Of songs, slippers and sea stars....

Val and one of his favourite books - of trucks- his obsession for things that go have begun!

Now that Mr Smellybottom has found his 'tongue', he's begun to parrot most of what we say to our bemusement - most of the time. Often, he spouts words in Chinese because his grandparents are the main caregivers. it's quite apparent the influence of caregivers cos in the first year when i was with him, most of the words he picked up was in English, now the new words are invariably in Chinese.

But kids do say the darnest things...! One day we caught him holding a paper bag, and when we asked him what he was doing, he said "take bag...." and we prodded on, "take bag for?" he replied "shopping" AIYOH! hilarious. He also knows that "money" goes into his plastic piggy bank, and often requests that we give him "money" so that he can feed his "pig". Thankfully, he's yet to make the connection between money and buying things.

These days, he charms his aunt calling her "Ah Yi..." sweetly over the phone, he beseeches his grandma with a well-timed "Po po...." and he absolutely melts his grandpa's heart by calling out for his "Ah Kong!" in the middle of the night or while looking for him in the crowd.

The boy also loves to watch the telly...unfortunately. The saving Grace is that the videos we play are all songs and kiddie programmes - so he's learning loads from them but well, sometimes, the too-many requests to switch on the TV gets to me. I'm mighty worried that we might be creating the next couch potato in the family.... Not that we have done badly - i mean, this is a family that sat around the TV eating, but still grew up well and not at all dysfunctional. So there's hope...

The songs he's learnt - he doesn't sing them. But he's becoming quite adept at filling in the blanks for us or doing the actions to accompany the songs. Row RoW Row your boat is a crazy mime of his hands rowing the oars - while he will sing "tar" to each line of Twinkle Twinkle little Star. His best song would be 1,2,3,4,5 once I caught a fish alive. The lil 'un had unconsciously picked up all the last words of this song so it's pretty amusing to hear him do it as he intones the words like "bite" and "right" with a curious British accent. (Think "Rawght" and "bawwte") There are a couple of Chinese songs that he does the same too.... but nope, he doesn't sing them. He just nods his head vigorously - so much so that Grandma fears he might injure his neck!



And it seems that all babies have a shoe fetish - perhaps it is the human desire to fill in shoes that way too big for them! But he absolutely loves going about in over-sized and potentially dangerous footwear. Sometimes, even while he's wearing his slippers, he tries to surreptitiously step into my Crocs and attempts to make an escape in them. It's funny but also scary ... in the event that he falls and cracks his coconut. I have some videos of him waddling about in these slippers but my bandwidth is an issue and i'm a lazy bum, so there...just a picture will suffice.



Here're some pic from our exhausting and very hot day out at Chek Jawa, Ubin last Saturday. Val saw sea stars up close, dug his hands into the gooey mud, traipsed all around threatening to snuff out sea anemones, and threw plenty of dirt at crabs. The little boy did so well.... still full of energy after the excursion (he had only a catnap) while the rest of the 4 adults with him were absolutely bushwhacked. I was almost close to tears trying to beg him to take another nap. The pocket dynamite fell asleep only at 530pm... gosh.. needless to say, it was a crazy night for me later on.....i think i'm still suffering from that ambitious day out.

With his auntie who woke up at an earthly hour to drive us to Changi - thks Ah yi!

Sea stars never fail to intrigue - even the adults were clamouring to stroke them!