Hooray Cassandra!

This week, Cassandra made two milestones before she turned five months on Sunday.

First, she was able to finally flip over by herself.  Hmmm... I'm not sure if flip over or turn over is the correct translation but in Filipino, we called it "dapa".  I never thought how hard it is to do this stuff but if you're a 4-month old baby with chubby cheeks, chubby arms and a big tummy full of curls it really is a great challenge.  Can you imagine Winnie the Pooh lying flat on his stomach?  

Some people say that if your baby is trying to flip over on her own, you should refrain from helping her as this might develop over dependence on you until she grows up.  I realized that there might be some psychological truth in that.  I just observed that the generation of parents today (like me) have the tendency to over help our kids. Maybe subconsciously, we can't stand seeing our kids crying and always thought that if they are in pain, removing the source is always the best solution.  This we know, isn't true as there are times, we need to grow stronger to get past a difficulty.

Second milestone was her ear piercing.  When Ate Champee went to her Ninang Rica to cure her cough, she also offered Cassandra a free ear piercing to make her look girly because her Lola Dayang called her pogi.

It was extra hard for me to hear her scream and cry in pain.  I wonder how it will feel like when she faces challenges in her adult life and everything I could do was just to stand by her and share the pain?  This realization made me admire my parents, my tenured household mates and all parents who were able to raise their kids as responsible adults.  I guess it takes a lot of balancing act on helping, inspiring, being hands on or off depending on the situation and the leading of the Holy Spirit to properly make our kids stronger.  Come to think of it, these maybe the same skills I'm applying in my corporate life when mentoring.