Empowerment!

After months of waiting for Brad to set up our family website with a blog for me, I discovered Blogger, and set up my blog in a matter of minutes. I feel so empowered by the internet!

This is my very last week of maternity leave. I go back to work next Tuesday when Ariane is only 9 weeks old. Although it will be difficult to leave her, I feel a lot more relaxed this time than I did when I first left Nikhil at home. Ariane has been getting acquainted with her nanny Gertrude, and I've accepted that Gertrude is as good a caregiver as any, barring myself, Brad or one of our mothers.

Ariane is growing at a rapid rate. I don't remember Nikhil growing so quickly. She is alert and interested in her surroundings, and smiles at me when I talk to her. If she is with Brad or Gertrude and I walk into her sight, she starts crying for me. It's very flattering.


Nikhil is a typical almost-2-year-old sponge. He is absorbing information at an alarming rate. This morning he sang the whole of "Sing a song of sixpence" to me, and I haven't sung it to him for at least 3 weeks. He's been memorising the text of the books I read to him, and then he points at the words and "reads" the book to me. And he can now sing the entire alphabet song without help. So I decided it's not too early to start teaching him to read.

Yes, I know he's not quite two years old. And no, I don't think I'm pushing him too hard, despite the fact that our public school system only gets children to learn to read at age seven. He is interested in books, he's picking up information faster than I can supply it, and he's more than ready to learn the shapes of letters.

All the research I've done suggests that teaching children to read phonetically is superior to getting them to just recognise entire words from the outset. So I will be following the sequence of teaching him the alphabet song, then teaching him to recognise and name letters ("cee" as opposed to "cuh for cat") so that he doesn't learn to associate C with Cat. Then moving on to learning the sounds - A gives "a" as in apple, "aw" as in ball, "ay" as in cake, "aa" as in arm, etc. And finally combining sounds into words like hat, mat, bat. That's how I learnt to read, but apparently not how the American school system teaches it.

As for Brad, he is DEATHLY ill. He can't get out of bed, cook, or do much for the kids. Poor guy, he's come down with the potentially fatal Congested Sinuses. I hope he feels better soon, but my prognosis is that he will have repeated attacks of a similar nature until Ariane is a little older and I can give him more attention.