Month: August 2006

One of Edda’s classmates had a birthday party at her house. I was in charge of driving the whole class over to the party. Normally, I don’t like to drive anyone around – but what can you do when you have the only car and it’s a minivan..

I was looking at the map last night to find out where I was suppose to drive to and I was so confused – the address seemed to take up the whole end of the street. Could this one house actually occupy a whole street-end-worth of land? I mentioned it to Jeremy and I was so excited, I have actually never been to a landed house before – that is, a house that is sitting on it’s own land with lawn all around it. (Our apt is about 1100 sq. ft. and there are a bazillion units in our condo complex which takes up a city block – typical singapore living arrangement.) So a house is very rare indeed. Imagine my surprise when I drove up and saw this:

Beautiful old colonial house with verandahs and everything! You just need to sit back under the ceiling fans and drink your gin and tonics.

Lovely place and lovely party. Exploring the grounds, meeting the dogs, face painting and jumping on trampoline.

Haircuts (10 minute haircut for 10 dollars (about 6 US dollars):

Headphones:

Donald is leaving early tomorrow morning. So tonight we fed him some ice cream.

We all were hung over from the fantastic weekend, everyone got up late and was late to school and work.

Tonight we had a lamb roast. Donald was the chef as he was the one who put the premarinated meat into the oven. (a hint for you dad! roasts are easy!) Edda for some reason has taken a liking to meat – I don’t know what happened, but I’ll take it! Vince, of course, is still our carb boy – plain noodles and rice supplemented with large glasses of milk/juice and carrots.

I started the Icarus Shawl. It’s going well – slowly but surely. I should join some sort of KAL. Hmmmm..

Mom goes high tech!!! She worked on her iPod a lot recently. This iPod was bought in San Jose with Donald’s help.

Look at her – she is enjoying herself and she is a 100% High Tech Grand Mom. Isn’t she?

We had dim sum at the Crystal Jade with Choon and his high school friend and his family. All very sweet folks and Vince was very smitten with their one-year old daughter. She was very interested in Edda’s stash of Cheerios and Vince was very happy to feed her one Cheerio after another.

We brought our headphones with us and Edda spent the whole 90 minutes at dim sum happily eating her oranges and listening to Abba. Dancing Queen rules! I was really impressed.

We ran back home to meet Gowri, our sitter, at 12:30 pm and then the big kids took off to the MacRitchie Resevoir Treetop Walk. We walked about 5 km in the rainforest, the highlight being this suspension bridge through the canopy of the rainforest. It was very hot but we did manage OK. We did sweat a lot – Jeremy took off his shirt because he needed to use it to wipe off his sweat – but it meant exposing his pale-white office worker skin to the blazing sun. We did have sunscreen, so his tender skin was well protected.

This is Donald’s last weekend in Singapore. We are making the most of it. Today we went to Sentosa, Singapore’s premier “amusement park”. Vince loved the luge – with Donald driving – he went fast, fast, fast! Then we took a ski lift back up.

Following the example of another family who has a daughter with Rett, we are bringing music along for Edda. Jeremy’s setting up her stroller with a portable sound system and also Edda’s going to have her own iPod and headphones. It really allows her to regulate herself in unfamiliar environments.

Vince has his first swim lesson today. It went just fine – much better than last year when he refused to go to the deep pool and was freaked out by the teacher speaking in Chinese to some of her students.

We went out to eat fish head curry and we found a nice playground at the local mall.

Edda loved it.

There are always so many things to do and not much motivation to do them.

This has been a week punctuated with friends and family and bits of lost sleep. Donald’s friend Choon is in town and I’m living vicariously through them to experience the night life of Singapore.

We are all daytime creatures, unknowing of dinners out and what happens in the dark in Singapore. The kids are in bed by 8, so we hang out at home. This week, Donald’s been out at night, so when he comes home the next day, I ask what it was like and I remember what it was like for me to go out at night.

A wonderful package arrived today from my SP, hooray! Thank you, thank you, thank you! Inside there were so many things, a beautiful necklace, squirty toys for the kids, wind-up toys (Ruby loved the jumping frog), a smooshed up hand towel.. All these things brought a smile to my face, but I present to you the knitting content:

This is the shawl I’ve been invited to knit with my SP, she provided the pattern and the yarn and also the motivation! It’s a beautiful thing, so wonderful and I am so overwhelmed by it. I’ll have to go rummaging for some needles and then I’ll take a deep breath and start.

I have been a bit down recently. Looking into the uncertain future and feeling melancholy – nothing too serious. Here’s Edda and Ranjit – her speech therapist who comes to our house, she’s one of the most upbeat, encouraging and cheerful person. Actually, most of the people I’ve met who work with special needs kids are irrationally optimistic.

It’s been raining and Vince loves the puddles, it makes walking to the mall a bit wetter and slower.

I started cooking dinner tonight. I hope I can cook five times a week, from Monday to Friday and Mom will cook during the weekends.

I told Mom I only complained about her cooking twice for all these years. Hope she will not complain too much. She didn’t.

As a matter of fact, she saw I was very busy tonight and offered to wash the dishes. It was awful nice of her. BTW, I cut myself. She even didn’t know.

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