I’m a lazy bum who would never willingly participate in any forms of exercise if there’s no gun pointed at me. So even while I sometimes rant about how I should be doing something to get rid of that tummy I shouldn’t have, all I really do is rant on and on and not do much at all.

But now that Ryan is such an active little boy who loves to play ball, dance, and do all sorts of funny things, he has naturally become our ‘exercise’ machine. It’s hard work trying to catch up with him. He sometimes insists we stand up and join him in his moves or play ball with him. I am not fit enough to keep up so I often have to give him some good reasons why I should stay in the background and be a spectator!

There’s really no need to have any expensive fitness equipment at home or even a gym subscription when you have children at home. Any parents out there agree with me? So for those who don’t have time to go to the gym, playing with your kids is a sure way to get enough exercises everyday!

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My natural ‘exercise’ machine

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Yesterday was Ryan’s first attempt at joining a story-telling session at MPH book store. There were just a handful of kids there to listen to the story-reading and they ranged from 2 to 8 years old.

It was also Ryan’s first “public speaking” experience as he was handed the microphone and to tell everyone his name, age and what he wants to be when he grows up. So he told everyone his name, and said that he’s 3 years old although he’s not quite three yet. And he said he wants to be a pilot when he grows up. I was one proud, beaming mummy

He sat right in front and was listening and looking at the pictures on the book intently as the lady pointed out the pictures. And after the story ended, some questions were asked and everyone received a little badge for attempting to answer the questions.

Came the second story, he got fidgety and bored. So we left after a while longer. I think it was a good experience for him. Not sure if he would want to go for more of these activities in the future as he gets bored rather quickly.

Also, I noticed that he doesn’t quite like to go mixing with the other kids. They were asked to go walk about during an exercise before the reading started, and he refused to go around. Just stood there and waited for the exercise to finish. Hmm…tough luck when it’s school time, I reckon!

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I have wanted to start Ryan on swimming some months ago, but all I did was talk and talk and talk and then came the H1N1 and I chickened out bringing him to a public pool. But we did buy him his swimsuit, and it waited patiently to be worn. Then some weeks back the grandma bought him one of those play pools that we could use at home.

We decided to let him have his first swimming experience in that little pool last weekend. It’s a very small one, but just nice to fit him into it with lots of his “toy friends” to play with.

He was very excited about it and willingly let his daddy change him into the swimsuit. But when it came time to go into the pool, he insisted that he wanted to remove the suit! There was no way we could get him into the pool with the suit on as he kept struggling to get out.

In the end we had to explain to him that the suit was meant to get wet and he HAD to wear something to swim. He still refused and made us take it off. We let him sit naked in the pool for a bit and then forced a t-shirt on him. But I was still uncomfortable with him being half naked in there so it was through more persuasions that we managed to get him back into the suit.

But even then, he was really funny. He refused to sit in the pool. He kept standing, possibly to avoid getting the suit wet. Then slowly, he went down on all fours and stayed that way playing with water. At the most, he would sit in that kneeling position. He just refused to land his butt on the floor!

Anyway, what matters most is that he had a happy time. I think it should get easier as we have more swimming sessions with him in the coming weekends. I just wonder how long it will take for him to be completely ok to get his swimming suit wet!

I also don’t know how long it will be before we bring him to the real pools due to hygiene issues especially with scary diseases going around these days. Some well-meaning friends who have pools in their homes for rent offered us to use them but I don’t think they are ideal either.

A friend recommended a pool that we can go to in one of those clubs nearby our place, as he finds it clean and not congested because people who are non-club members need to pay to get in and apparently club members don’t really use the pool. I guess that might be one alternative I will consider when we’re ready to take him to the pool. Well, more like when he’s ready to get wet!

Where do you take your kids to swim in?

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All kids at one point or another are sure to be somewhat attracted to kiddie rides of all kinds. Ryan loves them too but fortunately for us, he doesn’t enjoy the ride when we insert coins into them. He would instruct us NOT to put in coins, he just wants to sit in it and turn the steering wheels and press on those brightly lit buttons in the kiddie rides.

Whilst that saves us money, we somehow can’t help but think that parents who walk past us and see us not inserting any coins to let Ryan enjoy his ride must think that we are so stingy! I guess we just have to be thick faced and be okay with that perception of us!

Anyway, I’m writing this post to serve a reminder to parents. Something untoward happened to Ryan while he was on one of these kiddie rides in 1 Utama’s top floor at the new wing last night.

As usual we sat him into his chosen kiddie ride and he was turning the steering wheel and pressing the buttons…it was also our fault for not watching him closely and assumed that everything was alright. There was one particular button on that ride where the cap of the button had come off, so it was exposing the little bulb sitting inside it.

Ryan touched it and he immediately told us that his finger was very painful. He got burned by that heated bulb on the tip of his index finger! The bulb was so hot that his finger immediately developed quite a big blister. And his finger was quite red in colour for a long time. It all happened so quickly, we didn’t even see his little finger touch it. I felt awful as a mum for being so careless and letting him get hurt like that.

When we led him away from those rides, we tried to distract him of the pain and his fears of those rides. It was so painful for us to watch him in shock and pain. We tried to cheer him up by distracting him with the colourful cartoon game showing on the LCD TV at the Parkson toy department and shoving him in the direction of toys we think he’d like. He was alright all the time, not a single tear at all, but he kept his little blistered finger pointing out all the time, right until we got into the car to go home! My poor little boy.

Not only did he physically get hurt from this incident, he’s also quite skeptical to get onto a kiddie ride now. Maybe the memory of the painful  burn is still very fresh in his memory and that’s why he doesn’t want to get on them now, but I really hope this episode does not make him stay away from these rides. He’s still a kid after all and deserves to enjoy himself on them.

So parents, when you put your children into these rides, watch out for those buttons and make sure your kids don’t get burnt. It’s not fair that they get scared and therefore stay away from things they like just because they got hurt by some faulty machine. And from our carelessness, too. Also, being burnt may not have been the worst that could have happen. Who knows whether there’s any passing current in those  electrical parts too. I shudder to think of the worst case scenario…

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Do you often find product mailers in your post boxes? We used to get plenty from housing developers and hypermarkets. So much so that most times they are unseen and simply dumped into the bins.

Lately there are a whole bunch of mailers for services in the area of children development and enrichment lessons. I would’ve thrown these out in the past too but I think now is the time I start to take notice of some of them.

Do you believe in sending your kids to all kinds of lessons? I know parents start their kids off to some fun lessons or classes as young as two years old. Most of them would start off with Gymboree or something similar. I have yet to start Ryan off on anything, actually, and am wondering if I’m depriving him of something. Do you think I am?

Anyway, as much as I think it’s good to let kids learn as many things as possible from a young age, I believe very much too that it should all be done in moderation. I do not wish to load his day full of lessons from one hour to the next the whole day through, so much so that his remaining free time will be spent at home trying to catch up on some given homework or practise on his musical instrument for his next class. I want him to enjoy his childhood as much as possible doing non-class stuff.

So whilst I may glance through some mailers and brochures to check out what interesting enrichment classes are out there, I won’t be all too hyped out about registering him for all things dumped into my mailbox. If I feel suffocated with just these mailers, imagine how Ryan would feel going to all these classes!

All kinds of classes seem to be mushrooming these days from the regular tuition classes to Kumon lessons to speech and drama too. Even tertiary education courses are getting more diversed these days if you noticed, people nowadays can do courses on drawing and developing animations for games to some specialised medical coding training courses too. What a world of difference to what we had during our time, the boring old stuff like accountancy, nursing, law school, business administration, etc.

So now, if I were to send him for one or two classes a week to have fun, which would you recommend? The key thing is really for him to make some friends, have lots of fun and whilst at it, learning a thing or two.

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