Apple of my eye
She has grown so incredibly much.
1. Four teeth on the top and four on the bottom and looks like there’s more coming soon.
2. Word recognition - I have to say the ‘Baby Can Read’ series and flashcards have really done their magic. With exception for the animal names where there isn’t a way for her to express her understanding, she can understand and act out almost all the rest of the flashcards… body parts, actions like waving, smiling, kicking and even instructions like ‘touch your hair’, ‘arms up’.
3. She knows her own name and when you call her ‘Elena’, she’ll respond with a soft ‘aiiiii’.
4. Ask her ‘Where is ‘pau-pei’ (precious in Mandarin)?’ and she’ll point to herself.
5. She can identify shapes like triangle, square, circle, heart and star.
6. She can also identify certain colors - when the DVD says red, she’ll turn and look at her Stokke chair coz it’s also red in color.
7. She can do quite a lot of hand actions, and is always more than willing to ‘perform’ whenever you ask her to…this girl loves the attention, that’s for sure!
8. In some of the DVDs, she knows what’s coming next…for example, she’ll signal ‘fish’ when the DVD is still showing ’star’ coz the next slide that’s coming up is actually ‘fish’.
9. She knows how to snap her fingers!
10. Still refuses to hold her milk bottle…sigh.
11. Not very keen on food, though she now has a liking for plain bread.
12. Still cruising, and most of the time, she still prefers to crawl (she crawls ‘upright’ using the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. Her knees never touches the floor.).
13. She’s getting more and more attached to me which means I can’t even go to the toilet in peace…lol! I actually have to tell her ‘mommy is going to shee-shee’ (pee in Mandarin slang) and she’ll crawl after me and sit outside the toilet going ’sheeeeee sheeeeee sheeeeee’…
14. She loves going out and will get my mum to take her little ‘handbag’ (it’s a small black bag that my parents use to carry her napkin and water bottle whenever they take her out) for her and kick her legs and point her finger towards the door!
15. From not wanting to sit in the car seat when she was really young, she’s now a little angel whenever we bring her out. I don’t know if it’s because she prefers the front-facing Recaro seat vs. the Maxi-Cosi bucket seat…but I’m not questioning my good fortune! 
She’s a really happy baby and hardly throws temper tantrums for no reason. However, she IS very hot-tempered when she doesn’t get her way, and one thing I’ve learned is that I can’t go head-to-head with her…if she’s holding something and doesn’t want to give it to me, prying it out of her hands will cause a full-blown waterworks scene. The trick is always to distract her with something else, although it doesn’t work every time!
Honestly, there’s nothing more heartwarming than to see her crawl over to me, grab my legs, pull herself up and ask to be carried. And nothing more satisfying than feeling her weight in my arms, her head on my shoulder and one hand clutching my arm as I rock her to sleep.
She moves pretty fast and I’m just wondering when she’ll start to go forwards coz when we put her in her cot, she’ll shuffle backwards till she hits the end of the cot and then she’ll start complaining (read: crying) coz she can’t move anymore. She doesn’t seem too inclined to flip from tummy to back either…very strange indeed!
) as it would sway when the fan is switched on. As of now, the room is still devoid of furniture as I’m waiting for Ikea’s new catalogue to come out.
