As a parent in Singapore, it’s hard not to get caught up with the whole education frenzy. It seems like every parent wants to get their kids into the best schools and they go to great lengths to do so. Some buy a place within 2km of their desired school, some diligently offer their services as parent volunteers and some make significant donations to build a spanking new school gym.

I have very little intention of doing any of the above.

Not that I’m not interested in giving them the best education money can buy. But all this seems a bit excessive and I’m not even sure if them getting into the Ivy League equivalent of a primary school will set them on a fast track into an actual Ivy League college.

Now that they’re in school, I do feel a bit of pressure making sure that the kids are keeping up with their supposed learning curriculum. Truett came home the other day telling me his name is T-R-U-E-T-T and I had no idea he even knew what spelling was. Then Kirsten was all “my name is E-E-T-R-U-E-S”, which totally does not spell Kirsten at all. So I spent the next 15 minutes in the car trying to teach my 2-year-old how to spell her name.

By the time we reached, it had gotten worse, like “I-S-S-T-E-N-R”. Which is the point that I realized hey, the girl’s 2, just cut her some slack already. When I was 2, I didn’t even know what the alphabets were, much less string a bunch together competently. And honestly, I’m not particularly concerned that they can’t color inside the lines or draw a banana or count to a gazillion.

I’d be mightily impressed if they could name all the planets in the milky way and knew the difference between igneous and sedimentary rocks but if they weren’t big on those topics, I’m not sweating over it.

We do try to encourage creativity though, because it’s fascinating how they view the world and we’re constantly amazed by all the stuff they come up with. When they show me a blob that they’ve drawn, I try real hard to see the 5-legged dinosaur eating a fish. Just several days ago, we were having breakfast when Tru showed us the caterpillar he made using a bunch of coins.

Then rearranged it and made Mickey’s head.

And this afternoon, they found a 2 rolls of tape and used it to make a kite. It looked nothing like a kite but they had lots of fun running around the house with it.

They’ll do the math and the science thing soon enough. Now we’re just trying to get them to express themselves creatively before it gets educated out of them.