Carissa & Kailey

With the swine flu outbreak at St. Paul’s Convent Secondary School section, the Education department made an immediate action closing down all kindergartens and primary schools in Hong Kong for 14 days. I believe this does help slow down the spreading but this flu is definitely not under control with daily increasing confirmed cases. Looks like they may just have to go ahead and announce an early summer break this year.

Carissa still has a 1.5 hour class on Tues/Thursday of this week to rehearse for the graduation ceremony on the 27th (She’s not graduating from kindergarten, the K3 students are, but each class gets to perform on stage). Anyways, so, I was there, and I asked the teacher if we had to pay tuition for July in case the Education Department decided to continue closing school until September, answer was YES, we still have to pay, not quite an answer I would like to hear…sigh…but we will have to play by the rules and have no other options.

So, what do we do when Carissa is having her holidays?

Physical-wise: 1. Good thing the grandparents bought her a bike earlier as her 4 years-old birthday gift, when weather permits, I take her downstairs for a bike ride, which is very good exercise for her, and I wonder if she could loose those learning wheels by the end of this Summer. Am I asking too much from a 4 years old?  2. She’s still having swimming class once/week and I’m planning to increase it to two classes/week starting July.

Mental-wise:  1. I have bought her several practice books, these are books that help prep her for writing, exercise such as drawing vertical, horizontal lines, curves, etc etc, and of course, abc writing books and counting books. She basically can write all 26 alphabets both small and caps, but still, she’ll have to put an effort in writing them neatly.  2. it’s a good time to get serious with the flash cards she has been receiving from school on a weekly basis. Now that she has attended school for almost 2 years, you can imagine the pile of flash cards she has got from school. This break is a good time to help her refresh and sealed her memory on words printed on those cards.

Well, this is our plan for now. Oh…and to take her to the beach, so, be on the outlook for some beach photos! 

It’s only June but it’s already oppressively hot and humid here in Hong Kong, yet, the weather can’t stop us from having fun at the playground.

Here’s a video of my girls on the swings at 9 in the morning when the Sun is not at its hottest hours.

This summer, I have signed up Carissa to swimming classes, once/week in June and may increase to twice/week starting as of July till August when she’s off from her arts ‘n crafts classes for the summer. See below for pictures I took when she was at her very first swim lesson last week. I am happy with the class size, a ratio of 1:2 newbies and the instructor is a very patient lady who has her way to get along well with these girls. But I doubted if class size will remain the same when summer holidays are officially here, anyways, I was told class size will be 1:4 tops.

Kids warming up before jumping into the pool. The older ones in black swim suit, they’re slightly more advanced, hence assigned to a more demanding instructor who doesn’t tolerate whining, poor kids, but well, that’s the way to learn; whiners tend to be slow learners. Can you tell which one is Carissa? she’s the one w/ the yellow swim-cap sitting right next to the bunny ears (swim-cap provided and must be on throughout the entire class session).

Recent videos to share

Carissa dancing and singing while walking our pet dog, Mocha.

Kailey’s breakfast time, love the way she interacts with her baby language, I think baby language is the most pleasant-to-the-ears language on planet earth. Still teaching her how to request for more food in a nice, well-mannered approach, but sure will take a while, come on, she’s just a 13 month old baby!
Enjoy!

Carissa turned 4 yesterday! To celebrate, we threw her a birthday party at Cheeky Monkey Fun House. There were 2 reasons for throwing her this party,

1. we’re planning to switch her to another kindergarten coming September; therefore, this party served 2 purposes, a birthday/farewell party.

2. we just wanted to spoil her!

Party was a blast, majority of the little guests were her classmates from her class, the rest are her playdate pals and also her cousin, Cherry. Party started off with some singing and dancing to a few of their familiar songs like “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”, “If you’re happy and you know it”; followed with games like “Duck, Duck, Goose”; “Pass-the-Parcel”, of course there was cake and snack time, Pinata, and party ended with free time at the unit set.

Thanks everyone for coming, it was so much fun and thanks for the gifts! Carissa loves them all!

It just suddenly occur to me that I seldom blog about Kailey’s milestones, remembering that I did occasionally with Carissa back then when she was Kailey’s age now; and that I sometimes blog about how sweet Carissa is, Kailey, too, is one adorable little sweetheart!  To name one of the sweetest thing she does is: she greets us returning home with a cute Hi along with the sweetest smile; she greets me with the same sweetness when I attend her waking up from her sleep. What’s better than waking up first thing in the morning seeing my little princess says Hi to me along with a beautiful smile on her face, you bet that makes my day.

Here are some of her baby milestones at age 13.5 months old:

1. walking pretty well by now, started to challenge herself with stairs everytime she sees a set

2. climbing up and down the sofa is a piece of cake.

3. says mama (yay!) and she can also clearly say ’mama 抱抱’, but I don’t get to hear this often. She says ‘打打’ when we try to discipline Carissa, flapping her hand while saying and putting on a serious look on her face at the same time. (Thanks Kailey sweetheart, but we would prefer you stay out of this.)

4. says “果個, 呢個” while pointing at the same time.

5. says “嘩!” whenever she sees something that amazes her.  And you know, at this age, almost everything amazes her! LOL

6. loves pulling off her socks, there was this one time we were strolling inside Apita supermarket, she pulled out one of her socks, dumped it out of her stroller, I spotted her action, picked it up and continue strolling, to find out by the time we left the supermarket that she pulled out the other one as well, I ended up have to return to luckily still find that other one sitting on one of the ailse.

7. This is not exactly a milestone, but I still want to blog about it. She dropped 2 glass milk bottles from her playpen. We use glass bottles to prevent unnecessary BPA consumption, I am aware that there are BPA free plastic bottles available on the shelves, but I just want to be on the 100% safe side by avoiding plastic entirely. We now have plastic Chu Chu Bottles, they claim they’re BPA free and are PPSU (passed FDA tests, contains no hormone-disrupting chemical).  BTW, those glass bottles she broke were also Chu Chu. Anyways, if I were to blog about milk bottles, I can write up about a Twlight thickness kinda novel (OK, exaggerating, I know). To wrap up, we now have 2 expensive Chu Chu plastic bottles and very soon, I’ll help her ditch those bottles and completely switch to sippy cup, before that, I’ll have to do a search to get her BPA free sippy cups.

Well, so much for this milestone blog.

It’s been a while since my little princess last guest blog, here, proudly present my guest blogger, the following are a few of the words she can now spell, and she knows well what the ’enter’ key is for.
one

happy

cat

dog

apple

frtyuoljnkmbvvcopmjuop  –> she finally decided that she wanted to do some free typing.

Here in Hong Kong, kindergartens make it a culture organizing monthly birthday parties, and the one Carissa is now attending makes no exceptional. She IS one of the birthday children this month! Knowing that this is the month and that we also plan to throw her very own party later next week, she has been so excited about this whole party thing, mentioning it every single day.

Parents to birthday children were invited to the party, so, me, William + Kailey were there this morning, the party was fun, there were games, singing and dancing, and of course the main course, birthday cake. I think all of the kids there had fun too, not just the birthday ones.
Check out pictures of us at the school party.

1st picture, Carissa and the other birthday children; 2nd picture was taken after Carissa said she wanted to take a picture together w/ me because she was very happy that I made it to the party, this girl is so funny, I always said I am going to her school party but I wasn’t sure about William though, so I had no clue where that came out from, and I love the way she hug me in the picture, so so sweet.

Kailey was sitting in one of the chairs waiting for the cake, I think she thought she has a slice all to herself seeing all the other kids having one to themselves.

Kailey standing next to the teacher, she probably wanted to be part of the fun.