Having sensible kids is like having something precious stacked some where, which will occasionally bring a smile to your face. Do you agree?

Zara is turning 6 next week, besides still being rough when playing (the shouting, the shoving when she doesn’t get her way) and doing occasional crazy stunts (riding her new bike down a slope in full speed), she’s growing up to be rather sensible.

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We asked her how she wanted to celebrate her 6th birthday.
She said she wanted to have it in Jungle Gym.
I told her Jungle Gym is very expensive, we cannot afford to hold a party for her there.
She asked how come Zaria can celebrate her birthdays there?
I told her, that’s because Zaria only invited one guest, Tasha (my niece).
She asked how many guest she’s allowed if she wanted a party in Jungle Gym?
I said the most is 3.
So, she said for her birthday, she will invite only Tasha, Chloe and Chiyi (kids from the neighbourhood), that’s all.
Then I asked her, what should we have for lunch before playing.
She said she wanted to go to Grand Imperial which is also in BSC.
I told her that’s a very expensive restaurant.
So she said, “Then, you just cook a big pot of nasi lemak and bring there, and we can have nasi lemak for lunch.” O.O”
Good idea!
I’m actually trying to check out if Jungle Gym allows outside food to be brought in, so I can order pizza (her favourite food) for her friends before the play. I’d been trying to call Jungle Gym but no one picked up the published phone number (can’t you beat that?). So if any of you know the answer, please let me know.

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I was just complaining before bed time, “So long I didn’t do my exercise. Aigh.. You girls never remind me also.”
Zara answered, “Well (this seems to be her favourite word before a start of answer nowadays)…. this is not daddy’s (body), this is not your daughters’ (body), this is yours, so you must remember yourself.”
O.o”

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Daddy spend 30 minutes to 1hr coaching Zara on her Bahasa Malaysia everynight. Zara doesn’t appreciate the language, and always trying to avoid Bahasa Revision time.
She negotiated with Daddy. Daddy will spend half the time with her on Bahasa, and she will spend half the time coaching Daddy with Chinese.
And Yes, she’s more comfortable with Chinese now, and can write a few words confidently, so in her ‘class’, she’ll ask Daddy to translate what she wrote into English, of give Daddy 听写 (Chinese spelling).
One particular day, we only had 30mins before bed time, and she told Daddy they should do Chinese instead of Bahasa.
Daddy told her, “It’s more imporant for you to learn Bahasa than for Daddy to learn Chinese.”
She replied, “It’s important for you to learn Chinese. If you don’t know Chinese, when you go to China (for work) what are you going to do?” o.O”

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And here is the Ms-Coming-To-6-Year-Old frying an egg. I just started letting the girls do some egg frying for their own lunches recently.

Zara has been attending the Yamaha JMC class since last July. She has just started her Book 4 in October.

It was quite a struggle initially to get her to practice, and pay attention, but now, she seems to enjoy playing those musical pieces, and is quite motivated to practice.

She’s doing quite well in her keyboard playing, and she memorises all the musical pieces instead of reading the notes from the book when she plays. She’s still rather weak in note reading, and I hope she’ll pick up.

Occasionally, she even creates her own musical pieces; or adding the left hand chords herself when the teacher has only taught in class how to play the piece with one hand. Too bad her notes reading/writing is not very good, or I can ask her to start writing those notes down as she composed.

Here is a video playing The Little Red Shoe in her book 4, recorded 2 weeks back.

The other day Zara taught me something.

Zaria was playing with a watermelon in the kitchen.
First trying to kick it like a ball.
I told her, “Don’t do it, this is not a ball!”
Then she tried picking it up.
I raised my voice, “DON’T DO IT. This is NOT a ball!”
She ignored me, and then picked it up (she’s really strong, this one), and then tossed it like a ball.

“SPLAT“

The watermelon cracked into two.

It was the time of the month, you know, when women get grouchy, and easily irritable.

So I took the cane, and gave her a twack on the butt.

She cried of course. Looking for Jelly, then Daddy to ‘sayang’ her.

Zara who just came out from the toilet, saw the watermelon cracked into two, and Zaria wailing. She told Zaria, “Never mind Zaria, it’s a small matter. It’s not like you broke mummy’s precious jug or what.”

It’s like this light just shone down on me. Yah, it’s not even a precious jug or what, why did I cane her? Then I told Zara, “But I caned Zaria, even though it’s not a precious jug.”
Zara told me, “It’s ok. Just remember next time don’t do it again.” o.O”

So that day, I learnt from my child.

Thank You.

Kids get influenced so easily.

I had taken a few cake orders, and I like to ask the girls when I make something new, “Is this nice? Can mummy sell this?”

(She can finally write her own Chinese name)

One day, Zara did a painting, and she asked me, “Is this nice?”
When I told her it was, she passed it to Daddy, “Can you go to the market and sell this?”
She thought for a while, then added, “Maybe next time you get orders, you can give this as a free gift with your cake” o.O”

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We watched an MTV of a hit song on youtube yesterday, and after watching it, Zaria started drawing this.

Can you guess who this famous artist is?
.
.
.
.
.
Lady Gaga!

She can’t draw that well yet, but the glasses is very Lady Gaga. And she said the O–O she drew on the chest is Lady Gaga’s bra top! o.O”

And she even started doing the Bad Romance Dance.

Two things that Zara can really concentrate on are : 1) TV watching 2) drawing.

And of course, because of that, she’s able to draw what she has watched. Can you tell what shows she’s trying to draw? (answer in comments)

Drawing 1

Drawing 2 (which is from the same show as Drawing 1)

Drawing 3

Drawing 4

And Zaria, much younger, wanted to try too, and this is her drawing, and according to her, of a very famous character in one of the movies she watched recently.

Drawing 5.

Too bad they are all drawn using colour pencils (except Zaria’s drawing), making the colours and lines a bit light.

Zara could read, phonatically. However, she takes time to read simple sight words like their, my, we etc. I do not know what reading level children her age should be at, but I’d seen her friends in the same age group (from school, from her music calss) reading phrases with difficult words effortlessly. If I used that as a bench mark, then we’re in trouble.

I thought I’ll do something about it.

Normally in the evening, I try to spend about 30minutes with Zara, helping her with her keyboard pieces, her Chinese, her maths, and English writing or reading. Most of the time she’ll protest having to do more work (on top of her school homework).

So since last week, I thought I’ll start a reward system. Every day, if she’s done well with her extra homework from me, she gets a star. And each star is RM1. She can cash out the money at any time to buy anything she wanted. When this was first introduced, she already had things in mind that she wanted to buy. A pair of sun glasses (30 stars) and a helium balloon (30 stars).

Since the introduction of the reward system, daily, before we read her her bed time story, she’ll proactively ask me to choose the book for her to read; she’ll try to read phonetically, and I’ll help her with the difficult words. For passages which she struggled to read, I will ask her to re-read them the following day to familiarise herself with the words she found difficult.

After slightly more than a week of doing this, I could see her reading has improved a lot! She’s more familiar with the sight words, and getting better with her phonics.

These are the books I used for her reading.

Zaria seeing her sister getting stickers and all, wanted to participate too. She’ll ask me to pick a book for her to read too. Being younger, I’ll do most of the reading, but I’ll ask her to read words that are 3 or 4 letters which are spelled phonetically.

Some days, I got her to spell out the words she has read too, and she could. This was one of her ‘spelling’. She got the D written wrongly in AND, so she wrote again; and she tried a few times before she got the tricky S in STOP right.

I gave them each a ‘sticker passport’ (just A4 paper folded into 4), and their rewards are pasted on the ‘passport’. Rewards come from reading mainly, but I also give them a star if they are able to spell, do some sums, or behave extremely well.

Each day, after getting their stickers, they will count the total, and Zara woud do a count down, “20 more stickers and I can get my sunglasses.”

And Zaria told me yesterday after getting her 11th stickers, “I’m going to the shop to find something with 11 (dollars) on the label.” 🙂

On our way out shopping, another squabble broke up at the back seat.
Zaria : Maaa.. jiejie lying down on the arm rest.
Me : Let her lie down then. What’s wrong with that?
Zaria : It’s a(n) arm rest, not a head rest! I want to put my arm there!
o.O”

Zaria made a big mess in the bed room, taking out most of the toys from the toy basket, one of them was an iguana stuffed with alphabets. I asked her to clean up, and put everything back into the basket or we’ll not bring her out for dinner.
Zaria gave a big sigh then said, “But the Iguana will be so bored in the basket!”
o.O”

Lately, she’s always use the word bored, boring. Like in Penang, she wanted to stay in the hotel all the time, when we said we had to go out for lunch or dinner, she’ll roll her eyes and comment, “So boring, always eat and eat and eat and eat.” And when she found out we’re going to eat char kuey teow, she feigned boredom and said, “So boring, always char kuey teow, char kuey teow, char kuey teow.”
o.O”

In the mall, she wanted to go to the book shop but it was lunch time. So I told her, “No, we are going to eat lunch now.” She replied, “After we eat, then we read. OK?”
🙂 Glad she loves reading so much.

I showered her one cool evening, and when I was towelling her dry she told me, “Just now it’s so cold, my teeth was chattering like a castanet.”
o.O”

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She wanted to do ‘homework’ when I was coaching Zara, so I asked her to take a paper, and write A to Z for me, without any help from us.

And here is her writing at 3 and a half. The J and S are mirror image, the K strokes are a bit out, but I think she’s doing good.

Zara gave her a star, and I gave her a sticker which made her so proud of her work.

I can’t remember since when this started. Probably some time last year, Zaria started getting extremely annoyed by the labels on her clothes.

Initially, she would tug on them, and complained. Then she started getting the scissors, and tried to snip them off herself. She gets frustrated when she struggled to reach the label with one hand, and trying to cut it with the scissors in the other; she’ll shout for help in frustration.

Reasons she gave, “The label makes me so itchy!” “It’s poking me.” etc etc.

She will only relax when we cut it off for her. So most of her clothes has the washing instruction tag as well as the label snipped off.

Then for a few months, she refused to wear her socks to sleep (As girls don’t use blanket, I let them wear socks to bed so that they don’t get cold feet and can sleep better). She said, “The sewing so not nice. Make me uncomfortable.”

Eventually, I let her wear a pear of socks 2 sizes bigger, and she happily wore them and said, “This one the sewing is nice.” o.O”

So this girl doesn’t like frills, laces, that sort of things.