Ada et al
adventures of the notorious Yoohoo

ada whistled! we’ll try to record it. she’s not reliable but she purses her little lips and blows out and makes a little whistle noise. i am particularly excited about this since it took me approximately 30 years to learn to whistle.

* the title is a whistle-related reference. feel free to click the word “comments” just below this, type in your guesses in the box, and click “submit comment”. If you get it right, you’ll get a special prize.

Ada loves dress up and so do her moms. This particular look was created by Mamala with assistance from “baby Ada”–that is Ada back in the day, before she was a one year old. There are about 10 more entries in the Catching Up series.

Ada took to the toy piano like a:
(a) duck to water
(b) bee to honey
(c) you fill in the blank..

Click on photos to see and hear short videos!

Ada’s first birthday was this Friday, June 19th!

Celebrations started in the morning with official recording of Ada’s height (2 feet 3 inches standing, 2 feet 4 inches lying down), donning of Ada’s special birthday hat (sent express mail by her grandma) and unveiling of her new 25-key piano (see next post for first concert). After piano practice with Jimena, she refused to remove her hat for her morning time nap!

Celebrations continued with a trip to the Aquarium later in the afternoon, with Shu, and then dinner at Summer Shack with Ada’s friend Jaiden, Cyn and Zach, and Shu. You can see from the photos that she was very excited to open gifts and to dig into corn on the cob.

Festivities continued on Saturday with a trip to the Strawberry festival where Ada was greeted by Jimena and Jimena’s niece Claudia. We also saw Serena, Sophie, and Noah at the festival. Later Ada got her first glimpse of the Learning Tower, a great gift from her grandparents. And it doesn’t end there.

On Sunday, Ada went to Marcos’ first birthday party, done Brazilian style, which means completely all-out (there were 150 guests, balloon clown sculptures, and a real live clown). We then went to see cousin Anne and cousin Luke! Still no time for official cake, but I hear that may be happening this upcoming weekend with visits from two of Ada’s aunts and two of her cousins.

In this post are photos from her actual birthday — Friday the 19th. The next posts will have videos and additional pictures from the rest of the birthday weekend.

To see full photos click on individual photos. Click a second time for extra zoom.

This past Saturday I thought I’d take Ada for a stroll around the JP pond. But she had other interpretations of what strolling might mean. So while we spent a good hour there, we did not get very far. Click on each picture to see a short video.

Mamala went to NYC today to prepare a talk for a conference that starts tomorrow and I got to spend the entire day with Ada. Here’s two short videos documenting dinner. Notice in the first video her secret to devouring whole avocados and in the second her talent for doing milk ads and beyond…

Click to see Ada Avocado Video

Click to see Ada’s Milk Ad & More

Today Ada and I were reading one of those “I spy” books — (By the way, she’s really getting it! she can point to the things on the hide-and-seek side. This is new. For the uninitiated, there’s a picture or two on the left (white) side of the page of some thing or object or animal, and then on the right there’s a very busy photo composition of all kinds of things, mostly similar but not all. The idea is that you point out the thing on the left and then the kid points out the same thing on the right.)

– so we were doing one of those books, and got to a page with a black cat, and I said, “That’s a black kitty cat, like Hannah” — who, being very ill, was sleeping on a giant cat tube-bed right beside us — and then Ada kissed the picture of the black cat many times.

Hannah was the first cat that Ada noticed — she’s all black and wasn’t afraid to get right up next to Ada or, in fact, to try to shove Ada out of the way to snuggle up to us. She’s 20 years old now, very frail and in the throes of terminal kidney disease. So Ada doesn’t get to fall on top of her and kiss her in person, the way she does with the robust and (much) better-padded Sepia.

“talk, talk, it’s all talk — elephant talk!”

Can you guess what’s coming?

Yep. Ada has said her first word: Pippin. (Visual aid of Pippin below.)

Allegedly she has also said “nada” but apparently there is some ambiguity in her use of “nada”, and it sounds a lot like the random syllables she assembles (consonants with “ah”) so we don’t feel we can count it for certain.

But we’re pretty pleased with “Pippin”. Jimena (the witness) said that Pippin* came bounding into Ada’s playspace, and she pointed at him and said clearly, “Pippin!”

* Pippin’s original name was “Tigger”, and apparently he still has some identification with bounding.

Luke turned 5 this March!
As usual, we were late, and unfortunately missed seeing Luke blow out the candles. But we got to hang out with the birthday boy and family at Anne’s house. Click on photos to see larger images.

Ada has most of her meals with Mamala. These particular photos are a couple months old, and are the first in a series of chronologically out of order photos that I will be posting over the next week or two to catch up with the photo backlog… For the record, now that Mamala and Ada are older, they don’t make these kinds of faces any longer.