It has been 5 months after our little hero celebrated his second birthday. Haven't shared anything about him ever since but although I still call him 'baby' most of the time, our Ady Rifqi is now a toddler who is busy exploring things around him.
I wish time could move slower so he won't grow up too fast. I want to spend more time with him while he is very dependent of me because sooner or later he will become more independent, prefers his own space and going to spend more time with his friends rather than his old mama.
...and I'm so gonna miss this moment forever :-(
Although people usually refer two-years old kids as 'terrible two', I may not totally agree with that. In my opinion it is a lot more easier to handle a two years old Ady than the younger version of him because he can now understand and convey what he wants. Within the past five months his development is tremendous and the most significant of all is his ability to talk.
Ady may not be fluent enough talking and he is still babbling in his own language, but knowing what he needs is good enough. Among his favourite lines are
"nak milk" (want milk),
"nak air/eat" (want water/eat),
"nak balik umah" (want to go back),
"nak main train" (want to play train),
"jom main" (let's play) and he also likes saying
"eeeeeiii" when he saw gross or nasty things. Although he is still building his vocabulary to talk, he understands some instructions and even what people are talking either in malay or english. He can also now tell us when he is uncomfortable with his diaper or just had a poopoo - helpful info indeed.
Ady surprised me with few of his behaviours and one of them is being pro-active at throwing rubbish into the trash bin. Whenever he sees empty wrapper or anything identified as trash he will pick up and throw it without being asked. He also likes to help cleaning after our cats finish eating their wet food. If he sees the empty plates he will stack and put them on the kitchen counter next to the sink and throws the newspaper into the bin. When he did that for the first time I was really surprised because we never taught him the process. His actions reflected how kids can learn only through observation and therefore as parents, we should be more careful at what we are doing.
In addition to that, Ady is a concern fella. If he heard either of us saying we are in pain he will go into our room, open the drawer, take out bottle of aloe vera gel, bring it to us and even apply the gel with his fingers on our pain area. We always use the aloe vera gel on him if he got bitten by ants or mosquito, which he refers as pain so he replicates that. Again, the power of observation.
Growing up with five cats made our little gem a cat lover too. Among the five, his closest furry friend is Neslo. Neslo is a male cat and the biggest among the five. He is the 'house cat' type. He sleeps with us almost every night and even love squeezing himself in between us when ever we sit on the couch watching tv (he is now sleeping next to me while I'm typing this). Almost every day Ady grabs Neslo and kisses him with a "mmmuaaahhh". He even hug / cuddle the cat, sit on top of him, pinch his face and sometimes pull his tail but Neslo must have love Ady too because he either sit still or run away. Ady never had a single scratch from Neslo.
He still plays with the other four, but the cats sometimes run away from him. One of them, named MiuMiu used to give Ady a lot of scratches until he cried but Ady never stop wanting to play with him. He is always excited when he sees cats anywhere we went to. Actually Ady is not only fond of cats but other animals too. We even had to accompany him to pet shops because he always want to stop and watch the fish, cats, dogs, hamsters and birds. Will definitely bring him to the national zoo one day.
Alhamdulillah since 1 to 2 months back Ady can already count 1 until 10 in english by his own. He still couldn't recite A to Z without guidance but he knows the sequence and able to recite the alphabets together with us or with the song. The positive side of being a YouTube addict made him able to sing and understand few nursery rhymes and also increase his vocabs especially on transportation, because he just love them! Even most of his toys consists of cars, trains, busses, airplanes, trucks and others.
I couldn't wait to see whether Ady would follow my footsteps in the area of art, so when he requested to have a set of colour pencils I got all excited. Bought him a colouring book but I ended up colouring some of the pictures because the little boy only knows how to scribble. Or else he just requested me to draw something and most frequent one is to draw him a bus.
Since Ady is still unable to control his hand with the colour pencils I somehow got an idea to utilise them in a different way. On a printed out sheet with colourful circles, I taught him on colours and put a matching colour pencil to each of the circle. After two days Ady managed to do it by his own and the result is on the picture above.
In order to make him explore his creativity, I have made Ady a homemade play dough out of flour, salt, oil, water and food colouring. It was his first experience playing with dough and guess what, he did not want his hands to be dirty at first. I had to make few shapes and even finger puppets out of the dough before he got interested. That homemade dough didn't last long though and turned yucky on the next day. What a waste. We then bought him a Play Dough instead and he likes playing with it.
Ady is surrounded with people who love him. Not in the picture are his Nenek, Opah, Tok Wan, rest of the aunties, uncles and cousins.
There might be more development progress that I do not share here but on top of all I am glad and happy to see Ady becoming a well behaved boy. He still nags, cries on top of his lung, runs when ever to whereever he wants or says "nanakkkk" (don't want) loudly with a struggle in front of shops he doesn't want to enter, but that is just him being a kid.
We are proud of you, little boy and continue making us proud will ya?
xoxo,
Mama.
