Tuesday, June 23, 2009

JL’s update….

How about KorKor? How is he progressing?

Character
JL generally when he is good, he is a great ‘angel’ to our heart. However, when he is not in the right mood, Mummy will be screaming up to the ceiling like mad lady.

The two main things which disturb Mummy were:
1. Is he forgetful?We need to keep reminding him on things because if not he will get over active and almost like forget about himself.
2. Is he ignoring?
We need to keep calling him a few times until it gets louder and angrier to get him reply even a simple question.

Food
We had no problem with JL in food and he knew which proper food was and which junk food was. We never deprived him from chocolates and ice-cream. We would eat together especially ice-cream after everyone had the proper meal. We never had problem getting him to eat vegetables and fruits. We hoped he will be a good example to AL.

Kindy
We actually moved him to a nearer kindy early this year because of… read here for detail

Initially we only enrolled him for Chinese class. Then one day he came back that he wanted English and next Art & Craft. At the end, he stayed back from Mon-Fri in the kindy till 130pm except Mon (Art & Craft) would be 2pm. It did cost us some money but then the classes were still reasonable because lunch was provided and also we saved money on transportation if we were to send him to these extra classes outside the kindy.

We told JL that all these classes were not free so he would need to make sure he fully utilized the lessons to learn and have fun too. We wanted him to value the money and nothing was free. JL knew that PaPa and Mummy would try our best to give him as long as he had interest in learning.
However, some thing we had to let it go and we were very sorry that we were unable to give you all that you wanted.

Language
JL would mix his conversation with Mandarin and Malay – ‘rojak’. Even PaPa and Mummy started to slowly picking up Mandarin from JL. Even though it was not a perfect sentence by JL, it was a great achievement for JL who knew zero Mandarin and Malay early of this year and able to make simple sentences.

PaPa and Mummy used to converse in Malay when we needed to discuss something which we didn’t want JL to know. How about now? We ended up talking in dialect which sounded funny because PaPa couldn’t converse in Hokkien well even though he understood. As for Mummy, Mummy’s Cantonese was and is terrible, PaPa always said ‘hard to hear’ in Chinese. Mummy would speak in Hokkien and PaPa would either reply in Hokkien or Cantonese. Sometimes when we forget and started to speak in Malay, JL would reply to our conversation and asked us what that word meant? Oppsss….

Reading
His Chinese reading was much better than English. Surprise? PohPoh was having a hard time to get him do his English reading. We hoped he will pick up English reading soon so that he would be able to read by himself and read for AL before bedtime.

Swimming
Yes, this was long overdue. He had been requesting for almost 1 year. Then PohPoh found a swimming instructor in the apartment which charged reasonable fees. JL had another 4 more lessons to go to complete a total of 12 lessons which consisted of breathing, floating and Freestyle. After this, if JL wanted to learn extra styles, then we would need to pay for additional lessons. We would see how it goes first.

Mummy asked about AL, wow, it was soo pricey because it would be one-to-one with Mummy. The price was 2x more. We decided to only enroll AL later when she reached the minimum age to join the group lessons like the one we enrolled JL.

Music
Another of JL request which was long overdue for more than 1 year. Music could be an expensive affair. Then we decided we would let him join music after he completed his swimming lesson…. Will share on Music Class hunting in next post….
Were we overloading him? We tried to minimize but all was requested by JL... How can we as parents say 'No' to him? If only we could afford to provide him all the things he wanted to learn since was and is open to learning, if only.....if only.....

9 comments:

miche said...

Jeriel is such a good boy and he knows what he wants.

As always, money is the culprit. My girls has been asking me to send them for violin and piano lesson but we just can't afford it. :(

wen said...

wow, he is learning swimming already? i have yet to find a good teacher for swimming and piano lesson...

jeriel forgetting himself> how so? :)

michelle@mybabybay said...

Maybe it is boys, Tim is also very forgetful.

slavemom said...

My girl wud love to learn swimming but I still haven't done the 'hunting' yet. :) It's great that Jeriel's so enthusiastic abt learning new stuff.

jacss said...

emm...swimming is also our overdue activity, been promising the boys but haven't find time...excusehor!!
eh, how much u pay for jeriel swimming lesson huh??

A Mom's Diary said...

How's the swimming lesson progressing? If it's good, we may want to consider enrolling YY too, coz she adores water. We've just started her on arts and music class too, also at her request after trying out the classes.

JK said...

He's not forgetful or ignores what you say, he is just behaving like all other children, but I would say he's a good boy.

Anonymous said...

agree with Jo-N, my boy is also the same.

ZMM said...

Good boy Jeriel.
I haven't done an update on Zara for a long long time.. time to do that liao.