A wonderful impromptu date with Angel

in

Angel is currently on school holiday, that means most of the time she's staying at home playing with her toys and generally feeling bored. I've been wanting to take a day off from work and bring her out to play, but it's been raining heavily everyday, so I didn't.

But today, something happened.

As I was saying bye bye to Angel, I sneezed. I took a piece of tissue paper out from my bag, wiped my nose, and left the house. When I reached office, I couldn't find the key to my drawer where I keep my laptop. Apparently the key had fallen out of my bag when I took the tissue out at home. There was nothing much I could do, so I decided to take the day off and spend it with Angel.

She was very surprised to see back home so early. I took my lunch, did a quick research, and decided to bring her to Sentosa. Dark clouds had started to appear but I decided to take a chance. I packed her raincoat, swimwear, towel, singlet, shorts, two diapers, wet tissues, water bottle, biscuits and bread into my bag. There was no more room for my camera, so I didn't bring any.

We took the train to Harbourfront station. Angel insisted to sit on my lap and being very active, I had to calm her down with a game of Dora Dress up on the iPhone.

When we reached, I walked her to the cable car station. Angel has always looked at the cable cars from afar. Today, she stepped into one. She held on to my hand, walked into the cable car nervously, and started to explore all around.

After a round trip to Mount Faber and then to Sentosa island, I brought her to take the luge, I have always wanted to do this with Angel. Very nervously she climbed in the luge and onto my lap, we went down the hill faster than everyone else because I refused to use the brakes. She shouted excitedly: "SO FAST!". After the first round, Angel said to me: "Daddy we go one more time ok?", good thing I bought us a 3-round ticket.

We have to take the skyride back uphill. Again, very nervously, she stood waiting for the chair lift to arrive, I carried her to the seat, and she looked curiously all around underneath us.

When we were done with our third luge ride, I was afraid Angel would be hungry, so I passed her some inadequately packed biscuits. She was munching her first biscuit when she saw a M sign and shouted "Mac Donald!". As her wish, I bought her her favorite fries and Milo, I even got her to tell the staff "one happy neal" - though it was too soft for the staff to hear..

After our meal, we headed to the beach. In the water, I had to carry the fearless Angel back a few times because she was walking too deep for herself. Not only did I forget to bring the waterproof iPhone casing, I also forgot to bring a change of underwear for myself. So I had to head home with a wet crotch.

During our final skyride to head home, Angel said to me: "I lup daddy". I did not expect that.

It was a day I was ready to go to work but didn't bring my key. It was a day I decided that I could take care of Angel by myself for half a day. It was a day the dark clouds came and went.

It is definitely one of the best days of my life.

Angel's classes

in
Angel attends two classes every Sunday - art and craft at 1pm and ballet at 4pm. That means every Sunday about 5 hours of our time is reserved to bringing her to the classes, waiting for her to finish, fetching her, and feeding her lunch in between.

People might think that it is because we want to train her to be skillful. But actually there is only one reason why we do it - Angel loves them.

I don't want to send her to a class just because it "might be useful" for her in the future. She's only three years old and she's supposed to do what kids are supposed to do, which is to play.

All this started by us observing Angel and what she likes. We noticed that since very young she likes to shake her body to the music on the TV. She would try to follow the characters' movement by swinging her arms and jumping up an down.

Knowing that Angel has rough character, I suggested that we let her try hip hop dance, but apparently the classes are for older kids. So we brought her to a ballet trial class. Immediately after the first class we could sense Angel really enjoyed it and she wants more. She even asked us to get her the pink tutu on the spot. These days, after lunch at around 3pm she would nag us with "I want to wear pink dress" because she can't wait to dance!

Similarly, we noticed that Angel likes to paint ever since we brought her to try sand painting. And often Angel would come back from school proudly showing her art work. That's why we brought her to the weekend art trial class and she seemed to enjoy it. These days, she refuses us to carry her when the class starts. Instead she wants to walk up four storeys by herself to get to the class.

Angel is not very good at both classes. In fact, she's probably one of the worst students in there. In ballet class, she's rough, doesn't follow instructions well. It took her a long time to learn to walk on her toes, and she can't sit down in a graceful manner. In art class, she doesn't know how to hold the pencils and brushes the correct way, she often wants us or the teacher to hold it for her, and she would always draw outside the edges.

5 hours every Sunday is a lot of our time. Sometimes we even think about pulling her out of classes so that we get more rest. But every single time we see her come out of the class rooms with a big grin on her face, proudly showing us her ballet sticker book or art work, it just makes it all so worth while.

The little explorer is back!

in
I haven't been bringing Angel to night stroll for a long time now. Partly because my mum-in-law now brings her to the playground after school, and asks me not to bring her out at night. Partly because I have been busy and could not make it back home early. Also because of the recent one-month Chinese Hungry Ghost Festival, mum-in-law just doesn't allow me to bring Angel out at night.

I was beginning to miss the times we explored the parks at night together. So tonight, I pushed my bicycle out ask Angel if she wanted to go out, she said YES!

I helped her don her red helmet and off we went. We walked, we hopped, we ran all around Sengkang Floating Wetlands. We picked flowers, we tried on various outdoor gym equipments, we climbed monkey bars, we did all the things that we used to do.

Angel is still her active and curious self, only this time she seems to understand more of the things I say, and she's way more talkative than before.

What a lovely night.

Learning from a 3-year-old

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Angel will grow up, she will go into society and she will face tough times along the way. And when she does, I want tell her to look back and learn from her 3-year-old self.

This is what I will want to tell her:

Don't be afraid of failures
Everyday you make mistakes, you do the wrong things, hurt yourself, and get scolded. You keep saying "umbrella" wrongly, we have to repeat it about five times. But each time we correct you, you repeat after us immediately without any sense of embarrassment, until you get it right.

Always step forward
Sometimes you get sad and you cry, but you can turn it into laughter in a matter of seconds, as though the sad thing never happened at all. This is incredible.

I hope she will always remember this.

For now though, I think it's me that need to learn from Angel...