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:

Thanks to daddy for this.

Teacher: What is your ambition? What you want to be when you grow up?
Emily: Bible reader and Artist.

Another kid (non-christian): Pastor.
Teacher: Why you want to be a pastor?
Kid: So that I can talk a lot.

On another note, I did some clips last few days with the lovely ribbons I bought. Do you think it can sell for RM$2 per clip? I do for fun and I just have too many now.

Size of the clip: 1 inch.

Emily two front teeth has been jotting out like a rabbit teeth. It is a little loose and I believed it is about to drop. Both Tim and Emily had their first tooth at 3 months, so it makes sense to drop early. Emily refused to let me touch her 2 front teeth, she complain a little pain if I touched it.

Anyway, the other day when we went to Ikea, she was pushing the small trolley. I warned her not to push too fast as the floor in Ikea is not even. As I was looking at the display, I saw her crying and her front teeth were bleeding. I had to console her, no use scolding her at that moment because it will make her wail even louder. I wipe off the blood but the teeth were still intact. Apparently she bumped her face into the trolley handle.

A day later, the left tooth turned in a funny position. Again, she didn’t want me to touch it. She is mega sensitive to pain like me. :giggles: She was whining about it during meal time and I asked her to use the side teeth to chew.

Another day passed, the tooth was halfway out but not fully out. I asked her can I pull it out, she shook her head with fear. Well I have a strong feeling that it will come out by itself when she sleeps. She has a tendency to grind her teeth while she sleeps.

This morning as I woke her up, I saw her tooth missing. She opened her mouth and the tooth was there. So far she shred 2 milk teeth. Let’s hope her permanent teeth grow back in time for Christmas. 😛

My family and I went down to KL during the Raya holidays and we got back today. It was a smooth drive with not much traffic. On the other side of the road, traffic was bad. We intended to stop by Ipoh for breakfast but we missed the turning. Well it was not a turning but we need to keep left if we want to go to Ipoh. Some wise guy split the road into 2. It was rather confusing for us. We had to drive about 5 minutes to Simpang Pulai make a U-turn up. Today I saw that they painted the road to Ipoh and with lots of signs.

We decided to make a trip to the bird park. It was like ages since we went there. I think it was before we had children. Yeap, it was once where my hubby and I dated. Anyway it was not a good time to go because there were lots of people. I couldn’t find a car park. They should have opened the car park at the memorial but they didn’t. I had to park quite far away.

The park was huge. We managed to catch the 12:30pm bird show at the amphitheatre. It was almost the same as the one in Bukit Merah. Bird racing on a bicycle, bird doing math, bird finding the ball, bird putting the rings, eagle flying and bird recycling.

Next, Tim and Emily wanted to feed the fish and we went to a place where there was a nice pond with waterfall.

Lastly, Emily got a little gift from the bird that is a splat of papaya juice. I believed it was near the feeding area where the bird carried the papaya and flew above her. She pretty much had it at the point and wanted to go home. She told me she didn’t like bird park because of that. Poor Emily. Fortunately it is not bird droppings. Later she was willing to carry on after Timothy covered her with an umbrella.

It was a good exercise for us under the hot sun and we ended up soaking wet with sweat. I wonder why foreigners can still eat lunch outside while the locals want to eat inside where the air condition is.

Front & Back of A Peacock

The mystery gadget is an ice-cream maker without electricity called “Play & Freeze”. It is really cool because my children and I can make ice-cream at home. The problem is hard to find creamy milk in Malaysia, to really make creamy ice-cream. However, I only managed to get full cream fresh milk.

Here is the simple recipe.

For freezing process:
– Lots of Ice cubes, can get it from the local petrol station mart.
– ½ cup of rock salt.

For the ice-cream:
– 450ml of full cream milk
– 1 tablespoon of vanilla essence
– 1/3 cup + 2 tablespoon of sugar
– Dice strawberry

The play and freeze has 2 openings at each end. One end, I placed the ice and rock salt. The rock salt will maintain the ice freezing point to freeze the ice-cream. The other end, you put the mix the above ingredients. After that it is playtime, roll it, kick it and shake it. Play it for about 10 minutes then open up and stir it a little with a spoon. Play for another 10 minutes, you should get a nice ice-cream.

Tada….simply delicious ice-cream. I even tried to replace vanilla and strawberry with 1 bottle of vitagen. The children love it. We have more homemade ice-cream with this gadget.

I have a children room and of coz my bedroom. My children room is the 2nd room. The third room is my so call walk in, play room, ironing room and store room. Tim wants the 3rd room to be his room. When he was young, he disliked the 2nd room. He told me he didn’t like the glow in the dark stars I put up. He is starting to be a fussy boy.

Today I decided to take leave to do some spring cleaning. I cannot believe the amount of rubbish I accumulated. I cleared up the 3rd room, put a bed in for him. I had a table for him to do his homework. I even clear my store room. All in a day’s work.

The problem with me is that I like to collect things and I hate throwing things. My hubby said if I don’t touch it for a year, it ought to go into the bin. Sigh, I cannot have him throwing out my things. Who knows, I made need it sometime in the future.

By the way, I have a car seat, 2 strollers and a yiu yiu to give away. I wonder where I can donate it in Penang.

I am all exhausted now and there goes my 1 day leave. Next I need to repaint the rooms. By the way, see what my hubby did to our bedroom when I was in US…. isn’t it romantic?

Finally my gadget arrived today. Tim called it “mummy’s toy” Have a guess what it is? The children will love it. Let me test it and blog about it in the next post.

For those who have seen it, please do not reveal. Let those who have not seen it, have a go at guessing.