Mara is Two!

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These past two weeks we've been celebrating continuously. To put it in cheesy rhymes:

Roses are "Wed"
Violets are "Boo"
Gaius is three months old
And Mara is Two!


A Vacation Before
We started with a short trip with family and friends in Yosemite. We hiked 1900ft up on the Mist Trail with two kids in two backpacks, fought plagued squirrels valiantly on top of the Vernal waterfall, then went as high as Nevada falls and back down to the Valley (blog post to follow, but check out the preview photo).
We returned home just in time for Mara's actual birthday - the 29th.


The Birthday Weekend
We did two things somewhat differently than your usual birthday party:

1. Open house

 The idea
Our friends have extremely varied schedules between kids' naps, weekend activities and just plain lifestyle. Because there was no good time to schedule a party for everyone to attend, we declared open house all weekend: stop by and say Happy Birthday! 

 How it worked out
We saw a bunch of friends we sorely miss, and meeting everyone in smaller groups was much more manageable for Mara. We definitely had "hot spots" - apparently Saturday at 5pm is perfect visit timing for a lot of folks - but the alternating high-low intensity activities worked out very well.
As a plus, we did not have to plan nap times for the two kids around the events, everything went in a very natural order.

2. Experience gifts

 The idea
Plenty of research states that happiness is achieved through experiences, not things. Thus we tried to move away from the materialistic birthday party, and asked friends to just bring something to show Mara and talk to her about it.

 How it worked out
The conversations went much better in times of smaller crowds, a little less when many people were around causing a lot of distraction. Nevertheless, it was wonderful, and got better as time went on. Mara slowly got more comfortable being surrounded by people she doesn't see often, and we stopped in different parts of the house for impromptu discoveries.

The experience gifts that friends shared with Mara spawned the gamut from simply beautiful, to extremely thoughtful, to spontaneously perfect. Here are some examples:
  • Hangout, phone call and birthday games with family from Romania.
  • A 3D image of the Mars Land Rover, with bicolor glasses.
  • A father-and-son duo of guitar and ukulele.
  • Two twin baby girls inside their mommy's belly, who ended up arriving in the world just two days after coming to see us.
  • A photo of an island from a trip in Thailand.
  • Book reading in Romanian, plus a different way to say "purple" in Romanian: "violet" vs "mov".
  • Cool moves splashing in the pool, jumps and underwater.
  • How to use pool noodles as water cannons.
  • A very precisely colored drawing on the easel - see photo.
  • A complete train track loop - Mommy had failed at this task repeatedly over the previous week.
  • Stacking boxes in a really high tower - Mara was invited to topple them down, and she happily did so.
  • A photo of picking blackberries at a farm. This definitely planted curiosity in Mara's mind, because the following week she asked us to talk about blackberry bushes at the dinner table, and pointed on a bush on our neighborhood walk asking if it was a blackberry bush.
  • A photo of a large fish caught on a boat by Grandpa.
  • Discussion about colors with Pam.
  • Show-and-tell of running gear, by our friends who were heading to the park to train for their marathon.
  • Sweet green apples from our neighbor's tree.
  • Two purple wild flowers and two fern leaves.
  • A phone call and song from our Music Together teacher.

The Outcome

We asked Mara at the end of each day whether she enjoyed seeing everyone - she said a very clear "Yeah!" on both evenings, wanting to do it again in the morning. She had been shy at times during the first day, even overly-sensitive and asking for Mommy to hold her. The second day she was much braver and happier, knowing what to expect.
Later in the week, when we asked her if she'd like a birthday celebration at daycare too, she smiled and said another whispered "Yeah!". We'll miss these Yeah! whispers when the screaming No!s kick in... 

We loved it. Maybe we'll turn this into a tradition: we saw friends of all ages, learned a lot, had so much fun, and Mara is now definitely and undoubtedly Two.

A look back at August 29

2014

On her first year anniversary, Mara was shakily walking for the first time:
Direct link: https://goo.gl/photos/JtLvvkVXGstXuKnV9.

She was still taking bottles and eating in her little table-top chair.
Here she is, waving Hi! at the camera:



2013

Mara in her very first hour. She wasn't approving of this whole new cold-air immersion, and wiggled so hard on the scale that it was quite hard to get her weight.


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