The bag on the left is the one I lugged around for Izzy. The one on the right is what I use now.
31 July 2009
The benefit of experience
The bag on the left is the one I lugged around for Izzy. The one on the right is what I use now.
My mid-morning snack
So fresh they're still squeaking. But also probably the last of my harvest bar the odd pod left.
30 July 2009
Today we made a mobile
She even described how to do it though I cheated by using the lid of a steamer instead of a big circle of cardboard. Those are pictures of Handy Manny's tools on the side. We also tried to sellotape on my mobile phone for music but that didn't really fly. This is Izz's mobile. Not Roz's. That has to be made quite clear.
Where the flip does the time go?
Had one of those moments today when I witnessed an Izzy I don't normally get to see. We went to a neighbouring library for the Rhyme Time there. The session came highly recommended by friends who'd been: 'The woman doing it is excellent, she sings really loudly and there are about 80 mums who show up. It's like rhyme time done by Moonies.' And it's next to a Tesco so you park for free, and you don't need to book in advance as you do at our local library, which is just a crowded press of yummy mummies.
After Rhyme Time Izzy settled down to play some Go, Diego, Go game on a PC set aside for under-5 games. She had a good half hour of undisturbed play on it before I eventually began to feel sorry for two boys hovering behind her, since they'd waited quite patiently for about 10 minutes. So I told her to let them have a go and she quite graciously did.
I kept an eye on her while chatting to other mums nearby and was a bit surprised to see her taking control of the mouse while quite politely saying 'This is how you do it.' Their mum was crouching behind them and when Izzy intervened for about the third time I told her that maybe they would appreciate working it out for themselves. They both looked her age or older but seemed quite happy to let her show them.
Anyway then she got on the PC again, only to make way for a little two-year-old 10 minutes later. Before long she was guiding the two-year-old again. And when the tot refused to relinquish the PC, I told her that maybe she should find some other amusement. And so she disappeared into the interior of a child-sized caravan (this library is good).
There were two older boys and one girl in there as well and all I could hear from the outside was chatter and occasional laughter. Wondered how Izzy was getting along with the older kids and so I looked in and they all happened to be mid-giggle about something. Again was a bit surprised she appeared to be interacting so fully so quickly but was quite happy to leave her to it.
So then the two-year-old and her mum finally left, and one of the older boys came out. Turns out the tot had turned off the PC. He didn't know what to do and his mum didn't know or was pretending not to know either, as she was trying to get him to leave. He then managed to turn the PC on but when the log-in window came up both of them were foxed, and his mum made another plea for leaving.
So up pops our heroine, who confidently announces 'Oh you need a log in. I'll go and ask the lady at the counter. She can help.' And off she goes, indeed. It was exactly what I'd told her when we had to log into the computer earlier so I wasn't so surprised that she knew and remembered what to do. It was more her confidence in actually going to ask for help.
And then she's back, announcing: 'The lady says she'll come and help. But we have to wait a minute because she's serving someone else first.' Then she covered her mouth and giggled. 'She said serving.' More giggles. The boy laughs too but his mum is as puzzled as me as to why she's laughing.
Presumably she's not heard the word used in that context before. But I'm still astounded at how confidently she's interacting with everyone. So then the mum lures the boy away from the PC by offering to read him a story and Izzy positions herself behind her, asking 'Can I listen too?'
Then after the story, she holds out a Princess Poppy book to the mum and asks 'Now can you read this?' At which point I think the mum has suffered enough and intervene by asking her to come and choose the books she wants to borrow.
OK maybe this doesn't sound like much. But only yesterday, when we had lunch at M&S, I made Izzy go and buy her own cupcake, hoping the task would dissuade her from getting her mitts on the sugary thing. But she held her own and, aided by two very sweet old ladies in the queue, made it back to our table, from where I'd been observing her cut into the middle of the queue a bit worriedly. Now I thought that was quite a big deal, but put her confidence down to the power of greed. Also, she'd hung back from the queue uncertainly, until the old ladies offered help, really.
The Izzy I witnessed at the library is suddenly actually closer to the four-year-old she will be in September than the three-year-old I still think she is.
Then there's Roz
Who's now worked out that she can roll. And roll. And roll. And so when I put her down on one side of a rather big blanket in our living room, then went to fiddle with something at the TV, shortly after I felt her little claws digging into my feet and looked down into her beaming face. I can tell. You can tell. You can tell by looking into her face that she knows that you know that she knows she can move now.
And god almighty. Hasn't nursery always said Izzy is a bub who 'knows her mind'? Given how they have to be constructive, I interpret this as she is a stubborn, bumptious little monkey sometimes. Well Roz is just the same. Today she woke from a nap as I cooked dinner. Didn't want to be put down so I propped her on a pillow at the kitchen door.
She's often been alright there in the past, as long as I keep talking to her. Which is what I tried to do today. But she was having none of it. Her indignant yowls quickly turned into 'poor me' mews, complete with downturned mouth corners.
And then the siren howls. Oh my god she is loud. And I'd just started frying the fried rice so was quite loth to stop the process. Kept trying to talk to her - first entreatingly, then sternly - but nope. She howled and howled until - as has happened before - she choked in her rage and eventually puked. Some of it on my new silk cargo trousers as I'd picked her up by this time. (Damn but at least they are washable silk and only cost £16 in the sales).
I always feel like a meanie when this happens because it's not as if I don't know the conclusion of her howling once we pass pity-me mews and she enters the staccatto howls of rage. But at the same time I'm pretty sure she knows exactly what she's doing. I mean I know she can't help it - she's a baby - but it grates to be so manipulated by a 5-month-old.
She's been teething for weeks now and has recently been trying to chew when she feeds. She might not have any teeth but the shock of the pain is still enough to make me jump sometimes. A few nights ago, having done it twice during the day and been told off, she did it again and I affected a really stern tone.
'Rozzy. NO biting Mama. NO.' I even pointed a finger.
Her eyes widened in surprise. Then oh dismay. Her eyes screwed tight and her lips trembed as her mouth curled down and a really pitiful tiny wail issued. I might as well have slapped her across the face.
'Alright, alright,' I quickly relented. 'It's alright, Mama's not angry. Just don't bite.'
In a wink her features smoothed into imperturbility. She closed those eyes and began suckling contentedly again. In a wink, I tell you.
SO manipulated.
I believe we are not very far away now from life getting really interesting.
29 July 2009
Good day at the nursery
You can't see it much but Izzy is absolutely covered in chalk dust. That shirt is actually blue with pink flowers, not the dusky pink it appears on her left side.
Roman day at the museum
Our local museum does fantastic children's activities. This is Izzy with her Roman lady mask and woad Celtic tattoo.
27 July 2009
25 July 2009
Izzy celebrates her first ballet class
We brought her to a taster class (ie free) at the local leisure centre and she loved it. Probably partly because she got to go with NBF Martha, and they've both been fantasising that they attend ballet classes for a while now.
The two munchkins were hilarious in the class. Izzy couldn't stop grinning and hung on the teacher's every word. When asked what her name was, Martha said: "Martha ballerina." Talk about focus! And both of them kept jumping the queue to do things - like run on tippy toes and then present a scarf to an imaginary giraffe. The other girls, who were all taller and so, I presume, older, were very good about not minding.
The class itself looked like quite a lot of fun. There was a lot of imaginary play - 'Shall we go to the seaside today?' and they mainly acted out a lot of scenarios to go with the actions.
The only basics that were introduced were about pointing the toes - they did some foot pointing work on the floor and a lot of dipping of toes in imaginary lakes and seas. Oh and there was the first position - 'stand as if you've got a big pizza slice between your feet' - and demi-plie. It was quite fun finally coming face-to-face with the reality of it after months of made-up arabesques and jetes (thank you, Little Einsteins and Angelina).
The next morning, and the Saturday after this, Izzy's first question on waking was: 'Is there ballet class today?' So one of these days we'll be going shopping for her leotard and skirt and shoes.
24 July 2009
22 July 2009
Swine flu reaches Caversham
S'alright parents, don't panic. All it is, is that a child from the nursery has suspected swine flu. Have been a bit lax looking up current operating procedures at the local clinics but word on the street (ie my colleagues) is that they no longer bother confirming whether or not it is the swine variant of a flu since it appears in most cases to be no worse than ordinary flu.
Now, having not had very many flu bouts before, I am only hoping that the extraordinary number of colds I've had over the last year also add to the immunity building.
Er anyway. It was bound to happen, is what I reckon. So fingers crossed all goes well if we get it too. Heck only knows what happens if both Alex and I are poleaxed at the same time. Fingers crossed, fingers crossed. The last time anything like this happened we got what we suspect was rotavirus within a day of each other. But at least I'd recovered by the time he got hit. Hmm...
Things now
Roz turned herself over and managed to position her arms to push her head up today, making vague crawling movements until she got fed up and started yowling loudly. As you can see in the picture below. Go Roz! She looked very surprised and pleased when Izzy and I both cheered her. She's done it about three times now so I guess I'd better let her play on the carpet a bit more, instead of propping her on a pillow under her play tunnel.
She's also developing a really loud howl, which she deploys when she can see me, and she's howled a few times to be picked up, but I'm not doing it. Usually because I'm having to attend to Izzy's meal or getting her ready for nursery. It's astounding how loud it is - it goes right through my skull - and how quickly she stops as soon as I pick her up!
I weighed her when we got back and she is now 6.9 kgs - or she was two weeks ago, when she was 18 weeks old. I swear she's getting heavier to carry!
Izzy's slotted right back into her nursery routine like she never left. And although she occasionally thinks of family back home - mostly her cousins - she seems quite happy. Already she's plotting all sorts of sleepovers and play dates and unashamedly inviting herself to other people's houses.
We've had Felix and Dex and Martha over, and she's been out with the boys to a baby gym thing these last two weeks, and each time we part company she's moaning immediately that she misses them! Gah.
She's also come back rather more bumptious than I remember and has developed an annoying habit of saying 'I told you so' every time she happens to be right about something (eg Roz not wanting another feed before I take them both downstairs), and quite frequently when she's not as well.
She's also come back more Malaysian. More than a few times now, mainly when I've told her off about something, she huffs 'YOU AH'. Ie the Malaysia YOU-ah. It sounds completely hilarious when she says it with her little Brit accent so I find it hard to tell her off without laughing and have resorted to teasing her instead. If I ask her if she's pretending to be Kai Qing, who most frequently deployed this phrase back home, she gets even more huffy and goes 'Noooo! I'm IZZY!' Ya, ya, I did give birth to you, you know.
And whenever we take the delighted Roz out of the house, she laughs 'SO happy to go kai-kai, Roz? So happy to go kai-kai?' And Roz for some reason finds it incredibly amusing to view Izzy from the lofty heights of my shoulder. All Izzy has to do is skip along behind me and she provokes the loveliest giggles from Roz. When she prances and does a primitive dance, Roz all but splits her sides.
I'm pleased Izzy actually still remembers the song Hui Li taught her.
Yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi
Wo de peng you zai na li?
Zai na li, zai na li
Wo de peng you zai na li?
Things then
Darn I was going to post about our holiday home too but now find I should be downing my current bedtime comfort drink of cardamom tea otherwise tomorrow morning will involve another painful half hour of Izzy nagging me to take her downstairs and me trying to sleep just a bit longer.
20 July 2009
We are back. And we are settling into routines again. But the entire month home seems to have left us - well Alex and I anyway - in a kind of daze. For the first week home I felt just like that whatsisname Chinese poet wondering whether he dreamt he was a butterfly or was a butterfly dreaming he was a man. That's what it's like every time we go home. This is the life we could be living. This trip probably affected us more because we also visited Singapore. And most of our London gang who decamped there two years ago are now pretty firmly entrenched.
And we are still making our minds up. While I get increasingly discontented with homes that are rented, as the song goes. But for the first time I'm turning my head to the serious idea of staying that much longer here. The rationale is:
If there's any sort of deadline to go home it would be to put Izzy in a Chinese-language school. To do that she needs at least a year of Chinese kindy to cope. She turns four this September so are we likely to be going home in the next year and a half? If we aren't then there's that deadline scrapped, as she might as well benefit from free education here, which isn't all bad really, though it could do with some turning up on the discipline and fear front.
So plan B forming in our minds is: sort out the kids' education fund - which might do if we get round to buying a house here - and then semi-retire home once that's sorted. If we don't have much of a mortgage to pay off then we can get jobs we really like, be at home with the kids more, and not worry so much about making enough to educate them. Sound like a plan?
08 July 2009
Coffee morning
The girls and I are being ladies who lunch today. We need to run some bank errands and buy a buggy board so we can start walking Izzy to nursery.
04 July 2009
Well we're home
And we brought back two good head colds - so Roz and I had a rather fretful and sleep-deprived journey and first day home. Fortunately it's one of these 24-hour things and today she is sitting happily in her bouncy chair demanding entertainment. And I'm drinking cardamom tea to cling the remnants of our holiday.
Yesterday we visited Stourhead
Izzy insisted on having goes with the camera too so in the end I let her have my phone to take pictures with.
The Somerset countryside
Everyone and their dog must be heading to the beach today. Like us. But how lucky have we been on weather!
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