Dearest Sophie,

You are turning 3 next month! Wow!

You’ve grown so much the past month! Now you want to do almost everything by yourself. Your song of the month is "I can do, there’s nothing to it, I can do it by myself!" (Barney soundtrack).

Here’s you with your new toys that Mama and Yeye sent you all the way from Singapore!

Happy 3 years old soooooooooon!

Love
Mummy

We had quite an intense week with Mark Parker and God last week & we all needed some time out. So back to Tauranga we went with some of the other students.

And the weather is turning so it’s really looking much sunnier! Woo hoo!

It’s been two months since we’ve been here and I’m proud to say, we’re pretty much lived in!

Now our kitchen looks like a typical Chinese household kitchen! Woo hoo! We’ve been doing lotsa cooking over the weekend, at least one meal.

So far we’ve had Chicken Curry, Prawn Fried Hokkien Mee, BBq chicken, pig & cow innards (so cheap lah!) ala yakitori style (James’ idea), Chicken Rice etc…

Note to Prima Taste: YOU ARE A LIFE SAVER.

P/s James said he wanted to write a thank you note to Prima Taste so there it goes.

Before I forget…….. amazing how much we forget over time esp about our kids’ development!

Sophie’s suddenly developing double eyelids! I can’t seem to catch it on the camera but it’s so pretty!!!!

Other thing, she’s figured how to go to the toilet entirely on her own! She did it for the first time yesterday. We were just hanging out and all of a sudden she ran to the toilet and pulled the small chair, put on the toilet seat, pulled down her pants, peed, wiped, flushed etc…….. the only thing she can’t do is wash her hands coz the tap is too far away and our small chair is not high enough. Funny thing is that, I’ve been wanting to teach her to do this (using a chair to climb onto the toilet) for the longest time but I just never got down to doing it but she figured it out anyways.

And today, we were in class while she was napping and………………… she woke up from her nap, climbed out of her cot, opened the bedroom door and went to pee on her own. And then waited for us to come back because somehow the baby monitor (we’re using a walkie talkie because of the distance) didn’t work! So cute lah! My baby is growing up!

Sometimes James brings Sophie to the river to hang out while he drops a fishing line. It’s really fun, he’ll bring a big mat, some colouring books, her teddy bear, some toys and they just spend time together. So nice…..

Sophie going to school. I took this picture specially for you, godma n godpa, notice the bag and hat.

Behind her is the daycare she goes to every morning.

As some of you know, the childcare teachers in her school are all volunteers and they are different every school term (a term being 3 months, either during the DTS or FMS). When there is no DTS/FMS running, there’ll be no daycare.

For this DTS, Sophie has 5 daycare teachers – Tina (our school leader’s wife), Wan Lin (our friend from Singapore), Sunnie (from Korea), Misun (from Korea) and Lydia (from Sweden). Tina and Wan Lin are the English speaking ones and are more experienced while the rest struggle a bit more with the language. Halfway through the school, Wan Lin and Sunnie are leaving to do their DTS and then 2 other Canadian girls are coming to replace them.

It can be a little disruptive but thank God the kids adjusted pretty well. In fact, there was only one child who cried in the beginning when he was left at childcare. The rest of the kids did really well. Sophie cried on one of the days because the other kid cried but other than that, she’s pretty well adjusted too.

Tina is really good with the kids and the kids really love her. They have been learning a lot of new songs and Sophie’s singing all sorts of songs. Wan Lin’s been a great help at the daycare and she really helped to make really nice pictures and arty things with the kids.

It’s been such a blessing to have Sophie at the daycare and see her loving it.

We witnessed the birth of a calf last Sat at Ross & Sheryll’s farm!

3 things I learned talking to Ross (who btw is also our school director):
1. If the calf comes out wrongly, sometimes they cut it up piece by piece so that it’ll come out fully! Yeeks!
2. If the calf is a bull, it’s useless to them and they will sell it away and they’ll only earn $25-$30 bucks. Er… almost the same as 2 pieces of beef for bbqing. Hmmm….
3. Er… the cow ate up the placenta after the birth. Ok, maybe it does have some health benefits. Double yeeks!

It was so amazing to see it live. City girls like Soph and I never seen anything like it before! James was the "nat geo" photographer who dared go up close in the middle of the delivery to take pics. I stood a mile away coz I was so scared. Never go near a lady giving birth. Been there, done that!

Sophie & I attempting to climb to Waikere Falls. She’s a trouper but she wanted to examine every rock on the way so we never quite made it there.

Sophie and I have been having great fun!

As missionaries, I forsee ourselves moving from place to place a lot. For example, in 2 months or so, we’ll be off to another mission location as part of the DTS. This moving around can be quite disturbing to a little child. I was just talking to someone about how Sophie doesn’t really like to say goodbye or sometimes even hello. I know that kids go thru that phase but I think that Sophie’s case goes a bit deeper than that. I think she still grieves that she lost some of her friends from the last school and she’s afraid of saying bye. The person whom I spoke too also shared that her son went through the same thing at that age while living on the base. That confirms what I’ve been feeling all this while.

So, what I’ve been doing is, spending a lot of time with Sophie. Whenever I can, I try to spend extended time with her. When we arrived in this new home, I just sensed the Lord telling me to do so. Over here, I’m not really a stay home mum anymore. Sophie goes to childcare in the mornings till almost 1pm. We have lunch as a community and then she goes for a nap till 3.30pm. By then I’m normally home and done with the day. So in reality, she’s only with me from 3.30pm onwards. That’s not a lot of time compared to before we started on this journey!

So, now, we spend sometimes more than an hour before bedtime just hanging out. She’s at such a great age to just hang out. My little 2 year old teenager. We talk about different things. We play masak masak (cooking/toys). We read. We talk about the day. I even wait for her to sleep before I left the room so that she knows I’m there. I did this for the past three weeks since we got here and finally weaned her off needing me to be there until she slept. I can tell she really enjoys that time and is more willing to go to bed now. I guess going to bed meant she was left on her own again and she hates that. But spending time with her really helped to make her feel secure and rested.

This I believe is so important when a child’s environment changes so much over short periods of time. She really needs us to be the constant. Taking time to be with her and assure her that people and places might change but we are the ones she can trust and hang onto. It is so important because a child’s first ability to trust God comes from being able to trust her parents.

James & I at Waikere Falls, 15 mins from the base

The more I seek you
The more I find you
The more I find you
The more I love you

I wanna sit at your feet
Drink from the cup in your hand
Lay back against you and breath
Feel your heartbeat
This love is so deep
It’s more than I can stand
I melt in your peace
It’s overwhelming

This song is our theme song for this season of our lives.

We are finding that as we press in, the more we discover God. In the past, it would have been so easy to just live on the surface on our relationship with God and just accept it as it is but we’re discovering that there is so much to God that we have yet to discover.

Faith truly comes from hearing the word.

My heart longs to hear but my flesh is so weak and I’ve been struggling to really press in and search God’s word out for ourselves. But being in this environment of hearing the word and hearing testimonies after testimonies of the reality of God is really spuring our desire and hunger for more of God.

5am prayer time with the class (ok the truth I that I haven’t made it at 5am exactly but nearly there…) has been a tremendous boost to my experience of God. It was hard trying to enter in and pray at 5am every other morning (James and I take turns to go) in the beginning but oh my, it’s so good! I seriously have no idea what pushes me to wake up at that unearthly time! It really must be God! Funny thing is, I don’t even feel tired through the day.