This week is going to be interesting. James and I will be teaching in class together for the first time. We’ll be teaching for 2 days on pre-maritial counselling. We’re not conducting a pre-marital course but sharing with the class about pre-marital counselling and how to go about doing it.

First of all, it’s super humbling because we’ve never conducted a pre-marital course in our lives before! Second of all, we’ve only been married 5 years… almost 6 years. Third of all, we’re still working through so many issues in our own marriage. And now we have to train others to do pre-marital counselling! But but but… we believe this is what God’s been calling us to - to teach together and minister together. It’s a great challenge but we’re happy to do it. We’ll never get anywhere if we don’t start trying. So we’re excited and the prep has been going very well, thank God.

So, we will really really appreciate prayer for this Thursday and Friday. We’ll be teaching on why pre-marital counselling/preparation is essential esp in this time and age, who can do it, debunking myths about marriage, how to handle different pastoral situations e.g. cross-cultural marriages. Yep that’s the gist! Our heart is really to inspire the class to be pre-marital counselors/mentors and to help to sow truths about marriage is as God intended. Pray that the Holy Spirit will unearth lies about relationship and marriage within the class. Thank you for praying with us!!!

Ephesians 6:4: "Parents don’t keep on scolding and nagging your children, making them angry and resentful. Rather, bring them up with the loving discipline the Lord Himself approves."

I was tired after a whole day of class and it takes a long time to walk from class back home with a bag full of books, a toddler’s school bag, a laptop and many other things with her happily toddling along, picking up stones and leaves along the way, dwaddling… I found myself nagging and almost at the verge of coercing, can you pls hurry up and walk faster!?!

Then at the end of the day as I was preparing for the next day’s worship on the Father Heart of God, I read this: -

"The other day I rushed into my den urgently needing some information from my files. As I sorted frantically through my papers, my five-year-old son repeatedly blew his shrill tin whistle. I told him again and again to stop. There was a period of silence followed by a deafening blast right next to my ear, including a spray of saliva. I reached around, swatted him with the back of my hand and bellowed at him in anger. Immediately I felt that the Spirit of God had been grieved. I remembered the biblical statement that God is slow to anger and delights to be merciful. I took my son in my arms and asked him to forgive me. It was only right that I should correct his disobedience, but our children should always know that we discipline them because we love them, and not because we are venting our momentary frustration.

Our Heavenly Father is at this very moment being slandered and misrepresented all over the world by man’s cruelty and selfishness. Not only in the home, but in all forms of human government. His laws of love have been ignored and our mangled hearts continue on in carrying out injustice to all those smaller and weaker than ourselves." Excerpt from John Dawson’s article on The Father Heart of God

Oooo here I am ministering the Father heart of God in class and causing wounds to my own daughter at home because I failed to represent God rightly. How sensitive am I to grieving the Spirit of God when I discipline Sophie? O Lord, teach me your ways.

Sophie and I had a really good time looking back our flickr collection of travel photos.

Batam, Indonesia Oct 07, Sophie was 13 months old.

Shanghai, China Nov 07, Sophie was 14 months old.

I usually write a "Dear Sophie" letter each month to Sophie but think I’m going to document her development this month coz she’s almost 3 1/2 years old!

ABCs & 123s
As you know Sophie doesn’t go to formal nursery even though she turns 4 this year and sometimes I worry how she’s going to catch up before she goes to Primary 1! In Singapore, she’ll have to be able to read and write pretty well in both English and Mandarin by P1. Most of what she knows she’s picked up at home or from watching videos e.g Letter Factory, Blues Clues etc…

As of now, she knows the sounds to the alphabets and she can tell what names of things begin with. She can even spell some of her friends’ names. She tried to spell "Oliver" on her own yesterday and she managed "Olv" which I thought was pretty good coz she sounded all the consonants all by herself! She tried "Agata" and ended up with "Ugt". Guess all her friend are going to get strange notes with their names spelt funny! She loves "writing" notes to her friends and they make absolutely no sense but she’ll just write a whole bunch of letters. One of the games we play is "letter box", we have two cardboard boxes that we use as letter boxes and she’ll write mail to me and I’ll write mail to her and we post things to each other. It’s a super fun Saturday thing to do. Most times she writes gibberish but she practices writing alphabets and I write real letters and she loves to hear me read them to her. It’s fun! Best thing about it? I can lie on the sofa in the morning while we do this and it’s pretty relaxing.

She can write most of the alphabets but there are some that she still stumbles over e.g. she gets her "b" and "d" mixed up and she writes "S" the other way around. Unfortunately I didn’t have a proper system of introducing the alphabets to her so she’s unable to recognise some of the lower case alphabets.

I haven’t been doing a lot with numbers with her. She can count stuff confidently up to 10 but sometimes she messes up. She’s starting to learn about addition from Blues Clues. We play cash register sometimes and we buy and sell things for fun so she gets to count "money". The "money" we use are just glass beads that we got from the good ole $2 shop. However, Sophie can’t really write numbers. 5, 8, 9 etc are just so hard to manage. Guess if we work at it a bit more, she’ll get it but we just haven’t really had time.

What about Mandarin? Er… no comment. We haven’t made much progress here at all. She only knows the names of animals and refuses to converse in Chinese. Sigh… help!!!!

Managing her emotions
I’m not exactly sure why but Sophie went through a phase a few weeks ago where she kept screaming when she didn’t like the way things were. When someone takes her toy, she’ll scream REALLY loudly. Or if someone hits her, she’ll scream REALLY loudly. When that happens, it just make me cringe. She used to whine or cry but she didn’t really scream. So when it started to happen, my first reaction was to curb it because it just didn’t go well with my upbringing. Kids are to be quiet! (Right?!?)

Anyways, two things happened, I realised that she’s really just defending herself and it really made the other kid stop. The other thing we did was to begin to teach her that she can say "I don’t like that. Pls stop it!" in a firm way and if the other kid didn’t stop, she had the option to tell an adult. Giving her the space to express her emotion and frustration plus giving her words to that helped. Whenever I stopped her from screaming immediately, it always made things worse because she must have been thinking it wasn’t her fault and she was just telling him "no!". Sophie has a very strong sense of justice and being unjust to her really got her mad (I can totally understand that). Well, I’m not sure if it’s all working but we are monitoring this. I’m really thankful that she has not much problems telling us how she feels e.g. I really miss Evan and Eli or I’m really angry. I find that spending 5-10 mins with her walking slowly from school to lunch really helps for us to connect and she shares everything that happens in school. Very precious times.

Language
It amuses me to watch how Sophie is interacting with adults. I remember when she first arrived in NZ, there was a time when she went over to the neighbours’ house and sat down next to my friend and ask her "How are you?". Yesterday I saw her attempting to join in my conversation with her teacher. We were talking about Christchurch and Sophie said "Gabriel, you know we went to Christchurch and we did this this and this…. ". I forgot what she said exactly but it was so cute watching her telling her teacher about her holiday. Like a big girl! She’s normally shy with strangers but if she knows the person, she wants to join in all the conversations!

Character
Sophie in relating to Evan seems a bit bossy. She keeps telling Evan what to do. A little worrying. However when she’s with Toby who’s a year older, she’s happy to just go along. When she’s face to face with another bossy kid her age e.g. Leanna, they just go head on with each other. Leanna is quite strong willed too. Amanda (Leanna’s mum) and I had to bear with the two girls irritating each other all the way to Rotorua from Matamata! 1 and a half hours! I guess Sophie is pretty headstrong when she knows she can be but she can follow as well.

She’s quite clownish in a lot of ways. Everything needs to be special and different to get her attention. She enjoys variety and loves to be different. Creative in many ways. Sometimes she really amuses us.

Very sensitive. She is sensitive as a person and also sensitive to others. If she ever sees me sad, she’ll come up immediately to comfort me. Quite a pastor at heart.

Relationships are very important to her. Spending time is definitely her primary love language. If Evan is not around, she REALLY misses her. She’ll tell everyone that she misses Evan and Eli. When they are away on holiday, she’ll make cards for them.

Gifts are important to her. I think that is her other love language. She can remember who gave her what. Today someone asked her about her sunglasses and she told them that godma and godpa gave it to her. That was almost a year ago!

Meal times
Sigh… community living always makes it SO hard for a 3 year old to sit still to eat their dinner. She’s improving in this area but sometimes it’s frustrating! She’s so kiwi now - she eats sandwiches for lunch! Yeeks! Lunch normally consists of a jam/peanut butter sandwich with a fruit. Ang moh to the core ah? She can eat 4 slices of bread on a good day. I comfort myself in making sure it’s grain bread. She’s more into pasta and noodles than rice. She loves stir fry veggies e.g. spinach. I was surprised that she loves bean sprouts! All the veggies that I loathe growing up! However we only have that on the weekends when I cook. Most days she’s just eating peas or corns. Ooo and she likes lamb! When I cook lamb, I almost have no chance to get to it. She also loves seafood… hmmm wonder who she got that from!?! Of course that’s also only weekend food.

Likes
Colour - Red (Hiak! Thank God not pink!). Actually if you ask her, she’ll say "red and black".
Toy - Toy watch and eye looker (don’t ask me what an eye looker is - it’s a plastic thingy that came with her bicycle. It’s not even part of the bicycle. She gave it the name. :)) She sleeps with both of them, plus her kitty and Windy. Both of which came free. Who needs expensive toys?!?
Video - Elmo, Blues Clues
Friends - Toby and Evan (Toby wants to marry Sophie!!! Faint…)
Clothes - Dresses, must be able to twirl, if not, not counted.
Anything thing of nature - sticks, leaves, twigs, stones, shells, flowers… my house is filled with these things!
Breakfast - cereal with milk, eggs, pancakes
Lunch - Bread with jam/peanut butter
Dinner - pasta, noodles, stir fry veggies
Fruit - pear, oranges, actually she’ll eat any fruit, even durian
Treat - jelly, gummies, san zha
Drink - babychino, Ribena
Activities - Listening to Winnie the Pooh audio stories, du shu (study)… ya she loves to do worksheets and sit down to study, crafts (painting, drawing etc), read, play pretend, watch TV, chit chat

Dislikes
Activities - Slides. She refuses to go on slides. She’ll climb, she’ll jump etc but she won’t go on slides. She’s not keen to sing in public.
Food - Carrots, broccoli, onions, tomatoes, lettuce
Clothes - She’s not keen on wearing pants/jeans, prefers skirts/dresses. And she prefers to go barefoot.

Last Friday, we had a family fancy dress and games afternoon.

The girls came as princesses and boys came as prince/superheros. The adults too had to come with fancy hats!

Oooo Sophie was SOOO pleased to dress up. I made her a crown, got fairy wings from the $2 shop and James made her a wand out of bamboo and paper stars. She had so much fun playing the games and running around with either me or James. But the best parts were the ice cream after dinner and the chocolate gold coin treasure hunt at the end.

From Babycentre: If you could hold your baby’s hand this week, you’d notice the swirling lines that make up his unique fingerprints. You’d also see the veins and vital organs beneath his tissue-thin skin. He’s growing… Are your long-lost energy making a comeback? If so, you may soon find out why many women call this the honeymoon trimester. For other women, the discomforts last a while longer yet. Every pregnancy is individual  even women who have been pregnant before find that the second or third are different.

We had a baby scan this week and saw the baby! He was so cute and the scan was extremely clear. Sophie came with us and she got to see it too. She was really amazed and I think we were too. It’s been a long time, more than three years ago since we saw a baby scan! Seeing the baby just makes it more real.

From Left: James, Esther, Eli, Gin, Evan and Sophie. The table was full of food!

Last year, Chinese New Year just passed us by! This year I was DETERMINED with a capital "D" to do something about it! And when I’m determined, I’m determined! Hiak!

Two weeks before, I started planning the menu and hyping it up with friends (Asian friends that is. I tried telling a non-asian friend about it and he was like huh?. :)) I got down with Sophie and made her make some semblance of firecrackers, lanterns and Chinese fans with me… ok we tried. Then I went to the library and borrow a kids’ book on Chinese festivals and menus and I looked at it every night to drool… Finally, it wouldn’t have been complete if James didn’t make a trip to Auckland to buy all the foodstuff.

Left: We made these firecrackers with toilet rolls and crepe paper. Sophie made them on her own, very simple. I just showed her a couple samples.

Right: CNY is not CNY if the kitchen is not FILLED with food. Just looking at it made me so happy. Felt like home…

So on Chinese New Year eve, here was what we had:- steamboat dinner with chicken stock I made, hot pot mix, waxed duck, roast duck, stir-fry veg with chinese mushrooms, prawn mix chicken wings and dumplings! We even had durian after dinner! We ate till we had to roll out of our seats! It’s not a CNY meal if we didn’t eat till we dropped and have leftovers.

Hope everyone had a wonderful lunar New Year celebration with friends and family. We missed everyone back home and it’s really not the same without you guys.

We have really full weeks.

From Mondays to Fridays, Sophie goes to school both in the morning from 9 - 12.45pm and on Monday, Wednesday and Thursdays, she also goes in the afternoon from 2 - 3.15pm. Personally i think it’s too long for a little kid of 3 years old to be away from her parents, I really struggle with that. I know she really misses us and sometimes she whines about going to afternoon school because she’s a bit tired and just want to cuddle up. Sometimes either James or myself have to do work duty in between those times. Of course in addition to that, she sleeps at 7pm so we really don’t have much time with her.

But but, it’s only for a season and only for 3 months at a time.

So we try to make it up during the weekends!

During the weekends, I spend the earlier part of the morning with her. We do some crafty things and sometimes we get the paints out and just do painting. And then I CRASH. Serious. By 10am, I need to go back to nap. That’s when James takes over and he’ll bring Sophie out. Last Saturday, he brought her to the old pool area by the back of the base and they had a great time jumping in their boots (Thks DN!) in muddy puddles and searching for tadpoles. It’s really great fun.

There’s something about a child jumping in muddy puddles that makes me smile!

Last nite, after the kiddos have gone to sleep, we gathered around a bonfire to cook stick bread and marshmallows.

It was SO FUN!

I’ve never done this before. Tina made the bread dough and all we needed to do was wrap that around a stick and put it over the fire and cook it! After that we eat it with honey/butter/jam. YUMS!

I had a really interesting experience today. Our topic for these two days is Learning Styles. We are learning about our individual learning styles and how that affects our learning. Sheryll, our lecturer who is also our base director, used to be a school teacher so this topic was right up her alley.

As she was teaching, she got us to reflect on what we enjoyed most about school or hated most about school. As she did that, she started to share what she enjoyed most about school in New Zealand and she said "Playtime" and "Nature Study" and I was like going, "Huh? What’s that?!?!".

It took me a while before it dawned on me, oh ya we used to have recess time and we did attempt to do some sort of nature study. But thing was that, it wasn’t a big part of my school days at all. I hardly remember it. I remember eating really fast, playing some games and we were back in class. I even remembered that sometimes I used that time to study for the upcoming test in the next period. How long were our recess times anyway? 30 mins? In NZ, they have 1 hr! 

We have such different education systems. It’s amazing that I managed to survive ours without much scars. I guess I’ve always did pretty alright in school and it wasn’t so stressful during my time (yet.). I’m also thankful that my parents hardly put any pressure on me. 

Anyways, it was interesting to note what was missing in our education system. Guess I’ve always known it and tried to expose Sophie to as much of that as possible. Sheryll also got us to pray and redeem those moments when we had scars from learning and said to ourselves, "I’ll never learn that again!" and it was a powerful time. It’s amazing how many people have been hurt through the education process either by teachers or fellow students.

I also learnt that both James and I are visual and kinesthetic learners. No wonder we can’t hear each other very well! Ha! Looks like we’ve gotta write to each other more. It’s amazing to also note that so many of us are visual and kinesthetic learners but so much of our education system is auditory learning! No wonder so many didn’t get it!

From Babycenter:

Your fetus now looks like a baby, with tiny but fully formed fingers and toes. As his body grows and becomes more developed and functional, he’ll start twisting and turning like an acrobat, cushioned and protected by your amniotic fluid. You, on the other hand, are probably feeling less like a gymnast every day. Leg cramps, which can sometimes be a sign of calcium deficiency, and heartburn (caused by pregnancy hormones that relax the valve which separates the oesophagus from the stomach) may be annoying you during the day and keeping you up at night. Just remember, all this suffering is temporary and it’s all in a good cause you’re having a baby!

This week has been amazing! I feel like I’m in the 2nd trimester already. Energy level is up and I’m feeling pretty upbeat most of the time. Which is super cool because school is in full swing now and we have been really busy! I still need that little lie down in the afternoon but generally I’m good. I’m eating every 2 hrs and feel really greedy most of the time. The cravings are really bad this time. I’ve been thinking of eating that pink triangular steamed thingy with glutinous rice (what is that called!?!), duck porridge (Vic/Dan, the Maggi packs you sent are now coming to use! It’s my supper now.), fish noodles etc etc… HELP!

I’ve been reading this book by the Usborne called Flip-Flap Body Book to Sophie. It talks and shows how a baby grows in the mother’s womb, stage by stage. Pretty cool! A bit cheem for her but she enjoys looking at the pictures. Now she says baby is in the womb, not tummy.

L: Sophie and Leanna, check out how they picked up the same drink.
R: Me feeling the heat from the thermal pool. It’s boiling!

We spent Saturday in Rotorua with our friends from Vanuatu.

Rotorua is only about slightly more than 1 hr from Matamata where we are. It’s famous for its smell. You’ll smell sulfur as soon as you drive in. There is a lot of thermal activity everywhere. We went to an open park and you really walk at your own risk! Sophie was really fascinated with the bubbling mud pools and smoke. Ooo the smell!

Spending time with the Ni-Vans is always wonderful, always relaxing. You see the wonderful provision of the Lord everywhere they go and travelling with them, we get to experience that as well! They managed to borrow enough vehicles to take the entire team, someone arranged a BBQ lunch for them, free parks and free culture tours! It was so cool. Gonna miss them when they return and I’m hoping that we’ll get to go back to Vanuatu sometime this year. Maybe after baby is born.