This photo pretty much sums up our child in a single snapshot. Oh she'll play with her friends-- dress-up, hide-and-seek, catch, etc.-- but when given a choice, Sophie would much rather be in a corner with a book, either by herself or being read to.
The other thing that makes me proud is the fact that unlike her mother, she has pretty good sitting posture :)
Between Jude and I, we have too many books, CDs, and LPs than is probably acceptable (see here and here for a fraction of what we've been carting around). Which is just fine by us but not so great when you're looking at another move looming in the horizon. We're moving into a significantly smaller place and storage is likely to be an issue. And so to maximise space, we're starting to look into shelving systems, particularly in the living room and study to accommodate all the media we possess.
This post gives you a sense of what we'd ideally like to do with a shelving system. It's meant to make full use of wall space that would otherwise have gone to waste and more importantly, be able to store objects of different shapes/ heights/ dimensions/ depth. If we had all the money in the world, this is what we'd get:
The Vitsœ 606 Universal Shelving System was designed in 1960 and has been in continual production ever since. It's modular which means you buy the pieces you need according to your needs and constraints, and for what it is, it's actually fairly portable, able to be transported with each move we might take in the future. We love the clean, unfussy lines, and the multitude of ways in which it can be configured. It's like the pure idea of storage and design stripped to its bare essence. Watch this video for a sense of why this is such an amazing solution to everyone's storage woes:
Unfortunately-- and surprisingly if you ask me-- Vitsœ does not have a distributor in Singapore and the closest in the region is Tokyo :( There are a few alternatives we can get locally-- here and here-- but to make them really suit our needs, some custom carpentry might be required.
And so-- literally-- it might be back to the drawing board for us...
Inconceivably, it will soon be a full year since we've moved back to Singapore-- something I'll leave for another post-- and with that, we're getting ready to move out of our rented apartment here on the university campus to a more permanent place about a 20-minute drive away and slightly closer to the city. We actually bought the flat in 2006 and have been renting it out since then. It's a modest apartment and just perfect for the three of us right now-- between Jude and I, it'll be easy to manage.
Original floor plan
The thing is though, since we bought it, nothing has actually been done to the flat in the way of renovation. Our parents have been wonderful managers and proxy landlords so they've handled things like repairs and installation of an airconditioning system; but if we're going to be living there for the ostensible future, the whole place needs a fairly major overhaul. Which is basically the thing that has consumed our every other waking moment over these past weeks. Apparently, renovating a house-- no matter how small-- is no mean feat.
We have a designer who's helping us out with rethinking the layout for the house which at this point seems to involve things like hacking and rebuilding walls, reconfiguring spaces, thinking about door placements, etc. Apart from that though, Jude and I are on our own in terms of how we want the interior to look. We have a fairly clear picture of how future home will look-- my Pinterest board will give you an inkling. Of course, how much this vintage midcentury-inspired vision will actually come to fruition remains to be seen. So watch this space- I'm going to try to keep a faithful record of our renovation journey. This is the first time we're creating a home from scratch (well second, if you consider our garage-sale furnished place in Ann Arbor, but that doesn't really count coz we pretty much had to accept the place as it came and we were essentially longterm tenants...) and making it as close to our ideal vision as possible. I think it'll be nice to have something to look back on to show each little step we're taking towards that goal.
I know, it's been almost four months since I last wrote. A longer update is coming up- I promise.
In the meantime, here's a gem from the almost four-year old this morning:
"Mom, you need to accessorize." Which is priceless coming from a kid whose idea of fashion is matching blue and white polka dots with multi-colored stripes.
One of the things we were most worried about when we moved back to Singapore was Sophie's (in)ability to pick up Chinese. Jude and I speak the language well enough I suppose but it doesn't come naturally to us, which means between just talking to Sophie in English and having to first translate whatever we want to say in Chinese in our heads before then saying it to her, we've always taken the easy way out. Also, people say your mother tongue is the language in which you dream and my dreams have never been in any other language but English (can you subtitle a dream? Freud? Christopher Nolan?).
But thankfully, Sophie's preschool has an excellent Chinese language programme (into which they're constantly researching and re-evaluating, which makes the education geek in me so happy). She also has great Chinese teachers who have been the paragon of patience when it comes to exposing Sophie to the language. They understand that she had almost zero exposure to the language before her third birthday and are taking things slow with her; but they also practice the principle that the only way to learn a language *is* to be saturated in it and so they speak to her almost exclusively in Chinese, necessitating that she learns to understand what they're saying to her.
Sophie's been a quick learner of the sounds of the language-- she can repeat phrases and even complete songs almost pitch perfectly. But for a long time, she had no idea what they mean. A month ago though, she started asking me what certain words in Chinese mean, words she hears often in school or that appear in stories that are read to her- 蝴蝶 (butterfly), 一起 (together), 朋友 (friend), for example and I was more than happy to translate them for her and then ask her again the next day to see if she remembers. Sometimes she does, often she doesn't, but the fact is that she's interested and that's more than we can ask for.
Then last week, her Chinese teacher tells me that they're starting to teach the kids how to recognize Chinese characters and sent home a little game for us to play with Sophie (her first homework assignment!!). She didn't yet have to be able to identify each word but the objective was just to familiarize her with them. Basically, we were supposed to place four Chinese characters on a grid and systematically take one away in turn, and see if Sophie can identify the one that's missing. The four words were:
口 (mouth)
人 (people)
小 (small)
大 (big)
Since Chinese characters are fundamentally pictograms, I told Sophie to look at the words and pretend that they're pictures-- the character for "mouth" looks like a mouth open wide, "people" is a person walking, "small" is like a small, skinny person standing straight, and "big" is a bigger person standing with his/her arms and legs stretched open. And it went BRILLIANTLY. I almost couldn't believe it. In 10 minutes, our child who until 6 months ago heard no word of Chinese (except on Ni-Hao Kai Lan on Nick Jr.) could not only pick out the right word when prompted, she could also produce the sound when I asked. I thought my heart would burst from sheer pride.
Jude and I take hope from this NYT article which we talk about all the time to our friends in similar situations, with children learning what is essentially for Sophie, a foreign language. It talks about how a foreign correspondent for the NYT basically transplanted his entire family from Brooklyn, NY to Moscow and enrolled his children in a Russian-only elementary school. The kids had to learn everything in Russian, a language they had never heard before. It was pure torture. But after five years in Moscow, the children not only spoke fluent, flawless Russian, but also developed a deep love and appreciation for the Russian life and culture. We can only hope the same for Sophie...
Sometime in June last year, Sophie and I had actually started planning a book project together. For some reason, we were talking a lot about our emotions then-- mostly to do with starting preschool and moving to Singapore-- and I asked if maybe she wanted to "write" a book on the emotions she felt. She got really excited and we took a series of photos as a start. But before we could do much more with it, the huge move loomed large and we had to put the project on hold.
Even when we arrived in Singapore, the last few months have been consumed by settling in, new jobs, new school, new schedule, the holidays, etc. And it wasn't until last week when we found any time to go back to the book project.
The "When I..." idea is mine but everything else (especially the purple) is all Sophie. Her experiences with these emotions are pretty typical of a three-year-old I guess: a combination of things that happen to her/us on a daily basis (fighting to read one more book before bedtime), things that are constantly on her mind (hating the idea of an injection at the doctor's), things that have recently become quite the preoccupation (visiting Ann Arbor), and things from favorite books (the part when the boat getting tossed about in the ocean in Oliver Jeffers' Lost and Found).
I used FlipSnack to make it into an online flip book but I'm looking into the different options of printing it as an actual book we can hold and read before bed. It was a fun experience for both Sophie and I and I'm already thinking of ideas for the sequel- a trilogy perhaps? :)
For Christmas this year, instead of getting Sophie one big present-- mostly because we didn't want to clutter the house with another big toy-- we bought her several smaller ones instead-- a pile of books, furniture for her dollhouse, a pair of sparkly TOMS that she's worn practically everyday since, and a fully functioning digital camera. Honestly, it was the best $40 spent on a Christmas present. Sophie's gotten really used to us schelpping our camera everywhere and we use our phone camera in front of her all the time so she's pretty much grown up understanding the concept of capturing memories through photography. In fact, lately, she's been using our phones to randomly take pictures of things around her-- though not always in focus and we've gotten our fair share of photos of her fingers...
So the kid digital camera was something she really appreciated and we've taken it out with us everywhere since Christmas. It's as simple as they come-- turn on, aim, shoot, and scroll buttons to go through your pictures. The resolution isn't great but for $40, you're not expecting Ansel Adams quality photographs. And Sophie doesn't care so much how the photos look like but more the fact that she's the one who took them, with her very own camera.
Last weekend, when our friends Melanie and Jonas came into town for a visit, we took them to the Esplanade/ Marina Bay Sands area for a jaunt and took the opportunity for Sophie to go to town with her camera. We told her to look for things she found interesting and to take as many pictures as she wanted. Here are some shots that she took:
If there was one thing I had to learn to do this past year is to be a little braver. We had to make several huge decisions this year-- some much harder than others, as you can imagine-- and we wouldn't have been able to make them if we hadn't compelled ourselves to embrace a certain amount of uncertainty. We had to learn that we can't always plan and control everything that is happening in our lives and that a healthy dose of unknowingness might not necessarily be a bad thing.
We're in a mostly happy place right now-- and I mean that existentially more so than geographically but they're sort of related, I suppose-- and your guess as to what exciting adventures 2013 will bring (us) is as good as mine. But with the whirlwind roller-coaster that 2012 put us through, I think we're pretty ready for whatever the coming year has in store :)
It's been almost two months into the new job and I have to admit that I'm enjoying it more than I had expected. There's a lot of the number crunching that I knew would be part of the job, but also much intellectual stimulation, hard thinking (which I do enjoy, I have to say), and co-workers who make the challenging work exciting and interesting.
A new job has also meant a new schedule for all of us at home and that's something that's still undergoing some trial and error. Initially, I took Sophie to daycare and drove to work but that meant having to haul the poor thing out of bed at 6.45am and paying for really expensive season parking near my office in the central business district. We tried that out for a couple of weeks but realized that it didn't make sense financially or time-wise. Now that Jude's on break, he's taken over drop-off and pick-up and I take the bus to work, which has worked out so much better for everyone. Jude and Sophie get to sleep more and I don't stress out about being late for work. I also really enjoy long bus-rides (many thanks to Lush for great company), especially early in the morning, so it's been win-win all round. When term starts up again, we'll switch out depending on Jude's teaching schedule, but hopefully, it'll be more forgiving than a crazy early mad-rush for everybody everyday.
Coming home after 6.00 means little time for elaborate dinner prep. Thank god for our families though who always thoughtfully prepare a ton of food for us on weekends to bring home to freeze. Between that, takeout once or twice a week, and simple foods that are easy and quick to cook like fish, noodle soups, and veggies, we pretty much have dinner covered every night with time to spare to unwind and play and read with Sophie.
As for chores, we're managing to cope quite well-- if we need to, we put a video on for Sophie on weekends and do whatever major cleaning that needs to get done like mopping the floor or cleaning the bathrooms. But since no one is at home in the day, the house never really gets too messy or dirty; the Roomba also vacuums three times a week so that saves us from doing much dusting. Most importantly, we farm out the ironing to a laundry company because honestly, there is nothing I hate more than ironing...
The almost three-month break was nice to have after moving half-way across the world and gave me time to set things up in our new apartment. But it feels good to be back working and thinking about more than just how to hang our posters up or how many sets of bedding we need... I think the guy at our neighborhood DIY store was really getting sick of seeing me every other day with some new request ;)
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