This week marks the end of early intervention services for my daughter! I feel so excited. By all measures, she is thriving developmentally. (She still has anxiety around strangers, but I think that is mostly because of COVID and the fact that she has been at home with me instead of in daycare.) It has made such a tremendous difference in her skills and confidence.
When I told my son that his sister is ending her therapy services, he said to me that he plans on continuing feeding therapy and OT forever. That made me laugh, because I thought that he hates both of those services, based on his poor behavior during the sessions. Whether or not it's just him saying it in the moment, that's a good sign that he finds some tangible value in those therapies, right? (And he has already come a noticeable way in growing as an eater!!)
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It's a new year, and with it, I feel invigorated with new hope for the future, as well as some trepidation. Since I last posted, my son had stayed home for a while, until yesterday when we finally sent him back to school. It has been a good run at home. He worked on biking, math, and Chinese many days. After the holidays though, he started feeling sad and really missing his friends, so when the local COVID numbers became more reasonable, we sent him back to school. We are still incrementally working on Chinese with L, in order to maintain some academic rhythm to our days. I think he is now up to recognizing about 50+ Chinese characters. I still make and use the flashcards, where I put out the recent characters and their associated pictures for him to match up, but when he picks up a pair, he also uses it in a sentence. I find it is both a good way to make the review feel less tedious (more active on his part, and he can make it fun by constructing whatever sentences he wants), and also a sneaky way to encourage him to speak in more complex ways. A little while ago, I also pushed back and asked him -- my first time ever making this explicit request -- to try to speak to me only in Chinese. When he asked me why, I explained it this way: "We should always be improving and practicing something. You can already express yourself very clearly in English, so now it is time for you to practice speaking in Chinese. Once you are able to speak Chinese fluently, we can practice something else, like maybe Spanish." I found that framing language learning this way helped to avoid power struggle, because I did not say, "Chinese is part of my heritage and I think it's important for you." At his age (4.5), anything that helps to diminish power struggle is a win in my book. I also struck a compromise with him that if I notice he is trying to mostly speak Chinese to me during the day, then at bedtime, I would read to him bilingually. Else, I would read only in Chinese, since he needs the extra Chinese exposure. He thinks that is a reasonable compromise, and overall I have noticed a really good effort from him most days. When he forgets, I remind him either with an exaggerated, "Haaa??" or I give him a sentence starter in Mandarin, by translating the first part of his thought into Mandarin. He responds pretty well to both forms of reminder, and I am so proud to see that his language grasp is slowly improving. (He now asks me to teach him transitional phrases like "because" and "therefore", instead of just saying them in English, interleaved with Chinese. I think that is a really positive sign.) We have been biking and hiking a lot as a family since I last blogged, which has been a sanity-saver, because during this COVID winter we have not been seeing many friends, even outdoors. We also went sledding twice since winter started. Since my son was out of school between Thanksgiving and mid-January, for two recent weekends in a row, we have met up with his daycare friends for a playdate on bikes. Super surprising to me is that my son, who is physically VERY anxious to take risks, is actually a pretty confident pedal biker now. I honestly attribute it to him learning to bike on hand-me-down cheapo bikes that cost either nothing or just $20. He is on a free-to-us 16-inch bike at the moment, and it has a solid frame and weighs quite a lot. It is far from the fast, light bikes that I initially considered buying for him, but he has adjusted to it and rides it up a small, steady hill (130 feet of elevation over a mile) without resting. That particular route to the park includes some minor street riding as well, along a quiet street, and one time he was ahead of me at an intersection (I was walking his baby sister in a stroller) when I saw him waving to signal a driver through the roundabout. My big kid is growing up so fast! (I can't believe we are signing him up for Kindergarten right now!!) A particular delight for me recently has been to see my younger toddler blossom. Due to torticollis, she has received PT and OT help since last February, and SLP help since October. In the last couple of months, she has grown an astonishing amount, that all of her experts are ready to graduate her from their services. It has been amazing to see her improvement, and as her mom and primary caretaker during the day, I know it is no accident. More than any help she has received, she is such a determined little gal and just chooses a task and works herself at it until she gets it. She learned how to put together a jigsaw puzzle this way, over the course of several weeks, even though in my mind I thought it was way out of her reach, and similarly, just this week I saw her slaying a pretty complicated shape sorter stacking toy that she definitely could not do at the start of January. I forgot to mention Christmas, but this was the first year that my son wrote a letter to Santa. (He wrote it himself because I thought it would be a cool and semi-academic task for him to do, and actually it was pretty legible except for two important words being jumbled together. He asked for "a train" and Mercy Watson chapter books. "Santa" gave him train pajamas and two Mercy Watson books, which he promptly started reading on Christmas.) We dropped the letter off, and he was able to get a personalized response back in the mail! He was pretty excited that Santa's elves commented on his good manners in saying "Please" and "Thank you" in his request. We managed to make it a special Christmas, filled with many new traditions, even though we definitely missed traveling to visit the grandparents. Lastly, we are embarking on some new endeavors at the moment. I am currently food-training my 4.5-year-old, potty-training my 1.5-year-old, trying to sign up for Kindergarten / research after-school care options for next school year, learning new digital-teaching tools, and simultaneously trying to find a teaching job for the fall while still being a SAHM and tutoring on the side. That's probably story for another time, but, needless to say, there is never a dull moment around here.
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About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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