Lennox & Me

About 3 weeks ago Lennox started playschool. In Holland they can start with something called 'peuterspeelzaal' (toddler playgroup) from 2 years old. It is 2 times a week, about 3 hours each time. Since Lennox is bilingual and speaks Malay at home, he can also go 4 times a week when he becomes 2.5 years old. Although we have been going to playgroups in the past (since he was about 8 months old), i always had to stay with him for the duration. So for him and for me, it was a pretty big step to drop him off to the hands of the teachers (they call them ' jufs ' here). The only other times Lennox has been on his own is with family and one other time with a babysitter (when the birth of Sterling impending and we wanted to be prepared). His peuterspeelzaal has a pretty decent size, about 14 kids to 2 teachers. The kids range from 2-4 years old. From 4 years old the kids go to "Groep 1" which is like nursery (N1/N2) for us in Singapore. The first weeks have gone...

The first language in Singapore is English. It's the medium of instruction in schools and even though we can sound funny with our Singlish (Singapore-English) accents, we speak English well enough as the next Brit or American. (You cannot believe the number of times I've rolled my eyes at someone who commented, "Oh you're from Singapore? But your English is sooo good !") *rolls eyes. again* I basically grew up bilingual, speaking English & my mother tongue Malay. It wasn't a 50-50 thing, it was more like 90-10. My Malay was (is??) terrible. I just spoke it at home with my mom and grandma and that was it. Anyone who knows me can vouch as to how bad my Malay was, i was barely passing my Malay language classes and i was just uninterested in it. Since moving to Holland in 2008 i picked up Dutch (pretty quickly too i think), and now speak it relatively fluently. My husband on the other hand is effectively bilingual, speaking Dutch and English (almost perfec...