Stuart Little

I have a very strange eating habit, and everyone I know HATES it. I eat like a rat. I love to nibble my food and I eat reallllly slowly (unless I'm bloody starving, then I inhale my food). I think the sloth-like eating doesn't get on people's nerves as much as how I sometimes take days to finish one snickers bar.

For example, when I visited my sister in Hawaii, she brought me to this amazing old-school bakery, Liliha Bakery, with the most insane chocolate cream puff. Insane, I tell you. Anyway, I ate my cream puff over 3 days. I know, it's gross, but I loved it so much I had to prolong the eating process! I couldn't bear to finish it in one sitting because that would mean... the END OF THE CREAM PUFF. *sniff*

Anyway, PF annointed me "Stuart" (after Stuart Little, the mouse) when he kept finding half-eaten buns/chocolate bars/cakes in the fridge. When I hear, "Stuart has struck again!" coming from the kitchen, I know he's found the half-eaten mooncake/fruit/bazhang.

Today, DN earned the title of "Stuart Little".

I made pumpkin and leek soup today so we picked up a Delifrance baguette from an Esso station and drove home. PF and I were sitting in front talking. The baguette was sitting in the back, with DN. We were talking so we must have missed the first few rustles. Then, during a lull in our conversation, there was a rustle from the back. And a few satisfied smacks.

???

I turned around and saw this.

DN had done away with the scotchtape taping up the top of the baguette, torn aside some of the paper and was happily hugging and nibbling on the baguette!



Baguette + Baby + No Supervision = This!

Ao Yun Wan Sui!

Remember when we were watching Wimbledon? Well, over the past 2 weeks, DN has been "olympicising"!



"He's a bit slow off the starting blocks, but with a bit of regimented training, he should be Olympic ready by 2024."

Oishi !

You seldom see me blogging about cooking because, let's face it, PF didn't marry me because of my fried rice. I am the same gormless soul who made french toast with 2 tablespoons of salt. (In my defense, it was 5.30am and I was 13. I was SO disappointed when I took a big excited bite on the school bus and almost threw up on my sister.)

My mom came over for dinner yesterday and she made sushi for DN! It's pseudo sushi because we didn't use Japanese rice and we didn't have a sushi mat. But who cares? DN scoffed them down (he ate 10) at a supersonic speed.

Oishi!


I bought "snack seaweed strips", the kind that comes in 1-inch pieces. It was $2+ and we got it from Kimisawa.





Just put some rice in the middle and roll it up. Easy! My mom also put a small piece of asparagus inside. You can add whatever you want - egg, cheese, pork floss, ham, whatever!


DN, the resident fan tong (rice bucket), absolutely loved it. :)

The Best Butter Cookies EVER ...

... and I've lost the recipe. -_-

(Ling, help!)

Honestly, these are the best. The ingredients are like so "Duh, I knew that!" (flour, sugar, butter, egg yolks) but these little buggers taste damn good! DN had a fun time messing up the kitchen cookie-cutting all the cookies and a funner time eating them. Halfway through the cookie-cutting process, PF decided to make round little butter cookie balls and roped DN in to help. He gave DN a little piece of dough and said, "Roll the dough into a ball DN. Roll it!"

And DN rolled the dough across the table. -_-

Wah-hahaha... we couldn't stop laughing.


We had 2 little mounds of dough. One for anal-retentive me, one for DN. I really had to stop myself from snatching the dough out of DN's hands and redoing all the cookies. At one point, he was using the opposite side of the cookie cutter so we had some round cookies.


DN's cookies :)





No, an elephant didn't step on the cookies. The horrible looking ones are actually jam-filled and peanut butter filled cookies!





Can you spot the monster cookie that PF made? He's so proud of it. Whatever rocks your boat eh?

At the end of the baking session, there was dough EVERYWHERE! And the whole dining area was covered in a buttery film. I swear, the cleaning up took longer than the actual baking.

We all have our blonde moments

Things I used to hear as I was growing up:

"Stop walking like a man!"

"Sit properly!"

"Wear a skirt!"

"Don't laugh so much!"

"Why are you so clumsy?"

A graceful gazelle I was not. Heaving hippopotamus, maybe.

My sister was the gazelle. She took ballet lessons and was in the school gymnastics team and also has a very deformed looking pinkie toe (it looks like a squashed grape!) because of all that somersaulting, leaping and prancing.

I took piano lessons and always ran away from PE lessons and hid in the school hall with Funny Bee and that's why I was SO FAT in secondary school.

Anyway, despite having very large feet and a very low centre of gravity (i.e. short), I am still super clumsy. I have fallen down in school before, DURING LUNCH HOUR, in front of scores of milling students. Very very very embarrassing.

You must be wondering by now, where this post is going. Well, I fell down the stairs at home last week, while carrying DN! And when I say I "fell down the stairs", I really mean down the stairs, all 13 of them. (13! The odds were stacked against me from the get go.)

Last Wednesday, I decided to be Miss Fashionista (Blonde Moment No. 1) and put on a black shift and blue tights. I was quite excited about the tights because they were 50% off (Topshop) and textured! (Blonde Moment No. 2) I asked DN if "mommy looked nice" and he nodded "yes", clever boy. What I failed to ask him was, "should mommy walk down the slippery epoxy painted steps in her even more slippery blue tights and carry you at the same time". I did just that. (Blonde Moment No. 3)

I knew I was in for it on step number 2. Everything started moving in slow-mo from then on. I remember my left foot sliding off step number 2 and thinking, "Ohhh... shit. The bloody blue tights!!!" Now at this time, I was carrying DN on the right. And the handrail was (of course), on the right. I couldn't grab the handrail because I was carrying DN. DN! The poor guy! He was going to tumble down with me because his mom was dumb enough to walk down the stairs, in slippery blue tights!

Instinctively, and desperately, I grabbed him to my chest, and surrendered myself to gravity. I fell on my waist and then, on my ample behind and (get this), slid and bounced all the way down the remaining 11 steps. As I bounced down, step by step, I thought to myself, "What the hell? When is this going to stop!?!" I'm sure DN was thinking the same thing.

And so I fell all the way down the stairs and DN and I landed in an embarrassed heap at the bottom. By this time, PF had already run to the stairs from the kitchen because he heard me squeal like a stuck pig as I was falling down. His exact words were, "I heard something very loud." Thanks ah. -_-

DN looked flabbergasted, his eyes were as large as saucers and he had saliva all over his face (I had apparently grabbed him so hard that his face was smashed against me and his pacifier had flown out of his mouth and into the living room). I looked worse. If PF had seen me like this before our wedding, I think he would have changed his mind. My dress was hitched up to my waist and my blue tights clad legs were tangled in a heap. Oh, and I was moaning like an injured cat.

We were not a pretty sight.

But thank goodness DN was alright. No bruises, no scratches, no bumps. He was well-cushioned during the fall. -_-

How NOT to dress your child for photographs

1. children adults NO ONE should wear socks with sandals. Socks + Sandals = Country Bumpkin (see pic 1)

2. Plaid is a complicated print and should not be matched with other complicated prints, for eg, light blue animal print shorts with giraffes and trees. (see pic 1)

3. Pacifiers are not fashion accessories. (see pic 1 + 2)

4. Always make sure children have pants on before taking photos. Contrary to popular belief, going pant-less doesn't make one's legs look longer. (see pic 2)

5. Do not allow child to wear loud, striped, blue toe socks as gloves, even though he very much wants to. (see pic 2)

6. Boots + Toe Sock Gloves + No Pants + HRC Tee = Fashion Disaster (see pic 2)

Pic 1





Pic 2

The Internet - Boon or Bane?

Definitely a bane when it comes to work because I have students who think I'll believe that this came out of their a**es heads...

"When doctors withdraw life-sustaining treatment like feeding tubes from severely incompetent patients, it should be morally recognised for what it is - euthanasia, where death is foreseen with certainty."

... when they usually write like this...

"Euthanasia shouldn't be legalise as it is likes murder."

Hello! Am I red, wrinkly and chipolata-like? Do I look like I was born yesterday??? *slap-slap-kick-student-across-room*

But when it comes to parenthood, it's definitely a boon because I'm just so clueless.

Blogs are the best because you get to read what other moms have actually TRIED on REAL kids, and you know straight away whether it worked with their kids. Sometimes they blog about how they would do it differently and they even give suggestions. Lagi best. It's like Straits Times food reviews - no need to eat bak kut teh from Changi to Tuas to find the best. Just follow Wong Ah Yoke!

The blogs I like to check out are Ling's and Angeline's. Their posts on activities to do at home are labelled under Baby Education and Montessori, respectively. My sister, Dawn, has also posted some ideas under Art Projects and Music and Dance. She works with children so she has tons of ideas on how to play with them. I also like Pilgrim Parent's blog. I don't know her at all, but she blogs about fun stuff to do with kids under this label - Activities.

You don't know how much I need all these ideas. After a whole week of dealing with 18-year olds and thinking of interesting issues for them to discuss in class (gay rights, globalisation, media influence...), my brain returns to its normal pea size on Saturday mornings, and I become a boring, uninspired, how-long-can-the-TV-babysit-my-kid-before-his-ears-bleed parent. *sigh* My brain hurts.

So I'm going to leave the thinking to those wonderful people above and I'm going to copy... shamelessly!

Thanks guys, you've saved my brain. ;)

Here's Trinity playing a very simple game of "which cap fits which bottle?".


Here's Sophie making strawberry jellies.

Here's DN adding an egg yolk into a cookie mixture. (Yup, we tried it yesterday, but haven't finished making the cookies -_-... will explain more in the next post.)




Here's the final product of a simple "pasting" activity my sister blogged about.

I see a... GUITAR!

Looks like I'll be blogging a lot less in the next two weeks because it's "i want to kill myself marking time" in school. :( For now, here's a short little post about DN's first love - GUITARS!

DN has this mad obsession with guitars. It's very strange because PF and I are as musically inclined as bars of soap. I sing out of tune and PF sings even more out of tune. There's a chance we might do alright when playing a triangle, but don't bet on us. We have no musical instruments at home so it was with great surprise that DN developed this insane love for guitars.

It started a few months back when he was in the playnest programme at Julia Gabriel. After every class, he would head for the guitar and pluck the strings. Then, he discovered pictures of guitars in his 1000-word book (Thanks Ling!) and would ask us to show him those pages EVERY NIGHT. Soon, he started saying "guitar". It was at that point that we thought he might actually like to have his OWN guitar. There was once we were at Central and there was a little band (2 guitarists, 1 cellist) entertaining the public. DN stopped crying (he was fussing about being put in the stroller) and watched them perform for 30 minutes straight. At odd times in the day, he will pick up the strangest objects (racket, ladle, stick) and start strumming them like guitars. Funny bunny!

How else do we know he loves guitars? Just watch this video. ;)