Ashwini turned 6 years old last Saturday. Now that she will start 1st grade this fall, she officially is a “big girl”. Recently, we had a parent-teacher meeting with her kindergarten teacher to go over her progress at school and were happy to hear what her teacher had to say:


  • “If I had 20 Ashwinis in this class, my life would be so much easier."

  • “Ashwini can read, write, count and draw well beyond what is recommended for Kindergarten. She is ready to go into 2nd grade and not 1st."

  • “Even though she can read books well, she was a little shy about reading in front of the class last year but, now she does it all the time."

  • “She is very eager to help other kids who need a little assistance with their alphabets and numbers."
and many more praises that I don’t recall. Overall, her teacher was very happy with how Ashwini was doing at school.



At home, it is very delightful to see how she has grown into this role of the big sister. No doubt that there are a lot of fights, but it is amazing to see how patient she is with Adit many times and how she helps him while playing together. There are a lot of arguments about who is "the boss" of whom and who is in charge or in control but, we have worked out the organizational chart of our household. Adit is at the bottom and he is the boss of no one. Ashwini is Adit's boss only when parents are not around. I am the boss of kids and V is the ultimate boss of everyone.

Other than Kindergarten, Ashwini has been juggling many other activities such as ballet, swimming and Kumon class to get an early start in learning math. I wrote about her ballet some time ago and she is doing very well with swimming too. Now, she can swim properly even in deep water without any help of floating devices. She really likes swimming and wants to continue when she starts going to 1st grade.

For Ashwini's birthday, we had a hard time deciding where to arrange the party. Finally, we (actually, Ashwini) chose the dinosaur place. It is an activity center that is built around dinosaurs, fossils, and gemstone mining. Ashwini wanted to go learn about dinosaurs & fossils and we had a fun time as you can see from the photos below.

In the beginning, the kids were introduced to dinosaurs and what fossils are. Then, they went into a big room called "The Bone Zone". It was basically a big sand box with concrete models of dino bones buried under the sand. The kids dig into the sand and uncover the skeleton.
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The party coordinator was very cheerful and animated. She told the kids a story about how the dinosaurs got buried in mud and how their bones turned into fossils. Kids were just mesmerized by her storytelling.
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Cake and pizza was on the menu for the hungry junior paleontologists.
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The birthday cake had this flying tinker bell thingy...
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At home, Adit gave Ashwini her birthday presents and he had one for himself, too.

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As a baby, Ashwini used to love this series of pop-up books about bugs by David Carter. Some of his newer pop-up books are very artistic and are appropriate for older kids who can handle delicate pop-up sculptures. I bought 3 of these books for Ashwini and she liked them very much:

One Red Dot;
Blue 2;
600 Black Spots.

I'd highly recommend these books for kids of all ages and even for adults. They are just beautiful. Here is Ashwini showing a page from 600 black spots.
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