I used this reward chart to motivate my children to do certain things. I started with a couple of version but this is the improved version. Well it is useful as it helps me to wake my little gal up for school in the morning and get her out of the house. It doesn’t work perfectly because the flesh is weak, if you know what I mean.

I always believe reward is better than punishment. Of coz, not everything they do, get a sticker. Only those I have difficulty in getting them to do. So far this program has been working. I may add to the reward like after they hit 10 stickers, they will get a treat from me. They hit 100, they get a special gift.

You can try it. I can buy nice stickers too.

Today, Emily came to me and say, “Mummy can I wash the plates?” Aren’t you thrilled to hear that? I am recording this for her to read. She took a chair and sat on it to wash her bowl and utensils. Later I went around checking and it was squeaky clean.

I am so proud of her. She has grown so much. Loving Tim and her, every single day.

By the way, Tim also washes his milk cup every time he finishes his milk. I couldn’t remember when but daddy certainly train him well.

I am waiting for the day that both can wash all the plates and I can sit back to relax. :giggles:

Thanks to my itchy hand, I accidentally deleted my blog database. Panic!!! What was I doing? You see I saw an error message this morning on my blog. I logged a ticket to the web host. They were pretty fast in fixing it. I did a Google on the error message. It looks like my wordpress version is ancient and not supported by the latest PHP version. I wanted to upgrade my wordpress.

Of coz, I ran a backup on my blog. I saw a couple of test blogs that I created and so I do some housekeeping. Without realizing one of the test blog is pointed to my current blog database. Wah lah, the blog database vanished into thin air.

Cry! Next Think!

First thing, I log a ticket to my web host again to ask them to restore my database backup. I am glad they did backup. Of coz it is not the current backup. They were pretty fast in recovering my database. For the cost I pay, only US$10 per year, they are pretty good.

10 posts were missing from my blog! I have all my ads post in a word document, so only 3 posts I need to find.

Next, I look at my Google reader, managed to get 1 post. Yeah Google reader doesn’t like my blog. I am not sure why Google only cache some of my posts.

Calling for Help!

I IM my favorite bloggers to check their feeder. Thanks to Sue who managed to retrieve 1 more post for me titled “Burned!”

One More Missing!

I search hi and lo. I went through all the search engine cache. Guess where I found my “hiking” post? Thanks to a search engine called http://gigablast.com/ , I managed to get my last post there.

If you ever lost your blog, let me know.

It is another toy from Ban Dai. Ban Dai produced the famous Tamagotchi, a digital pet. Once I own a little dragon pet before.

Yesterday I was shopping with my children. As usual all they wanted to look at was the toys section. I saw a few items on sale. An electronic Treasure Gaust was going for RM15.00. At that time, I didn’t know what it was. I know if you buy 2, you can fight with one another. Looks like fun, so I got 2 for my children. It is actually a fishing digital toy.

It is quite cool because the toy has a GPS system. For RM15 with GPS, cool right? Actually it is Gaust Positioning System, got you there! Gaust is some creatures you need to catch. It is floating around, the gadget has a compass system to allow you to find the creature. Once you got to the creature, you use the reel to capture it, like a fishing game. There are many different creatures you can capture. You can use the creature to fight with your opponent too.

Ohh, you can also feed the creature to make it transform. I Google the toy, it is selling for US16.90. Maybe it is not so popular here.

Yeah I am having fun with it too!! Here are some pictures of Gaust. Source: http://www.bandai-asia.com/gaust/s_chi/gaust.html

Today I took my children to hike up the Bukit Jambul hill. It is a tough hill to climb. Before having any children, I always go up with my hubby after work. It is a good workout after conquering the hill. The path was easier then. Now it looks difficult, I believed some of the pathway has eroded.

The children were very excited at first. The climbing up for us took a long time as I need to guide Emily up every step. It was a long way up and down. They were happy when we got to the top. We could enjoy the breeze and the view. The nice view was block by some big trees. Sigh, I was hoping to sip some ginger tea but none avail.

They also got some exercise equipments up there. I wonder how they managed to carry all the way up there.

The difficult part was getting down, some parts were slippery. I had to help Emily to take baby steps down. To add to the difficulty, it was getting dark. Emily could not see the pathway. However we managed to get down safely. We were the last family to get down. It was really an achievement for us. It took us 2 hours in total to go up and down.

We asked the children if they want to do it again, they loudly jeered “NO”. My hubby and I enjoyed it. We need to KIV this until the next holiday.

Yeap, my children had so much fun that they are burned. Burnout and sunburn. On Sunday, we headed to the new Penang Hard Rock Hotel. I managed to get a package deal but it is not cheap. It took a long time for us to check in, maybe because of the school holidays crowd.

Check In
Fortunately we went up at 2pm. However, I sent the kids to the swimming pool to have some fun first. They were eager to jump in. I got the room about 2:45pm and they upgraded it to a sea view room.

The Room

It has a beautiful view of the sea. The room was spacious and clean. The deco, nothing to shout about. The bathroom was a little small and does not have a bath tub. Thumbs down from the children. Imagine I came to the same hotel in 2006 under a different management and brand. The charge is almost double, I guess now better service. Most of the staff working there are fairly young. I will blog about this in parkbay.net.

Some rooms are directly connected to the pool. You can jump straight into the pool from the room. Very cool! I don’t advise kids to do that as it is deep.

Too bad the room does not have any Cartoon Network. If not, they probably ask me to stay another day. They only have Disney Chanel.

The Pool
The swimming pool is the major attracting for kids. There are 3 slides. The depths of the water near the slides are deep for younger children. Even Emily could not touch the floor. She is over 4 feet. If you are bringing your kids below 4 feet, make sure they have arm floats.

Emily and Tim spend 2 hours on Sunday and Monday in the pool. The sun was scorching hot, yet they didn’t want to leave. Fortunately for me, I can go in to the kids’ playroom which is air-condition and look through the glass window to monitor them. Ended up both was sunburn!

Kids Playroom & Teen Club
They also have kids’ playroom where they offer babysitting and a teen club to play Xbox, PSP, billiard, 2 computers with Internet…etc . However there were a crowd of kids hogging them.

Meals
The package came with free breakfast and lunch. The breakfast was good, I loved the nasi lemak and so did Tim. Emily had bake beans, hash brown, cornflakes and juices.

We had lunch at Hard Rock Café. The food wasn’t very good. The fish and chips were over battered. Make it very “jilat” for me. Tim ordered pizza and he didn’t like the square pizza. He kept telling me that pizza is not like the picture shown. He was really disappointed.
Overall, the children have fun. Will I go back there again? Maybe. I am hoping they will reduce the hotel membership so that we can use the pool without the hotel room.

School Holiday is here after one more day at school. I guess it started after exams are over for the children. I bet some already were given holiday homework to do. The school break is only 1 week. Not much we can do.

By the way, 2 of my kids’ birthday fall at the start of the holiday. Timothy’s birthday will be on Sunday. He already asked for his present. Not a toy? But a pool party. Guess where? I am not going to throw any big party but invited my nephew and my niece to a pool party. I will blog more when I have the pictures next.

I am still trying to think what to do for the rest of the holidays? Maybe I will take them to do some craft at the craft center.

Tim says “School’s Out!”

Lately there are a lot of tragic cases happenings surrounding children. One almost kidnapped cases, a few fire cases and yesterday “Man Armed With Hammer Assaults Pre-School Children”. My heart dropped when I saw this news on the TV last night. I pray that the injured children will recover from physical injury as well as getting over the traumatic experience.

If you are sending your children to pre-school, do your child a favor. Ensure that the principal locked the premises gate or door. Safety must come first. I heard of some school is now thinking of getting security guard for the school.

I constantly pray for my children protection that nothing bad will happen to them.

I have learn, it is good for the school to have tough exam papers. If most of the school children do not perform well, then the teachers need to work harder to ensure the students know their stuff. Of coz, parents like me have to prep our children more to ensure they keep up to speed with the teaching.

I was happy to hear a comment from my boy’s English teacher that she will ensure all her class students know their stuff for the next exam. I am not sure how she will do it but I can see the passion in her. I am glad she wasn’t defensive but was able to ensure her students improve. Kudos to her!

I wonder how the BM teacher will react when I go and see her.

Well I said I had to feedback to the teacher about the exam paper not in line with the syllabus taught in class. I had to see more than 1 teacher because Tim has different teacher for different subjects.

I met the English teacher, she was a nice lady. She told me that she took over the class only 3 weeks ago. She did prep the class what to expect in the exams. Obviously my boy was in lala land and didn’t tell me. I believed her. In the English paper, Tim wrote this for making sentence:

She didn’t give him any marks at first. My opinion should be given some marks although she was looking for

I believe both are equally correct grammatically. Finally she did give him marks for that. Let me know if I am wrong…

Next was the Maths teacher, she approached me. She told me the teacher who set the Math paper was from another school. The new teacher had a different expectation. I told her the exam was to test whether the student learn things taught in the classroom. Maybe the school expects us to send our children to tuition. Then again, if we do that what is the school for?

I have yet to meet with the BM teacher. Oh by the way, the BM teacher is also the new teacher who sets the Math’s question. This is one of the questions for BM paper for Std 2:

Generally I heard most of the students didn’t do well for this term. I also heard that apparently one girl scored all hundred. Guess what? She is the daughter of one of the class teacher. Next is, one class was prep by the teacher and did an exercise on one of the BM question. The rest of the other classes were left out. The news I got from kepoh-ing with some of the parents.