The Shah's

Monday, December 12, 2011

Holiday Letter 2011

Dear Family and Friends,

Season’s Greetings from South Carolina! We hope you have a joyous season and a very Happy New Year.

Last year (2010), you may have noticed that we did not post our annual letter. We were quite busy from the start of the year. Here is a quick update of 2010: We learned the 2nd week in January, we were expecting a new bundle of joy. In April, Salil fell 8 feet from the playground landing us in the hospital for his first surgery with pins inserted to fix his fractured elbow. In late April, we took Salil to visit Disneyworld. (He got all the character’s signatures on his cast.) In September, Neepa gave birth to our new little man, Kiran Doshi Shah, who was born a day earlier than planned. He was welcomed into the world on September 8th, 2010. Needless to say, since then we have been re-learning functioning on little sleep. He has truly been a joy!

As both of us have continued to work, placing the boys in daycare/preschool was a big decision we made at the end of 2010. We contemplated many ideas and originally enrolled Kiran in the same daycare that Salil was in. After just a few days of that, we realized the chaos this created in our lives as Neepa had just returned to work. So, a new change was upon us. We were incredibly lucky to be able to hire an amazing teacher from Salil’s old daycare to take care of the boys at home. Erin has been an absolute blessing to our family, and has bonded with Kiran since he was a mere two month old, and also helped Salil along for the nine months before he began elementary school this year.

It’s been a wonderful year as a family of four. It has been a joy to see Salil and Kiran grow as brothers. Salil has become a caring big brother and enjoys being around Kiran, even carrying him around the house occasionally. He is such a big help bringing diapers and helping feed him. As a big brother, he is protective of certain cherished possessions that he feels Kiran may not “respect”, such as his numerous Lego models. Salil has gained a great appreciation for artwork, especially with Erin’s guidance at home. Erin also helped us out greatly by taking him to swimming, piano lessons, and play dates. Salil’s big milestone this year was starting kindergarten at Lake Carolina Elementary school. He is doing great and loving every day! We are also blessed to live in a community that places a high value on both their own children’s education and supporting the local school. Of course we are learning to juggle additional commitments in terms of volunteering and Salil’s new activities (he’s taken a great liking to after-school karate), but we are enjoying this new phase of family, friends, school, and community.

Kiran has come to idolize Salil, and will playfully follow him and pull on his clothes. Kiran has gone from infanthood to becoming a boisterous toddler, learning to walk quickly by 10 months (chasing big brother Salil probably helped). He’s developed his own unique charming personality and we have learned how different two children in the same family can be. . He is quite the character and loves to dance anytime music is played especially the Mickey Mouse clubhouse music. Erin has also taken him to a weekly My Gym classes, daily stroller rides, and play dates.

As usual, we’ve enjoyed spending time with our immediate families this year. The big news is that Mihir’s brother, Mehul and sister-in-law, Mimosa had a beautiful baby boy, Ulises, in May. We had visited Chicago earlier in March for her baby shower, and also to introduce Kiran to Mihir’s extended family there for the first time. We returned in July to see Ulises. Coincidentally Neepa’s parents came into Chicago that weekend for a wedding, and we were able to spend some time them as well. They were happy that we were able to make a few trips up to Charlottesville over the year, too.

This year, we took a few trips to visit extended family and good friends. We also celebrated our 10 year anniversary by taking a weekend trip to Charleston. We went as a family to Atlanta to visit Neepa’s cousin Sonya and husband David, and Mihir’s cousin Falguni and husband Nipul. We also made a weekend trip up to the Raleigh-Durham area to see Neepa’s cousin Reena and her husband Darshil, and also Neepa’s cousin, Sachin.

During Thanksgiving, we made a week-long trip to Virginia, visiting Northern Virginia and Charlottesville. We stopped by Mihir’s cousin, Vaishali and husband Sulay’s house first, then went up to Neepa’s sister-in-law Mausami’s house (her brother Hetal, now working in the State Department’s Consular Affairs IT unit, was working in India for a few weeks). The boys had loads of fun with their cousins Dev and Diya. Afterwards, we all went down to Charlottesville to be with Grandpa and Grandma Doshi. Neepa and Mausami helped Grandma out by shuttling her to her JCPenney Black Friday work shift at 3 am, then splurging on a little shopping for themselves and the families afterwards.

Neepa has continued her work at the Municipal Association of South Carolina, and is adjusting to blending her busy schedule to include the boys’ activities and still maintain a strong circle of friends. When she was pregnant with Kiran, Neepa joined an on-line moms’ board that had other expectant mothers with a September 2010 due date. She became quite close with many of them, including several in South Carolina and the Southeast. She met up with a few of them during our July visit to Atlanta, when we visited our cousins. Later in October, she hosted a 15 moms and their 1-year-olds (plus a few of their siblings as well)! The house was completely packed but everyone seemed to enjoy getting together and getting to know each other better. Early this month, one of the moms graciously invited us to spend the weekend with her and her family in Atlanta, and we all had a blast there, both with the kids and just the grown-ups as well.

Mihir remains working as an associate airport engineer at the South Carolina Aeronautics Commission. His major effort this year was studying for his Professional Engineer (P.E.) exam in October. Many, many hours of reading civil engineering books and doing practice problems over several months were certainly a challenge, especially for Neepa who sacrificed and took up slack for maintaining the house. As of this letter we are still anxiously waiting for results from the October exam, and hopefully Mihir will be able to put a couple of important letters after his name on his business card soon.

We wish you all a wonderful and prosperous year ahead.

Happy Holidays and as always, we'd love to see you!

Love,
Neepa, Mihir, Salil and Kiran

Monday, December 5, 2011

Restarting this blog

Hi All

We are restarting this blog! We promise to update photos and tell you what the kids are up to monthly. You can also keep in touch with us by adding us to facebook

https://www.facebook.com/neepa.shah
https://www.facebook.com/mihirpshah

Thursday, December 10, 2009

2009 Holiday Letter

Dear Family and Friends,

Greetings from the Shah family during this holiday season. We wish you all a happy and healthy New Year.

Well, we truly are parents of a "big boy" now with Salil nearing 4 years old! Last year we mentioned how he began speaking in sentences - today he is a full-blown conversationalist, complete with a tsunami's of "WHY?"'s of course. He is doing very well in school, with his teachers usually letting us know how cooperative, helpful, and intelligent he is (although sometimes we wonder why he doesn't seem quite so cooperative at home). He has a good balance of play and formal learning, and he's well-versed in his numbers, colors, alphabet, months, seasons, days of the week, and more. Every once in a while he will blurt out some new word or phrase and we wonder where he picked them up - he truly is a sponge!

Outside of school, Salil has been pretty busy with swimming and soccer lessons during the warmer months (which is thankfully are plentiful in South Carolina), and the occassional playdate with friends from school and Neepa's mom's group. He's also become quite a Lego fan (much to his engineer dad's delight), and is content to quietly build his own creations (much to both parents' delight).

We are still working at our respective positions (Neepa at the Municipal Association, Mihir at the Aeronautics Commission) , continuing to enjoy stable work that allows us a lot of quality time with Salil, especially during these unfortunately uncertain economic times.

Our trips this year largely consisted of family visits - we flew to Chicago in January for Salil's 3rd birthday, including a big party at Chuck E. Cheese with the extended family and a smaller celebration at Dada and Dadi's house the next day. Salil was also treated to a good snowfall the first day there, so along with his Daddy, Dada, and Mehul Kaka, we went sledding on the Edens Expressway overpass nearby Dada and Dadi's home. To this day he still thinks Chicago means "planes" and "snow". In late May we visisted Grandma and Grandpa in Charlottesville, where we also spent time with Hetal Mama, Mausami Mami, cousin brother Dev, and baby cousin sister Diya. A second visit to Chicago happened in October, where Salil attended his first Cubs game at Wrigley Field, by way of his first 'El' train ride. He was a great fan and enthusiastically yelled "Yeah Cubs!" on their way to a 5-0 win, although we're sure a large helping of cotton candy also helped. Ryne Sandberg throwing out the first pitch and singing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" during the 7th inning stretch was icing on the cake (at least for Mihir). The three of us did take a small weekend "vacation" to Myrtle Beach later that same month, thanks to our friends Manisha and Vikas in Virginia lending us their beachfront condo. Salil enjoyed collected seashells and building sandcastles, and of couse Neepa enjoyed the oodles of outlet shopping opportunities. For Thanksgiving week we drove up to Northern Virginia, celebrating Diya's first birthday and spending time with the rest of the family, then driving down to Charlottesville for the rest of the week (including an obligatory midnight-on-Black-Friday trip to Toys 'R' Us). We hosted our Virginia relatives in May and also in September, giving Salil more happy times with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.

Many of the experiences and memories are shown in photos posted on our blog below. We hope to continue to share such moments of our family throughout the next year!

Happy Holidays and Keep in Touch Always!

Love,
Neepa, Mihir, & Salil