Haleema

Grandmas are great.  Mine plays with me everyday.  We colour in, read together, play chasings and she’s teaching me Arabic.  It’s a great support both to me, and my mother.

Haleema

Grandmas are great.  Mine plays with me everyday.  We colour in, read together, play chasings and she’s teaching me Arabic.  It’s a great support both to me, and my mother.

But we’re not unusual.  Mums and dads with young children in the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children often have contact with their parents. 52% are in touch with their own parents weekly and 29% of toddlers are like me, looked after by their grandparents regularly every week. And one of the interesting findings is that children in this kind of informal childcare could be learning to speak and comprehend better than children in any other type of care arrangement.

And doing well, I am.  Mum was really worried back in Life at 1 that I would never start walking but at 16 months I leapt off the floor and never looked back.  With running came sentences, and with sentences came a passion for books.  I can never get enough of people reading to me.

Watch me tackle a book on my own in my Life at 2 video clip.

The coming year has some major change in store for me.  Mum hopes to go back to Uni and finish her industrial design degree.

Dad is finished at University and has joined his family’s business full-time.  See how I go in my next installment in the Life Series when my time with parents becomes more precious.