Introducing your child to a New Baby

Last year, I wrote about how The Barn Owl and I prepare our kids to welcome a new baby into the family. Since then, I’ve had messages from other parents wondering how we prepare our kids to meet their new sibling for the first time.

J and Little E love their little brother Thumper to bits, and they both help me out a lot at home by looking after him and playing with him, which I am very grateful for. When they met him for the first time, they were both so excited and so happy to see him! They absolutely couldn’t get enough of him.

I was so glad that the groundwork we had laid in the months previously really paid off!

J and Little E meeting Thumper for the first time

I think it is really important for the new baby to make a good impression on his or her older sibling as well. The Barn Owl and I always try our best to make sure that not only our older kid is mentally and emotionally prepared, but that the baby is also ready to meet them too!

So here’s:

Debs G’s Guide to Introducing your Child to a New Sibling

1. Prepare your child for a special solo adventure. You’ve probably already made arrangements for who will be looking after your older kids when you head off to the labour ward. The kids have to know that they will be spending at least one night away from both Mummy and Daddy, so it’s worthwhile letting them have a taste of this experience at least once beforehand so that they have something to look forward to. This is a no-holds barred opportunity for grandparents or relatives to coddle and spoil the children and otherwise turn their stayover into a junk food fueled paradise of fun. I also took advantage of this opportunity to squeeze in a date night with The Barn Owl (fancy restaurant and a movie) and to have a lavishly indulgent lie-in the next day.
2. It’s all about Daddy now. In the month or so leading up to the end of your pregnancy, it will be time to let Daddy take the reins with the kids, especially with regards to the baths as well as the evening and bedtime routine. After all, you will need to be able to devote time to the new baby without your kids feeling abandoned – and Daddy will have to practice putting the kids to sleep on his own since he may have to spend a day or two doing that anyway.
3. Resist the urge to have the children brought to you immediately after labour. If you are anything like me, you are the sort of person who does not want their children in the labour room with you. My reason for excluding the children from the birth is because I knew from previous experience, that I am an emotional and otherwise unpleasant person during labour, and I do not want to traumatise them. After labour, when both I, my husband and the baby are exhausted and messy-looking, I think that seeing the kids immediately would not be a pleasant or reassuring experience for them (even though it would be a reassuring experience for me). I feel that it is better for them to hear my cheerful voice over the phone, then for them to look at my exhausted face and see me with all the tubes and urinary catheter in situ. Even if I reassure them verbally, they will still worry for my well-being after observing me in that condition – and I don’t want them to ever resent the new baby.
4. Do not hog your husband – the kids need him. After labour is over, and both baby and I are nicely cleaned up and waiting to be transferred to the ward, this is when The Barn Owl leaves and goes home. He does not stay over in the hospital with me and he does not spend every waking moment in the hospital with me in the days to come. Yes, it’s lonely being in hospital on my own, but really, I do not need him with me anymore – I can get on with the breastfeeding and everything on my own or with the help of the nurses – so it would be selfish to keep him in hospital with me when the other children need him much more. Let him go home, reassure the kids, show them pictures of the new baby and sleep comfortably in his own bed.
5. Timing is everything. First impressions count, so I always make sure that both I and the new baby are looking spiffy when the older sibling(s) arrive. The best time to do this is in the mid-morning after the doctors ward rounds and baby checks, and just after the baby has had a full feed and has had a nappy change. This will mean that the baby is in a good mood, maybe even alert for a few minutes. I always make sure that my hubby gives me a heads up before coming to the hospital with the kids, so that I have time to prepare the baby! I also make sure that the baby is lying happily in the bassinet on the far side of the room when their big brother/sister arrives, and not in my arms or being breastfed. If I’m still breastfeeding or changing the baby when they get to the hospital, I tell my husband to distract the kids until we are both ready. I want the older kids to walk in the room and see me waiting for them with open arms! This allows me to literally show them that the baby has not displaced them in my affections!
6. Greet and cuddle the new big brother/sister first before doing anything else. The first thing that I do is cuddle the older child, making sure that he or she is happy and contented. They need that reassurance that you are still there for them.
7. Stay by their side until they are ready to see the baby. Once we’ve finished greeting each other, I wait for my kids to ask permission to see the baby! Usually once the kids have ascertained that I am well, they will start to clamour to see the baby. I don’t get up to bring the baby to them either. I sit right next to them and ask their daddy to push the bassinet to the bed, or I hold their hand and walk with them to the bassinet.
8. Give them space. Your child is going to be more excited about seeing you again than seeing the new baby – mostly because the baby is still just a small blob that lies there and doesn’t do anything. Do not be surprised if after a few moments frowning at the baby in the bassinet, your child wanders off to go look out the window and otherwise appears to be disinterested in the baby. Use this time to thoroughly spoil your older child with attention, and don’t keep trying to draw them back to the baby or pester them with questions about the baby (“Do you like the baby? Huh? Do you? DO you?”). Be cool. It just takes them a longer time to process this whole event, which is really quite overwhelming! They’ll eventually warm up to their new sibling and want to hold it, and take pictures (which will be your cue to make an almighty fuss of them), but if they don’t feel like doing any of that right now, don’t sweat it or it’ll become forced and unpleasant. There will be plenty of opportunities for you to see that sibling bond forming!

Last Minute Chinese New Year Crafts: Are you chicken?

Chick chick chicken!

In J’s school, the kids in his class are planning to bring their own Chinese New Year decorations and make their classroom look really cheerful and festive for the celebrations! J is really into paper-folding crafts and origami at the moment, so I had a look around and here is our favourite tutorial by Yilin Pan!

We used slightly shorter rectangular ang pows for our chickens, so they are more angular looking and can be placed in both a sitting and standing position! J also decorated his chickens using different coloured Sharpie pens.

I think these would look really cute as a table display or strung up or a mobile – and you can use pastel or white envelopes instead of red to make a sweet Easter display!

Happy New Year!

P.S. For more last minute Chinese New Year crafts, click here and here.

 

Queen of Clean Konmari Challenge!

Hi Debs!

I’m so pleased that you managed to complete not only your Baking Challenge, but also successfully implemented your Happy Family Plan!  I’m so proud of you!

Now, I have a new challenge for you!

I know that we have a slight tendency in our family to hoard all sorts of junk.

When I moved from my old apartment to the New Castle, I noticed that I had built up an impressive collection of junk not limited to but including:

• Guinea feathers that J collected from a beach when he was just a little pup.
• A Sonic the Hedgehog figurine that had fallen down the back of a shelf
• A set of fancy titanium ladies golf clubs that I hadn’t used since moving to the apartment; and
• Every stuffed toy I’d owned since I moved to Australia, some of which had deformed into just little balls of shapeless fluff.

Luckily for me, my move to the New Castle forced me to par down my collections of old rubbish, though I think I’ve still got some old High School clothes that no longer fit.

That being said, you have not had the luxury of a recent move to pare down your stuff.  Plus, the last time I visited, I remember you mentioned that J, Little E and Thumper had so many gifts of old and new toys, that you were despairing of where to put it all.  Therefore, I would like to challenge you to a total declutter of your home!

Obviously, I’m not asking you to throw away all of your stuff like a crazy lady, that would be excessive.  However, there’s no better way to declutter your home than by following the advice of the Ultimate Declutterer, Marie Kondo!

That’s right!  For 2017, I am challenging you to the following:

1. Complete a Konmari style clean up of your house by the end of this year!
2. Review the books “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing” and “Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up“
3. Write a post every time you do a Konmari step or feel particularly proud of doing a Konmari-inspired thing (like folding clothes the Konmari way).
4. Enjoy your happy family!

So, get ready to be the Queen of Clean!  Good luck!

Developing A Growth Mindset in Kids or, Astronaut Training Camp – A foundational skills workshop by The Little Executive (A Review)

Back in 1995 when I was in Smartypants Class in secondary school, I did a school research project on highly intelligent “gifted and talented” children – partly because I could and partly because it pleased me to think that I was experimenting on my classmates.

My project was an independent study on children who were identified via the use of standardised testing to have IQs within the top 0.5 percentile of their peers. I wanted to compare the emotional and social development of “gifted and talented” children to that of their peers to find out if there was any real or perceived difference.

Case in point: Debs G going to Smartypants Class (Picture Credit: The Far Side of Gary Larson)

One of the things that I discovered whilst working on this project is that there are a great number of “gifted and talented” children who are also seen to be underachievers by their teachers and that this in fact a rather common phenomenon. I also realised that in my particular cohort of students, these underachievers were from the group of girls who entered the Smartypants Class at 10 years old during Primary School, and were known to be the “Black Sheep” of the class. These black sheep did comparatively poorly on standardised tests as compared to their peers. It was a mystery as to why this should happen, when they had so much potential so as to be identified as “gifted” at a younger age!

Through surveys of my classmates and their parents, I found out that many of my friends believed (as I also did) that success is based on personal aptitude. Amongst ourselves, we would go through great lengths to prove our God-given cleverness to each other, claiming not to have studied for tests or exams as well as making sport of classmates who did work hard in order to score well, calling them “muggertoads”. In fact, so much of our personal identity was wrapped up in being in the Smartypants Class that one of the biggest fears that we had was that of failure – especially if we had bothered to put in effort – because it would prove that we weren’t special at all.

Sad, right?

As part of my project research, I found a book called “Learning and Motivation in Children” at the Smartypants Centre library, and there was an article about how children’s perceptions of their own intelligence affected their ability to learn. In a nutshell, it showed me exactly what I already knew from observation – that kids who were told early that they were smart and talented also became perfectionists who stopped trying when they couldn’t be perfect straightaway. This was called having a ‘fixed mindset’. This article affected me profoundly, as I realised that putting too much stock in my own innate intelligence and abilities instead of valuing persistence and hard work could hold me back from achieving my personal goals.

I didn’t know this at the time, but one of the authors of that article, Carol Dweck, went on to publish many more articles and books about an individual’s implicit theory of intelligence and the importance of children developing and thinking with a growth mindset. She is currently one of the world’s leading psychologists in the field of development and motivation. In her research on learning and motivation, she found that having a growth mindset is a key feature of people who are internally motivated and who are also more likely to succeed when faced with challenges both in school, in work and in life.

Now, as a parent, I have been trying to teach J and Little E  to work hard and persevere, to be self-aware and learn from criticism or setbacks. These are important foundational skills that I feel are important for them to develop at a young age.  Now, I realise that determination, persistence and perceptiveness are considered to be traits which most people will develop on their own through personal life experience, however, it is becoming quite clear that not everybody has the opportunity to figure these things out before they enter the workforce. This is why even our National University of Singapore has set aside a special department, The Centre of Future Ready Graduates, in order to equip all their tertiary level students with these skills!

However, I’m not an expert in education and pedagogy, and all I am doing is trying to muddle through and guide my kids in the best way that I can. When Michelle, co-founder of The Little Executive, contacted me to ask if I would be interested in sending J and Little E to an Astronaut Training Camp during the December holls last year, I was more than happy to oblige!

J and Little E having fun at Astronaut Training Camp with The Little Executive

The Little Executive actually came into being when one of the founders of Leapfrogs Children’s Therapy Centre, which supports children with learning disabilities, realised that there were more and more parents attempting to enrol their mainstream schoolchildren into her occupational or educational therapy classes.

She realised that all these children, even though they had no learning disabilities at all, seemed to struggle in school on a daily basis as they not only lacked resilience but also had certain learning gaps and a fixed mindset about their innate capabilities. The Little Executive aims to help children develop those essential executive functioning skills needed in order to develop a healthy growth mindset towards lifelong learning.

In my opinion, courses aimed teaching study skills tend to be quite dry and boring as they are often quite abstract in nature – and yes, I have attended my share of such courses as a kid attending the Smartypants Class. However I was pleasantly surprised to find that The Little Executive has found ways to help kids develop these skills in a really fun, hands-on way! I don’t think that the kids even realise that they are learning how to learn – but I have seen the results on my kids and I can tell you that it works. I wish I’d attended these classes myself as a kid, because it really would have saved me a lot of angst.

J with Jim, one of the educators at The Little Executive

The Astronaut Training Camp, which was held over 4 mornings, was a real treat for J and Little E. Through games, sensory experiments and brainstorming sessions, the kids used their problem solving, communication and observational skills to learn about various aspects of preparing for space travel – even preparing their own dehydrated snacks from bananas, troubleshooting potential issues that might happen during space missions and working together to construct their own shuttle!

Parents were invited to attend a short presentation on the last day of the camp, and I got to tinker with all their craft projects and find out more about what went on during the camp. I was most impressed with the incredible rapport that the educators were able to build with the kids in such a short space of time. Additionally, they were able to engage not only the youngest preschooler (Little E), but also the oldest primary school kid (J) and cater to their different learning abilities.

After exploring the space shuttle, Thumper is waiting for his turn!

The educators also gave me great verbal feedback on the strengths and shortcomings of both J and Little E, which showed me how experienced they were in assessing children and working on supporting their weaknesses. I would also have appreciated some written feedback on the kids that I could peruse and mull over at my own leisure!

Thumper was really excited to see all the things that his brother and sister made during the camp (especially the really cool jetpacks), and I can tell that he is waiting for his turn to attend Astronaut Training Camp with The Little Executive one day.

I think the greatest reward for me was to see how the course affected J and Little E. I’ve been observing the two of them since school reopened and I have noticed two things:

1. J’s handwriting has improved dramatically as he has become more conscientious in class, taking more pride in his work.
2. Little E has started revising her Chinese language readers on a daily basis, asking her brother for help with words that she doesn’t know.

Needless to say, I am more than pleased!

For more information about The Little Executive click here.

Trial classes for The Little Executive’s regular programme are held every Saturday (SGD$48 for a 1.5 hour parent-accompanied class). For more information on trial classes click here.

The Little Executive has got two very exciting camps lined up for the 2017 March school holidays:

For more information about Holiday Camps at The Little Executive click here.

A Special for Owls Well Readers: Congratulations for getting to the end of the post! The Little Executive has kindly offered a very generous discount code just for Owls Well Readers! If you would like to sign your kids up for any of classes at The Little Executive, just quote  OWLSWELLBLOG15 for 15% off the total fee! 

Last Minute Chinese New Year Crafts: Floral Hanging Ball Decoration

Chinese New Year is SUPER EARLY this year and if you’re scrambling for quick and easy decorations for the house, here’s a really pretty floral ball hanging decoration that you can try!

Materials:

• 60 square angpows or 30 rectangular angpows (use last years angpows if you have them)
• Scissors
• Sticky tape or staples (we used red washi tape and clear scotch tape
• String or ribbon (we used leftover yarn)

Instructions:

1. If you have rectangular angpows cut them in half to make them square.
2. Fold the angpows in half diagonally so that two edges of the square meet together. You should end up with a cone-like shape. Secure the edge with tape or staples.
3. Join 5 of these folded angpows together to form one flower.
4. Start assembling the floral ball by joining 3 flowers together and securing the petals together with tape or staples.
5. Add 3 more flowers to form one half of the floral ball as shown below. I found it easier to form one half of the floral ball at a time. 
6. Fix the two halves of the floral ball together with tape, then double check all the petals to make sure that they are well secured. A good rule of thumb is that each petal should be secured to two other petals!
7. Finally, attach a loop of string or ribbon to complete the decoration!

Are you ready for The Good Life? (A Challenge!)

Hey Meimei,

Congratulations on completing the 2016 Knitting Challenge! *confetti*

Now, I was thinking…now that you have kinda gotten your garden figured out and it is not full of boulders and tree stumps, I think you are ready for a new challenge!

Poor Becky clearing all the boulders and weeds (Image credit: Romulation.net)

There used to be a very popular BBC TV series in the mid-1970s called ‘The Good Life’ (which, by the way, you should totally watch).

Image Credit: Do You Remember?

During the series, Tom Goode, a successful but harassed draftsman, decides to eschew his corporate life in favour of becoming self-sufficient. He was supported in this harebrained mid-life crisis by his wife, Barbara Goode, the most gung-ho lady you might ever hope to meet. Together, they began growing food in the garden to the chagrin of his neighbourhood, making their own clothes and even generating electricity!

This series grew to be so popular that the Queen requested a Royal Command Performance which turned out to be a private viewing of the filming of the final episode, performed live in one take.

No, I am not suggesting that you quit your job in order to go and build your own nuclear reactor or meet the Queen! Put down that letter of resignation now!

I am going to give you a ‘The Good Life’ challenge!

Here are the three elements of the challenge:

1. You have to give us a ‘The Good Life’ post on Owls Well once a fortnight. With pictures. This update can be a general update on how your garden is doing, or a something that you have learned or observed whilst in your garden. (And yes, your rabbits are in your garden so that is counted. Even though you have no plans to eat your rabbits.)
2. You have to sell some of the produce from your garden for real cash money. Barter trade is also acceptable.
3. You have to cook a meal for the Aged Ps that includes produce from your garden. (Bonus points if it’s a multi course meal!)

P.S. If you build this generator, you can consider your challenge completed!

Challenge Completed? The Knitting Challenge!

So, about my challenge…

I made a pretty yellow lacy shawl that the Aged P wore on a cruise…

And I made this fancy strawberry shortcake beret hat that wasn’t a beanie hat[1], which you are wearing!

Green and pink strawberry beret (which you are wearing incorrectly, I might add).  Haywire pattern from Nellas April on Ravelry.

And then I got…distracted…

I made this wedding sampler for our wedding anniversary.

…very…distracted.

I found this Christmas thread in the local haberdashery store and absolutely HAD to make something with it.

…so I kinda stopped knitting for the rest of the year.

At first, I thought that I hadn’t actually completed the challenge, but then I realised that the beanie hat did use a technique that I very rarely used because of its difficulty.

Check out that braided basketweave!  This is cable knitted, which requires three knitting needles at any given time.

So, YES.  I have decided that I passed the challenge!  Woo!

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[1] The difference between a beret hat and a beanie hat is the stretching technique after finishing.