Taiwan 2017

This summer K-bao made her third summer trip to Taipei to visit K-Grandpop, K-Grandmum and her other beloved relatives.

Indeed, as it was both her grandparents' 70th birthday and Father's Day in Taiwan, the entire extended family made it out from various cities around the world for a full reunion.

K-bao and her sister C-bao don't get a lot of time with their cousins and aunts and uncles on K-Pop's side, so it is always a blast for them to hang out.

Whether it be burying themselves in card games (Uno, The Big 2 which they both learned to play on this trip and absolutely love), huddling together over a table to watch the Netflix show Horseland, or just plain goofing around, whenever the cousins or Shu-Shu or Xiao Goo-Goo (and Uncle Zech) were around, it was a quick goodbye to K-Pop and K-Mum and the girls would be off.

Needless to say, K-bao also enjoyed plenty of great Taiwanese food -- beef noodle soup, red bean paste buns, black sesame desserts, ice soy bean milk and tea eggs. 

 K-bao had many other adventures in Asia this past August -- more posts to come!

Goooooal

K-bao has wrapped up another soccer season with the Roar. The season was generally quite successful, as measured by both K-bao's personal growth and the team's success.

Indeed, after some ups and downs over prior years, K-bao has grown in her own love for the sport, and genuinely looked forward to the weekly practices as well as the Saturday games.

Some of this was undoubtedly the social aspect; a number of her best friends are on the same squad. But the K-folks also noticed that she also started to enjoy the game more after devouring a series called The Kicks, written by US Olympic gold medalist Alex Morgan. The series includes six books that chronicle a number of middle school girls' soccer adventures, including some uplifting messages about self-empowerment and team spirit.

While K-Pop and K-Mum's primary agenda for K-bao's soccer is for her to have an activity to work out her overabundance of energy -- learning a few lessons about working in a team, winning and losing and dealing with adversity are some nice side benefits too.

K-Pop managed to capture a couple of the goals she scored over the course of the season:

Honolulu Reprise

K-bao just completed a spring break trip to Hawaii. It was her second trip there, the last being when she had just turned two, in 2011.

We stayed at the same place (Hilton Hawaiian Resort) and took a picture with a similar pose. (Looking at the below, it is clear that K-Pop clearly will not be able to do this again in another six years). K-Pop didn't notice this until putting the two pictures side by side but the baby has now being replaced by a purse.

Strike a Pose

Here's a pic from a few months ago, taken at First Baptist Church in San Francisco, that shows K-bao's sassy side (which constitutes about 80% of her personality).

Mexico

Over the winter break, K-bao & family made a trip down to Mexico to attend the wedding of K-Mum's cousin Uncle Stephen. Sister C-bao was also invited to be a flower girl. K-bao was not happy to learn that she had aged out of the program. However, the trip was so relaxing and full of sugar that she quickly forgot about the disappointment.

K-bao had a lot of fun hanging out with her cousins J-Cuz (cousin Justin) and K-K. Here she take K-K on a lap around the pool, and then comes down the water slide with J-Cuz.

The key attraction was, of course, the unlimited dessert buffet. No further explanation needed.

One of the nice highlights of the trip included an in-house performance of The Lion King at the resort.

Love Poem

A couple of days ago, in a moment of affection, K-bao was inspired to pen a spontaneous verse for sister C-bao.

She uses quite sweeping language in her description of her 4-year old sister: wise, generous, kind.


Of course, a few minutes later, all the inspiration was quickly forgotten and the sisters went back to their normal, um, less loving routine. 

Home Math Academy

On Saturday mornings, K-Pop has established a routine consisting of:

1. Hearty breakfast, normally a combination of eggs, oatmeal with chocolate chips, fruit, yogurt and sometimes cereal (though any cereal in the diet invariably elicits protests from K-Mum when she appears later in the morning). 
2. One to two sheets of math
3. Two sheets of Chinese
4. Piano for K-bao (with ABCMouse, an educational app, for C-bao)
5. Free play

Both girls have made good progress with their math. C-bao has only recently started her worksheets and is currently on basic addition and subtraction up to 30. K-bao can now do double digit multiplication, basic division, and very simple algebra. Here are a few recent problem sets that K-bao tackled. 

Birthday gal

A few weeks ago K-bao celebrated her 8th birthday. Xiao Ah-yi and Jiu-Jiu joined her on the special day along with the rest of her family.

As usual, K-bao asked to go to her favorite Japanese restaurant, where she gobbled up numerous orders of unagi.

Afterwards, she enjoyed fruit and cake, while wearing a self-made birthday crown.

Uncle Calvin had also given her a Dubs shirt, which she sported proudly.

By the way, for the record, this evening was only the first of quite a few "birthday treats" that K-bao enjoyed over the course of the week. The celebration went on for a bit, which seemed perfectly fine for our little. 

Mystery Reader

This week K-Pop was a "Mystery Reader" in K-bao's class. The Mystery Reader is a parent who comes in to the class on a given day to share a book or two with the girls, but doesn't reveal his or her identity ahead of time; instead, he gives the girls some clues so the girls can guess who's coming.

The clues are revealed over time and are supposed to get progressively more obvious, and K-Pop's clues included:

• As a child I owned a large dog in a place far, far away
• Your name plus my name = 11 letters
• I have three siblings and none of them live in San Francisco
• I love basketball and my favorite player wears #7, but yours wears #30

Of course, K-bao guessed who it was right away, and badgered K-Pop incessantly in the days ahead of the reading, but K-Pop stayed strong and didn't confess.

The day of, K-Pop read two books to the 2nd graders: Ruby's Wish and Cat and Rat: The Legend of the Chinese Zodiac. Both are set in China, and with Chinese New Year coming up this week K-Pop and K-Mum thought the subjects apropos. The second book is just a fun animal story, though it alludes to issues like competition and selfishness; the first has much more serious themes around gender discrimination, girls' education, ambition and hard work. Both were fun to read.

K-bao was beside herself with excitement, as she usually is when either K-Pop or K-Mum show up in class. Several times she tried to take over the reading entirely.

Afterwards -- and full credit goes to K-Mum for this idea -- K-Pop passed out red envelopes with chocolate gold coins, but not after the girls learned how to say Xin Nian Kuai Le! And, no surprise -- the coins were a big hit.

Strict

One thing the K-folks have always struggled with is the fine line between appropriate sternness and discipline -- to hopefully engender in the kids a healthy respect for authority and boundaries -- and overly authoritarian "traditional" Asian parenting that might "clip their wings."

Of course, according to K-Mum, given the sometimes unbounded sassyness on display in the house from time to time, that's one balancing act that K-Pop need not worry himself about.

Over this past year a specific area that K-Pop has wrestled with is the enforcement of piano practice. K-bao has progressed remarkably quickly in her first real year of piano playing, but it has not come without some, um, "struggles" along the way. Given both K-Pop's and K-Mum's own childhood experiences, the irony of some of our impositions today have not escaped us. And it should be clarified that the piano proposition is really K-Mum's brainchild, though of course music education is something that K-Pop wholeheartedly supports.

However, little notes like the below, which K-Pop received from K-bao after one particularly challenging practice session, reassure K-Pop to grit through it.

(By the way, having just completed Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, K-Pop can rest assured that he is but a marshmallow in the greater tradition of Asian parenting)