Pictures of Lydia Reading

DSC_0045

DSC_0054

DSC_0059

DSC_0194

Notes:

SiowFong took all of these pictures on March 3, 2007.

With respect to time spent reading to Lydia, Ma Wee does the most as she is with Lydia

during the weekdays, SiowFong does it most nights, and I do it occasionally.

Days of Discovery

April 11, 2007


Days of Discovery

Lydia seems to learn something new every day. Tonight Ma Wee informed us that when Lydia saw a typewriter on television, she waddled to the small desk area in the kitchen where SiowFong keeps her laptop, uttered some sounds, and pointed there. In another example, when SiowFong was reading some Winnie the Pooh books tonight to Lydia, SiowFong occasionally identified objects in those stories that Lydia was familiar with (such as a pig, a bear, and a ball). After SiowFong mentioned those things, Lydia left SiowFong’s lap to look for them and bring them back to SiowFong. In yet another instance, when SiowFong asks Lydia, “Who is mommy’s precious?” Lydia smiles at SiowFong and then points to herself.


Languages

Even though Lydia is being exposed to three languages, Mandarin (from Ma Wee and SiowFong), English (from SiowFong and I), and Cantonese (from me), she understands us much of the time irrespective of the language that is being communicated to her. Because Lydia spends the most time with Ma Wee when we are away at work during the week and because Ma Wee and SiowFong communicate a good bit when SiowFong is home, Lydia hears more Mandarin at home than she does the other two languages.


The Preschool Years

In the book entitled The Educated Child: A Parent’s Guide from Preschool Through Eighth Grade authored by William Bennett (the former Secretary of Education under President Reagan), Chester Finn, and John Cribb (Free Press: 1999), the authors begin the first chapter with this paragraph: “The first three to five years of life are, in many ways, the most critical period in a child’s education. Observers of human nature have long recognized the profound importance of early learning. ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,’ advises the Book of Proverbs. ‘The most important part of education is right training in the nursery,’ Plato observed.

In that first chapter of the book (pages 21 through 24), the authors write, “Consider a few of the physical, intellectual, and emotional developments that mark the preschool years:

Growth of curiosity

Children are born to learn…It is crucial to fan those early sparks of curiosity throughout the preschool years…Teachers rank curiosity as a vital quality for a child to possess when entering kindergarten – more important than knowing the alphabet or how to count.

Development of interests

The interests children find early in life can be powerful predictors of later academic success. For example, teachers know that youngsters are more likely to become good readers if they develop a fondness for hearing stories read aloud during the preschool years. They learn to write more easily if they acquire an interest in drawing and scribbling before they reach school age.

Formation of character

Students who have been taught the importance of hard work and responsibility are much more likely to get good grades. Such ideals and habits take root before the school years. They settle into young minds and hearts through the standards that parents set, the exhortations they offer, the expectations they establish, and the examples they place before their children.

Shaping of personality

Attitudes and dispositions may change in later life, but early childhood experiences are crucial contributors to the complex mix of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make up each person.


Social development

In their earliest relationships with parents, in particular, children gain understandings of how others will treat them and how they should treat others. These expectations are long lasting, helping to shape social behavior throughout adulthood.

Brain development

A child’s brain structure continues to develop after birth…Some research suggests that early childhood experiences – the images a youngster sees, the language he hears, the books he’s exposed to – may affect the actual wiring of the brain.

Language development

The amount of language learned during the first few years is awe-inspiring. By the time a child is three years old, he should be able to understand most of the words he will use in everyday conversation for the rest of his life…

[One of SiowFong’s sisters, MayLee, a university librarian in Australia who has been doing a lot of research about children since we received Lydia, wrote SiowFong today to tell her that a preschool child can learn up to five languages!]

In some respects, the chances of your child’s doing well in school are determined before he reaches kindergarten. Likewise, your greatest contribution to what you hope will be a lifetime of learning comes now, in the preschool years. If you do your job well at the beginning, your child is likely to thrive when he comes into contact with other teachers.

If you provide a loving and safe home; if you give him the feeling that he is cared about and cared for; if you provide a stimulating environment and ample changes for him to explore it; if you set sensible limits and the right examples; if you read to him, play with him, talk to him, and answer his questions – if you do all these things, schoolteachers should be able to serve him well. If you do not do these things, it will be immensely difficult for professional educators to save your child from academic mediocrity.

You may find that assertion disconcerting. Of course there are exceptions. But the weight of a vast body of education research, as well as the experience of countless teachers and parents, stands behind this statement: much of your child’s learning potential is set for life at a very young age.”

Pictures of Cheeks

DSC_0040

Lydia and mom

DSC_0060a

Profile view of Lydia

DSC_0062a

Three-quarters view of Lydia's face

DSC_0077

Dad with Lydia

DSC_0088

Lydia looking at mom while mom is taking Lydia's picture

DSC_0090

Lydia loves to point. Here she is pointing at mom's camera.

Notes:

All these pictures were taken on March 24, 2007 during the one-hour horse-drawn, covered carriage tour through Stanley Park in Vancouver, British Columbia when rain was steadily falling.

SiowFong took all of these pictures except the first one, DSC_0040.

(The flash mounted on the camera's hot shoe was aimed upward at the carriage's white and green canopy, so the light was bounced into the face(s) of the subject(s).)

Easter Sunday

April 8, 2007


Shoreline Nursery

Our usual Sunday morning routine has been as follows. First SiowFong and I attend the first service at 9:00 AM at Shoreline, an English-speaking church, while Ma Wee stays home with Lydia since Ma Wee does not understand any English. Then SiowFong and Ma Wee go to one of the two local Chinese churches that are both within a few miles of our home to attend the 11:00 AM service while Lydia and I remain home.

Today, Easter Sunday, was different because all four of us went to Shoreline at 9:00 AM. Lydia went to the toddler nursery for the first time, and she encountered about ten other children who were around her age. When we checked Lydia into the nursery, she hesitated being placed into the arms of one of the volunteers, a Caucasian lady in her mid-50s, so SiowFong carried Lydia into the room. To ease Lydia’s transition into the nursery, SiowFong stayed with Lydia during the first half of the service, and during the second half of the service, Ma Wee assumed SiowFong’s role in the nursery. According to SiowFong and Ma Wee, Lydia’s first experience with the nursery was uneventful. She played pretty peacefully with her peers, and she ate her graham cracker during snack time.


The Absolute Need for Easter

Pastor Bob prefaced his sermon today with these words, “For Christians, Easter is the grandest day of the year.” For many Americans, Pastor Bob’s statement may seem odd, particularly in light of all the fanfare and marketing surrounding Christmas, but despite the publicity surrounding Christmas, Easter is the most important occasion.

Why is that so?

“Ralph Wood, professor of theology and literature at Baylor University, once asked a group of seminary students to compare two individuals: an astute collegian who tells you insistently that sin and the fall of man are fallacies invented by the superstitious, and a young pagan in a remote village whom you find in the woods sacrificing a chicken on a makeshift altar. "Which man is farther from the truth?" he asked. The students hemmed and hawed but hesitantly agreed that the pagan boy, however primitively, understood something the other did not. There is a need in our lives for atonement. There is a need for blood.

As Malcolm Muggeridge regularly insisted, the depravity of man is at once the most unpopular of the Christian doctrines and yet the most empirically verifiable. We have within us a basic sense of our desperate condition. We are aware--or often reminded--that we are not quite what we were intended to be. Something went wrong, something we yearn to see made right, but somehow find ourselves incapable of restoring.

For generations, the Israelites labored to follow laws that were meant to atone for their sin and restore them to the presence of God: "And you shall provide a lamb a year old without blemish for a burnt offering to the LORD daily; morning by morning you shall provide it" (Ezekiel 46:13). The language of sacrifice and offering was found throughout Near Eastern culture. But Israel's sacrifices were not the same as blood shed by those attempting to appease the many gods they feared and followed. The prophets sent throughout Israel's history were forever insisting that God wanted more than the empty performance of sacrifice. He wanted sacrifices offered with hearts of worship. He wanted lives yearning to be in his presence, though recognizing the fear of such an act. He wanted to be near his chosen people, and He made them a way through the blood of a spotless lamb.

When Scripture speaks of Christ as the Lamb of God, it is easy to think of it as something like a symbolic code. Each time we read of the lamb or the lion in Scripture, it is easy to move through the text with an instantaneous recognition: The lamb is Christ. The lion is Christ. But Oxford scholar John Lennox reminds us that these passages tell us not only who it is, but what it is. It is Christ as the lamb, the spotless lamb whose blood my life requires. The description moves well beyond symbolism. He is the Lamb whose blood atones my depravity, the Lamb who moves me forever into the presence of God.

When the apostle John describes his vision of heaven in the book of Revelation, the Lamb is found in the center of a singing multitude. "Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders" (Rev. 5:6). Lennox thus asks thoughtfully: "But how can a slain lamb stand?" On this day of holy week, it is an image that poses much for our hearts and minds. The Lamb who bore my sins, forever bears the scars of my atonement, even as he stands.

As the Lamb, Christ has reached a need we could not. He has become the sacrifice we could not give. He is the Lamb who was slain so that we could bow and sing in the presence of God on Easter Sunday.

The hymnist declares the glory of Christ, the only one who is worthy:

Behold the Lamb of God!
Into the sacred flood
of Thy most precious blood
my soul I cast:
Wash me and make me clean within,
And keep me pure from every sin,
Till this life be past.

Indeed, behold the Lamb of God! The Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Cornerstone, the Shepherd, our Advocate has overcome. The Slain Lamb stands.”

(Source: Jill Carratini. “The Lamb of God.” www.rzim.org., April 4, 2007.)