Digress a bit. For a period of time in kindy, I was in some art class. I don't know why I was signed up for it. Anyway, I only remember drawing two things:
- A dark red heart - as in the one with aorta and whatnot sticking out. And for some strange reason, it was on exhibition at my kindy graduation. I remember PM - he was my MP - laughing at it. Indeed, why did a kindergartener draw a bloody heart?! But I was strangely fond of that :p
- NDP - with the President's chair in the middle and floats in front. This memory is more blurry - I remember only the colour of the chair (red, as always!) but not the colours of the float. I recall vaguely that I was struggling with the drawing coz I didn't know how to draw the amazing floats.
Over time, the floats stopped being so amazing to me. Attention was turned to the various formations - always better on TV than at the NDP itself unless the seat was super strategic.
Watching NDP on TV from my 20s onwards was, sadly, not as exciting anymore. But I still tried my best to tune in faithfully, and read or do something with NDP in the background.
Coz I like National Day :)
Two or three years ago, I learnt about the Gottman Sound Relationship House in the course of a project at work. At the top of the house was "create shared meaning". One way to do that is via rituals.
Watching NDP on TV with Mother's fried rice and teh C was a key childhood ritual of mine. So I have been thinking of having more rituals for our little family.
In particular, I want to raise my kids as Singaporeans. Looking at them and looking at myself as a kid, I realise that they are very insular. We have been singing those lovely songs every year but more needs to be done.
Firstly, we would not leave Singapore over any long National Day weekend in future. We did it last year and spent more time travelling than on leisure. More importantly, we should celebrate National Day with and in our country.
I have been thinking about it on and off since last year. I had great plans to have a simple dinner at home so that we could eat and watch NDP on TV together, and even decided that they could go to bed slightly later so that we could catch the fireworks.
Big fail coz the NDP schedule today was different due to COVID-19. Both the morning segment and the evening segment didn't fall within our regular lunch and dinner time *.*
As every channel was showing NDP, the kids had no choice but to watch, haha! And they were quite patient about it mostly. We managed to catch both the flag and the jets (gone in five seconds :p) from our window! So happy to see that they were curious and happy to see them and the parachutes on TV :)
Kai standing to attention for the National Anthem - so proud of him!
His brothers didn't listen to me and were rolling about on our bed *.* Well, they will learn!
The flag floated by far away and we saw the reverse side - but "helicopter!"
Yu took this picture of a parachute on the TV :p
Of course they had a lot of questions:
- When is the flag coming?
- Where are jets?
- Can we see the parachutes too?
- What if they forgot to bring the parachutes?
- What if the parachutes don't open?
- Is it very high?
- Can we jump too?
It just so happened that we had a family dinner outside. That was when my 30GB data plan came in useful! Yu and I watched a little of the evening segment - we got to watch some over dinner after all, haha! But I couldn't turn up the volume so I saw only images...
Wanted a photo of me with this lovely mask from the fun pack but my koala stole the show totally!
The restaurant had people going around to take photos so I took too!
The restaurant kind of mixed up our order so the adults waited quite a while for dinner. I was quite pissed coz we could have caught the fireworks!!
We were in the car by about 8 pm but I drove s l o w l y - scared coz second time driving this car... Ya, I lousy :p We managed to catch the Pledge moment on radio at 8.20 pm - I was very happy we caught that coz Yang had been learning it the past week, from the song during dinner time and also from school. But there was no sound from behind me... Yang had dozed off! T.T
We turned into the carpark as the Anthem ended but I parked s l o w l y... By the time we rushed up, the fireworks were over!!! Our location should have sight of the Yew Tee one and maybe even a bit of the Woodlands one? Sighs...
Today, I was happy to watch the NDP segment re-run! The evening segment started just as we turned on the TV, phew!
And Yang got to recite the pledge, yeah!
Secondly, I decided I need to set up a small curriculum to teach them about Singapore, our people, our culture.
There are plenty of homeschooling resources out there but much less on national education. Since this second idea came about just before National Day, I thought I'd start with how Singapore came about. I searched YouTube for videos on our history but it wasn't easy finding something suitable for kids - need to be fun and not too chim. Going to spend some time curating videos etc. Need different levels to engage the three of them too.
Hope to have some time this week to do this instead of doing OT!
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