It's been 3 weeks since Kayla was born and Karyn has been a loving big sister to Kayla.
I suppose we've done a good job with the early psycho-education during my pregnancy. I also attribute it to the fact that she had witnessed my SIL's pregnancy and arrival of her baby boy Kayden (her 9-month old cousin whom she adores and plays with every weekend at Ye Ye's house) that she was able to understand the concept of pregnancy and birth.
Although she did stump me one time when I was about 7 month pregnant, by asking me, "Mummy, how come Mei Mei can be inside the stomach?" GULP. I was stumped. Don't tell me it's time to begin sexuality education at age 3???
Luckily, I remember my "super Dad-friend-cum-ex-colleague Uncle" James who has a 5-year-old and a 18-month-old, both girls too. When we were working at the previous workplace, we had often traded stories of our kids and parenting techniques.
At his sound advice, I explained to Karyn that because Mummy and Daddy love each other, so we got married; and then have baby inside stomach. No need to talk about the birds and the bees, she's too young to comprehend. I thought, "you mean that's it, so simple?" Whew! Luckily Karyn was able to accept the answer and didn't ask further.
Okok, I have sidetracked once again. Back to Karyn's recent updates. But before that, let me put down on record her reaction to Mei Mei when we first came back from hospital.
During the first few days, we had difficulties with her sleep and behaviour. She couldn't understand why she had to stop sleeping in our room. Although my mum has been here to stay with us and sleeps with her in her own room, she had a lot of difficulties staying in her room and falling asleep. I think she made like 8 rounds back and forth, to my room and back to hers before she managed to sleep. And it was unrestful sleep somemore.
Behaviour-wise, it was quite tough for everyone in the first week. Karyn got shouted at and scolded for things like playing with Mei Mei's sterilised bottles, messing my bed up, refusing to keep her toys and stuff, refusing to finish dinner, etc. The list went on. I suppose we were all adjusting to a new member in the family and to the new dynamics. Personally, I think I was pretty high strung in the first week, maybe my hormones at fault too. Anyway, I'm glad everything fell nicely into place from the 2nd week onwards as we gradually adapted to our new way of life.
Actually I started this entry wanting to share about the technological advances that Karyn has made in the past few weeks.
First, she started with MS Word. She always asks to type on our computer and we had rejected her before. So she had to live with typing on her toy laptop. Then one fine day, I relented and let her type on MS Word. She first started typing in the default black Arial font 12. Within days, her documents became as colourful as the rainbow! She had learnt how to change font, change colour and type smiley faces. I taught her the first two and her daddy taught her the smiley faces. And amazingly, with just one round of demo and one round of hands-on trial, she could do it independently already! Do I have a whiz kid or what??? But of course, one entire document is one colour and another document another colour. We haven't taught her to highlight portions and change yet.
Before long, I discovered that apart from MS Word, she had learnt from observation, how to open the Picassa software and view photos on her own. All because she had seen her daddy do it (she always pesters him to show her her old photos and videos) umpteen times.
On top of MS Word, she also loves to play games and print colouring pages on the Internet. After her daddy went through the games with her once or twice and we had helped her bookmark her favourite sites, she is able to start the games and play independently. Her favourites are
Sesame Street (on
PBS Kids),
Bob the Builder, "Ladybird game" (of which I don't know the URL) and some random Barbie/Princess/Dora/Hello Kitty colouring pages which her daddy will source for her.
