The Magic Words

For some reason, Erika seems terrified of this particular illustration of Blackbeard, the pirate. It is on one of the picture books that we often look at and read. When she first saw the illustration she just got off my lap, ran away and stood a distance from me and the book. She’ll probably get over this fear in due time.

But in the meantime, I was able to use this fear as one of my magic words to convince her to follow me. One use of this was during bed time last night. Maita was long asleep as she’s a bit sick and she normally gets to sleep earlier than Erika. Erika wanted to go out of the room to play. I told her that the pirate is out there and she decided to stay in the room.

This afternoon, after coming back from lunch and grocery shopping, it was time to put both girls to sleep. I tried to convince Erika to go to the toilet before sleeping. Her mom also tried but was not successful either. The use of the magic words allowed me to finally get her to go to the toilet to pee. I told her that if she needed to pee the pirate will help her. She said she didn’t want that and I told her that she better let me help her then. She dutifully followed me to the toilet to do her thing.

A similar thing happened at dinner time. We tried to convince Erika to eat dinner but anything we said seemed to fall on deaf ears. She just ignored us and continued to look at her book. She did eat one yellow kiwi and some apple when she woke up at 5:00pm. I asked if she wanted to eat some Hwo Long Kuo (Dragon Fruit) and she pretended not to hear. The magic words that finally worked were Honey Crunch (the honey and nut coated breakfast cereal).

As I write this final post of the year, I think about the challenges in raising our two young daughters. For Erika the current challenge is to teach her to visit the toilet in a timely manner. Given that she’s three and learning to assert herself, we hope that eventually we are able to instill the habit of regular toilet visits. Hopefully, we can reduce the scrambles to the toilet whenever Erika gets that tingling feeling that’s a certain sign that she can’t hold it in anymore.

For Maita, the challenge is a bit different. She’s quite headstrong and she has to learn to compromise and share. She ends the year slightly sick. We remind her that she should have taken an extra jacket to wear in school yesterday. Her classroom is a lot colder than our home and she needs to wear more when she’s at school. We hope she sees the cause and effect of her actions.

I end this post with a picture of Maita when she’s about Erika’s age. I think it's a fitting end to the year. I like her smiling face when I picked this photo of her. I’m glad that I was able to improve it with photoshop.