All About Your Child

School Holiday is a time when there are less rules within the four walls.

Computer-games-is-on-Friday had changed to computer-games-is-everyday-for-an-hour.

Sleep-because-you-have-school-tomorrow had changed to sleep-because-mommy-have-no-strength-to-entertain-you-anymore.

Play-because-your-worksheets-are-done had changed to play-because-you-have-the-right-to (this week).

School Holidays SHOULD be different, shouldn’t it?

To many parents, school holidays is the BEST TIME to catch up on school work, to give extra tuition on weak subjects like maths *faint*, to learn what is to be taught when school reopens, believing that learning ahead is the key to better grades.

To me, that’s scary. But different parents have different priorities, so I’m not here to say right or wrong, there are just too many Grey areas in life which we should not waste too much time debating on.

Yesterday, we spent half the day with my PIL and my favourite niece, ZY. Now that my eldest SIL had been retrenched, what better opportunity is there than this week of no-school days to bring her children back to Malaysia to visit her parents.

ZY, who has NEVER been closed to her parents naturally stayed in Singapore and keep the old folks occupied. My MIL often say, “ZY is more like my daughter than my granddaughter.” How true! No one in the family has ever rebutted that sentence.

The trio came over to my house yesterday.

The adults spend time chatting while the kids had snap-snap and munch-munch fun under the big umbrella.

What a way to kick off the school holidays. Nice! :)

Singapore is still not getting the number of babies needed for the population levels to remain stable without extra measures like ‘importing’ foreign talents to stay in this Garden City.

60,000 babies are NEEDED each year to make this a possibility. In other words, it needs a fertility rate of 2.1 babies per woman so that the population can replace itself naturally.

The number shows 39,935 babies were born in 2008 which is the highest number since 2002, 40,760 babies. The latest number includes the babies from the 1 million foreigners who work and stay in Singapore.

Singapore’s population is only 4.84 million and with the massive new job opportunities popping out from the opening of Marina Bay Sands^™, more immigrants are expected to make Singapore their home.

Marina Bay Sands^™ would be a place with three cascading hotel towers , retail stores, trendy Celebrity Chef restaurants, endless entertainment at the theatres, the hottest night clubs and a Las Vegas-style casino. Business visitors will also enjoy the extensive Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions (MICE) facilities featuring state-of-the-art technology, highly flexible exhibition halls, and a convention centre that can host over 45,000 delegates.

While everywhere else is talking about recession and retrenchment, Singapore is offering opportunities to secure your rice bowl, would you come over? I think the attraction is obvious.

Well, the Marina Bay Sands^™ will be up and running late 2009 or maybe early 2010, so we shall see how the new influx of foreigners could help with the number of babies produced.

As I write this, I find it really weird, to be conditioned subconsciously in the mind that with better living standards, babies can be produced ‘more naturally’???

Babies are born because a married couple wants to build a family, irregardless if they are rich or poor, isn’t it? Though money is definitely an issue to consider in sustaining a family’s expenses, it is still not the main consideration, isn’t it?

Anyhow, I will just sit back and see how the impact of this new landmark would have on the number of babies born when they do the count in year 2010.