Insta-Friday and potty time!

Yes!! Adiel has begun her potty training! What??! She is only 1 year and almost 4 months... It took me by surprise, but apparently she is imitating the older kids at the Montessori kinder garden and she lets the teachers know when she wants to visit the potty, she sits there with a book and then she pees! I do not plan on pushing her to accomplish anything on this matter yet, but I am attending whenever she lets me know she wants to pee. We will see...

On a different note, I recently got my iphone, and with it came many great apps. Of course my first one was Instagram, to be able to take some nicely filtered pictures and share them with my network. So here are my pictures of the week. You will see some deck fun in the sun, baby horse (the name is Chiquillo), neighbors house (my favorite in the mountain), a sunset walk with daddy, the fields, some sugar craving, a few sky shots and a home made ravioli dinner preparation with Uri and our neighbor Aris (yes, it was yummy!).

 

 

For more Inta-Friday here is the link:

 

Have a great weekend.

Until soon,

Mercedes

Taking photos

Many things going on lately, many changes, events, and some good news, here and with you there!

Among our adventures, I did my first photo shoot! It was very simple. My friend Aida is about to give birth, and I totally think no mama should be without a nice photo of her belly, so we captured her pregnancy. These are a couple of my favorite pics...

 

She looks great, doesn't she? It was a nice afternoon, I had a lot of fun.

Then last weekend we went to the beach with Adiel's friends (and families) from the kinder garden. It was very nice to get to know some of them, but all the kids got sun burnt! Here are some of those pics...

Adiel has taken her firsts steps, so the chase will intensify very soon! She is very sweet, but I am having trouble with her nap schedule and she has gotten into a couple of tantrums lately that are hard to manage. What do you guys do when tantrums come? 

Until soon,
Mercedes

First day at school!!

She is the youngest one of all the kids (by a couple of months). It is a small Montessori kinder garden where they will encourage her to be her own person and to go for whatever calls her heart, to be considerate... and that there are consequences to everything and to wash her dishes! Even when we came in the first day all the kids knew her name (they would correct each other saying aDiel, with a D, jeje, so cute!).

When I came to pick her up she was covered in sand from the sand box, and she was happy, but as soon as she saw me, she almost started to cry... my darling little one!

In the beginning I am just taking her for a couple of hours a day. After the summer she will be going for longer time. So many things are about to open for her, and I look forward to all of them!

Mercedes

Adiel's rainbow party

We got home from Israel less than a week before Adiel's first birthday. I thought for a second to just let it go, and maybe eat out with daddy and her and let her blow out a candle on the restaurant's slice of cake to celebrate. She will not remember, I had no time to prepare and invite, and I certainly did not want to spend a lot of money. But the truth is I do want her to know and see how special that day was to us. So, I decided to invite a few friends and neighbors to a cake and sweets party, and take a couple of easy DIY decorating projects.

This is Adieli's first birthday and rainbow party:

I got her cake at a local bakery that we love and prepared an ice cream buffet with fruits and goodies. I also got cookies and lots of candy. Luckily for everyone there, Uri thought of serving margaritas and those were a big hit too.

For the decorations, I did a rainbow paper curtain (idea from here), some tissue paper pom poms, lots of paper flowers to decorate the cake (tutorial here), a rainbow paper garland, her pom pom birthday hat (another idea here), rainbow butterfly confetti, the mini garland cake top, and I bought and hung a "Felicidades" (Congratulations) garland and a bunch of balloons for the balcony.  It sounds like a lot, but everything was pretty easy to make (and I got a little help from my friends!).

Here she is with her uncle:

 

We sang Happy Birthday to her in her three languages and then I served her a big piece of cake that she absolutely loved.

It was a beautiful day and we had a good time. 

 

Feliz Cumpleaños mi hermosa Adiel! Que sea un gran año lleno de aventuras y descubrimientos en nuestra montaña, que hagas muchos amigos en tu nueva escuelita, que nos riamos a carcajadas, que hables y opines y me cuentes, que bailemos juntas, que leamos muchas historias, que puedas conocer y rencontrarte con toda la gente que te quiere, que aprendas mucho... que seas feliz amorcito mío! 

Show me some birthday pictures!
Until soon,
Mercedes

To the Journey Sisters (big and small),

It was just over a year ago that we first came together- nervous, excited pairs, strangers to each other, drawn close by an impending dive into the unknown and unknowable. It is wonderful now to look back at those first moments, tentative conversations, preliminary curiosities and see the seeds of the beautiful extended baby family we've created. There was a (not-so-long-ago) time when I would not have believed that such unplanned joy and love was possible. Fortunately, these recent years of my life have been full of powerful lessons in the ultimate potential and perfection of uncertainty- of bold action leading to unexpected wonder.

My pre-baby life seems so far away and always just under the skin. Parts of myself are in retrospect, unrecognizable, yet I remember so viscerally the surging, overwhelming tides of feeling that once pushed and pulled me in every direction, all at once. I remember too, the first glimpses of stillness, the first contact with that mysterious being- intuition, the first sense of true direction. From there, everything happened rather quickly.

At school with "my" first children

In January 2009 I quit my two jobs (teaching art at a charter elementary school and managing a coffee shop), ditched my West Hollywood apartment, gave away a good portion of my belongings and trekked to India. I didn't know how long I would stay, or if I would ever return to LA. My intention was to travel solo for awhile and then to continue an intensive meditation teacher training program that I'd been working towards for two years. The program began in India and then was completed over three months spent in residence in the mountains of Arizona. At the time I left I didn't know whether I'd be able to pay for the Arizona portion of the course so I decided if I couldn't scrape together the money I'd  head to the Himalaya looking for either a wise man to apprentice with or a cave to hang out in 'til enlightenment dawned. I was maybe a little crazy.

On the train from Mumbai-Jaipur

Fast forward a bit (hard to do as I could probably write an epic about those months of wandering), change locations from the foothills of the Himalaya to the snowy peaks of Flagstaff, AZ-- I did make it after all. I settled in with eleven others to begin the long, intense process of learning to teach others the practice that had, just a few years before, radically altered the course of my life and my perspective on just about everything. One of those eleven was a handsome Aussie man with an excellent onomatopoeic surname. We got to know each other through the testing phases of our course, always competing to come out first or best at each individual milestone (I always won). Friendly competition quickly became something much more, something that we struggled to keep within the bounds of the strict rules of conduct for the training. By the end of the three months, we were fully and undeniably in love and without a clue what to do about it. After about a month apart, during which we spoke every day, realizing that even out in the real world our feelings were not changing, I took off for the land of Oz.

On the balcony at our first apartment.

 It wasn't long at all before we discovered that our love was too be big to be contained in just two beings-- our Little One was on the way and had big plans for us. It happened fast, but as we've found, when the time is right, nature has it's own timetable.  What seemed like an endless nine months of some discomfort and adjustment and many, many big changes (we got married! we moved from Sydney to Venice! we taught a lot of people to meditate! we met all of you!) was in a moment compressed until it seemed infinitesimally small and quick-- impossible to have been sufficient for that little being to develop to the point of joining the outside world. But somehow it was, somehow as crazy as the path was, as filled with bumps and turns and mud and mess, it all distilled into pure perfection, on the morning of May 1st, just as the sun rose, when our Saskia Deva Beverley Vroom emerged.

It's very bright out here.

She is a powerful being already. She is what led us to all of you. She fills us with joy and wonder each day and I feel blessed and eager to share her journey with you her sisters, and to watch all the Little Ones as they forge their paths and we fulfill our purpose as their guardians along the way.

Sending love to you all,
Angie