The Kids

Huda is going to start school for real in less than 2 months while Farah will be moving on to N2 come December this year. How my kids have grown!

What have they been up to?

In no particular order, here are the milestones they met and the grouses I have. 

1. Farah can speak quite well for a 3 year old. She speaks more English than Malay, unfortunately. And unfortunately too, a lot of Singlish creeps into her language. I have no issues with Singlish if they can codeswitch efffectively but not if that is all they can speak. Her speech is clear and she can use complex sentences in her speech. Hooray!

2. Both kids are eating well. Huda - too well. Huda's eating habits are a bit strange. She eats A LOT. For dinner (which is at 5.30pm on schooldays because she comes home absolutely famished), she has at least 2 full servings of rice. We are not talking about 2 tablespoons of rice per serving. We are talking one entire rice bowl per serving (and more sometimes). She will eat that and ask for seconds. And thirds sometimes. And occassionally she wants even more and I will discourage her. 

The surprising thing is, despite this huge amount that she's eating, she's still terribly underweight - at the 3rd percentile - so the checkup last week showed. At 1.06m, her desired weight should be at least 21kg but she's only 16kg. But, I no longer worry about her weight. I'm happy to see her eating well. The only thing that perplexes me and anyone who sees the amount she eats is, where does it all go to?

3. Huda has problems with her teeth. The front upper teeth have some decay in there. So, she's been going to see a dentist (the one at the polyclinic) about it. She has to start using adult toothpaste which she abhors. If I don't supervise her nightly toothbrushing ritual, the toothpaste will end up all over the kitchen sink. (Toothbrushing takes place at the kitchen sink cos it's so much bigger than the bathroom.)

4. Farah can be so adorable. She'll make the funniest of faces when she wakes up in the morning, all on purpose. 

5. But she can also be so contrary. Being a kid, she has very little respect for hygiene. So she has no qualms picking up ice cream sticks, sweet wrappers or just about anything off the ground. I'll get so mad. The madder I get, the more she will do exactly what she's not supposed to do. In fact, when it comes to anything that makes me mad, she will do exactly what she's told not to do. I am not going to try reverse psychology on her just yet. Instead, I will keep calm, tell her succinctly what she's not supposed to do and move away. I am hoping for that (the keeping calm part) to work. 

6. She is also completely off diapers now. Her nighttime diapers went away after a few nights of dry diapers. One night, I truly forgot to put on her diapers for her before she slept and the next morning came without any incidents. So I tried again, always making sure she goes to the bathroom before she sleeps. And what do you know? We're saving a bundle without diapers now!

7. Farah picks things up quickly. She gets irritated by her sister when her sister goes "pink colour". She'll tell the sister, "Teacher Inah says pink is a colour. You don't have to say colour, right Mak? You just say 'pink'."

Each time she tries to teach her sister something, it's always preceded with a 'Teacher Inah says..'. That's her teacher in N1 who deserves a whole lot of credit for Farah's language development. 

And then, there's her loyar buruk-ness. How do you translate that to English? Once her sister snapped at her, "Padan muka." Serves her right, the sister said. Her reply? "Don't call me padan muka! My name is not padan muka."

8. Now, while Huda goes for her wushu on Sundays, Farah goes for her madrasah at the same time. Kids Alive's madrasah programme is only for kids in K1 and above so until Farah is old enough to join the programme, she'll be going for this other madrasah conducted by Little Muslim Readers. While both kids are away, I intend to start jogging. The keyword here is intend. 

9. My father and sis-in-law bought the special Quran Waqaf from Pergas and Masjid Al-Raudhah and Huda has been using that for her nightly Quran reading. No more ipad cos it was getting pretty annoying with the screen moving everywhere when we accidentally touched it or when I'm jabbing at the letters in frustration. She's now starting from the back where all the chapters are shorter. She spends up to two weeks per chapter (slow progress is mostly due to my laziness in insisting on a more regular schedule) which also includes memorising. At one point in time when I was pregnant, I was just too tired to teach and left everything to the Ustazah who comes in twice a week to teach her. Now that I'm in the pink of health, I have gone back to daily reading (no discounts on weekends either). I set myself a target of 6 times a week which means I can only slack a bit once a week. 

10. I've left Huda to read on her own these days but realised just now that I must get her to read aloud to me to check on her pronunciation. I saw her buried in a book when I went to pick her up from school this afternoon. I asked her what she read. She said, "Danger on the High Seas." Only that danger was pronounced da-nger, like the nger in singer.

11. She doesn't want to nap in the afternoon on weekends so I told her that she could stay up when Farah is napping as long as she is quiet and allows me to enjoy my Kindle Paperwhite (this one, I may just dedicate one whole entry for it). One afternoon, after Farah slept, she sat beside me, took out her English-Malay picture dictionary and started reading it for the entire 2 hours that Farah napped. Huda loves her picture non-fictions. She loves the Disney's Words books - Words that Tell You about Things, Words that Do Things and Words that Name Things. (Those books are tough to find and I definitely did not pay Grolier $3000+ to get those books! I'm glad she loves them!)

12. Farah was reading her Iqra'  book. ah, bah, bah she went, recognising the basic sounds the letter makes when a stroke is placed above the letter. Suddenly she went, "Ba ba ba balik kampung. Oh oh oh balik kampung..." breaking out into a Sudirman song.

Okay. That is all for now. I am going to spend some time with my Paperwhite now before turning in.