on the stage (after one of the teachers carried her to the mic), she did great :) (That is her head teacher holding the mic - Sonal ma'am)
When she was done, she was so proud of herself :) (her assistant teacher is the one in the red/green outfit in this pic - Ritu Ma'am)
I might have been scared too... For the kid's first speaking competition they have all the lights turned off (except on the stage) and make all the parents wear masks so the kids don't know that it's their parents (They think that the parents will make the kids nervous). Although they aren't as scary as the masks we were supposed to wear for Aashini's first presentation... they were a little scary to Diya (who currently has a huge fear of Spiderman)...
After all the kids spoke, they came on stage and did a Taekwondo presentation. Diya was a little nervous but got into it after a little bit.
Doing her kicks :)
Then they did a song too. Diya LOVED that part! She had been practicing it at home and just loved it!
She loves music :)
She was so proud of herself afterwards! She said: "My teacher is going to give me chocolate and I'm going to share it with Aashini!" :) It was cute :)
After the performance they let us go into the computer lab and the kids got to show us what they've been learning on computers :)
Then Diya showed us around and showed us her favorite places to play.
This is one of Diya's buddies in her class :)
Playing in the dirt...
Playing in the fun ball pit! :)
Here is a video!!! The first part is Diya doing her Introduction and her Hindi poem. Then I put the song (because it was her favorite) and then a few other pieces of the performance. Diya has a cute little stutter right now. She's been going through a big growth spurt and the last two weeks she's started stuttering (Aashini did this too). It's pretty cute in this video :)
Here is Diya practicing her poem before her performance (it's much more animated :)).
Aashini is getting big!! It's amazing the things that she knows and learns... she's like a little sponge! Her Hindi is already better than mine!!! She loves learning and writing and doing all kinds of art projects she creates herself :) She's hilarious :)
The other day for summer camp she wanted her hair in "a lot of parades"... (she calls braids, parades... she thinks I say it wrong... haha!) I wasn't sure how to do that (without taking tons of time) so this is what I did... it made her happy :) haha! She wanted me to take a picture of it to put on the blog... she insisted on reading a newspaper for the picture... not sure why :)
She did her own hair the other day... what do you think??
The other day at a store she found this big lollypop and said: "mom! Please take my picture with this lollypop!" :)
Diya has quite the personality! She is sweet & spunky with attitude :) haha! This picture shows some of that personality :)
I love her sweet crinkled-nose-smile :)
(Ignore the mess in this picture :))... Diya loves her friends!! She never likes to be alone! She loves friends and people around her at all times. This past month Aashini was in Summer Camp, so Diya had to play alone (or with us) in the mornings... Diya's favorite stuffed animal is her bunny (who is called either: "Bunny" "Funnybunny" or "Honeybunny"... she can't decide)... The other day she pulled up these chairs and was reading to her bunny... I thought it was cute :)
Diya drew this smiley face the other day :) I thought it was cute :)
If I pull up the camera, Diya will ALWAYS pose! haha! She's a funny one :)
Wearing her roller skates and posing :) haha! Aashini and Diya skate at school, so we were practicing at home the other day :)
Diya posing for another picture... haha!! You can see her "pink hair" in this picture :)
Diya is a super fun girl! She keeps things interesting :)
My sister sent a couple of costumes to the girls and they were so excited! My girls LOVE Dress-Up... they do it almost every day!
Diya LOVED her fancy skirt! She loves it so much that she wants to wear it outside all the time too :)
Diya is our little fashionista! She wanted everything matching... she had a purple purse and a few other purple things... and she was stressed out that her shoes didn't match for this picture :) haha!!
Aashini LOVES her pirate costume :) She loves playing pirates. Here she is saying "Argh!" :)
The girls posing together :)
Diya is showing off a little bit of attitude here :) haha!
Aashini has had a super fun summer! There are only 2 weeks left of summer now. For the first 4 weeks of summer Aashini went to Shining Star Camp (which she seemed to think was called "Treasure Camp"). It was super awesome! It was put on by her school.
Here she is waiting for the school transport to pick her up one morning :)
This was the last week of Summer Camp... On Friday we got to go to the school and watch them perform and show us all the things they learned this summer. The Shining Star Camp had 4 Tracks...
The first Track was Dancing. Dance is a big part of the culture here and we love it! They taught them multiple styles of dance. In her dance performance she showed 3 different styles of dance (Hip Hop, Jazz and Bollywood I think)... Here she is about to begin her performance :)
Here she is during her dance :) I like the bottom picture... she's being a DJ :)
She always has her tongue sticking out when she's concentrating :) haha!
Here's a VIDEO of the dance! It was awesome! Aashini learned the choreography pretty easily :) Go Aashini!!!
Here are some of the bigger kids doing one of their dances :) They were super fun :)
One of the other tracks of the Summer Camp was "Skills for Life". This is where they learn how to model and showcase themselves :), personality developement, self discovery, mass communication, etc...
For this part of the performance, each kid walked across the stage smiling and waving and then came to the middle, did their "introduction" and said a few lines. It was cute :)
Here is the Video of her speaking:
Another track of the camp was Theatre. They did all sorts of fun things in this track. They did puppets, voice modulation, using props, miming, and all kinds of creative things... One day they gave all the kids magic wands and when they came to the front they would turn the rest of their group into something and the group would have to act that way... pretty fun :)
For the Performance, they did a play where everyone was a vegetable :) Aashini was the Gobi (Cauliflower)... Her hat (which had the cauliflower on it) didn't stay on, so they took it off before she got on stage :) Here she is speaking her lines as the "Chorus".
Here she is speaking her lines.
This is what her costume was supposed to look like :)
Here is a video of the play (Not the whole play... mostly just the part she is in... her part is about halfway through the video):
So... the 4th track was "Sports and Adventure"! This one was totally fun!!! They had an amazing team of sports professionals that did everything. The kids did Team Building Games, Skill Building in Sports and Adventure Sports. In the Skill Building in Sports she did Skating, Table Tennis, learned how to dribble a basketball and play Cricket!!!
Adventure Sports was super fun!! They did Artificial River Crossing (it was a small zip-line from tree to tree on platforms), Rock Climbing, Rappelling and Flying Fox. What is "Flying Fox you ask?"....
Here is Aashini suited up and ready to show us how she did the "Flying Fox" all summer...
Here is the climbing wall (it's 5 stories tall!!!!!)... Flying Fox is an AWESOME Zipline sliding from the top of this tower!!!!!!!
Here's one kid going down :)
For the younger kids, they didn't have them climb up the stairs to the top of the climbing wall to slide down... they connected them at the bottom of the zipline and pulled them up and then sent them down (they kind-of got two rides :))
Here's Aashini on her way up!!
She's super high up!! :)
Here she is on her way back down!!
Aashini is a bit of a scaredy-cat... just the other day she screamed and cried when we put her on top of a camel because it was too high up! She wasn't scared at all on the Flying Fox! She LOVED it! She said she did it a lot! How fun!!!
Here's a video of Aashini going up and down the zip line :)
I've been bad at posting lately, but I'm finally starting to feel good and have energy again! :) Anyway, here are videos of the girls...
This is a video of Diya learning to click her tongue (in the bath) :) haha! She makes some funny faces :)
Here's a video of Aashini playing with a friend at the play place near our house :) You can hear her speaking a little bit of Hindi with her friend in this video :)
