Smiling monkey on the right:

Pirate monkey on the left:

Loving monkey:

Silly monkey:

Aaaargh!

Here’s our monthly family picture:

Just kidding. I’m just playing major catch up here. I started these dolls back in December. I finished the Alan doll on Christmas Eve. It took me a little longer to finish the rest of the family. But I know I finished Isabelle and Nathan when we went to the zoo in January because I took this picture there.

The dolls might look a little familiar. I used them for the entire month of January as my banner:

And it would have made sense if I had shown the dolls then. But…I couldn’t find them. Isabelle kept playing with them and losing them. At first the Isabelle and Nathan doll went missing. And when they turned up, daddy doll went missing or someone was always missing. Well, I’m glad I found them all at the same time so I could get a picture.

The dolls were a collaboration between me and Isabelle. It was originally from this banner:

I created it in Illustrator. In Illustrator you can save only the artwork on your art board. So, I don’t usually draw what’s not going to be in the final image. In the original file we had no legs. Why draw legs when you aren’t going to see them? But every time Isabelle walked by and saw me working on it, it drove her crazy. She kept asking where her feet were. So, I drew some for her. But then when she had feet, she wanted the rest of us to have feet. So, of course I had to draw some for her.

And that’s what I was going to use for our family dolls. I started changing us a little bit around but I liked Alan in this, I call it “sexy pose”. Hee hee hee!

But Isabelle didn’t like it. She wanted daddy standing like normal and she wanted us in different colored clothes and she wanted to be in a dress and why didn’t we have shoes on? I love what she came up with.

And here we are with our dolls.

And finally our real monthly family picture.

This weekend my grandmother had a birthday dinner. In San Jose. No, wait. Cupertino. Well anyhoo, since we knew we were headed out that way I thought we’d give Kari a call and we could have a playdate before dinner at Children’s Discovery Museum.

Kari was planning on going to Hakone Gardens though. I’ve been wanting to bring Isabelle to a Japanese garden so we decided to join her and her family there.

Isabelle and Kari’s daughter, Miss M, ran around making lots of noise for a tranquil Japanese garden.

And then they stood around watching performers. Oh no wait. They only stood around watching a little then Isabelle got bored and tried to start a game of tag. While people were performing. That was an excellent time to leave.

So Kari invited us back to her house. I loved Kari’s house. It felt so homey. It was a perfect environment for little ones with music, books, toys, and a playground in back. I want a house like theirs.

They made us fresh lemonade from their tree out back and we chatted while the kids played some more. Kari’s husband, Jeremy, so patiently threw balls with M, G, and Isabelle. And looking through my pictures I realize this is the only picture I have of Jeremy and G. Bad blogger. I’ll do better next time Kari.

After playing for a couple of hours, which just flew by, Kari sent us off with a bag of lemons from her tree. Mmmmm yum. And we headed off to dinner. During the dinner Isabelle picked up the microphone and started singing happy birthday by herself. Hee hee! That’s my little rockstar.

We hung around with my family talking and eating for hours. I was so busy talking and eating at my table, I barely talked to the other two tables full of people.

We didn’t get home until after midnight. What a tiring but very fun day.