Shobo Norvo Borsho and more

Henry celebrated the Bengali Shubo Norvo Borsho (Happy New Year), which is on April 14th, at his school.  The celebration was complete with the kids giving a dance performance, face painting, t-shirt painting, and more. Scott and I were able to take off of work and join in the fun.

We watched the performance for awhile before convincing Henry and Jafe to get up on stage. They finally acquiesced...

HA!  They just stood there for the 8 remaining minutes of the stage time.  We were cracking up.

In other news, in early May Henry started swimming confidently all on his own.  We’ve been having so much fun with him in the pool these days now that we get to watch him jump off the side and swim a number of feet to us.  The other day, for the first time ever, Henry started swimming around, beyond just splashing around on the stairs in the shallow end, by pushing off from the bottom stair, going underwater, and turning back to stand on the stairs before we even got in the water.  Then, as we were walking up to the edge to get in, with our friend Jess, one of Henry’s new favorites, who joined us for the afternoon, and Henry said he wanted to jump off the edge to show Jess he could swim.  He not only jumped off and swam, but he took three separate breaths while swimming back to the wall!  Now that is independence!  Ever since this milestone Henry has been even more of a fish.  

 

As soon as Henry could really swim he wanted to go down the slide into the deep end.  He just climbed right up the stairs and went down practically without hesitation.

Now that Henry can swim around on his own (with us nearby of course), we can focus more on getting Elliot accustomed to the water.  He is quite a natural!  He loves splashing around.  If we leave him to figure out how to entertain himself, he immediately will start repeatedly climbing out  and getting back in the pool.  He’ll do this for 10 minutes, easily, finding each out and in, with all the accompanying splashes, so exciting.  He also doesn’t care at all if water gets in his face or if he finds himself suddenly underwater for a second before we pick up up if he accidentally falls in. We betting that he’ll be a natural swimmer like Scott.