All dressed up

   

  

  

  

Christmas with the cousins

It was round the clock fun for the kids as we spent five days in Pleasanton with Zephan, Josh, Jonathan, Piammai and Sujan mama. We went out to light shows and restaurants and games arcades. But all the little people wanted to do was play together and make little Johnny laugh! Worked out great for the less-enthu who had a sleep-eat-and-veg-out agenda!
Christmas morning was a blast with all five kids excited to rip into the gifts pile-up. Zephan prayed when we left thanking God for us coming over and also thanking Him in advance for spring-break when he's sure he'll get to spend the whole week in Portland with his cousins.

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Underwear

Yo's big question today was: "When will I stop doing underwear?"

Quite a valid question, when you consider over the short span of his life he has been encouraged to keep moving from diapers to pull-ups to underwear. There has got to be something else they want me to do next, right? Why the sudden dis-interest in my undergarment selection now?

Pre-school Performances

The kids had their very own class performaces at pre-school. Malaika's (which was over a month ago!) was a Fall/ Thanksgiving based one. She had no idea what was happening (like the majority of her class) but she was incredibly calm for a two-year-old at her first performance.

  

Yohan's class performed some Christmas-themed songs. Evidently, there were some tears before he got on stage, but when the spotlight was on, he held his own.

  

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Christmas Party

The usual cast of characters, events and chaos made up the annual Narjala Christmas party: PDX gang in all its splendor, the White Elephant gift exchange, Santa's dramatic appearance, wailing kids, hyper kids, food and gifts. We probably had more kids than ever before thanks to two new babies in the group this year!
This year it was Malaika's turn to be scared of Santa. And Yohan figured that Kartik uncle's eyes bore a striking resemblance to Santa's!

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Thanksgiving!

Almost Christmas time and us slackers haven't got our Thanksgiving post up. Anyways, better late!

We hosted Thanksgiving for the first time this year, although our turkey binge-ing was postponed to Friday. Junaid and Ruki joined us from Oklahoma and Dhruva and Nikki from California. What followed was three days of eating. Literally.

Junaid and Ranjit handled the bird while I kind of delegated tasks (hehe!) and later Ruki and I chopped and baked and mashed and hashed out our huge meal. The turkey itself was brined and spice rubbed and injected with marinades and basted and fussed over. It tasted good -- as far as turkeys go, at least.

The kids were spoiled with all the attention from doting uncles and aunties who played and tickled and read to them!

The rest of the visited included a trip to the Saturday market for lunch, a trip to the Chinese Garden for tea, a trip to Trader Joe's for ingredients for more food (and tiramisu) and lunch at the fancy Peruvian place, Andina's. Yeah, it's going to take some New Year's resolutions to work off the calories from that Thanksgiving.

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Rasams' Visit

Ramya and Sam and sweet little Anika visited in November (Yup, our chronicle-ing has become somewhat jumbled!) and as usual we had a great time with most of our activities centered around food! Our Christmas celebrations started with a visit to a local church's Christmas event which included "train" rides, bounce houses, a Gingerbread man that Yohan had no problem high-fiving and a gospel tableau.
Back home, the dads were also put in charge of the labor-intensive construction project of the Gingerbread house which both of them took quite seriously.
Other highlights included Ramya's biriyani and a trip to Jaciva's with Vijay uncle for chocolate lava cake.

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Fall Pictures - the Pro version

A few weeks ago we put up some fall pictures of the kiddos we had taken ourselves. A little before that we had a professional photographer do our annual fall photo shoot. Unfortunately the location wasn't very fall-like, and we'll have to remember not to go back there next year.

  

  

  

  

I wuv you

As of now, Mika's friends in school are Wucy and Wauren, and she refers to herself (when possible) as Mawaika Wiwy.

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It's all fun and games

The kids have been playing together more often over the last few weeks. It's quite cool to see how they interact with each other, and observe the conversations they have together. And this may be just a guess, but am sure Susan is rather thankful for the brief moments of respite this newly-entered phase affords her :)

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