Phonics

Matty has shown a huge interest in phonics in the last couple of months and I have to say that he is pretty good at it. He is able to identify the first letter of every word almost without fail simply by listening to the pronounciation.

Yesterday I was stumped when he told me that "W" starts with "D". Took me a while to realise what he was driving at and when I did, I didn't know how to correct him because he wasn't entirely wrong either. If you think about it... "W" (pronounced as "double U") indeed starts with a "D".

Elaina is 2!

Elaina finally turned 2 on 18 March. Whenever Elaina or Matty celebrates their birthday, I always tell myself that I have survived another year of parenthood and the celebration is not just for them but me as well.

As usual there was no big birthday bash... we had lunch at Sushi Tei and followed by a birthday cake that evening. The cake is always more than enough to make the birthday girl or boy jump in joy. That was pretty much about it for Elaina's birthday. We had wanted to bring Elaina on the Ducktour but only to realise that the boat leaves on the hour and each ride takes about an hour. We would have problem getting to Matty's school to pick him up on time.

One of the major milestone that I hope Elaina will hit is to get her completely toilet-trained for the daytime. Now that the work in this area is done for Matty it is just about time to get Elaina started.

Someone got into trouble....

17 March 2009 - Matty pushed one of his classmate in school and the boy fell from the stairs.  Good thing the boy was ok... probably fell down from just a step or two.

The teacher wasn't too sure what exactly happened but she heard Matty shouting at the boy that he doesn't want to be-friend the latter.  Next thing she knew... the boy got pushed off the stairs.

Needless to say Matty got himself into hot soup and was reprimanded in school and at home.  He is still serving his sentence of "no computer and tv games" that had been imposed by Papa until this Sunday.

Perhaps the redeeming part of this whole episode is his show of remorse (it was clearly written on his face that he had done something wrong and was feeling very bad even when he got home from school) that and his admittance that he was the one responsible for allowing what had happened to happen.  

Emotions

We took the kids out to Vivo (what's new?) last Sunday and ended up in McDonalds because Marche had a queue forming even though it was only slightly after 6.

Elaina has always been a big fan of french fries (aren't we all?) but she couldn't even swallow her fries when it was served. Reason? There was a toddler boy around her age, seated diagonally across us being given a tongue-lashing by his folks. Elaina was so affected by that scene and started to tear. I got her to look away but it only worked for a while. By the time she got to her 2nd fries, she turned around once more and her tears started to roll again. That's Elaina for you. She has so much empathy for a person in tears. She even cried once when she heard a sad song. Not that she understood the words but I suppose the melody rubbed off her.

I grew up as a crybaby and got my mum frustrated often because I cry over nothing and everything. My brother used to make jokes out of it even until today and of course that got me crying even more back then. Thank goodness I grew out of that. It is cute to have overflowing emotions when you are 3 but not a pretty sight at 30. And perhaps it is because I learned to appreciate that no amount of crying will help at the end of the day, I want Elaina to be tougher even as a girl and not an "emo queen". It is ok to cry but definitely not ok to cry just about anything. Tears are fine but too much of it makes the person look at the world in a blurry state.

On the other hand, Matty displayed his lack of emotions in a recent episode. He "lost" his first best friend because her mum decided to put her in another school. Although Matty did tell us that he misses Jodie when he didn't see her consecutively for a few days, his life in school went about just like any other day. I probed him further this morning for fear that he might be taking it negatively but much to my surprise he has now named another boy in his class as his best friend. He told me that he misses Jodie but he isn't sad at all (with a grin on his face) and he knows that it is because she has now gone to a new school. It has become a drill that if he stop seeing a familiar face in class it is because that person has gone to a new school. Talk about bouncing back! I just wasn't expecting him to move on so quickly and accept changes so easily. This is way too much "toughness" for me to accept from a boy this young.

Am I starting to sound ironic in this post?