transposable element

my mom and aunt will be coming over and i need to make another trip to ikea to get some stuff. instead of buying guest beds, i was thinking of getting a sofa bed since we needed a sofa anyway for the third bedroom we’ve converted into a working cum tv room. we’ve decided that the living room is not the place for the tv. afterall, the only person who really uses the tv in our household is jan (well i do, too, but only for 3 programs in tfc), and this way, when guests come over, we can entertain in peace, without having to compete with the volume of ben 10’s heat blaster. if jan would have his way, he’d want a home theater carpet and a popcorn maker, as well, but no way, jose. be happy i’m putting in a sofa at all.

i wonder when will i find the time to organize jan’s baby photos. mia’s are fine, i can take my time, and as long as they’re backed up, nothing can go wrong with digital files. but most of jan’s pics were taken by film camera. and though i still think that the quality of jan’s photos taken by a film slr exceed that of the shots i’ve made so far of mia using a digital point and shoot, the disadvantage is that the prints simply won’t last as long, especially the way they are stored right now: simply stacked inside cardboard boxes. i’ve recently read that negatives, even when archived well, have expiration dates. i guess i have to find time to scan those prints somehow.

how do you store your print photos and negatives?

i think i was 24 when i got a passport and only because i needed to travel abroad for work. during that time, there were no budget airlines, and airfares are prohibitively expensive such that to travel abroad for holidays was something only rich people did. never in my wildest dreams did i imagine that i would be traveling this much in my lifetime.

my children, though, by virtue of having relatives on opposite sides of the world, are destined to be voyagers from the start. jan was about 8 or 9 months when he got his passport and in the last five years, has probably clocked in more air miles than the average adult. and mia? she now has a passport, too, at the age of 3 weeks! no, no plans of traveling this early, but it’s a requirement for her residence permit here in singapore.

although both jan and mia are also pinoys by descent (jan was registered at the philippine embassy, then in bonn, and mia will be registered here in singapore as soon as i figure out how to prepare her footprint), they only have german passports. well, it’s the pragmatic choice, for travel convenience reasons, but recently, we were told that by law, they should be using a philippine passport when they enter the philippines. strange, as jan has always used his german one to enter the philippines and we never encountered problems at the immigration. and i am sure we aren’t the only ones. i can’t imagine american-born and thus american-passport holding pinoy kids use philippine passports to enter pinas, if they even have one at all!

how old were you when you got your passport? if you have a pinoy passport, what’s the color of your passport– brown, green, or black?

what every mother wishes for her child.

every now and then, something happens — a statement, an action, a picture — and i’m jolted into realizing that my baby isn’t a baby anymore.

this sums up why, if it was only financially feasible, i wouldn’t put jan into a local school:

The problem is that academic hothousing is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

True, it can sometimes yield the sort of results that make teachers gawp and parents crow: but what about the longer term? Does all that early learning pay off later?

No. The latest research suggests that reaching learning milestones early is no guarantee of future academic stardom.

One study in Philadelphia found that, by the age of seven or eight, there was no discernible gap between the performance of children who spent their pre-school years in nurseries that were rigidly academic and those who came from laid-back, play-based ones. The only difference was that the hothoused kids tended to be more anxious and less creative.

While many believe that knowing letters, numbers, shapes and colours is the best preparation for school, teachers take a very different view. They say that the child who arrives at reception socially adept, who knows how to share, empathise and follow instructions, will stand a better chance of mastering the three Rs later on.

The argument that more testing and toil is the best way to shape them for life in the 21st century is starting to fray at the edges. A report by King’s College London suggests that the cognitive development of British children is slowed by spending too little time messing around outdoors.

“By stressing only the basics - reading and writing - and testing like crazy you reduce the level of cognitive stimulation,” says Philip Adey, professor of education at King’s College. “Children have the facts but they are not thinking very well.”

In the future, the biggest rewards will go not to the yes-men who know how to serve up an oven-ready answer, but to the nimble-minded innovators who can think across disciplines, delve into a problem for the sheer hell of it and relish the challenge of learning throughout their lives.

unfortunately, even if i sell both my kidneys, we don’t be able to come up with the thousands of dollars required to even land a place in the german school, for example, which is asking for some 10K euro as a kind of bond, and annual school fees of more than S$15K. arrrgh!

some people think that learning martial arts incite aggression and violence. contrary to what is portrayed in the movies, however, martial arts students actually learn discipline and courtesy, first and foremost, and to avoid confrontation and violence whenever possible. in enrolling jan in taekwondo lessons, we were not aiming for him to learn to punch and kick like the ninja turtles, but rather for him to develop confidence and control. that he’s having lots of fun with it and saps some of his energy is, of course, a bonus.

pardon the blurred pic. i had to use full zoom and had to take the pic discretely. see more learning-related photos in this month’s pinoymomsnetwork’s fampics.

i try, but sometimes, not hard enough. i know it and feel guilty about it. i should be more caring, more attentive, more friendly. jan deserves more hugs, more time, more laughter. he needs to be read to, played with, and talked to more often.

being busy, being tired, those are not valid excuses. isn’t her child a mother’s foremost priority?

but if there’s one crucial thing i know i did right, it’s choosing my child(ren)’s father.

in every sense of the word, hubby’s as much of a parent to jan as i have been, perhaps even more. he has changed diapers and rocked jan to sleep almost as many times as i did. he has been there during jan’s crucial well-baby check-ups, and did research on all medications and immunizations jan ever received. he pushed jan’s buggy and wore the sling for far more kilometers than i ever did. it took him 3 sessions to teach jan to ride the bike (never with support wheels!). he is totally involved about jan’s schooling, and has attended all parent meetings. he’s read bedtime stories and tinkered with legos and playmobils with jan more than i’ve ever had. nowadays, his morning routine involves packing jan’s breakfast (jan insists on “real” bread for breakfast), ironing his uniform, and bringing him to school, not leaving until jan has had his breakfast.

i’m not a perfect parent. far, far from it. but i thank my lucky stars i have a parenting partner that more than makes up for it. i may be his better half, but he is, hands down, the better parent.

i was initially leaning towards judo, as i got the impression it’s less aggressive, but when we checked out the taekwondo school last weekend, jan’s eyes were all sparkles during the trial session. he was allowed to try on the uniform and throw a few kicks, and from the expression on his face, it would have been brutal if we didn’t sign up. his first session will start this week.

in kindergarten, we also signed him up for an optional program called little einsteins junior science program. he missed the first couple of classes this month as we were in the philippines, but it seems that he really had lots of fun with the lessons last week. he usually doesn’t talk much about what they learn in kindergarten, but on that day they had the science class, he was lecturing us on the stages of a butterfly’s life cycle over dinner. i think he liked the classes, alright.

but, there goes my asus eee pc budget.

the great thing with having an eloquent 5 yr old in the house is that life is never boring. jan can talk non-stop if you let him, and i don’t mean senseless babbling, either. he would reason himself out of trouble if he could (which often drives me nuts and definitely adds to my wrinkles! i swear i’ll need a Miami facelift soon!) and would come up with arguments and thoughts you wouldn’t have expected of a child.

my favorite time with him, though, is just before he drifts off to sleep, when he’s all settled and just shooting thoughts off his mind. not arguing, just plain conversing. he’d sometimes even use this time to tell me “you know mom, i’m sad with the way you treated me earlier” and such (yes, he’s often uses the same sentences i use on him, hehe), which would then trigger a light heart-to-heart talk. when he’s on this mood, i forget he’s just 5.

but it’s not always serious talk. here’s one just last week which started out serious, but…

jan: mom, when babies are born, what can they do?
me: not much, really.
jan: they cry. and scream a lot.
me: well, not as much as you did this afternoon when you threw a tantrum on the way home. remember?
jan: um, yeah. but you know, mom, crying is not that bad. actually, crying can be good, too.

at this point, i was thinking: oooookay. mala-boy abunda, ano ba! next thing he’ll say, it can be cathartic or some such psychology mumbo-jumbo.

me: what do you mean?
jan: well, especially when you’re outside… you know. teacher said grasses and trees need water to grow. and tears are made of water, right?

right.