It has been a fun couple of weeks for the little boy and me. He likes to be involved in our daily activities and to his credit, he is a great little helper who enjoys the fun and novelty of the activities. Yesterday, we spent the late afternoon boiling a big pot of lemongrass drink for Daddy. I enlisted the little guy’s help to count the lemongrass stalks, bring over the pandan leaves.. and he had his first encounter with the lovely fragrance of freshly cut lemongrass and pandan leaves!
I took it a step further today and got him to help me with baking brownies. He helped me bring over the eggs – carefully! – and I got him to count 4 eggs and take them out for me. He also helped me get the chocolate and counted the walnuts as I added them in. I haven’t had the courage to let him get his hands dirty with baking just yet, I’m not ready for the mess and clean up involved just yet. But it is something I intend to do with him in the near future, spending the afternoon making little cookies and cutting out star and cat shaped cookies and having them for tea afterwards sounds like a fun activity for the both of us!
For now though, his job is simple enough for him to handle on his own, and I like to encourage helpfulness at home in simple ways. John is almost 22 months now and in another 2 months he will be turning 2 years old! Unconsciously, I’ve been considering him a 2 year old for awhile now, after awhile you kind of stop counting in months and start rounding up. I’m really happy with John’s development. He has a sweet personality and he’s good natured and well-behaved for a 2 year old. I’m proud of him and of ourselves too.
Everyone at home has been playing a big part in ensuring consistency and working very hard to encourage the right behavior such as helpfulness, tidiness, patience.. and discouraging the undesirable ones like hitting, screaming, willfullness and tantrums in general. Although they call it the terrible 2′s, I don’t believe a child suddenly wakes up to be a terrible misbehaving monster on his second birthday. Any parent will tell you that they start showing signs of willful and uncooperative behaviour as they approach their second birthday. I think the right attitude needs to be adopted by the parent, for this developmental stage to pan out positively. Essentially, my child is finding ways to assert his independence and that’s a good thing. He cannot help but have his own opinion and wants, that’s part and parcel of growing up. So the ball is in our court to shape his behavior and help him express his independence in an acceptable manner. In this aspect, I feel very blessed to be able to be with my child as he approaches his 2nd birthday. Being a stay home mom has its perks – I’m there when he is being willful, misbehaving or just being plain difficult and I can nip that behavior in the bud before it gets out of hand.
Good behavior aside, we’ve also been having a lot of fun teaching him funny things to do to make everyone laugh. During chinese new year it was, “gongxi gongxi ang pow packet please” accompanied with hand actions. It was very funny. Teeheehee.
