When she starts discovering the world ....

Ca y est!! She is 8 months 2 weeks, 7.9 kg and 69 cm.

She is not yet walking, but she likes to pull herself up to a stand by holding the edge of the table or sofa and walk around it. She wants everything to grasp into her chubby fingers. It will then be put in her mouth to taste. She makes loud noise when she bangs my wooden bangle on the table during her meals. I found the most amazing thing is to see the movement of her fingers taking a small bean. Her fingers are like dancing!

She has fascination to my mobile phone, camera or remote control. Sometimes I am shocked to found her playing with cable wires or falling off from a standing position. But I'll try not to put away the things that she holds abruptly and keep myself calm. By raising your voice and snatch the 'off-limit' stuff abruptly from her grasp, it will create frustation for the baby. Unless it is very dangerous and life-threatening, we certainly need to raise our voice to protect them from danger.

Ludo and I agreed that until she reach 3 years old, we can introduce "NO" concept. Meanwhile, we are learning to use "STOP" if she is anywhere near danger. Although we seldom use it, but we want her to know the concept. This is the age of curiosity, if we only say "NO" to her, that important word will have so many different meanings that it will confuse and not really tell her anything useful. We learn to help her to tell what we want her to do. For example instead of saying "Do not touch this, it's dangerous!", we say "it is hot, it will burn your finger if you touch it". Haha!! It may easy to say it here, we laugh about it everytime we should say it because we are so not used to. Oh well, it is for the sake of the baby we changed for tor the better. We think that "NO" is the easy word for baby to imitate it, hearing our little girl saying it often to us may add our frustation :-))

We knew that this is the beginning of her discovery .... as parent, we have so many things to learn about these age. This is the age where we need to stimulate her senses, helping her to understand the world, guide her to grow more. I'd like to see her growing to sniff our herbal plants, touch the textures of the soils, get dirty to plant the beans, touch the slimyyy fish, play with the water spray, they are all in our garden (we are lucky to have a small garden for her to explore). Dirt is her friends now, and we bath her using good old 'DETTOL' to kill germs and bacteria.

And I believe, every parent have their own style handling their children. Sometimes it's obvious around us, the western will adopt freedom and liberty for their children meanwhile Asian parents have the tendencies to always protect their children closely. Anything will work as long as we, as parent respect our children to develop and growing.