Outside

Finally the weather was nice enough for the kids to go outside and play for awhile. Claire was right out there with the boys as soon as I gave her the OK.

Once again, I got bit by the blogger bug and posted a bunch in one day. Keep scrolling down until things start looking familiar.


Claire, hard at work figuring up how much my groceries are going to cost.

It's going to cost you an arm, leg and everything between, but no worries; I have a credit card!

This is the look I get many times when I point a camera in her direction. She is quick too, I'll try to act like I'm not taking her picture and she'll smile and then bam, I push the button and get this.

Princess YaYa

All the little girly things that we saved from Emily's younger days are being put to great use. Here is Princess YaYa taking a break from her princess work to play a little Dora on the Leapster.

Dora

Claire loves Dora the Explorer. We ordered Dora in Chinese off of eBay before our travels but unfortunately they did not arrive before we left due to a lost shipment. We made it through China fine without them but I would recommend getting them and taking them with you because Dora is a big deal in China. Claire knew the theme song and every thing so having Dora in Chinese was very familiar to her at home. The words that would be in Spanish are in English in the Chinese version. In fact, we've figured out that the phrases that Claire could say when we arrived weren't from any tutoring but rather from Dora. We aren't even sure if she had any tutoring at all and they probably had fun with our $150 and just made up the spreadsheet of "lessons" to make us feel better.

We had saved this Dora dollhouse for many years, in fact probably 5 or 6 years. Nobody has played with it and J has urged me many times to sell it in a yard sale but I held onto it for some reason. Maybe it was God working long ago to keep that Dora dollhouse in our house because Claire absolutely loves it. It has been great watching her play "house" and seeing that she knows how houses are set up and how family members interact.
Ignore that laundry basket in the first photo; I was trying to accomplish chores while she played!

shirts

Emily picked to wear her jie jie (big sister) shirt to school today so the outfit I had laid out for Claire was trumped because she needed to wear her mei mei (little sister) shirt as well.

Pictures are getting increasingly hard to get; she hides whenever she sees the camera next to our face. I think we'll have to bust out the telephoto zoom and start shooting wildlife style on her.

Pizza

She loves pizza and gets very excited when she sees it. She even calls it by the English name, although it sounds more like peesa when she says it.