panganay moments

1. He's counting. i mean, he finally has mastered the concept that there is a one-to-one correspondence between a number and its object, so that when he counts his fingers, he can show me 6 fingers when asked for 6 fingers. he can count his clementine pieces without recounting the same pieces again and assigning it more than one number. he mastered this a month ago, but i can't help it, i'm still tickled pink by his breakthrough.

2. He knows his oppositions in terms of space. Above vs below. Right vs left. Inside vs outside. Black vs white. To be honest, he started mastering this at age 2, so when we had a parent-teacher conference two months ago, I couldn’t help but feel damn proud when his teacher told us that mikka is advanced for his age in terms of his counting skills, identication of letters, numbers, and colours. He knows animals his father taught him, he watches national geographic channel, bbc, and cnn and can identify the channel logos. Not only that, he can also identify the logos of Thalys, ICE, and local Belgian IC trains. He knows if we’re doing our groceries at Delhaize, Carrefour, or GB by simply looking at the signages of the stores. He’s fooled quite a few of his uncles at our Saturday gatherings, making them believe he can actually read. Two weeks ago, he was reading the digital display on the VCR and he identified the date, saying, “it’s 2006!” and it was. I glowed. Just that morning, mikka and I had a lesson in identifying numbers, from 10s to 100s to 1000s, and he was already applying it that evening. As for telling time, I can only teach him how to identify the hour on the hour time, simply saying, “every time the minute hand (he does know the differences among the hour, minute, and second hands on our wall clock) is on 12, it’s always an ‘o’clock’.” At this point, I can’t expect him to transform the numbers 1-12 on the clock into the minute equivalents yet. As far as he knows, those are only numbers 1-12, and not 60 minutes. That will come, but not yet.

3. He’s improving with his colouring and writing skills. I can’t get over it. To distract him from the Season 3 DVDs of ‘Alias’ S and I are avidly watching before our Sunday deadline (time is so short and it’s a great and suspenseful season! Sydney vs Lauren, talk about hot spy chicks!), I sat him down to a colouring practice session which evolved into a writing session as well. after months of seeing him bring home school work with haphazard colouring, mikka has gotten quite the hang of colouring within boundaries, so that his pictures now look neater and more… identifiable. Then out of the blue, he says, “mama, I want to write the letters I-C-E. (he’s an avid fan of the German ICE trains which we have ridden twice, the first when we went to hanau last year, and the second when we visited cologne last September). So I made him write with a blue marker on one of the pages. Grasping the marker awkwardly, I could see that he had an idea of how the C should curve, and the need to attach three horizontal parallel lines to complete his letter E. the letter I must be the easiest thing to draw so there was no difficulty for him there. Then using some of the techniques of “positive praise” that super nanny jo keeps impressing in her tutorials, I saw mikka glow bloom and thrive every time I exclaimed “excellent! You’re a great colouring boy! Woohoo!” in the beginning it was mostly theatre on my part but when I saw him struggling to write his letters on his own initiative, and his colouring showing more control, I couldn’t help but let my excitement get the better of me. The first time he showed me his coloured cow, I fervently wrote the date on the bottom of the page and ran to S with the obra maestra, gushing like crazy. At the end of our colouring and writing session, mikka was strutting around the apartment, chest puffed out, stride filled with so much confidence, while S and I laughed at his newfound sense of new learning. To the point na nga that he wants to draw and draw more, kahit pagod na ako!

Nothing really puffs up a mother’s heart more than seeing her own child blossom beneath her gaze… now if I can only think of ways to help him develop better motor skills with the scissors, because that’s what his teacher told me I could help him with at home… and in this department, I really am at a loss because I don’t know how to impart such skills to him! And by the way, I was a poor student of art in my student days. Partly due to my lack of self confidence and the trauma of having an ex-boyfriend’s mom as my art teacher, who I one day discovered had told my close friends, “lara sucks in art, I don’t know why I even bother to encourage her!” and I was part of the yearbook staff that did the layouting, and she was the moderator of that “division”. I don’t think I will ever recover from that stigma; the recollection of her plastic smile as she encouraged me with what I thought were super creative ideas while deep inside she was recoiling in horror at my work.

Which is why it takes a lot of effort on my part to really buckle down and do art work with mikka. In the beginning, S told me, after I told him exasperatedly that I couldn’t draw the planes and trains mikka demanded of me, “it doesn’t matter if you can draw it or not, dear, what matters to mikka is that you’re working with him. So even if you create these funny looking objects, just do the best you can and you’ll see, it makes mikka happy because you’re with him.” Of course I have seen the wisdom of his advice, but recently, it’s gotten a little comic when mikka tells me, “mama, that doesn’t look right, the train should be bigger.” Reminds me of the time I tried to draw the setting of a short story I was taking up with my freshman literature class years back… my students, after several minutes of trying to decipher my misshapen cows and horses, chorused, “ma’am, here’s aaron, he can really draw, maybe he can draw instead…” and since that day, I have always asked my classes, “who can draw and give me a hand?” I do so chuckle at the memory. I have crazy students --- and son!