Kiana's 1st Birthday Party / Happy Father's Day, Daddy!

This weekend we had had Kiana's 1st birthday party with her friends and celebrated Father's day. It was fun!


On Saturday, we actually had *two* 1st birthday parties: first we went to Wesley's (Rowan's little brother) party (12-2:30pm), and then we hosted Kiana's party (4:30-6:30pm). Kiana went down for a nap late and so Aidan and Daddy went first, and she and I caught up with them later. Both kids had fun playing in the water at the new playground by Indian Road Cafe in Inwood, and Aidan and Rowan had a blast playing "pirates" on the play structures.


Afterward, we trained home and Daddy picked up pizza and balloons while the kids and I took a break from the excitement (Aidan watched Diego and ate a hot dog; Kiana ate her hot dog in her high chair while I washed up dishes.) Then Mary and Cira met us at our house and helped us carry our own party paraphernalia to the sledding hill at Fort Tryon park.


We had pizza, watermelon, chips, and chocolate-frosted coconut-banana bread for birthday cake. Kiana polished her face with a slice of pizza, ate tons of watermelon, and actually (for the first time!) was gung ho about her birthday cake! I love her chocolate-faced picture with Daddy! We all enjoyed hanging out with everyone, the babies (Hudson, Henry, Sylvie, David, Wesley, Oliver and Kiana) and and the big kids (Rowan, Cira, and Aidan). The big kids had fun drawing chalk designs on the sidewalk and using our bubble-gun to blow millions of rainbow-colored bubbles (the babies LOVED chasing them!), and everyone had fun playing with the balls and getting messy with the food.



On Sunday, it was Father's Day! We let daddy sleep in, and gave him beautiful original-child-art cards (Aidan's was a wall-sized 3-media piece of art!), as well as a bouquet that Aidan picked out (sunflowers and little yellow flowers). As requested, we had blueberry pancakes for breakfast. While Kiana napped, Aidan and Daddy watched The Princess and the Frog. Then, after pizza for lunch, we all spent the afternoon at the Tenafly pool. Aidan continued to amaze us with being incredibly brave and willing to try new things in the pool: he has now held his breath and gone under water until he touched the ground in 4 and 5 feet deep water, and on Sunday spent a long time jumping to me from the steps at the side of the pool and floating back. In fact, he was so excited about his adventures, that he didn't want to get out even when his lips started turning blue and his teeth started shivering! We did get out eventually, and he warmed up happily in the sun. I am thrilled that he is having so much fun!


AIDAN Highlights:
Aidan is suddenly incredibly into playing with language! His teacher Joanna at school uses Spanish with them in little bits, and he just started getting into Dora and Diego , and he has started asking what how to say thinks in Spanish all the time. We love this! However, it ends up being a little funny, because at the same time, he has also gotten really into using his own form of Pig-Latin right now: in his Dragon Slayer Academy books, there is a talking pig named Daisy who talks in Pig Latin; Aidan loves this and has developed his own variation of it: he cuts off the consonant at the beginning of words, but doesn't add it to the end of them! To vary it up, he also sometimes plays with just using the first letter of the word instead of the whole word (e.g., "Hi, M" instead of "Hi, Mama!"). He has been doing this for a while, but then, after using a lot of Spanish this week, this morning he left for school, and responded to a question with "S!" - when I was confused, he explained brightly, "Si!" (Yes in Spanish!) This is getting fascinating but sometimes hard to keep up with!


KIANA Highlights:
- Kiana is absolutely FURIOUS about being told "no" right now: if I take anything away from her, she throws a full out fit - throws herself on the floor on her tummy and bucks up and down in frustration! She's definitely gotten the hang of it from practicing! She still is usually amenable to exchanges, but no delays in between taking something and giving something else to her are acceptable, and even exchanges are not always good enough.
- She is also incredibly clingy right now. If I leave the room, she immediately looks for me, and when I walk back (10 seconds later), she toddles quickly over to me with a giant grin and deep, relieved breaths, saying "hi!, hi!, hi!" as if she had thought I was going to be gone forever! As Alex notes, I am *very* popular right now. (Sigh!)