Leaving Gili Air

The last days, sad to leave, but happy to be heading home, and saying goodbyes amid promises to be back next year.

Littletree did her daily Bahasa Indonesia work over breakfast…

And we got to meet the freshly born twins, Nadiya and Nadira – the newest additions to the family we stay with on Gili Air (pictured being held by their grandmother and great grandmother.)

Littletree spent our last morning playing with Naiela, the little three-year-old girl who lives next door to us; Naiela absolutely adores Littletree, and taught her a bunch of nursery songs in Indonesian.

As a parting gift, Littletree decided to give her soccer ball to Naiela, seeing as proper soccer balls are at such a premium on Gili Air. A very valuable gift indeed!

Naiela was so happy, and Littletree too. Until finally, it was time for us to get on the boat back to Bali. The whole family came out to hug us goodbye, we shall miss them so much!

Epic Sandcastles

What can one do when one is living beachside on a small tropical island? Swim, swim, swim and swim! Well, asides from the snorkelling; collecting and studying the amazing coral;

And marine life;

And aside from playing football on the beach; and learning about the life cycle of turtles; and running around with kids, and learning to speak Bahasa Indonesia; and getting our heads around exchange rates that are 1:9500… there’s always sandcastles EPIC SANDCASTLES!

The kids got hard to work constructing the most elaborate architecture

They devised ways of building bridges, and using driftwood and coral to reinforce construction

Moats, tunnels, waterways, drainage systems… And the inevitable race against the tide

(yeah, some of the “big kids” got in on the fun from time to time ;) )

I’m just continually impressed by the ingenuity of kids working in groups – it’s incredible to see how they solve problems and learn together.

Magnetic Family

Littletree came up to me the other night and asked me to stand up. She held my hand, looked me up and down, and then walked off. Minutes later she went up to Purple and did the same thing.

Odd...

Turned out she was trying to make a picture of the three of us using alphabet fridge magnets; she wanted to get the relative heights, arm lengths and arm angles as accurate as she could.

Yep, we really look like this:

A good friend pointed out to me that Littletree is lucky to have sets of magnetic letters in two alphabets – she wouldn’t have been able to make this (at least, not so easily) if she had only the Latin letters, or only the Hebrew set.

And there I was thinking the benefits in raising a multi-lingual child would be in communication, linguistic ability and neurological function – I never would have guessed it would open up her artistic possibilities as well!

Learning to Read

Littletree has been really inspired to learn to read lately, and she practices writing a lot as well. The other day, quite out of the blue, she said she wants to learn to read Hebrew.

We have a big stack of Hebrew learn-to-read books that Purple brought back from Israel one time, only Littletree wasn’t interested in them back then. So I got them out and dusted them off and we sat down and went through the first one together.

First I read it to her once through, and then we looked at all the individual letters and talked about what sounds they made. We have a set of Hebrew alphabet magnets on the fridge, so we got those to help us as well.

  

After about half an hour of practicing together, Littletree was able to read through the whole thing, she was so excited and proud of herself at the end she made me take a video of her reading it.

And then it was on to the next book…

I love that we’re a multi-lingual household and I love that it was totally Littletree’s own intrinsic motivation and choice to start learning to read :D

Duckling

Littletree said she wants to go back to Brazil, and she wants to learn to speak Portuguese, so we went to the library to get a book to learn Portuguese. I found us some great lessons, with books and CDs, so we’ve been polishing up our language skills; it’s been more than six years since I had any practice in speaking Portuguese, and I keep getting mixed up with Spanish!

So at the library, it was story time, which we don’t go to much any more as it’s mostly aimed at pre-school aged kids, but this week, the librarian had brought in a cage full of ducklings for the kids to pet.

Littletree loved it, and of course now she really wants to get chicks :) So I’ll be amping up our mission to repair the aviary we have in our yard so we can have chickens.

I can’t wait to be having our own eggs! :)