I love Pocoyo

I first met Pocoyo and his friends last month when we stumbled onto their program on Disney Playhouse. It had a very different concept for a children's program which to my surprise, worked! Big Buddy, and even Little Buddy, enjoy it very much.



The program revolves around the adventures of Pocoyo and his friends, Elly, Pato, Loula and Sleepy Bird as they explore the world around them. The characters are depicted in bold block colours with very little accessories. To further minimise distraction, the usage of props is kept to a minimal and when present, are always integral to the storyline. All these help young children focus on the main points. The storylines are simple, often exploring a single concept per show. Narrator Stephen Fry does a great job as he guides Pocoyo along, often engaging the viewer to participate too.

As for me, I love the artwork, humour and the antics.

Hey, I sound as if I am Zinkia Entertainment's spokesman, raving on and on about this precocious little boy! Anyway, I invite you to check it out and let me know what you think.

Can I go to the pet shop?

Over the weekend, we asked Big Buddy where would he like to go and he requested to visit the pet shop. I suppose most children enjoy small animals and both Big Buddy and Little Buddy are no exception. Both are avid animal lovers and they love visiting pet shops, parks and the zoo.

Some of our neighbours are pet owners and whenever Little Buddy meets them walking their dogs, they willingly allow him to hold the leash and walk the dog for them. To my surprise, he is unafraid to approach large dogs and has even made friends with several furry friends.

Diaper-free afternoon naps

All of a sudden, Big Buddy said he did not want to wear his pull-ups for his afternoon nap 2 days ago. I was more than happy to oblige as I was desperately wanting to wean him off pull-ups for naps and bedtime at night too. I told him that he cannot wet the bed and will have to go to the toilet should he need to pass urine. He nodded his head with a serious look and said 'OK!'. When he woke up 2.5 hours later, I was so pleased to see that his briefs and bed were dry. I praised him, telling him he was behaving like a big boy.

That was 2 days ago and since then, he has been incident-free for his pull-ups-free afternoon naps!

I am so proud of him and of how quickly he managed to arrive at this achievement, considering that he had always woken up with wetted pull-ups despite bringing him to the toilet before his naps. Perhaps this had been in part due to our rule that he can no longer wear pull-ups when he goes out with us during the weekends. In a way, I was glad too that this whole business of toilet-training for naps was child-led. One mommy encouraged me to adopt this method and true-enough, there were no tears nor fights to it.

Previous attempts to toilet-train him for night-time were disasterous as he absolutely refused to be woken up to use the toilet and ended up wailing loudly, waking up the household. Mommy friends had shared with me how they managed to totally toilet-train their children and I tried out their methods to no avail. I was left wondering when it would be Big Buddy's turn.....

Till now!.....It gives me hope that the goal of Big Buddy being night-time toilet trained comes within sight and I look forward to the day when I can stop buying pull-ups for him. Yipee!

Celebrating Parents' Day

Our church has the annual tradition of concurrently celebrating both Father's Day and Mother's Day in June each year, dubbing it Parents' Day. I personally find it meaningful as parenting is a partnered responsibility and celebrating both occasions on the same day confers due recognition to both parties at the same time.

This year, Hubby was asked to pray for the parents of our church and on behalf of the parents, to pray for the youth of our church too. I was listening to his prayer and I was overwhelmed that God considered Hubby and I qualified to be the earthly guardians of our two sons. Yes, parenting is indeed a privilege and an awesome lifelong responsibility. We not only look after our children's physical needs but also their emotional, social, psychological welfare and as Christian parents, their spiritual growth too. It really seems daunting now that I have typed it out, somehow it sounds less intimidating when I say it in my nightly prayers :)

However, apart from the demands of parenting, we have also experienced immense joy, amusement, pride and satisfaction as we witness their growth, antics and achievements. There were the tears, fears, stress and I-am-so-mad-till-I-want-to-pull-out-my-hair moments but definitely nothing else comes close to what our children have given us.

On this Parents' Day, I want to say Thank You to God for adding both our sons to our family. Thank you too, to Big Buddy and Little Buddy, for being such joys in our lives. Our hearts are full.....

Movies and more movies!

Hubby and I are movie buffs and we get our fix from Hollywood Clicks. It is an online DVD rental with a doorstep delivery service.

We love it for the convenience and the huge library of movies, documentaries and TV series available. For a reasonable subscription fee, we are no longer passive audiences watching whatever Starhub pushes out on their various cable channels. I am reveling in the low-cost opportunity of finally being able to check out some indie/cult movies that I might otherwise not be able to have access to.

We have been so satisfied with this option that recently, we upgraded ourselves from a 2-disk plan to the 3-disk plan and are now looking forward to more home entertainment.

Cool music site

I stumbled upon this cool website Project Playlist while browsing through the applications on Facebook. I don't know about you folks but I find those invitations to Mob Wars, Vampires, Zombies, Slayers and whatever-else-biting/slaying/warring type of useless applications super irritating.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find Project Playlist. It allows you to create and share playlists by consolidating songs which are already residing on the internet. Although I could not find all of my favourite songs, it was however compehensive enough to allow me to create some decent playlists that accompanied me while I tap away at my workstation. The cool standalone player is pretty nifty too.

Go check it out!