Sean @ 35 months

I can't quite remember when it started, but this past month, I've been hearing a lot of " I love you mummy" from Sean. He feels the need to express himself that he tells me he loves me more than 10 times a day. It's wonderful for me of course, but he's so honest that he'll tell his Daddy and Akong that he doesn't like them.

He's becoming more chatty but his vocabulary is very limited, so you'll hear these phrases very often from him:
"This one" "That one",
I'm trying to get him use more descriptive words but it's our own fault because I notice we use these phrases often too. So we have to be more conscious about our own speech.

"Don't know" - he uses this all the time because he wants me to do things for him.

"Don't like this" - most of the time it's food. He's been very picky about food.

" Mummy help Sean" - i.e. he wants me to help him

" Mummy follow me" - I am his personal playmate so I have to follow him everywhere but when I get lazy and refuse to play with him, he goes:

" Mummy no sit down", " Mummy no sleeping", " Mummy stand up", " Mummy sit here", mummy this, mummy that all the time....... This is what happens when you only have one child and you are his constant companion. You get bossed around!

But there are times when he's really cute, like when he likes something, he'll go "I love it!" or he tells me he loves me over and over again.

He's also been saying a lot of "Thank you"s and sometimes he reminds me to say thank you too if he does something for me. Except that he tells me " Mummy thank you" and I'll go " What for?" Then I realized he was reminding me to say thank you because he passed me an item.

His pronunciation still needs work. He mixes his Rs and Ls, his Ds and Gs..... "I love you" sounds more like "I dove you." But he sounds so cute that I'm just going to enjoy it and not going to worry too much about it.

His ( Tue and Wed) kindergarten is on holiday. So he's been watching more TV and has started playing simple computer games with Daddy. It's more to let him get a feel of the mouse. His favourite games are " Red Remover", " Curious George", "Calliou" and "Clifford" from www.pbskids.org, and "Neverwinter Nights". He's also been playing "Transformer cards" with Daddy.

To counteract the TV watching that he's been doing, I've tried a few more Montessori-like activities at home. The sand (or seed) writing. Pouring water, Spooning seeds, Beading, Sorting colors/ maths, puzzles. I didn't want to buy anything new so most of the games are done with whatever I found at home. We usually do it on the verandah because I know how messy Sean can get.


Pouring activity. We used an old plastic container, a Vietnamese coffee strainer and a Nescafe milk jug, and a few sponges. It was a hit. He loved it and promptly wet everything around him. I've seen other children doing water activity, they are never as messy as Sean.







The sponges were supposed to mop up spillage but Sean stuffed them in the strainer, in the container, and after that mopped the floor with them, but never as they were intended to be. I found a lot of amusement in watching him play with the water.








Spooning. We reuse the biji selasih that we played with for sand writing. I mistakenly thought it was Mustard seeds because they are so tiny but they are actually Basil seeds. It's a simple activity that's just spooning the seeds into the glass candle holder. It was messy because Sean found amusement in the fact it gets really messy. *shake head*





I took clearer photos of him doing some beading. It's so cute to watch him concentrate for once and put in the pink beads into the wire.

I bought some buttons to do color sorting on an old paint pallete. It turned to be a maths activity instead once I wrote numbers on each of the indentation. First, we put buttons of the same colors in the middle and count them. There are 10 buttons of each color. And then I'll tell him, I'll put one in number 1. Then we count the rest and put in number 9. Therefore, 1 and 9 becomes 10. Next color, we'll put 2 and 8, and so on.


We replayed old puzzles. Previously he found it hard to put together the wooden puzzles because the color on the pictures given are different from the actual color. So I drew up the shapes on pieces of cardboard to help him do the puzzles. It was much easier this way.

I'm not sure what this game is called. I found it somewhere in the house. I thought this could be an activity that encourage taking turns. There are yellow and red discs. Unfortunately, taking turns for him means that he does all the red discs first before I can put in any yellow discs. ha ha ha.... That's something that needs to be worked on.