Travelled to the end of the world (aka Pasir Ris), but I wasn’t deterred by the long commuting time. See, I went prepared because I had brought along the Berries textbook. On certain parts of the journey, the daughter determinedly read aloud a 3 words x 4 lines passage on balloons. She was stumped by 1-2 words but when I told her how to read them, she huffed and puffed, saying that she wanted to read everything “by my own self”. (Work in progress. Trying to get her to say “by myself” in the name of grammatical English.) Such complicated are female creatures, even the youngest ones. Anyway, the moral of this story is that she kept reading the 12 words again and again until she became relatively fluent at reading the entire passage. Her persistence left me awed and surprised in equal measure. When do children lose their innate sense to try their hardest at something? Or have I been lucky that the daughter was born tenacious?