Check out our new header!

Bernard made me a new header for Lana's blog! Check out how great it looks :)

If you're viewing on google reader or something like that, here it is, just for you (Uncle Ant!):

My Sensitive Girl

Lately, we have been having a couple of Movie Nights with Lana. She really likes to watch the stories and she will talk about them for a long time after she has seen them. She loves to watch the Tinkerbell movies (which she regularly watches on our iPod Touch, it's a saviour for when she's cranky at a restaurant!), and a week or two ago we watched Finding Nemo, fast forwarding the frightening parts because as Lana says, "I don't want to be scary" (hehe - so cute!)

Last night, we decided to watch The Lion King with her. Lana has been loving lions lately, and Bernard has been singing "In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight" with her, so it was a natural choice. We decided to fast forward some of the scary parts of the movie with Scar and all that, but for some reason we didn't fast forward the stampede when Mufasa died. It is not so much scary as it is sad.

As Simba was crying out for someone to help him, I looked over and saw a tear in Lana's eye, and as Simba began to cry, Lana told us: 

"The baby lion is crying. And Lana is crying too".

It's called suction...

People often talk about the short attention span of kids and how it's extremely easy for them to lose focus. Lana is no exception in this regard, and whenever we go out for dinner, we always try to make sure that we bring our iPod "survival kit" loaded with games and movies! I recall a few months back when what I call the "TESLA" group (an acronym comprising the names of the kids in the group) met up for dinner during Mid-Autumn Festival. By the end of dinner, each kid was sitting with either an iPhone or Android device, completely absorbed in the game they were playing (with the exception of Shayne of course, who was sitting quietly and eating away - she was the smart one)!

Having said that, however, I am sometimes amazed at how Lana can be fixated and focused on a particular thing for a really long period of time. For example, one of her favourite toys lately is "Play-Doh". She'll be happy sitting in her chair for hours smooshing them into different shapes. (One time, Lana climbed out of her chair in the middle of playing Play-Doh and walked off - so I assumed she had finished playing with them and I packed it all up. I thought there was a lot of truth in the old adage of "out of sight, out of mind" - at least until Lana came back a few minutes later and, upon noticing that her Play-Doh had vanished, burst hysterically into tears and wailed "I want more Play-Doh"!)

Oh, and when I mentioned "different shapes" above, I actually only mean "balls". For some reason, Lana is content with just making balls. Every time I suggest making something different, she'll respond with "no daddy, you make a ball", then proceed to rip off the tiniest piece of Play-Doh for me to roll into a ball. And oftentimes my attempts at discreetly rolling the Play-Doh into a worm or sausage is met with "no daddy, you make a ball", upon which Lana will promptly deem me unworthy of making a Play-Doh ball and confiscate the piece I'm working on. :| It's all right though, because the short-attention-span mechanism kicks into gear shortly, and within half a minute, Lana will be asking me to make a ball for her again. ;) Once or twice, we've also let her mix a few Play-Doh colours together, resulting in what she calls "multi-balls" (multi-coloured balls) which can be a source of fun for hours and hours. (Warning: Making lots of "multi-balls" will eventually lead you to only have a Play-Doh set consisting of only one colour - brown.)

The other things that she loves of late is "swimming" in the bathtub. A few days ago while she was happily splashing away in the bathtub, I let out the water too soon (despite her protests) and suddenly found myself faced with a traumatized little girl, bawling as she watched her fun going down the drain along with her bathwater. So yesterday, I decided on a different tack - I asked her to pull the plug to let the water out instead. As the water started to drain out, I put Lana's hand over the drain and told her: "it's called suction". I eventually convinced her to put her foot over the drain as well just for fun. Lana was fascinated by this - and my little ruse had worked. ;)

So bedtime finally came along, we said our prayers together, and then we tucked our little girl into bed. Nicole and I were sitting outside in the living room just unwinding and relaxing - she was blogging away on the computer and I was playing my video games on the TV screen. A few minutes went by when suddenly Lana called out from her bedroom:

"...it's called 'suction', daddy - it's called 'suction'..."

So much for the short-attention span theory.

I hope you all had as much fun for Christmas as we did, and may your New Year be filled with multi-balls and suction. :)

Potty Training - or not...

For a long time now, Lana has been "ready" to be toilet trained. She knows when she is going to the toilet, she has a fair amount of control over it - BUT she seems to have absolutely no desire to go on the toilet!

We've tried a little kiddy chair on the regular toilet, and we've tried a little potty, but she's not very interested in either of them.

Lana does like to run around with no nappy on, and she does this on a semi regular basis - only to pee all over the floor and laugh, saying "Do we pee on the floor?? NOOOOO!!" like it's the greatest joke of the year. 

At school, the teachers do some very basic "toilet training", taking the little ones to the mini-sized toilets there. They encourage us to actively train our kids at home as well - but I'm at a loss.

Part of me thinks that if she's not interested, she's not interested. I don't really care personally if she's not toilet trained in the next six months (after that I would care a bit more, I think!). I know that eventually she will actually want to go in the toilet instead of in her nappy, and maybe it's best to wait until she's ready (a bit like my philosophy for taking away her dummy, but that's another story for another day) - but then I also know that sometimes a gentle push is needed as well. 

I'd appreciate any hints or tips about the situation, how can I get her to WANT to go in the toilet? And should I push it now, or wait six months?

How Come?

The one thing that amazes me more than anything else about Lana is her language development. I think I've mentioned this to everyone I talk to about her - it's the proud mummy in me, I guess - but she keeps amazing me more and more all the time. 

For a long time, she's been asking a million "Who" and "What" and "Where" questions. 

"What's that over there?"

"Where's daddy going?"

"Who did we see today?" 

Yesterday, she asked maybe her first "Why" question (although she said "How come" - that's a habit of mine passed down to the next generation - something that locals here in Hong Kong find hard to understand so I have to always "correct" myself).

"Mummy, how come the leaves are moving?"

(after I recovered from shock) "Because it's windy today!"

For her to ask that question, she would have first had to notice that the leaves were indeed moving. Then she would have had to think that sometimes the leaves move and other times they don't and there has so be some kind of reason to make that happen. And last of all, she had to know how to ask me what that reason was. Pretty complicated when you think about it!

I know that questions can be annoying to some parents, but as a kid who probably drove my own parents crazy with questions, I find it so fun and exciting :) I can't wait to answer even more of her (sometimes crazy) questions as she grows up :) :)

Dear Lana

I love it when I wake up in the morning and I find you snuggled up next to me, but I have no idea how or when you got there :)

My Favourite Things

Lana is at an age now where she has a lot of likes and dislikes. She has many favourite things - favourite songs to sing, favourite things to do, favourite toys to play with.

Among her favourite things to play with is Lego - the "Duplo" kind that is more suitable for two year olds than the itty bitty kind. She has a couple of sets of lego, including a "Bob the Builder" (formerly known as Bobby DooDah), a zoo set including a crocodile, a couple of lions, an elephant and a giraffe, and a farm set with a few farm animals. She can play lego for hours!

Lana also loves to play with play dough - although we insist on her sitting in her chair to play with it (I don't want it caked into every corner of the house!). For some reason, she always wants to play with the green colour and then she will tell me what she wants me to make. Sometimes it's a crocodile, or Mickey Mouse, or a ball. Lana mostly will squish it, or roll it, or poke it with her fingers - but her creative formation skills are not yet on the "Sculptor" level yet. It's quite therapeutic though just to mush it. No wonder Lana likes it! 

Lana's always been a big fan of playing with balls and she has a bunch of different types of balls. She has a couple of bouncy balls, an inflatable beach ball, soft balls that rattle, the list goes on and on. She loves to throw and "catch" (although her "catching" at the moment is just holding her arms out and hoping that Mummy can manage to make the ball land in her arms - but hey, that's a start!!)

One thing that Lana loves to do is to go out to the park. Nearly every afternoon when I'm at the hospital, our helper will take Lana downstairs to the park at our complex. Lana's met so many little friends there - and since I'm not going with her, I don't even know them all. But over the past couple of months, I've had many people - both adults and children - say to me in passing "Hi Lana's mummy!". I never have a clue who they are, but they all know Lana from the park. On the weekends, Bernard and I will often take Lana to one of the larger parks around our area. It's a bit more of a walk away, but there's a lot more to do there. Lana's a bit of a daredevil - she will attempt to climb things which are obviously too large for a two year old, giving Bernard and I a mini-heart attack! She is highly independent as well and often doesn't want any help with these climbs - but we always stand behind her (or under her) just in case. 

Lana has a favourite story - it's "The Gruffalo". It's a very fun book, it rhymes so it's a great read for kids this age. The story is about a mouse who takes a walk in the woods and these predators want to eat him - but he makes up a creature, the Gruffalo, to scare them away. After a while, he actually comes face to face with a REAL Gruffalo who wants to eat him! Lana can actually recite nearly the entire book - it's so cute. Sometimes I'll just hear her mumbling to herself, "A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood. A fox saw the mouse and the mouse looked good!"

When Lana is going to sleep, she often will ask for Bernard or I to sing to her. She has a few favourite songs that she always asks for. First of all is "Little Peter Rabbit had a fly upon his nose" (which also turns into Little Gruffalo had a fly upon his nose, or Little Elmo, or Little Tigger, or whoever else happened to have a fly upon their nose). Then she will ask for "Jesus Loves Me" too. Sometimes she will sing along, but often she just listens as she falls asleep.

One of Lana's latest little "quirks" is that she insists on picking which shoes Mummy will wear - and she has a favourite pair of Mummy's shoes too obviously, since every single day for the past month, she's insisted on me wearing my black Mary Jane crocs. I don't really mind - I don't care that much which shoes I have on anyway. But one day, I happened to put on a different pair of shoes and Lana didn't notice until we were already out of the house. When she DID notice, she had a mini-melt down. "Black croc shoes, Mummy!!" 

I'm sure that if I thought about it, I could name another hundred or so of Lana's favourite things - she is that opinionated!! But these are some of the main things that come to mind :) 

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

These are a few of my favorite things

- My Favourite Things, from Sound of Music