Exploring Our Children’s Potentials

When Anya attended a trial tennis lesson some two months ago, she was required to try and hit inflated balloons with her little tennis racket.

Being light weight, these balloons’ slower move allows little children more time to concentrate, aim and hit them with the rackets.

It’s a great hand-eye coordination exercise!

And these days, Vai likes to do this too at home. He’d go around the house hitting a balloon up in the air with his little ‘badminton’ racket, looking up and following its movement closely and hitting it upwards again with his racket.

And I often join in the fun and help keep the balloon up for as long as we can!

PS: Other than using a racket to reach for the balloon and hit it upwards, he’d sometimes use his palm, my plastic ladle (!), even his sister’s plastic toy plate among other things!

Hehe. That’s us waiting for our bus home after we sent Anya to school.

Yet to watch ‘Hancock‘, and am looking forward to catching it on DVD with hubby on our regular ‘movie date’ at home!

PS: A few others that are on our ‘waiting list’ : The Dark Knight, Wanted, and Kungfu Panda, and The Mummy – Tomb of the Dragon Emperor!

We are all prone to change. We all make mistakes. We change our mind, our decisions, even our promises. We too may not be truthful in our words and actions.

Hence, when one puts one’s trust and hope on another, it is possible for him to experience disappointments.

It is only when one puts one’s trust, hope and life on God the Source of Life and the Creator of heaven and earth, that one can be rest assured of HIS promises and words, for HE is unchanging, loving, almighty, true and eternal.

I was browsing through my photo archives and found this one. One of my favourites! Anya’s only about 2.5 years old here.

AND to think that I took it some two years back! How time flies!

Kids. They grow so fast and however much we want to turn back time and re-live those cherished sweet moments with our little ones, we can’t.

Our kids can’t stay little forever.

They grow, become increasingly independent and they’ll one day go and live a life of their own with their own family. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it should be.

And with this in mind, I’m glad I’m here today to spend those precious growing up ‘bitter-sweet’ moments with my little ones. Fulltime.

Soon after we made those jellyfish hats, the kids insisted on playing with their coloured matchsticks.

And so we decided to make some prickly creatures. I was open to the idea of making some sort of a sea urchin or a porcupine.  And both kids chose to make porcupines.

What you need :

– Chloroform cups
– Masking tape
– Coloured matchsticks

What you do :

– Tape the two cups together
– Let the kids carefully poke the matchsticks through the cup

This seemingly simple task apparently required so much concentration and effort from these little ones because they had to carefully poke through the cup and avoid tearing / making too a big hole. If they’re not careful enough, the sticks would slide INTO the cup and ‘disappear’.

Other than learning how to focus and concentrate, the kids exercised their fine motor skills too here!

Oh btw, they didn’t finish making their ‘porcupines’. Instead, they had fun ‘tearing’ and ‘plucking’ the sticks out when the ‘bodies’ were half covered with sticks!

Oh well. As they say, sometimes the ‘results’ don’t really matter as much as the ‘process’ of learning itself ?

The other day both kids refused to nap, and since we had quite a bit of time to spend together, we made this jellyfish hat! Very simple and relatively fast to make.

What you need:

– Paper plates (plastic bowls are great too!)
– Cream-coloured crepe Paper for the long wiggly bits
– Glue, scissors

What you do :

– Cut out the crepe paper into some 25mm-wide strips
– ‘Unroll’ each strips and cut shorter strips from each one
– Kids : apply some glue onto the back of paper plate and stick the strips
– Just so that the hat will ‘stay put’ on the head, glue a shorter strip on to the plate – from one side of the ear to the other

When they’re done with their hats, Anya put hers on and ran around the house (and with her speed, of course it kept falling off too!)

And Vai, well somehow he refused to have those wiggly bits around his head.

And he preferred to just, lie on the floor.

Kids.

Because,

We giggle.
We snatch.
We cry.
We help.

We tease.
We poke.
We annoy.
We care.

We tickle.
We share.
We refuse to share.
We laugh.

But on top of it all,
we love.

One of those moments I absolutely adore.