Learning Can Be Fun
I struggle as a parent everyday, from the moment I open my eyes till when I snuggle up with lil Aaron to go to sleep every night. No one ever tells you how difficult it is being a mummy or a daddy and if only all kids came with manuals, wouldn’t our lives be a whole lot easier?
Ethan’s is now in his 1st year of real kindergarten and I have taken it upon myself to help him by ‘tutoring’ him. I help him with his homework every afternoon and I help him with his BM, English and Mandarin reading. Recently I’ve also started to teach him Maths and I have to admit that my patience is wearing thin. As a child my parents never demonstrated much patience with my brother and me so I never really acquired the skill (patience). So I find myself very hot tempered when I am teaching him and most of the time end up scolding him and sometimes even hitting him. (YES, I am ashamed) I admit he has learnt a LOT in 6 short months and even his teacher is surprised that he is one of the top english readers in his class now. He went from reading Peter & Jane Series 2A to 5A. (as a gauge, his friend Daniel is in Year 6 kindy and he is reading 4B) There are only 2 other kids in his class reading 5A now, so I am proud but my impatience is getting the better of me.
Over the short March school holidays, I went through his work as usual with reading and writing, using the old boring repetitive technique because I found that kids learn very well through repetition. Repeat, repeat & repeat and they will eventually get it! I was begining to forget about having fun like a 5 year old should. I was getting quite fed up that he kept forgetting his mandarin characters, even though he kept writing pages of the same characters.
So on the very last day of the 1 week holiday, I decided …. heck..who cares if he can’t remember how to write it, let him have some fun painting them. Ethan loves to paint, so I got him to paint the mandarin characters on A4 paper and this is what he said. “mummy, this is so much fun”
Here is a video of him painting the last character - shou , unfortunately I was having so much fun too that I forgot to take out the camera till the last word!
oooppps!! I just noticed that I entered the wrong year for the movie title, it is March 2009 not 2008. I am too lazt to re-edit the video and take another hour to upload it to youtube, so it will stay as 2008, please forgive me! 
Random Things Going On…
A few nights ago we hosted dinner in our house for Chris’ family and after dinner we were about to play a game of UNO when I noticed that Chris’ 10 Year old niece was more interested in watching Beverly Hills Chihuahua, so I asked… “are you gonna play UNO or watch the movie” Emma retorted.. “haven’t you heard of Multitasking?” I shut up and dealt the cards! I wonder what they teach 10 year olds in school nowadays??
Over the last 2 months, I’ve been Working hard to relaunch one of my subscription websites so finally last month I sent out an email promotion about the new launch and had a 5.25% conversion rate. I was very pleased as it is above the market average of 2-3%. Together with my graphics designer we have improved the look of the website, so it now looks a little more professional, or at least we think it does! lol…
I was approached by someone to do a JV to launch another subscription website targeting UK users late last year, so this partnership finally materialised this year so I now run a another member’s only website with approximately 500+ subscribers. It remains to be seen how well this website will work out in the future as subscribers only stay on and become full paying members if they are happy with the services provided. So we may end up with only 300-400 paying subscribers….I am happy even if it is only 100!
At the start of this year I had decided that I was not going to sit on my butt and wait for things to happen, so I sought out a JV with another guy who owns this massive mailing list and created yet another membership site to market to this huge list. His list is so huge, you won’t believe me if I said it… 165,000 people subscribed to it!! So I’ve been keeping myself very busy working on this. Our initial marketing plan did not work well, so I had to go back to the drawing board and take the website to a whole new direction.
I am sitting here… doing quite a few things right now…
- I am deleting 1000 spam comments from one of my blogs..
- am chatting with my friend about our kids
- am helping Ethan with his homework
- am listening to Anoop…
- am selecting a blog theme for my new JV
with 100 thoughts running though my mind as I am writing this!
Earnings - August, September 2008
I’ve been sitting by and watching the ratings for this website slip over the past few months. It seems that ever since I’ve stopped updating my online earnings my readers are just not too interested with the rest of what I have to say…lol
I also need to admit that I am a lazy ass for not updating my blog often enough to keep an audience satisfied, so here is my 2009 Resolution - I will try to update my blog weekly from now on!
Here is what I made since my last earnings update for the months of Aug, Sept 2008. Further earnings updates will follow.
August 2008
USD - $227.65
GBP - £451.00
September 2008
USD - $232.82
GBP - £821.00
The earnings for Aug - Sept 2008 were STILL relatively good compared to the last quarter of 2008 as I had begun to spend a lot of time focusing on Ethan’s school work. You’ll see a significant drop in my online earnings from October onwards.
Conversations With Little Aaron
2yr old kids are just so sweet and say the most adorable things, I love to chat with Aaron and listen to what funny things he has to say everyday 
Every morning when Aaron wakes up I always lie down next to him to cuddle for a while and just chat or sing some songs. This morning we were chatting and just playing with each other when I asked him to sing a song. So he began singing Happy Birthday which is his all time favourite song and he will even blow candles after the end of the song.
His lyrics went something like this…
Aaron : Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you….happy birthday to …
Mummy…Daddy…Koko…Ah Koo…Ah Kim…Ah Ma….Ah Kong…
Me : (rolling on the bed laughing as he had never ever included so many of us in one song before) hahahhaha….
Then I asked him to sing another song and he agrees.
He then sings this …
Aaron : Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,
happy birthday to mummy toom-toom (mummy’s tummy)
happy birthday to youuuu….
Aaron loves my tummy for some strange reason and pays homage to it daily… LOL. Now it has a birthday too!
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Every afternoon at around 3pm is Aaron’s nap time, he usually sleeps for about 2-3 hours. When he wakes, he loves to lie on top of my tummy or just lie still on top of me. I must admit I also enjoy this time with him very much as I know that he will soon grow out of it as my little baby is growing up at warp speed.
I always use this time alone with him to chat about what he does in school or we just cuddle and make each other laugh. Today I asked him if he’d like to have another baby…
Me: Aaron, do you want to have another baby?
Aaron: NO (without hesitation)
Me: Mummy can make Aaron a little baby so that Aaron will have a baby to play with…
Aaron: NO, Dowan…
Me: But it would be nice to have a baby to play with.. no?
Aaron: NO, dowan baby.
Some time later…I asked again to see if he would change his mind.
Me: Aaron, can we make you a baby..OK?
Aaron: NO
Me: Mummy and Daddy can make Aaron a baby so that you and Koko will have one more friend to play with.
Aaron: Ok, but mummy only, no Daddy…
Me: Mummy needs Daddy to make baby…
Aaron: Mummy only, dowan Daddy…
So… in the end…I guess we are back to square one! LOL…
Singapore Holiday Videos - Marina Bay New Years Countdown
We were in Singapore over the New Year and was at Marina Bay for the New Year’s countdown and it was simply spectacular. I’ve never seen fireworks so up close before…at one point I got a bit scared that fire may fall out of the sky
We took many videos of our trip to Singapore and I will post a few more up in the following posts. For now enjoy this nice fireworks show for the countdown.
1st Day of School
last week was the first week of school and Aaron was so very excited (as he would say) to finally find out what Ethan his brother had been up to everyday while he waited patiently at home for him!
i had bought them each a school bag with wheels so that … Ethan could drag his bag of tricks to school with him (no he is not in magic school!) and Aaron could also pull his bag along just like his Koko. you see Aaron loves to follow everything that Ethan does cos he thinks that his big bro is just plain cool and whatever Koko does is fun.
this is a picture of what little Aaron looked like on the morning of the first day of school, sitting next to big bro…
this year we’ve (chris and myself) have made a new year resolution that we will try our best to send the boys to school on time. so we were all ready and headed down to have breakfast at 8am.
here is a picture of them after breakfast and all eager to go into the car to head over to school…
check out the bags…Ethan wanted the Power Rangers bag to fuel his obssession with them and i loved the little Ironman on wheels. what do you think?
i drove them to school parked the car and took both of them into a rather chaotic scene of crying 4yr olds tugging at their parents legs..! lol.. i quickly glanced at the notice board to find Ethan was now in Purple class - which is on the first floor!!!…so much for the wheels… and little Aaron my baby is in Peach class which is a pretty long walk all the way to the back of the school. so Ethan headed off to meet his new classmates while i took Aaron to see his new friends. along the way we passed by the 4yr olds class and half of them were crying and screaming…obviously they did not think that school was going to be fun.
when we got to Aaron’s Peach class, we were greeted by 2 teachers. surprisingly Aaron warmed up to them almost instantly, he did not even glance back at me (IMAGINE THAT) so i went over to kiss him goodbye and told him i’d be back later to get him when school was out.
they grow up so fast…many a time over the last 1 year i’ve wished that i could freeze time so that they would never grow up cos they are so cute and adorable at this age… at the same time secretly wishing that i would never grow old too…
here is a video fo Aaron, not so long ago (to me).
My New Banner
I LOVE my new banner!!!!!
If you’ve been reading my blog from day 1 you’ll notice how it has evolved from an online marketing blog into a working mummy blog. I think it was about 2 weeks ago after my “Too Young For School” post that I felt like the whole “This is how I make money online” thing was not working for me anymore… No doubt, I still blog a lot about making the extra 1k a month online but recently I’ve just been so involved with my boys and I’ve suddenly got so much to say about parenting these days so I decided to ask my Graphics Designer to create a new look for me.
So here it is…after much discussion back and forth this is version 6D. You must think that I was a real pain of a customer to be dealing with … (hahaha) … I am NOT! You see everytime I make a small change like the font or the colour of the font, one version gets created. So 6D is actually pretty good, doncha think? Much better than 12M LOL..
When we first started out, Tsulin did all my wording for me and the picture editing, but I only decided on the wording today. I was thinking of how I would include the fact that I work from home and I am also pretty much a hands on mum.
So for a moment I actually thought of using “excerpts of my life as a part-time mom and a full-time internet marketer“!!!!! ROFL… Can you imagine the look and the thoughts that would be going through my reader’s heads when they read that?
There is some truth in the funny tagline above because I am really kind of a part time mummy since I don’t need to be glued to my boys and have to follow them around all day long as I have my Indonesian maid who does everything for me. All I ever do is referee their fights (between the boys) and supervise the maid after giving her some instructions to follow (While I’m also their driver and meal companion and their tutor….etc etc..I actually spend a large percentage of my time working). BUT for the sake of humankind (human rights NGOs haha) I’ve decided to make it sound a little mummy friendlier!!!
So then…..forget what I SHOUTED out in my first line in this post and tell me what you really think? Nice or not nice? Do you hate it or do you love it…. Do you like the font? Do you hate the way the pictures were edited? Do you think the colours match my blog theme? How do you think I can improve on it or should I change anything else? (Tsulin must be thinking…. OMG…we will end up with Version 20C at this rate!!!)
If you’d like to see more of Tsulin’s graphics work, you can go to her blog and see the lovely pictures there. You can get her to create banners or edit your pictures for your “About Me” page or for any or all your posts. She can even edit a nice profile picture for Facebook! You can contact her at (tsulinplusplusATgmail.com). Please change AT to @ before you email her.
