California

We stayed at my parents' house in CA for two weeks. It was a lot of fun.















We took these things across a 4-lane highway. It was pretty stressful.







Bribes in the car:












"I'm on a boat. Look at me I'm on a boat"






Another birthday party for Mona:







Eating the cake this time:




Easter:














Cyra and octopus catching some rays and having lunch:










Cyra and Lulu drawing a girl with really long hair. They have seen Tangled 20+ times.

Mona eating sand:

Birthdays!

From now on, I will be sharing my birthday week with little R.

My Birthday:


I was gone at a conference for a few days and got back the night before my birthday and Jared and the kids had made me a poster and set up a perfect day for me.



Jared got "me" the new Ipad. It was fun to play around with. Then we discovered cut the rope and the kids fell in love with it.

Then it was Ramona's birthday.


We took her shirt off before giving her a cupcake because we didn't want her to make a mess, but we must have forgotten what kind of child we had. She doesn't make messes.







"Thanks mom. I'm not really that hungry. I'll just have a salad and some water."





I finally had to force-feed her some birthday cake:


Happy Birthday, baby R.

Happy Noruz!

We celebrated the Iranian new year this year with the family and then with some friends. Here are the pictures:

We made Haji Firooz cookies.







We had a haft sin:



I'm really proud of my sabzeh this year:



And the hyacinth made our house smell nice for a few weeks.

Some food:




Giving out dollars to the kids:






I love that the kids are old enough to get excited about noruz. We read books about it all week and they were really into it. The entire next week, Cyra watched a Rick Steve's travel guide to Iran that was an hour long. She watched it almost every day.