Maile and Lauren share many similar traits, but when you go to the playground with Lauren you see one of the big differences between them. Where Maile was cautious, Lauren is fearless. Up and down the slide she goes, not a care in the world. Up she goes climbing anything in site.
Lauren, the Sky Walker
Funny how these things work – I imagine it is largely due to just wanting to keep up with her older sister, but it’s a trip to see her on the playground…
Every year right around March 30th I try to do something fun with Maile and/or Lauren to commemorate a good friend of mine, Lonny, who passed away 7 years ago. We call it Lonny Day. This year it was Lauren’s turn for her very first Lonny Day.
In the morning we dropped Maile off at school and ran around with the big kids for a bit. Then we stopped by and said hi to Mommy at her new office (Lauren told Mommy right away that “she missed her” since it had been a whomping hour and a half since we had seen her 😉
From there the real fun began – we headed over to the San Francisco Zoo for the morning. Lauren is an awesome age to go to the zoo – she just ran around asking to see “more more animals” and stared in wild amazement as the giraffes and zebras and monkeys trotted and swung around right before her eyes.
The morning started with a breakfast pit stop and some sliced apples...
Lauren ran up to every fence, poked her head against it and then yelled to me when she saw the animals - pretty much the way a zoo should be viewed!
Checking out the flamingos - 'pink!'
Loved spending the day with my little girl...
And, of course, the day ended with some ice cream 🙂
I this counts as a milestone – Maile has introduced us (or at least me) to the first trendy thing that I had no idea existed until she discovered it. A couple weeks ago, YouTube released a app for kids that contains kid-friendly videos. Maile has been watching lots of videos about drawing and play-do creations – but one of her favorites is watching kids from Japan open these mini-Japanese cooking sets and watching them make them. It’s kind of like an easy bake oven-type thing.
(Dad note: incredibly there is not a wikipedia entry for this yet. We’re really cutting edge here. Maybe Maile and I will write one. This was the best site I could find with some details.)
She devours these videos. Here’s what one looks like:
(That video has been watched more than 16M times!!!)
Seriously – she would watch that all day long if we let her. (And she could – there are 202,000 on Youtube!!!) Luckily, we live right near Japantown so we went down and picked up a kit to try ourselves.
Maile Girl digging in to her poppin' cookin' set...
Here’s Maile getting some practice in making her own “popin’ cookin'” video:
(Dad note: when I went to post this tonight, I saw that this post is my 1,500th since I started the blog ~5.5 years ago. Wow. I’ll need to reflect on that sometime soon – in the meantime, thank you for following along 🙂
As you know we do a lot of dancing in our house. Lauren is always a willing participant, but she often follows the lead of her older sister. Recently, she’s begun working on her own set of moves – no doubt we have many a dance off in our near future. This weekend, she was all about perfecting her “spin move” – as Mommy related to me, this is very serious business. In fact, Lauren did not want any videoing of this going on (yes, we’ve reached the “no pictures” phase with Lauren…)
Sneaky Mommy still managed to capture our little one at work…
Hope that gives you a smile as you start your week 🙂
(Click here for the first video.)
(Click here for the second video.)
I discovered these pictures from a couple weeks ago that Christine took when we were exploring over at Ocean Beach. We’re definitely having fun exploring this great city of ours!
The sisters who dig together...
Very focused on our sand creation...
Foreground and background - getting artsy over here 🙂
Lauren tends to take after her Daddy when it comes to a slight aversion to sand - so the fact that she was digging in and getting both hands dirty was a win!
(Dad note: be sure to watch the final video in this post. You won’t be disappointed.)
We’ve been exploring more and more of the city on the weekends. On Sunday, Mommy led us on a fun excursion to the Seward Slides mini-park over in the Castro. The slides are these two long (and steep) concrete slides that you can ride down on pieces of cardboard.
All smiles ... at the bottom of the slide.
Facing the slides, ready to conquer!
The steps were steep - that's where a helpful big sister comes in...
Can you spot Maile Girl at the tippy top of the slide?
Mommy took this great shot of the three of us at the top of the slide...
Mommy and Lauren get ready to go...
So those were some shots getting to the top… how did it go going down the slide? Well…
Maile Girl started strong and then had second thoughts…
So Daddy agreed to go down with her the first time. Which was a good idea. Sort of. Daddy forgot that his younger daughter is slightly more adventurous than her big sister. So then this happened…
Awesome.
(Click here for the first video.)
(Click here for the second video.)
Our normal nanny, Kelly, was off last week, so we had one of our regular babysitters, Brooke, watch Lauren and Elena all week. Brooke is all a professional photographer so we received an excellent set of photos of Lauren and Elena living it up all week. Definitely captures life as a two year old. Looks pretty good if you ask me!
