Obsession with Wooden Toys

Recently, I have begun to purchase wooden toys that I feel are pretty educational, whereas Hubby kept those that he felt were not useful in Ian's development.

I started off with a chunky wooden puzzle from Melissa & Doug and it had kept Ian busy for a while. Soon, he has mastered how to put the correct pieces into the puzzle, and so I got more of them in my recent spree at Amazon. 

On top of the puzzles, I also purchased a shape sorting clock.  Although it was meant for 3+ year old children, I simply could not resist the sale price.

See how Ian played with the little blocks...

Ian @ 21 Months

Photos taken on 29 Dec 2009

Fun @ T3

This is a belated post on our family outing at T3, on 12 Dec 2009.  It was the first time we went there, after hearing that there are some shops and eating outlets.  It was indeed rather fun for Ian.  There were many sites for kids of various ages to play, and Ian seemed to be attracted to them all.  However, he was not yet keen in watching the planes landing and taking off, at this stage.

It was the first time we let him try the slide and he had loads of fun with it.  (Now he is an expert because he gets to practise it at his childcare.)

Perhaps we will be back again another day!

First Post in 2010

Little did I realise that I have not posted anything in December 2009.  Our family enjoyed some happy moments together during Hubby's long leave.  We managed to bring Ian for a swim again in the pool, I finished his quilt, Hubby managed to reshuffle the study room so that now it is a lot more spacious and tidy, and we made an attempt to bring Ian to east coast beach although in the end, we didn't manage to achieve our goal because the carpark was simply too full. 


Childcare
Ian started attending the childcare since Jan 4 and for the first 3 days, we had been allowed to attend with him.  Both of us attended the first day and was with him throughout.  On the second day, Hubby returned to work and I sat in the class with Ian.  On the 3rd day, we left him on his own most of the time and the teacher said that he did well.  We found that the food portion served at the childcare was small and Ian is the type of child who needs a lot of patience to be fed (slow eater).  He was always looking for food when he got home and was knocked out by 2pm.  I guess the activities at the centre were effective in burning out his seemingly everlasting energy.  I wonder whether it was because of the small food portion, or the energy-burning activities, that Ian lost some weight after 1 week.

Unfortunately, on the second week, Ian only attended for 1 day as he caught a flu first, followed by a very bad cough.  We suspected that he caught it from Hubby because he fell sick first.  During our 3rd visit to Dr, Ian was diagnosed with an infection of the upper airways.  It was lucky that we saw Dr on time before the infection spreaded to the lower body.  As of now, our whole family is still on the recovery phase.


LNT
We have also changed Ian's class at LNT to join the 2007 batch, after consulting his Chinese teacher who said he could try for 3 classes to see if he could catch up.  I attended the first lesson with him, and found that the class exercises were much, much more challenging.  The other 2 students in the class were about 7 months more senior and were already talking quite well.  The class exercises include difficult memory games (I feel quite stressed!), advanced puzzles (not the 3 pieces type that the 2008 class used to do), drawing mazes and connecting dots, and also reading lyrics.  Frankly, I think Ian still has a gap to do these exercises proficiently, but Hubby thinks that we should give him a chance to learn it.  Good thing is, I think the other kids are also not able to do most of these exercises on their own although they displayed more advanced abilities than Ian.  I also hope that Ian can pick up something from the older kids (he was always the oldest one in the previous classes).  Let's see how the next few classes go...