Beach Weekend

Back in February K-bao enjoyed a couple of days at the beach with sister C-bao. The weekend was sunny but not particularly warm, so as a precaution K-Pop insisted on the girls wearing their full winter coats.

Not exactly beach attire

K-bao led her sister in singing, dancing and digging ditches. Finding water under the sand was met with as much excitement as one might expect in a discovery of fine pearls.

The presence of the ocean brought to mind of course one of K-bao's favorites, Rachel Platten's Fight Song, and she quickly broke into the relevant lyrics: "Like a small boat, on the ocean...sending big waves, into motion..."

Here she demonstrates how to create a tower of sand, and promptly delegates the task to sister C-bao.

Overall, the first day was fun enough that the sisters made a return trip the next day to do pretty much exactly the same thing.

A Duet

K-bao has shown remarkable progress since taking up the piano about 6 months ago. She can now handle basic tunes, and while we can't say that practicing through the hard pieces has been entirely devoid of whining, the K-folks are proud of her pluck and persistence to date.

Here she is playing a simple version of Bach's famous Minuet in G with K-Pop.

Flexible

K-bao has shown herself to be exceptionally limber and flexible from birth, and has shown a bit of talent for gymnastics. Even on the soccer fields over the last couple of seasons, whenever there wasn't much action going her way, we might see her do a cartwheel or two off on the side to pass the time.

Her flexibility is a trait inherited squarely from K-Mum, by the way. K-Pop has trouble enough trying to reach his own ankles from a standing position.

Superbowl City

On Super Bowl weekend, K-Pop took the girls downtown to see the sights and hear the sounds. K-bao had started to hear about Superbowl City and was eager to see what the fuss was all about.

The girls took a bus downtown, which they thoroughly enjoyed.

Of course, the very first thing the girls declared upon entering a public space with no bathrooms was that they needed to use the potty, so K-Pop had to trudge the girls up to his office downtown to use the amenities.

Unsurprisingly, downtown was horribly crowded. Alicia Keys was apparently about to take the stage, so once K-Pop and the girls were in the vicinity the sidewalks became impossible to navigate. The girls had a birthday party to get to later that afternoon and couldn't get into any long lines, so they had to content themselves with watching the spectacle of the crowds.

We did manage to snap these pictures a little further away from the action.

All in all, not a very satisfying trip, but at least K-Pop got a few kisses out of it.

Face

Why K-bao feels the need to make a fierce or wacky face every time someone is about to snap a picture is beyond us, but more than our fair share of her pics have this theme. In spades. Let's just hope it's a passing phase/face.

STEM

K-Pop took K-bao this past week to her second STEM Night, an annual tradition at K-bao's school where the older grades create hands on projects that demonstrate scientific and engineering principles.

The K-folks love the school's emphasis on girls' STEM education.

Here is K-bao checking out some projects and getting explanations directly from the older girls. The projects below utilized some cool computer hookups to demonstrate conduction, among other principles.

This project showed static electricity and magnetic fields.

But clearly the favorite project of the evening was one where K-bao got to fill a bottle with water, pump it full of air and then watch it shoot off into the sky like a rocket.

The evening came to a dramatic and unexpected end a little later when the fire alarm went off and the entire community was ushered outside.

All in all a short but hopefully memorable experience for little K-bao that reinforced some of the practical and fun applications of scientific principles. 

Bluff

K-Pop introduced the girls to the game of Blind Man's Bluff while hanging out on the lovely grounds of a nearby campus a few weekends ago.

We didn't have blindfolds, so the girls wore their jackets backwards and donned their hoodies on their faces, and both tried to find K-Pop at the same time.

It was pretty much a game of nonstop giggles.

In this next video K-bao actively and illegally interferes with her sister's seeking.