Princess L's 4th Birthday

Four years ago, this little baby (quite literally) popped out of me. A bawling babe then, she has since grown (though by not a lot), into Little Ms Petite. But what she doesn't have in size, she makes up for in speech. 

Over the years, she has progressed from baby babbling to sentences that explicitly expresses her observations and wants, to vividly describing her thoughts and imagination, and to recent times of correcting us on our 'wrong english'.

A bite on her nugget later, she exclaims that it "looks like a boot. So funny right?"

Or when a piece of slightly chao-tah fried chicken is put on her plate, she tells us that she doesn't "want this piece because it looks so dirty."

To kor kor when he says a sentence wrong, "No. Not 'shot'. Its 'shoot'. Like 'you shoot me.'"

To her grandmother, who accidentally tells her to pass the phone to ah-gong. "No, not 'her'. It's 'him' because Gong-Gong is a boy!"

Sings "~Beauty and the maaan..." and when I correct her, she tells me that since the beast has become a man, we must not sing it as 'Beauty and the beast' anymore. 

And like all little girls, she dreams of being a princess and meeting her prince one day. With the latest craze in Frozen, she tells me she is Elsa while I am Anna, and points to Prince Hans as a 'bad prince because he pretend to love Anna.'

While I am continually amazed at her (at times rather astute) thinking, I am similarly aware that my baby girl is growing more and more as the days pass by.

This year as she turns four, her cake of choice is (no suprise) a Frozen cake. Sitting by the gigantic cake this afternoon, she smiled shyly as her school of nursery friends sang her the birthday song. And in tune with her current obsession, friends and family have also kindly gifted her with a variety of Frozen item-ed presents. 

I watched as she approached the small pile of presents with a mixture of surging happiness and shyness. And as she (with a lot of help from kor-kor) ripped open the presents with glee, leaving papa to collect the torn scraps of wrapper strewn all over the floor, I couldn't help but think that my baby girl has grown so much, so fast.

My little chatty, helpful girl, who complains incessantly about her brother, with the kooky thinking, quirky taste, two teeth less, who writes her 'a' lopsidedly, colours on her colouring book with only one single colour per page irregardless that there are seven princesses pictured together, says the funniest things I've ever heard, the one who shares her wild imagination, tells me 'I love you' and 'goodnight' multiple times before she sleeps every night, is already Four.

And the sobering truth that one day, she will grow up and then she wouldn't want to be celebrating her birthdays with us anymore, creeps into my thoughts. 

But I take heart because in meantime and for a few years more, I can still be her Co-cake-knife-handler, assistant candle-blower, be witness at her 'presents-opening-ceremony', and papa will retain the honorable title of the 'official strewn-wrapper-crusher'. 

So, Happy Birthday my Sweetheart! Don't grow up too fast.
Wishing you happiness and health, and everything good.

Love, Hugs and Kisses,
Papa & Mama.

S updates - Term 3

As the holidays for Term 3 ends and Term 4 approaches fast, I attempt to recall incidences that have happened during the previous term for my quarterly blog update. To my dismay, (or maybe relief) I wasn't able to think of any. To me, this translates to the fact that nothing major had happened, that might have caused me to overly fret or particularly remember. Term 3, as I recall, was rather monotonous and uneventful. Which in my instance, is something to be thankful of. 

There certainly were several small glitches here and there. The Chinese teacher called to inform me of the numerous corrections that S had accumulated and failed complete. And there was the ordering of the year-end photos that S, despite multiple reminders from us to hand the order envelope to the collection booth, kept forgetting until the order closed. Then there was the time he missed his first lesson of extra classes and followed the school bus home instead of staying back like we had reiterated a gazillion times over the weekend prior to the session.  Evidently, it seems that S doesn't take well to instructions, and that reminders are probably a waste of our breath. But in the scale of bigger issues, these were no-sweat stuff.

Term two had ended rather poorly, and I worried every so often, of S being bullied, of him not eating recess, of him not knowing when and how to ask for help instead of keeping mum about things, and many other nitty gritty worries that I've simply lost track of. Thus, to have this term pass by so uneventful and quiet is something that I am thankful for.

Academic-wise expectedly, S didn't perform as well as his classmates. And I do understand that he needs more time than typical to improve and that it isn't fair to compare his progress to his peers, or lament that his test results are (yet again) bordering on failure. So the least I want him to do, is to enjoy school. And I want to keep reminding myself this point. 

It is so easy to lose focus and fall into the kiasu mindset (for lack of a better word, no offense intended please) of parents with typically progressing children. I would have easily fallen into the same track if I could because it is just so easy and natural to want to compare worksheet scores, art pieces, Chinese word recognition, processing skills and every other thing they learn and do in school. But since S isn't a typically progressing child, that choice wasn't ours to take right from the start. 

Having said that however, it still takes a lot of effort and self reminders to avoid falling into the comparison trap, and to keep the focus on simply letting him enjoy the schooling process. I'll admit that I am in a constant internal battle wavering between pushing him (what if I over-push and result in him having a phobia of certain subjects, or worse, hate school?), or letting him progress at his own pace. (What if he remains stagnant?)

Despite my confusion in directing him through school, I'm glad to say that so far, he seems to be enjoying himself in school. Although like other children, he is lazy in getting his homework done, and tells me Maths is his least favorite subject. He certainly takes after me on that last part. 

As with the start of every new term, I am unsure of how things will progress with him. I can only wait and observe from the sidelines as my thoughts continually battle each other, and support him as much as I can from there.

Term four seems set to be a term of frustrations with the introduction of the multiplication table. For a child with language difficulties, with normal problem sums stumping him on a daily basis, I am not looking expectantly towards days of frustrating explanations of concepts that I myself am clueless in explaining. 

But I will endeavor to try, and hope that together, we can inch towards a never-give-up attitude to courageously face on to the difficulties that we may come across. 

If only my patience level could be multiplied just like the multiplication table.

Oh well, it's the last term after all.

Chiong ah~!!

Dad's 64th.

My mind can't remember the date you were gone
But it flags out to me the day you were born.
You would have been all of '64' today
With a cake and candles, and hair so grey.
You would have been smiling with wrinkled eyes
As you 'chide' me for the cake, your usual guise.
Life's little joys we had back then
You're in a happier place now, I understand.
Life is a cycle we can't control.
Still, I miss you with all my heart and soul.

Happy Birthday, Dad.

4th Sept 2014