Look what my girl did? She did this on a MAC.

Children in this age can do many things with technology. During my time, I don’t even have a chance to go near a computer. Oh wait, computer wasn’t affordable until my college years.

Let’s hope she can create more with a computer!

Children’s day is here and my girl came back from school, telling me that there is a costume parade in school. She wanted to participate asking if I can help her with her costume. Yeah she loves participating in most of the school activities. She is very different from her brother. Her brother will tried his best to stay away.

At first I was reluctant to help because of my busy work schedule. Moreover she doesn’t know what character she wants to be.

One day, she quietly sat down and started working on something. It was a Thor weapon. She is really keen on participation. Then I started searching in the web to see Thor’s costume. It did give me ideas on how to make 1 really fast. Getting the template is the most important part.

Finally I did this in 2 days for her….

Let’s hope she win something with this costume. Even if she didn’t, I am sure she will get lots of attention especially with the boys.

One day my girl came and showed me what she did on iPad. It has nothing to do with any games. In fact she learned to use KeyNote (from iWork) and created a simple presentation. She does have my genetics. How she learn it? Apparently by following the computer based training. I am so proud of her.

By the way, I only learn how to do presentation when I was in my University. I had to use the old fashion Word Perfect. There is no drag and drop, tool bars nor user friendly menu. It is mainly command generated done on command line. Yeap, that’s my generation!

Emily will graduate from her kindergarten end of the year. She already received an acceptance letter from her future primary school. I was surprised that they were so efficient.

Her school is preparing for her graduation photo taking. The school requested that she wear long white shirt and any color skirt. Do you know hunting for long white shirt was so difficult? I went to many departmental stores but I couldn’t find. Ended up, I asked the school to get for her.

She is all excited.

Emily: Mummy, I will have a congratulation.

Mummy: *blur* what tion?

Emily: I will wear a square hat, shake hand with the principal and get a piece of paper.

Mummy: It is called graduation or convocation.

Emily: Yeah!!!

Anyway, she grows up real fast, it was just like yesterday I gave birth to her.

I still remember that she came out huge and broke my c-sect stitches.
I remember she loved to pull my face and give me a big juicy kiss.
I remember she refused to call me until I tricked her at 2.
I remember she got me all worried over her UTI and fever fits. She even had fit in Berjaya Times Square where we had to call an ambulance to send her to hospital.
She makes me laugh at all her funny remarks and actions.
She is such a joy in the family, no question asked.

Emily has started going to the new music school for over a month. I have seen so much improvement in her. Previously when she was with Yamaha JMC:

• I have to nag her to practice her music
• I have to reward her with stickers every time she does it correctly
• At times in class, she reluctantly plays or participates. She is moody all the time and stuck close to me. Maybe because it is after her nap, wrong timing.
• She refused to play with both hands. She only played with both hands when she is very sure of the piece.

Now I see a big change:

• She will practice her music and happily show me what she has learned.
• She can read notes.
• She can play with 2 hands.
• After music, class she will be very cheerful. I suspect the teacher must have praise her a lot.

With this music school, I can free up my Saturday to have a family time together. Her class is now in the evening on a weekday. It is also not after her nap time and I don’t have to accompany her in the class. She does better without mummy. By the way, currently the teacher is giving her 1-1 lessons for a price much lower than Yamaha. I don’t have to buy any CD or DVD. The books are much cheaper and written by a local musician.

The teacher teaches her finger drill and let her play according to her pace. I hope to see her play a whole song beautifully with both hands. My nephew who is with this music school and never practices his music was able to play excellently. He passed his level 1 exam with flying colors. How? I think it is the way the teacher teaches.

After learning the longest word from mummy, Emily picked up Greek alphabets from daddy. Daddy is learning Greek because he wants to understand the Bible better. New Testament was written in Greek. Emily remembers all the Greek alphabets. Amazing to see how children mind can absorb and memorized things.

Some of you may already know some Greek alphabets when you learned Maths like alpha, beta, gamma, delta, pi, micron or omega. So it is not foreign to you.

Here goes:

Greek Chart:

A big word I learn when I was watching Disney at Emily’s age. It was sang by Julie Andrews in Mary Poppin.

According to Wikipedia, the roots of the word have been defined as follows: super- “above”, cali- “beauty”, fragilistic- “delicate”, expiali- “to atone”, and docious- “educable”, with the sum of these parts signifying roughly “Atoning for educability through delicate beauty.

Emily picked it up. She wanted to learn it when she heard me say it. I didn’t know she could do it. Now she is teaching daddy to say it. Anyone of you heard this before?

Here is the Disney version of the song:

Few months ago, Emily saw the Jusco bear and wanted to get one. Jusco is having a 25th anniversary celebration and if you spend above certain amount, you can have the bear for RM5.90. It is also a spot and win contest. Meaning, put the bear in the car and if spotted, you win some cash vouchers. I told Emily to put the bear in the car although she wants to sleep with it at night.

Months later, I received a phone call at Changi Airport, I was returning from the states. I was really tired and half asleep. The caller asked me to go to Queensbay mall to have the photo of the bear in my car taken. Yeah, as if I can fly straight to Queensbay mall from Singapore. I made another day appointment with her. She told me I could win RM250 voucher.

After the picture was taken, a few days ago, Jusco staff asked me to collect the gift vouchers. It was only RM50, not exactly RM250. I am still happy with it. The RM250 draw is end of Dec when you get spotted with the entire collection, 6 in total. A little gift from the bear.

Of another topic, Giant just gave me 400 pages of coupon valid till 31st Oct. Tough competition out there.

Emily was asked to be a flower gal and she was so excited. She attended a few church weddings and saw flower gals throwing flowers on the ground. Immediately she wanted to do the same. She thought being a flower girl was to get married.

Emily: Mummy, I want to be a flower gal. But I don’t want to leave you.
Mummy: Huh? You don’t want to leave me?!
Emily: I still want to stay with you. I don’t want to stay with my husband.
Mummy: LOL. Being a flower gal is not getting married….

Phew, I bet she felt relief after hearing that she can still stay with mummy and papa. I got her a nice flower gal dress from Parkson. I did the headband and the flower girl baskets.

They had a rehearsal and Emily was a little tense but she got the hang of it. She did enjoy herself on the actual day. (6 June 2009)

Both Tim and Emily birthday fall on a school holiday. Before school closes, Emily wanted to share her cake with her school friends. At first, she wanted a Cinderella cake but somehow when I said Tinkerbell, she liked it.

As usual I search for a picture of Tinkerbell on Google and asked the cake house to draw it. For the past years, they could duplicate exactly what I passed to them. However, I was a little disappointed with the Tinkerbell cake, the face of Tinkerbell is a little distorted. Anyway, Emily cannot tell the different, she was eyeing on those star jelly and chocolate. That’s what she cared about.

I sent the cake to her Tadika and she had a great time with the celebration. I don’t usually attend the celebration because I do not want to disturb the school schedule. And after many rounds of birthday celebration, there is no urge to even prepare any party packs. Yeah, mummy is getting lazy.

As for presents, Emily already told me beginning of the year what she wants. My mom is also given her and my family a treat. Let’s hope they enjoyed it there.

Source of pic: http://www.disneysmilesstore.com/shop/images/TinkerbellSite.jpg