Crazy Lil' Shopaholic

10 weeks

2011-03-01T09:16:00.003+08:00

From noob to semi-pro in 10 weeks. I am in the process of teaching practice. 1 week down, 9 to go.

I remind myself that I need to be fully committed and passionate to get the best out of the experience. I am fortunate to have great resources and people to learn from, the rest is what I make of it!

First sleep-talk (like daddy like son)

2011-01-25T00:07:00.002+08:00

Just heard Dominic utter his first sleep-talk. He said something like "so loud, it's so loud". Then he said "must change... must change..." I peeped in and found him lying in bed with eyes open, but he wasn't fully awake. Cuddled him a little then he rolled over and slept. Daddy has a habit of half-waking and talking nonsensical stuff or asking nonsensical questions, and I guess D inherited this quirk. Another sign that my boy is growing up, he's no longer a baby, soon he'll no longer need me as much anymore. All the more to cuddle him now!

Dom's first virus from school

2011-01-25T00:03:00.002+08:00

Unfortunately, Dominic is down with flu. He's had it since last Thursday, it's been five days already. He's getting better but recovery is slower than what I'm used to... I suspect it's a virus he caught from a classmate in school. We expected such thing happening when he starts school but it's still difficult for everyone when it happens. It's some kind of kiddy super flu bug - almost the whole family at in-laws at here at home are infected! My nose is totally blocked and I have micro-teaching tomorrow! Hope Dom gets better soon and he doesn't develop a cough instead! :(

My son goes to school!!

2011-01-13T13:22:00.004+08:00

Dominic is finally, officially, going to school! He is a school-going tot!

We registered last Friday 7 January at a kindergarten near home. First day was officially this Monday 10 January. Today is day 4 of school. What an adventure it has been!

Day 1

Mommy accompanied D all the way today. He was super excited about taking the school bus, couldn't wait for the bus to arrive at grandma's void deck. When he saw the bus approach he gave a loud yell! Wow so drama and funny. He enjoyed the bus ride.

Stepped into school. Had berakfast, then class. D didn't participate fully in the activities, but joined in in his own way, a little apart, a little together. We're happy enough with that. Seemed to enjoy himself, no fuss at all.

He allowed the teacher to change his diaper. Mummy bluffed him that we could go home after changing diaper. Big mistake! He refused to re-enter class and cried! FInally managed to settle down by reading with me. Then in a blink it was home time and we took the bus home. And that concludes the first day! Quite successful I think.

Nicholas and the others.

Day 2

Grandma says to let D go by himself today and let the teachers handle it. So Mommy accompanied D on the bus to school. Then while he was taking his temperature, I sneaked off! I heard D say "Where's Mommy?" But the teachers were really attentive, carried him in and paid attention to him.

Mommy became the crazy lurker outside school, in the RAIN! Lingered on outside school walls and peeped through the hole, eyes open ears open to catch if he was fussing. No noise at all! I was so impressed! Then I sneaked in and tried peeping at him. He did great! Caught him washing his hands, then in class joining in the activities. I was so impressed! Finally went home.

The next step for Dominic

2011-01-07T17:16:00.002+08:00

This morning husband and I went to the kindy to check out the place. Decided it was OK and enrolled D. He will be attending Pre-Nursery starting Monday! Our boy has grown up!

We brought D along to get a feel of the place this morning. He was in time to watch the kids have breakfast. One extremely cute and sociable little boy named N came up to talk to us. Then D gave me a hug, and N promptly joined in for a group hug! D was stunned and pushed N away. N was so good natured he didn't even take offence, just smiled. N looks to be potentially quite a live-wire - if D overcomes his shyness I think they'll be great partners-in-crime!

My main concern for pre-school is that D will not enjoy it. When I pop in to peek at the lessons being conducted in the various classrooms, it seems the children are all sitting and listening to teacher. How will D stay still?? Even during Pre-N breakfast, the children were quite well behaved and did not require any restraint from the teachers. I expect D will be the super-active and rebellious one of the group. I hope that the programme is not too structured, else D will not enjoy it, leading to behaviourial problems and then we will have to reconsider school!

I'm trying to keep an optimistic mindset about this. Ironically I have to miss two days of my school to attend D's school. But his needs override mine of course.

I don't think D really knows what's going on haha. Let's hope this works out well and D grows to be more independent and learns to love school!

Musings

2011-01-05T17:26:00.000+08:00

D and I share the same love of lazing in bed. We enjoy lying in bed after waking up, just rolling around, and he'd hug me, give me kisses and nuzzles, and talk to me.

Sometimes we'd just look into each other's eyes. And I wonder what sort of person would he grow up to be?

Rebirth

2010-10-22T22:35:00.005+08:00

Mummy has been in a new job, new school(s) and new vocation since March this year. It has been an exciting, gruelling, crazy time! New faces, new friends, new skills and new challenges.

Right now I'm almost half-way through school. Assignments and deadlines are plenty, I'm still surviving. I try not to panic, and I try to pace myself. It's a long journey ahead, no point burning out now.

I'm enjoying Dominic so much now. He's a handful but such a cutie! The house is full of his singing and chatting. He can really sing and dance now. He'd sing his favourite songs, his nursery rhymes. He'd dance along to the DVDs or the rhymes. Not pitch perfect but perfect to mummy's ears :) He's an amazingly fast learner. He loves buses, trains, vehicles, books and puzzles. He can reason and use logic, so we're dealing with a little boy now, no longer a baby. He's so funny! He does something funny and new everyday. The other evening he watched a VCD and saw a seal moving/flopping across the beach. Then he got down on his tummy and wiggled about, and bopped his head! Hilarious!

Dominic throws a tantrum because of a clash of wills, or when he wants something he can't get. So we really need a new bag of tricks to distract or reason with him. He currently attends a Saturday music class which he really enjoys.

The next step is school. Wonder how that'll go?

My favourite time with Dominic is when we cuddle, or just spend time lying in bed, chatting about the day, or about things like music class. He likes to sit in my lap to read, laze, chat, or sprawl across my lap to play his buses on the floor. I'm his cushioned chair! I also love it when he hugs me and nuzzles my face and neck. Lately he has taken to kissing me on my lips! What a darling boy!

Our first stress-free meal!

2010-10-17T23:11:00.002+08:00

This Sunday morning, husband, Dom and I went to Centerpoint to get him some puzzles. We first went to Macdonald's for breakfast. It was a milestone because we had our first stress-free meal! We sat at a table, Dom sat next to me on the bench-seat, and we could eat comfortably while Dom ate hashbrowns. He finished 1.5 pieces of it! And stole some lemon tea from husband. What a lovely breakfast. No fuss, no tantrums.

Then we went to the supermarket for a quick stop. And finally bought some puzzles from the Robinsons sale at the atrium.

We were most impressed that we could have a proper meal with Dominic! It helped that it was a familiar brand although place is new, familiar food (hashbrown), and I think he preferred sitting with us on the same seats. It was more cmofortable and relaxing, compared to being restricted in a baby chair. I hope we'll have more of these family meals!

Lessons from teambonding

2010-08-30T18:10:00.003+08:00

This morning I attended a teambonding session for work. It was enjoyable. Some reflections:

I am ashamed to say I don't have much faith in people and tend to give up on them too quickly. This is something I really want to change. This hit me when my teammate was trying to teach another two how to play their part of a relay game. When I suggested a change of people because I was worried they couldn't do it, the guy gestured to wait. And he patiently taught them how to do it by coming up with a count-and-throw technique. Finally they got it and were great at it! Instead of writing people off, I should try to figure out how to teach them to get things right first, give people a chance and benefit of doubt, and be more patient with them!

Our fearless leader was another guy I was inspired by. He was really upbeat and enthusiastic, which kept morale up. He was also bold, and steadily and readily led us, throwing himself into the role. I really appreciated his effort and all the shouting, and he did really well. At the end of the day I think he was well-liked and everyone supported him. I think it shows that if you put yourself out there and threw yourself whole-heartedly into a role, leadership or not, people recognize the effort and respond accordingly. So, one creates the type of reception by the people around him. It doesn't just happen without a reason.

All in all, it was a rewarding session and I have much to learn and relearn.

The End of a phase

2010-08-27T18:31:00.001+08:00

Today marks the last day of my contract teaching. I am just about to start my student life!

It was an interesting, memorable two terms and I have learnt and seen a lot. There is definitely much more to learn!

Understanding each other

2010-06-15T11:53:00.003+08:00

Since yesterday Dominic has been repeating after me - "Mummy says no Eh Eh Eh!", "Mummy says no shouting!" This is after I had told him not to whine his demands, but to try and speak instead. I'm heartened because this means my nagging has gotten into him somehow and he is trying to process and follow my instructions!

Several times Dominic caught himself whining and says "Mummy says no Eh Eh", it's as if he realises that he is whining and remembers that it's wrong. He is also trying to verbalise his requests more. I'd hint to him by saying "What do you want me to do? Mummy...?" and he'd try to complete the sentence - "Mummy open."

This morning was another milestone, he wants to use the computer, and said "Computer is off". I told him "Yes, it is off, cannot use." Then he tries to request for it "One time computer?" I thought he should be rewarded for asking so nicely and so I let him use it for a while before his nap!

It is an improvement! The boy is picky and has a hot temper, a combination that results in many crying tantrums! I hope he learns to verbalise his needs more.

Restless sleep

2010-05-04T09:11:00.003+08:00

Last few nights have been tumultuous, Dominic has not slept very well. He goes down easily enough, but at about 2am and starting from there, he'd toss and turn. He also makes frustrated noises like "Argh. Argh. Argh." repeatedly to express his unhappiness. I'm not sure what he wants because he can't tell or respond to me. After a while he'd settle down, but sometimes this would go on for some time.

Last night he kept up the wakefulness for some time. It was sad to see him so irritated and yet unable to help. Finally he settled down after a bottle of milk. Because of the poor sleep, he woke late today.

I find that when Dominic is overstimulated during the day, it would manifest at night and he'd have restless sleep. Also, he may be going through a growth spurt or a renewed love affair with milk because he is drinking more these few days. Just a week or so ago I thought we had cut off the middlle-of-night milk feeds, but judging from his sleep lately, I think I have to give him milk once again. It's difficult to know if he is really hungry or just wants to drink out of habit. But since he eats less rice on the weekend, he may really be hungry at night.

I think another reason why he is so restless at night could be because his brain is forming links from what he as learnt and probably has lingering irritating or unresolved issues from the day. It is part of growing up, I guess.

Another point of worry is his ear wax - there's plenty of it in both ears! I'm worried the accumulation may affect his hearing. Is there something to use for a non-invasive ear cleaning??

A little bedtime verse, bedtime stories

2010-04-20T09:00:00.004+08:00

I would often say this little verse to Dominic at bedtime:

"Head on pillow
Hands on bolster
Tutu in your mouth."

Lately Dominic has learnt to say this too at bedtime! It's so cute when he recites it. He would omit a word here or there but he'd say all the key words like head, pillow, bolster, mouth.

Husband reports that sometimes at bedtime, Dominic would tell him a story, instead of the other way round! Dominic would often tell the story about him and papa riding on the mrt train, going out, etc. Dominic loves to listen to stories and would always request to hear a story or two at bedtime, and now he has started authoring and telling his own stories. It's so cute and so great to see Dominic progressing linguistically as well as creatively.

Poor baby is sick

2010-04-20T08:36:00.003+08:00

Last night we brought Dominic to the clinic for his fever. As usual, the boy hated the clinic and cried immediately upon entering the consultation room. Now, being more verbal, he actually said "Go out! Go out!". And when the doctor was listening to his heart, he said "OK! OK!" I.e. OK we're done, we can leave now.

Hearing him plead with us to leave the room was so heartwrenching for husband and me! Poor little boy! We felt so bad for him, but had to hold him tight for the doctor to examine him.

After the consultation, D was so tired out from the experience and drained from the fever that he lay quietly and limp in daddys' arms.

After taking medicine last night, it seems he is doing better this morning.

I hope D recovers soon and that the flu bugs leave him alone! It's so sad when our little boy is sick. :(

the teaching chronicles 3

2010-04-19T14:13:00.000+08:00

another week!

school has lent me use of a laptop! finally! i am now efficiently prepping for class haha. it is much better. i feel like i'm getting the hang of teaching. i still don't have total control of all my classes, but i feel i react faster and without too much thought or hesitation. i also manage to enjoy more of the classes, this is important to me because i don't want to be burnt out or hate work. of course there are still problematic classes, but at least there is some joy to be had, which balances things out.

you're exactly right about classroom management. 1-2 monkeys are bad, some classes have 3-4, which is impossible. with the laptop i am better able to prepare a meatier program and this helps to hold the majority of the class's interest. busy, engaged students are less prone to making mischief.

i think we do have a support officer, but im not sure who she is haha. we have a counsellor. thing is, i'm not sure if it is a new development that they are integrating the ADHD and autistic children into mainstream? or is it just that teachers are more aware of these diagnoses and start to identify the afflicted students? i duno. some are obviously with problem, i've come across students who are totally not in tune with the program. they just play or do their thing at the back of the class. actually those are not the problem, once u accept that they will not be participating. once they are familiar with me, they know that they'll be left alone if they leave the class alone, and they'd mind their own business. one of such boy is actually very sweet - he just can't help himself.

i find the biggest problem are the functioning children without discipline. regular kids who just refuse to listen, sit, follow instructions, and go haywire any chance they get. school is like their playground. they still think they're little children at home playing the whole day, no rules no restrictions. these kids you need to teach, need to engage, but first need to discipline, and are very difficult to. if i had them full time e.g. form teacher, probably it'd be easier cos then i can really hammer them into submission haha! but with half an hour a week, it's tricky.

i had my observation last friday, and just met my reporting officer for the report, and it's good! she said i did well for a 3-week old teacher, there is room for improvement but overall good. I got a B, no further observation required for me. i'm happy! i guess this means NIE later this year! i know my class contributed a big deal to my results, this was my best class, most focused and intelligent, i couldn't have done it without them.

u must have been to the foodcourt at the top level. im glad it allows the kopitiam card. that place has the nicer, more expensive food outlets.

[sic]

let me know what are your plans! now that you are more free we can meet up soon :D

Dominic is 2 years old!

2010-04-19T12:57:00.003+08:00

Dominic turned 2 yesterday! What a 2-year it has been. Dominic has brought so much joy to our lives. He's now a charming, funny, witty, mischievous and clever boy. His vocabulary is impressive. He strings together funny sentences. He has a temper and hates to change his clothes. He is affectionate and loves to cuddle with me. I love to cuddle with him too. He'd hug me tight and rub his face against mine, and I do the same back - time stands still and we are just lost in the moment. It is what I enjoy most about motherhood, to have bear-hugs and cuddles with my boy.

We had a weekend of celebrations, starting with tea-turned-dinner with my family. I catered DIY popiah and kueh pie tee. The family stayed for dinner, watched a DVD, and had a cake. Simple, fuss-free celebration, which I enjoyed, because we can all just sit and just relax as a family. Grandparents bought Dominic a blue toy car, and a generous ang pow.

On Sunday, we had a big bash with the extended family of the in-laws. It was a Thomas themed party! There was a Thomas Happy Birthday banner, Thomas tablecloth, Thomas mylar balloons, red and blue balloons free-floating in the ceiling, and a huge 3D Thomas train cake. Grandparents generously catered a vegetarian buffet dinner. It was crowded, noisy, festive, and hot! But it was a great experience. We had the help of 2 photographers, I can't wait to see the pictures!

We sang Happy Birthday song to Dominic frequently over the last few days, and taught him to blow out imaginary candles at the end of the song. Then he'd cheer and clap. When it came to the real thing, Dominic looked stunned throughout the song, but did manage to blow at the candles, although I'm not sure if he blew out any of the two candles! Still, it was a good attempt!

Unfortunately Dominic had a bit of a fever, but we caught it in time and brought under control with some medicine. We suspect it is a viral infection. He lost a little stamina for the party, but enjoyed himself nonetheless.

My darling boy is two! I love him so much. Happy birthday Dominic! Mummy and Daddy love you, and treasure every moment with you.

Blessed

2010-04-17T13:57:00.000+08:00

Today is the day before Dominic's 2nd birthday, and his confinement nanny called to wish him a happy birthday. I hope Dominic will always remember how fortunate he is that he has people who remember him and think of him and wish him well!

Our confinement nanny took care of Dominic from day 3 of his life, upon his return home from the hospital, for a month and a half after that. She has always remembered his birthday, and called to wish him a happy birthday on his first birthday, and now on his second. It's so kind and thoughtful of her. We are truly fortunate!

the teaching chronicles 2

2010-04-08T14:12:00.001+08:00

Hi!
It's the end of a long Thursday in school. I will still stay back further to prepare for my observation, which has been shifted to 16th Friday, but a quick email break first.

Yes I "personal email" in school a little, I also surf the motherhood forum occassionally but very quick browsing, and ibank. I figure I need some relief now and then, so heck care.

You've reminded me of the poster, haha I will print it out now.

I just came from a relief Eng supplementary class of one of the most hopeless P4 classes. I listen to their form teacher complain constantly about them. So I knew there was not much change of teaching anything, I just had to nanny them. Plus with the new English syllabus now, Stellar or wadever, there is no ready textbook so it's difficult to just pick up from a point and teach. Classes like this make me wonder how to educate those in the class who can and want to learn! The mix of students are so disruptive it really is pointless.

It's classes like these that scare me about teaching, one day I also will kena such a class and I don't know how I'm gonna handle it!

The good thing is that I notice many of the upper primary classes in this school have a co-form teacher, which I think must be reassuring esp if you have a difficult class - at least you can take turns to scold and discipline! And can complain to someone who understands!

I am given most of the SOW and resources, but there are missing material here and there, but like I mention at this point I've given up hounding them for things esp. since mine are the "relief" and lite classes. Just to give you an idea of how onz the people here are about the lite subjects, the HOD of Soc Studies & Health Ed (same lady) told me to get the SOW from her online sharing folder, and all of the folders and documents are titled 2008, 2009! Haha! No 2010! I assume those must be the working copies so I didn't bother to check with her la! Sets the tone of the subject's importance already, doesn't it?

[sic]

I'm looking forward to tomorrow, a short day. I'm gonna add oil for the lesson plan now so that I can enjoy tomorrow!

the teaching chronicles 1

2010-04-06T14:09:00.000+08:00

Hiee!

yes time flies and it has been a blur. the school has given me the "relief teacher's" classes so i have social studies and health ed for a myriad of classes from p1 to p5, plus a little art and music scattered around. bcos i have so many classes and see most of them a period (30 min) a week, i have trouble remembering who the students are and where i've stopped! also since i'm taking the lite subjects, it's hard for students to take me or the lesson seriously. some classes are challenging. i do remember the notti students' face though haha.

most of the colleagues are nice. some have a certain "kuan", like overpromising and not delivering, or being somewhat impatient. my reporting officer is friendly but not very detail-oriented. my buddy is kinda slack, i have to chase him for things n then i feel bad for being an added workload. i feel that support for work has not been sufficient but i realise that they are all busy mid-term. so based on what is provided, i just try to get through the work & keep a low profile. on the bright side my subjects are non-examinable so i don't have exam pressure, just need to cover the subject objectives by mid-year, with the freedom to plan lessons my way. in that sense i'm v fortunate, so no point to hiam too much. my objectives in class are to maintain control, attention, n try to enable students to absorb some new info while keeping lessons somewhat enjoyable haha.

the good news is that i have a lesson observation coming up, it's next wed, and if favorable, school will recommend me to enter NIE this aug/sept. i'm excited & keeping my eyes on the prize!

teaching has really opened up my eyes abt classroom management - it is the most challenging aspect for me. i realise it's not about the level, but more about the mix of students. some classes have super-disruptive kids, worse still like 3 or 4! others are tamer. sadly i feel i am in control of half of my classes, and ineffective for the other half haha! i also think it is sad when some of the children need more personal attention because they are slower or on the other hand, because they are good, but cannot get it due to time constraint or because i'm focusing on keeping the class in order. i plan to request to sit-in my buddy's class to see how the pro does it before my observation - hopefully i'll learn something.

today i yelled at a kid to "show him as an example to the class", then i realised that he was low IQ. the other classmates warned me earlier - "teacher, his mind got problem one" - but i thought they were insulting him. i felt so bad n so silly after that. :( that's a lesson i learnt today, to be more mindful of the low ability one, not all notti students are deliberately disruptive.

hear fm u soon!

Article: The Myth About Boys

2010-03-11T16:25:00.000+08:00

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1647452,00.html

Thursday, Jul. 26, 2007
The Myth About BoysBy David Von Drehle

My son was born nearly 10 years ago, and I remember telling him that morning that he was one lucky baby. Forget Dr. Spock or Dr. Brazelton--I took my cue from Dr. Pangloss. If this was not the best of all possible worlds, it was certainly the best time and best place to be starting out healthy and free in a land of vast possibilities. In the months and years that followed, however, there came a steady stream of books and essays warning that I had missed something ominous: our little guy had entered a soul-crushing world of anti-boy influences.

There was, for example, Harvard psychologist William Pollack's Real Boys (1998), which asserted that contemporary boys are "scared and disconnected," "severely lagging" behind girls in both achievement and self-confidence. The following year, journalist Susan Faludi argued in Stiffed that the cold calculus of global economics was emasculating American men. In 2000 philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers blamed off-the-rails feminism for sparking The War Against Boys, and two years later writer Elizabeth Gilbert found The Last American Man living in a teepee in the Appalachian Mountains. By the time our boy was headed to third grade, magazine editors were grinding out cover headlines like BOY TROUBLE and THE BOY CRISIS, and I was getting worried. The voyage to manhood had come to seem as perilous and flummoxing as the future of Iraq.

It's enough to make people long for the good old days. Sure enough, one of the hot books of the summer is a zestfully nostalgic celebration of boyhood past. The Dangerous Book for Boys, by brothers Hal and Conn Iggulden, flits from fossils to tree houses, from secret codes to go-carts, from the Battle of Gettysburg to the last voyage of Robert Falcon Scott. A sensation last year in Britain, the book has been at or near the top of the New York Times best-seller list since late spring.

The Dangerous Book, bound in an Edwardian red cover with marbled endpapers, has many of the timeless qualities of an ideal young man: curiosity, bravery and respectfulness; just enough rogue to leaven the stoic; an appetite for any challenge, from hunting small game to mastering the rules of grammar. It celebrates trial and error, vindicates the noble failure. Rudyard Kipling would have loved it.
These charms alone can't explain the popularity of an amalgam of coin tricks, constellations and homemade magnets, however. Clearly, The Dangerous Book has tapped into a larger anxiety about how we're raising young men. This is a subject worth digging into, because it reflects not just on our sons but also on their sisters, on the kind of world these kids might make together--and on the adults who love them, however imperfect we prove to be. With fresh eyes on fresh facts, we might find that an upbeat message to a newborn boy is not so misguided after all.

THE MYTH OF THE BOY CRISIS

"I don't think anyone will deny that girls are academically superior as a group. Girls are more academically powerful. They make the grades, they run the student activities, they are the valedictorians."

Christina Hoff Sommers, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was explaining how she came to worry deeply about boys. In the book-lined parlor of her suburban Washington home, she ticked through a familiar but disturbing indictment: More boys than girls are in special-education classes. More boys than girls are prescribed mood-managing drugs. This suggests to her (and others) that today's schools are built for girls, and boys are becoming misfits. As a result, more boys than girls drop out of high school. Boys don't read as well as girls. And America's prisons are packed with boys and former boys.

Meanwhile, fewer boys than girls take the SAT. Fewer boys than girls apply to college. Fewer boys than girls, in annual surveys of college freshmen, express a passion for learning. And fewer boys than girls are earning college degrees. Even sperm counts are falling. "It's true at every level of society" that boys are stumbling behind, Sommers continued.

Observers of the boy crisis contend that families, schools and popular culture are failing our boys, leaving them restless bundles of anxiety--misfits in the classroom and video-game junkies at home. They suffer from an epidemic of "anomie," as Harvard psychologist William Pollack told me, adrift in a world of change without the help they need to find their way. Even in the youngest grades, test-oriented teachers focus energy on conventional exercises in reading, writing and other seatwork, areas in which girls tend to excel. At the same time, schools are cutting science labs, physical education and recess, where the experiential learning styles of boys come into play. No wonder, the theory goes, our boys get jittery, grow disruptive and eventually tune out. "A boy will get a reputation as hell on wheels that follows him from one teacher to the next, and soon they're coming down on him even before he screws up. So he learns to hate school," says Mike Miller, an elementary school teacher in North Carolina. Miller's principal has ordered every faculty member to read a book this summer titled Hear Our Cry: Boys in Crisis.
In short, society treats "boyhood as toxic, as a pathology," says Sommers--who may have been guilty of this herself when she wrote several years ago that the Columbine killers were emblematic of turn-of-the-century boyhood. But she's right that it's not girls who are shooting up their classrooms--and boys are at least five times as likely as girls to die by suicide.
There are statistics to back up every point in that sad litany, but I also found people eager to flay nearly every statistic. For instance: Is it bad that more boys are in special education, or should we be pleased that they are getting extra help from specially trained teachers? And haven't boys always tended to be more restless than girls under the discipline of high school and more likely to wind up in jail? A growing congregation of writers have begun to argue that the trouble with boys is mostly a myth. Sara Mead is one; she was until recently a senior policy analyst at Education Sector, a Washington think tank largely funded by the Gates Foundation. Intrigued by the wave of books and articles about failing boys, Mead crunched some numbers, focusing narrowly on the question of school performance. The former Clinton Administration official concluded that "with a few exceptions, American boys are scoring higher and achieving more than they ever have before."

In particular, Mead decided that boys from middle- and upper-income families--especially white families--are doing just fine. "The biggest issue is not a gender gap. It is these gaps for minority and disadvantaged boys," she told me recently in the think tank's conference room. Boys overall are holding their own or even improving on standardized tests, she said; they're just not improving as quickly as girls. And their total numbers in college are rising, albeit not as sharply as the numbers of girls. To Mead, a good-news story about the achievements of girls and young women has been turned into a bad-news story about laggard boys and young men.

The more I probed, the more I realized that the subject of boys is a bog of sociology in which a clever researcher, given a little time, can unearth evidence to support almost any point of view. I also came to the sad realization that this field, like so many others, has been infiltrated by our left-right political noise machine. Our boys have become cannon fodder in the unresolved culture wars waged by their parents and grandparents. On one side, concern for boys is waved off as a mere "backlash against the women's movement," as two writers declared dismissively in the Washington Post last year. The opposing side views any divergence from the crisis theme as male-bashing feminism.

Then I came across a new report from the Federal Government: Uncle Sam's annual attempt to paint a broad statistical portrait of the nation's young people. In long rows of little numbers printed on page after page of tables, this report told a different story from that of either the woe bearers or the myth busters.

WHAT THE NUMBERS SAY

"America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2007" is the work of many agencies, from the Department of Justice to the Department of Education to the Bureau of the Census and beyond. It gathers a trove of data, and as I made my way through it, I concluded that there's real substance to the boy crisis, and there have been good-faith reasons for sounding an alarm.
Statistics collected over two decades show an alarming decline in the performance of America's boys--in some respects, a virtual free fall. Boys were doing poorly in school, abusing drugs, committing violent crimes and engaging in promiscuous sex. Young males lost ground by many behavioral indicators at some point in the 1980s and '90s: sharp plunges on some scales, long erosions on others. I was forced to confront a fact that I had secretly known all along: that teens of 30 years ago--my generation--were the leading edge of an epidemic of thugs, dolts and cads.
No wonder so many writers began calling for change in the late 1990s. Reliable social-science data often lag a couple of years behind the calendar; it takes time to gather and compile a nation's worth of numbers. Stories about social trends that you read today may be describing the reality of 2004 or 2005. The groundbreaking boy books were a response to statistics portraying the worst of a physical, mental and moral health crisis.

There's more to the story, however. That downward slide has leveled off--and in many cases, turned around. Boys today look pretty good compared with their dads and older cousins. By some measures, our boys are doing better than ever.

The juvenile crime rate in 2005 (the most recent year cited in the report) was down by two-thirds from its peak in 1993. Other Justice Department statistics show that the population of juvenile males in prison is only half of its historic high. The number of high school senior boys using illegal drugs has fallen by almost half compared with the number in 1980. And the percentage of high school boys drinking heavily is now the lowest on record. When I was in high school, more than half of all senior boys told researchers they had downed five or more drinks in a row within the previous two weeks--a number that I have no trouble believing. By last year, that figure was fewer than 3 in 10.

Today's girls are also doing well by these measures, but their successes in no way diminish the progress of the boys. In fact, together our kids are reversing one of the direst problems of the previous generation: the teen-pregnancy epidemic. According to the new report, fewer than half of all high school boys and girls in 2005 were sexually active. For the boys, that's a decrease of 10 percentage points from the early 1990s. Boys who are having sex report that they are more responsible about it: 7 in 10 are using condoms, compared with about half in 1993. As a result, teen pregnancy and abortion rates are now at their lowest recorded levels.

What about school? Boys in the fourth, eighth and 12th grades all score better--though not dramatically better--on math tests than did the comparable boys of 1990. Reading, however, is a problem. The standardized NAEP test, known as the nation's report card, indicates that by the senior year of high school, boys have fallen nearly 20 points behind their female peers. That's bad, not because girls are ahead but because too many boys are leaving school functionally illiterate. Pollack told me of one study that found even the sons of college-educated parents had a 1 in 4 chance of leaving school without becoming proficient readers. In an economy increasingly geared toward processing information, an inability to read becomes an inability to earn. "You have to be literate in today's world," says Sommers. "We're not going to get away with not teaching boys to read."

Even here, though, there may be grounds for a hopeful outlook. Boys at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels are showing modest improvement in reading and now trail their female classmates by slightly smaller margins than before. If that's a sign of improved teaching and parental focus on reading, then we ought to expect gains in the higher grades soon.

"I think it would be an error not to be optimistic," says Michael Gurian, author of several books about raising boys. "But at the same time there is reason to worry." He sketches the sinking trajectory of undereducated males as blue-collar jobs move to low-wage countries. Though definitive data on the dropout rate are as elusive as Bigfoot, there's little question that a worrisome gap is opening between boys who finish high school and those who don't. Boys with diplomas are now far more likely to go immediately to college than the boys of my era were. Solution: we need more boys with diplomas.

And that can be done. A generation of enlightened teaching and robust encouragement has awakened American girls to the need for higher education. Women now outnumber men in college by a ratio of 4 to 3, and admissions officers at liberal-arts colleges are struggling to find enough males to keep their classes close to gender parity. "We've done wonderfully with girls. Now let's do the same for boys," says Gurian. One way to start might be to gear advanced training to male-dominated occupations--already the case in many female-oriented fields. Schoolteachers and librarians (roughly 70% female) must go to college, but firefighters and police officers (pushing 90% male)? Not necessarily. Top executive secretaries are college educated; top carpenters may not be.

About the only scale on which today's boys are faring dramatically worse than the boys of my era is the bathroom scale. When I was in high school in the late 1970s, roughly 1 boy in 20 was obese; today 1 boy in 5 is.

My favorite statistic seemed to sum up all the others: fewer boys today are deadbeats. The percentage of young men between 16 and 19 who neither work nor attend school has fallen by about a quarter since 1984. The greatest gains in this category have been made by black youths. In 1984, 1 out of 3 young black men ages 18 and 19 were neither in school nor working. That proportion has been cut almost in half, to fewer than 1 in 5.

Today's boys may wear their pants too damned baggy and go around with iPod buds in their ears. They know everything about Xbox 360 and nothing about paper routes. I doubt that they slog to school through deep snow as I recall doing back before the globe warmed up. But judging from the numbers, they are pulling themselves up from the handbasket to hell.

SO WHERE DID WE GO RIGHT?

Unfortunately, it's one thing to observe human behavior--count the crime reports and the teen births and the diplomas awarded and so on--but quite another to explain it. Popular science and the best-seller lists skip eagerly from one theory to the next, lingering with delight on the most provocative if not always the most plausible. A recent paper suggested that falling crime rates can be explained almost entirely by reduced lead exposure in childhood. Which was odd, because last year economist Steven Levitt's best seller Freakonomics chalked up the improvement to legalized abortion, which, he theorized, cut the number of unwanted children prone to wind up as criminals.

Or take the teen-pregnancy numbers. It's not enough to credit the virtues of responsibility and better sex education. Something racier is desired. According to some writers, fewer teens are getting pregnant because they've all switched to oral sex. Or maybe the phenomenon is due to a still unexplained decline in sperm counts.

But before we go dizzy on cleverness, let's pull out Occam's razor and consider a simple possibility: maybe our boys are doing better because we're paying them more attention. We're providing for them better; the proportion of children living in poverty is down roughly 2% from a spike in 1993. And we're giving them more time. Parents--both fathers and mothers--are reordering their priorities to focus on caring for their kids. Several studies confirm this. Sociologists at the University of Michigan have tracked a sharp increase in the amount of time men spend with their children since the 1970s. Another long-range survey, reported by University of Maryland researchers, has asked parents since the 1960s to keep detailed diaries of their daily activities. In 1965 child-focused care occupied about 13 hours per week, the vast majority of it done by moms. By 1985 that had dropped to 11 hours per week as moms entered the workforce. The 2005 study found parents spending 20 hours a week focused on their kids--by far the highest number in the history of the survey. Both moms and dads had dramatically shifted their energies toward their kids.

Are there risks of overparenting boys? Sure. And here's where the success of The Dangerous Book gets interesting, because it suggests that as parents spend more time with their sons, we may be reconnecting with the fact that the differences between boys and girls need not be threatening and that not all the lore of the past about how to raise boys was wrong.
Gregory Hodge is a good example of this return to tradition. He is principal at the Frederick Douglass Academy, a public school in Harlem. His school was one of three recently honored by the Schott Foundation for excellence in educating black male students--the most troubled cohort but also the group making the greatest progress in many areas. Hodge told me that when he arrived at the combination middle school and high school 11 years ago, the academy was already a great success--but the student body was 80% female. The new principal made it his business to recruit more boys. Today, of the academy's 1,450 mostly poor and minority students, half are male. Yet the dropout rate remains virtually zero, and this year (like most years) every member of the senior class graduated and was college-bound. Every one.

Hodge says the secret is to reach boys before they get into trouble--he uses the academy's basketball facilities to lure youngsters still in grade school. Once you have their attention, you must show them a world of possibilities that you genuinely believe they can achieve. "Young people are looking for validation," he says. "You are important. You will be successful. We don't talk about 'if' you go to college. Around here it's 'when' you go to college."

Frederick Douglass Academy students adhere to a strict dress code and accept rigid discipline. Many of them virtually live at the school, even on Saturdays, doing hours of homework, attending required tutorials if they lag behind, participating in dozens of sports and activities, from basketball to lacrosse and ballet to botany. "Everything a private school would offer a rich kid," Hodge explains. But within this highly structured setting, the school recognizes that many boys need room to learn in their own way. "Some of the kids are hardheaded," Hodge says in a gravelly Bronx roar. "That's what makes a boy. They've gotta experiment, learn the hard way that his head won't break concrete. Male students tend to want to find things out for themselves--so why don't you use that as a teacher?

"I once had about 15 boys very close to dropping out," the principal continues. "They weren't into sports. I had to find something for them to get into. Finally I made a recording studio for the little meatheads, and they ran with that. All of them made it through to graduation. I'll try anything--dance, chess, hydroponics, robotics--anything to let these kids know that this is a world they can fit into, where they can be successful."

THE BASICS OF BOYHOOD

Nothing Hodge says is remotely ground-breaking or experimental--and that's precisely the point. Only in recent decades have societies seriously begun to unlock the full potential of girls, but the cultivation of boys has been an obsession for thousands of years. "How shall we find a gentle nature which also has a great spirit?" Socrates asked some 2,500 years ago--essentially the same question parents ask today.

Ours is far from the first society to fear for its sons. Leo Braudy of the University of Southern California, in his 2003 book From Chivalry to Terrorism, noted recurring waves of anxiety. Europeans of the 18th century imagined that free trade and the death of feudalism would spell the end of honor and chivalry. Then, with the dawn of the Industrial Age, writers like John Stuart Mill worried that progress itself--with its speed and stress and short attention spans--would cause a sort of "moral effeminacy" and "inaptitude for every kind of struggle." By the end of the 19th century, a manhood malaise permeated the entire Western world: in France it inspired Pierre de Coubertin to create the Olympic movement; in Britain it moved Robert Baden-Powell to found the Boy Scouts; in the U.S. it fueled a passion for the new sport of football and helped make a hero of rough-riding Theodore Roosevelt.

All these reforms shared a common impulse to return to the basics of boyhood--quests, competitions, tribal brotherhoods and self-discovery. There was a recognition that the keys to building a successful boy have remained remarkably consistent, whether a tribal chieftain is preparing a young warrior or a knight is training a squire or a craftsman is guiding an apprentice--or Gregory Hodge is teaching his students. Boys need mentors and structure but also some freedom to experiment. They need a group to belong to and an opponent to confront. As Gurian put it in The Wonder of Boys, they must "compete and perform well to feel worthy."
The success of The Dangerous Book for Boys is one sign of a society getting in touch with these venerable truths. Nothing in the book suggests that boys are better than girls, nor does the book license destructive aggression. But it does exude the confidence of ages past that boys are to be treasured, not cured. "Is it old-fashioned?" the authors ask themselves about their book. "Well, that depends. Men and boys today are the same as they always were ... You want to be self-sufficient and find your way by the stars."

A TRIP TO BOY HEAVEN

If The Dangerous Book were a place, it would look like the Falling Creek Camp for Boys in North Carolina--a rustic paradise complete with a rifle range, nearby mountains to climb and a lake complete with swimming dock and rope swing. The choice of activities at the camp is dizzying, from soccer to blacksmithing, from kayaking to watercolors, but no pastime is more popular than building forts of fallen tree limbs and poking at turtles in the creek. Leave your cell phones, laptops and iPods at home.

There I met Margaret Anderson, a pediatric nurse from Nashville and a member of the faculty at Vanderbilt University. She works in the infirmary while her 11-year-old son Gage discovers the woods on multi-day pack trips. "I call this place Boy Heaven," she says.
Falling Creek subscribes to a philosophy of "structured freedom," which is essentially the same philosophy paying dividends among boys at the opposite end of the economic ladder at the Frederick Douglass Academy. It works across the board, says Anderson, and she wishes more of the boys she sees in her busy Nashville practice lived lives of structured freedom too.
"Whether it's urban kids who can't go outside because it's too dangerous or the overscheduled, overparented kids at the other end of the spectrum--I'm worried that boys have lost the chance to play and to explore," Anderson told me. Our society takes a dim view of idle time and casts a skeptical eye on free play--play driven by a boy's curiosity rather than the league schedule or the folks at Nintendo. But listen to Anderson as she lists the virtues of letting boys run themselves occasionally.

"When no one's looming over them, they begin making choices of their own," she says. "They discover consequences and learn to take responsibility for themselves and their emotions. They start learning self-discipline, self-confidence, team building. If we don't let kids work through their own problems, we get a generation of whiners."

That made sense to me. As I watched the boys at Falling Creek do things that would scare me to death if my own son were doing them--hammering white-hot pieces of metal, clinging to a zip line two stories above a lake, examining native rattlesnakes--I didn't notice many whining boys. Yates Pharr, director of Falling Creek, seemed to read my mind. "It's the parents who have the anxieties nowadays, far more than the boys," he said. "We've started posting photographs of each day's activity on our website, and still I'll get complaints if we don't have a picture of every camper every day."

Worrying about our boys--reading and writing books about them, wringing our hands over dire trends and especially taking more time to parent them--is paying off. The next step is to let them really blossom, and for that we have to trust them, give them room. The time for fearing our sons, or fearing for their futures, is behind us. The challenge now is to believe in them. [This article contains charts. Please see hardcopy or pdf.]

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Article: The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting

2010-03-11T16:22:00.001+08:00

Friday, Nov. 20, 2009

The Growing Backlash Against OverparentingBy Nancy Gibbs
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1940395,00.html

The insanity crept up on us slowly; we just wanted what was best for our kids. We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old's "pencil-holding deficiency," hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school, playground and practice field — "helicopter parents," teachers christened us, a phenomenon that spread to parents of all ages, races and regions. Stores began marketing stove-knob covers and "Kinderkords" (also known as leashes; they allow "three full feet of freedom for both you and your child") and Baby Kneepads (as if babies don't come prepadded). The mayor of a Connecticut town agreed to chop down three hickory trees on one block after a woman worried that a stray nut might drop into her new swimming pool, where her nut-allergic grandson occasionally swam. A Texas school required parents wanting to help with the second-grade holiday party to have a background check first. Schools auctioned off the right to cut the carpool line and drop a child directly in front of the building — a spot that in other settings is known as handicapped parking.

We were so obsessed with our kids' success that parenting turned into a form of product development. Parents demanded that nursery schools offer Mandarin, since it's never too soon to prepare for the competition of a global economy. High school teachers received irate text messages from parents protesting an exam grade before class was even over; college deans described freshmen as "crispies," who arrived at college already burned out, and "teacups," who seemed ready to break at the tiniest stress. (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution.)
This is what parenting had come to look like at the dawn of the 21st century — just one more extravagance, the Bubble Wrap waiting to burst.

All great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience that inspire rebel bands to plot together. And so there is now a new revolution under way, one aimed at rolling back the almost comical overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads. The insurgency goes by many names — slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting — but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they'll fly higher. We're often the ones who hold them down.

A backlash against overparenting had been building for years, but now it reflects a new reality. Since the onset of the Great Recession, according to a CBS News poll, a third of parents have cut their kids' extracurricular activities. They downsized, downshifted and simplified because they had to — and often found, much to their surprise, that they liked it. When a TIME poll last spring asked how the recession had affected people's relationships with their kids, nearly four times as many people said relationships had gotten better as said they'd gotten worse. "This is one of those moments when everything is on the table, up for grabs," says Carl Honoré, whose book Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting is a gospel of the slow-parenting movement. He likens the sudden awareness to the feeling you get when you wake up after a long night carousing, the lights go on, and you realize you're a mess. "That horrible moment of self-recognition is where we are culturally. I wanted parents to realize they are not alone in thinking this is insanity, and show there's another way." (See the 25 best back-to-school gadgets.)

How We Got HereOverparenting had been around long before Douglas MacArthur's mom Pinky moved with him to West Point in 1899 and took an apartment near the campus, supposedly so she could watch him with a telescope to be sure he was studying. But in the 1990s something dramatic happened, and the needle went way past the red line. From peace and prosperity, there arose fear and anxiety; crime went down, yet parents stopped letting kids out of their sight; the percentage of kids walking or biking to school dropped from 41% in 1969 to 13% in 2001. Death by injury has dropped more than 50% since 1980, yet parents lobbied to take the jungle gyms out of playgrounds, and strollers suddenly needed the warning label "Remove Child Before Folding." Among 6-to-8-year-olds, free playtime dropped 25% from 1981 to '97, and homework more than doubled. Bookstores offered Brain Foods for Kids: Over 100 Recipes to Boost Your Child's Intelligence. The state of Georgia sent every newborn home with the CD Build Your Baby's Brain Through the Power of Music, after researchers claimed to have discovered that listening to Mozart could temporarily help raise IQ scores by as many as 9 points. By the time the frenzy had reached its peak, colleges were installing "Hi, Mom!" webcams in common areas, and employers like Ernst & Young were creating "parent packs" for recruits to give Mom and Dad, since they were involved in negotiating salary and benefits.
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Once obsessing about kids' safety and success became the norm, a kind of orthodoxy took hold, and heaven help the heretics — the ones who were brave enough to let their kids venture outside without Secret Service protection. Just ask Lenore Skenazy, who to this day, when you Google "America's Worst Mom," fills the first few pages of results — all because one day last year she let her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone. A newspaper column she wrote about it somehow ignited a global firestorm over what constitutes reasonable risk. She had reporters calling from China, Israel, Australia, Malta. ("Malta! An island!" she marvels. "Who's stalking the kids there? Pirates?") Skenazy decided to fight back, arguing that we have lost our ability to assess risk. By worrying about the wrong things, we do actual damage to our children, raising them to be anxious and unadventurous or, as she puts it, "hothouse, mama-tied, danger-hallucinating joy extinguishers."

Skenazy, a Yale-educated mom who with her husband is raising two boys in New York City, had ingested all the same messages as the rest of us. Her sons' school once held a pre-field-trip assembly explaining exactly how close to a hospital the children would be at all times. She confesses to being "at least part Sikorsky," hiring a football coach for a son's birthday and handing out mouth guards as party favors. But when the Today show had her on the air to discuss her subway decision, interviewer Ann Curry turned to the camera and asked, "Is she an enlightened mom or a really bad one?" (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

From that day and the food fight that followed, she launched her Free Range Kids blog, which eventually turned into her own Dangerous Book for Parents: Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. There is no rational reason, she argues, that a generation of parents who grew up walking alone to school, riding mass transit, trick-or-treating, teeter-tottering and selling Girl Scout cookies door to door should be forbidding their kids to do the same. But somehow, she says, "10 is the new 2. We're infantilizing our kids into incompetence." She celebrates seat belts and car seats and bike helmets and all the rational advances in child safety. It's the irrational responses that make her crazy, like when Dear Abby endorses the idea, as she did in August, that each morning before their kids leave the house, parents take a picture of them. That way, if they are kidnapped, the police will have a fresh photo showing what clothes they were wearing. Once the kids make it home safe and sound, you can delete the picture and take a new one the next morning.

That advice may seem perfectly sensible to parents bombarded by heartbreaking news stories about missing little girls and the predator next door. But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with "How can you let him go to the store alone?," she suggests countering with "How can you let him visit your relatives?" (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) "I'm not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn't be prepared," she says. "But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources." Besides, she says with a smile, "a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It's nowhere you'd want to be." (See pictures of eighth-graders being recruited for college basketball.)

Dispatches from the Front LinesEleven parents are sitting in a circle in an airy, glass-walled living room in south Austin, Texas, eating organic, gluten-free, nondairy coconut ice cream. This is a Slow Family Living class, taught by perinatal psychologist Carrie Contey and Bernadette Noll. "Our whole culture," says Contey, 38, "is geared around 'Is your kid making the benchmarks?' There's this fear of 'Is my kid's head the right size?' People think there's some mythical Good Mother out there that they aren't living up to and that it's hurting their child. I just want to pull the plug on that."

The parents seem relieved to hear it. Matt, a textbook editor, reports that he and his wife quit a book club because it caused too much stress on book-club nights, and stopped fussing about how the house looks, which brings nods all around the room: let go of perfectionism in all its tyranny. Margaret, a publishing executive, tells her own near-miss story of how she stepped back from the brink of insanity. On her son's fourth birthday, she says, "I'm like 'Oh, my God, he's eligible for Suzuki!' I literally got on the phone and called 12 Suzuki teachers," she says, before realizing the nightmare she was creating for herself and her child. Shutting down your inner helicopter isn't easy. "This is not a shift in perspective that occurs overnight," Matt admits after class. "And it's not every day that I consciously sit down and ask myself hard questions about how I want family life to be slower or better."

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Fear is a kind of parenting fungus: invisible, insidious, perfectly designed to decompose your peace of mind. Fear of physical danger is at least subject to rational argument; fear of failure is harder to hose down. What could be more natural than worrying that your child might be trampled by the great, scary, globally competitive world into which she will one day be launched? It is this fear that inspires parents to demand homework in preschool, produce the snazzy bilingual campaign video for the third-grader's race for class rep, continue to provide the morning wake-up call long after he's headed off to college.

Some of the hovering is driven by memory and demography. This generation of parents, born after 1964, waited longer to marry and had fewer children. Families are among the smallest in history, which means our genetic eggs are in fewer baskets and we guard them all the more zealously. Helicopter parents can be found across all income levels, all races and ethnicities, says Patricia Somers of the University of Texas at Austin, who spent more than a year studying the species at the college level. "There are even helicopter grandparents," she notes, who turn up with their elementary-school grandchildren for college-information sessions aimed at juniors and seniors. (See pictures of Barack Obama's college years.)

Nor is this phenomenon limited to ZIP codes where every Volvo wagon just has to have a University of Chicago sticker on it. "I'm having exactly the same conversations with coaches, teachers, parents, counselors, whether I'm in Wichita or northern Canada or South America," says Honoré. His own revelation came while listening to the feedback about his son in kindergarten. It was fine, but nothing stellar — until he got to the art room and the teacher began raving about how creative his son was, pointing out his sketches that she'd displayed as models for other students. Then, Honoré recalls, "she dropped the G-bomb: 'He's a gifted artist,' she told us, and it was one of those moments when you don't hear anything else. I just saw the word gifted in neon with my son's name ..." So he hurried home and Googled the names of art tutors and eagerly told his son all about the special person who would help him draw even better. "He looks at me like I'm from outer space," Honoré says. "'I just wanna draw,' he tells me. 'Why do grownups have to take over everything?' "

"That was a searing epiphany," Honoré concludes. "I didn't like what I saw." He now writes and lectures about the many fruits of slowing down, citing research that suggests the brain in its relaxed state is more creative, makes more nuanced connections and is ripe for eureka moments. "With children," he argues, "they need that space not to be entertained or distracted. What boredom does is take away the noise ... and leave them with space to think deeply, invent their own game, create their own distraction. It's a useful trampoline for children to learn how to get by." (See pictures of college mascots.)

Other studies reinforce the importance of play as an essential protein in a child's emotional diet; were it not, argue some scientists, it would not have persisted across species and millenniums, perhaps as a way to practice for adulthood, to build leadership, sociability, flexibility, resilience — even as a means of literally shaping the brain and its pathways. Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and the founder of the National Institute for Play — who has a treehouse above his office — recalls in a recent book how managers at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noticed the younger engineers lacked problem-solving skills, though they had top grades and test scores. Realizing the older engineers had more play experience as kids — they'd taken apart clocks, built stereos, made models — JPL eventually incorporated questions about job applicants' play backgrounds into interviews. "If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being" in life, Brown has argued, "play is as fundamental as any other aspect.'' The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that the decrease in free playtime could carry health risks: "For some children, this hurried lifestyle is a source of stress and anxiety and may even contribute to depression." Not to mention the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation of kids who never just go out and play.

Remember, Mistakes Are GoodMany educators have been searching for ways to tell parents when to back off. It's a tricky line to walk, since studies link parents' engagement in a child's education to better grades, higher test scores, less substance abuse and better college outcomes. Given a choice, teachers say, overinvolved parents are preferable to invisible ones. The challenge is helping parents know when they are crossing a line.

Every teacher can tell the story of a student who needed to fail in order to be reassured that the world wouldn't come to an end. Yet teachers now face a climate in which parents ghostwrite students' homework, airbrush their lab reports — then lobby like a K Street hired gun for their child to be assigned to certain classes. Principal Karen Faucher instituted a "no rescue" policy at Belinder Elementary in Prairie Village, Kans., when she noticed the front-office table covered each day with forgotten lunch boxes and notebooks, all brought in by parents. The tipping point was the day a mom rushed in with a necklace meant to complete her daughter's coordinated outfit. "I'm lucky — I deal with intelligent parents here," Faucher says. "But you saw very intelligent parents doing very stupid things. It was almost like a virus. The parents knew that was not what they intended to do, but they couldn't help themselves." A guidance counselor at a Washington prep school urges parents to find a mentor of a certain disposition. "Make friends with parents," she advises, "who don't think their kids are perfect." Or with parents who are willing to exert some peer pressure of their own: when schools debate whether to drop recess to free up more test-prep time, parents need to let a school know if they think that's a trade-off worth making.

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A certain amount of hovering is understandable when it comes to young children, but many educators are concerned when it persists through middle school and high school. Some teachers talk of "Stealth Fighter Parents," who no longer hover constantly but can be counted on for a surgical strike just when the high school musical is being cast or the starting lineup chosen. And senior year is the witching hour: "I think for a lot of parents, college admissions is like their grade report on how they did as a parent," observes Madeleine Rhyneer, dean of students at Willamette University in Oregon. Many colleges have had to invent a "director of parent programs" to run regional groups so moms and dads can meet fellow college parents or attend special classes where they can learn all the school cheers. The Ithaca College website offers a checklist of advice: "Visit (but not too often)"; "Communicate (but not too often)"; "Don't worry (too much)"; "Expect change"; "Trust them."

Teresa Meyer, a former PTA president at Hickman High in Columbia, Mo., has just sent the youngest of her three daughters to college. "They made it very clear: You are not invited to the registration part where they're requesting classes. That's their job." She's come to appreciate the please-back-off vibe she's encountered. "I hope that we're getting away from the helicopter parenting," Meyer says. "Our philosophy is 'Give 'em the morals, give 'em the right start, but you've got to let them go.' They deserve to live their own lives." (See the 10 best iPhone apps for dads.)

What You Can DoAmong the most powerful weapons in the war against the helicopter brigade is the explosion of websites where parents can confide, confess and affirm their sense that lowering expectations is not the same as letting your children down. So you gave up trying to keep your 2-year-old from eating the dog's food? You banged your son's head on the doorway while giving him a piggyback ride? Your daughter hates school and is so scared of failure she won't even try to ride a bike? "I just want to throw in the towel and give up on her," one mom posts on Truuconfessions.com. "This is NOT what I thought I was signing up for." Honestbaby.com sells baby T-shirts that say "I'll walk when I'm good and ready." Given how many books and websites drove a generation of parents mad with anxiety, a certain balance is restored to the universe when it becomes conventional for people to brag about what bad parents they are.
The revolutionary leaders are careful about offering too much advice. Parents have gotten plenty of that, and one of the goals of this new movement is to give parents permission to disagree or at least follow different roads. "People feel there's somehow a secret formula for parenting, and if we just read enough books and spend enough money and drive ourselves hard enough, we'll find it, and all will be O.K.," Honoré observes. "Can you think of anything more sinister, since every child is so different, every family is different? Parents need to block out the sound and fury from the media and other parents, find that formula that fits your family best."
Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting, teaches seminars on how to peel back the layers of cultural pressure that weigh down families. He and his coaches will even go into your home, weed out your kids' stuff, sort out their schedule, turn off the screens and help your family find space you didn't know you had, like a master closet reorganizer for the soul. But any parent can do it just as well. "We need to quit bombarding them with choices way before their ability to handle them," Payne says. The average child has 150 toys. "When you cut the toys and clothes back ... the kids really like it." He aims for a cut of roughly 75%: he tosses out the broken toys and gives away the outgrown ones and the busy, noisy, blinking ones that do the playing for you. Pare down to the classics that leave the most to the child's imagination and create a kind of toy library kids can visit and swap from. Then build breaks of calm into their schedule so they can actually enjoy the toys. (See how to plan for retirement at any age.)

Finally, there is the gift of humility, which parents need to offer one another. We can fuss and fret and shuttle and shelter, but in the end, what we do may not matter as much as we think. Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt analyzed a Department of Education study tracking the progress of kids through fifth grade and found that things like how much parents read to their kids, how much TV kids watch and whether Mom works make little difference. "Frequent museum visits would seem to be no more productive than trips to the grocery store," they argued in USA Today. "By the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it's too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago — what kind of education a parent got, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children."

If you embrace this rather humbling reality, it will be easier to follow the advice D.H. Lawrence offered back in 1918: "How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning."

Of course, that was easy for him to say. He had no kids.

— With reporting by Karen Ball / Kansas City, Mo.; Alexandra Silver / New York City; and Elizabeth Dias and Sophia Yan / Washington

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An induction

2010-03-11T11:49:00.002+08:00

Induct
–verb (used with object)
1.to install in an office, benefice, position, etc., esp. with formal ceremonies: The committee inducted her as president.
2.to introduce, esp. to something requiring special knowledge or experience; initiate (usually fol. by to or into): They inducted him into the mystic rites of the order.
3.to take (a draftee) into military service; draft.
4.to bring in as a member: to induct a person into a new profession.

"Induction". This word brings a sense of a new beginning to me. It's been a long time since this mummy has had a significant beginning. Tomorrow, I will attend an induction. How exciting!

An update

2010-03-11T11:19:00.004+08:00

Dominic is approaching 2 years old soon, he's almost 23 months now. In the previous post I noted that he knows the phonetic sounds of about 50% of the letters, now I think he knows at least 80% of them. Ah ma and Ah gong are teaching him letter-word association, they're up to letter G!

Dominic is really picking up words and sounds very quickly. Often he would repeat the last one or two words that we say or read. He learns new words very quicly too. His sense of humour is more sophisticated and independent. No longer are we the ones that tease him, he'd be the one who baits and teases us now!

The wider range of vocab and better command of language works well for all of us. Sometimes D would be frustrated and throw a tantrum. I'd tell him to speak properly or repeat himself, mummy can't hear or understand him. It seems he does understand this and he'd quiet down. He also respods better to reasoning and logic. This morning I told him he can't use the computer because he's not wearing any clothes. He immediately responded by pointing to his pants and happily allowed me to put them on him. Hopefully this paves the way for greater understanding and less crying.

We've introduced the car seat to him, he sits on it when we make the very short trip from our carpark to ah ma's house's car park.

Last weekend we went for a late Chinese New Year photoshoot. This was requested by ah ma, who insisted that it must be done every year till boy turns twelve! Haha how indulgent and loving of her! But I suspect D will be not as adorable at around seven, so we can shave a few years off haha. We went to a studio that had an indoor studio CNY promotion. The shoot was successful in the sense that D got comfortable quite quickly with the place and the photographer. He ran around and played with the toys and props. He even went up to her and pinched her nose a few times to get her reaction. On the other hand the shoot wasn't that big a success because it was in a small, confined area - D kept running out of the shooting area and refused to stay still at his mark, not to mention pose or smile or look at the camera. The photographer also had a set idea of how she wanted to present the images, but D did not cooperate with her, he didn't want to sit on her stool. There weren't many toys that engaged him that could keep him in one spot. Finally I told the photographer to take down the backdrop and just take the shots casually. She commented that D was the most active toddler she's worked with. I think there are plenty worse that she hasn't met yet haha! I hope we do get some nice, usable shots, we shall see in a week's time.

We've gotten used to the weekday routine at home. Daddy is great at putting D to bed, no noise, no fuss, no singing, just quiet settling down and sleeping. Usually done in about 20 minutes time. Amazing! He should have done this a long time ago. My schedule is work-home-boy-dinner-shower-housework-boy-sleep. No time for tv or anything else. Can't wait for the helper to arrive.

I am finally quite comfortable with sleeping in D's room. I'm usually out by 11.30am. D is also used to our routine, he sleeps peacefully till around 4-5am when he wants his milk. The milkfeed is also quite fuss-free and peaceful by now, minus his usual mid-tone complaining. I love being greeted by D when we wake in the morning. When he wakes earlier, which is usually the case, he'd stomp over and sleep with me on my pillow. Sometimes he'll fall asleep again, or he'll just cuddle and roll around and burrow, till he's bored, then he'll start talking to me. His first word of the day is usually "vacuum" - the vacuum cleaner, with which he has a fascination/fearful obsession. Then he'll go through a few of his favourite words like "MRT train", "bus", "bird park", and burrow some more. If I'm awake I'll reply, or if I'm too sleepy I'll just hug his warm little body and try to lie comfortably. After a while he is bored and wants out, and we both get up officially and start the day. There are rare mornings when he'd sleep till 7+am. Those "late" mornings are a treat for me!

Learning and development

2010-03-01T15:08:00.003+08:00

At 22+ months, Dominic can now:

Recite A to Z
Recognise A to Z in lower case and upper case
Knows the phonetic sounds for about 50% of the letters
Knows a word starting from a letter for about 20% of letters

Count from 1 to 29
Recognise numbers 1 to 20
Count from 1 to 19 in chinese!

A new beginning

2010-03-01T13:44:00.005+08:00

What a difference a week makes!

It is now Day 5 sans-maid. Maid told us last Wednesday night that she wanted to go back, so we sent her off on Thursday. We had plenty of reservations on how we and Dominic would cope. He's not a fragile infant anymore, but a soon-to-be 2 year old toddler is plenty to handle too!

We thought D would miss the maid, but the good news is that toddler's memory is truly quite short. In the beginning, he asked for the maid now and then. By now, he would ask for her once or twice a day and that's it. More like a short question on where is she? But not a longing for her, no tantrums or pining. He's happy to let us take care of him, with the exception of day-time naps.

How it's been so far? It's been good and bad! We're surviving... last night was difficult because D woke at 4am and didn't return to sleep >.< But the past 3 nights were OK. A run-down:

Feeding - not so good! D EXTREMELY picky with food now, it drives us nuts. He's on a white rice, white udon, fried nuggets of fish or meat diet. Supplemented by fruit. Hardly takes any fibre. I'm thinking of re-introducing flaxseed and sneak it in his milk. His regular formula milk is changing its formulation, the new one gives him harder poop. This is worrying when he's not taking in any fibre! I hope he gets out of this picky eating phase soon :S (I hope it IS a phase and not permanent!) MIL has been fantastic with feeding D, coming up with ways and tricks to encourage him to eat more. He'd be stick-thin without her! We are also teaching him to use his utensils more - he is making progress.

Day-time nap - bad! D hasn't gotten used to ah-ma putting him to bed during the day. This results in an overly-tired and cranky tod in the late afternoon. Coupled with the fact that ah-ma dislikes forcing him to sleep, I'm not sure if he'll recover his routine! I sure hope they work out this kink this week, a baby on a suitable routine is a happy baby!

Night-time sleep - average! The good news is that mummy here has been successful so far every night in putting D to bed. I do feel very fulfilled at being able to do this. The first night D took 45 minutes, subsequently he took 30 minutes before entering dreamland. The bad news is that D has a habit of waking up in a foul mood at 4am!! This happened every night. He'd cry and shout angrily. Most nights I was able to pacify him and get him back to sleep, by distraction then calming him down. Last night however I lost the fight - he dozed off, but woke again and didn't go back to sleep for the rest of the morning! I've been up since 4am today. It's terrible. This must be the true taste of mothering / childcare. :P I need to strategise what to do tonight, or maybe I should just pat him to sleep longer and not stop before he's in deep sleep... Poor daddy stayed up together with us, I hope he managed to recoup some sleep this morning. Daddy's been an angel, really patient and tolerant despite how D antangonises him - I think he's reached new heights with his patience, nearing saint-hood!

Shower, changing - good. Other than his habit of not staying still to get dressed, D is quite OK during shower time. Daddy even showered him yesterday - his first attempt!

Play, activity - as per normal. At times when there is only one caregiver (me) and I'm not able to give D any attention, D would keep looking for me for companionship to read a book etc. I think it's because he's always had a companion with him. When there are people around, he'd be his happy ol' self!

Routine to daily life - challenging. Everyone is concerned if I will be able to handle D alone on weekday mornings, getting ready to get out of the house and going over to the IL's. I think it will be tricky but not impossible. I will have to plan further ahead, like get my work clothes ready the night before, wash my hair the night before, and do chores more efficiently. But since safety is foremost on everyone's minds, the IL's maid will come over in the morning to assist us to go to the IL's, on mornings when I will be alone with D. Weekends are tiring too, because looking after D is a full-time job! The playing, feeding, cleaning, is tedious. Hopefully we get more used to this, and with D regaining his day-time nap and establishing a good routine, the days will get better.

There have been many changes these past few days, it's been trying but not without rewards. D is now closer to us more than ever, and we do feel a sense of accomplishment when we are able to take care of him. Without the instigator, we would never have changed our habits, and admittedly the habits needed changing. The maid leaving was overall a good thing for everyone, so that we can move forward and improve! Now we just need more time to get the hang of things.

Highs and lows

2010-02-03T10:15:00.003+08:00

Dominic's days and nights are filled with emotional highs and lows. Soaring highs of happiness and fun and playfulness. He'd play, run about and scream with joy. That is when he is at his most adorable, mischievous self. You can't help but fall in love with him.

But when he hits his low, it is a deep ravine! He'd cry, shout, scold and throw things around. He cannot be pacified. And he holds his unhappiness in his heart so much that he is unable to have his meal. Until he gets out of his tantrum or is distracted by something... then he is all smiles again, a happy angelic little boy.

The extreme mood swings he, and we, have had to go through these days!

Start of the terrible two's?

2010-02-02T11:17:00.002+08:00

We had a difficult night last night.

At 11pm, Dominic suddenly awoke and went into his temper tantrum - for 2 whole hours! He cried and shouted and scolded. We coaxed, threatened, sang, told stories and looked out the window, bribed him with biscuits and water - all to no avail. He was inconsolable!

Finally, he settled down when we turned on his favourite Buddhist VCD. After watching it a while, he went into the bedroom, but refused to sleep, until Daddy told him some stories. It was about 1.30am when he finally succumbed to sleep. We were all exhausted from the ordeal! You can imagine how stoned the three of us were this morning.

The helper did admirably, she was really patient and kind towards Dominic. Much better than me!

There really wasn't any trigger for his tantrum. Lately Dominic has been more short-tempered and hot-tempered. He'd throw a tantrum at the slightest matter, and it took a lot to pacify him. The other night he refused to join the family for dinner at a restaurant, threw such a tantrum that he spent the evening walking around outside and went without his dinner. We are really quite clueless how to handle him.

Is this a sign that the terrible two's are starting?? Dominic is approaching 22 months. It is getting to be a struggle with him - when we want to walk, he wants to stop, and when he wants to stop, we need to go! It's a struggle to get him to follow our instructions.

From what I've read about the terrible two's, the tantrums come about because the toddler is showing his independence and expressing his will, thus the constant fights and tantrums. I hope it is just a phase and that Dominic's temper would mellow. Often I'd stop short of complaining because where could his temper have come from if not me? :P

In the meantime I want to try to work on him getting used to eating at a table in a restuarant. Maybe we should take him out to dine more often. It'd be a challenge, but it'll be worth it for Dominic's development.

A contradictory boy

2010-02-02T10:51:00.004+08:00

When Dominic is at home, he always dreams of going out gai-gai. He will talk about taking the bus, the train; he'd fantasize about riding the escalator, about going to the MRT train station and watching the vehicles on the road.

When we bring Dominic out, often he'd get nervous when we enter a new building or restaurant and start to whine. After a while he'd start to say "home, home" - he wants to go home!

Luckily, once we manage to warm him up, he'd enjoy himself and let himself loose, and not think about going home anymore.

Isn't he contradictory! His heart yearns to go out yet when he's outside, he wants to go home!

Reading the words

2010-01-13T16:21:00.002+08:00

Dominic is keeping up his reading habit. He still loves to read. Lately, I observed that while reading, he would want me to point at the words, and is looking at the words while I read out loud, rather than at the pictures. I think he is taking more interest in words - that's good!

I have been buying some Thomas the Train early readers. He enjoys them very much.

With only a tu-tu in his pocket

2010-01-13T16:19:00.003+08:00

With only a tu-tu in his pocket, Ah-gong brings Dominic out for adventure. Riding on the bus,
riding on the upper deck of a double-decker bus (!), and riding on the MRT train.

These are Dominic's favourite gai-gai moments!

Dominic says

2010-01-06T11:44:00.002+08:00

"Baby eat ju ju" (pacifier)
"Baby sit MRT train"
"Papa (is) home"
"Do-mi-nic!"

Haha!

Milestones at 20 months

2009-12-28T15:12:00.002+08:00

Dominic is now able to:

Confidently count from one to twenty
Confidently recite A to Z
Confidently recognise A to Z in capitals
Recognise about 70% of a to z in small letters
Say 2-worded phrases, e.g. Mummy's car, Thomas toys
Sometimes clap to a beat

He loves his junk food, like hot dogs, fishballs and jelly! He is a huge fan of blueberries, even the sour ones, and raisins. Lately his milk intake has increased, this is good news!

Article: 50 of the world's best design blogs

2009-12-17T11:22:00.001+08:00

From Times Online December 16, 2009

50 of the world's best design blogs

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/interiors/article6953167.ece
Source a late Christmas gift or ideas for a New Year makeover from the coolest interiors blogs on the planet
Lynne Robinson

Do you aspire to something more original than a generic Ikea-filled home?

These blogs are full of inspired home-styling ideas, suggestions of how to support small-scale, affordable designers selling handmade items and vintage and modern homeware, as well as tips for upcycling old furniture.

This list does not cover architecture or wedding design and is a small selection from the thousands of blogs focusing on interiors, graphic and product design. All post regularly and have a strong identity with original content.

50. Lovely Clusters Pretty design finds chosen by a Hawaiian-based graphic designer.
49. The Fabric of my Life Musings and photo collages from a London interior stylist.
48. Design Squish Design blog with an emphasis on nature, sustainability and eco issues.
47. Pillar Box Post London style and observations from an American ex-pat.
46. Automatism The daily visual inspirations of a Canadian illustrator.
45. Nestled In Home renovation and thrifty finds from Finland.
44. Oliveaux A Brisbane-based interior designer shares her passion.
43. Brooklyn Limestone The renovation of a traditional Brooklyn limestone townhouse.
42. Delight by Design Glamorous interiors and classy styling ideas.
41. Please Sir Vintage purchases to covet and more from a North Carolinian designer.
40. Chez Larsson The interiors and craft projects of a Stockholm family home.
39. Katy Elliott New England-inspired selections from an ex-Domino writer.
38. Simplesong Design favourites with a clean and simple quality.
37. Modish Portland-based champion of indie designers.
36. Oh So Beautiful Paper Wedding invitations and inventive stationery ideas.
35. The City Sage California-based Anne Sage’s features include seasonally-themed styling and book reviews.
34. The Design Files Melbourne homes, shops and design.
33. Home Shopping Spy Technically the blog of Ideal Home magazine run on the writer’s sparky comment.
32. Mint Design, art and more from graphic designer Ellie Snow, with an interesting recent series on adapting to a freelance lifestyle.
31. Making it Lovely Feminine favourites, independent design and home decoration.
30. Oh Hello Friend Beautifully-designed and curated posts from a graphic and jewellery designer.
29. Fine Little Day Quirky Scandinavian style from a Swedish designer and photographer.
28. Bliss Photographer Mrs French’s ‘I heart Monday’ wishlist is a weekly highlight.
27. A Field Journal Visual eye candy featuring this talented student’s own photography and craft projects.
26. Coco & Kelley Trend watch from a Seattle-based interior and events stylist with a penchant for elegant glamour.
25. Wee Birdy Incredibly cohesive: London shopping and birds-inspired design, authored by an Australian magazine writer living in London.
24. Pia Jane Bijkerk Unique content from an Australian prop stylist and author living in Amsterdam.
23. Daydream Lily Her other life - dreamy images selected by Melbourne-based research scientist Liss Winnel.
22. Sweet Paul Craft and styling ideas from New York-based food and prop stylist Paul Lowe.
21. Design for Mankind Featuring edgy graphic and product design, this blog has a brilliant video series highlighting issues facing creative freelancers.
20. Dos Family Photographer Jenny Brandt’s aspirational home tours feature stylish Swedish families.
19. This is Glamorous Consistently classy selections with a high glamour factor.
18. Lobster and Swan Hastings design muse Jeska shares her photography and vintage-styled vignettes from her home.
17. Frolic! Relaxed style from a Portland-based floral stylist.
16. Grain Edit Mid-century inspired graphic design.
15. Print and Pattern Popular British blog focusing on colourful surface pattern design.
14. Swiss Miss Unique ideas and products picked by a Swiss graphic designer living in New York.
13. Bloesem Kuala Lumpar-based writer Irene also has an offshoot blog featuring child-specific design.
12. Young House Love Interiors advice, DIY and moodboards from a young couple renovating their own home.
11. Design is Mine A perfectly picked selection of art and design from independent designers worldwide.
10. SF Girl by Bay Bohemian chic from San Francisco-based Victoria Smith, a former art dealer.
9. Creature Comforts Featuring Flickr favourites and promoting handmade design, this blog’s layout is itself a visual treat.
8. Emma's Design Blog Scandinavian style from a Stockholm-based design enthusiast.
7. Poppytalk Vancouver-based blog with a marketplace for independent designers.
6. Decor8 All-round comprehensive design blog written by an American living in Hannover, Germany.
5. Oh Joy! Stylish selections which complement the cool aesthetic of the writer’s own successful stationery range.
4. Desire to Inspire Interiors inspiration galore, co-written on different continents by an Australian and a Canadian.
3. The Selby Uber-cool photographs of creative people in their living spaces, taken by photographer Todd Selby.
2. Design Sponge With a book in the works, Design Sponge includes readers’ DIY ‘before and afters’ and inspiring house tours.
1. Apartment Therapy Every aspect of interior design is covered in this American mega-blog, with the useful option of posing your design dilemmas to its readers.

Lynne Robinson has a design blog at www.teaforjoy.blogspot.com, focusing on British design, tea shops and vintage finds.

Article: The online Christmas gift guide

2009-12-17T11:19:00.002+08:00

The online Christmas gift guide

From The Sunday Times November 22, 2009

Sit back, log on and forget all about the seasonal crowds, with the best sites to help you choose your presents
Katherine Ormerod

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6919998.ece

Okay, you’re not going to get the smell of roasted chestnuts wafting down the pavement, or come across the Salvation Army hollering out Hark the Herald in haberdashery. And there can be no pit stops in Claridge’s for a refuelling martini. However, the advantages of doing all your Christmas shopping from your armchair (or desk during your lunch break), feet up, cup of tea to hand, have persuaded 93% of people surveyed by eDigitalResearch and IMRG to do at least part of their Christmas shopping online this year.

And why not, when you don’t have to haul all your goodies round, cursing the heel on your shoes and elbowing all the other shoppers out the way? Online shopping 2009 is safe, reliable and comparatively stress-free. If you are worried about late deliveries, it’s worth noting that most online sites now deliver up to December 21, with some even offering Christmas Eve delivery in central London.

You can also make a difference buying online by purchasing through thegivingmachine.co.uk or easy fundraising.org.uk. With access to hundreds of sites, including big players such as Amazon and eBay, these sites donate their “click-through” commission to whichever charity or school you would like to benefit, meaning you can give as you buy at no extra cost.

If you are an online Christmas virgin, check out thesiteguide.com, which will point you in the right direction. The following, however, are where the Style team plan to spend their festive pennies.

Gift sites
Iwantoneofthose.com Christmas fun for the whole family, especially good for kids (and kidults).
Last orders December 22, 5pm. We love Retro Stylophone, £14.99, now compatible with your MP3.
Culturelabel.com From geeky fun to arty gifts, this museum collective is the place to go for cerebral offerings. Last orders Depending on partners, up to December 23. We love Diana+ camera, £55
Amazon.co.uk The big daddy of online entertainment also offers well-priced fragrances, electrical items and hot toys, including the best stock of Go Go Hamsters. Last orders up to Christmas Eve (depending on location). We love True Blood season one box set, £23
Buyagift.co.uk Romantic breaks, track days and watersports — this site has it all. Last orders December 23, 2pm. We love Day excursion for two on the Orient Express, £360.
For Her
Net-a-porter.com Luxury brands, up-and-coming labels and one of the best edits available anywhere. Last orders December 21, noon; central London, Christmas Eve, 10am. We love Charm link necklace, £490, by YSL.
Wahanda.co.uk A new spa directory site offering great reviews and vouchers for treatments. Last orders December 22, 4pm. We love Spa voucher, redeemable at more than 370 locations, from £25.
Myla.com Its elegant and feminine lingerie will guarantee brownie points. Last orders December 22. We love Frieda embroidered knickers, from £35.
Asos.com The online leviathan backs its popularity with ever-changing styles from high street to designer fashion. Try asos.com/red for a quick link to sale stock. Last orders December 23. We love Studded red leather duffel bag, £65.
Oliverbonas.com Great value gifts, from pretty frames to flirty dresses, with a useful pricing code. Last orders December 23, using next-day service. We love Pink cashmere slippers, £59.
Mulberry.com User-friendly with a rainbow selection of covetable totes. Last orders December 21, 2pm. We love Abigail violet croc-print suede shoulder bag, £795.
Theconveniencestorefashion.co.uk A great source of niche, limited-edition pieces at the forefront of fashion design. Last orders Allow four weeks for delivery. We love Bespoke initialled T-shirt dress, £295, by Richard Sorger.
For Him
Treathim.com From adrenaline rush to bachelor-pad accessories, you are sure to find something here, even for Mr Fussy. Last orders December 22, 5pm. We love MP3 retro speaker amp, £25.
Oki-ni.com For limited-edition trainers and supercool accessories. Last orders December 16, 2pm. We love Original Nike Air Max, £90
Menalamode.com With more affordable designer labels (jackets from £99), this site offers a compromise between quality and price. Last orders December 23. We love Stripy gloves, £34, by Farhi by Nicole Farhi.
Go-british.co.uk Stock includes bowler hats and stylish brollies, perfect for old-school gents who love a British brand. Last orders December 21. We love Bowler hat, £259, by Locke & Co.
Abebooks.co.uk For first editions as well as literary gossip, reviews and author interviews, AbeBooks is the thinking man’s Amazon — often with lower prices. Last orders Most sellers use Royal Mail, so December 21 is the guide. We love Collectable books under £30 — beautiful original covers dating back to 19th century.
Home
Lifestylebazaar.com This online boutique offers edgy and entertaining accessories. Perfect for quirky gifts. Last orders December 23, 10am. We love Orange fruit bowl £29.50.
Hiddenartshop.com Contemporary homeware, cutting-edge jewellery designers and eco-gifts, this site is crammed with original finds. Last orders December 15, unless product has longer lead time. We love Hoopla silver ring necklace, £44, by Little Object.
Bouf.com Ideal for original artwork, inspiring prints and sculpture. Last orders December 15, 5pm (excluding made-to-order items). We love Giddy Up Horsey cushion, £40, by Zedhead.
Glut.co.uk Combining green-fingered treats with sybaritic indulgence, The Gluttonous Gardener offers a selection of impressively packaged gift crates. Last orders December 22, noon. We love Orange-blossom Liz Earle crate, £78.
Discount
Theoutnet.com There are bargains to be had at net-a-porter.com’s outlet store — just make sure you know her size, as returns charges apply. Last orders December 18, midnight. We love Sequined courts, £348 (were £695), by Christian Louboutin.
Catwalktocloset.com This sample sale portal offers discounts of up to 85%. Last orders December 21, noon. We love Lamé dress, £420 (was £2,470), by Marc Jacobs.
Brandalley.co.uk With different labels on sale every day, you can find pieces from Prada to Whistles at up to 70% less than prices in store. Last orders December 10. We love Stilettos, £106.50 (were £355), by Georgina Goodman.
Kids
Elc.co.uk Check out the fancy-dress costumes and toys, from doll’s houses to fire engines. Last orders December 22, 2pm. We love Rock-star guitar, £23.
Jesters.com Great for some good old-fashioned fun. Look out for wooden trains, juggling sets and puzzles. Last orders December 18, noon. We love Folding medieval castle, £80.
Ilovegorgeous.co.uk Fantasy dresses made for little princesses. Last orders December 23, noon. We love Marie Antoinette dresses, £107.
Firebox.com An incredible selection of gadgets and gizmos, ranging from the eccentric to the ridiculous. Last orders December 23, 5pm (depending on products ordered). We love Magic 8 Ball, £5.95.
Alexandalexa.com Fashionable treats for Suri Cruise wannabes. Last orders December 22, 2pm. We love Navy boys’ coat, £54, by Mayoral.

Adventures in NTUC

2009-12-04T13:50:00.004+08:00

A friend of mine commented "Always go NTUC buy se mi?" today.

And I think, yes I ALWAYS go NTUC and have SO MANY THINGS TO BUY. The list of things to buy is non-exhaustive!

On normal weeks I go to NTUC Xtra at Jurong Point twice, to stock up on groceries, fresh food for the boy and other household stuff. And then there are the ad hoc stuff like toys, gifts, seasonal whatevers. I like to make use of my lunch hour - strictly an hour - to go for a fast shopping trip, so you can imagine there isn't much time to shop and dally. I guess this is why I have to go so often, because each shopping trip has such a time limit, but then one can't carry that many things on a trip anyways.

I calculated that I spent S$500 at NTUC Xtra last month November 2009!

But I love shopping at NTUC. It's big and spacious and chok-full of things. NTUC has everything I need and more. The only gripe is the lines at the cashier on Friday and weekends.

So I figure since I go to NTUC so much I shall share the wonderful buys and discoveries I make there!

I may also put some posts on shopping at Jurong Point under this tag too, since it's crazy to have so many tags for so few posts.

I did it!!

2009-12-01T20:01:00.001+08:00

It feels good to be able to say "I DID IT!!" happily and proudly!! :D

Article: You CAN save your marriage…

2009-12-01T10:28:00.002+08:00

by Ron Afable

(Filed under Dads, Family, Relationships)

http://networkedblogs.com/p19420605

Save your marriage

Ending a relationship through divorce or separation can be the worst thing that could happen to anyone—next only to a death in the family. Infact, in a sense, it is like death…the death of the family as a unit. Tempers flare, tears fall and children often get traumatised, confused, and hurt.
We can only begin to imagine what goes on inside the hearts and minds of the couple who have gone through so much that they resort to throwing the towel in. How hopeless they probably feel.

While sometimes you have no choice but to call it truce, don’t be quick to do it, unless you know that you’ve tried your level best. As cliche as it sounds, a relationship is akin to a garden. If we want it to thrive, we must water it regularly. Not just must special care be given, we need to take into account the seasons as well as any unpredictable weather. In addition, we need to sow new seeds ever so often and pluck out the weeds. Similarly; to keep the magic of love alive we MUST understand that love goes through seasons. Almost every couple has gone through a period of lows…questioning their relationship or marriage. So my friend, even if you are in the bleakest of stages right now…even if it’s the period of winter for your relationship, take comfort in knowing that spring WILL arrive. It’s just a matter of time. Don’t be quick to give up! Instead try to nurture your marriage with these relationship rescue tips.

LOVE- the verb

Stephen Covey, the highly acclaimed author of “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has this to share in his book,

At one seminar where I was speaking on the concept of proactivity, a man came up and said, “Stephen, I like what you’re saying. But every situation is so different. Look at my marriage. I’m really worried. My wife and I just don’t have the same feelings for each other we used to have. I guess I just don’t love her anymore and she doesn’t love me. What can I do?”

“The feeling isn’t there anymore?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he reaffirmed. “And we have three children we’re really concerned about. What do you suggest?”

“Love her,” I replied.

“I told you, the feeling just isn’t there anymore.”

“Love her.”

“You don’t understand. The feeling of love just isn’t there.”

“Then love her. If the feeling isn’t there, that’s a good reason to love her.”

“But how do you love when you don’t love?”

“My friend, love is a verb. Love—the feeling—is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?”

Covey states that love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Love, the feeling, can be recaptured.

Do Not Confess Each Other’s Sins

I recently went home to my parent’s place back in the Phillipines on a mission. Being the eldest, my parents asked for my help to reconcile two of my younger brothers (both married) who have just lately been constantly locking horns over some property issues.

Having not visited for years, my arrival became an impromptu family reunion of sorts. My other brother came to visit too. We drove to a nearby resort to celebrate. The atmosphere was festive, everyone was in high spirits. It took only a conspiratorial wink and a nod and a look surreptitiously passed among us brothers, and we knew it was time. The four of us excused ourselves from the rest of the family (wives and kids) and walked to a spot where we could have some privacy.

It helped that my role and influence as the eldest remained as how it was when we were younger and were still living together. Without much ado, I started, “Boys, we have an issue and we have to address it. This is how we’re going to do it: without forgetting that we are here to resolve this issue, each of you (addressing the two brothers) will tell us what mistakes you did to cause and worsen this feud. You have been busy confessing your brother’s sins, it is now time for you to confess yours.”

I was surprised that the first one asked to “confess his sins” did not only identify his faults, he also went as far as elaborating his wrong attitudes, his jealousy, and pride as the root of his mistakes. He ended up apologizing to the other brother for those “sins.” When it was the other brother’s turn, he also did a good job “prosecuting” himself, by admitting his mistakes.
When the two brothers shook hands and hugged, our mother who was earnestly watching from a distance shed a tear of joy.

Like my brothers, a husband and wife can have a misunderstanding. However, things can get out of hand when both would focus on proving the other’s guilt. It becomes a “you started it,” or a “I did something wrong, but your reaction was worse,” or, “You are more wrong than I am,” kind of finger-pointing drawn-out battle. No one would want to accept defeat.

We have a saying that says, “when you point a finger to someone, the rest of your fingers are pointing towards you.”

The Enrichment Journal reports that the divorce rate in America is 41% for the first marriage, 60% for the second and 73% for the third. I am bringing this up because separation may not be the answer. It could happen again and again, unless you start looking inside of you and try to see how you have contributed to the demise of your relationship.

Be More Compassionate

Accept your spouse’s imperfections. No one is perfect, but two people can be perfect for each other. And never forget that you have your own set of imperfections.

Open Up

You need to muster up your humility. Instead of talking about your frustrations towards your spouse, talk about your frustrations about yourself. About how you are not handling the situation well, then humbly ask for her help. You will be surprised at how she would reciprocate.
Absolutely avoid finger-pointing battles.

Give Her Importance

Usually, the trouble is doubled by if you are constantly on the lookout for her mistakes and your only means of relating to her is by measuring how miserable she makes you feel. It becomes a chicken-and-egg argument: she makes you feel bad so you make her feel bad so she makes you feel worse, ad nauseam.

Most importantly, always remember to put more importance to the relationship than on how you feel about it. When you do, you will be surprised that that is the only way for the relationship to make you happy and contented.

Article: Your Role As A Parent

2009-12-01T09:42:00.004+08:00

Came across this article this morning with a rather different and contradicting view on discipline and how to raise a child. Not sure if it is too indulgent, although I wish I could be that indulgent and not suffer any negative consequences - I suspect there will be! But I think it touches on a key point of self esteem and how important it is to nurture a healthy self esteem in a child. This is something that has often been neglected over good grades, behavior, etc.

Your Role As A Parentby Chitra Jha

http://networkedblogs.com/p19384925

(Filed under Behaviour, Bigger Kids, Family, Moms)

Most of us take our role as a parent way too seriously. We feel completely responsible for our offspring’s welfare. We consider it our duty to guide them in all aspects of their lives. After all we are the parents; we know what is best for our children. If we will not guide them, who will?

All these arguments are well-intentioned and I have no issues with these. But in our desire to do the best for our children, we forget to give them ample doses of love, affection, and understanding. We think that too much love would spoil them. We believe in discipline more than understanding.

In my view, all that we parents ever need to do is to provide generous dollops of love and acceptance to our children. In the absence of a warm and loving atmosphere, no child can ever achieve her full potential. Even discipline does not really work in a hostile environment. In my practice as a life skills coach, I come across individuals with low self-esteem, which stems from their childhood. Unless the home atmosphere is warm, caring, safe, protective, and friendly, a child cannot be self-confident. And as you well know, self-esteem is the most critical factor in achieving success in life.

Don’t Kill Their Enthusiasm

When we like ourselves for what we are, we are more likely to work hard and achieve more. Observe your children. Your encouraging, loving words are their biggest motivators. The moment you put them down, their enthusiasm to do anything vanishes in thin air. If your children are not doing well at school, first look at your home environment. Be objective. Ask yourself; are you the cause of their poor self-esteem? Most of the times, we unfavorably compare our children to their friends. What do you think it does to their self-image? We think that by shaming them, we are motivating them to excel. We couldn’t be more wrong. Apply this rule to yourself. Do you strive to work harder if someone ridicules you? No. You would build up frustration, and anger towards that person. That is exactly what is happening in your home. Pay attention to it and take corrective measures.

My favorite line is a cry from a child, “Mum, love me the most, when I deserve it the least.” This line haunts me. Yes, when we think that our child does not deserve any love because he has been naughty, disobedient, destructive, or a failure; that is when she needs our love the most. Our job at these times is to trust our children and help them discover the talents, abilities, resources, and the personal best that is hidden behind their rough and unappealing exteriors.

We feel let down and disappointed by our children, if they do not tow our line. We label them as ‘difficult’ children. Have you ever wondered if the children feel the same way about us as well? Have we ever given unconditional love to our children? Why do we always have to be judgmental at every step? Our parenting years (and our children’s ears!) are full of ‘good boy’, ‘bad boy’, ‘good girl’, and ‘bad girl’ at each step and after each action. From praise to disgrace, such adjectives confuse children. Their self-worth fluctuates from minute to minute.

Look at their strengths – Not flaws!

Our attention is more focused on the socks left on the floor, unmade beds, badly done homework, bad influence of friends, poor grades, and complaints from the teachers. We do not focus on their good qualities, assets, and strengths, especially when these do not meet with our pre-conceived notions of what is good and what is bad. If we are constantly reminded of our shortcomings, we start believing in them. Our children do the same. By telling them about their strengths, we help them believe in themselves. Their worth increases in their own eyes. They feel capable of making a difference in the world. This empowered attitude leads them to success in whatever field they choose.

So let us get out of our cocooned worlds of expectations and reasoning. Let us pay more attention to playing with our children and understanding them. The time spent together with them is something that we should treasure more than anything else. I believe that our children are our ‘gurus’. There is a lot that we can learn from them. Just observing them is an education by itself.

Are we ready for this new challenge?!?

The first step towards meeting this challenge is spending quality time with your children. Children love to do things with their parents. They feel most loved when their parents make time for them. Otherwise they feel disconnected and empty from inside. So play with your children, do activities like cooking and running errands together. Talk to them about ‘their’ day and ‘your’ day, and see them blossom.

Children also feel loved when you do things ‘for’ them. Make a special breakfast for your son, or help your daughter study for a test; teach your child how to ride her bike. But remember that there is a fine line between doing too much for your children, and doing things as an expression of love. Let them do for themselves what they are capable of doing. Just be flexible with help. Don’t make them entirely dependent upon you.

Some children love to hear words of praise or other affirming statements such as ‘I love you’. Sometimes the words you use can make or break your child’s spirit. Your kind and encouraging words can lift your child up, while harsh words spoken in anger can wound a child. Try sticking sweet notes in your child’s Tiffin box, highlight her/his talents and achievements, and create a special nickname for your little one. These gestures will boost the confidence of your child.
Some children are particularly cuddly. They like to be hugged, while some others do not wish to be held. Such children need physical contact to feel loved. Some parents find it extremely difficult to be physically affectionate with their children because they themselves were never loved that way by their parents. If your child keeps hanging on to you or constantly touches you, it is a sign that she needs to be hugged, kissed, and patted on the back. Even tousling their hair, or wrestling with them will satisfy them.

What is the role of gifts in bringing up your children? Most children appreciate receiving gifts. Their faces light up, they talk animatedly and cherish their gift for a long time. A gift need not be expensive to be special. But do not give gifts to substitute for your time, hugs, affirming words, and things done for your child. Then it becomes a bribe; let us not bribe our kids. A child whose emotional love tank is full will be more responsive, co-operative, and happier than the one whose tank is always devoid of love.

So, pay attention to your children. Listen to their requests. Pay attention to their complaints. Be patient with them, and understand what they might need from you. After all, love is the foundation of every child’s happiness and sense of security.

Let us re-visit Kahlil Gibran’s famous poem in The Prophet.

Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams!
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of infinite,
And He bends you with His might.
That His arrows may go swift and far!
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
So He loves also the bow that is stable.

Chitra Jha is a healer, writer, corporate trainer and verbal ability instructor.

Life is good when

2009-11-20T11:18:00.003+08:00

Life is good when you're snuggling in bed with your hubster, and he tells you you're beautiful and sexy. And he does not sound like he's joking. Haha!

Life is good when you have something to look forward to.

Life is good when we gather as a family for dinner, and Dominic is up to his adorable tricks, everyone laughing and happy and eating durian cake!

Of playgroups and difficult children

2009-11-09T13:23:00.007+08:00

We were having a conversation with some mummies this morning and the topic came to toddler playgroups, and difficult and disruptive children in class.

I know first hand how trying it is to have a difficult child in class. Dominic is by nature slow to adapt to new things and needs time to warm up to anything new. As such he had never really enjoyed playgroups, because he couldn't accept the new environment, people and activities. We've been to several trial classes which were disasters. He would cry once the classroom door was closed. He would cry once the teacher started to sing! Many of these playgroups involved a lot of circle time, where everyone would sit in a circle and the teacher would lead the activities. Dominic did not do well with this, because he didn't find the activity interesting, he didn't like the way the teacher sounded/sang (the singing was fine, he was just very sensitive to new people making loud noises and music), and when he got bored with the activity or when we were in between activities, there was nothing to occupy him and he would get anxious and thus act up.

In most playgroups, once a child fussed badly, he would be brought out of the room to calm down so as not to disrupt the other students. I think this is a reasonable form of action. But this resulted in us going in and out of class, and missing a large part of class. The worst part of this was that it taught Dominic that if he cried loud and long enough, he could get out of class. We spent most of the time outside the class.

We used to dread playgroup! I was worried he'd never learn how to behave in class.

Then from a mummy's recommendation, we discovered this center called Wee Care. I'm glad to say that after 4 sessions, Dominic has learnt to enjoy his playgroup! Several factors have made this playgroup suited to Dominic's temperament.

The classroom was spacious and had toys on-hand for free-play. While class was on-going, Dominic could entertain himself with the toys and puzzles and books, while watching the activities. When he felt interested and comfortable enough, he would join in the class. This is a great arrangement because he could choose what he wanted to do and thus there were no melt-downs, cutting down disturbance to the rest of the class greatly. We didn't have to leave the room, so he could still gain something from the activities by watching closeby. I am hoping he would grow to be comfortable enough to participate in more of the activities, but for now I am contented with his level of participation and comfort.

In Wee Care, there are three different areas for activities - the classroom for circle time activitiesm, the playroom for free play, and the playground downstairs. There would be a different theme and different set-up and toys each week. The change of environment kept things fresh and interesting for Dominic. The less bored he is, the less he would fuss.

There is about 30 minutes worth of free play during the class, with the purpose of learning through play. Every week the school would put up different toys and activities according to the week's theme in the playroom. Children would be allowed to play freely, while the teachers engaged them. Dominic could explore and play without restraint. I think this is a good way to teach him that his play reward comes after he has finished his lesson during circle time. He also had the freedom to do an activity e.g. painting, when he felt like it, not as dictated by the teacher.

It is also great that Dominic has grown quite fond of a particular teacher, he likes it when she shows him attention and would try to get close to her.

During the start of the last lesson, Dominic said "mum mum, mum mum". I believe he looks forward to snack time most of all. He was always the biggest eater at the table, having several servings of the food! I can imagine him in primary school, just waiting for recess time to arrive...

If someone asked me what did Dominic learn from class, I would say - nothing much! But I think it's a good way to spend an hour and a half, where he could be put in a different, fresh environment and for him to learn to slowly adapt to it. I also want to gently introduce class structure to him, where there is a dictated time for study, play, music, etc. and for him to learn to follow it. He no longer cries in class, even when the teachers sing. He still tries to escape from circle time and whines to be let out, but can be distracted by toys. I am relieved that we have managed to find a playgroup that works for us!

This term is till December this year. I'm not sure what comes after, we'll see how it goes!

It's tedious having to manage a child with a shy temperament such as Dominic's. I wish he would be more easy-going and unafraid of new things, like why doesn't he enjoy exploring play gyms more and play in ball pits and ride in toy buggies? I try not to get over-anxious about it and try to stop obsessing over his behavior. After all most shy and difficult children do grow out of it and emerge as normal functioning adults, no? Not to mention, all that reservedness and hot temperedness has got to come from somewhere! (*guilty*) I am also not so convinced that a hard, forceful method is a good way to try and change him. I'm hoping that if we respect his personality and encourage him to make progress at his own pace, change will happen for the better, sooner or later! I also try to keep in mind the notion that I should look out for and encourage what he is good at, instead of pin-pointing and harping on what he lacks.

The next challenge I want to pose to Dominic is playgyms. I want him to be able to play confidently and enjoy exploring the gym. So when we're able to, I hope to bring him to the playgym on a Sunday morning. I expect it'd take about three tries (hopefully!) for him to really enjoy it, and it's alright!

18 month celebrations

2009-11-06T13:41:00.002+08:00

This is a belated post.

To celebrate Dominic turning 18 months, we did a few things.

1) Lunch at Miao Yi Vegetarian Restaurant at Coronation Plaza on 11 October 2009, Saturday, with my in-laws. Food was good!

2) Photoshoot at Jacob Ballas Children's Garden with C&T Photography Studio. I jumped at the chance of a photoshoot when C&T advertised their 1 hour outdoors promotion. It was a good price, and we have not had a photoshoot for a long time since Dominic first birthday, so I went for it!

It was a nice sunny afternoon on Sunday 25 October 2009. We met the photographers at the entrance of the garden 4pm and in we went! The weather wasn't too hot but it still felt warm and humid. Dominic enjoyed running about on the path. It was a lot easier for us because we didn't have to carry him all the time. There were lots to see, lots of plants and educational structures. The photographers were professional and the lady was good at engaging Dominic. The highlight of the day was the waterplay area - there were fountains and water features and the children went crazy in there! Needless to say, Dominic dove straight in! Soon he was soaked as he played with abandon. His tongue was stuck out most of the time because he kept licking the water. I worried a little about bacteria but what's a mummy to do? You can't enjoy and yet be overly hygienic right? :P

The photos turned out great! There were nice solo shots of Dominic and some nice ones of the family. It was a very worth-while investment and a fun way to enjoy the garden.

Dominic as toddler

2009-11-06T13:08:00.003+08:00

Dominic is now 18 and a half months old, officially a toddler. He can walk, talk, has a sense of humor, is mischievous and is a real cutie-pie. We love playing with him and watching him do stuff.

He has a cute manner of walking around idly and swinging his hands, just being happy and content, knowing that the people he loves and who loves him are around him. When I see him like this I think this is the epitome of a "care-free childhood".

Most interestingly, I notice that his mind has matured too. Sometimes I would catch him on his own playing or entertaining himself. One evening he was in his room alone, both hands tugging at the top of his t shirt, then clapping his hands, then tugging again. I don't know what he was thinking but it amused him. He has also learnt to count by himself. A few days ago he counted his bricks as he laid them out on the floor - one, two, three, four, five. He can recite and recognise numbers one to ten reliably, but I have never encouraged him to learn how to count things, because I thought it was too advanced. Surprisingly, he got it on his own. Again, he has proven cleverer and more ready for "advanced stuff" than I thought!

I believe this shows a maturity of mind, and the ability to fantasise, reason and entertain. Dominic has always had a thoughtful side, when we teach him something new he'd listen, repeat, think, and listen intently again. Now we can see that he is processing in his mind and projecting out what he has learnt through actions, without our prompting.

Lately he has been in a "good mood" too. My maid had commented on this. Smiling and laughing more. The home environment hasn't changed. What I think has changed is that with Dominic's maturity, he is better able to understand what's going on and find more humour in things. He "gets" jokes and the games that we play with him. He also comes looking for us to play more often. When his uncle is at home, he'd go look for his uncle and pull him to play. His sense of humour has grown more sophisticated, we can give him a sly cheeky smile or look and he'd get it and return it back to us. When he plays with toys, or when he reads a book, he'd find things funny and laugh out loud. Before this, I know he enjoys reading a lot but he doesn't really smile or laugh at the book. Now when he reads, sometimes he'd smile or laugh out from the satisfaction of reading, or from spotting something he likes in the book, or from relating to the content. It's so much fun to watch him think and process his thoughts, and react!

He can recognise most of the alphabet in upper case, with a few mistakes here and there, like mistaking N for H for instance. He also can recite the alphabet from A to Z with about 80% accuracy. We would fill in the blanks and he will take off from where he remembers. I am beginning to introduce the alphabet in lower case, I hope it will not overwhelm him.

With the more mature Dominic, I try to reason and explain things to him, instead of forcing him against his will. It is probably still too early for him to understand everything, and sometimes I will have to impose my authority. But I find that explaining and persuading him tends to result in less fights and tantrums, although it will take more time and patience!

Other observations about Dominic is that it seems he prefers the color blue, I think it may be his favorite color. He'd usually choose the blue ball, or the blue coin/counter.

My helper has commented that lately Dominic does not like her stir-fried dishes, like stir-fried vegetables with meat. I think it is more a phase - when it comes to diet Dominic goes through phases. Not long ago he loved the fresh yellow noodle and ate it constantly, but suddenly stopped after about three weeks. I encouraged her not to give up and that once he got over his current steam egg phase, he will switch to something else. The problem is not likely about her cooking nor use of garlic because he has been eating such food previously without protest. Sadly Dominic does seem to be a little picky when it comes to food but I hope he'd not torture the helper so much!

Dominic is still very much attached to his pacifier. But I notice the urge (gian) is sometimes triggered by the caretaker. He knows who would often give him the pacifier and tends to ask for it when he sees her. For example come evening time, one look at the helper and he'd have the craving for the pacifier. And he'd fight when she removes the pacifier from his mouth. But when he is occupied with playing or reading with me, he'd happily allow me to take the pacifier away from him and not ask for it afterwards. So I think in some part the craving is by association.

Dominic's favourite vehicle is still the bus. He loves taking a walk to the bus stop or road side to wait for his favourite bus service number nine-nine. Oh how happy he is when his grandpa is home - this means several walks downstairs!

A new favourite of his is Thomas the Tank Engine. He now loves to watch the video and listen to the song "Go Go Thomas" on the official website. He loves this song and can watch the video several times in a row. It's addictive for him! For the rest of us it's getting a little tedious.

He is getting more affectionate and would come and hug me and the helper now and then. He loves a good cuddle. Some weekdays he'd come wake me up by calling me and hugging my face. He loves to play catch with his dad too and is always ready to play. He's such a cute little boy!

Stats at 18 months

2009-10-27T09:23:00.004+08:00

We went for Dominic's 18 month checkup and vaccination yesterday.

At 18 months and a week old, he is 83cm tall, 12kg heavy, with a head circumference of 48cm. Doctor commented that he is growing well and is above average. He could be taking in about 2 ounces more milk, but since he is eating yogurt and cheese it's ok.

Doctor also commented that he is a little overweight. This is seen from the weight-for-age chart on which he is in the 90th percentile. Seriously?! He looks thin! He is in the 75th percentile for the other stats.

Dominic enjoyed the clinic waiting area, but cried loudly when he went into the consultation room. He cried from start to finish, with the injection in the middle! There was no fever yesterday, but we'll monitor for the whole week. He didn't sleep very well yesterday and last night.

Poor boy could be teething as well, we suspect his molars are sprouting. He is drooling more and has taken to chewing on the boardbooks.

Kampung mama and Kampung boy

2009-10-07T15:11:00.007+08:00

You know you are a Kampung Mama when you feed your son apple by biting off a piece, chomping it into smaller pieces in your mouth, then popping the pieces out of your mouth and feeding them to your boy using your fingers. EEEWWW!

That's how far I've regressed. >.<

Dominic is a Kampung Boy.

His dress sense is very simple, uncluttered. He is happiest in a light, baggy singlet and cloth nappy. He hates collars, long pants, and pulls angrily at long sleeves. He hates putting on his clothes, he just wants to run about naked.

He eats with his fingers and makes a big mess. He prefers others to feed him using fingers rather than spoon!

Toys don't hold his interest for long. He likes to throw baskets, collanders and bowls around the house. And he likes to open cupboards, ransack the items and rearrange them.

He enjoys walking on the grass and he loves dogs, birds, and buses (??).

Feeding woes

2009-10-07T13:48:00.002+08:00

As Dominic grows older, he gets more opinionated and has many preferences. We are in the throes of feeding woes. He has decided that he doesn't like porridge anymore, but prefers rice. He also likes to feed himself. We tried to teach him to use the spoon but it has not been successful. He cannot focus on learning how to use the spoon, instead he plays with it - hitting the bowl, mixing the food, etc. But he loves to eat with his hands, especially the thick yellow noodle. He'd dangle the noodle in front of his face, pop one end into his mouth and sluuuurp it all in. He also dislikes being fed and sitting in the high chair. The helper has resorted to feeding him with her hands! He is a true blue kampong boy, all that's missing is a banana leaf for a plate. It is a terror feeding him outside.

Lately he has rejected fish. It's worrying because fish is an important part of a child's diet. I may have to introduce cod liver oil soon. In the meantime, I have suggested that the helper deep fry the fish like in fish and chips, to see if he will accept it.

Sadly Dominic is no longer the chubby baby as before. He has grown thinner, but taller.

Alphabets

2009-09-12T16:07:00.002+08:00

Dominic is able to recognise and name the following alphabets in capital letters - A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, O, P, S, and Z!

I can count!

2009-09-12T15:57:00.005+08:00

** Correction - Dominic can recite from 1 to 10 by himself! WOW!

Dominic can now recognise and name numbers 1 to 10 reliably. He can also count by saying the number that follows next. E.g. we say 1, 2.... and he'll say 3. He recognises the numbers' order from small to big. He loves to count the steps when he climbs or is being carried up and down the stairs.

His favourite number is 9. Maybe because there are plenty of 9's around us - our block number, house unit number and the number of the bus that goes down our road. Bus nine-nine!

Mimicking mummy

2009-09-08T14:54:00.002+08:00

I often tell Dominic "Come! Come! Let's go!" when I want him to follow me to do something.

Last night Dominic heard and mimicked me. He repeated "Come! Come!" after me. It was funny!

Understanding stories

2009-09-08T13:58:00.006+08:00

Lately I introduced Dominic to some new books.

The first book is Blue Hat, Green Hat by Sandra Boynton. Boynton is a popular children's writer whose stories have a funny twist to them. I found the book quite funny and entertaining. Dominic however did not get the humour at all. He had no interest in this book right from the beginning, and I could hardly get him to listen to the whole book. I guess he just does not get Boynton's sense of humour.

The second book is The Lion And The Mouse from the Step Into Reading series. Surprisingly, Dominic enjoyed the story. I thought this book would be more draggy and complex and boring than the Boynton book, but I was wrong. This book consists of 20 pages, and Dominic could sit through it easily. A sign that he likes the book is that he will want to read it repeatedly. I think Dominic prefers books with an established storyline - a head, body, and an ending. 20 pages, without flaps, is about as long as he can concentrate on.

DOMINIC WALKS!

2009-09-01T09:36:00.008+08:00

31st August 2009, Monday, is officially the day when Dominic walks independently! The long-awaited day has come! He is 16 months and 13 days old!

MIL reports that in the afternoon after his lunch and bath, Dominic went to the bedroom to look at the religious books, then got down at the doorway and started walking to the kitchen. And he never stopped after that! Throughout the whole day, he stood up and walked everywhere on his own initiative. No more crawling for him!

We were all at MIL's for NN's birthday dinner that night, and Dominic walked around the house. He was so cute! He was still a little wobbly so he'd stumble or sit down after a while, but he definitely preferred to walk to get somewhere and did it on his own accord. He walked from the bedroom past the living and dining room and to the kitchen, made a wobbly U-turn and walked back out again. It's so cute! And a little drunkish.

Our baby is officially a toddler; he's a big boy now! We're all so proud! :) The pair of Barney sandals we bought over the weekend would definitely get some use now.

In other news, we've spotted several molars sprouting in Dominic's mouth. Not just singles - they're all coming out in a row! On both sides and bottom and top rows too! Must be quite an experience to have them all growing out together. Hopefully once this phase is over Dominic will be able to eat more solid food and up his milk intake.

Article: Parenting Shy Children

2009-08-21T09:39:00.002+08:00

Taken off The Asian Parent Singapore edition
http://sg.theasianparent.com/articles/parenting_shy_children_alan_yip_mind_edge

Parenting Shy Children
By theAsianparent Singapore Team

Parenting Guru, Alan Yip, advices parents on how to raise "shy" children. Alan is the author of best-seller, FUNtastic Parenting, and the founder of Mind Edge.

First of all what we must be aware of and careful about is not to use negative labelling, if we call our child shy, we are conditioning them to be shy, day in and day out and that is terrible, this is a diservice that we will be doing to them.

So instead, we need to change our language. How do we do it? Rather than calling them shy, we should say they are a bit reserved, or it just takes a little bit more time for them to warm up and speak up. Instead of focussing on their shyness, now we have to give them exposure. That means get them together with other children. One of the best ways is to team up this child with aother younger child. When we now pair them up, the so called 'shy child' with a younger chuld, by default this older child's confidence will go up, as this child is not dealing with another child of equal or greater capabilities. So that is one way to enhance the self esteem of the shy child.

Another way, start catching the child doing things right. We are hungry for recognition, if we start to be Sherlock Holmes and look for good things that they are doing right, focus on their efforts and praise them when appropriate, you now ignite their fire of confidence at one step at a time and not over night, but over time. This is some of the strategies for parents to use.

Another key area is to identify this childs unique strengths and qualities. What is the child good at? If the child is very artistic, great! Praise the particular trait in specific terms. "Wow, mummy loves the way you use the colour combinations, the brush strokes are very bold. I love the vibrancy of the colour." You have solid praise to help the child become more confident. Don't focus on weaknesses, build on strengths. That is another extrememly important area for parents to keep in mind.

Article: Parents as Coaches

2009-08-21T09:36:00.001+08:00

Taken off The Asian Parent, Singapore editionhttp://sg.theasianparent.com/articles/parents_as_coaches_kenny_toh

Parents as Coaches
By Kenny Toh

As parents, we play many different roles in our children’s lives. We provide for their needs, guide them when they are lost, teach them new skills, become their source of comfort and support when life gets tough, and discipline them when they misbehave. The list seems endless, but there is one thing for certain; all are driven by the intention to give them our best as well as bring out the best in them.

Today's children are developing and growing at an alarming rate and posing parents with new challenges that traditional approaches to parenting fail to address.

The authoritarian approach that demands children to do or behave as told fails to foster mutual respect, while the disciplinarian approach is overly skewed on correcting external behaviours such that we overlook the innate goodness in our children. On the other extreme, permissive or laissez-faire parents who give in easily to their children's demands in a frantic bid to be liked often fail to instill the necessary values that are essential for raising self-reliant and socially responsible children. A fresh perspective to parenting that is relevant to raising today’s children is certainly needed. Most parents want to bring out the best in their children, but many do not know how.

Unfortunately, love and good intentions are not enough. Apart from that, children also need lots of guidance, encouragement and support. Within each child lies a seed of magnificent potential, waiting to be nurtured or nourished to fruition. Hence, amongst the many hats that are available to us, the one that is highly appropriate for helping our children uncover, develop and actualise their potential is that of a ‘coach’.

Parents-as-Coaches is an approach to parenting founded on the premise that our primary role as parents is to bring out the unique greatness in our children. Powered by love and centred on the well-being of the child, it integrates the heart of parenting with the practical disciplines of personal coaching, enabling us to evoke the confidence, resilience, independence and compassion within our children. Our task is to guide them to uncover and manifest their innate potentials through being who they are, who they can be, and who they want to be.

A child’s development is a function of nature and nurture. Apart from being the source of genetic constitution that determines our children’s nature, we also play a critical role in shaping the environment in which they are nurtured to develop and grow. Pre-schools, schools and enrichment centres fill only one part of our children’s environment for growth. A larger part depends on the nature of interactions between parents and children.

As a start, parents who aspire to coach their children effectively may begin by applying the following set of powerful and enduring principles.

The seven principles of coaching for parents are as follow:-

1. Lead by Example
Children learn through modeling and the most effective way to influence them is not through our words, but our actions and behaviors. For example, it is not uncommon to spot a parent yelling at a child “Don’t scream!” The incongruence between our behaviours and our message can send a conflicting signal that causes confusion in their learning. This principle reminds us to first be what is desired of them ourselves, and let them model after our way of being. In other words, it calls for us to ‘walk the talk’ and lead by example

2. Be Powered by Love
In Parents-as-Coaches, we view love as an unconditional acceptance of our children and a willingness to extend ourselves to nurture their growth. Accepting our children as who they are liberates us from the common tendency to mould them into who they are not. To truly love a person with full acceptance is no easy task. Each child has its own strengths and weaknesses, and accepting the latter is challenging especially for parents. A natural tendency is to work on the weaknesses, trying to eradicate or fix them as if the child would be ‘perfect’ when that is accomplished. But coaching is not about turning our children into what we think they should become. It invites us to take a more expansive and generative view. Instead of focusing on our children’s weaknesses, we help them to harness their strengths such that the weaknesses become irrelevant.

3. Nurture the Nature
To nurture means to cultivate from within, and not impose our values from the outside. All children begin with a seed of goodness and our job is like that of a gardener, nurturing the growth of the seedlings by providing the proper nutrients, and weeding out negative influences where appropriate. The critical nutrients that we provide our children include love, encouragement, support, and guidance. This principle directs us to pay attention to understanding the nature of our children, and explore ways to nurture their unique gifts and talents.

4. Be Guided by Vision
Being result-oriented is one of the distinctive features of coaching. Begin with a clear vision of what your child wish to accomplish, and then translate it into specific goals that are worth pursuing. Goals are important guideposts that make the journey of growth meaningful. Children are naturally inspired and motivated towards attaining goals that they have set for themselves as opposed to meeting expectations that parents place on them.

5. Focus on the Actions
Action transforms reality. A key aspect of coaching is about guiding our children to feel sufficiently empowered to take actions so as to realize their goals and aspirations. Through actions, they get the feedback and lessons that are necessary for learning and growth. Without action, there is no result, and dreams remain simply as dreams.

6. Engage the Heart and Mind
To influence and guide our children, establishing and maintaining rapport is critical. We need to constantly engage their minds and their hearts, paying attention to their thoughts and emotions that are may not be reflected clearly in their behaviours. Seek first to engage their heart, then the mind, for they seldom care about how much we know until they know how much we care about them.

7. Enjoy the Journey
Parenting is a privilege for a life-long journey of joy and growth shared between the parent and the child. This last principle reminds us to be present in our children’s lives and enjoy the journey with them. Often, the quality of time spent together is in the quantity.

Coaching our children effectively does not require a university degree or a Ph.D. in child psychology. What is required is a commitment to continuously learn and apply the right principles and practices that will enhance our effectiveness in bringing out the best in our children. It is a practical discipline that most parents get lots of opportunities to apply daily. Begin with a shift in mindset. Start by being a coach, thinking as a coach, and acting as a coach.

When in doubt, be guided by the seven principles!

Walking progress

2009-08-20T14:42:00.003+08:00

Boy is making good progress with walking.

Now,

. He likes to walk "monkey-style" by holding our hands while we stand behind him. Sometimes he chooses to walk rather than crawl.

. He can walk 8 steps unassisted.

. He can cruise with one hand holding on support

. He can walk slowly with us holding one hand while we walk beside him

The MIL says husband walked at about 17 months, and expects Dom to be the same. In many ways Dom is similar to husband. That's both good and bad! Husband disliked drinking milk, and Dominic suddenly lost interest in milk about a month ago. It was as if a switch just got turned off. Intake dropped from 7 ounce a feed to 3, just like that. Without warning, no rhyme nor reason. We are at wit's end.

Well, they being similar gives me a guide on what to expect from Dominic, at least.

Reflections on playschool and behavior at 16 months

2009-08-18T09:45:00.009+08:00

From the age of 12 months, Dominic has attended some trial sessions of playschools. These playschools are generally short, developmental sessions for children that focus on different subjects, e.g. music at Kindermusik, fun and learning activities at Gracekids and Julia Gabriel, or gym sessions at MyGym.

Dominic has never been a very attentive student. He tends to do his own thing, and roam off to explore or protest when the activity does not catch his interest. But generally he is able to adapt to these lessons with no problem.

We did not commit to a playschool, because I thought he was doing fine without it, and I was still shopping around for the right one - indecisive mummy!

About two weeks ago, we attended a class conducted by a mummy-teacher. We were there early and he was happy in the room while the adults chatted. When she started to sing, Dominic immediately cried. He had a total meltdown. The class was basically wasted - he refused to go in and we spent the hour outside playing. I was perplexed by his behavior, because this guy loves music - he watches Barney and Wheels on the Bus, and we sing to him frequently. Dad thinks it's the teacher's bad singing :S

But I wanted to test this again, so a week later we went to a Kindermusik trial. Dominic attended the same trial when he was younger, about 13 months. This time, he started to fuss at the counter while taking his temperature. He cried loudly when we entered the classroom. He had a meltdown again. We couldn't get him to settle in the class, he hated the teacher's singing, and we had to go out of the shop to pacify him again.

I was really quite affected by his behavior. What could be wrong? He had been fine with previous playschools, and I could not understand what changed.

I thought it may not be totally his fault because it was really crowded and noisy that session, so the following afternoon I brought him again to Kindermusik. Being a Monday afternoon, the place was quiet, the mood calm. Dominic actually recognised the shop and pointed at his favourite mural - Sun, Moon, 2, 3, etc. To preempt things, we gave him his pacifier. When the helper brought him into the class, he immediately started to whine, but she got him interested in the toys in the room. He spent about 7 minutes before class started happily playing, stress-free. The teacher came in, talked to the babies, and he was fine.

And then the singing started, with the shakers and all - and he started to cry. He couldn't be pacified and left the classroom. This time we just waited at the reception area of Kindermusik - Dominic went back to the familiar mural and calmed down. Then the teacher took out some hula hoops, which Dominic was attracted to because they were "circles". So he went in and played with the hoops, not participating in the activities, but more like observing. And then the class played drums. Dominic watched for a while, then decided to join in. By himself, he approached and played with the drums.

I thought this was a great sign. Unfortunately class had to move on, so the drums were kept. There was nothing to play between activities, and he acted up again. So we went out. Mural, point point sun etc. Even the class singing Old Macdonald couldn't lure Dominic in.

Then the xylophones came out, and Dominic was tempted enough to go in again. Unfortunately he got tired of the tiny one he was given, and he couldn't get the big wooden ones, so he fussed and out he went. After a few minutes, class ended. We left Kindermusik, walked around the mall abit, had a snack (ice cream and bread) and went home. During snack time, he went up to a couple at the neighboring table on his own accord and initiated contact, by telling the lady his "bag" (milk bag), "book", and said "bye".

I consciously made the outing experience a pleasant one overall, so that he would want to go back again. There was plenty of enthusiastic praises during the outing. After which, I would remind Dominic again about "music class" and the fun things he did there - the circles, the drums, and the xylophones. Now when I talk about music class, Dominic would respond by saying "circle" - he remembers playing with the hula hoops.

Based on all these observations, what can I conclude and where do we go from here?

. He hates large crowds, loud noises and a tense mood at an enclosed, foreign environment. This is something to take note of when we enter people's houses or even a restaurant. He has fussed twice when entering noisy, crowded restaurants. In future I should prepare him before going in, by telling him where are we, what are we doing here, what to expect and what to look forward to. I'm sometimes quite surprised that we have to deal with his psyche, mind and emotion so much. He's really quite sensitive and cerebral. Gone are the days when he was still a baby and would just go wherever we go!

. He wants to do class on his own terms. He hates that the toys he was playing with get taken away repeatedly by the teacher (in the course of changing activities), and probably is why he dislikes the teacher (and class?). If the activity interested him, he'd join in. Else, he prefers to play by himself. He would protest if we carried him to join in the activities against his will. I'm not sure if I should accept this because maybe he is not developmentally ready for structured lessons, or if I should train him to adapt to lesson structure. One alternative is to go to a more free-and-easy class, like Busy Buddies at GraceKids, where there is a large space to explore, toys around the room to play, and he can join in the activities when he is comfortable. The downside is that he may never learn how to be disciplined nor learn as much because the educational value of this program is less than a right-brain training program, for example. But maybe he needs to slowly progress from a casual classroom environment to one that is more structured when he is older and hopefully ready. But what if he won't be ready ever?? @_@ Daddy thinks he learns enough at home and doesn't really need to learn from the classes; they are just for socialization purposes.

. Previously when he was younger and had less autonomy, he was content to enter the classroom and go through the lesson. When he was uninterested, he would just crawl off. Now that he is older, more assertive and independent, he knew he disliked the controlled confines of a classroom (could he sense it even before class started?), and protested immediately when the class started. So his behavior was actually nothing new, just that he has learnt how to identify unpleasant, objectionable things quicker and protest more effectively. I had failed to pick up on the potential problem. I wonder if we had committed to a class back then when he was more malleable, would all this be avoided? Another example to support the theory of starting early when it comes to introducing things to babies!

. He is overwhelmed by live singing by a stranger, regardless of voice! I think he should watch more shows like Singapore Idol and live concerts!

. He is not really anti-social. He does approach strangers when he is good and ready. But he dislikes strangers who get in his face.

. He needs time to warm up. Gotta take it nice and easy.

. He needs distraction to deal with anxiety. When he is uncomfortable in an environment, he needs to be distracted by things he likes (e.g. numbers, circles) to first accept the place, then to slowly enjoy the place.

. Separation anxiety? When first introduced to a new environment, Dominic naturally clings to me and the helper. But I notice that when he is warmed up and happily playing, he doesn't bother to look to us for assurance. I have not tested if he is truly that confident and can be by himself for some time. This is something that should be interesting to find out.

It isn't easy trying to understand and handle Dominic. I think now we expect children to do more at a younger age, thus the arising of more problems possibly because the children are not developmentally ready for the activity. I should focus on the medium-term goal of getting him classroom-ready at nursery age of about 3. Seen in this perspective, he still has some time to slowly learn to adapt to a classroom setting, and I shouldn't be too obsessive about this matter. Dominic's more introverted nature is similar to Daddy's, and actually I'm not much of a wild-thing myself, so I guess it is natural that his personality turns out this way. Keeping this in mind, I think it would be good to stretch him a little. I think while I may never change his inherent nature, it would be beneficial to build up his self-confidence and socialization skills. And if he develops discipline and longer concentration span along the way - all the better!

Milestones and areas to work on

2009-08-11T14:29:00.004+08:00

Milestone chart: 13 to 18 months, taken from http://www.babycenter.com/0_milestone-chart-13-to-18-months_1496589.bc

Came across this milestone chart online and did a casual assessment. The items in blue are those that Dominic can do well. The ones in orange are items that he can do, but not consistently nor very well. The ones in red are items that I want to work with him on!

I realise that Dominic has not been exposed to activities like sorting, matching, and taught simple instructions. These are activities that playgroups often cover. I think I should work on these with him at home. Some activities to carry out are sorting cards or items of the same colour together, sorting items from big to small, arranging items in a row, matching containers with their covers, matching shapes, and teaching him some instructions like "take one piece" and "put it back". Dominic doesn't like to be restricted and has a short attention span, so I think I will face some resistance - he'd throw cards and caps sooner than you can tell him what to do with them! And he can hardly sit still. I'd have to find a way to slowly make him understand. He does well with books, so I will have to incorporate books into the lessons.

I also want to introduce more sensorial learning. For example, teaching colours by using coloured water. Hopefully these lessons will make a deeper impact on him. I hope he does learn something rather than play with the teaching tools!

Finally, I'd like to introduce some simple art and craft projects.

I'm excited about this; it should be fun coming up with lessons and sourcing around for material.

Walking - Progress report

2009-08-11T10:48:00.003+08:00

Dominic is cruising a lot more, and doing the "monkey walk" (aka. walking with someone holding both his hands from the back) a lot more these days. Sometimes he'd even take a few unassisted steps! The longest walk he did was about 7-10 steps. We are all very excited by this progress and think he will be walking independently soon!

Alphabets, numbers, shapes and colours

2009-08-11T10:22:00.003+08:00

Dominic can recognise some alphabets. The ones familiar to him are A, B, P, O.

His favourite numbers are 8 and 9. He can pronounce these numbers. I don't think he understands the concept of counting though.

He can recognise the circle shape, and can pronounce "circle", although he sometimes forgets the word.

He'd spot alphabets, numbers and circles wherever he goes.

He learns his colours from a mattress cover at his ah-ma's house - blue, green and yellow.

Reading books

2009-08-05T10:54:00.003+08:00

At 14 months, Dominic has started to read books. By reading books, I mean he can say the last word of a sentence, either by looking at the picture, or just from memory! It's funny when we read a sentence from a book and he'd finish it for us, while sitting away from us playing with a toy! He has a decent vocabulary now.

Some excerpts from his book I Spy Little Book, sentences that he can complete:

A golden ... KEY
A bright blue ... CAR
A shining ... STAR
I spy a butterfly just for ... ME!

Progress!

2009-07-28T16:13:00.003+08:00

I was greeted with fantastic news when I went to collect Dominic at my MIL's yesterday. The helper told me that Dominic has been pushing the plastic stool in front of him while walking all over the house, the whole day! This is great because it shows interest in walking, and gives him more practice on his feet. I believe this is the progression leading to independent walking.

Previously I have tried to introduce a baby push-walker toy to Dominic, only to be rejected outright. He simply refuses to push it. My helper reasoned yesterday that the toy was probably too low and he had to bend to push it, whereas the plastic stool (those standard backless ones) was just the right height. I told the helper to let him practice walking and pushing everyday at my MIL's. Unfortunately he can't do this at home because it would disturb the neighbor downstairs, and our stool is very noisy when pushed. The one at MIL's has less friction when pushed.

All in all, am very heartened by this progress.

Mummy and daddy go pat tor

2009-07-27T15:36:00.003+08:00

Hubs and I had a lovely afternoon out yesterday. We went to the Esplanade, had a pasta lunch there (not that great), then watched Sing Dollar!, a local comedy theatre production, which was great! Thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. It's great to go pattor once in a while, just the two of us. Dusted off my leather handbag and found that it was peeling in some places. That's sad... but thinking of my budget for a new bag is even sadder haha. I think I'll just use the old thing for a while more.

New word of the day

2009-07-23T09:12:00.001+08:00

Today's new word is "gate".

On the walking front - still no progress! Mummy is getting anxious!

New word

2009-07-13T10:15:00.002+08:00

New word of the day - "Coin"

We gave him some coins to play with and taught him how to pronounce the word. Dominic got it right after a few tries. I think he can catch on and imitate more complex words rather quickly.

Unfortunately FIL later said not to give him coins to play in case he swallows one haha.

Despite his verbal dexterity, he still refuses to call or learn my helper's name - much to her distress! LOL I think he is feigning ignorance on purpose :P

Progress

2009-06-30T11:02:00.002+08:00

Dominic is getting better at standing up from sitting position now. He can do it and stand quite steadily on his own for three to four seconds. In addition, last Sunday he made another achievement. At grandma's house, he stood up, then walked 3 steps forward! We were all amazed and so happy. Dominic looked really proud of himself too. He sort of got the idea of foreward movement on feet now. Now when we do standing practice, he tries to move his feet as well. It's great fun watching him stand up and try to walk.

I also observed that when we hold his hands to walk, he walks with his feet flat on the floor more often, as opposed to on tip-toes. I think he's finally getting it!

Brag

2009-06-26T14:06:00.003+08:00

Last evening, Dominic was able to recognise and name all the members of his family from a photo! He named "G'ng" - Ah Gong, "Maa" - Ah Ma, "Papapapa" - dad, "Mama" - mummy, and "Dor" - Dominic!

I gotta get the husband to bring out the videocam to record these achievements for posterity.

Sleeping through the night

2009-06-23T15:10:00.001+08:00

Last night was Dominic's first time sleeping through the night, without waking for milk. He went to bed at 7.30pm and woke this morning at 7am. Amazing!

This was because we spent the day out yesterday. I brought Dom to MyGym at Great World City, where he participated in a baby gym session, had lunch at the cafe there, then another hour of free-play at the gym, roaming and exploring and crawling around. In the evening before dinner, he spent about half an hour at the playground downstairs, playing on the slide and observing some older children. I guess he was really tired out!

Getting verbal

2009-06-23T14:55:00.003+08:00

Dominic is really getting control of his mouth and pronounciation lately. He can listen and mimic many word and alphabet sounds, like the "K" sound, "P" sound and "B" sound. His favourite words now are "clock" and "car". He is really obsessed with clocks.

I like to listen to him pronounce the P sound, he'd really "PUH" the wind out of his mouth.

Lil' monster!

2009-06-23T14:48:00.002+08:00

Our boy has turned into a little monster. He turns into the temper monster when he's angry about something, usually it is when he's denied something. He'd screw up his little face and cry and shout his loudest! And fling his hands to hit the floor. We're getting more used to his tantrums, most of the times we'd just pull him away and distract him, or leave him to vent it out haha.

A spring in his step

2009-06-19T15:06:00.002+08:00

Dominic's been really enthusiastic about standing these days. He'd get both feet placed on the foor, then squat, or try to push up to standing position. He does this frequently when he's playing with his toys or reading books on the floor. This results in some funny poses like when he's trying to read the book on the floor, but with his buttocks in the air, his legs bent and trying to straighten, and his hands are the only support that is keeping him upright. He is also squatting a lot more.

He succeeds in standing a few times a day. He'd push up, stand very wobbily for about three seconds, then sit down again. I can tell he is enjoying this new trick!

I'm very heartened by his progress, because he shows a real interest in getting into an upright position e.g. kneeling, and a drive to stand up independently. I guess it is all about timing, a baby will learn when it is time. Of course, all that teaching and encouragement from us must have helped too!

Temper temper

2009-06-15T17:18:00.003+08:00

The last few days, we've had a taste of Dominic's temper. He is quite quick to anger. To show his displeasure, he would fling his arms downwards hard and hit the floor. Or if he was not given what he wanted, he would throw a massive crying tantrum. At first we would try to pacify him, but yesterday it got so bad that we just did what we had to do (soap and wash his hands - basic hygiene, non-negotiable) then brought him elsewhere to distract him.

Normally I think I am quite cool-headed about his tantrums. But this morning as we left for the IL's, it got to me. Man, he was really obnoxious. I was holding his hands for him to walk to the door, but he refused and threw a tantrum. I guess this is where the annoying bit starts, for me. I've always felt that you accomodate and do it the soft way until the child gets irritating, then you consider discipline haha.

I'm pretty sure we'll be seeing more of Dominic's temper in days to come. Let's hope we get over this phase of trying to understand each other and the battle of wills, soon!

** On hindsight, before a child truly matures into an adult, I think it is all about parent and child trying to understand each other and battling wills, isn't it. Which means this "phase" would last, what, all of 21 years, if I'm lucky? OMG. Correction to the previous paragraph then - my hope is that we have less of his tamtrums and more of proper, constructive communication. :D

Playdate with the boys

2009-06-15T17:13:00.002+08:00

Mom organized her first playdate last Sunday. 6 boys, their mummies, daddies and helpers gathered together at Gramma's while she was away with Grampa in Taiwan. XL and ZH and Auntie Y were very kind to help around the house during and after the playdate.

The boys played with toys, had a little splash and swim time in an inflatable, shallow pool, ate snacks, had some tv time, then went home. The adults had cakes, puffs, pastries and ice cream, and chit-chat.

Dominic did well on Sunday, he wasn't shy and approached the other boys with curiosity. But he got tired of the toys after awhile and crawled off on his own, very typical Dom behavior. He enjoyed the water play. On hindsight, I should have let him played freely instead of holding on to him, kiasu mummy that I am. Wonder if it is a good idea to fill up the pool again the next time at gramma's.

All in all, I think the boys enjoyed themselves very much. It was tiring, but wasn't too tedious. I wish I could have played the participant role more, but that's how it goes. Great to have the space to roam around and plenty of things to occupy the boys.

Viral fever

2009-05-18T17:31:00.003+08:00

Dom was down with a viral fever the past few days. This was how it progressed.

14 May Thursday - Evening, I noticed he felt warmer than usual. Temperature was 37.3C, which I thought was quite normal, so left it at that.

15 May Friday - Morning, dropped him off at MIL's, asked her to monitor. By late afternoon, she said he was running a temperature of about 37.6oC. Husband brought him to the clinic around noon. Was diagnosed with viral fever that would last about 3 days, to be followed by an outbreak of rashes. Prescribed antibiotics and fever medicine.

To date - been monitoring boy's temperature regularly and giving him his meds. His fever ended on Saturday. The worst thing of all has been his night-time sleep. Boy would stir at about 2am, then once every hourly till about 6am - crying, fussing, rolling about in bed. The maid reported that after awhile he would settle down and sleep. Till he finally awoke for the day. And he'd usually have a bad morning because, I suspect, his sleep was so restless. It's already happened for 3 nights, and we are all tired out by it. Poor boy. Can only hope his sleep gets better once he stops all meds completely. His appetite had suffered, once again hopefully will be regained when he stops his meds.

Mother's Day

2009-05-08T13:34:00.002+08:00

This Sunday is Mother's Day. It will be my 2nd Mother's Day. Last year we were still too busy adjusting to parenthood to celebrate.

This morning husband called and said I had to sign some papers for insurance, and that he will drop by this afternoon for me to sign.

Just now he called, I went out to meet him and guess what? He handed me a small bouquet of three sweet pink roses and wished me Happy Mother's Day! Also gave me a Bengawan Solo cake and said to share in the office. How sweet is that! I was floored. Everytime I receive surprise flowers I am dumbfounded and get this silly dumbstruck grin on my face. Same as now. After so many years this guy still manages to surprise me. He's so nice lah ehheheheheh

One of my mummy friends commented that husband has mild tempered and good guy face. Another friend also said he's a nice guy. He's a good good guy lah. Baby is good good boy and I am good good girl haha.

A baby

2009-05-07T15:58:00.001+08:00

Two tiny feet

That wave in the air,

Two little hands

That tug at your hair,

Cute bottom for patting,

Adorable face-

A bundle of joy

To love and embrace.

Two little feet

2009-05-07T15:55:00.000+08:00

Two little feet, ten little toes,
Leave their impressions today.
Soon they will wear two little shoes,
And be running and jumping at play.

Two little feet, too little time,
Before they are walking to school,
Kicking a rock, or skipping a rope,
Wading a puddle or jumping a pool.

Two little feet, One little child,
Will soon go their own way,
But footprints in my mind recall,
They stood here yesterday.

Growth progress and vaccination

2009-05-07T13:11:00.004+08:00

Dominic went to the pediatrician on 5 April for his checkup and third (and last) of his pneumococcal vaccination injection. He weighs 10.78kg and is 75cm tall now. PD commented that his weight is above average, head circumference is normal and didn't grow much taller than last visit. Am just happy that he has been happy and healthy and eating and pooing well.

Boy has always hated being restricted or held down, and did not take well to the PD. He started crying right from the start of the consultation when the PD used the stethoscope on his chest. And the crying lasted right through till the end of the injection, till he was brought out of the room. The clinic assistant commented that he was so loud that the whole clinic could hear him, and I laughed that he started even before the painful portion happened.

This last pneumococcal jab is supposed to be potentially fever-inducing and more painful than normal, party because it's the nature of the jab, and partly because babies over one year old are more sensitive to pain. This PD's practice is to apply anaesthetic cream on the injection area, leave it on for half hour, then have the jab. This is boy's first jab on the arm. I think the cream worked because Dom's crying was the same tone and level from start of consult to finish. He probably was too worked up to really feel the injection.

We were instructed to monitor his temperature for 48 hours. I'm glad to report that Dom is in the clear, he did not develop a fever from the jab.

My good friend YH commented that Dom's behavior at the clinic is normal and healthy. She says children should know that it is not right for a stranger to touch them; that is why he protested. She said that as long as he was not scared to look at or communicate with strangers, it's fine. I've never thought of it that way and I guess she is right.

Today I received comments that boy is "manly and sexy", and the "strong and silent type". Haha I don't know how a 1 year old baby can manage to be manly and sexy! But it's a cute compliment all the same. :)

No to durian

2009-05-06T10:33:00.002+08:00

We celebrated Ah Ma's birthday last weekend with a durian cake. The cake from Emicakes was really chok-full of durian meat. Dom had his first taste of durian. He didn't like it! Turned his face away and refused to eat. Ah Ma said that during pregnancy I took a lot of durian, that is why he is averse to it now. Haha! I hope Dom will learn to enjoy the fruit when he is older. Afterall my brother learnt to enjoy it when he was about 17 so such things happen.

Happy birthday Dominic!!

2009-04-18T22:53:00.003+08:00

Happy birthday, darling Dominic! How time flies! One year ago today, Dominic entered our lives, and things have never been the same since! Busier, more tiring? Yes. More joyful and fulfilled? Definitely! Our boy is a great source of joy and love in our lives; we are so grateful for him.

The birthday party was a success. Family and Dominic's April friends celebrated at Ficus Ballroom in Jurong Country Club. Lunch buffet, a very cute, 5kg, Spot the Dog number 1 birthday cake, goodie bags, lots of fun. Mummy did up the room with helium balloons in blue and orange, a Pokoyo-with-Dominic birthday banner, and a play corner for the babies consisting of a rented Winnie the Pooh slide and a ball pool. I'm so glad the babies had fun, and we received positive feedback on the food. Can't wait to view all the photos of the party that our photographer had taken.

The biggest and most heartwarming surprise is that Dominic's confinement nanny, CY, SMS'ed us a birthday greeting! Nanny CY was a great help and friend to us during the first 1-2 months of Dominic's life. I dare say not many nannies still remember their ward after one year. I called Nanny CY in return, and she said she still remembers Dominic fondly. How sweet! The feeling is mutual. Nanny CY is still taking on confinement jobs. I think she is a fantastic caregiver and very well suited for the role.

Dominic is indeed very fortunate to be surrounded by so many people who love and care for him. Not to mention two very doting grandparents who gladly give their all - time, money, effort, for his well-being. He is such a lucky boy! I will always remember that he has grown healthy and strong with the good grace and love of these selfless people, and will always be grateful towards them. I hope Dominic will remember them and be thankful too!

As for Daddy and me, we have survived the first year of parenthood! We heave a happy sigh of relief. :)

Happy lunar birthday!

2009-04-08T22:45:00.004+08:00

Dominic turns 1 by the Chinese lunar calendar today. Mother-in-law held a mini celebration of sorts in the morning.

She cooked a bowl mee sua for Dominic, with 2 red eggs, 2 chicken drumsticks (must be opposing legs to represent a pair), and other ingredients in the soup. After prayer, Dominic was fed the yummy food.

Then we all had mee sua too for lunch!

Later that evening, Daddy and I decided to let Dominic partake in the traditional choosing of objects to symbolise his future path. The options are:

Chicken drumstick - plenty to eat
Orange - good luck
Celery - "qin cai", hardworking
Calculator - career in finance
Ruler - career in engineering
Pen - scholar / literary career
Stamp - official / career in the government (we didn't have a stamp so substituted with a wooden toy puzzle that looks like a stamp)

The items were laid on a tray and presented to him. Dominic went for the pen first, then the stamp, then the ruler!

This is supposed to signify that he will have a literary or scholarly career, or one as a government official. And if all else fails he'd probably take up engineering LOL.

If I try to explain his choices by logic, I think he went for the familiar items first (pen and stamp), although the pen was not outstanding at all since it was the same blue colour as the tray. The ruler was even less outstanding, it was transparent plastic! But even though he looked at the other items he kept going back to these three and fiddling with them - especially the pen and stamp. I do know my boy and he is a creature of habit, once he likes something he'll always go for it! :D (A bit like dad.)

After a while daddy and I got a little bored and gave him the celery and orange, which he also played with. LOL

All in all it was a fun day, and a fun experiment.

Mummy marked this day by doing her first hair chemical treatment in almost 2 years! I have not had anything done to my hair other than wash and cut since I got pregnant until now, almost 1 year after giving birth, due to the risk of chemicals being passed on to foetus or through breastmilk. But I thought to give myself an update and so invested in a new hairdo - loose curls by digital perm, new dark brown colour and light brown highlights! Husband said it took five years off LOL. While I am flattered, I do think he is too generous, but the new do does make me look fresher.

It cost me a bomb though! Like pasting money on my head. How does it happen that there are promotions and discounts everywhere but I always pay full (and inflated) price?? And I think the stylist thinned my hair too much. It's a reasonably good outcome, but overpriced, and I'll likely not go back to the stylist again. Nice girl but meh skills.

The end of breastfeeding

2009-04-07T08:23:00.003+08:00

5 April 2009, Sunday, marks the last day of my breastfeeding journey. I pumped my last pump on this night. I have been breastfeeding in various stages - fully latch-on, partially latch and expressing, and fully expressing - for 11 months, 2 weeks and 6 days.

6 April 2009, Monday, is the first day I spent without pumping at all.

Today, 7 April, Tuesday, is the first time in 11 months and 2+ weeks that I wore a dress that could not easily be taken off to work!

This is the end of a significant stage of my life, and an achievement that I'm proud of! :)

I'm glad I've had the chance to breastfeed my baby, it is indeed a precious experience and so wonderous to be able to give sustenance to your child.

I will always remember how tedious and time-consuming breastfeeding was. From the early days of disciplined 3 hourly feeds, bad engorgement, milk leaking from the breasts, dripping all over and on the floor, the mess it made. The wrist pain that was brought about by holding the breast and baby during feeds. The conflict of switching from latching to expressing entirely. The Avent manual pump and hot water bottle that became my close friends. How nursing bras made me feel so dowdy. The challenge and tricks of keeping supply at a steady quantity to match baby's demand. These are all memories that I will keep forever.

11 months old

2009-03-18T14:26:00.002+08:00

A quick note to commemorate Dominic's 11th month!

We are all in a tizzy preparing for his birthday party. Food, venue, banner, etcetc. Daddy just mentioned a photo album to be presented during the party, so that means more work for Mummy! Off-hand I am thinking of doing digital scrapbooking and getting it print and bound in a hard-cover book, as well as a poster. Big ideas with one month to materialize, hope I'm able to get it done.

This saturday ah gong, ah ma, uncle, and us all are going for a photoshoot, to mark his first birthday and to thank grandparents and uncle for taking such good care of him. :)

I'm thinking of doing another photoshoot with grandpa and grandma at their house, but it's still in the works.

Oh woe is mummy, I have mild diarrhea and not-so-mild bodyache today! I think it was an overripe rockmelon I ate last night that caused it. Let's hope I recover with a good night's sleep.

Dominic's repertoire of words

2009-03-11T10:24:00.003+08:00

Dominic's a chatty boy these days! He is able to pronounce words more accurately, and is getting to be a good mimic, copying the words we say.

Here's his repertoire of speaking words at 1 week short of 11 months:

bird (favourite word!)
flower (favourite word!)
mum mum
pa pa
ma ma
book
go!
girl

These are the words he can say. The words that he understands are far more than that!

Everyday we are amazed

2009-03-04T10:35:00.003+08:00

We are amazed everyday by what Dominic does and has learnt to do.

This morning, daddy carried Dominic to our cupboard, which was open. Dominic peeked at the stuff lying inside. Daddy picked up his comb, and combed his hair. Then he passed the comb to Dominic. Instead of playing with the comb, Dominic leaned over and put the comb back into the cupboard. Then he clapped his hands! So cute! We gave rave compliments.

Daddy tried this a few more times, and each time Dominic returned the comb into the cupboard without toying with it. This is quite a surprise and departure from the norm because usually he'd fiddle with any new item that he gets his hands on. I guess he must be thinking that this item belongs in the cupboard and should be returned, so he put it back. Daddy tried with a different object - his shaver cover - and again it was put back in.

It is interesting to see Dominic's logic and reasoning. Along with that, his personality has really blossomed and we have a lot of fun playing with him and observing him. He continues to surprise us everyday!

10 months old

2009-02-18T15:32:00.002+08:00

Dominic is 10 months old today!

How time flies! Here is a brief status report.

He has taken to porridge well, and still drinks a decent amount of milk everyday.

Dom's digestive system is like mine, a bit rugged and slow, so he is on a 2 portions of fruit and 2 portions of vegetables diet a day. This works well and he poos everyday or once every 2 days.

He can crawl on his tummy quite well although always with reluctance and only if he has to! Lately he is slow to crawl but instead tries to hoist himself up like a push-up, or on his knees. I think he is trying to crawl on fours but has not figured out how to do so yet! You go, boy! He is also trying to sit up from the on-fours position. He has succeeded a few times, so there is still much practice needed on the playmat!

Dominic has been to two express photoshoots. Photos from both turned out very nice :) Next up - photoshoots with Daddy so we can have some family shots.

Boy is a tiger at home, yelling and playing and sometimes bullying his caretakers. But when outside, Dominic is quite insecure when in new situations and meeting new people. He has koala tendencies, clinging on to us and burying his head in our shoulders. Mummy hopes to encourage him more by exposing him to playgroups on weekends.

We are now in the midst of preparing for Dom's first birthday party. Pieces are falling into place! There are many things to consider, but Mummy will try to organize a fun time for birthday boy and family and yet not break the bank. :P Dom may wear his first pair of shoes too on his first birthday - how exciting!

Favourite words

2009-01-20T11:42:00.004+08:00

Dominic has just turned 9 months! He is very verbal.

His favourite words are "Gai gai" and "Mum mum". On some mornings, these would be the first words he'd utter once he wakes.

Gai gai is his favourite activity! He loves going out. Mum mum - selected foods only. So far he likes his bread and noodles hehe.

He crawls!

2009-01-14T13:16:00.003+08:00

Dominic did his first legit crawl today! This qualifies as a first crawl because he displayed deliberate actions repeatedly to achieve a foreward movement. He is four days short of nine months old.

This morning, he was having some tummy time on the mattress and wanted to reach for the calendula cream bottle. He raised his buttocks then pushed his body forward along the mattress to get it. After a few crawls, he reached the bottle! We tried a few more times and he still managed to get the bottle.

Daddy and I were so impressed. Well done Dominic, Mummy is so proud of you! :D

Food that works and those that don't

2009-01-05T12:35:00.001+08:00

Because Dominic is quite a picky eater, and I am persistantly introducing porridge to him, we have met with some failures and some successes.

Food that works so far:
Threadfin fish (marinated with salt and ginger, steamed with ginger) + cabbage
Pork (minced or meat) + cabbage
Cod fish (must be fresh only) + spinach
Salmon + spinach

What does not work:
Chicken + spinach + carrot

The Wheels on the Bus

2009-01-05T12:28:00.002+08:00

This is Dom's current favourite show - The Wheels On the Bus DVD! His favourite episode is Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. He loves the songs and the clown when he talks. It is his meal-time entertainment - although I know TV during meals is bad eating habit >.<

http://www.thewheelsonthebus.com/

Dom's first big boo-boo

2009-01-04T17:27:00.000+08:00

Sad day, Dom had his first big knock today. He fell off our bed! Luckily my bag was on the floor so his lower body landed on the soft bag. Also he didn't go down very fast, but was still too fast for me to grab him.

Hello and goodbye

2008-12-31T16:57:00.002+08:00

Well, it is done. Click and submit. Fingers crossed!

2008 has been crazily eventful on many fronts, the baby, and many challenges at work in terms of prices, commodity availability and health hazards. It can't get any worse than this, right? ;) I am hopeful and determined!

2009 will be a year of changes - to regroup, reorganiz, recreate and change for the better.

My resolution:
Lose debt, regain control
Lose weight, regain self
Do my best for Dom

Mum-mum and other words

2008-12-24T10:14:00.002+08:00

Dominic is super-chatty now. When he is in a good mood, he will chatter, making sounds like "heeh heeeh heeeh", or hum. When he spots us eating, he will demand to be fed, and say "mum mum!" and smack his lips! That is also a sign that he likes the food he is eating.

It is always a boisterous time when Dominic plays with his ball. He would yell and shout while he throws the ball. He really enjoys playing with it!

Dominic's first home-cooked meal

2008-12-23T14:35:00.003+08:00

Today marks the first day that Dominic has accepted my home-cooked porridge! Well to be exact, the helper did the cooking but it was my recipe, my instructions and I did the seasoning.

Previously we have had many failed attempts at getting Dominic to eat home-cooked porridge. I have tried fish, silverfish, pork, vegetable stock, carrots, cabbage, potato. All met with disapproval and disinterest. Then one weekend, I let him have some of our porridge, and lo and behold - he liked it! We conclude that boy likes salty, flavorful foods because he's been picking at our food so often!

So this morning we cooked up a batch of pork and cabbage porridge, packed it in a Tiger food jar and brought it to ah-ma's. Helper reported that he liked it, and ate until it turned cold before stopping because he likes his food warm.

This momma feels proud of herself! I guess you can't change the basic instinct to cook for your child with love.

Jurong Point

2008-12-15T09:57:00.000+08:00

I love the new Jurong Point because I can find decent XXL-sized clothes there. @_@

Dominic's first word!

2008-12-15T08:45:00.004+08:00

Dominic said his first word today at 8am - and it is "Ma Ma". Oh it is so sweet... and how exciting! :D

Adding on the next day:

Spent whole of yesterday feeling quite floaty because of this hehehe

To recap HOW it happened exactly, boy was going through his usual tantrum during morning wipe down. He was almost done and I noticed he was making word sounds like "Mmmmaaamaamamaa papa waaah *cry*" So after he was done, I carried him up to placate him. He was still making the word sounds. I encouraged him more by saying "ma ma". By accident, he said a few "ma ma"s, to which I gave lots of praise. He too surprised himself by his words. I kept saying "ma ma" for him to imitate. And then, right in front of my bedroom mirror, boy looked intent for a while, then with a blank look he said it - "MA MA" loud and clear. WAAAHHH *applause heaps of praises etc from me* I repeated "ma ma", and after a while he said again "ma ma". Then he was done, and off we went to Ah Ma's.

Ah Ma's feedback of yesterday was that he was a chatty boy all day at her place! Kept talking and said "ma ma", "pa pa", "mum mum". Unfortunately when boy came back home, he was in his usual grouchy-sleepy mood and kept silent. Thus poor daddy did not have a chance to hear boy speak. Another day, we hope!

Wave bye bye!

2008-12-14T22:29:00.002+08:00

First wave byebye was performed by Dominic tonight, he waved Bye Bye to Grandpa!

We OOHHED and AAHED and CLEVER BOY'ed so much that he felt scared and cried a little after that :P

Earlier on tonight, Dominic also did the Gong Xi Gong Xi hand action by himself repeatedly. :)

Our little baller!

2008-12-10T21:42:00.002+08:00

Dominic has learnt how to throw the ball! He'd pick the ball up with both hands and fling it away. Such a smartie! We've been teaching him this trick for the past couple of weeks, and after intensive training, he's finally got it. Now, to teach him to throw the ball into the hoop..... heheheh.

Flippin' pages

2008-12-01T11:19:00.000+08:00

Dominic loves his books. Now he can entertain himself with a book, by looking at it and flipping through the pages one by one by himself. He has several favourite books, like "Baby's First Words" board book, "On The Farm" sparkly board book, and his new favourites "Where's Spot?" and "Wiggle Your Toes!".

7 month checkup

2008-11-20T10:30:00.003+08:00

We went to the pediatrician today. Dom weighs 9.375kg and is 73cm tall. It's a good weight!

Boy took the last of his rotavirus immunisation and the first of his pneumoccocal immunisation jab. Poor baby cried during his pneumoccocal T_T. There's no escaping it, there are 2 more to go!

Dominic's first favourite book

2008-11-18T10:55:00.004+08:00

Dominic has discovered his first favourite book! It is The Berenstain Bears' House of Mirrors, from Random House's (Early) Step-Into-Reading, Step 1.

It is a completely unassuming book - thin, in paperback, and simple drawing with few words and syllabus. But he absolutely adores this book! Just calling and showing him the book would send him walker-ing excitedly towards me. He'd coo and squeal in delight.

I would read the book slowly, accompanied by actions, emotions and funny voices. Dominic would look at the pictures, then up at me to see my expression. Some phrases would get a smile from him - "Round, round like a ball!", "Mad... Very very very mad!" He finds my mock-angry face funny and would chuckle at me.

Dominic loves this book so much that when we finish, he'd whine, and we can read this book over three times before he finally loses interest.

It is great to find a common activity that we both enjoy and understand. I can really feel a connection when we read this book. So thankful that we found it purely by chance on sale for only $3 at Suntec Carrefour.

Due to his boisterous affection for the book, it is now somewhat worn and dog-earred, but that's all fine because he loves it so much and even enjoys looking at it on his own.

I will be looking into the Step Into Reading series, and picking up more of similar books for him. Now that I finally have an idea of what book works, my shopping for books will be more focused.

Home sweet home

2008-11-17T11:09:00.000+08:00

Well the hubster's home and already the familiar signs of irritation have crept in haha. Of course, the joy of having him around is back as well. Can't live with him, can't live without him!

A missing piece of the heart

2008-11-13T17:48:00.004+08:00

Daddy goes on a work trip once every year-end. This is the first time with baby that Daddy went overseas.

I think as a family, we miss each other more when one of us is not around. The house feels empty, hollow. I did not miss Daddy that much on previous years, but with boy around, it feels like a piece of the heart is missing.

I don't know of boy is aware of the missing parent, he seems normal enough. Daddy had the foresight to burn some video clips of him singing nursery rhymes and chatting. When boy watches the vcd every evening, he pays rapt attention to the screen. He seems to recognise the face and voice, and watches intently.

Thankfully we are kept busy everyday so we don't have time to mull over things too much. It is now Thursday and only three days away till Daddy's return! :)