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Unexpected and Unintended Wisdom from the Little One

Our little girl is at the age when she is picking up new words and ideas. I am starting this blogpost as an on-going record of the some of the darnest things that missus and I have the good fortune of hearing the little one say.

I will be keeping this as a live thread. Will add more entries as and when the little one comes up with more pearls of wisdom.

Wisdom?

Why compare? Missus and me were talking about how little one’s twin cousins who were around 6 weeks younger than her were quite advanced in their speech faculties. Little one asked innocently, “Why you compare?” It’s a good reminder to us not to do that and be more mindful about our remarks.

I did not wet my shirt… This one demonstrates the (intentional) power of positive framing. A few times, the little would wet herself when her diaper overloads. Instead of saying, “I wet myself…”, she would say, “I didn’t wet my shirt…” We can’t get upset with that….

Contentment… Missus was trying to dissuade the little girl from watching too much Peppa Pig on YouTube, by saying, “We all want a lot of things. I want to you get to bed early, be a good girl and many other things”. Little Miss’ comeback, “But I only want one thing: watch cartoon!”

Sound Logic?

It must be a small bird… One time, missus was telling the little one that we needed to keep the window closed to prevent birds from coming in. The sliding window was slightly opened. The little one said, “Must be a small bird…”

How did that get in there? Little girl was flipping through a book with an illustration consisting of anthropomorphic animals doing human things. One of it had them riding a bus. The little one asked innocently, “How did it [an elephant] get on the bus?”

Reasons for dodging medication. Little girl needed to put something into her ear to get her earwax out. Following is the sequence of argument:

a. She refused saying, “I’m scared”.

b. My wife offered to help. She said, “Your shoulder is sore from Yoga” — which was factual.

c. I offered to help. She said, “Your arm is sore” — which was factual as I had a vaccination done.

d. We offered to get her soft toy friends as proxy helpers. She said, “Bear bear is too small to help”, “Pillow has no hands”, etc.

It’s not raining heavily because I can hear the music… in our car when it’s raining lightly. She remembered times when it rained so heavily that the noise of raindrops made any music we played in the car inaudible.

Appropriate soap volume. One time the missus told the little one not to use too much soap because of her small size. Then she said, “Mama bigger so need more soap… Dadda very big need a lot of soap!”

I put myself to sleep… Missus and I said that the little one had never once put herself to sleep. Little one retorted, “I have. In the car!” Technically true as she has a tendency to fall asleep during car rides.

Out of box thinking?

A family of poop. When asked why her booger couldn’t be removed from her nostril.“My nose poo poo cannot come out. It on holiday with my poo poo and their daddy-mummy….”

Once upon a time, I sat down on a chair like a cat.

Master Negotiator…

I want to read a book… Little one wanted to play a game before sleeping. Missus said, “No, let’s read a book”. Little Missy said, “I want two books”. “No, one book…”, said Missus. Little miss brought the thickest book she could find….

(Not) Fun with Phonics

After a long hiatus, I am finally back to writing. Been just too busy and this is mainly due to the little one. This has been because missus and I have lately become more preoccupied with trying to raise our daughter’s literacy. She will be going into elementary school next year and we’ve been fretting over her lack of sight word recognition.

We sometimes wonder why we’re so stressed over this. Thinking back to the time when we entered the first year of elementary school, we never had to be able to recognise words or read. I recalled that all we probably knew were the letters of the alphabet.

Now children in Singapore in pre-school have to learn phonics. We tried to help her by enrolling her in after school enrichment classes. We also had started to use the evenings after school and work to practice with her.

I have one major gripe with phonics and it is that English is too syncretic in its origins and has too many exceptions for phonics to work. A simple word like “my” for instance. M is mer and y is yee so how did it end up being pronounced as mai and not mee as is the case in the word astronomy?

Another source of frustration. I realised that I can’t pronounce the word “author” without making it sound like “otter” — something which the missus had mercilessly teased me for. How we discovered this was that our daughter’s class was supposed to be visited by a children’s book author. But when I told my wife, she thought that some zookeeper was bringing a wild animal into class…😑

Slowly but steadily, despite the challenges (the little one’s and us as tired out parents), the lil one had been improving. Something we can count our blessings for and to remember that each child develops at his/her own pace and that we should be patient so as not to dampen their enthusiasm and curiosity to learn. Something I must try hard to live by.

Shanghai Holiday: Legoland Discovery Center

2nd floor, Changfeng Joy City, 196 Daduhe Rd, Putuo, Shanghai, China, 200062

The Legoland Discovery Center is more of an indoor playground and quite scaled down compared to a full-fledged “Legoland” that we went to in Nagoya. But it was still great fun for the Lil One and my wife and I as well. It’s got enough fun things to do and definitely lots of Lego / Duplo blocks for children to exercise their creativity.

We were there around late morning — again after a slow start to the day as had been our MO for our holidays. Starting off the visit was a virtual reality ride. As the ride is for two and missus didn’t fancy getting dizzy from motion sickness, it was me accompanying our little girl for the ride. The set up was kind of like two race car seats fixed to a mechanical device that tilts you in tandem with what you are seeing on your VR goggles.

Thankful to say, the lil one and I both had fun and did not regurgitate our breakfast. After that, the visit was a guided tour through several rooms showing visitors how Lego blocks are made — including interactive games such as building your own Lego mini figure.

We hadn’t taken any photos except at the room with Lego sculptures of city scenes in Shanghai. Below are some of the photos.

A dragon dance display

The main event of the visit was free play with a collection of Lego blocks impossible for anyone but the biggest Lego fanatics. Our little girl definitely had great fun while missus and me became two little kids again playing — it’s rather normal for me as I am the designated proxy sibling….

Lil One with her Lego “guitar” accompanied by Missus.

All in a very nice relaxing outing for our little family. That’s it for this post, signing off here. Thanks for reading.

Shanghai Holiday: Shanghai Natural History Museum

Address: Jing’An, China, 200041

This is the one place we wanted to bring our Lil girl to in Shanghai. We decided to forgo Shanghai Disneyland since beyond having Mickey and Minnie in some of her utensils, our daughter hadn’t really been exposed to the allure of the House that Mouse Built. And it costs a bomb to go… On the other hand, the little one loves dinosaurs and the Shanghai Natural History Museum is pretty much built around its dinosaur exhibits, so it was a no brainer for us.

The one big winning feature of the museum was its gigantic dinosaur exhibits. This consisted of replica fossil displays but the greatest attraction for the kiddos had to be the animatronic brontosaurus that was displayed at the main exhibition space (see below).

When the Lil One first saw it move, she was squealing and waving her hands as if she was a groupie seeing her pop idol performing. The photo below was taken during the umpteenth encore by the dino superstar — there was no sign of the enthusiasm fading. We had to set a time limit for her to leave the “concert”….

Besides dinosaurs, there were also many exhibits of replica animal specimens. Some of these were of current animals and others of prehistoric animals. Quite a sprawling space. The building is actually a large underground space which probably went 7-8 floors down. So when we entered, we had to make our way downwards instead of upwards. Quite an interesting architecture — this article that described the building much better than I ever could.

It was a great place to spend the time with our kiddo. It was nice seeing her enjoy it so much — the joy reminded me of when she first played with a bubble gun as a toddler….

Signing off here. Thanks for reading. Will leave you with what I thought were the best pictures representing the breadth and scale of this museum. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays Everyone!

Shanghai Holiday with the Lil One

Without intending to, 2023 had turned out for our little family of three to be our year of revenge travelling. In early-October, missus and I rather spontaneously decided that we would take one more overseas holiday for the year. The criteria were cool weather and a short-ish flight that’s at up to 5 hours.

So quite easily we had narrowed down Shanghai which nicely fitted both criteria. After the decision, everything came together quickly within two days everything was booked. The Lil One these days required less of luggage train to travel so it made the decision easier.

This post will be about the general experience during our time there. Will do maybe two to three blog posts to deep dive into specific places or experiences after this.

First up, we lucked out on our accommodations again. I found the SSAW Boutique Hotel Shanghai Bund (see below). It was a short walk from the Yu Garden as well as at nearby F&B establishments. It is also about a 10 minute plus walk to the Bund. The room was nice as well — it was big enough to set up a sofa bed for the little one (we didn’t take any photos before we messed it up so nothing I can show here). One minor thing that bothered me though: Is SSAW an acronym and if so, what does it stand for? The answer had eluded me throughout the trip.

We were not adventurous enough to take the metro with our Lil One, but our hotel was close to the Yu Garden station which had two different metro lines (10 & 14). Instead, we DiDi-ed (took private hire cars everywhere). With the international version of AliPay, this is really simple — DiDi is a function within the AliPay. This meant that you could seamlessly pay for your rides.

This was so different from when we visited China in 2019 (with the Lil One being a wee little spot at under two years old). Back then there was no international AliPay. This meant we could only pay in cash and only taxis could accept cash for rides. This time we were not restricted to taxis and could actually access the more plentiful private hire cars.

Part of the experience in Shanghai is being able to hop on increasingly numerous electric vehicles (EVs). We got to experience being in various car makes such as BYD, Buick, Roewe and even Tesla. EVs seemed to be increasingly ubiquitous in Shanghai — my impression is that they seem to make up around 10 percent of the cars on the road when we were there. An interesting thing about Shanghai traffic is also that there was a ban on horning within the limits of the Outer Ring Road and they had a really high tech way to enforce it via a noise detection system. One of the drivers we spoke to said that the technology was first used by the military to detect and pinpoint the positions of snipers. Anyone interested in the technology and can read Chinese, here’s the link to how the technology works.

We really took things easy during this trip. Most days we woke up at 9am. Unfortunately, this was necessary for about three days of the trip as the Lil One and Missus took turns falling sick with what appeared to be mild stomach flu. I fortunately had it only after coming home.

That’s it for this article. Will hopefully get to writing two or three more articles of our time there. Thanks for reading.

Playground Review: Sky Residence @ Dawson / Margaret Drive Playground

35 Margaret Drive [link]

Have not been writing for a few months. Mainly due to being busy with other things but also the fact that there wasn’t that much to write about on the family/parenting front. Still, it doesn’t mean that we’re sticking to the same routine. We’ve actually been expanding our options for weekend / leisure activities and not relying on the tried and tested.

Jungle gym concept with plenty of Freeform climbing

I would like to see it more from the perspective that trying something different / new had become less noteworthy and more the norm — hence, not much of a motivation to write about. I am taking more of an attitude of experiencing new things, letting it sink in for a while, before thinking about whether to write about it. Or maybe that’s what I tell myself to excuse my tardiness.. hahaha

We recently visited the newly opened Margaret Market. This is a new eatery and retail space located within a conservation building built in 1956 as a wet market within Queenstown which was Singapore’s first public housing estate. In the building’s previous iteration before the makeover, it had a huge “38” painted against a red roofing panel (see below).

Back to the playground, it’s nestled between Margaret Market and the newly completed Sky Residence @ Dawson [link] public housing development. The playground consists of a platform for a tube slide, a network of ropes for freeform play / climbing and a mini spinning wheel / merry-go-round.

We had slowly conditioned the little one to be more independent in playing and not expect either missus or me to hover around and rescue her at the slightest bit of distress. This playground allows her to play quite independently as the obstacles (mainly climbing cargo net for the tube slide) are quite manageable for her as she becomes more physically capable and confident.

During the weekend early evenings / late afternoon when we visited, you can expect there to be a good number of families with children of various ages there. I would say that the playground would be more suitable for children at least 4 years of age as the equipment (provided by Kompan) requires children to have some rudimentary to intermediate climbing skills to get around — though there is also a more accessible obstacle in the form of a staircase to reach the top of the tube slide.

The verdict on the playground, on evidence of the little one being totally at ease with running and climbing about, is that it’s a great outdoor space. It is mostly shaded at around 5 plus and it will be especially nice when it gets breezy.

The great part about this is that since it is quite popular, our little girl gets to interact with other kids as well as sometimes grownups who might help her or speak with her. Two occasions stand out. One was of an older girl giving her instructions on how to spin in the merry-go-round and the other was another parent giving her a hand in climbing down from the cargo net obstacle. Being an only child, such experiences are invaluable to our daughter.

I would highly recommend this playground for both for the design and the overall experience. Families can probably plan their evenings around it as they will be able have an early dinner (which is the norm for families with young children) at Margaret Market after the kiddos are done playing.

That’s it for this blog post. Not sure when I’ll write the next one. Thanks for reading. Signing off for now.