Aqueelah’s Ramadhan Experience

Alhamdullilah. My 5 year old daughter, Aqueelah, has started fasting this Ramadhan. She’s on summer vacation now and wakes up late anyway.

During the first three days, she only fasted half a day. We’d wake her up for Sahur (here in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Subuh is at 4:30a.m). The first morning, she was upset and to be honest I felt so sorry for her that I thought we should just abandon the idea. I didn’t want her to “hate” fasting. On the contrary, the whole idea was to let her “practice”. But I decided to just let her try. We all went back to bed of course after Subuh. I woke her up at about 12:30p.m. She wanted her “breakfast” after her shower and I allowed her to. But I told her that she had to break her fast with dates/tamr first.

By the third morning, the tears were gone at sahur time. She finished her sahur of bread and eggs,and water. On the fourth day, she only asked to break her fast at 2p.m.With only 5 hrs away till Iftar, both my husband and I tried to encourage her to continue. We tried to distract her with activities such as drawing, colouring and reading ebooks on the iPad. She did go into the kitchen a couple of times to open the fridge or larder but each time she returned to the family area without any food in her hand. Alhamdullilah, she succeeded in completing a full day of fasting yesterday.

As I am writing this now, she is off at Quran class. I’m trying to encourage her to write/draw a Ramadhan journal of her own.

Our plan for the month is to let her fast at her own pace. It won’t matter if she doesn’t complete full days.

Well done Princess. Mama & Abah are so proud of you.

Hope to hear our readers experience of their children’s early fasting days:))

May our children grow to be faithful Muslims.

Dr Rizalina Bahari

 

 

 

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