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Entertainment

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Ethan’s current craze is non other than Cars.  Oh yes, he has moved on from his Thomas & Friends craze…

I can’t really remember when it started but it could have started from the time he got his first Cars magazine.  He has been eagerly looking forward to every monthly issue since then and has amassed quite a number of magazines too.  On top of that, he has also won some prizes from some competitions in the Cars magazine and right now he is collecting the Cars stickers for the Cars Panini collection.

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He also has a Cars calendar and some posters, plus a height chart, which he uses to measure his height frequently.

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His favorite character from Cars is Lightning McQueen, and it’s no surprise that he has already made a special request for a birthday cake next year!  Not sure if his mind will change then, but we shall see…

So guess who’s eagerly counting down the days to the movie premiere of Cars 2 later this month? 🙂

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Hannah adores playing with Lego blocks and lately she is also using those blocks as a form of pretend play.  It’s interesting to see what these kids can create and she never fails to amaze me with her creative imagination.

Hannah has a tendency to collect and fix Lego blocks in a certain color hue, and she will hoard all the blocks of that color hue, refusing to let anyone touch it.

Hannah calls these her “chocolates”.  All the Legos which are flat and thin are “chocolates”.

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This is a “birthday cake” (notice it is a GREEN one made with Legos in hues of Green), with RED candles.  After she builds her cake, she’ll ask me to sing the birthday song and she’ll pretend to blow off the candles.  Then she will “cut” the cake using a Lego “knife”.

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And this is Hannah feeding her baby bear (“Bear-bee”) some milk using a Lego “milk bottle”.

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Look at that level of concentration right there… 🙂

I don’t even know where she got the idea of feeding a baby with a milk bottle.  She does not drink from a milk bottle…yet she holds the “bottle” and “feeds the bear” so well, don’t you think?

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Having a knack of solving puzzles seems to run in the genes, because now Hannah, like her brother Ethan, is beginning to show a keen interest on puzzles.

She especially loves to build words from word puzzle letters and she has sort of “hijacked” this toy from Ethan.  When she was first introduced to it, she needed a lot of help piecing the words together, but now she can more or less form all the words by herself.  She can even recognize a word simply by looking at just one of the letters from the word.  For example, she would grab hold of the letter E and tell us she wants to build the word TREE.  Then she would look for all the remaining letters and piece them together.  Sometimes she would ask for some help by saying, “How this one goes, Mommy?”  But eventually, she would be able to finish forming all the words, arranging them neatly on the floor.

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One quirky behavior is that Hannah would arrange all the animals together in a row, and then all the rest of the words in another area on the floor.  It’s as if she can differentiate which are the living things and which are the inanimate objects.  All with the exception of the word BUG.  We’re guessing she does not know that a BUG is an insect, which is a living thing.

And while arranging the word puzzle pieces, she would say to herself, ” This one goes here…this one goes here…ta-daaa!!!”

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Another puzzle that she has been into lately is what she calls her “princess puzzle”.  It’s a jigsaw puzzle  and granted, it is quite a tough puzzle to piece together for a 2-year old, but repeated practice has resulted in her being able to piece together almost the entire puzzle.  But because the pieces are quite small, some of them have chipped off.

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Despite that, Hannah is still able to guess and place the pieces correctly in position.  Sometimes she would even correct me when I accidentally place them in the wrong place!

And here’s the finished result:

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Hannah LOVES music.  When she was a small baby, she would respond very positively to music and it came as no surprise when she started to tap her feet and move her booty to the music too.  She loves to sing now, and a few days ago, I was able to capture a few snippets of her singing.  Enjoy!

Oh, they were laughing at the end because Pete was behind me doing something funny, trying to make them laugh! 🙂

During the same long 3-day weekend when we visited the beach, the other place the kids wanted to go to was the zoo.  Ethan and Hannah both adore animals, and since Hannah had not been to the zoo before, we decided to make a day trip to the nearest zoo: Taiping Zoo.

We initially planned on arriving in the morning and then having lunch afterward, but that plan clearly backfired and we only arrived in Taiping around lunch time.  We had lunch with Taiping Ah Ma and Ah Kong before we headed for the zoo.

After slapping on lots of sunblock all over, we bravely walked into the hot scorching sun ….err…. ooops, I mean zoo. 😛 We wanted to start off our trip with a tram ride, but after waiting for our turn for 20 minutes with no sign of movement from the LONG queue, we decided to walk around the zoo first, and then do the tram ride later.  Amazing how so many people there were at the zoo despite the burning hot weather!

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It was definitely no walk in the park, for the weather was really hot.  Plus I wasn’t really in the mood to take pictures too, despite bringing my camera along.  The kids weren’t in camera-smiling mode either.  So pictures were rather minimal…

Anyway, here are a few pictures I snapped of some of the animals in the zoo:

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I was surprised that most of the animals were rather well cared for.  I didn’t remember them looking this good from my last visit years ago.  The elephants especially, looked really healthy! 🙂

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We went back to take the tram ride after we had walked round the zoo, and the kids really enjoyed that.  Despite the hot sun, we had a swell time, and no one got sun-burnt! 🙂

Better put up this post while the show is still showing on the silver screen…hehe…

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We went for Kungfu Panda 2 the 2nd day after its opening.  It was also the last day of school before the school holidays, and the best seats in the house were about 4 rows from the screen.

Not wanting to let the kids down, I bought the tickets anyway, and upon entering the cinema, we found that the seats weren’t too bad after all.  I mean, we didn’t need to strain our necks or anything, in fact it was rather comfy, cos ours was the first row before a group of rows which was nearer to the screen, hence we had a LOT of leg room!  We found out that the majority of the tickets in that cinema was booked by an international school for some of its students.

Anyway, we made sure this time that the popcorn lasted way longer than our previous experience with Rio. 🙂  Hannah was quite all right and was very excited every time she saw Po, the panda.  Halfway into the show, our little Hannah fell asleep in my arms, and we managed to watched the entire show without disruption.  Ethan of course, is an expert cinemagoer now and he enjoyed every bit of the show.  Even Mommy and Daddy enjoyed it (some parts tugged at the heart strings too…)

We enjoyed the show so much that last weekend, we decided to watch Kungfu Panda 1 at home, simply because we had not seen it, and we wanted to piece together the entire story.

If there is a Kungfu Panda 3, we’re definitely gonna watch it! 🙂

Last weekend, we’d asked Ethan to choose where he wanted to go, since Pete had a long holiday weekend (Agong’s birthday).  At first, Ethan was undecided, but then he later announced that he wanted to go to the beach.

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I told him that if he wanted to go to the beach, he would have to wake up very early, and he would also be responsible to wake everyone up, so that we could reach the beach early.  The previous weekend, cousin Jonathan (from KL) went to the beach too, but Ethan declined because he said it was TOO HOT.

Anyway, on Saturday morning, at approximately 6:30a.m., I was awakened by Ethan at the foot of my bed, saying, “Mommy, wake up!  Time to go to the beach!”  At 6:30a.m. I tell you!

Well, despite waking up so early, we got ready and arrived at the beach at about 9:45a.m.  That’s considered very early for our standards.  The sun was still warm (not baking hot), and the sea was inviting.  We chose a rather secluded beach that was not too rocky, and that was not too popular with tourists.  Slapped on copious amounts of sunblock on top of the layer I put on them at home and we were all set!

The kids got to play with the Rio beach ball Ethan had won in a magazine contest.

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Ethan and Hannah immediately wanted to go and play with the waves.  But as soon as the waves licked their feet, Hannah was screaming, “Carry me, Mommy!” and she wanted to return to our umbrella.  (see that pout?)

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Ethan, meanwhile, had a LOT of fun with the waves, showing totally no fear whatsoever.

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Hannah preferred to steer clear from the water’s edge, and play with her plastic cup, scooping up the sand and pouring it out.

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We definitely need to get more sand-castle building tools for them the next time we visit the beach.

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Ethan said, “Daddy and Mommy, thank you for bringing us to the beach today!  I had a LOT of fun!! Please, can we go again?  Please please?”

Of course we can, darling…and hopefully soon!  Can you believe that it was the FIRST time Ethan and Hannah had been to the beach in Penang? 😛

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About a week ago, Ethan’s school organized a Literature Night for all the Kindergarten-1(K1) students.  Apparently this is an annual event for just the K1 kids.  It was held on a Saturday night and there were 2 classes of K1 kids involved.  Unfortunately Pete had to miss this rare opportunity because he was away on a business trip.

The rationale behind having a Literature Night is to celebrate literacy amongst students, and also it is tradition that there would be short presentations from parents/siblings/grandparents who were sporting enough to volunteer.

Initially, because I knew Pete would not be around, I intended to give Literature Night a miss, but then I discovered that it would be only for K1 and next year, Ethan would not have this chance again.  Plus, he kept on telling me that he would also be performing with his class as Narrator 1.

He said, “Mommy, Teacher said I am Narrator 1 because I can read SOOOOOOO well.” And then he beamed with pride.

How can I say no to that?

So I checked with my Mom and asked if she could accompany us to Literature Night, and I was so grateful she said yes.  Even though she had to rush to Genting Highlands the next morning, she still came all the way from Ipoh to lend her help and support.  And for that I am eternally thankful. 🙂

Ethan was SO excited in the days leading up to Literature Night and kept giving me a countdown as to how many more days it would be  to Literature Night.  Here he is, all ready for Lit Night, and impatient for us to leave the house.

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On the way to his school that evening, he kept telling me that he had to arrive BEFORE 7:00p.m.  Well, of course we arrived on time, and the event was going to start very soon too, because everyone was incredibly punctual 🙂

Here’s Hannah posing for the camera before Literature Night started.

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…and with Ah Ma too:

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Ethan and his classmates getting ready for the Chinese presentation:

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…and Ethan doing a spectacular job at being Narrator 1.

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Ethan’s class did a rather ambitious performance in the form of a Readers’ Theatre.  His class teacher chose the story Skyfire by Frank Asch.

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Some of the kids gave very good recitals of poetry and song presentations.  And Hannah had a good time watching the presentations too.  She even sat close to one of Ethan’s classmates, Marcus, to watch. LOL

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When it was time for our presentation, we headed out to stage as the “Three Generation Quartet” (Grandma, Mommy & Kids).  We were supposed to sing a two-song medley comprising Do-Re-Mi and This Little Light of Mine, but halfway through Do-Re-Mi, the mp3 stopped playing.  Nevertheless, as the saying goes, “The show must go on”…so we continued singing Do-Re-Mi till the end.

Later on, when the school principal managed to make the mp3 work, we were asked to present the whole medley again, this time with no glitches.  Hannah more or less *grabbed* the mic from me so I was left without a mic for some time.  She even asked to go up to the stage to *sing again* after we had come down from the stage. 😛

Errr…pictures and video of our presentation are with a friend of mine, who has not passed me the downloads yet. 😛

All in all, a really enjoyable night.  And Ethan had a really great time.  So glad he managed to experience this night.

 

ethan-beingsmart

This is how Ethan classifies age and age groups.  According to Ethan:

  • At the age of 0 years, you are considered a baby.
  • At the age of 1 year old, you are considered a small toddler.
  • At the age of 2 years, you are a medium toddler.
  • At the age of 3 years, you are a small kid.
  • At the age of 4 years, you are a medium kid.
  • At the age of 5 years, you are a BIG kid.
  • You remain a BIG kid from 6, 7, and so on until you attain the age of 12.
  • At the age of 13, you are a small teenager.
  • At the age of 14, you are a medium teenager.
  • At the age of 15, you are a BIG teenager.
  • You remain a BIG teenager until the age of 19.
  • When you hit 20 years old, you become a small adult.
  • At the age of 21, you are a medium adult.
  • At the age of 22, you are a BIG adult.
  • You remain a BIG adult until you get married and have kids.
  • As soon as you have kids, you become either a Daddy or Mommy.
  • And when those kids grow up and have their own kids, then you move on to become Grandpa or Grandma.

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During our regular visits to Toys R Us, Hannah never fails to “test drive” the kiddie cars.  Of course, it’s rather difficult now because they do not have any which aren’t chained up.  But that does not deter her, for she will just climb in and out of the cars one after another in a row.  Sometimes she finds herself stuck and unable to get out, so I will have to carry her out from the front windscreen of the car.

Now, doesn’t this scenario sound familiar? 🙂

Yes, it was exactly what her brother, Ethan, did several years ago, when he was about 1.5 years old.  See photo evidence below:

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Ethan has definitely outgrown that phase, but it looks like his sister is quickly learning the ropes! 🙂

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