Faith at 2 and a half

It has been a while since I blogged. During this time, Faith has grown to be a fountain of endless surprises. At 2 and a half, I thought it is timely to recap the milestones that our little girl has reached....

Potty-Trained (fingers-crossed)

If you would recall, in one of our earlier posts in Dec 2008, we described how we had unsuccessfully "tried" to potty-train Faith. Back then, we had bought two types of potties - a modern-looking one from IKEA and a traditional "trophy" cup that mum-in-law purchased from a provision store at Toa Payoh.

In any case, after close to 9 months, as our little girl would say - "I did it!!" - all thanks to mum-in-law's perserverence. And as you might have guessed, tradition triumped over modernity and the "blue pot" proved more functional than the IKEA one.

It all happened quite quickly last week. Last Wednesday, when I picked mum-in-law and Faith from JG, mum-in-law proudly recounted how Faith was now able to pull down her pants and pee into the potty on her own. It seems Faith had also pooped into the potty - however, when she did it that afternoon, she had cried when she actually "did the deed". However, that evening, just to show that her daddy could really be proud of her, she actually, on her own accord, ran to the potty, pulled down her pants, and popped one more time into the potty and this time round, not only were there no tears, our little girl proudly said to me, "I did it, papa!" (of course :)).

All this has been really timely as Eve and I have not been able to find Pampers Dry Large for sometime now!

Drawing and Painting

Faith has been playing with her Magna Doodle for some time now. Where she was first largely fascinated with using the Magna Doodle to trace her hand and footprints, she has since graduated to scribbling things on the board on her own. Recently, she picked up drawing a bunch of grapes, using the circular magnets provided. And she now does it quite deftly - first imprinting the circles, and then drawing the "stalks" of the grapes. Given the amount of practise that she gets at Bishan, practically every weekend, doing colour painting with my parents, we are all secretly harbouring hopes that our little girl would at least be a little more "artistic" than her mummy and daddy.

Finger Dexterity

One thing I learn as a parent of a precocious baby girl is how kids tend to "rotate" their toys with seemingly no predictability. Perhaps they get bored easily. And perhaps, they never tire at challenging themselves. Faith recently rekindled her interest with the "bead-maze". Just some context to how this toy came about: When Faith was still at the Little Gym, Eve had chanced upon this toy at a store next to the LG. This was about a year back - and she was quite convinced this was a good investment for Faith, to help her develop her finger dexterity. When she brought it home, I recall that Faith got bored with it pretty quickly as she was unable to really manipulate the beads.

Things have changed. Faith has recently been keen to experiment with the bead-maze. Just this evening, she pulled the toy down (it is pretty heavy) from the console. And she proudly demonstrated how she could "transfer" a bead from one end to the other, through the most difficult maze. Imaginably, Eve and I were so proud of her :)

Piggy-bank

It just occured to me that Faith's milestones in this blog all revolve around something that Eve invested in :) Ditto for the piggy-bank. Eve had bought this nice piggy bank that gave a "oink oink" sound whenever a coin is deposited into the bank. Since then, whenever Faith sees any stray coins lying around, she will duitfully deposit them into her piggy bank. Our little girl somehow figured that there must be a way to take the coins out and she had kept pestering us to show her how. But so far we've managed to keep that a secret. Hopefully the day she finds out how to take the coins out, she would also be sensible enough to put all the cash into a savings account and not have it scattered around as toys :)