This Baby Can Read!

Yes! Believe or not but our little Musa can read at 16.5 months old! He may have possibly been able to read earlier but unfortunately because of my unattentiveness, I unwrapped this wonderful gift only last week!

It was a rainy, lightning & thunderstorm filled night, last Friday night, 10th November 2006, and I was much relieved to be home from work before the clouds decided to split, which in doing so released a forceful downpour of not only cats and dogs, but chicken and ducks, and what I felt was also cows and buffalos, accompanied by their own personal sound and lighting effects courtesy of nature.

Anyway, back to the excitement at hand. After giving the kids a bath, around 6.50pm, I stayed with them in their bedroom playing hide 'n seek, transformers, blocks, boing-boing bouncy ball and all other games and activities that we could come up with until it was their bed time, which on a god blessed night would be around 9.30pm.

At around 8.30pm, Umar was happily building his Decepticon army, thereafter equally happily pulverising them to pieces (though how much pulverising can you do to lego blocks?). Musa was sitting on my lap whilst I read to him. Little did I know that he could have been reading to me!

Musa soon became restless and I had to quickly get his attention before he decided to destroy Umar's Decepticon army. I reached down for the Magna Doodle board and wrote the word "ear" on it and showed it to Musa. What he did next almost blew me away. He touched his right ear. Did I see right?? I wasn't sure so erased the word and re-wrote it. And he touched his right ear again! I did it a third and fourth time; and he subsequently pointed to his ear the third and fourth time as well!

I was so excited at my new discovery, a gift from Musa, I call it, that he was equally excited by my facial expression and the praises I was heaping onto him. At that time Tok Nik, Tok Ayah, Uncle Dani & Aunty Izue just arrived for a visit. I shared with them this newly found talent of Musa, and soon found out that he could also read the word "mouth", by touching his own cute little one and "eye", by touching his gorgeous doey ones.

When Amil got back from work, he thought I was pulling his leg when I told him Musa could read. Okay, firstly Musa can't even speak, accept for a few incomplete attempts at vocalising some words. He can however say "Da-da" as in Daddy (yes, a total point of pride for Amil), which is the only complete word he can speak (and no.. he has not attempted to say Mummy or Mama either). So for him to be able to read? How can he right? Well wrong. He can and he does this by pointing to the corresponding body part or doing the corresponding actions to the words shown to him. Of course Amil was equally excited and overwhelmed at the replay of Musa's "reading" sessions.

Over the weekend, Amil and I continued to write various words on the Magna Doodle board and pieces of paper, which Musa would read and subsequently point to or enact out correctly 85 - 90% of the time. The other 10-15% he would not get right was probably due to the confusion he felt when looking at all the monkey like antics and displays of excitement shown by Amil and I when he did get it right!

Todate, he can read the following words: ear, mouth, eyes, hair, point, finger, laugh, arms up, clap, clapping, though we are yet to try some more new ones. We have kept in mind that since he can't really talk now, it may be difficult for him to express words such as animals, things, and the like.

However, what has been more compelling for us to realise, other than the wonders of him being able to read, is the fact that he has opened up our eyes and hearts even more to getting to know what he is all about and what his personality is like. Not to just take for granted that he's only a baby. Although we know that he's one smart, funny and very cheeky baby, it has made us realise how important it is to cherish every little moment and every little thing he does. We may have seen most of it before, with our first born Umar, but this serves as a reminder that it's only Musa's first time and that we need to go through it all with him and with the same feelings or at least effort we had put in the first time around. Each child is different and to think otherwise, to think that their milestones are similar or just the same... is to risk missing out on a lot of good things and their unique, individual achievements...

Note: Musa learnt to read via watching the "Your Baby Can Read" VCD series, which I had actually purchased for Umar more than 2 years ago. Since Umar was not interested in it, possibly because he had other activity classes (The Shichida Method), I kept it aside and only resurrected them when Musa was about 6 months old. Musa would watch the 20 minute VCDs once to twice a day, whilst drinking his bottled milk. And now at 16.5 months old, he still happily participates whilst watching the VCDs. In case you'd like to know more about the VCDs, you can check out this website http://www.infantlearning.com/

Musa's photo was taken on Thursday, 31 August 06 at Tok Ba's kampung house compound in Ulu Sepri, Rembau, Negeri Sembilan.