SarahLinh's Blog

I’ve promised myself I will find dance classes for Sarah as she seems talented at dancing and she truly enjoys dancing too.

So we’ve found a couple of schools (there must be many more but we just don’t know any addresses) and we went around to ask for details.

The first school we went to told us there was a modern dance class that evening and we should come back to check it out. So we went to the class and there were only 3 children of different ages and different levels. The teacher seemed nice and pro. The problem was the class itself. The music wasn’t exciting at all and the class was just a bore. The style of dance seemed highly inappropriate for a 4 year old. Each of the 3 kids were practicing different steps and there was no class dancing at all.

Although I felt from the very first moment it wasn’t right, we did stay until the end of the class to see Sarah’s reaction. She loved the class so much that she was much more interested in watching an ant running on the tiles (!!) and despite the teacher’s and other kids’ insistence, she totally refused to join the class.

There is another option that we are going to see this afternoon….I do hope it’s better….

These are Sarah’s latest paintings.

 I feel proud of her not only for painting so nicely but for the fact of getting new surprising, sometimes impossible for me to understand, ideas.

Flower

Teddy

This a teddy bear, more precisely Mr. Bean’s Teddy. And the brown spots you can see at his side are his tracks….

Windmill

Duck tracks

Believe it or not, these are “duck tracks, for people to know where the blue duck went, where the pink duck went, etc….” The idea belongs to the painter hehe and I am still wowed by it.

About 2 weeks ago Sarah was sick. She’s got a throat infection, most likely a pharingitis or tonsilitis due to drinking a pop with ice in it.(I was against letting her drink that in the first place, but the circumstances resulted in her drinking it anyway)

Luckily I have discovered the wonder medicine that puts her infections away in 3 days, so she wasn’t even sick for more than that. Out of 3 days, 1 day she didn’t eat anything at all, 2nd day she ate but less than usually and the 3rd day she ate normally. Despite this, in these 3 days she lost the 1 kg and half she gained in the last months and turned skinny, underweight looking and pale.

So as she doesn’t have a very healthy look, I’ve decided to make some changes in ehr diet to help her gain weight. This is kinda difficult since she almost has no appetite and she is forever restless.

So I’ve bought a lot of different kinds of food for her and I’m trying my best to make her eat them…as she is a very picky eater too…Waiting to see the result of this campain….hopefully soon enough

” I want to be a pink superhero with long orange hair. I want to fly in the sky and save people. If there is a fire, I’ll put it off with lots of foam…”

Later:

” Mommy, why am I not a superhero?”

Funny words, comming from a 4 year old who still refuses to eat by herself at times. Some people would say watching TV is harmful since it gives children deceiving ideas like these but I’m not so sure about it. To me, it seems a good thing that she can actually produce such a series of thoughts…and in the end she did realize without me telling her that she isn’t a superhero. So it didn’t really give her a fake view over herself.

This is her last day of vacation, she is going back to kindergarten tomorrow and I bet she won’t be very happy about it. We should go out to take some fresh air, maybe at the bach or somewhere…I’m still thinking about it. She didn’t nap at noon (again!) and she might be cranky and unreasonable (again!).  After this though, she will get to spend very little time with me on weekdays so I would like to take advantage of the time together we have left.

Later…

So we did go out. We went to the beach, then we went to Highlands Coffee to eat a cake. They didn’t have any cakes though which was really disappointing for both of us since sodas and other drinks you can find anywhere but that’s the only place where they have such good cakes.

After that, we went to the supermarket for a short shopping session and dinner. At least it didn’t rain anymore because the last week was too rainy for my taste.

Outside Highlands Coffee

Cranky (I told you...)

Cooling down at the coffee shop

Today it didn’t rain anymore so we decided to go out. We went to the Front Beach park because we seldomly go there and it was nice and shady. A little bit more crowded than I expected it to be on a working day. Sarah wanted to take pictures with the statues, but not with all of them, only the ones she liked. There was also a nice sea breeze that we enjoyed. Too bad we couldn’t stay for longer but, in spite of the shade from the trees, it was awfully hot. So we walked around for about 15 minutes, took pictures and then we left. We decided to go to Garden coffee shop to drink a fruit smoothy.

People say Vung Tau is too small a city and there isn’t much to do but I think it’s beautiful and its combination of beaches, mountains and new broad streets is charming. I guess the air is pretty clean too thanks to those trees on the mountains and the ocean. It’s also a blessing to be able to go to the beach whenever you have 1-2 hours of free time and not having to drive for hours to get to the seaside. The city, small as it is, is still bustling with motorcycles, people and cars and I don’t miss the impossible jam, dirt and noise of a bigger city.

I do wish it had more facilitiesfor foreigners, like an international school, books in English at the bookstore or a gym with an English speaking instructor. But even without all these, I love Vung Tau and I rarely feel the urge to go somewhere else.

Here are Sarah’s pictures at the park:

"This lady has undies hahahaha"

Coconut trees are her favourite

It was hot from the sun...

Fishing boats

Here are some of Sarah’s drawings. I have noticed lately they are getting more and more complicated. It’s still a mistery to me where she gets all these ideas…One thing she doesn’t like to do is color the drawings. It’s probably overwhelming for her to try and color all those small characters, given that they are so many

What I like the most about her drawings are her original representations of things. She doesn’t draw things the way I show her or the way she sees somewhere else, she never tries to copy, she just draws them the way she imagines them. She can still remember things she hasn’t seen in a long time, like a Christmas tree, a snail and so on. It’s also interesting how her characters evolve as she changes her views and starts understanding more about the world around her. The human characters in particular look different almost every month so I suppose her perception changes quickly.

A funny thing she likes to do is to draw price tags on the drawings and write a “price” on it so if you want to see a drawing or to keep it for a while you have to pay for it )

Sarah got a new car. Even if she is a girl she totally loves it. It looks like a real car and it moves amazingly well. Oh and it’s R/C operated which makes it twice more fun. After choosing it herself and playing with it for a while she declared “This is the best car ever! It goes round and round and round” .

My point of view, as a parent: It looks really fun and it sure helps develop eye/hand coordination…Sarah seems to use it much better than me now after she has practiced hehe.

The best car ever

You can notice the unusual shape of the remote control. It’s  easy to grab…