Well what are we up to lately? Isaac and Isabel started swimming lesson three weeks ago. They are in the same class and their lesson is 3pm every Saturday for half an hour. For the first time I could finally sit and watch instead of going into the water with them. Every Saturday afternoon the whole family goes together and it has become our family time. Mark and I were very impressed with Isaac's progress. He absolutely loves swimming and his fear of water has totally gone. I don't know whether it's because he got older and more brave or it's because Isabel is in the same class with him. Isabel is doing very well too. She is such a water baby, she is the youngest in the class but she swims fastest. Today the kids swam for two hours in total and we had to drag them out of the water and force them to leave.
As for Isabel's dancing class, she has improved so much since the start of this term three weeks ago. She has become part of the team (as opposed to the "outsider" and "later comer") and has done so well in following instructions and doing all the poses and actions. She still wanted me to hold her hand, stand next to her and do everything together for the first three minutes of the class. Then she would wave her hand at me and say to me, "I can dance now, you can go now. You go and sit on the couch and watch me." I was more than happy to follow her order.
Isaac is still into drawing and writing letters and numbers. I'm no longer paranoid about his academic knowledge because he has been very good with all alphabets and numbers for a long time and he is learning new words everyday. I reckon he should do pretty easily when he starts school in a couple of months time. Thanks to having a big brother, Isabel is very advanced academically. We went to Isaac's school's parents orientation last Tuesday and had good impression. In two weeks time, Isaac will start his orientation program. Would be interesting to see how he feels. We have been telling him constantly about going to school and hopefully he will adjust to the new life easily.
And the big people...
- Mark was busy working on our brand new family budget, thinking hard how we could save/invest for our retirement, and getting some finanical advisers to draw a blueprint for us... For obvious reasons it's a depressing topic for me and I had no interest participating in his initiative. I'm still in the process of trying to commit myself to get on the same page as him.
- We also briefly looked at properties on the internet and were shocked finding out that the housing prices had gone up so much since last time we looked (5 years ago). We went to two open houses two weeks ago just for fun. We liked both but both were too expensive. I guess we have given up this idea for the time being.
- My work has been so busy and I'm just thankful I don't work full time. So looking forward to the Christmas break - however I probably won't enjoy it as much as previous years because we now have a budget to stick to!
