Happy Birthday, Julian! Julian celebrated his 6th birthday on 28 May 2012. His current weight is 25kg and he is 117cm tall.
Here are his updates:
- He seems to be good with numbers. When he sees 4-digit car registration numbers, he would mentally calculate the sum of the first 2 digits and the second 2 digits (sums that do not involve a carry, of course).
- His Chinese writing has improved, often knowing the order of the strokes, but he seems to need more work in spelling, reading, and speaking.
- His current favourite books are a picture dictionary, and a picture atlas.
[Julian]
[Julian the Superman]
Julian celebrated his birthday with his friends at the kindy on 17 May 2012 (Friday). We got him a cake and prepared party packs for him to distribute to his friends. His babysitter prepared alphabet nuggets.
[Julian's Micky Mouse cake at kindy]
We had our extended family over for his birthday celebration on 26 May 2012 (Sunday). We had lunch at Sea Palace Restaurant. We baked him a chocolate ladybird cake (Gaston the Ladybird is one of the characters on Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom, a cartoon that he watches).
[Julian's ladybird cake]
[The kids having fun with the cake]
[A family photo]
On 28 May 2013, we bought a few cake slices and had a simple celebration.
[Julian's signature smile]
We were in Kuala Lumpur for a holiday from 9-12 April 2013.
We left after lunch on 9 April 2013 and headed for Kuala Kubu Bharu to visit Aunty D and Uncle C. We arrived around 5pm and had tuna quiche (that we brought along), fried bananas, and some pau. We left after dinner and arrived in KL at around 9pm. We stayed at Antonia's place.
Day 2 (10 April 2013) saw us at the Royal Malaysian Air Force Museum in the morning. It's located at the Sungai Besi airbase. We managed to get the kids into the cockpits of a couple of old helicopters before being told to keep off the exhibits :o). There were quite a few helicopter and light airplane take-offs and landings on the runway by trainee pilots, and the kids seemed to be more interested in these than the old planes.
[Old planes]
[The boys in a really big kiddy ride :o)]
[Jianna with an old plane]
[Jianna in a helicopter]
After the museum, we headed to IKEA at Ikano Power Centre. First, we had lunch at the IKEA restaurant. Although it wasn't our first visit to IKEA, it was however our first dining experience there. The food tray trolleys were pretty cool and makes perfect sense especially if you have one parent seated at a table keeping an eye on 3 kids and the other lone parent having to bring back more than one tray of food.
Once in the IKEA showroom, it was pretty much a "put that back!", "no running!", "behave yourselves!", "come here!", "this way!" affair. But it was fun nonetheless. Julian had a go at Smaland and was happy to be by himself with a few other kids, but Justin wanted to remain with us as we went off to run an errand.
[Jianna trying to unzip the carpet]
[Justin (a.k.a. Ben) on a ladybird (a.k.a. Gaston)]
Other interesting experiences at IKEA were the ice-cream machine (token operated and the sundae dispensed itself) and the drink vending machine (robotic arm fetches the drink and drops it down the chute). Perhaps we need to get out of Penang more often, ha ha :o).
After IKEA, we went to Kid's e World (also at Ikano Power Centre). This was after reading about it in Chloe's blog. Queensbay Mall in Penang has something similar at a cheaper rate but a holiday is always a good excuse for us to "close one eye" and let the kids have some fun.
[Julian going down the giant tube slide]
[Justin going down another slide]
[The ever popular ball pool]
[The air cannon was another "loud" favourite]
Jianna's photo appeared in the Little Stars section of Baby Talk's May 2013 issue!
[Jianna's photo in Baby Talk's May 2013 issue]
The pressure is off now that all three siblings have had their photos published :o). Julian had his published in 2008, while Justin had his published in 2012.
Julian turned 71 months old on 28 April 2013. He is about 23-24kg which is heavy for his age.
Here are his updates:
- He continues to be picky with food but whatever limited variety of food that he likes, he eats a fairly good amount, hence his "bulk".
- He sometimes likes to be carried especially when sleepy/tired or when upset. He also likes to play "horsey". Now these are getting to be a challenge in view of his "very healthy" weight.
- He hardly takes his afternoon naps anymore. This is good because at bedtime, he now dozes off quite quickly.
- He seems to be doing well academically in kindy, but we are a little bit concerned about his social maturity and hyperactivity/short attention span. This is in view of his going to primary school next year.
[A happy Julian on the see-saw]
Jianna turned 1 year old on 30 March 2013. She now weighs 8kgs and is 74cm tall.
Here are her updates:
- She has been fully on breast milk until one. On 1 April 2013, she was introduced to formula milk.
- She's an 'expert' at walking now.
- She can communicate with us using 'sign language' and various sounds like 'ah', 'eh', and 'mm'.
- Shortly after the previous post, she began saying 'o' when holding the handphone to her ear. She also says 'o' if we are on the phone with someone.
- Current favourite toys include stackable cups (but not stacking them yet), mini Jenga blocks, teddy bear, musical elephant and of course, the item her brother(s) are playing with :-P.
- She gets jealous when her brothers, especially Justin sits on Mummy's lap or is carried by Mummy. She would try to come between Justin and Mummy and even try to push Justin away, verbally fussing at the same time. She would 'demand' for a feed, knowing that she would get Mummy to herself that way!
[Jianna]
[Jianna likes oranges]
[Jianna getting aquainted with the computer]
Repeating what we did for her brothers, we celebrated Jianna's first birthday with lunch at Sea Palace Restaurant in Taman Pekaka, Penang. We booked 3 tables. Again, keeping to "tradition", we baked yet another teddybear cake. This time it's an orange cake, and coincindentally looked like her favourite teddy bear.
[Jianna's orange teddy bear cake]
[Jianna on her 1st birthday (photo taken by Niq)]
Happy 1st Birthday, Jianna!
Julian turned 70 months old on 28 March 2013. Here are his updates:
- Started swimming lessons on 10 March 2013 at the USM swimming pool. His teacher says he's totally not afraid of the water, but doesn't follow instructions too well (as expected).
- Although still very rudimentary, his Mandarin seems to be improving both in speech and writing.
- He initiated a "volcano" game in which we were required to name all sorts of volcanoes, e.g. apple volcano, strawberry volcano, etc. So, the idea is to come up with as many things as possible acccording to different categories such as fruits, vegetables, vehicles, etc., often going by alphabetical order.
[Julian's parrotfish impression]
Justin turned 44 months old on 25 March 2013.
This month, we noticed that he's quite a problem solver. When he 'couldn't' write '8' in one of his activity books, he drew a circle and a crescent beneath. Number '9' was a 'c'+'1'.
[Justin digging into a plate of fried rice]
[Justin: Here are some flowers for you]
