Cayen was 6 years old

In the last one year, he was noticeably more able to share with his younger brother. In fact, sometimes we marvelled in his ability to repeat so patiently his instructions to Cayson repeatedly. 

Perhaps Cayson’s empathy and sharing nature has rubbed off him, or perhaps the big brother responsibility has sank in, but relatively speaking, he had matured as the older brother in the past year (though the small regular fights still happen from time to time). When I aligned from the car each morning, he would ask me to “have a nice day”! 

In the past year, he had managed to go for quite a few lessons , mostly non academic like sports, mental arithmetic, executive functioning, music etc. The only academic one was initiated somewhat by himself when he realised that his Chinese is not good. 

This year, he showed that he is able sit in a place and do work with focus if he wanted to. His recent teacher review at Little Executive was pretty good as the teacher spoke of his great improvement over the last quarter where he willingly and knowingly stopped fidgeting and playing with his pen and can sit still. He also stopped doodling on the back of his goal card and started to really focus on his work. He also writes Cayson’s name on his paper after his name quite often so teacher knows of Cayson too. Guess he really likes his little brother. 

Once, he even stepped up to help resolve a dispute where the children needed to pick one diagram to draw and three kids wanted dinosaurs and another kid wanted something else. Finally, he somehow got the three to go with the lone one.. as he figured and told the rest that that person will not be able to go with dinosaurs. This is no mean feat as he’s usually the inflexible one. 

Also, teacher realised that he was more willing to participate and join if she asks for his help to be the leader to go cajole the rest of the children to start the activities. (Previously he would join depending on his mood). 

He was willing to also share his first sticker with a friend who didn’t win and was a little upset. This would not have been possible in the past . In fact, today when I gave him some snacks, and he first thought of offering it to his little brother before he ate it himself. So yes, while there’s still many fighting over toys incidents from time to time, I realise the quantum improvements this year as the positive incidents are increasing amongst friends and I hope the good trend will continue. 

His teacher was also impressed by how he questioned about how much toilet paper is needed when she said she’s going home to dresss her daughter as a mummy. 

This reminds me that I should read him more science or history books as he’s quite interested in some of them. Today, he suddenly asked me if it’s the 15th? I asked him why. He said he wanted to see if it’s full moon , because he wants to try seeing the astronauts that I spoke of in the history book. And suddenly he was declaring it’s world war three when playing dinosaur fighting with Cayson. I suspect that must have been related to the World war 1 and 2 that I broadly mentioned. 

At the grand age of 6, he still dislikes sleeping as much as ever. In fact, he’s the first kid I heard would rather do maths than take his afternoon nap. 

And while his strokes are not quite good but at least he could manage a short swim now, so guess that’s another milestone for him this year. 

For the first time ever since he’s borned, he left us to attend an overnight camp in school. That’s yet another major milestone I reckon. 

Overall, he’s really grown up this year and suddenly it just feels all too fast especially when Facebook just flashed back his one year old video. Before I know it, he’s going to be in Primary 1 in two months’ time. Gotta treasure every moment ...love you baby .