Boo-ooo-ooo

I had a fright of my life last Thursday afternoon. It was lunch time, I put Netanya on her high chair, locked the tray table and walked just a few feet away to get her lunch. The moment I walked away from her, I heard a loud crashing sound from behind me, followed immediately by Netanya’s screams. She had landed on the floor, together with the tray table, right next to a wooden bench. I rushed to her, thought she might have suffered from some minor cut or bruises, not at all prepared to see what actually has happened to her. The moment I picked her up, I saw blood streaming down from her forehead, I was petrified and suddenly at a lost. I quickly grabbed some tissue papers and wiped away the blood, comforting her while trying to take a better look at how bad the cut was. There was a big gash, almost an inch long, on her forehead. I knew I had to bring her to the doctor, she looked like she needed stitches. She was in shocked and in pain, blood was on her face, bib, my hands, my shirt and the phone as I frantically tried to reach my hubby. My heart was aching, I wanted to cry, and I was blaming myself for not taking good care of her.

At the doctor’s office, she was screaming and crying when the nurse tried to clean her wound. Poor girl. The doctor said that she could use glue (dema glue) to seal the wound instead of stitching. No kidding, it’s really glue! I was quite relieved that she didn’t need to go through stitching, I dared not imagine the pain she had to endure for that, plus she might even end up with an obvious scar. After glueing her, the doctor assured us that she was fine, and she would heal in no time as long as she doesn’t scratch off the glue and injure herself on the same spot.

Soon after we came home, she has totally forgotten about the pain and the entire ordeal at the doctor’s office. She was playing and happy as a clam, back to her old self  like nothing has happened. See (the picture) how she’s beaming with smiles barely 2 hours after we got home.  I think I felt the pain for her more than she felt it. She’s a tough little girl.

Little Miss Chatty

Netanya started babbling and screaming since she learned that she can make noises, about 5 or 6 months old (not too sure). But she spoke her first intelligible word at around 11 months old. Guess what it was? Mama? No. Dada? No. Milk? No. You’ll never guess, it’s a 2-syllable word, ‘biscuit’! Yes, her first word was biscuit, though she said it without the ’s’ sound “bee-cuit”. It was too cute. Needless to say, her favorite thing in the world at 11 months old was eating biscuits. When we were in Singapore, everyone was so amused and enchanted by her ability to say this word so well that she was rewarded, all day long, with biscuits of every kind. And for a month, everyone around her pronounced biscuit as ‘bee-cuit’.

Since she turned 1, she has learned a few more words. Here are some:

- family: dada, mama (finally), 哥哥，姐姐，婆婆

- animal: doggy, bird, fish, 大象，猫猫

- others: ball ball, more, 奶奶 (for milk), “mom mom” (when she wants food), “da” (means wait), “bom bom” (means to take a bath), “by-per” (can mean both diaper and apple), “na na” (means banana) and bubble

Sometimes the things she said all sounded the same, but looking at her gesture and the context in which the word was spoken, we could guess what she was trying to tell us. Even though she only speaks a handful of words, already we could tell that she’s going to be quite a chatterbox. Oh, and the strange thing is, she has totally forgotten how to say the word ‘biscuit’, but in no way does that mean she doesn’t love to eat biscuits anymore. Guess there are so many types of foods she likes to eat that she doesn’t focus on just one.

Fun breakfast idea

 

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, especially for growing kids. This breakfast menu is both fun and nutritious for the kids and for the moms, this is extremely easy to prepare. All you need to do is to toast some frozen mini waffles, put a dollop of low-fat whip cream on each mini, then let the kids top them with their choice of fruits, which is Russell’s favorite part besides eating them. And to complete it, serve it with thier choice of either milk or juice and you’ll have some very happy campers.

What pretty flowers!

The gardenias in our backyard have finally bloomed. When we first planted them, I thought they were not going to survive my poor gardening skills. They had yellowy leaves and whatever handful of flower buds there were just fell off before they could bloom. I was really disappointed last year. This year, when we returned from Singapore, I was pleasantly surprised to find lots of flower buds on my 3 gardenia plants. I fertelized them, water them frequently and check on them everyday, hoping that this year they will bloom. I’m so glad all the effort didn’t go unrewarded. We finally get to enjoy the lovely, sweet smelling flowers. Russell loves it when I put some flowers in a dish of shallow water in his bathroom. If only we can have gardenia flowers all year long, we can stop using Glade to make our bathroom smell good.