How Kate is Like Her Mother

In school, Kate is referred to as Katie-Kate. Her preschool teachers gave her the nickname and all her classmates call her that, as a result. On the last day of school, as they said goodbye to her, I mused that we wouldn't be hearing that name till fall, when she returns to preschool.

So I asked if we could call her Katie-Kate at home.

"No." she said.

This surprised me, because she'd always looked happy when that named was used. 

"Do you like being called Katie-Kate?" 

"No."

Oh. Imagine being called a name for a whole year, and actually not liking it. And still smiling about it.

"Do you like being called Kate?"

"Yes."

"What about Katydid?"

"Yes."

And we went down the list of family-originated nicknames, all of which she approved.

That got me thinking - if she hated her preschool nickname, how would we tell the teachers next year? 

Several days later, I asked her why she didn't like being called Katie-Kate.

She replied, "Because it's hard to write. You have to write K-A-T-E and then K-A-T-E again!"

When I was in my late teens, I began to disprefer writing my first name and started using LiEr (my Chinese name) for written communication. It remains the name by which I am known in my sewing and business world. Given what I feel (or not) about the Chinese aspect of my culture, this was certainly not because I thought its Chineseness was particularly cool, or that I disliked Lorraine in any way. Rather, it was because it was half the length of my first name, and I cleverly realized that, in any given time, I could write "LiEr" twice as many times than "Lorraine". I am Singaporean, remember, and Singaporeans are nothing if not efficient.

And now Kate has caught on, too, about 15 years before her mother did. Smart kid. And obviously Singaporean.

Before Cellphones

Continuing with the kids' What If series, here's yesterday's. We were driving to a family get-together and communicated briefly on the cell-phone to get directions. When we hung up, Kate asked, "Before we had phones, did we shout out the window?"

Kateisms & Jennaisms

Kate and Jenna are now in a very enjoyable phase in which they ask about What If scenarios. The most recent one involves a world without furniture. Their questions go like this:
"Mum, if there were no chairs, would people sit on the floor?" and 
"Before there were beds, did people sleep on the floor?"


It's always the floor, though. They've probably deduced that furniture is that phenomenally life-changing invention that lifted people off the ground and into higher states (literally). 


Other What If scenarios include the absence of plates and clothes. I always find it hard to keep a straight face when answering, because the girls are sooooooooo earnest (and sometimes slightly troubled at their realizations) when they bring their questions to me.

Photo of the Day

A rare thing indeed, for all three girls to be looking at the camera!

Stuck in my head

Hello all!

A bit quiet on the blogging front. Lots of photos and videoclips to share but no time to actual get to them. Some updates first!

Jenna and Kate are done with preschool for the year. Wednesday was their last day - they watched a puppet show by their teachers, then the kids performed some of their favourite songs for the parents. This was followed by ice cream (yes, at 1030 in the morning!) and playing on the school playground one more time before saying goodbye. This was Jenna's last year in preschool but I was not quite the emotional softie this time around I was when Emily graduated in 2010. The first time is always hardest, I think. Kate will return for her final year (and ours, as a family) in the fall. I'm not looking forward to saying goodbye at the end of that year. But it is a while away yet.

Another consequence of school being done (for the younger girls anyway) is that I no longer have to do the 8 school runs per day, two and a half days a week. I felt so liberated yesterday that I volunteered to put up all the screens in our windows. Finally, some time to contribute to the house! Most days during the school term, it was a challenge just to get dinner on the table at the end of the day. And now I'm excited to  be able to do housework. Perspective is a funny thing.

The girls are almost done with spring swimming lessons, but we are planning to have them continue them in the summer. We are also looking at becoming regular visitors of the water park across the street. We've been looking longingly at its slides since we moved into the neighborhood, but we've always seemed to have only babies in our house. This year, though, we have girls - specifically, girls who love the water. I am excited. I get to be in an outdoor pool AT LAST. Never mind that I will be chaperoning children, not doing laps. An outdoor pool. OUTDOORS!

Jenna has two loose front teeth (bottom). She is thrilled and is already fantasizing about the loot she can expect from the tooth fairy. Emily, having walked the road before her, is full of ideas of what Jenna can ask for and getting Jenna all excited about losing her teeth.

"Maybe a Barbie horse!" says Jenna.

"More like $1." I say, practically.

"One time the tooth fairy left me a craft kit." says Emily, looking pointedly at me.

More updates later when I can share photos and videoclips (the kids call them movies).

Back to the title - I have Kevin Max stuck in my head. This does not worry me, because it's one of those strange but regular afflictions that have no adverse side effects apart from not knowing all the lyrics to the songs. The kids are used to this, and sometimes I infect them, so that, together, we are belching out random and disconnected snippets of verses and choruses in the car, the living room, the kitchen. It's quite frightening to the casual observer, but we have never attempted to hide the fact that we are noisy family, anyway. Oh, how we love music! And instruments! And jamming! But there is nothing quite as portable and enjoyable for multitasking as the human voice, so we use ours a lot while unloading the dishwasher, driving to the supermarket, and cleaning up our rooms. If I expose the girls to nothing else, they will at least get to experiment with as many genres of music as their parents have in their repertoires (and respective CD collections). Just the other day, I had to stop and grin, when I heard Kate sing Ella Fitzgerald. 

But back to Kevin Max. Long ago, there was a Christian band called DC Talk. Very cutting edge and not for everyone, especially folks who preferred the likes of Sandi Patty (also awesome). Now DC Talk had three members - two more visibly/audibly well-known than the third. It seems that, having just this week discovered that very talented individual, I'm living to regret overlooking him for the past couple of decades. Well, better late than never, and he's certainly making up for lost time by taking indefinite residence in my head.

Here's a videoclip of his cover of Bob Dylan's When He Returns:

Off to breakfast now! More soon.

Grass Heads

Our grass heads have sprouted!

The kids made these grass heads a couple of weeks ago. We cut up a pair of their old tights into smaller sections, which the kids filled with potting soil and grass seed. Then they decorated them as heads and watered them. They started off slow, largely because we had a spell of rainy, unsunny weather. Then last week, they started catching up.

Soon they will need a hair cut.

Off to make some magic wallets this morning!

Maybe a change

Dave and the kids gave me this new camera for Mother's Day. It's one of those new mirrorless cameras - they're small like, but take superior pictures to those of, a compact. And you can change the lenses. The point was to have a camera I could take with me to the park or the zoo, to record the adventures the girls and I have when Dave is at work. The alternative is to take our big camera with us, which never happens, because I always forget. 

It's only a day old, so we can't fairly extol its virtues. But yesterday we took it with us to our favourite ice cream parlor to break it in.

And look at this next photo:

and this one (taken by Jenna)!

That's right- it's Dave, who is enjoying being on the other side of the lens for a change. 

We get to see more of him now that there are two cameras on duty!

Continuing Education

Emily's career as Jenna's and Kate's governess is now over. Her two students finally decided that they didn't enjoy formal home education as much as they did, and that was that. 

Education as a whole, however, still continues, even if the lessons are different.

I'm acutely curious about "Hips". I need to ask about that. 

What The Girls Made

This is a birdhouse Jenna made in preschool during a woodworking session. She labeled the parts of the house and explained that the door (which either Dave or I have to nail in place later) was to prevent the big birds from getting in.

Emily has been working with Model Magic recently, which is a soft air-dry clayish modeling material. We bought a small pack of white, which she discovered she could tint by dotting small lumps of it with a marker. See - left alone, children will find ways to overcome limitations. This is her pet menagerie, and their various food-and-lodging accessories. 

No photos of Kate's recent creations - hopefully in a later post!

Cooking Show by Jenna

Years before she becomes famous onstage, I thought it would be fun to mention that Jenna has a particular talent in acting and impersonation, and that we, her family, were the first benefactors of it. I love that, among our children, she is our resident introvert (or so she appears to be) and also quite the performer. She can imitate any accent and has successfully and effortlessly replicated the speech of numerous characters she's seen on TV. The rest of us try but we can barely remember some of the words, let alone the way those words are spoken to make them distinctive to those characters. 

Completely unself-conscious, she is also a natural in front of the camera. We love her sense of humour!

This is a recording of her regular cooking show, as she and her sisters call it. We did it in one take. Enjoy.

Kate is 4 Years Old

More than a month late, I am finally posting about Kate's birthday!

Our little Katydid is four.

What a personality. What a spunky little gift from God you are! We love you to bits. You are zany-funny like no one else we know. You dance all the time. You created the Shake-It-Down-Low wiggle, that you later confessed was a fancy potty dance. You are snuggly in delightful ways that more than make up for your strange disinterest in being cuddled as a baby (we think you were so ready to conquer the world that you had no patience for being trapped in someone's arms). You take forever to wind down at night because you think the world is too exciting for going to bed from. You sit up with us after lights-out, reading to yourself and talking, talking. You adore your sisters and do so many incredible things because you think you're as old as they are, like drawing, writing letters to people and coloring princesses. You are enamoured with sets of tiny things and love the small cardboard shapes that are the discarded leftovers of other projects. You love food, particularly fruit and will eat anything at least once, but you are partial to breadless hot dogs, and any meat that can be interpreted as chicken. You hate butter with your jam toast, and take bites of the middle of your sandwiches. You sing like an angel. You still say "w"s for "r"s. You have just discovered the wonder of friendships and have created a hierarchy of Best Friends in your preschool class. You have strong opinions about fairness and justice and you know how to stand up for yourself. You love movies, princesses, mermaids, fairies, Barbies and dressing up like all of them. We want to give you the world, but you have already given more than that to us. We are so proud to be your family!

When we asked Kate what kind of birthday she wanted, she said,

• I want my Moorhead Grandma and Grandpa to be there (she understood that her Singapore Grandma and Grandpa wouldn't get to see her till next winter)
• I want my cousins to be there
• I want a princess cake
• I want a cardboard Barbie House

So we gave her what she asked for.

We added a few things to her list, too.

And at the end of the day, we had a feast of hot dogs and brats. 

Rainbow

Yesterday's rainbow. Everyone went out to ooh and ahh.

Photo of the Day

Although, by "the day", I really mean "one month ago".