Junya turns 37 months today and Sakura is 14 months old!

Haha yes the journey continues even though I have never seen/heard anyone referring their kids as 37 months old😂

My two baobeis.

Let’s see what happened in the past month!^^

 

For Junya

1st month , 2nd month , 3rd month , 4th month , 5th month , 6th month , 7th month 8th month, 9th month , 10th month , 11th month , 12th month , 13th month , 14th month 15th month , 16th month , 17th month , 18th months , 19th month , 20th month ,21st month , 22nd month , 23rd month 24th month , 25th month , 26th month , 27th month , 28th month , 29th month , 30th month , 31st month , 32nd month , 33rd month , 34th month , 35th month and 36th month here.

 

School life

Other than the little birthday party at home, I wanted Junya to celebrate with his friends too. Just a candle-blowing and cake-cutting session. I brought the cake to school and invaded his class for a short while.

I think he was quite happy but for some reason he was so so so shy the whole time! Omg 3 year old already paiseh about being together with his mother in front of his school mates. Want to act cool isit. 😒

His classmates are really all very well-behaved. They sing song for him, and there was a Japanese boy who ate most of the cake lol.

So so so sooooo shy why????

 

Anyway, I suspected that he really took the shyness after me. No joke. I was the saddest student in the entire class. I had no BFF. And that alone is sad enough. I mean, who doesn’t have BFF in primary school?!?!? Unless you are like really super weird… even bullies will have other bullies BFF.

So, Junya’s school had a sports day. So the parents and the kids all went to the park to join some activities.

These are his classmates. They are mostly girls. So adorable. It’s quite obvious some of them are BFFs because they will hold hand with each others and stick together like superglue. And then they did the activites again and again and again.

Meanwhile my son…

Yes.

I have never seen any kids so anti-social before. (Although the teacher reassured me that he isn’t like this when I wasn’t around.)

It really reminded me of myself. I was exactly like that. I belonged to no group. I was always pacing behind everyone. I was so alone that I started befriending my note books. Which became my diary. And then when I turned an adult, I befriended my blog. It is a miracle how I made so many virtual friends as of today. And I mean YOU. You, you you you you and YOU. ALL of you. Thank you.

I felt so sad and also a little worried for him, because I remembered how lonely I was. I am not sure how I could help him, because it could be in the DNA.

I did not want to force him to be friends with everyone like all the textbooks say you should. Because I know that is impossible. At least for me. I wanted to tell him, it’s ok to not make many friends. It’s ok to be alone. Your mama was like that. She was a little lonely, but she was fine.

 

Swimming 

Our swimming coach was incredible. I did not expect a child who was so afraid of the pool, could in a few months swim without any assistance.

We tried a private coach in Singapore. Junya was very resistant and did not really follow his instruction. In the end, he only spent 15 minutes “playing” water with Junya, and then ended the session by telling me that “I don’t think he is ready to swim. Maybe you try again when he turns 4?” and then billed me for S$80. In my heart I thought, maybe it’s you who are not ready to be a coach?

So I decided to go back to our coach in KL. Who charged 1/3 the price haha. And he was the best coach we could ever get. He taught Junya from when he was equally resistant, crying desperately to get out of the pool to this:

He can now swim on his own for a very short distance. The improvement is incredible. I am proud of him.

Sakura loves the pool so she’s gonna be a swimmer too.

 

Self-Entertainment

Honestly, I rarely have time to sit down and play with him. So he has to self-entertain. I also stopped buying any new toys for him (what’s the point? They only played for 5 minutes!!) so sometimes he just had to make do.

Dig out old toys to play cooking with Sakura.

Sing karaoke on his own LOLOL. He was dead serious. (You could watch the video on @cheesiepetit’s IG.) He sang like he had a crazy audience.

And make art sometimes. Awesome.

 

Self-Control

At 3 years old, I am giving him more freedom now to explore his boundaries. (Actually it is really because I don’t have the time nor energy to be paranoid about every single little thing.)

I have decided to just 放生 (life release lol. Like let the tanked fished go back to sea and the caged birds fly lol). As long as he is not doing anything life threatening, I basically just let him be lol.

In another aspect, I also give him more trust. I trust that he will be nice to his sister (so I can put the both of them together over a box of Lego and cook a quick lunch), and I trust that he can practice self-control.

When he tells me mama, I want to eat Fujisan (the Meiji Apollo chocolate). I say okay, and hand him a box. Then I tell him, you can have one, then you put back into the fridge. And then he will say ok. So far I have never seen him take extra. And the chocolate box is always back into the fridge. Although after a few hours he will tell me again, mama, I want to eat Fujisan lol.

 

Mama, are you ok?

He started asking me this recently. And then I realized, kids are really much, much, much smarter than we give them credit for. Sometimes when he makes a mistake (for example spilled a whole bottle of milk or spoilt something in the house) and I really don’t have the energy for a serious lecture, I just fix it quietly without saying anything. Or sometimes when I am just feeling very down with my personal issues.

And then he will asked, mama, are you ok?

And then that’s when I realized, I must have shown it in my face. Every time I feel a little displeased or tired, I must have shown it. And he saw it all. They all know how we feel, even when we try to hide it.

 

For Sakura

Read Sakura’s 1st month, 2nd month , 3rd month , 4th month , 5th month 6th month , 7th month , 8th month 9th month , 10th month , 11th month , 12th month and 13th month here.

She has 7 teeth now 🙂

 

Walk Walk

Biggest milestone this month!! Last month she could walk holding my hands.

She can walk independently now 🙂

Although most of the time she will just grab my hand and force me to walk with her. Baby, I know that you are very excited about your new skill, but sometimes mama just really, really want to sit down. T___T.

Mimicking

Sometimes she picks up a face brush and pretends to put foundation on her face. Sometimes she picks up the remote and put it next to her ear to wait for me to say “hello hello???”. Sometimes she bangs the table after her brother did the exact same thing -___-.

 

Understanding Conversations

Sakura starts to understand a lot of sentences and commands, for example “pass this to oniichan” or “take your bottle and drink water”. She will also sometimes put her hands together when she is full (gochisousama deshita).

When I ask her “where’s the aircon?” she can point and exclaim happily, “zair!!

Sometimes she helps me with house-chores too. When folding laundry, she will pass me the clothes or help stuff them into the drawer. (Which I have to re-fold of course lol). the classic 越帮越忙,of course.

 

Oppai

So Sakura finally accepted the bottle and was sleeping through the night when I was away for my trip to Setouchi. According to my mom. And then when I came back, I let her latch as frequent as she wants to boost my milk supply as I rarely expressed during the trip. And of course because I really missed being intimate with her.

That was the biggest mistake I’ve made. I ruined my entire effort for the past month…

I knew that I did not want to stop breastfeeding so soon this time, but I could have done it some other way. With only that one single night of oppai-buffet (free access to boobs whenever, wherever), she is back to waking up multiple times a night grabbing my shirt sobbing for milk, and also needs to be nursed to sleep even for afternoon naps. And I really don’t have the heart to repeat the cry-it-out method again. So for now I’m just letting things be. Sigh… Never mind lo. Save milk powder money… (which is a lot!!)

 

Self-feeding

Ok so I want to talk a little bit about this whole self-feeding thing.

After I uploaded IG stories of Sakura eating by herself with fork and spoon, many mommies DMed me to ask how I did that Baby-Led-Weaning method that Sakura can eat so well at 13 months.

Well, the thing is, BLW was exactly what I did not do with Sakura. Surprise!

You see, I too was one of those new, overly-excited parents who bought this whole BLW (baby-lead-weaning) trend. I tried to let Junya self-feed at 7 months, hoping that he could learn to love food by exploring with his little hands, feeling the textures, experimenting with the flavors of different food, practicing this basic survival skill, etc.

However, the danna was totally not a fan of this idea. No Japanese kids will eat noodles with fingers, he said. It’s basic table etiquette. He could not stand the mess nor the lack of table manners, especially the whole “playing with food” idea, that’s the worst. (Yes even at the age of 1 he fully expected his kids to have table manners. Manners over everything else.) Oh not to mention all the food wastage. Totally unacceptable. I tried to explain to him how BLW works, but he did not buy any of it. Please do not do it with the next child, he said (I was pregnant with Sakura then).

I sort of gave up BLW at 10 months with Junya because the mess was driving me nuts. It’s just not worth it. I suspected that BLW was an evil plan someone come up with to mess up with mother’s sanity even more. Who loves cleaning up a macaroni explosion?! I even had a helper back then yet I feel so annoyed with the crumbs and sauce and food thrown under the high chair and everywhere else. And I was also constantly worried that the helper would secretly hate me for giving her extra work to do. (“Why can’t she just freaking feed the kid with a spoon like the rest of the world does?!”)

Guess what?? Even after I quit BLW, the habit stuck. He self-feed pretty well, but mostly with hands, and had a hard time adjusting to cutleries. Why trouble yourself with these complicated clumsy wooden/metal stuff when you can just use your fingers?! That was his logic. Up to almost 2 years old, he still dug his hands into soup WTH. He does pick up fork and spoon and tried to use them, but whenever he got impatient, it’s all fingers. Rice, noodles, bits of wet food. And the danna just sighed in disapproval. It was a nightmare. And I really did regret it… like, good god what have I done?! It was like I have turned him into a baby monkey.

With Sakura, I gave up from day one and spoon-fed her ALL THE WAY. I just could not afford to have tomato sauce all over the table, high chair, floor tiles, and 15 soiled rompers in the laundry stack daily, now with two kids and no help except the cleaning robots. I was too tired for that. I needed to preserve my sanity. Self-feeding can get the heck out the door for now.

As a result, Sakura has never touched any wet food with her hands before other than finger snacks like biscuits, egg bolo, pieces of bread, etc. Stuff that you eat with hands in common sense. And she did not show any interest in playing with cooked food either. She just happily opened her mouth and swallow whatever I stuck into it. Great, I thought. I probably will have to spoon-feed this one up till kindergarten.

As it turned out, she did not like touching food, even given the chance to. It’s like she thought that it was yucky to dip her dainty fingers in gooey sauce lol. Touché!!!! I was not sure if it was a good thing, but it saved me SO MUCH time and energy. I fed her, perfectly clean, we were both happy.

Last month, she started trying to grab my chopsticks (or Junya’s chopsticks) and would protest if we don’t give it to her, so I gave her one mini fork to play with (for those who asked on IG, it’s a dessert fork I buy from Daiso). To my surprise, she could feed herself with a little help from me (lend her strength to poke her fork deep into a piece of broccoli, etc). So. That is the story how she accidentally started feeding herself. It took only one try and zero training. (I guess the real training starts now.)

So what I want to say is that, being a parent is really hard lol. What I thought would be beneficial for my child, turned out to be not so the case, and vice versa. The worse thing is that you only get one chance per child, and you can’t go back to fix it. You can only keep having more babies for all the parenting trial and error.

I also learnt that what works for a child might not for another one. I tried hard to help Junya self-feed with BLW method, turned out he still has a horrible appetite until today, while Sakura has been quite a good eater being spoon-fed all her life. So each individual is really different. So if you ask me honestly, I think this BLW is a little bit of a BS to me. But it may work magic to other families. There’s really no need to be pressured into social norms.

For mothers who did not have success with BLW, it is ok. Maybe your child does better without it. For mothers who are still spoon-feeding your 3 year old, it is ok. Maybe he/she just loves being fed by you.

We will all be okay.

 

For Mama

No Eye See Mama

Sometimes I really really wonder, (and if you are one please tell me how you do it!!) how can a germophobe/clean freak ever be a mother?! How do they even survive without going insane?!

Every day I have to deal with the children’s dirt, stains, slime, gooeiness, stickiness, not only on them, but every single corner of… and around… their existence…

Never ending.

You mopped away a stain, a new one appears. You picked up a crumb, they spilled a ton more.

Some mothers told me that their OCD (about cleanliness) is auto-corrected after the birth of the second child lol.

I consider myself to have quite high tolerance of… uncleanliness (for me it is infinity-second rule, if it is my own house lol), but the constant chaos is still stressing me out quite a bit. Two kids, 3 meals a day… it’s really quite hard to stay motivated because right after all the effort to make your house spotless…it gets immediately turned into a wreckage again..😭

Can all you clean freak mamas tell me how you stay sane?

 

Pokenotmom

Sorry if I keep sounding like I am very exhausted. I am. So… this month… I don’t feel like a Pokemom. I’m on fake MC. I upgrade again next month k brb.

Put on extra make up for the first time in I dunno how many years.

Sorry I can’t even think of a proper ending for this blog post haha.

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