July 2016

Can You Play Hide and Seek in a Small Apartment

little-boy-hide-and-seekIf you’d asked me a few years ago, whether we could successfully play hide and seek in our home (apartment, unit, whatever you want to call it), I would’ve probably laughed and said “No way”. Why? Well, let’s see. We live in a small 3 bedroom place. Three bedrooms, lounge/TV room, and kitchen. And that’s it. Well, okay there are sperate bathroom and toilet, but that really is it.

So how could we play hide and seek and actually have fun doing it? Where would we hide? Surely finding anyone, even a 5 year old, would be easy, and the game would quickly be over. read more

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What Should We Do About Overweight Children

overweightThe topic of overweight children and in particular obesity, recently came up when my son, Jay, came home and told us that one of his classmates is only as couple of kilograms lighter than me. Now to put this in perspective, I’m an average height adult male (just under 6 feet tall) and at the high end of the average weight range for my height. The boy on the other hand is around 7 or 8 years old. I haven’t done the math but I reckon he’d be classified as obese.

The thing is, here in Singapore they have a system set up to help deal with weight problems in children. They didn’t do this in Australia when I was a boy, but hopefully they’re doing something similar now. And I’m pretty sure there are other countries that do have similar programs to Singapore, especially with the obesity problems being faced in many countries these days. read more

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What to do with a Stuttering Child

helpI’ve been told that around 5% of children will develop a stutter that lasts more than 6 months. This is what happened to my son, Jay. To be completely frank, I’ll admit that I don’t recall when he started to stutter, but I can tell you that by the end of his first year of school it had been there for more than 6 months. In fact he had been stuttering for more than a year.

Being a loving father who believes his son is perfect in every way (even after threatening to sell him on ebay), I was in a little bit of denial as to whether it was really a problem. Fortunately (for Jay if not for me) my wife was more believing and convinced me that we should take him to a speech therapist to at least have him checked and see what our options were. read more

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My Son Pranked Me – Twice

ice-cream-50402_1280I’m sure that in this day and age we’ve all seen, or at least heard about, the prank videos on YouTube. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Jay decided to prank me, his father and best friend.

Before we get to the pranks though I just want to point out that I haven’t let my son watch the prank videos that you’re probably thinking of. No, the prank videos he’s seen are the ones where the prank occurs in the world of minecraft. On servers where several people play together it’s quite common for the gamers to prank each other, usually in non-violent ways like covering an entire area with slime blocks, or moving their entire house to a different place. read more

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Funny Things Kids Do – H goes D’oh

doh-slapRecently SO (my wife) and I were talking about her nieces and nephews (she has 10 of them) and I was reminded of an incident that occurred shortly after we moved to Jakarta. For a little background, SO and I met and got married in Australia while she was studying there, and then moved to Indonesia shortly after.

Anyway, back to the story. H (name withheld to avoid embarrassment for H and any possible harm he may do me if he reads this) is now in his late teens and studying at university, but at the time he was around 2 or 3 years old. read more

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