Aquarian times

I thought August was a busy month for birthdays, but so is Feb!

Pops turned 69 yesterday and we had a low-key celebration at home, just immediate family and some satay, mee goreng and cake.


Jane’s birthday is tomorrow and we had an advance lunch celebration today at Lei Garden, Chijmes. Never been there before, it was alright but we all thought the dim sum at Royal China was much better.




She’s just about ready to pop, a little Cupid will arrive by next week. After lunch as I was walking through Raffles City, I heard a loud ‘Dear’…turns out I had walked past Nickypoo without even knowing it, but he recognised my dress from the back!

Nat has been pretty whiny all week, crying every morning when we leave for work. Mostly for her daddy but if he’s not around, she’ll cry for me. He doesn’t help the situation when he prolongs his goodbyes but from what I hear, she stops crying after we leave and she’s fine the rest of the day as she gets ready for school etc.


It’s mostly the mornings but she’s been rather quick to burst into tears at every little ‘no’ when she doesn’t get her way or has to give in to Sasha. I think some jealousy also at play...need to have a word with her and get to the root of it.

We’re trying to ascertain if anything happened in school lately but doesn’t seem to be the case, she missed all of last week.

Anyway, this morning we promised to bring her to Vivocity by bus to have some one on one time and she was all excited when I met her at the bus stop after work. Before Nick arrived, we shared a hor fun which she fed herself half before I had to intervene.



Then we walked on the skypark, and saw the sunset. She was her usual bubbly self but the moment we mentioned taking a cab home, she started whinging to take the bus so we caved. We did see the huge moon out tonight though, so big and round but it’s not obvious on my photo.


Methinks it’s just another phase of separation anxiety and she probably just misses us on weekdays but it’s something she’ll have to get used to. Mildred thinks she can’t cope at school and wants to hire a personal tutor! For nursery? No freaking way!

It's okay baby

Sasha just cracks me up. This morning before church, she pushed her favourite baby doll in one of the toy supermarket trolleys around the house. ‘Baby’ was all wrapped in a blanket too.

When she bumped against the platform, baby got flung out and Sasha went over and covered the doll with her body and cheekily said, “It’s okay baby” and ‘Be careful baby”. Like a little mum that one!

At church she couldn’t keep still and gave me her current favourite pose of tilting her head to the side and raising her elbow.



We walked to CHIJMES after mass and had lunch at Hog’s Breath. Me and Nick raised eyebrows at each other when our elf ordered steak and calamari as her main, which cost $12-16 more than either mine or Nick’s main.

Don’t mean to sound cheapo but even I don’t go for the most expensive dishes on the menu when someone else is buying but I think this was actually deliberate because she’s leaving soon and doesn’t care.

In the evening, Ben picked the girls up and met us at Centrepoint after the Istana do. We ended up having dinner at Teochew City restaurant and did a family lo hei before rounding off with dessert at Haagen Dazs. Mmmm, macadamia nut.

C is for…

…Chinese New Year Garden Party.


The boy received an invitation to the Istana for a Chinese New Year Garden Party hosted by the PM for grassroot members and he was allowed to bring a guest, so this was our C date.



I had planned to wear a floral Ann Taylor dress but decide to go chinoiserie with a cheongsam tailored in HCM that I had yet to wear.

There were very specific instructions on how to enter and security was tight. We met his colleague Robin at the entrance and took the shuttle bus in together. There were tents set up on the lawn of the Istana building from calligraphy stalls to costume booths.

Right off the bat I spotted Yam Ah Mee, the PA CEO who was everybody’s favourite GE results announcer.


And then I saw another gentleman who looked so familiar, I thought we might have been in SHATEC together. But a few minutes later he and Nick recognised each other at the same time and then I remembered who he was. It was Malcolm, our wedding banquet sales manager from Mandarin Hotel.


Amazingly he still recognised us after 9 years, and he was there in his work capacity, Mandarin were the caterers but he’s also involved in grassroots work and had an invite of his own.

We chatted for quite a bit, he was very friendly and it was as if we’d been friends for a long time. He hasn’t been at Mandarin all this time, going back and forth with other hotels but he’s now a director there and invited us for Chatterbox chicken rice anytime.

Spent the rest of the time MP-spotting, Baey Yam Keng was very popular with the females, lots of aunties wanted to take photo with him. Lily Neo was glammed up in a full length cheongsam and we spent most of our time chatting with Robin and an MP named Dr Lim Wee Kiak and his wife, they seemed quite down to earth, although he made an infamous comment once about ministerial pay.




Robin was involved in a group photo for his district Canberra and we helped him take pictures of his moment with the PM. There was one other MP who was wearing the same shirt as PM Lee, never co-ordinate! LOL!


As we were leaving, I spotted Dr Tan Cheng Bock who narrowly lost the presidential election, he had my vote!


It was an interesting experience, the Istana grounds are lovely…it had been 27 years since I was last there so it was nostalgic to be back.

Natalie is 4...that's so magic!

The munchkin turned 4 today and the theme of this year’s party was Abby Cadabby. Abby who? Abby is the fairy on Sesame Street and after Riley and Reagan had fairy parties last year, Nat was keen to have one too, except we zoomed in on one particular fairy. Plus, she’s so pink and purple, Nat’s favourite colours.



It was supposed to have been a small party for her little friends, but once you add their parents, some friends and some family, our humble home was filled.


I bought all her décor and partyware online, Mummy, Lita and Wendy helped to decorate yesterday. Cake was from Aunty Yochana, the same one who did Gigi’s cake last year, my brief was to ensure Abby looked like Abby because I had seen some distorted faces on cake samples online. Food was from Manna Pot, it was okay but their chicken rendang was undercooked, tsk tsk.



Caitlin, Sarah and Rayhan were among the first to arrive and Nat retreated into shy mode once more people arrived. She was practically glued to Nick’s hip the whole time.

Once we had a sizable number of kids, we played one game first. I had hidden small stars all around the house and the person who found the most would win a prize. That person was Gigi, of course Aunty Lita helped her a lot!

After lunch, we played a game of ‘Pass the Parcel’ which Gigi won again! Swear, no kelong! The background music put Caitlin in the mood to dance and she told me that she felt like dancing, hence I decided to play ‘Statue Dance’ next. The kids had fun bopping, they were all in fact quite still when the music stopped so in the end I gave prizes to all.



Next was the cake cutting, all the eager children surrounded the cake and at first go, Nat was beaten to the candle blowing by Rayhan, and we had to relight the candle.


After that it was pretty much free and easy, we blew bubbles outside and all the little girls were screaming their heads off in excitement…luckily no neighbours complained! Some of the cousins stayed on for dinner, we had so much leftover cake and food.


Now that she is 4, I have a few targets for Nat i.e. to sleep diaperless at night, stop drinking from a bottle and feed herself proper. Also to sleep in her own bed, she’s back to sneaking into ours in the middle of the night.

She does feed herself at times, but doesn’t complete a whole meal…loses interest when she’s half full. She’s recently started cleaning her own bum when she poops and doing a good job of it.

She recognises a few more words, ‘up’, ‘moon’, ‘star’, ‘and’, ‘the’, ‘to’, ‘in’ and can sign off on a card with ‘Nat’.

She’s still pretty vain, she doesn’t like to wear certain dresses because there is no pink or purple in them and she hardly ever agrees to wear shorts. It’s either leggings or dresses.

Since she started school, her routine has not been consistent. Sometimes she naps in the afternoons and sometimes she doesn’t. I think it makes her more tired. Haven’t weighed her recently but she should be between 13-14 kg and her height is almost a metre.

She’s still fussy about food, very reluctant to try new things. She loves fish and chips though and ice cream and anything with crunch. She doesn’t like dhal, but Gigi and Sasha do.

She likes to make a face when we ask her to pose for photos, pursing her lips like an old lady, but when she grins, it really brings out her features. Daddy’s going to have a hard time in future!

Sasha at 22 months

My little rascal is just 22 months but behaves much older than she is.


I just received a mailer from Baby Centre that said that at this age, don’t expect them to be able to jump with two feet off the ground yet. Sasha’s been jumping for at least 5 months! She jumps everywhere, on the bed, on the sofa, on the floor, from steps and she’ll just hop, hop, hop like a rabbit!



She's even made up her own songs, using popular tunes. We were all tickled when out of nowhere she started singing ‘Mee tai, mee tai, mee tai mak’to the tune of London Bridge, and then she did it with ‘prata’, ‘noodle soup’ and ‘tom yam soup’.


She tried tom yam soup courtesy of Mummy and even though she acknowledged it was hot, she came back for more. She’s constantly eating! And she feeds herself her fruits sometimes, most of the time aiming correctly into her mouth.



She likes to pretend to be somebody else, channelling Tim from Hi-5 and Sham from Club Magic. She would say, ‘Tim fall down’ when she fell, or ‘Tim is dancing’, when she danced. Sometimes she would wrap a blanket around her head and say, “I’m the mother”, and carry her baby dolls around and pat them.

She’s a regular joker, she knows how to make fun of her sister. Wendy would ask her what the various animal sounds are and she would duly reply ‘meow’, ‘woof’ or snort. But when Wendy asks, “What does Nat-nat say?”, Sasha would pretend to put on a whiny voice and imitate Nat with, “I want Daddy”. And when Wendy asks her what she says all the time, she would cheekily add on “I want puting”.

Speaking of the pacifier, it’s still constantly in her mouth though I have instructed Wendy to start hiding it during the day and only bring it out during sleeping time. When she sleeps, she needs 3 items – her bolster, baby doll and the pacifier.

For all her bravado though, she can be a little wuss when it comes to the Merlion. For some reason she is afraid of it, and will repeat ‘I don’t scared Merlion’, when she actually means she’s scared.

She has a new photo pose, the Bugs Bunny pose where she will poke her teeth out and tilt her head to the side.


Nick is away in Rome this week and Nat has a runny nose again. This is the second cold she’s had this year, but so far no fevers so that’s a relief. Bubba will be 4 on Saturday!

Visiting Sunny Spring

Brought the girls to visit Nya-nya and company today, Nat refused to wear a matching outfit with Sasha and insisted on re-using her red cheongsam.


We all squeezed into Kevin’s car, Gigi wore a lovely yellow kaftan dress…she’s so into yellow!


Nya-nya tapau-ed biryani and prawn mee and mummy contributed some buah keluak. The twins are so big, it’s O-level year already! I still remember them as babies…

Nat and Gigi received new school bags from Aunty Nicole and Sasha got a new Hi-5 DVD. As we were leaving, I saw a very pretty chrysanthemum outside the clubhouse.



At night, we had our own lo-hei, today was Ren Ri, the 7th day of CNY which is ‘everybody’s birthday’. The girls get a kick out of messing up the assortment of veggies and love eating the crackers, we always have to put extra.



I can just eat ‘yu sheng’ as a main dish, without the ‘yu’ of course! No raw fish for me!

A ball of a time

Attended 2 birthday celebrations today, a bowling party at Seletar Country Club in the morning for Cameron and Amazonia in the evening for Ananya’s 3rd birthday.

Cameron’s birthday is actually on 9 Feb so this party was very early. Decided to just bring Nat to Cameron’s party so as not to tire Sasha too much before Ananya’s party and also use the opportunity to spend some one on one time with Nat.




Borrowed the car from Kevin the night before and we were late in getting to Seletar as I had to go to the market in the morning first and Ma dilly-dallied as usual.

We somehow got lost after entering the Seletar Camp area and it took another 20 minutes to find the place, plus it didn’t help that I had forgotten my phone…just one of those mornings!

We made it eventually. Nat was reluctant to bowl at first but she soon warmed up and got into it. She had a ball (pun intended) and it wasn’t too difficult feeding her because she was quite distracted.



By 1plus most people had left so we took our leave too. Nat fell asleep in the car but woke up when we reached home and didn’t sleep anymore.

I think she was too excited about going down the big slide at Amazonia which I was surprised she actually did several times on her own, even backwards and played independently with her cousins, she’s usually a scaredy cat.


The insecurity did kick in halfway though, she started crying on the slide after 30mins on her own. She was looking for someone to go down with her and thereafter she clung to me like her usual koala bear and didn’t let go of my hand the rest of the evening.

The coordinators there played some games with the kids, Nat won the prize in a treasure hunt for a red ball, blue ball and watch because I was the only parent accompanying the kids and could help her out.

There was a game they played though that made use of stacks of paper cups and it involved the kids stacking them on the floor to build a tower. However I was appalled when the staff placed the cups back next to the drinks dispenser! Grubby hands + cup rims on floor = dirty cups for kids to drink from!



Reagan has grown so much, eating independently and protesting loudly when Jeanette took her popsicle away momentarily to clean her hand. Sounded just like Sasha…Tiger babies are so fierce!


Speaking of Sasha, she had a ball of a time too (pun intended again!) jumping into the ball pit with gusto.