July 2014

Maile turns 5 on Friday. 5.

When we first met...

... at 1

... at 2

... at 3

... at 4

... and at 5!

If you are reading this on the Hapa Haole blog web site, there is a list of months over on the right side of the page. It starts with this month (July 2014) and goes all the way down to July 2009. 5 years. If you haven’t done it in awhile, click on a random month in there – my guess is you’ll get lost for a bit in the stories this little girl (and, of course, her sister) have brought to life. Some nights Christine will call me over and she’ll have a video from two or three years ago up – we’ll watch and remember and laugh.

It does seem like every day Maile grows up faster and faster. Christine and I try to keep up – give her some nudges to stay on the track we think makes sense, but for the most part get out of the way and see where she takes us. She awes us constantly (and if we’re being honest, drives us a little batty more and more) – but it really is incredible to watch this person form, to figure things out, to get excited, to get scared, to get sad, to get mad, to learn, to develop passions, to dance, to sing, to smile and, especially, laugh.

Wow, indeed.

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Maile’s 5th(!) birthday is on Friday. Crazy. This afternoon I thought it would be fun to do some Daddy/daughter shopping and I took her to buy a “special birthday dress” that she could pick out.

We took the bus downtown and went to the Gap. Now Maile’s shopping style currently is “see it, want it” – everything is immediately her favorite. So I decided to teach her a little bit about how to make a decision. We went around the store and picked out all the dresses we liked and then we asked the lady working there if we could have a dressing room. We went into the dressing room and put all the dresses up on the hangers so we could check them out.

Maile Girl with her 5 potential special birthday dresses...

Then we tried them on one-by-one, checked ourselves out in the mirror and then decided if it went in the “I like it/maybe” pile or the “I don’t like it/get it off me quickly” pile. (Only one dress end up in the latter pile and that was because Daddy grabbed the wrong size).

Here’s the lineup:

Option #1 (a little timid to start)

Option #2 (now we're really getting in to it)

Option #3 (I swear I was not encouraging these poses!)

Option #4 (We loved this one as soon as we put it on...)

Option #5 (Wrong size one - get it off me!)

As mentioned above, I have no idea where these poses came from – I wasn’t encouraging her – just suggested we take a picture so we can remember what the dress looked like. She also doesn’t get it from Mommy. She just started a new show, PAW Patrol, maybe it’s from that 😉

After we tried them all on, we left the dressing room and reviewed all the pictures. Which is your favorite? We decided on…

… #4 – our very special birthday dressy and it looks beautiful on Maile!

Maile was very excited about her pick - he wanted to wear it home, but I convinced her to save it for her birthday party on Saturday

We had a lot of fun, but I’ve most definitely created a monster here.

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