A Cure for Black Thumbs

I finally found it, nearly two years after I embarked on project greenify inside the house.  The cure for my black thumb is just finding a plant that never dies.  And when you find it, you just run with it.

All over the house.  

Utility areas

Outside the windows of each bedroom

The pattern is clear

Unashamedly repetitive of me

Outdoors, indoors - they're all the same

Christmas and beyond

Big or small

DIY'ed

High or low or in-between.

Don't the pops of green look so fresh?  The air literally feels healthier.

That plant is called a Pothos - and it's super easy to propagate all 35 of these pots around my home from just a couple of healthy ones.  Yup, I have 35 of these same white pots with the same plant.  I kind of think this makes the greenery look neat.  

Maybe it's because my house is always messy.  

I was going to share a few other successes from other plant species I braved my way to, but just a few weeks ago, our helper went back to her hometown and ... they've died.  So I guess they weren't as black-thumb friendly as I thought:

They say you can't screw up succulents but pfffft 

That tall one is gone now

And this one is getting thinner and thinner

 I knew it was too good to be true!

For The Love of Splash Pads

As a parent in the third-world, I tend to be overly protective of my little girl.  Which usually means she can't get dirty, wet or sweaty for fear of getting sick.  A visit to Singapore as a first-time parent changed all that.  Thanks to public splash pads which are nearly everywhere.

It was liberating for both of us.

Gardens by the Bay

Singapore Zoo

Jurong Bird Park

Jacob Ballas Children's Garden

Vivo City Mall 

   

KLCC Park in Malaysia

Hong Kong Disneyland

Shangrila Mactan in Cebu (or any Shangrila Hotel in Manila) - not public anymore though!

Public splash pads are sorely missing in Manila,  but I've been desensitised now so I don't mind this:

SM Aura

At Market, Market fountain.  This time I left her spare clothes in the car so I had to wrap her in my cardigan afterwards!

If you've found other splash pads or fountains I'd love to know!

Here's our DIY version.  We've had it for three years now:

I felt ridiculous for buying it because all it is is a plastic tube with holes.  But how fun.

Just hook up a hose and you're good to go.

At her lolo and lola's house in Tagaytay

With her cousin's baby pool last year

With a cheap tin foil-made river when we had no plastic pool

And with another cousin who couldn't resist it either!

I don't have a garden or backyard space either, but maybe the garage this summer if we're desperate.   

What We Do With Book Jackets

If you're anal about keeping your books good-as-new, look away right now.  

You won't like seeing what I do with them.

I've been cutting up the dust jackets on Ladybug Girl's books ever since we started buying them. 

Like a ritual, she always removed the dust covers because they got in the way of reading.  I soon got tired of being book-anal myself so I began to think of ways to squeeze some use from the covers rather than keeping them in storage or throwing them in the trash.

We have this box in her art shelf for making collages or artwork:

  

A few books into this, I've delegated the cutting to Yaya  

I lost the pictures of some of the artwork from this box, but you get the idea.  Sometimes we take the box to bed at night, and I choose a random cut-out and ask if she remembers the book and what happened in the story.  Just fun.

If you're really serious about squeezing more use out of the covers, cut out the words.  I left this invitation to make her own silly phrases which is really sneaky practice in early creative writing.  This one was inspired by the Montessori movable alphabet.

All it is my favorite contact paper stuck down to her easel, sticky-side out:

We had a good laugh after I got home to see what phrases she made.

Last one to share is my favourite.  You know how the dust jackets print a preview of what the book is about?  I have that cut up too along with the title.  Like an answer sheet, she has to stick the correct title to match the preview.  This one was inspired by the hands-on Montessori nomenclature work where a child matches cards.  Something like this:

And this:

That's still contact paper stuck down to the tray, sticky-side up

I once used a box-lid and washi-tape instead of the whole contact paper set-up.  Washi tape re-sticks easily so it's easy to move around the titles:

As an early reader it was one of her favourite activities to do. 

If you're wondering how our cover-less books are doing, I've never missed them.  Those hardcovers are pretty sturdy!  Sometimes you have to let go of the extras if you want to make shortcuts.  

A Shortcut to Art Appreciation

It's only through my daughter's Montessori education that art ever entered my consciousness.  I don't recall ever studying art or music appreciation at traditional school, do you?  Montessori places huge value in art as a form of expression, abstraction and imagination.   The classrooms use nomenclature cards to build an awareness, vocabulary and interest in artists' works.  I've seen many great homeschool resources online for you to DIY your own art card sets.  Basically you download, print, laminate and cut  -- I've tried it. My laminating machine is a grossly under-utilised capital expenditure ever since. This is my working-mom solution:

Leave a Valentine-Making Station

Ever since Ladybug Girl turned old enough to understand Valentines day, we've made cards.  Just cards.  You would think that with all the craze and craft ideas out there, I would cook up something fancy.  
Nope, I've stuck with cards.  Here's why.

Materials are cheap and plenty:  

paper, stickers and pens.  bam.

 It makes for great no-brainer floor time together after work:

Doing it together models the practice, and the value of thoughtfulness

And best of all - you've got an instant high-interest activity tray for leave-behind play!  If you didn't know this yet, I love a good activity that Ladybug Girl can have fun learning with while I'm at the office.  There's a whole gallery built on this here.

In our early years, I started leaving behind super-simple card-making prompts like this:

that started out as a blank card, pink and red pencils, and cool stickers

A year older, I began to leave a box for letter-making.  Which she later filled with her finished cards and marked for the occasion:

The "Val(entine's) Day Box" : so special, she wrote in real letters instead of her then-usual scribbles.

Growing collection inside the box.
You can tell she wasn't big on handwriting then, but she brought the box to school and handed valentines out to her classmates

This year, to encourage her to actually write words on the cards, our card-making station looks like this:

We had all these materials in her art shelf, just now repurposed for Valentines

The top reason I've stuck with card-making year after year?  I see how she's grown better at it.
First her handwriting:
 

But best of all, her thoughtfulness.

This year I'm amazed how she had personal insight into each person she chose.

Raj gets the minecraft card; Allie gets her favourite cookies all over hers; and so on.

Sometimes the simplest traditions are the best, don't you think?