You are now officially one and a half year old. Your status is now elevated from a baby to a toddler.
There is a saying in Parenting where the days are long and the years are short. I truly felt how fast the last 18 months flew by.
This month, your affection for your grandmothers grew. For your maternal grandma, you started seeing her more often this year. The short 3 weeks stay at her place has indeed fostered a closer bond between the two of you. You used to push her away but now, you pull her closer to shower her with hugs. For Nan, you started planting kisses on Daddy's phone screen and hugging the phone to express your affection for her. We hope you would be able to see your Nan soon this year to give her a real kiss.
In your nursery, we have a basket to store the big building blocks and a lego box for the inumerable lego pieces. I made a surprising discovery when we were clearing the play pen together. You have learnt how to sort each piece of plastic brick and lego into their respective basket or box. In order to test my theory, I misplaced a piece of building block into the lego box to observe your reaction. You gave me a disapproving look, took the building block out of the lego box and threw it into the basket.
You have fallen deeply in love with the nursery rhyme "Row Row Row Your Boat". You would demand I pick out the story book featuring this song and sing along with you. I then started putting you in the toys basket to "stage" a boat ride while humming the melody. Lately, you have learnt to empty the same toys basket, sit in it and pretend to be on a boat while mummy rocked you backwards, sideways and forward. This never ceased to crack me up as you really only know the 5 words in the whole song - row row row your boat! I love these little pockets of time spent with you.
You have truly started showing off your prowess in imitating and picking up language. You were able to imitate us and say words like okay, tired, plants, light, door and wall. In fact, you have successfully identified walls and doors now. The teachers at the infant care commended you for the ability to articulate and mimic their words. We were also told that you love to order the other kids around and command them about. Of course this was slightly frowned upon.
Your appetite for milk has grown and often after your normal feed, you would request for more. Daddy and Mummy have been conversing to each other if we should do 30ml, 60ml or 90ml additional quantity of milk. Soon enough, you picked this up too. After every feed now, you would imitate us and say 30, 60 and 90! We would tease you and ask how much milk we should top up and you would randomly choose either 90 or 60! We would then proceed to prepare the amount of milk you requested for.
When Mummy was in around 27 years old, I went to Kuching and came across a wooden rocking house. I was single and had not met your Daddy yet. I decided to buy that rocking house and bring it back to Singapore because I had a vision that one day, my kid would be sitting on it. You adored the rocking horse and whenever you sat on it, you would say "yao yao yao" in Chinese which meant swaying and rocking in English. It all felt quite surreal for me having kept the horse in pristine condition for more than a decade.
Being the adventurous and vivacious little toddler, you have no short of bruises and bumps all over your head and body. Although you would constantly be tripping and falling over, nothing came close to scaring me out of my wits than you slicing a little piece of flesh off the index finger of your right hand. On the night of 24 March 2020, Mummy was bathing you to prepare you for bed while daddy was having his night out with Uncle Ben. What started off as a lovely night of warm milk and a hot bath came to a sudden halt when you decided to stick your index finger through the stainless drain cover. You started crying and I thought you have hurt yourself lightly when you pulled out your finger. I could not be more wrong. Blood started gushing out while I was still holding on to the shower head! With no time to lose, I grabbed you out of the shower and tried to stop the bleeding but to no avail. You started crying uncontrollably and I was close to having a panic attack. We had no choice but to ring Daddy up to save the day. Daddy rushed back and was brave enough to wash the wound to find a cut so deep that a piece of flesh was left hanging to the skin of the finger. Ouch! A lot of drama and endless wound cleaning and dressing would take place over the next 5 days as we headed towards a long road of recovery. My heart broke as this happened under "my watch".
I could not imagine all the heartaches I have to endure for all future bruises and cuts now...
Recover and rest well my baby darling!
p.s. 31 March marked the last day you were in infant care. You would be attending a new school on 1 April!
XOXO,
Mummy
