Water baby

It's my belief that this stems from the McGregor genes. Every since, she was old enough to hold her head up (4 months), Alicia has been exposed to the joys of swimming.

Most swim classes in Singapore cater to babies from 6 months so it was two full months later that I could actually sign her up for official swim "training".

Classes at that age consist mainly of attempting to dispel water phobia (which you would think can't possibly exist given babies lived in a sac of liquid for close to 10 months!) which includes dunking their heads underwater and also teaching them water safety.

From day one, Alicia braved these tasks without so much as a whimper so much so that her swim teacher decided to use her for activity demonstration (instead of her 'floatie').

This all continued nicely until she was just over a year old. It's funny how kids change overnight. She still loved playing in the water but absolutely whinges about having to do any form of structures swim drills....sheesh....so we decided it wasn't worth the $25/lesson to put up with a struggling kid and we were better off letting her play in the baby pool at our place.


Here she is....all smiles as usual when she's by the pool. I put this picture in cos' I thought it was funny how she picked out matching toys (which I've been told look like DILDOs! hmph...) to her wet suit (which I've also been told is absolutely fugly...sad to say, I have to agree).

Catching up

Lazy days are here again. When I started this blog, my first entry was about how long I would sustain this blog and at the moment, I'm fighting a losing battle. Sigh....

I could attribute this to the fact that work zaps all my energy and blogging inspiration or that Alicia's developmental milestones have plateaued with age and there's nothing too exciting to blog about but nah, it's just plain old laziness.

Anyway, here's an update on Alicia. She's like the little girl with the little curl in the middle of her forehead (literally too!) - when she's good, she's very very good and when she's bad, she's horrid.

Fortunately, she tends to have more good days. She typically wakes up happy, loves to play cheeky little tricks on everyone and has absolutely no stranger anxiety. Which is a good thing we're not living in NY anymore or I would be in constant fear that someone would kidnap her.

But the one thing she refuses to do is talk. I watched her "best friend" at playgroup go from saying "Mummy" to forming two word sentences like "Water, mummy", hoping that she do some of that mimicking kids her age are good for. But nope, nada, not a peep, just random "urrgh, urrgh" whines when she wants something.

Breakthrough though in the last couple of weeks. She now says "Mama" and "Dada" pretty clearly and "up" when she wants to be carried and finally after months and months of coaxing, she made my maid's day by saying "yaya" (tagalog for nanny).

She's also gotten into the habit of saying "bye" followed by a flying kiss which incites squeals of delight from the aunties and uncles we meet when we go out.

All this talking only happens when she's in the mood. Otherwise, she has no qualms about clamming up and acting like a "yaya" diva when you're trying to get her to perform.

I guess we all have our off days.....even toddlers!