Sharing Jennifer Lopez Twins Joy!

Seems like twins is the latest fashion statement. Jennifer Lopez is on the latest People Magazine cover with her twins, Max and Emme. Her twins boy and girl were born last month on 22 February.
I share Jennifer's twins joys when my twins, Asher and Gwyneth was born on 12 October 2004. It is a indescribable feeling but it is marvellous. You felt incredibly blessed with a girl and a boy born to you at the same time. See Lopez's tired eyes and glowing face and you would probably understand what I meant.

Amazingly, Jennifer Lopez is not the only celebrity having twins. Angelina Jolie is pregnant with twins now; Marcia Cross from "Desperate Housewife" is also happily blessed with her currently 13 month old twins girls. Even Dora The Explorer, one of my twins' favourite TV show, had caught up with the twins' fashion with a twins brother and sister!

Teaching my kids to be offensive to School Bullies

The last time I wrote about my twins being bullied in preschool, a website "Coffee Grounds", primarily discussing about school bullies, picked up my story to relate to his readers. I find that interesting as finally some parents congregate to share and hopefully seek some practical solutions in a common issue that they faced with their young kids.

Perhaps as a first time parent, it amazes me that school bullying could occur at such a young age (my twins were only about three years old when the incident happened). At that time, I was thinking hard if my parenting skills could have gone "hay wired" in anyway? Maybe as parents, we could have entrenched such a strong mindset of good behaviour in our kids that when school bullying occurs, the kids did not know how to deal or react to it.

So recently, my husband and I decided to teach our twins to be on the mildly offensive side to their school bullies should any incident happen again.

"If Jarren beat you again, tell him to stop it, and quickly tell your teacher about it." We role play in front of them a few times. I noticed that my twin son brightened up immediately as if he was armed with a "new weapon". We got both twins to role play with us until they are both confident about saying,"Stop it, stop beating me .....I'll go and tell Teacher Michelle now...".

A week after the role play, my twin son told me cheerfully that he had fend off one of his friend who tried to beat him. I praised him for being brave. He definitely feels more confident in preschool now. It is a stark contrast in comparison to his worried face every morning when I brought him to preschool previously.

Are kids having fun?

In our daily and busy life, we often sent our kids to the childcare centre early in the morning before we went to work and brought them home after work in the evening. The kids followed a routine almost daily for 5 days.

Sometimes, they would ask,"why do I have to go to a childcare, why do I have to take a nap in school, why do you have to work?". These are questions that are easy but also difficult to answer. In this "cat eats dog" society coupled with rising inflation, a dual income in a family is almost ascertain to ensure some quality of life. So talking about kids having fun? Are they? Perhaps on the weekend only where you would bring them to the zoo, parks, excursion for some fun. You can see the delighted faces smiling at you for the whole day.

But I pitied the new generation of preschoolers or young kids. Before they joined the first year of primary school, they have got to recognise words, understand simple arithmetic and science. They need to familiarise with all these to be in the "norm" group and not in the "outstanding" group of students. So some preschoolers' weekends are spent in phonics, brain stimulation, science and language enrichment classes, just to prepare them for a good head start in their life. And these enrichment schools usually emphasize 'learn through play'.

During our generation, we only needed to know the letters of the alphabet and recognising the numbers, who cared about addition, subtraction in arithmetic or spelling of words in English?

So are the kids today having fun? I wonder?