mommy always says that sienna is a mean girl, but i think she must be one of the popular girls.  she has been invited to way more birthday parties for school friends than i have.  and today, we went to a party for someone that had been in sienna’s class for a short time, but then moved to another school.  it was ahnnika’s birthday party.

we don’t really know what the etiquette is for school friend parties.  if you get invited to a party for a school friend and the invitation doesn’t say “siblings welcome”, do you bring your siblings?  mommy made up her own rule.  if the party is at a park, she contacts the parents to ask if it is okay to bring a sibling.  if the party is at a venue where there is limited capacity and/or they charge by child, she assumes that siblings are not invited.

anyway, ahnnika’s party was at the same park where sienna had her birthday party.  we really like that place.  i was really looking forward to all of the planned activities like the scavenger hunt, tug-of-war, and other games.  a game of tug-of-war broke out just as we were leaving, but none of the other activities happened because we were having too much fun playing in the playground.

we also spent a lot of time eating because there was a crazy ridiculous amount of much food at this party: a whole table of chinese food, a whole table of indian food, a whole table of filipino food, and a whole table of vegetarian food.   everyone even got to bring home a to-go container — we piled ours up with homemade chicken adobo.  yum!

most of the pinatas that we’ve seen at friends’ parties are the pull-string kind, but ahnnika had an old-fashioned swing fest with a my little pony pinata.  there were a lot of older kids there, so we used a real bat, a blindfold, and a rope to make the pinata move up and down.  by the time the big kids had their way with that little pony, it was a double amputee decapitated horse with candies spilling out of its bodily orifices.  mommy was a little traumatized.  how is that not horrifying for kids? 😛

we had a great time and scored giant bags of candy.  i’m glad that ahnnika’s mommy said that it was okay for me to go to the party.  what do you think?  what’s the official rule on siblings attending school friend birthday parties?

it was another busy saturday that started out with soccer practice and a soccer game.  i really love playing soccer.  right after the game, i had to rush over to my martial arts studio for my very first tournament.  mommy has always been against me competing (for now), but this was an in-house tournament.  we were just competing against other students in the dojo and we earned an extra tip for participating, so of course i wanted in!

so how do 4-6 year olds compete in a martial arts tourney?  well, you’ve probably heard of flag football, but have you heard of flag sparring?  apparently, it’s a thing.  that’s what we did.  instead of scoring
points for punching/kicking our opponents, we just had to steal each other’s flags.  in the individual round, i didn’t win.  i don’t even think i scored one point.  but in my defense, the boy who beat me was a blue belt (i’m yellow) and he ended up winning the whole thing.  i did much better in the team event though.  i beat my opponent and helped my team win!

i got a participation medal for the individual event and a 1st place trophy for team sparring.  it was my very first trophy and also the first time that i actually won an award (rather than earning a finisher’s medal or ribbon for passing a class).  i am SO PROUD of this trophy!  when mommy congratulated me and told me that she was proud of me, i thanked her and told her that i couldn’t have done it without her.  smooth, huh? 😉

mommy volunteered to be a time keeper for the tournament.  so after i was done with my matches, i got to help mommy with the big kids.  she managed the stopwatch, and if time ran out before the match was decided on points, i got to throw the towel (which was more like a soft stick) into the ring.  i did a pretty good job, except for the one time that i hit someone in the head. =P

while i was at the tournament, daddy took sienna to abby’s “frozen” (the movie) birthday party.  daddy said that sienna mostly enjoyed playing in the sandbox in abby’s backyard.  i missed out on he fun activities, pinata, taco caterer, cake, and of course seeing abby and my friends, but i don’t have any regrets — i earned a 1st place trophy!

happy birthday, abby.  sorry i missed your party!

today, sienna had her regular once-every-4-months check up with her dermatologist at UCSF.  no new news.  her genetic skin condition (pityriasis rubra pilaris, type IV) continues to progress slowly.  there’s still no cure.  and mommy still doesn’t want to have a biopsy performed on sienna.  so basically, mommy took the day off of work to take sienna into the city… to be examined by more new doctors and learn no new info.  sienna’s primary doc told mommy that she hopes she doesn’t feel like sienna is a lab specimen.  mommy said she does, but she gets it.  i sort of think that this is how her appointments are going to be for awhile.

after the appointment, mommy and sienna were hungry.  sienna said she wanted finger pasta (penne) for lunch, so mommy looked for italian restaurants in the city.  she found a michelin-starred place, but it ended up having a dress code and they were way under-dressed.  so instead. they ended up at a fancy italian restaurant in walnut creek called massimo ristorante.  mommy and sienna had a nice mommy/daughter lunch date and enjoyed the warm afternoon on the patio.  so i guess the day wasn’t totally lost. 🙂

since things didn’t work out with the halau in danville, sienna has been looking for other dance classes. uncle henry actually found a dance studio in livermore that is enrolling new dancers for a holiday performance of “frozen”. perfect! we love that movie and we know a lot of the songs!

so today after school, we headed out to the dance studio to observe a class. we figured that livermore wouldn’t be too far — that’s where our swim lessons are. but… our school is little bit farther in the wrong direction, we got caught up in rush hour traffic, and this dance studio is DEEP into livermore. we never actually made it there. mommy decided that we couldn’t do this drive every week, so there was no reason to go to the class today.

on a whim, we decided to stop by the halau in pleasanton. they just started offering a wednesday evening class (today was the first) that would be perfect for us. unfortunately for sienna, they also just raised their minimum age from 3 to 4. we stopped by anyway.

when we entered the dance studio, the kumu introduced herself as “auntie gloria”. she was so warm and welcoming toward all of us, and she invited sienna to participate in the class.

after the class was over, mommy talked to auntie gloria and asked a few questions, just like she did at the halau in danville. these two halaus are so opposite of each other! this halau in pleasanton doesn’t compete at all (but they do perform a couple of times a year). auntie gloria teaches just for the love of hula, hawaiian culture, and of course, the kids. (she even taught preschool for many years.)

mommy braced herself, and then broke the news to auntie gloria that sienna had just turned 3 years old and didn’t meet the new age requirement. without hesitation, auntie gloria said she would make an exception for sienna. she was more concerned that mommy was feeling comfortable about sienna actually learning and getting value from the class. (if you watched the video, you probably noticed that sienna was mostly just sitting and watching.)

well, sienna is now an official hula girl.  if you’re interested, the name of the hula school is halau makana lani. i’m pretty sure they’ll be performing at the art and wind festival in san ramon next memorial day weekend, so mark it on your calendar!

po-po always wanted grandkids.  she talked about it all the time.  ALL the time.  at one point, her friends even bought her a baby doll to strap into the back seat of her car.  everyone talks about what a wonderful person she was and how much she would have loved me and sienna and cousin zoey, but she became an angel before any of us were born.  we never got to meet her. 🙁

well, po-po’s birthday is in a couple of days, and even though she’s an angel and we can’t see her, we still get together every year around her birthday to remember her.  and it’s not like anyone would ever forget her — it’s just an excuse for all of us to get together.

po-po would have turned 65 this year.  she would have retired, moved into an in-law unit attached to our house, fed cookies to me and sienna when mommy wasn’t looking, and taught me and sienna how to use a computer (she built and ran the computer lab at the elementary school she worked at).  at least, that’s how she had planned it.  but she would have been way behind on the computer training because sienna and i are already experts. 😛

we’ve always made it a point to reserve our saturdays for playdates and parties.  so basically, no activities or recurring commitments.  but now that i’m playing soccer on saturdays (we didn’t have a choice), saturdays are now booked with back to back events.  today, we were actually double booked.

mommy went to lunch and “wicked” (the musical) with gung-gung and some other quons — auntie mabel, auntie jillie, and uncle mitchell.  uncle henry went too, but i guess he’s the one that took the photo.  while they were there, kyden and i took daddy to isabelle’s 1st birthday party.

at first, i was pretty upset that i didn’t get to go with mommy, but i’m pretty sure that we had more fun.  gung-gung really liked the musical — so much that he didn’t even nod off once!  and if you know gung-gung at all, that’s saying a lot because he’s nodding off all the time. 😛  but no matter how good the show was, it couldn’t have been better than isabelle’s party.  even though it was a baby party, she had a taco caterer, a jumpy house, a movie playing in the theatre room, and of course… cake!  it doesn’t get much better than that, right?

i have played a lot of sports over the past few years, but those were just classes.  but now i am playing “real soccer” on a real team.  my team is the mighty minions.  we have a coach, uniforms, practices, and the moms take turns bringing snacks every week.  that’s right, mommy is a bona fide soccer mom!

on my team, there are 2 kids (including coach’s son) who i’m pretty sure are going to be professional soccer players when they grow up.  there’s also a kid whose dad was a soccer player and seems to want his son to be a professional soccer player when he grows up (he gets yelled at a lot). there’s a boy who really doesn’t seem interested in playing at all, and also a kid who wears an old hand-me-down uniform that doesn’t match the rest of our team.  and then there’s me.  athletics is not my gift, but i don’t totally suck at soccer.

in this league, we play 3-on-3 against other teams, we don’t have a goalie, and we don’t keep score.  mommy says that it’s not about winning and losing — it’s about doing our best, improving our game, and having fun.  whatever.  i keep track and announce the score after every goal.

i love real soccer.  it is so much fun that i don’t even mind having to get up earlier on saturdays than on regular school days.  (mommy, however, is not excited about the 8:00am start time for practices.)  and one of the really cool things about my soccer league is that a lot of my friends (mostly kids that i recently met at my new school) are playing also.  after our games, we meet at the park’s playground and play together for a little while.

here are some photos that mommy took of our game.  take a look at the expressions on our faces, and you tell me if you think that anyone is out there “just for fun”. 😛

GOOO MINIONS!

today is labor day.  i don’t really know what that means, but it doesn’t matter.  all i know is that sienna and i don’t have school, mommy and daddy don’t have work, and neither does the rest of the tanaka family.  so auntie barbara, uncle randy, grandma, and grandpa came over to hang out with us.  in other words, daddy got another excuse to grill.  (not that he needs one.)

we were supposed to be celebrating uncle randy’s birthday (which is in a few days), but he ended up bringing a car load of belated birthday presents for sienna.  i was so upset that there were so many presents for her and none for me.  i felt a little better after auntie barbara promised me that uncle randy would bring an even bigger pile of presents for me on my birthday! 😀

we had a nice time hanging out, and we ate a lot of food — especially dessert.  we bought “nothing bundt cakes” for uncle randy’s birthday, and grandma brought a yummy fruit tart.  and just as we were finishing up dessert, uncle henry stopped by on his way home from tahoe and brought us an apple pie from ikeda’s (to trade for kiara, who stayed with us over the weekend while he was in tahoe).  there is no shortage of desserts in our house right now.

(photos coming soon, hopefully.  in the meantime, here’s a photo of the last slice of that ikeda’s apple pie.)

sienna and i never forgot about the first time we went to habitot, and we had been looking forward to going back.  our favorite thing about that place was the fire engine.  mommy’s favorite was matthew’s reaction to painting my hair blue.  that was a year ago.

today, we finally got to go back.  this time, we met up with the lims and the fungs.  we had lunch at a nearby restaurant, then walked over to habitot.  when we first arrived, the first thing we noticed is that the fire engine wasn’t there.  we were sooo disappointed.  but that disappointment didn’t last long because there was a space shuttle in its place!

sienna and i spent a long time being astronauts and journeying through space.  when we posed  for a photo, we got photobombed by a space alien.  is it just me, or does that alien look just like claire and bella’s daddy?

we checked out the rest of the very small place — raked some leaves, delivered some mail — but we didn’t paint this time.  i didn’t need any streaks in my hair today. 🙂

we were pretty much done for the day, until…  sienna spotted claire painting a pretty butterfly on her face.  yes, on her own face.  DIY face painting for kids?  BRILLIANT!  sienna and i got in on that action.

after we finished painting our faces, we continued playing for a little while.  we tried posing for a nice photo with matthew, but c’mon, really?  can you really expect us to pose and smile nicely when our faces looked like this?!

we had a fun time today.  it’s kind of far away, so mommy and daddy said that we can’t go there all the time, but maybe we can make habitot a once-a-summer habit. 😉

a couple of  months ago, sienna did another skin prick test and tested negative for an egg allergy.  hooray!  but before we celebrated too much, sienna had to do another oral challenge to make sure she had really outgrown her egg allergy.

so she went in for the oral egg challenge today.  just like last time, mommy made some tamago, and she and sienna went in to the doctor’s office prepared to spend most of the day there. when sienna arrived, she was greeted by three different nurses/doctors as the “singing baby”.  i guess they remembered her performance from her last visit. 😛

the first “serving” that sienna got to eat was 1/8 tsp.  she happily announced that she liked it and that it tasted like tofu!  after she ate it, the nurse checked to make sure she didn’t have any sort of allergic reaction.  she was fine.  so 15 minutes later, sienna got to eat 2x the previous serving — 1/4 tsp.  again, the nurse checked her and she was fine.  so she waited another 15 minutes.  the nurse set up a portable DVD player so that sienna could watch a movie in between her tiny bites of egg.  the third serving was 2x the previous amount — 1/2 tsp.  that bite did her in.  within a couple of minutes, she started getting hives around her eye and mouth.  the doctor came in, and he called off the challenge.  sienna: 0, egg: 1.  (actually, that’s 2 points for egg since this is the second time that sienna has failed an egg challenge.)

the nurse gave sienna some benadryl, and the little hives went away within a few minutes.  but just to be safe, they made sienna stay for two more hours for observation.  luckily, mommy brought a big container full of fruit for sienna to eat.  she was starving because she wasn’t allowed to eat anything in the morning before the oral challenge.  mommy was hungry too, so she ate the rest of sienna’s tamago. 🙂

well, the bad news is that sienna failed another egg challenge — she’s still allergic to egg.  the good news is that mommy and sienna were outta there in plenty of time to go eat a real lunch!