Post 4th Birthday

Well I promised to post about how the 4th birthday went and as always I am way late to come and post here.

I know the show we arranged for the birthday was a big hit!! But I vaguely remember all the details.

Coming back to what Shreya is upto these days, well, I guess we are making her go through the grinds of Math and Reading so that she has some head start to her start of Kindergarten in Sept 2012.

She is enrolled in the phonics program at her school for a year now. Well we have decided to stop that starting May 2012 and have her take Reading in Kumon.

Yes, Kumon. The favorite Desi parents place to make their kids smarter!!! Shreya is already taking Math class there since January and is doing great.

I think the best part of Kumon, is the regular homework booklets that they provide. Those really help us, the parents, with what exactly to look forward to with respect to homework.

On the other hand, the Phonics program used to just hand out a small piece of note about what was covered and pointers to what we can do at home. But I think, that didn't help us any bit with what exact material to use to do any reviews or homework.

Kumon practice of providing booklets comes in handy, as it provides the ready-made material that we need to cover at home.

Hopefully with Reading at Kumon, will help us review her reading skills at home too!!

That's enough of curriculum!!! I hope we are not overburdening her!!

With respect to her other activities, She has really improved upon her swimming skills!!

And yes she went through a Soccer class in Feb/March, and boy she did suck big time.

As per the Coach, she lacks aggression and that should come with practice.

I think next sport for her to try is Basketball!!. Still haven't enrolled her but will do in a few days..

Until next time...

Wow it has been really long since....

I came here. This really shows how much I like to write.

Anyways coming back to Shreya, Man there is so much that I can write.

However, I would just try to summarize some of the highlights that I can recollect since the last post.

First thing first as parents we are proud of her verbal skills. She is a real chatter box especially in the night just before going to bed. Its she doing most of the talking then we reading her some stories. Most of her stories are about what happened in the school.

She will be turning four in couple of weeks. Last year we celebrated her birthday at local Bounce U inviting just kids from her school and our community. Being peak summer time the response from schoool was not that good as most of the kids had already planned vacations or preferred being on beach/with family then some kid's birthday party.

So this time we plan to celebrate her birthday at school in her class. And have a birthday party at home with a special show. I will cover the details of the show in the next post after her birthday.

Maybe its time for me to now start a blog to post about her little sister, Ishitha, who is showing some better speaking skills then her lovely big sister.

Until after the fourth birthday....

Post Birthday: Height of Procastination.

I really thought my next post would be immediately after Shreya's second birthday.

But having this post come now really shows how motivated I am about this :).

Anywho, in my defence, I have been keeping some notes about what I wanted to post in my gmail scrapbook (Well that is nothing but draft mail). I seem to be relying too much on the scrapbook!!

Well coming back to the little big girl, boy there is so much to write about!!

Well the birthday celebrations were great!! The cake, the friends, Shreya's pink dress; everything worked out well I guess!! Thanks to Vivek's SLR we got some nice quality pictures taken.

Shreya has become pretty consummate at two word sentences such as "He is cooking?" (looking at Emeril's Food show) or asking Mama if she is doing dishes!!

"Twinkle Twinkle little star" is her favorite song and she starts singing it as soon as she gets settled in her car seat and we are on the road.

It was hilarious to listen her sing "Sing a Thong(Song)" the first time!! That is one great song with some nice lyrics and rendition by Nathan Lane on Sesame Street is my best and Shreya's too.

Another funny pronunciation is "fag" for flag.

Since we moved to the new house (Yes we are proud owners of a Townhouse), Shreya has been very excited about the amount of extra space she gets to play around. Especially the first few days she was constantly enquiring about Mama or Papa,if he/she is "downstairs" or "upstairs".

A funny incident that happened a week ago was when she said "I scared" when I asked her to go downstairs and get her dudu(milk) bottle by herself.

Shreya seems to have become good at distinguishing the basic colors!! Thank god things are no more just purple. She also seems to have started recognizing different letters; although not in a expected order.

And yes she has her own counting sequence. It can be anything from 2,1,6,7 or 2,4,7,10...

This is becoming a rather long post and I better stop right now.

Just One week from Second Birthday

This post is coming after a long gap from the first one. As they say "It's never too late..."

So the second birthday is just a week away!! The invites have been sent out, we shopped for the party decoration and return gifts as well as food. However the food part is not finalized as we didn't find the food at Sultan that good. One of the snacks tasting stale didn't help boost our confidence to order for the birthday party. Hot Breads visit was a success and we are getting exactly what we wanted for the cake and the cup cakes. Hopefully by tomorrow we will have the food part sorted out!!

Coming back to our "Princess" I would again like to focus on her vocabulary and talking aspect. Its amazing to see the rate at which she is picking up new words. Mind you we get to know that only when she uses them in front of us. So it would be safe to assume that she maybe knowing lot more words!! For example she made use of words like "move", "noise" and "gas" in the past few days.

Today as she was pretending to vacuum the house with her lawn mover, one of the lawn mover's piece come off. She immediately ran to her Mama and asked her to "fix it"!!.. By the way the lawn mover also makes "beep", "beep". Yes it has a imaginary HORN.

Its also amazing to see her use these words in communication and convey what she wants to. However, sometimes she does say some words which don't make any sense even after constant repetitions. This makes her feel hapless and frustrated and we feel sorry for the whole situation. I guess the best thing to do in this case is to divert her into a different conversion which seems to work 90% of the time.

More after Shreya's second birthday !!

Long pending

It's almost two years. How I know?, you ask. Well Shreya will be two next month, duh!! So its been almost for two years that I have been thinking of writing about my experiences watching Shreya grow and learn. Finally, I decided to take a shot and that too during office hours :).

The main idea of this blog is to record Shreya's progress as she grows and I go through the fatherhood experiences.

So coming to the point, some of the new things Shreya has started doing in last few weeks is picking up new words and remembering them and using them.

For example, she has picked up this "Oh Ok Ok" in conversation with Mummy and Daddy as if she completely understood what we asked!!!

Then another hilarious phrase she uses is "What happened"!!. This is in response to anything that she sees is weird or out of the extra-ordinary. You naturally respond to her question by trying to explain the weirdness. Which she listens to intently. But then comes to the hilarious response in the form of "What happened"!! This explaination and the questioning goes back and forth until I give up by yelling "You happened".

Until later..