The bigger they are, the harder they fall

For most people, "falling flat on your face" is just a concept. Unfortunately for Sonia, last Friday it became a reality while she was in Tracy visiting with Dada, Bebe, and cousin Maya. I can only describe what happened second-hand since I was in Palo Alto, but according to Sameer (under whose...uh..."watchful care" this happened), Sonia was chasing Maya out into the backyard and failed to notice the step down, so she wiped out onto the concrete and basically caught herself with her face. Sameer neglected to mention this to me when we spoke on the phone that night, but since the next day she awoke with what was essentially a shiner, he had to come clean. The good news is that Sonia seems basically unaffected by the whole thing (it certainly hasn't slowed her down any), and now the bruising is all gone and all that is left is a scab from where she scraped herself on the cement. I don't have any pictures of the day-after bruise (somehow Sameer failed to get any photos of it...how convenient), but as you can see from this picture from this morning she is well on the road to recovery.

The other thing we quickly found out is that if you take your child out with bruises / scrapes on her face, everyone feels the need to share with you their horror stories of childhood injuries (except those people who don't talk to you because they're trying to figure out if you're an abusive parent). Based on these lovely tales we've heard all weekend, we are apparently lucky that, a) she didn't hit herself an inch closer to her eye, and b) she didn't knock out her teeth (which, according to this helpful real estate agent we met, happened to her grand-daughter who had to live with the knocked-out teeth until her adult teeth grew in years later...brutal). I know that childhood is all about getting bruises and scrapes, and our friends who are more seasoned parents are old pros at this, but it's just hard to believe that we're already at that little kid phase.

In other news, the house hunt has begun anew, but with no success. We didn't make an offer on the house we were considering last week, which was just as well since four other people offered far higher than asking and we would have lost anyway. This weekend we saw four more houses, decided that none of them was "the one", and so we await next week's inventory. To kill spare time, we like to sit around and discuss which houses we saw in the last year that in hindsight we should have bought but didn't. Good times.

That's one way to cure a bad hair day

We had a great, relaxing weekend enjoying the incredible weather we've been having lately. On Saturday we went to a Chinese New Year get-together at Janet and Andrew's, and then we had dinner with some friends from work and business school who were in town visiting (both of whom have kids that are within 2 months of Sonia's age, so it was great to see all 3 kids playing together). On Sunday we went and looked at a couple of open houses, including one we are actually considering putting in an offer for because we are idiots and want to time the market as badly as possible (stay tuned for updates here). But, I think Sonia's favorite part of the weekend was our trip to the park, where she repeatedly went down the "big girl" slide. I'd been trying to figure out what to do with Sonia's hair which is becoming crazier and crazier (she is starting to look like Krusty the Clown from the Simpsons), and as you can see from this photo from the bottom of the slide, I think we may have found a solution.

Since that's maybe not the most flattering photo, here's another one from a shoe store we visited (someone just keeps getting bigger!) which is a bit cuter.

January Photos

Well, this is about as anti-climactic as posts come, but below are our pictures from January. Too bad we only managed to get the camera out a couple of times...we'll have to do better this month!

Not much new going on Chez Dholakia. Sonia has learned to point to her nose (or ears, mouth) when you ask, "Where's your nose?" But, she does all of this quietly since she is still in no hurry to talk. She continues to be a picky eater, although oddly mixed veggies seem to be one of her favorites (after grapes, raisins, and Cheerios of course). Her hair is getting crazier by the day -- I keep waiting for it to become a bit longer and be ready for pig-tails, but instead it just gets curlier and sticks out more and more. I'm not sure if cutting it would "fix" it or not, so we just pretend that it's cute. :-)