This is Tekina with her Valentine's Day book. She has been reading (well) for a couple of months now, and is doing fantastic! She absolutely adores the Dora, Disney Princess, and Barbie books. She can sit for hours reading her phonics books too. Not to far from where Noa was at this time. She's got a bit of a noggin on her shoulders!
This is Noa and one of his classmates. Their class performed "The Emperor's New Clothes", and he was a construction worker sent to check the "magic cloak" for the emperor. He had a small singing part.... but Noa seems to like to sing better in groups rather than solo. Sorry, no future Josh Groban here..... no, probably not.
This is Malia... Cynthia's (Siope's sister) daughter. They came to visit us from Maui for a while. She had a lot of problems as a baby (E Coli. and spinal meningitis), so she's a bit slow cognitively. However, they were so much fun to have over for several weeks. She's got her share of a diva attitude, but we think she's so much fun to have around! We miss them dearly!
As I'm sure all of you are suffering from a bit of the cold/flu season -- we have not been exempt. Tekina has been sick much of the winter, and in this picture, she was at the Dr.'s office with a bunch of red blotches all over her body. You can see her red hands. It looked horrible, but it was apparently only a fever rash. It disappeared in 3-4 days, but she looked like a little racoon for a while there. We're lucky not to have been horribly sick, and thank heavens for modern medicine to treat ugly things like this!
This is at Paul's 2nd birthday party on New Year's Day. Paul is Mia's son (Siope's oldest sister). He absolutely adores Noa. We went to dinner afterwards. It was a fun day. The previous night, we were able to spend some time with Yan and her family playing games, then had our New Year's celebration about a half hour early because of grumpy kids. Our neighbors must have been checking their watches, because of all the ruckus we made with the poppers and noise-makers.
Bubba Doo is not crawling yet, but he's moving around a bunch. He turned 6 months old today! Time has flown by so fast. He's getting so tall, and strong. Out of all the food I've given him, so far, he likes pear oatmeal and sweet potatoes. I will probably be making poi here in the next week for him to try. No teeth yet, and that's fine by me since he's only partly bottle fed still!
Last, but not least, Finelea above is sporting a beautiful formal dress that was given to her by her former special ed teacher. You can't see it too well in this picture, but the silver material has some black embroidered flowers and vines up the dress. It's gorgeous, and Finelea LOVES to wear it. She loves to dress up, and frequently pats her chest and says, "Ayye DooduFuuuh". Which means, I'm Beautiful!So, what's happening now, you might ask? I am job hunting so Siope can go to school. He feels like there's one of two things that he can do: become a sheriff, or get his master's in Statistics. He's going to try both, and see which one takes him first. As for the kids, we'll be figuring out how to best take care of them during this fiasco. I'm proud of Siope for figuring out how to support our family through our financial crisis. There are always things we could cut... but it would not amount to what we need to keep our house... which is what we're trying desperately to do now. So, I had a job interview at Stanford on Monday, and I'll know in about a week if I'll get a call back from there.
As for the kids, Finelea is still doing well in school. She's benefiting mostly from the speech therapy she receives. Although I'm not doing any brain therapies now with her, I see her progressing in different ways. I will begin brain therapies again as soon as I get a good schedule nailed down for us. As changes happen to me in my life, schedules get mixed up all the time, but now I'm looking forward to a long break from sickness and pregnancies so I can get some stuff done!
Noa is in 3rd grade at the GATE program, and doing well. His science fair is coming up, and he'll be showing off his cloud chamber. I'll let him write about that on his blog.
Tekina is going to go to Kindergarten sometime this summer. She may or may not be in the same school as Noa. We'll have to see. For now, she's doing well, and loves to learn.
Bubba doo... well, I gave most of the updates for him in the picture above. He's a little stinker.
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