Stephen started going back to school this week. It's great seeing him getting better.

Last night we brought Stephen to walk-walk in our neighbourhood. He doesn't seem to like the loud music and he was yelling quite a bit. Than we had our dinner at Yoshinoya but he wasn't interested (which we thought he would be bcos there was rice & some fried finger snacks) and he only bit off only one part of each finger snack (he enjoys crispy food). Finally he had his share at Mac where he was contented with his cup of iced milo, nuggets (he clapped his hands & shouted 'yeh' when I flashed out the first piece of nugget for him) & fries. For Stephen, we would try to pace his eating more so to moderate his prefences in eating one type of food over another.

The children enjoyed having grandma's presence when she came over to stay for Fri night. They were so excited that they refused to sleep on their own bed but squeezed into the same bed as grandma. Papa had to move Stephen over in the middle of the night bcos it was simply too close for comfort.

Yesterday, my mom tried to help Stephen say 'mimi' (as in 'mi' in mommy) as he often has a 'b' sound for his 'mama', and she managed to get him to say that for a few times. Stephen seems better with saying 'mimi' so now I'll be his 'mimi'. A couple of days back, Stephen was looking at Deborah's toy and said 'jie jie sister'. With Annie, he repeated after her as she said the word as she pointed to the different words (with pictures) showing different emotions such as happy, sad, angry,etc. It was very nice to have Yifan coming over during the week to just play with Stephen. Oh yes, I handed Stephen my mom's pillow and asked him to put it on 'popo's bed' and he walked into her room and he did it.

From these, it's not difficult to see that Stephen's awareness of himself and others and his willingness to verbalise is increasing. For this we just got to press on. The other area to concurrently work on is managing his emotions. Looking forward to this week's 'lessons' with Stephen...