Our little storyteller...

Penny's getting SO chatty these days. For some time now she's often been chattering away on her own and to others lines from songs, rhymes and her favourite books, but the past week she's been doing something that we thought certainly warranted a new post :)

A few days ago while she was in her bath tub, I heard her substituting the names in the "Two Little Dicky Birds" poem with "Mama" and "Pepe". She had also been reciting lines from the book "Bear on a Bike", going ".. where are you going, Pepe? Please wait for me!" And just today Loy was enjoying some pieces of starfruit with her after dinner in the living room and Penny suddenly burst out in 'song' (she can't carry a tune yet :), going "Twinkle, twinkle, little fruit star, how I how wonder what you are..."

Anyway, now that I'm actually posting again in the midst of busy work, I might as well update on this online baby journal a few of Penny's current favourites.

"The Smartest Giant in Town", "Room on a Broom", and "Day Monkey, Night Monkey" (All Julia Donaldson's--she's a wonderfully poetic and rhythmic storyteller whose three books here we highly recommend!! We have reservations on the suggestion behind her other book "The Gruffalo" though, that it is alright to lie.)

"Bear on a Bike" by Stella Blackstone (whom we recently discovered to be the same author who pens the "Cleo Cat" series which Pepe also loves!!)

"Teeny Tiny Baby" by Amy Shwartz

and "Little Brown Bear" (whom Penny calls "Borus Bear") by Martin Waddell

Penny still loves her old favourites, including the "heavy George book", the complete stories of Curious George, a Christmas present from her Uncle Eugene.

Amazing to us, and amusing, as Penny's linguistic skills might be at this stage, she's also now appearing to enter into a more terrible phase of the Terrible Twos. She's been observed to be a lot more temperamental, whiny, and again tending to challenge our authority (and even as she had indeed shown marked improvement in her behaviour the last few weeks!). She likes to say "No no no no no" in an emphatic way, and loves to be contrary, rejoining statements and requests with "not --", which, incidentally, has greatly amused my mom's helper who often just waits for her to respond predictably to her statement "Wah, Pepe so pretty" with "Pepe not so pretty". And maybe it's a Singapore thing. Yesterday morning I overheard her saying "So funny one" and couldn't help but tell her to drop the "one". :)