Phone Calls

En really enjoys making calls to the favourite people in his life. These people include: Xiao Gu (my husband's sister), his grandparents (grandpa and grandma), pa pa and ma ma. Once or twice a week, I will dial my parents (partly to occupy En's boundless energy) for En to talk to them. He will hold the handset and look quite serious. He will nod his head from time to time, say "yes" and gesture a little with his hands. I am not too sure what grandma asks him each time they converse. However, there is bound to be the following responses from En that seem to inevitably pop up again and again. For example: "En En feed fish", "mushrooms", "En En going botanic garden", "ma ma working". Well, to be fair, these phrases more or less describe his daily routine of feeding the goldfish, eating lunch (which may or may not have mushrooms but he seems to imagine them in every dish or wishes they were there!), and his desire to visit botanic gardens, one of his favourite outdoor places. As for ma ma working, that's moi working from home!

Imitation

I got this pair of retro-looking spectacles from a company DnD. Hee... Looks cute on En huh?

En loves to imitate the adults at home. He will slip his toddler's tiny feet into his grandmother's house slippers and flop around with them. Never mind that they are twice each foot's length and with each step he takes unsteadily, he threatens to trip over them. He will also wear my shoes, pa pa's shoes and grandmother's shoes and try walking around in them. Everytime he wears a chequered shirt, he will say its Grandpa's shirt cos my dad always wears chequered shirts!

Kids really imitate their parents or caregivers so we have to be careful what we say and do. I once uttered "Alamak" accidentally and he thought it was a really funny word so he kept repeating it and laughing each time he said it. This is really the time to keep the profanities away (not that I speak a lot of them!). Even when we wish to criticise other people, we have to watch our tongues cos our little ones are abosrbing and learning our value systems. Its timely I guess that we also watch our tongue as the book of James in the bible does say that our tongues are deceitful and can cause a forest to be on fire (i.e., cause huge damage!).

The Cat and the Dolphin

Last week, En was doing some finger painting on a cat. Was trying to teach him "C" for "cat". He really had fun with his fingers swooshing around in the fingerpaint. I realised that its very "safe" (no active boy running around the house threatening to paint my walls with his fingerpaint!) to put En on the highchair when doing painting activities. The mess is minimal as I lay a piece of plastic on his high chair table top as well as the floor.

Today, I decided to do "D" for "dolphin". I got En to try and colour some dolphins. He chose all the crayon colours for the respsective dolphins. He would start colouring them and after a few swipes of the crayon at each dolphin, would abandon them, leaving poor mummy to finish up his colouring for him. :) Here is apicture of the Dolphins swimming around in the sea (made up of a lid of a printing paper box). In case you are wondering, the fluffy white bits on the top right hand corner of the box lid are clouds. :)

The dolphins were supposed to hang by a thread so that they can be "jumping" around in and and out of the sea. However, my attempts to hang up the dolphins were met with vehment protests of "no", "no", and "no"! I am not sure why. But En preferred sticking the dolphins directly onto the sea! Oh well, its his craft so I obliged. I realised that it could be that he is more familiar with sticking items with glue and pasting them on paper. So, maybe a different method of crafting didn't agree with him! The same thing happened when I shifted some of his drawings around in the living room. He was quite upset that I had shifted their position so I had to re-shift them back! Todders.. hmmphh.. only God would know what they are thinking about!

Alphabets

Today I decided to play an alphabet game with En which I had sourced from the internet. The game consists of individual alpahbets with "wings" which are stuck on my clothes, arms and legs. The toddler is supposed to pick them off you and as he does, you recite the alphabets to him and paste it onto a wall. En was initially interested enough to pick some alphabets off me and stick them on himself. However, his interest waned shortly. I did manage to get him to pick the alphabet "A" off the wall, stick it on his forehead and pose for a picture. Poor En has a runny nose today hence the wet nose look!

After I took some pictures of En, he wanted to see the pictures. His favourite mode is the "I" mode these few weeks. He will say "I see" to see pictures we take on our digital camera. Inevitably, it would be followed by "I press" as he would want to take a picture using the camera. He managed to take a rather nice shot of our feet (ahem, of course, I had to steady the camera as he took the picture).

Boys and Their Toys

We took a family holiday to Perth recently. There, we stayed over with church friends for a few nights. Our church friends, a lovely couple, have two active young boys. Husband bought two NERF guns for them as presents. En seemed to have developed a better hold for the NERF gun after playing around with the boys for a few days. He can hold the gun almost quite properly (he doesn't know how to pull a trigger yet, thankfully!) and make "phhsshh" sounds as if firing the gun in emulation of the boys. What can I say? I just have to admit that he would have gotten to the toy guns sooner or later. :)

Milestone 1: Eating by himself

I have recently been training and encouraging En to use his spoon to feed himself. Mostly, we would have to hold another spoon and feed him the food, whilst he plays with his own food (in a separate bowl/plate).

This morning, during breakfast time, En had cereal with milk, together with banana mashed up into the cereal. I handed him the spoon and confidently told him to eat his own breakfast. I forbidded my maid from feeding him. A hungry child would certainly want to eat his food! He managed to feed himself breakfast quite neatly! I was so proud of him! There was only a dollop of cereal mash on the flood (probably the neatest floor we had after his meal).

Well done, son!

Now, to try and get him to feed himself his own lunch and dinner. Those are a little trickier. The bite-sized pieces of food tend to be picked up by hand (since En thinks its faster to pick them up by hand rather than scoop them and put them into his mouth). Soon, soon I hope. :) Its just so nice to see your little toddler feeding himself, all like a grown-up.