Lil Man is 17 months old!

Dear Alex,

I’m a week late in getting your monthly ‘progress report’ out! Nevertheless, as usual, I have plenty to write about!

#1 Your coordination has improved by leaps and bounds. You can run and stop to pick up something then run off again. And climbing up small steps has become easy-peasy.

#2 This Chinese New Year, you are up and about, compared to last year when you were just a babe.

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#3 You throw bad tantrums when not allowed to self-feed. You see, if you really meant to feed yourself properly, we’d have let you but most of the time, you end up using your fingers to pick food out. If only you behaved as you did in this photo all the time, mummy will gladly let you self-feed.

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#4 You have begun to demonstrate pickiness when it comes to food choices, which well, is pretty normal but please don’t be too picky, ok?

#5 You love trains!

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#6 You have started being able to play with jiejie’s toys

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#7 And join in activities like drawing at the easel:

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#8 You’d ask to play the piano by patting the piano bench and nodding your head vehemently:

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#9 You love ransacking the kitchen cabinet that I’ve set aside for kids’ stuff:

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#10 You can build simple structures with the Junior Engineer set:

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#11 You now love to take a bit of formula milk (about 60-80ml) before your bedtime bath and sometimes in the afternoon too. You love sitting down with your sister to drink milk together:

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#12 You love reading and you’d ask for ‘book book’ and your favourite is… Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?:

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You would meow like a cat when we flip to that page and you’d try to plant kisses on some of the animals you like.

#13 You spoke your first sentence!! And it is… “I WANT THAT!” Must have learnt that from your sister. You are also able to repeat words after us sometimes, such as ‘bao bao’, ‘zebra’, ‘umbrella’, ‘flower’… some are one-time occurrences and some words, sadly I didn’t manage to note down in time and have forgotten. Your favourite words this month are ‘wear wear’ and ‘walk walk’ – you’d bring your shoes to me and exclaim ‘wear wear, walk walk!’ ๐Ÿ™‚

#14 You can walk to your sister’s school!!! And it’s a few bus stops away!!! You are one very strong boy!!

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#15 You started on sorting and stacking this month:

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Extremely happy with yourself!

#16 You celebrated your third grandaunt’s birthday:

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and grandma’s birthday too:

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#17 Sensory play this month include coloured salt:

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and water beads:

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You love to crush water beads in your hands or by stepping on them… No more water beads for you for the moment!!

One of the most memorable moments this month for me? You were fussing and I happened to have a piece of paper in my hand and because you were fussing, I passed it to you and told you that that piece of paper is rubbish. I thought you’d just go off with the piece of the paper but you headed straight to the toilet to throw the piece of paper into the trash bin! Ah, that’s my clever boy!!

Till next month’s update, I just wanna say, I love you more and more each day!

xoxo,
Mummy

Posted in Parenting | Tagged | 1 Comment

Coloured salt sensory box

coloured salt sensory box

I’d read about colouring rice, salt and pasta for the longest time and finally got down to colouring one of these – SALT. It seemed to be the easiest and fastest to do so after seeing how the Penguins small world playย I constructed (with mainly salt)ย was such a hit, I decided to colour my very first batch of salt, just to see how it would turn out.

I went with blue since it’s my little girl’s favourite colour, but it was my boy who got to play with this first as she was in school when I coloured the salt. With two packets of salt and just a couple of drops of food colouring, I mixed in the colour with a disposable glove (you can do it with a ziploc bag too) and voila, it was ready for play! No wait-time at all as I used very little food colouring for the amount of salt and I was so pleased with the beautiful shade of blue. It made me happy just to look at it! To add to the sensory element, I added a couple of drops of Oceanus fragrance oil. If I ever make purple rice or salt, I’ll add lavender oil for sure! ๐Ÿ™‚

Anyway, I love how salt feels so similar to sand but maybe that’s why my little boy doesn’t really like to touch it while my girl tries to bury her feet and hands in it.

coloured salt

I threw in measuring spoons and a small container initially but my boy decided that he wanted the snowmen cupcake toppers in too so I added them in. These cupcake toppers come in so handy – they were the highlight of my little girl’s Christmas playdough imaginative play and of course the Christmas cupcakes I made for her last year.

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After both of them had had enough with these measuring spoons, I brought out two spades and two little trucks – two of each so no fights right? I was so wrong because they fought over the colour of the spade and truck. Sigh. But everything still went as per planned after they finally compromised…

coloured salt

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I think my little girl had more fun with this as she could make tracks in the salt with the trucks and fill up and empty the trucks while my little boy well, just scooped … and scooped. But scooping I guess must be rather fun for a kid of his age as he just went on scooping for a long long time. ๐Ÿ™‚

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Other sensory activities:

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Posted in Fine Motor Skills, Homeschooling, sensory bins, Sensory play | Tagged | 2 Comments