Do they start young?

Just had this conversation with Sarah, who came up to me with a gleeful look on her face.
Sarah: Daddy, do you know there are 3 boys in my class?
Daddy: (thinking: with that gleeful look on her face, don't tell me she finds them cute?!?!) Oh, is that so? What are their names? (good to check them out right?)
Sarah: There is Jiewei... and there is Jesse... and there is Hector.
Daddy: Which one do you like most?
Sarah: I like... Jeyron the most.
Daddy: (thinking: what?! another boy?!) What do you like about him?
Sarah: Jeyron is a girl!
Daddy: Oh, Jeyron is a girl! (phew!)

Well, never too young to check... :)

Quirky Sophia

Our little Sophia, ever since she started to really speak, she's been saying the funniest things to us. Some days I wonder where she get her ideas from. Really, she looks all serious and quiet when she's with strangers or when she's out but behind closed doors, she's really a very funny and quirky girl and we've been finding it hard to get angry with this one. (Ya, Uh-oh, right? The youngest, baby of the house... yah, they do get away with things coz they're cute...)

Anyway, we were preparing to say our good night prayers and then all of a sudden Sophia pointed to herself and said, " I'm 爸爸(Daddy), (points to me) You're Genevieve, Kor Kor is a lion, Che Che is a cat and Daddy,..... Daddy's a bird.... 小鸟，小鸟 (And then she proceeds to stress and drag the word 鸟)"
We were really bewildered by her sudden outburst and then after all that, she looks at me and smiles sweetly.
Ya, what was that all about??? I can only attribute it to her quirky self.

Then, a few mornings after that, Caleb was in the toilet getting ready for school. Sophia woke up from her sleep, went to the toilet, closed the toilet door and started saying in a sing song voice "Hello Handsome! I can see you! Handsome! You can't catch me!"
I was again bewildered by her because 1) We don't call Caleb "Handsome" 2) Kids don't just wake up and run to the toilet immediately to say such things! They wake up and ask for milk or just smile or something... They don't shoot out of bed and start teasing their siblings the minute they wake up. Again it made me wonder, where did that come from???

Well, this morning again she came to the toilet when Caleb was brushing his teeth and again in a sing song voice, she said "Handsome... I'm watching youuu... I'm watching you brush your teeeeth..." Then she gave us a cheeky smile. Well, I asked everybody at home whether they taught her to call Caleb handsome but apparently nobody has... at least not directly. Occasionally we have said things like tell Caleb he looked handsome in a shirt that he wore but we've never called him "Handsome".

My little cheeky, quirky girl who's so full of mischief!

Conversations on Thanksgivings

I was doing quiet time with the kids one night and suggested to them that we should each share something to give thanks for for that day.
I started my thanksgiving and shared with them how I was in a huge rush that morning (busy, busy, busy) and I stuffed a whole pancake into my mouth, in my rush to finish up my breakfast. And after a couple of chews, I swallowed the pancake and realised that I was having difficulty getting it down my throat. And the immediate thought that came to me was... My pancake's stuck. I can't get it out and I can't swallow it. I'm choking. So... this is how people can choke on food and die! (I never really understood it, until now...) And so I quickly grabbed some water to try to wash down my pancake and I could feel it moving really, really slowly down my throat. And I was starting to have some difficulty breathing! No kidding! So, I shared with the kids that I was really, really thankful that I managed to wash the pancake down and I would not try that again. And they should not try that too.

So all 3 of them sat there looking really thoughtful as I shared and then this is what they said to me...
Caleb: Mummy, what if you forget and next time you're in a rush and you stuff your breakfast in your mouth and choke again...
Me: Oh, I wouldn't forget that. I've learnt my lesson. There are some lessons that you need lots of reminders before you'll learn it and there are some that you only need to learn once and you'll never forget it again.
Sarah: But Mummy, you're very forgetful. Every time kor kor, me and Sophia ask you to do something, you always forget to do. We have to keep reminding you...
Me: Ohhh..... Is it.....

(Opps.....didn't know how to respond to her on that one. But it was interesting to hear that from her! And it is true that many times there are things that the kids ask me to do and I take a super long time to get them done, coz it's low on my priority list. With 3 kids demanding stuff from me all day, and with limited hours each day, I've got to prioritize what I can do and usually, it's to meet their basic needs, then there's school work, projects, outings... you get the drift, so if their request is what I deem more frivolous like mending a toy or buying something that's not of utmost importance, then it falls lower down on my to-do list and sometimes, when the list gets too full, it gets dropped off )

So, note to self - I should try to be more sensitive to the kids' requests and make an effort to do what they ask me to do even though I don't think it's very important or necessary. Sigh! It's tough being a mum you know!

And then, we moved on to our next thanksgiving. Recently, Caleb has been asking me to let him take up piano lessons. We have a keyboard at home and Caleb has been trying to play songs on his own. Sarah takes KinderBeat lessons as part of her enrichment in school and she loves her lessons and seems to have an aptitude for music. As for Sophia, she's a little too young for us to tell but for now, she loves to sing and listen to music. So me and ND thought that it would be nice for the kids to take up piano lessons so that they can learn to appreciate music and possibly serve in the worship ministry in future.

Cost is definitely a constrain and consideration on our part and so we had prayed for God to provide. And a few days after that, ND came home to tell us that his classmate has a church friend who will be willing to teach our kids piano at a nominal sum, some time next year. We were really happy and excited to hear the news and this is what the kids said when I shared the news with them and told them that learning music can also allow them to serve God during worship sessions.

Sarah: Yeah! Next time I want to be the worship leader! And the guitar leader! And the piano leader! (I was really surprised to hear that from her... considering she doesn't like standing in front of crowds. But then again, you never know what God can do!)
Caleb: Haha! Then you're going to be a one-man band, is it? (I thought he was quite humorous!) I want to be guitar leader.
Sophia: Yeah! I want to be violin leader! Ee-orh, ee-orh (and she pretended that she was playing the violin)

I thought the 3 of them were really funny and told myself I really have to blog this. God has always had a great sense of humour and who knows, maybe one day, my 3 kiddos will really be God's worship leader, piano leader, guitar leader and violin leader as they desire so.

Love Singapore Event

In August, Caleb and Sarah were asked to participate in a Love Singapore event. Our church was roped in to help provide 20 children from the age of 4-14 to represent the children of the next generation. The requirement? They had to go on stage to sing the national anthem as the finale of the event.

So, this Mummy had to get busy and start teaching my kids how to sing our national anthem. (And you're wondering why I haven't blogged for so long? Very busy lah! With kids at this age, whenever they get some project, who's the one who has to do most of the work? Me lah! Story telling competition, school recycling project, lantern making, graduation concert, learn to sing national anthem... got a lot of things to do you know. Plus sometimes, I have to double my efforts coz there's 2 of them in school... Ah, I'm digressing but yah, sometimes I need to vent a little to maintain my sanity...)

So, I was given 1 week's notice to give them a crash course on our national anthem. I found that the most effective way was to show them some  youtube videos with our national anthem and sing along with them and we were ready on the day itself.

As usual, the one that I worried about was Sarah coz she tends to get cold feet whenever she needs to stand before an audience. However, this time round she seemed excited that there were so many other children around and so she gamely followed along. Me and ND gave her lots of thumbs up to encourage her and boost her confidence.

Here's the kids lining up from shortest to the tallest. Both my kids were right in front.
Sarah was the tiniest kid there and Caleb was the 2nd shortest boy there.

Rehearsals. The kids arrived slightly earlier and had 2 rounds of rehearsals.

Me and Sarah, waiting for the actual performance.

Caleb, monkeying around.

The actual performance. They all sang with gusto!

After the singing of the national anthem, one of the church leaders went on stage to pray a word of blessing for the children and for the children of their generation.

I thought that the event was good exposure and fruitful for Caleb and Sarah, to be able to join children from other churches to participate in such an event as a body of Christ.

Graduation Concert

It's the time of the year where most preschools are putting up their year end concerts. For us, it's a little more significant than previous years coz this year, Caleb's graduating from Kindy and Sarah's doing her debut performance.

Our little graduand receiving his cert

Standing before the crowd


Taking his place with his classmates



After all the graduating students received their cert, they presented the audience with a graduating song...


The lyrics of the song they sang...


After that, it was time for all the performances.

We don't really have any idea what Sarah was going to perform. I just know that she would be singing and dancing. She seemed quite enthusiastic about her performance until the day of the performance. When she woke up, she told me that she had a stomachache. She went to lie on my bed, told me in a grouchy and weak voice that her stomach hurts a lot and she don't want to go to school. Me and ND's immediate thought - Butterflies in the stomach! I had to be very patient with her and thankfully manage to persuade her to get herself ready for school.

So here she is just before the start of the performance, peeping from the door at the side of the stage.


She was thrilled to be able to spot us and couldn't stop grinning from ear to ear. I think she was eager to show off her costume, make up and hairdo to us. (And yes, no more stomachache!)


She kept waving to us, smile coyly and twirl her skirt the whole time that she waited for the song to start. We thought she looked really cute and nice in her costume.


Sarah in action...


There was this boy she partnered with for the dance and he was very "enthusiastic"!
First thing Grandpa said after the performance was (in Hokkien and in a very unapproving tone...) "My grand daughter so cute and pretty, but her boyfriend (the boy she danced with) so rough with her! Use so much strength on her and she never even scold him!"

Watch Sarah's full performance here and see how how sweetly she's smiling at her partner.


As for Caleb, this year, his teacher requested for him to be a narrator for the story that his class was presenting. The story is set in a forest with 4 woodpeckers as the protaganists. The woodpeckers and other forest animals are living in harmony with the plants and trees, till the arrival of 2 bears who goes about destroying the trees in the forest. The animals in the forest then use scriptures to remind the 2 bears that God created all things. They are beautiful and so the bears should love and take good care of God's creation.
Caleb with his classmate, Angeline, introducing the story.



We all thought Caleb did an excellent job narrating the story. He was fluent and his intonation was very good. Grandma and Grandpa were exceptionally proud coz the people sitting around them commented that Caleb's Mandarin was very good. They asked Grandpa and Grandma whether we spoke Mandarin to Caleb at home, of which they replied that we speak English at home but Caleb practised very hard for this performance.

We did put in some time and effort to practise for the performance. When Caleb's teacher first spoke to me about him taking on the role of the narrator, she said that she thought he would be a good choice coz his Chinese foundation is not too bad and he has always taken his assignments seriously. So she felt that he would be able to do the job.

When I first saw the script, I was like "Wah, the words are quite difficult to read!" I couldn't read a few of them myself and had to refer to the dictionary. Caleb started off not knowing how to read 95% of his lines. I went through the script with him a couple of times, of which the first few times he cried, he grumbled, he fretted about how difficult all the words were. After that, things just got easier when rehearsals started in school. I think it's peer pressure. He came home telling me that Angeline could memorise the whole script and even his lines without needing to look at the script. And he too could memorise his lines after a while and said it's not difficult anymore. However, he still held on to his script as his security blanket. Towards the last week of the performance, he was no longer working on memorizing his lines but adding emotions into his lines.

Caleb standing with his classmates towards the end of the story.


Here's Caleb's performance on video. Again, this Mummy blundered on capturing the whole performance. The last time round, when Caleb did storytelling, I was so excited, I forgot to start the recording. This time, I started the recording for 2min and then I realised my SD card had run out of memory and was no longer recording! After scrambling for a spare SD card, here's the remaining 7min of his performance!


After all the performances, they got the classes to come out for the grand finale.
The school sang the closing song - "This is My Father's World" in English and Mandarin.


The hordes of parents clicking and snapping away

Sophia with Grandma. I think she can't wait for her turn to be able to perform.


After the performances were over, we took more photos.
I like this series that we took of Caleb and Sarah.

Kor Kor and Che Che

Caleb was really sweet. He realized that Sarah's top was riding up and showing her belly and he tried to help her adjust her top. Though sometimes he can get all rough and rowdy but generally, he's a sweet Kor Kor.


I need to help you pull up your skirt...

There, that's better...

Now we're ready to pose...

This is so funny!

This is my brother...

And this is my sister...

And we love each other very much!

And along comes Sophia to join in the fun

Grandma decided to join in too!

And how can we miss out Grandpa...

And then it's time for some photo moments with friends. These 2 girls are Sarah's classmates.
The girl in costume is one of Sarah's best friends in school. The other girl just joined her class.

Kor Kor and his friend from the other K2 class decided to join in too

And to end our eventful day, of course we had to take a family photo!

Caleb's idea of Our Father's World

These girls won't make good army sign-ons :)

Sophia's Funny Face & Beautiful Eyes

I was going through my backlog of videos and photos and I found this video of Sophia that I thought was really cute. When she was about 12-14months old, she went through this phase of scrunching up her face when we said "funny face" to her and trying to blink her eyes when we said "beautiful eyes". It was also around that time that she started speaking more and was working on calling out "daddy, mummy, korkor and cheche".

Kor Kor and Mei Mei's performance

Sophia loves to sing and imitate her big korkor, the performer.
Here's a little video of Caleb singing to the tune of ABC to humour Sophia and Sophia, trying to imitate and sing along with her Kor Kor.

Recycling

Caleb is big on recycling. As I was doing my run just now, I ended the run with a Pocari isotonic drink plastic bottle in my hands, and remembered with amusement a "chastisement" I got from my dear son once.

I had printed some documents to read on already-recycled paper and after having read them, I folded them in a manner which would allow them to be easily placed into the dustbin without taking too much space. Caleb, who was just standing next to me, obviously having observed my actions, looked at me with squinted eyes and said,"Daddy, you are going to recycle them right?!"

I was frankly both amused and guilty at the same time, and that guilty part probably showed on my face while I remained lost for words. He followed up on his first rapier thrust with another quick jab, saying, this time with a fiercer tone, "Daddy, you know you should recycle right?!"

To cover my guilt, I burst out laughing, agreed heartily and sheepishly unfolded the sheets of paper again. I asked the mummy where our pile of recycle materials were and with an amused-knowing look on her face, the mummy pointed out the pile to me.

My son is big on recycling, I better be careful with what I do with my rubbish... by the way, Caleb, in case you read this post in the future, as I walked home just now, I threw the Pocari bottle into a recycling bin downstairs. :)

Chinese Story Telling Competition

Today is Parents' Day at Caleb and Sarah's Kindy. As part of the school's efforts to strengthen the parent-child bond and to promote the love of the Chinese language, they have organised a parent-child Chinese story telling competition. Caleb and Sarah both wanted to take part in the competition so I went ahead to sign them up for it.


Since each child is supposed to pair up with a parent, I persuaded ND to take on the task of teaming up with Caleb while Sarah teamed up with me. ND's initial reaction was "Cannot lah..." It's exams period for him and he's extremely stressed up. But when ND heard me talking to the kids about the competition a few days later, somehow he changed his mind. Despite all his assignment deadlines and the stress of schoolwork that he was facing, he agreed to team up with Caleb. His only condition was that he was really busy so I had to take care of all the ground work. So I chose the story, practised with Caleb, went with him for his rehearsal, prepared the props and just briefed ND the day before on what he had to say and act. (Thank you Daddy! I know you love us all very much and Caleb definitely appreciates the time u set aside for him )

Here's the performace that ND and Caleb put up today. Despite the little practise that they had together, I thought that they did an excellent job as a team. They were both very animated and provided lots of comic relief to the audience.(ND has got the "performing" genes and Caleb's really a chip of the old block.)

The story that Caleb told was 狮子的肚子饿了. It's a story about a hungry lion and his animal friends. I was so eager to watch them on stage that I missed out recording the intro of their story. 


Don't you think they did well? Caleb was the 2nd last to go on stage to tell his story. The last candidate to go on stage was his classmate. She's from China and she was extremely fluent in delivering her story and her story was much longer and quite interesting. So my initial assessment was that I think Caleb did quite well but she'll probably come in 1st coz her Chinese standard's really way above the other children. I thought Caleb would have a chance for 2nd place. 

Sarah on the other hand, had cold feet when she saw the huge audience that she had to perform to. We went onto the stage together but she was just willing to smile at everybody and she wanted me to do all the talking. I tried to persuade her to say her lines but she started looking more and more distressed so we left the stage without telling our story. My daughter's very much like me and I can understand the stage fright that she experienced. I used to get butterflies in my stomach whenever I had to go on stage as a child. See, I wouldn't even have signed up for the storytelling competition on my own accord, if not for the sake of encouraging my kids and giving them some exposure. (Ha... I told ND that it was a big sacrifice on my part to sign up for the competition coz I was stressed about the story, worried about whether my kids can deliver their lines especially when they can't speak Mandarin fluently, worried about the props and worried about whether Sarah would act up on stage!)

When the results of the competition was out, we were pleasantly surprised to see that other than the top 3 prizes, they were also giving out consolation prizes to the children who participated. They explained that it was a form of encouragement to them for being brave enough to attempt to perform in front of so many people on stage.

So that's me and Sarah on stage receiving our consolation prize!

And then we waited in anticipation for Caleb's results. All the other prizes were given out except 1st and 2nd for the K2 category. The principal asked the audience who they thought was 2nd and surprisingly they all shouted Caleb's classmates name. And indeed, surprise surprise, Caleb actually came in 1st! I thought it was really a great achievement for him and naturally he was really very excited and kept saying "Mummy, this is my first trophy!!!" (Ya, hopefully there's many more to go... haha)

Here's the kids on the way home after lunch. They were all exhausted by the story telling competition.

And here's the champion for our chinese story telling competiton!

As for Sarah, even though she didn't tell her story on stage, looking at her performance when we rehearsed at home, we all thought that she stood a chance to come in first for the Nursery category if she had said her lines.

After the competition, I asked her whether she would be willing to take part in other competitions in future and she said no. Interestingly, her reason was that she only wants to perform at home and not in front of her classmates coz she doesn't want them to laugh at her. After that she told me that she thought she would get a gold trophy like korkor and I told her that I thought so too if she had told her story on stage. But coz she didn't say anything on stage, they couldn't give her the trophy. She thought about it for a while and then shook her head and said,"but I don't like to go on stage."

Sarah's a really sensitive girl and she thinks that when the audience laughs, it's a negative reaction. I had to explain to her that the audience laughed at Caleb coz they loved his story. But I guess different children have got different personalities. Whilst Caleb the extrovert thrived on the attention on stage, Sarah who is more introverted, didn't like the attention on her at all.  

Nevertheless, I thought the competition was very good exposure for the children and me and ND are so proud of them for the effort that they put in to practise their stories.

Present from Sarah

I received this as a present from Sarah today. There was no special occasion. She took time to draw this for me.

 

It doesn't look all that stunning. But I love it. I can still see the eager smile that she wore on her face as she passed it to me. It was precious. Thank you Sarah for loving me the way you know how.

This reminds me of how God sees us as we offer our filthy rags to Him. Our Father looks at that which we offer to Him, and what He sees is not all that stunning. But He loves it. He can see the eager smiles on our faces as we praise Him and honour Him. It is precious to Him. Thank you God for letting us love you the way we know how.

Children... you need to know this...

CNY 2011

Family photo taken with Grandpa, Grandma and Chek Chek on the 1st day of CNY.

Our kids were all clad in super bright red clothes. They looked like walking ang baos but obviously had the nod of approval from the older generation.

 Funny pose from the 3 walking ang baos

Individual shots:
Kor Kor

Che Che

Baby (that's her nick at home...)

The Kungfu Fighting Duo

Not to be left out... Another martial arts expert using the Xue Di Zi (Flying Guillotine weapon)

Here's to ursher in the Rabbit year
The geeky version

The demure version

Prelude for next year - the year of the Dragon

2nd day of CNY, we were a little more subdued in our dressing.
Family photo that we took.

Our 3 musketeers

To end this post, special appearance from our Ms Vietnam. 

Grandma bought this from Vietnam and our dear girl was pleased as punch to be able to wear it and pose for us. We all thought she looked really nice in it.