Elgarmummy.com

Author: Sarah

  • Getting My Article Published

    Getting My Article Published

    It is the 28th SEA Games and I love watching the events, especially the swimming finals. I used to watch the competition on television, and even go to swimming meets with my friend. Even though I was very keen on watching, it would be near impossible with very young kids.

    It turned out that I was stuck at home with horribly infected feet with burns after putting medication on blisters which developed after walking to a clinic five minutes from my home. It had even resulted in an A&E visit, and it was excruciating pain as the nurse tried to remove the dead skin.

    photo (2)

    Hence, throughout most of the SEA Games, I was stuck at home, so I spent my evenings watching the swimming finals.

    I had enjoyed watching the commentary provided by Gerald Koh and Mark Chay, as they gave me a greater insight into swimming. In the past, I had attended swimming meets with my friend, whom I had discovered enjoyed watching swimming competitions. In the past, I could only see them swim for a few seconds or a minute, and I had never thought about what swimmers had to go through and put in.

    I had also enjoyed the time with Gar. Gar would sit beside me at night and watch the competitions together. He was very tickled by the backstrokers, whom he described as swimming backwards. Whenever the swimmers won gold medals, I would sing the Majulah Singapura, our national anthem,  during the award ceremonies and Gar learnt how to sing after a few times.  When I asked him what sport he would take part in, he mentioned that he would like to jump about.

    A few nights later, I had inspiration so I typed out my article at 3am (couldn’t go back to sleep as the antibiotics were quite strong on my stomach) on my iPhone and emailed it to myself.  I have always wanted to be a published author, so I guess writing to the newspapers would be a great start.

    The next morning, I tidied the article up and sent it to Today Voices, a forum for Today newspaper. I thought I would stand a higher chance getting my article published as the newspaper is owned by Mediacorp and I was writing about their programming.

    I received an automated response to the article. They said they would contact me if they were to publish it.

    I had expected my article to be published the next day, so I was disappointed when I did not see it. Perhaps I should just publish it on my Facebook feed instead.

    I read the newspaper in the afternoon after I was back from my appointment with a podiatrist. I was reading, when I finally saw my article, Ex-swimmers add depth to commentary. It took up half a page of the tabloid, along with another article. There were minimal changes, and I presumed the editors found it easy to edit. I remembered when I was writing for a student paper when I was 14 years old, the editor mentioned that my articles were the easiest to edit, compared to the other cub reporters.

    20151206_AP_page_32

    I was so excited! My writing is far from Pulitzer standard, but I just like to write. It is a good form of catharsis for me, and it was a good start.

    A motivation speaker mentioned that to know what you are really passionate about, dig deep into what you were doing when you were 8 to 16. What do you like to do? What are you good at? I had been writing diary entries since I was 10 years old on paper, and then when I was 20, I started blogging. I guess some of my greatest joys come from writing. This is what I really want to do.

    Sorry for the digression. On the same night, I was watching a Japanese drama starring Takuya Kimura. He had lost his memories and forgot why he had married his ex-wife. It was later revealed that he did not respect her dream. They met when she wanted to interview him. He married her to climb up the corporate ladder. He would demand her to get the household chores done, and would wonder why she would lose track of time, as she would always be working on her computer. When she had finally finished her book, she was so excited and she gave her husband her book to read. She was very disappointed when he used her book as a coaster, and her brief show of anger when she saw the coffee stains. I could empathize with her.

    My husband did not show any excitement for me that my article was published. He even said that he knew I would be eager to write the next article, but said I had better do the household chores. I think he was quite frustrated with being sick as well, and without a helper to help with the chores, but I definitely felt my spirits dampened by his lack of enthusiasm.

    I would still strive towards my dream of being a published author.

  • 4 Ideas For Children During Free Time

    4 Ideas For Children During Free Time

    After being confronted with the reality that my young children spend far too much of their free time on iPad either playing Minecraft, Tap Zoo and Surfer Run, or watching YouTube videos, I decided there must be better things for them to do, because they become quite irritable after playing online games for too long. There are four big ideas I would encourage them to do during their free time.

    1. Play

    Active play is great for young children. Gifted children may have asynchronous development physically, so spending time outdoors could help them with their gross motor skills. Unstructured play is important for their development. We also go to the playground occasionally. Gar loves to climb and he becomes braver each time. I used to hover around Gar, but now that he is older and more skilful, I can let him have more independence. My son’s preschool teacher also mentioned that negotiation skills are best observed at the playground.

    The boys love to jump on the sofa. The younger one loves to jump from the piano bench, tables and beds. We have lots of playmats to cushion his jumps. Someone mentioned that having a mini trampoline would be a great idea. I haven’t had time to check that out. In the mean time, my 3-year-old sofa looks bad.

    The boys also love to play with balls. They could throw it, kick it or roll it. Gar loves to put on his father’s soccer gloves. Sometimes I will even join in, but I think I am far from bending it like Beckham.

    Apart from active play, sedentary play is important too. Gar loves to play with Batman and Joker at the moment. My husband had bought Duplo Batman, so the brothers love to play with them.

    Recently, we started playing Twister, a game that ties you up in knots, as El loves to say. What I can say is my children can’t seem to tell left and right apart.

    playing twister1

    Charades is another game that we have played before. It is no ordinary charades. It is dinosaur charades. El would act out various dinosaur species, and get me to guess what they are.

    Not too long ago, with his latest Minecraft obsession, and some Citiblocs tiny wooden blocks, he made me guess various items, such as tree, treehouse, heart, and other things that look exactly like how they do in Minecraft.

     

    2. Create

    Let children come up with something. Sometimes they could create their own games, or sometimes they could recreate drawings or other handicraft.

    El creates drawings filled with dinosaurs or Ben 10 aliens. Despite nearly 2 years of art lessons, he is still not so good at drawing. However, I still love his drawings. I have tonnes of unused exercise paper, so he just takes them and draw. He fills them up with maps of various continents and countries. He writes a lot of information on those papers as well.

    Gar has learnt how to use a pair of scissors through practising cutting those cute pictures from Kumon books. He can use a normal pair of scissors. Sometimes I just let him cut coloured paper. This helps him with his fine motor skills. He does this when he is bored.
    cut paper dog let's cut paper

    We used to do painting, but I usually ended up painting most of the time. Gar likes to watch me paint more than he paints. If he does paint, he uses a lot of yellow.

    gar and el painting

    Now that we have finally bought a piano, I would also play songs for them to sing. Gar loves Skidamarink at the moment, so I play that and he will sing along. He loves to sing. It is also a tactic by me to get El to the piano so that he can practise the piano.

    3. Think

    It is good to have down time. They could think about anything. It is also good when they are in cars and have nothing to do. Simple games can be played.

    Sometimes El sees me reading newspapers and he would join in. Last week, I saw an news article about a basketballer named Curry, and it tickled El greatly because he likes to eat curry. He was so inspired he came up with a song/rap (can’t really call it a song because he cannot carry a tune) about curry. All I did was to give him a piece of paper and a pencil.

    There is a cartoon with a character named Mabel. In an oft-televised advertisement, she says, “My name is Mabel. It rhymes with cable.” The boys are also tickled by this. El started thinking about rhymes.

    “My name is Ace. It rhymes with ice,” he said, while we were in the car.

    “No, they do not rhyme,” I replied, and made the vowel sounds for him.

    It was only when I wrote it down I realized he had rhymed them via spelling. To provide him with more examples, I showed him a video on Michael Learns To Rock, about star/car, and stay/anyway as part of rhyming pairs. Think he wasn’t keen on the music.

    Other thinking games include thinking of as many animals/birds/dinosaurs/countries, depending on their current obsessions, starting with a particular letter.

    Boggle is another interesting word game.

    We have plenty of books at home, so sometimes Gar will request us to read the books to him.

    4. Dream

    Dreaming and thinking are not exclusive, but I would like to think of dreaming as something that is more abstract and allows more room for creativity.

    I like to throw random questions to El. If you were a tree, what would you be? He replied he would be a shelter for animals.

    What is your ideal school? He said it would be a nature school. He told me that his school would be situated in a forest, and surrounded by trees. They will study about nature. He went to check out images of nature schools, and then drew his own school.

    nature school 1

    Sometimes we need to give our gifted children time to dream. If they have too many packed activities (which I am sometimes tempted to do), they are just going through the motion, and may soon lose their zest for learning.

    You could check out creative journal prompts and get some questions to ask your children. They do not have to turn this into a writing activity. They could just verbalise their thoughts, and you could encourage them to dream. You never know when their ideas could crystallise.

    7 habits of happy kids

    I had bought a book on The 7 Habits for Happy Children and read a story to El. It was about a character feeling bored. He was encouraged to take charge himself and not depend on others to relieve his boredom. The habit was about Being Proactive. When El mentioned that word to me a few days ago, I reminded him of the story, and immediately he went to find something to do. I hope my boys will take charge of their own free time and find something to occupy themselves, or just use the time to dream. El will be going to school next year, and with the stressful Singapore education system, I hope he will have free time to play, create, think and dream.

    This is part of a blog hop by Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page for June. Click on the image to check out other blogs on the gift of free time.
    the gift of free time

  • Gar’s Toilet Training

    Gar’s Toilet Training

    I had met up with my children’s teachers last week, and Gar’s teacher said that he should be ready to go without diapers. I was a little doubtful, because he had not told us he needed to pee all the time, but I thought we would give it a try.

    We wanted to try earlier, but he complained that the underwear was making him feel itchy. We left it as that. On Saturday, I tried again, and then he said the same thing. I decided the tag was the offending item, and not the seams. I snipped it off. After a short while, he came back to me and said it was still itchy. The remnants of the tag were still there, so I had to remove the whole thing. I hope the pants will not spoil.

    tag

    This was the same pair of underwear that El refused to wear because it “says ‘Wednesday’, but today is Tuesday”. In a way, I am glad Gar is not able to read yet, so he cannot pull that on me. However, he refused to wear the yellow one because he wanted the blue one instead. Hey, I thought yellow was his favourite colour?

    strong wednesday

    I told him to let us know if he wanted to pee. Unfortunately, he shouted ‘wet’.

    “Do you still need to pee?” I asked.

    “No,” he replied.

    I wanted to change him, but had to cut out the tag from the next pair.

    Ten minutes later, he peed again.

    The process repeated a few times. We went through lots of colours within two hours. I had to be careful not to make him feel discouraged at any stage.

    It was only in the afternoon he managed to let us know. We also made him use the potty or go to the bathroom every half an hour to an hour. Sometimes he would say no, and sometimes he would say yes.

    We were running out of underwear and tried to dry them in the hot sun and then in the air-con.

    In the meantime, I was also cleaning my bedroom, and vacuumed lots of dust. The bed was smelly with Gar’s urine, because he somehow managed to wet the bed a few times through diaper leaks at night. I used Febreeze and also use my Raycop anti-dust mite vacuum cleaner. I had tested positive for allergy to one of the three major dust mite types, so this helps a lot in preventing rhinitis.

    In the late afternoon, Gar said he was sleepy and he wanted to sleep. I was not sure whether he was tired out by the excitement. After that, we put him back on diapers.

    We will try again the next day.

     

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