Hawaii #1 (first of 3!)

For those of you who don't want to be bored with 3 blog posts worth of Hawaii pictures, please just skip the next 3 posts! I couldn't get the number of pictures down to one post's worth no matter how hard I tried.

Sumeet Sarina and I had an amazing time over the thanksgiving holiday in Hawaii. Smita hadn't been since 6th grade and it was Sumeet and Sarina's first trip! As you'll see we enjoyed it immensely and will probably be back some day soon. The first batch of photos is all from Oahu...

Fun in the sun

Finally a California winter day! Sarina loves playing outside and it is so much better when we don't need jackets!

Tis the season

For holiday parties! Sarina has been enjoying eating and being merry at many holiday and birthday parties this month!! Mommy is still gaining weight faster though....

Smita

Sarina on a train ride

Sarina is in her fascinated by trains phase. Were taking a caltrain ride to check out big choo choo

Sick day

Sarina was feverish this morning so spending day with mommy. After a nice nap we hit the Japanese garden. Here she is saying hi fishes!

Hawaii (preview)

We just returned from a wonderful trip to Hawaii over the thanksgiving Holiday. We have lots of photos to sort through and lots of stories to tell. In the meantime, here are a couple photos as a preview... these are of Sarina in her almost daily routine of heading out to the beach (swimmy diapers, swimsuit, sunscreen, hat beach shoes and toys.) Clearly she has everything she needs for loads of beach fun.

Lake Tahoe

A couple weeks back we went on a little weekend getaway trip to Lake Tahoe. It was a beautiful fall weekend - lots of colors, cool, clean air and many pinecones to be collected. We explored and played around the lake, collected pinecones, went out to eat and enjoyed relaxing in the house we stayed at. We also had our friends Dan, Priscilla and Helen come along... Here are some pictures from the weekend

More Pics from the Winery

Our California girl loves the outdoors and holding a wine glass. It's of course full of water right now, not "daddy juice", but looks quite sophisticated wandering around the winery with it. Here are some photos from our brief weekend excursion to Obester winery, playing bocce ball, admiring the gardens and picking some apples. We are all excited that one of our favourite weekend destinations is only 15 minutes from our new home!

Obester winery

Sarina is enjoying "wine" tasting and bocce ball on a beautiful Saturday morning.

Housewarming / Birthday

A few weeks ago we had a housewarming party combines with Sumeet's birthday. It was a perfect, sunny October bay area day. We did a lot of grilling and enjoyed some home brews courtesy of our friend, Jon. We had a yummy birthday pumpkin pie as well...

Here's some pictures:

Halloween!

We had a wonderful Halloween weekend filled with pumpkin carving, trick or treating and welcoming trick or treaters to our house. We carved up some pumpkins; mostly mommy and daddy did the carving while Sarina supervised (munching on cereal the entire time.)

The next day, Sarina got dressed up as Elmo and hit up the neighborhood. She loved seeing the pumpkins and decorations everywhere and had fun picking out candy (though, she doesn't really know what it is yet.) She did recognize lollipop's and went for those whenever available....

Fun, fun... her's some pictures of our weekend Halloween adventures.

Sarina in daddy swing

Here's an action shot of sarina in daddys swing in our yard tonight! Sorry for the blur!

itsy bitsy duet with daddy

Sarina's favourite song when she was a baby was itsy bitsy spider. It's back! Now she's singing it. Of course she is a bit camera shy these days, so it's hard to capture the whole song on video. I managed to trick her by using my phone this time but she wised up by the end.

Three pumpkins!

Sarina's daycare has a cool pumpkin patch set up this week for the season... sarina loves seeing the pumpkins and can only really count to 3 (though she has 8, 9, 10 if you ask her for more but nothing inbetween) ... so when she sees a lot of something, it's usually 3 - e.g., THREE PUMPKINS!!

Gooooooal!!!

More pictures to come from our trip to Tahoe with the McCloskey's this weekend, but here's one of Sarina playing foosball with Helen. It's really not clear who won, (unless "winning" means grabbing balls off the table while in play in which case Sarina did)

Eating and Singing

Sarina is taking a little break from eating beans to sing happy birthday! Should be noted that Mommy taught Sarina to sing the song and she has been singing it all the time... but whenever the camera came out she would stop. Eating the beans distracted her enough to sing a bit on camera...

SOCKS!!

Sarina LOVES socks. She loves wearing them (sometimes four at a time - socks on her hands too), she loves picking out socks to wear and she loves sorting/arranging socks. An easy way to get her angry is to try taking her socks off without her permission (just ask the doctor.) This morning when I got out of bed, the first thing she said was "danny, no socks" like it was unthinkable that I wouldn't be wearing socks.

In this video, Sarina is making a little pile of all the socks from the laundry. All the while, she's singing the ABC song...
The rest of the laundry gets tossed aside in search of socks...

No time for talking... eating Dhokla

This weekend, Mommy made Dhokla for Sarina to eat. Sarina is normally fairly chatty when eating, but not this time. She loved the Dhokla (and was probably quite hungry) and had no time or interest in conversation. Just dipping Dhokla in chutney and eating... then repeating Dhokla after Dhokla

Dancing machine

Sarina recently got a fun play kitchen. She's clearly going to be a renaissance woman as she doesn't do any play cooking, but rather the parts of the kitchen she enjoys are the radio and telephone. Here she playing the radio on her kitchen and having fun dancing away.

Bi-see-cul?

Sarina got a new helmet to ride her tricycle! Now if only her feet reached the pedals...

Farm visit

Last weekend, we took Sarina to a farm in Half moon bay. She got to play in the petting zoo with rabbits, baby goats, ducks, chickens, etc. She loves all these animals... from a distance. When up close, they are all a little scary. We also attempted a pony ride (but quickly aborted when Sarina wanted no part of it.) She did love the train rides and in particular the hay ride. We all called it a "hay choo choo" and she still talks about "hay choo choo" almost daily.

On the way, we also stopped for breakfast - of course Sarina loved her big girl glass and munching on a bagel.

Hummus and Rice for lunch

Here's a little video clip of Sarina having some lunch. One of her favorites, hummus. She never forgets to also share lunch with Jalapeno, her monkey (she calls him aah-aah - as in the sounds a monkey makes.) She's also quite good now at dipping crackers and scooping out the hummus...

Q, R, S... yah, yah... V

Here's a little video of Sarina singing a part of the alphabet. The parts she forgets often gets replaced with "yah, yah" as seen here.... She sometimes even sings the alphabet song replacing every letter with the word "no." Another version for another day...

Daddy and Sarina tofu game

Here's a little (ok, a little long) video of Sarina and Daddy playing the tofu eating game. The game involves daddy trying to take Sarina's tofu... usually out of her mouth. That leads Sarina to hurry up and eat her tofu before daddy gets it.

If you listen carefully you can here her say, "no daddy, its mine"

fun, fun, fun!

Watching choo-choo's

One of sarina's favorite things these days is watching trains, or choo-choo's as we call them.

They are a little big and scary though so she prefers watching from the safety of the car.

Here she is watching a choo choo go by at the train station.

More Buffalo pictures

Here are more pictures from our trip to Buffalo. We did lots of outside playing and Sarina had a lot of fun with her Dadhi and Dadhu. We also took a trip to Niagara Falls and her Aji and Azoba came to visit. Fun filled week!

Beans and Chips (take 2)

Sarina was sporting two very cute ponytails when she came from school today. Here she is at dinner tonight - all smiles!

Dadhi and Dadhu

We just returned from a trip to Buffalo to visit Dadhi and Dadhu (Sumeet's parents.) We all had fun and got to spend a lot of time at home. This time, Sarina was all about her grandfather - every morning she would wake up and say "Dadhu, Dadhu..." More pictures to come, for now, here's one of my favorites...

Frequent flyer

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Look who's on an airplane!

Alka Auntie comes to visit

Sarina has a really nice time showing Auntie Alka around her new house! Here she is happy as a clam with Alka.