Mom the Rehearsal Mistress

 The twins graduate kindergarten in about a month and to celebrate it, they wear little mini caps and gowns, walk onto stage, receive their scroll (conferring them honours for finger painting, playground and sand play), take a bow and curtsy before strolling off. After that, they put on their dancing shoes and do a song and dance for us. From what I've gathered,  they've been rehearsing hard at school.

Jordan came home brandishing a piece of paper. She explained that she had to learn everything on the paper and say it without it. She had lines essentially. She was one of the three narrators for their performance and she had to be word perfect by November 2.

I had flashbacks to the time in secondary school where I had to emcee my school's Awards Night concert. I had no one to really help me and it terrified me massively. I remember muttering the lines every night as I fell asleep. 

So for Jordan, the most important thing is to treat it like it's a normal thing. People go up on stage and speak all the time. Right. Well, at least I can try and make it as painless as possible.


So, how do I help her?

So my job has been to make sure that she can pronounce words like "environment", "practically", "sumptuous" and that she says words like "salmon" correctly. It's taken me back to teacher training days where we were taught to pronounce words like "pronunciation", "vehicle" and "restaurant".

For Jordan, who still doesn't understand grammar rules implicitly, she remembers the big words but not the verbs and articles which hold no meaning for her.

I get her to stand on a raised platform. A chair, a stool, she wanted the dining table but I was slightly worried about the fan lopping off her top part of her head among other things. We all gather on the floor and watch her.

I tell her to look at us in the eyes.

Her brother balances a lion atop her head and this time I don't take it down. I tell her to keep the lion on her head. It helps her stand straight and not "goyang' like a palm tree.  She's learnt the meaning of the word "goyang" since.

After a week of practicing, the hardest bit is getting the lines out of her without the script and with minimal prompting. I've taken to contextualising her lines by asking her questions that would lead to the lines as answers. So far, it's helping but that soon will have to go.

It's coming along.

All I know is that being a stage mom and rehearsal mistress is hard work. 

Read More

Mom the Research Coordinator

It was suggested that I do a series on the roles of the moms. We've seen all the cliche wall papers on Facebook about what a is, apart from just being the person who has given birth to the child.

And we also know this from the fact that our kids begin most sentences with "Mommy, can you __________ (insert action).

So, this shall be my next series.

Last week, it occurred to me that I was Evan's research coordinator. Evan loves science experiments (ex-P-riments, in his words). The problem is that he's still a little bit young to figure out the stuff needed to set up the experiments. Usually, he pulls out his Big Book of Science Experiments and randomly points to something that has sparked off his interest. We've done the Coke-Mentos experiments, water experiments, shaving foam ones as well and others that I cannot remember. His idea of my spending time with him is to do experiments with him. And we did just that, this time with inspiration from Gingerbread Mum's Milk Magic.

It had to be full fat milk. The fat globules in the milk were key to the experiment. What we did was to add food colouring into it first. The food colouring stays as a darkened dot in the milk, though the colour does slowly bleed out a little and swirls around prettily. It reminded me of the chromatography we used to do in the chem lab. That, in itself got lots of "WOW!" and "AWESOME!" (I hate it when everything is "AWESOME!" but that is another post altogether) but introduce a drop of soap detergent by way of a q-tip and colour explosions begin to occur.

So apparently detergent weakens the bonds between the fat and the proteins in the milk and the fat and soap apparently do some sort of fat bumping gymnastics which causes the colours to bump around, much to the amazement of the twins. Muffin just liked swirling the colours around but Evan and Jordan wanted to know what caused it and they kept trying to figure it out for themselves, trying it in water instead of milk, more soap, less soap, changing it to new milk claiming their swamp coloured milk had too much soap in it.

When we explained it to Evan, he could rattle it off. How much of it he understood of it, I really don't know but I do love that he's such a science geek and finding new experiments for him to do. We're going to try the erupting volcano one next but he doesn't know it yet.

Read More