Family Day 2012!!! (aka Anniversary)

 HaPpY FaMiLy DaY!!!!

August 10th is our wedding anniversary.  This year was our 10th Anniversary and we decided to start a new tradition!  We decided to start "Family Day" to celebrate the day we became a family :)

This year we decided we were going to give the girls gifts...

Aashini LOVES art and being crafty and creative, so we cleaned off my desk (that I never use anymore) and filled it full of art stuff (crayons, markers, paper, tape, glue, scissors, etc).

 Here is Aashini when she first saw her desk... she was SOOOOO excited!!!!  It was so cute!  She spends at least an hour every day at her dest (and many days, much more!)

My funny girls :)

 Diya LOVES fashion, dress-up, dolls, doing hair, etc... so we made her a fashion station.  

 This is what was in her fashion station :) 

 Both girls had fun playing with it and fixing their doll's hair, doing their make-up and even dressing up themselves :)

 This cracks me up... I think Diya looks like Elton John here :) haha!

 Aashini dressed up like a princess :)

 Diya showing off her new style :) haha!  The girl walks around the house all day with high heels on! haha!  She wears them all day!

 They had a long weekend, so we were going to celebrate Family Day mostly on Saturday... BUT all night Friday night (our Anniversary), Aashini was up throwing Up... so she wasn't 100% on Saturday morning.  We were going to try and go Ice Skating, but she' wasn't up for it... so instead, we did painting! :)

 Later that day, we pulled out their princess tent to play in :)

 That night we made a big tent in the living room, ordered pizza and watched a movie together.  The girls got to sleep in the tent all night :) 

It was a fun First Annual Family Day :)  We're definitely going to repeat this next year :)

Hangin' Around - America

Just a few fun pictures of the girls :) Aashini is a little jungle girl :) She loves wearing leaves and things on her head as she hunts for bugs :) That's my girl! haha!

Diya likes to do what Aashini does :)

Aashini in her bath towel :)

Diya in her bath towel :)

We went at had South Asian food one day. The girls were super happy :)

Here's Diya chowing down on some roti :)

Aashini's roti was well done - but she didn't seem to notice - she was so happy to eat South Asian food and had really been missing it :)

Here's a Turtle Aashini drew - I thought it was so cute :)

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 :)

Pottery Painting :)

The other day Adam thought he was feeling better and wanted to get out of the house. We decided to go to the mall and let Aashini paint at our favorite pottery place. She LOVED it! She painted a plate that she'll be able to eat on when we get it back :) She loves to paint. Look at the concentration on her face!

The plate was completely covered in paint when she was done with no white spaces! At one point I asked her to smile for the camera and she gave me this funny face - haha! Cracks me up!

Diya didn't get to paint but she had fun too :)

Coloring!

Aashini has been coloring a lot lately. This week at school, Aashini has a coloring competition. She's been excited about it and has been practicing :)

Here she is working on some of her homework for school (yes, my 2 year old has homework :)). I love her cute little hand :)

Here she is, proud of her artwork :)

Little Artist :)

Aashini loves coloring. She loves blank paper the best :) haha! The other day she drew this cute smiley face :) Every time she draws a smiley face she almost always draws a line for the forehead :) haha!

The other day she drew a picture of her buddy Hazel (or Pazel as she calls her). Here's Hazel's mom's blog and here are a few pictures of Aashini with Hazel while they still lived in South Asia :) Anyway, Aashini drew this picture of Hazel and was so proud of it :)

Here she is - all proud :)

Mela Fun!

I took a funny belly picture today :) I'll explain the Disney part in the next post, but thought I'd post the belly picture part of it before I'm further along (if that makes sense). Here's 32.5 weeks! (I love how Minnie is pointing at my belly :))

Last night we went to a Diwali Mela (Fair) in our neighborhood (I wrote more about it on the other blog if you're interested) :). Aashini is finally big enough to ride on a lot of the rides, so that was fun for us as well as her. She loved this ride!

It's just a bunch of cars that go around in a circle (man-powered).

She didn't want to get off!! She loved it!

There was a booth there that had diyas (lights/lamp) that kids could paint. Aashini thought it was AWESOME! She was so cute painting. She painted so carefully and everyone watching was amazed and how meticulous she was painting. It was funny!

Here's her diya :) I think she did a good job :)

Holiday time is fun!!

Entertainment :)

Toddlers are pretty easy to entertain :) Aashini has a bunch of things that entertain her now :) FOOD is one of those things :) She LOVES Mangoes! She cries for them sometimes. She only says it in Hindi but doesn't have that word down perfectly. The Hindi word is Aam (alm - not sure how to spell it in English) but she says Maam... it's cute ;)

Anyway, this mango was huge!! It's the size of her head!!Aashini loves to color! She has crayons & chalk and goes to town with it. She has a blank notebook that she loves to color in too :) This is an older picture - but that's what she's doing here :)
Aashini loves Elmo! She gets to watch Elmo some afternoons and Adam also has Elmo on his phone. It's great b/c if she's really grumpy or upset while we're out, Adam can hand her his phone and let her watch Elmo and she's perfectly happy :) It's so cute :) We were on a long car ride & it was past her bedtime, but Elmo on the phone saved the day. This day (in the pic below), we had a man come to work on our inverter (our battery back-up for the house when the power is out). I was feeling pretty sick and couldn't keep an eye on Aash, and Adam was busy helping the guy fix our inverter. The power was off and on, so we couldn't just turn on Elmo to entertain Aashini, so Adam pulled out his phone - it was quite helpful :) (notice she's wearing an Elmo shirt in this pic as well as an Elmo bib in the other pics)...
We have some weird corn here in South Asia. You can find Sweet American corn here in frozen bags and there are guys on the street that sell cups of hot American corn, but other than that, it's South Asian corn. It's harder corn - more like Maize. It's chewy too. I don't really like it, but we were wanting some corn on the cobb the other day, so we got some. I'm not sure if Aashini really liked it or not, but she sure loved eating it! I love this pic (below) - she is holding the stick in a funny way - it looks so proper :)