Tooth brushing

Sophia has a dental appointment next Wednesday afternoon. She has a corner tooth where food gets stuck and refuses to come out on brushing, and every couple of days, husband I have to pin her down and tackle her with a tooth pick.

It was quite fun at first with us playing dentist and Anjali shining the torch in Sophia's mouth. And then the torch ran out of battery (possibly one of the kids were playing with it and left the light on) and so Sophia doesnt want to show her mouth without a torch.

But her attitude toward tooth brushing has improved (marginally). She still yells as if all the monsters in the world were behind her, and she still doesnt want to use tooth paste. Each time she needs to gargle, I lose a couple of hairs on my head, but she has learnt to sit still while yelling her throat hoarse.

Of course, i can tell her that if she doesnt brush her teeth, they will become like Swati aunty's and the image of Swati aunty's tooth in the plastic is still fresh in her mind.

A tough nut

"Mummy, I dont want to go to Ballet", says Sophia.

"Why not?" I asked.

"I dont want to go to ballet because all the childyen are teasing me"

"Why for?"

"Because I have no ballet skirt"

"I will make you a beautiful ballet skirt"

"No. i dont want to go to ballet, but I want to go to my yeal school"

"I see. "

Half an hour later, husband and I are discussing the logistics of making a tutu.

"Mummy, I dont want to go to ballet"

"You always complain that Anjali goes for class and you dont go for any class. This is your class"

"No. Mummy please... i dont want to go for ballet, but I want to go for other class."

"You have to try it"

"No!"

Now trying reverse psychology

"OK Sophia. You dont have to go to ballet class and you dont have to go to piano. Mummy and daddy will work with Anjali on her ballet and piano and reading and we wont work with you for anything. Ok?"

Bottom lip comes out in a perfect sulk.

"Ok"


Shucks. IT backfired. Is there a Maisy goes for ballet book that i can borrow? Of courrse, I could tell her that Dr Birute Galdikas learnt ballet. That would work better than Maisy. And it is true

Fairy water and jogging

8.30pm:

Sophia: Mummy, can I make fairy water?

Me: Yes, after Anjali plays her piano

Sophia: Please. i want to make fairy water.

Anjali settled in the piano with husband and I took a tub out for fairy water.

Sophia: I want to do fairy water in the hall

Me: No. Water play is in the bathroom only

Sophia: But the bathroom is so wet!

Me: thats kind of the point. I am going to hunt up stuff too put in fairy water and you tell me when you are ready.

Sophia (with an expression of self sacrifice): I am eady to make fairy water in the bathroom.

Anjali finished her piano and the girls played a while putting bottle caps and marker caps and beads in the water

8.45pm

Husband: I am going jogging

Anjali: Can I go with you?

Me: Your bedtime is in half an hour

Anjali: Please, can I go.

Husband: I will run very fast Anjali

Anjali: Its ok. I can take my kick scooter and go with you

Sophia: No!! Anjali, dont go jogging.

Me: Do you also want to go jogging

Sophia: Anjali, dont go jogging.

Me: Sophia, what do you want?

Sophia: Mummy sniff, mummy sniff, I want to go jogging but I want to finish the fairy water first.

Me: Ok, let Anjali and daddy go first and then when they come back they will take you again.

I was, of course secretly hoping that she would forget about this and then we could send her to bed. I should have known better after five years of parenting.

Anjali and husband left for jogging. Sophia and I played with the fairy water, made fairy dust, put fairy spells on each other, and then played dress up (with Sophia wearing my old shirt as a dress and a sash around it) and drank vanilla milk shake



9.15pm:


Anjali came back with husband. The girls began to play and at some point began to take out brooms from the closet to sweep the floor.

Me: Its bedtime.

Sophia: But I want to go jogging.

Me: There is no bicycle tomorrow. You have to wake up early.

Sophia: But you said that I could go jogging and you are not taking me. You said...

There was nothing for it.

Me: Can you take her for a quick round the playground?

Anjali: Wait, I will get my water bottle and come.

Sophia: You said you will take me jogging

Me: I never said that i will take you jogging. I have never jogged in my entire life.

Sophia has the sense to look rather mollified. But

Sophia: You said htat daddy will take me jogging,,,

Me: i know what I said, now change and go.

And they went

On the role of heroes in the bringing up of children

Yesterday evening, Sophia opened the sensor box, took out the marbles and the pista shells and began her favorite game.

Sophia's favorite game is the orangutan pretending game. She gets two marbles as orangutans, puts them on a plate, a binch of pista shells as food and she is Dr Birute and goes on like this for a long time.

In our home, Dr Birute has become a sort of hero amongst the girls. To add to the richness of the hero worship, I am currently reading her Reflections of Eden, and names like Louis Leakey and Jane Goodall have now become part of our daily play.

More often than not, stories from reflections of eden take the place of our bedtime reading routine and reading the book also gave credibility to my stories. For one thing, when Sophia asks

"How do baby Orangutans go to sleep?"

I can give her the correct answer with a clear conscience.

I do owe Dr Birute a lot for one important lesson. That heros often have to undergo things they dont like to get the things they want. Last night, I told the girls about how she had to get Orangutan urine on her when she was tailing orangutans and how her bottom got burnt when she sat on a log.

The girls listened enthralled.

And it was a fundamentally wonderful wildcard to pull out when Sophia began her

"I dont want to go to school" routine.

"I dont like my school", she said. "It is very long and very boring"

"Do you think Dr Birute found it boring to be in the forsts waiting for days for the Orangutans to come?"

"Yes"

"Thats what makes her a hero."

"I am a  heyo mummy?", she asked as husband belted her in the bicycle.

"Yes", I told her and off she went to school with a pouch full of her oen toys (the school toys are apparently too boring for her).

Thanks Dr Birute and hopefully we can com,e to the jungles in April.

Recycling spotlight: woven rag rug in the making

This is my current on sometimes off sometimes project, a woven rag rug.

Pretty isnt it. If you look carefully, you can see three layers, with a fouth one in the making. Let me start off by telling something about it.

THe first layer is a set of miscellaneous clothes - mostly old children's clothes. Hence the bright and assorted colors. The second off white patch is an old bedsheet that belonged to thattha and patti which patti had dropped over for me to use. It was totally ragged for thattha to use although he had gotten several years worth out of it. The Third layer is a bunch of demins. I think it was five pairs of old jeans, torn at the crotch and had to go into the bin kind. We ripped up the legs. The current layer in progression is a baby bedsheet which we never used because it was made out of polyester.

My idea is to make it a really huge focal point for the licing room or the reading corner, and put lots of homemade cushions on it and a papaer mache table.

I had started work on the paper mache table last week. the idea was to make a sort of thick central base using ktichen rolls and mache over them so that they were bound together and strong and then put a layer of paper mached cardboard on top.

It was a good idea in principle. i had loosely bound the kitchen rolls togehther using duct tape and left them in the kitchen to paper mache at my next convenient time, but Sophia decided to use them as a footstool. So wehn i got back from work, what was left there was a huge mess of cardboard rolls. I popped them right back for further work another day

conversing with the rain

I completely lost my hat yesterday afternoon. I am not even going to justify myself, but I bossed and intimidated the girls into doing a lot of work, including Anjali's reading and piano. Sometimes it drives me crazy that these kids have all these resources around them to encourage learning and creativity and play, and these things are virtually untouched unless husband or myself jump in to lead them. The sewing box is untouched. The lightbulb lab hardly gets used, and the children these days hardly draw on the floor. There is a box of sidewalk chalk left on the floor near a cupboard that they have free reign over and that is never used either. Painting activities donot last longer than five minutes.

The only thing that these girls take self initiative about is talking, jumping, gossiping, bullying husband etc. Puzzles get a fair bit of attention, but only when husband takes them out. Either there is some bad organization and an overwhelming number of toys that they have grown out of but are still within their vision. And then Anjali complains that when she is with patti' she has to do only tamil writing and no activities other than playing with toys, and when she is with me, she gets to do homework and activities. How many activities exactly can I do with the children over a period of two hours every evening?

I have read the articles that much of children's time must be devoted to free play but the organizer in my head screams when this free play time is devoted to talking, jumping and mummy carry. "If I had so much free time", I tell myself, "I would complete a hundred and fifty craft projects. I would spend less time hanging around and more time doing constructive stuff".

Not that the kids dont do creative stuff. Anjali and Sophia spent about an hour yesterday in the bathroom squashing soap and water and creating a slippery mess on the floor, and then they moved seamlessly to the toyroom where they were segued into some kind of pretend play or another, which involved taking all the seeds/ shells and marbles from the sensory box and cooking with them and making a zoo full of squirrels. Top points for imaginative play. What about constructive play?

Yes yes, i have read the articles on pretend play and free play and taking part in child directed play developes confident children... but is there a need for the child to move from one constructive activity to another? Constructive activity being defined as an activity that is constructive in my opinion and that visibly improves a skill in the child? And should the constructive activity also be child directed? Do children who perform this kind of free child directed "unconstructive play" get into a child play rut?

That is a tall order for children of three and five year old - identify what you are weak at and work on activities that improve this skill. Afterall, that is what parents are for, to identify that the child is weak at something and create opportunities for improvement.

What are these opportunities? What to do when the child ignores them or doesnot take sufficient advantage of them (Note: my currently hot headed definition of sufficient advantage is when the time spent at the activity is sufficiently greater than the effort that it took for me to set up the play)

The authors of the playful parenting book that I am currently off and on reading are probably going to go all grim and unfriendly when they read this post, but what the hell, its my blog, and writing helps me to toss arouond thoughts and ideas that are too complicated and muddle my head when I keep them in.

I know and understand that play and playing with children really helps them to become confident. Look at Vaishna, for instance. I remember her spending hours and days at a time, closetted in a room, even when she was about 8 or nine years old. A room with a black board, armed with a stick and a bunch of toys. She would go on for hours pretending to be a teacher. And look at her now, with a CA under her arm and a march into her career. 

YEs, play is important, but where should the parent draw the line between studies and play? Which comes first? Something Swati said yesterday at the IEP facilitators' meeting comes to mind. What are the tangible benefits of IEP activities? They dont help children improve in Math/ Science/ English. But then we can ask ourself - what is the advantage of having children who are good at Math, Science, English as opposed to having confident children. The director at my institute is known to tell us not to put too much importance into the fact that someone has a PhD. Gates had no PhD, nor did steve jobs. The highest IQs he said, are the school dropouts and the delinquents. They are too bored of school and dont think that what school gives them is of much use and they take their brians elsewhere. Then there is us.

And it all brings us back to the role of parents. I was about to say facilitators... but the role of parents.

I dont want to go to school

Sophia: I dont want to go to school mummy

Me: Why not?

Sophia: Because... (you could almost see her gears whirring )... because... mummy... going to school is like locking myself up in a room full of monsters.

I had to try very hard to keep a straight face about that one. it was, I think pretty serious.

She did get on to the bicycle and was pretty mollified by the new cycle cushion, but I understand from husband that she gave a good bit of trouble getting into the assembly area and clawed him a lot.

It might all boil down to the fact that she didnt quite have enough sleep last night, since having absolutely refused to sleep in the afternoon, she came up with absolutely ridiculous excuses to sleeping in the night, like

1. I am not sleepy
2. I dont know how to close my eyes
3. I cannot sleep on the bed, I need a lap to sleep on. I need mummys lap or patti's lap to sleep on
4. Baby orangutans never sleep on the bed
5. i need mummy milk shake now! I need Vanilla milk shake
6. I am very bored.

Recycling spotlight: Lightbulb lab

The old lightbulb lab that we had made for getting too ratty, and ti was time for a new one. It took a good bit of work to make it, but here it is. I am very proud of the construction, since it is both sturdy and capable of holding much more things than the old lab.



Made entirely with cardboard, styrofoam vegetable trays and plastic salad boxes, paper mached over with lots of layers of newspaper and junk mail.

Recycling spotlight: Slotted disks

There was a hure connecting disc playground features in this collossal. I was pretty inspired by that and while Anjali was doing her homework on Friday, I began this project. It could have been very simple if I had left it to just cutting the milk carton to make the discs, but since I had a lot of old clothes that could be cut up, it ended up being more complicated.

It took a bit of tweaking, since the slits needed to be a little thick. The recommended thickness, I think is approximately the width of the cardboard, but here is Sophia having a good time with the construction.

Anjali's argument

I was mumbling some bedtime story to the children

"And then...", said Anjali.

"Enough Anjali", I said. "I am tired, the story is long and tomorrow is a school day"

"Mummy", she says, "Finish the story. You are always telling me that I should finish my work and you are not finishing the story"

You ought to be careful what to tell the children. I have always been telling Anjali that she doesnt sit at an activity. Scratch that, she doesnt sit at many activities. On Saturday, she spent about an hour doing a paint by number kit that husband had gotten for her. She has been known to spend half an hour or longer at hama activities and she spent almost an entire plane trip working on a scratch pad with rainbows on it. On Friday we sat together to work on homework and we were at it for abot 45 minutes.

I guess it is somewhat my expectations, that I expect the children to sit at fine motor activities, but Anjali sort of stope doing fine things when the novelty wears out. For instance, the hamabead work stopped after the first couple of cars and any beads that were subsequently done were not completed, but poured out half way. The same gotes for the sewing/ embroidery and knitting projects. I guess it is rather early for her, I didnt start doing embroiodery and stuff till seven or eight, and there is not much interesting about running stitch. Its only fun when you do chain stitches and the like.

I guess that the thing to do will be to offer the activities again and again.

Sophia has made good improvement in her letter identification. I have been using the sandpaper montessori letters that I made for Anjali and never used with her and she is getting good at sounds. I guess it is important to let the cchildren do things at their own time

Gymnastics, wounds, and white witches

Anjali fell off from the swing at home. It was her own fault. She was standing on the swing despite repeated warnings and fell off. She got a rather nasty bruise on her right hand. Husband tried putting a bandaid on it, but that didnt quite work, since Anjali only likes to raid husband's band aid box when the bruises are imagined.

We are seriously thinkng of giving her an outlet for the physical activities. I tried to hunt down TaeKwan do and gymnastics. However, the only gymnastic classes that we could find were at the turf city club. TaeKwan Do, which was offered at the SCS clashes prime time with patti's Shloka class - not that these kids sit in Shloka. They play and sometimes run off to other rooms in the house. But then, better to avoid timing clashes.

There are Aikido classes in the community club on Friday evenings and it is these lessons that husband and I are considering. We have been quite happy with her community club lessons, and Anjali is apparently making progress in her ballet. The catch: Aikido lessons are for children six years and up and Anjali is not yet six. However, her wrestling skills are very impressive and she can resort to using all her limbs to pin you down in a fight - trust me, I know.

Maybe what these kids need is a serious body using fight. I mean, how much can you play princess? I think princess playing is totally boring, atleast it is until you pop a couple of dragons into the picture.

Sophia has a new ambition. When she grows up, she wants to be a white witch, so that when she walks, roses will bloom at her feet and butterflies will flit around her and rabbits will jump up to her and eat carrots from her hands.

This is because husband and I have been reasing Eva Ibbotson's Which Witch and we were discussing the book. Ofcourse, the girls wanted the story and Sophia wants to be a white witch.

She has, atleast temporarily, stopped wanting to be a baby orangutan.

Gren living: continued

Since the people from Colex didnt turn up as promised on Friday, there was a bit of a bummer about what we were going to do with all the stuff to recycle. The recycling bins that were supposed to be there under our block were also not there, and the ones at patti's house, I think seldom get emptied. Atlease, each time we go there, they are full and they have lots of plastic bags around them.

I was half thinking of calling Colex again, but last Wednesday, I finally found a recyling bin, about five minute walk from acasa. The issue was thhat there was a need to sort the recyclables, which I began to do with the kids and finished after the girls went to school.

There, my first attempt at recycling waste. I know there is no need to make a big deal out of it - people recycle all the time, but it is a first timer for me. And now, we have three bins, (husband is very amused by it), two small ones for paper and plastic and a bigger one for cans. We dont use many cans, but I gathered that milk cartons are counted as cans.

Now the question to ask is whether it is possible to be truly zero waste. We have begun to store vegetable peels in the fridge for a week and then blend them together. Every Sunday, the plants get a vegetable peel treat. With the recycle routine in place, the only things that we will probably throw are the toxic stuff and the cooked food waste.

Fairy shoes and Princess clothes

Anjali didnt wear her sandals to Yogyakarta. The reason was that they were horribly ratty and the plastic on top was peeling off to reveal some very shabby looking interior.

No matter what Anjali's faults are, she is a very fair kid, and understands that she got into this situation because she went for the fanciest not very sturdy shoes in the sop. So left wwith no proper shoes, she, very uncomplainedly, wore her (plain) school shoes to Yogya and didnt even complain much the day she had to wear them without socks.

As a result, and as a result of reading the creative family, I promised her that when we returned to Singapore, she could have two pairs of shoes, one sturdy pair for wearing outdoors and one very silly highheeled sparkly lousy for the feet pair to wear at home only when she wanted to play princess.

She tried to make true the bargain on Tuesday, which was the day after we had returned. But it was a real no go, since the shops were closed for Chinese new year.

So yesterday, after ballet, we went to the shops, just Anjali and me, to choose shoes.

Now see how fortune favors Anjali Curic. She found her sparkly shoes fast enough - high heeled with beads in the heels (dont even ask)

But no matter how hard I tried to look for study, durable sandals, they were all either too small or too big for her.

So we were heft to choose another princess sandal, which was durable, but was white and girlish and had Cinderella on the Velcro.

And so quite naturally Sophia threw a tantrum when we reached patti's house and she discovered that she didnt have Cinderella on her velcro. Her Cinderella on the velcro shoes were rather battered and one shoe was missing a ribbon and while she still wore them, we preferred to have her wear another pair of more presentable, but distinctly unprincessy shoes

No amount of pointing out teddy bears in her existing shoes would console her and I left patti's house just when thattha was starting to grumble that I should have bought Sophia too a pair of shoes (Sophia has some three pairs of shoes at home, excluding those that Anjali has grown out of)

And then when we got home, Anjali paraded around with the high heeled shoes that made clanking clopping sounds on the floor when she walked and gave me no end of worry that the people from downstairs will shout as they often do when we drop marbles on the floor.

And Sophia saw them

And while Anjali was nice about it and let Sophia parade a bit with her shoes, Sophia still wants her own princess shows and wouldnt wear her old shoes which have Cinderella on the velcro (to be fair, the ribbon is missing from one shoe although it is perfectly servicable)

"Why didnt you come with me to Bata?" I asked

I conveniently forgot to mention to Sophia that she stayed in patti's house basically because I didnt want to buy three more shoes for her to top off the shoes that she already has. I am running out of room in the house.

"Because I was tired", she says.

"Well, next time we go, remind me to get you a pair of shoes. ok?" I tell her

I am hoping that she wont hold me to it. But I will have to give the shoe shop entrance a wide berth for a few weeks.

Anjali asked me if she coould wear the lousy for the legs shoes in bed while I read her bedtime story.

I agreed, as the shoes were new and made her to promise not to wear them outside the house and even in the house, only for princess play.

She was hugging them when she slept and I took them off her hands and put them at the foot of them bed.

I tripped over them a couple of times in the morning, but the kid wore them first thing in the morning.

She has been having this high heeled shoe fantasy for about an year, so I guess it is time we indulged it. After all, i remember my own high heeled shoe fantasy and begging my parents for them.

I was, I think, around nine at that time and definitely not six

But then again, in those days, shoe shops usually stocked Hawaii Sandals and not shoes with princesses painted on them

How exactly does Cinderella feel about having kids stamp on her face all the time?

Jogja moments

Here are some selected photos from our trip to Yogyakarta. We had a great time, and the kids learnt and experienced a lot. A slight negative, Sophia fell sick in the trip and had to stay back from school. Here are some of the highlights

 The animals in the Yogya bird market: Attention, if you are an animal lover of any kind, donot visit this place

The Ramayana ballet at Purawisata

 The mighty temple of Borobudur and the elephant ride

 The statues of Mendut

 Village tour by horsecart

 Prabmanan

 The colorful lake at Dieng Plateau

 Horse riding to the bubbling voilcano at Dieng

 Chilling out in the hotel

The amazing Moutn Merapi

Recycling

The girls helped me yesterday to paint a large cardboard box, which was constructed using two milk cartons joined together. It is officially the new recycle bin. I spoke with Colex and apaprently they do recycling collection every other Friday from our doorstep. Trying out this Friday for the first time.

The need to take off

Not counting the weekend at Bintan, we have not taken a real holiday since returning from Romania. And it has been even longer since we took a proper holiday which was not prepackaged or organized by others. I think the last one was Bali or perhaps the Bangkok trip, which was, of course the most adventurous. The Bali trip, while we had a say to the places we wanted to visit, still was not as much DIY as we would have wished. The Bangkok trip was over 5 years ago. Maybe the triip to Auckland would count in some senses... Anyway, a few proper DIY trips are in order

 

I have been poring over lonely planet guidebooks and the internet and trying to find hotels, sights, sounds and trying to get an over all sense of Yogyakarta. Am really looking forward to the trip. It will be different, since we have the kids... but we have been talking to them a fair bit.

 

Sophia is dissappointed that we are not going to see the orangutans. Dr Birute is still the unsung hero of her dreams. And her favorite game is still to ask me to be Dr Biyute and herself to be the baby Oyangutan. And her favorite wuestion is "When we go to see the Oyangutans, how many years I will be?"

 

But the volcanoes of Yogyakarta and the temples of Borobudur are bound to mesmerize and fascinate. The guidebook has been loaded into the kindle and I guess everything is in order. I have spoken to the girls about the bird market and Sophia wants to buy chickens (we are putting it on hold, but not the visit)

 

This is probably the first temple/ culture oriented holiday that the kids are taking, if we donot count the transylvanian trip that we did in Romania when Anjali was a year old. Husband is into nature, and we have tended to go for forest/ beach trips, landing ijn one place and exploring there for a few days has been the general norm of things.

 

There is going to be a significant amount of nature in this trip too - we are planning to cover Dieng and Merapi, so it should be an all rounded one.   

Its very easy to be out argued by your five year old

I was bouncing off husband the idea of going to Mustafa to see the money changer to change money for the trip to Yogyakarta.

Husbnad was not very keen on losing an hour on the detour to Mustafa, but Anjali overheard us.

"I want to go to Mustafa"

And then, much later


"I havent gone to Mustafa in so long. The last time I went to Mustafa was the time I got my thomas shoes, and now Sophia is wearing them. "

That kind of logic is quite hard to beat

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She also makes an excellent food critic

"Mom", she says "you know the french fries that youo made for Sophia's birthday party?.. I think you should roast them some more. They tasted like potatoes and not like french fries"

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And a great architect

"Mom. Ramya, Sophia and I will live in the pool. You just have to change our water everyday like daddy changes the guinea pigs cage"

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To Ramya

"You know, my mummy can make french fries and cake. My daddy has just run down to buy ketchup, but my daddy can make ketchup"

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To Ananya
"My daddy is a superhero you know, you want to see him making a fountain?"

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I was grumbling on Saturday morning about the amount of effort that you need to put in organizing a birthday party. Making goody bags, and getting the games and stuff together.

And on Sunday morning, I was putting together the sandwiches when Sophia walks into the kitchen

"Mummy, you know I have two birthdays. "

"One is when I have the dyagon cake and one is when I have the gyuffalo cake"

And when the three year old remembers the dragon cake put together for her an year ago, I think it sort of makes the whole thing pretty worthwhile.

the resident animal lover's tips for taking care of guinea pigs

We are moonlighting ans doiong shows for National Geographic on animal loving. This is the next one, after william and Sara. Those paying attention may listen to someone going "daddy I am a baby oyangutan"

He has terrible tusks and terrible claws

The cake itself didnt quite satisfy husband's high standards of a light and fluffy cake. I should work on my sponge skills.

But the gruffalo is awesome and the girls had a great time decorating it with m&ms