Our Home. Our Life

We have been waiting for this day to arrive since sometime in December last year.  We were all really excited when Sandi finalised her travel arrangement to Singapore and so with great anticipation, she arrived in our sunny island at 1pm on Singapore Airline this afternoon.

I’m sure the last person Sandi expected to see at the airport was Dillon.  Although Sandi knew that Dillon is still in town with her mother, she did not know that we had also made arrangement to pick up Dillon from her mother earlier due to some personal commitment that Faizah had to attend to.

And thus right now, we have Sandi and Dillon sleeping in our house.  What great reunion!  We will have Dillon for this weekend and Sandi will be in Singapore for the next 6.5 weeks. We will sure have lots of fun!

I have not been very active with blog updating lately.  There were some really cute pictures taken in our last two visits to my in-laws’ farm that I thought I should post and share them here. Although late, it’s better than not posting at all.

We were all thrilled to learn from my father-in-law that these ducklings were just 1 day old.

Our children are indeed lucky to be able to have some “hands on” experience with some farm animals that city kids these days may not have a chance to touch.

This is why we love to bring our girls back to the farm whenever we can find the time.

Holding a new born piglet with gugu.

It is indeed rare to see a cluster of durians hanging on a tree at such a height.

Another fun thing to do at the farm that the girls don’t get to try in our SG flat.

Their grandma always comes up with cute and fun ideas for the girls.  They definitely had lots of fun with the motorised bike.

Xmas presents from shushu and shenshen.

We were at the farm again two weeks later with the Phoon family.  We all had a chance to savour some organic durians.

Yu-En loves the taste of durians.  We had to restrain her from eating too much of the heaty fruit.

Yu-Xin and Huiying getting up close with the piglets.  We could tell that these little animals were scared to death.

Yu-Xin finally plucked up enough courage to touch them after these frightened piglets were being forced to a corner of their sty.

The kids were intrigued with the mimosa.

Really love this picture with the kids running… so carefree, so innocent and happy. Children should be given lots of opportunity to connect with nature and learn to appreciate its beauty.  A fun childhood is what we want to give to our girls.

Following gong-gong around while he looked for ripen durians.

Two weeks have passed, Yu-En has finally settled down in school.  Although she cried when she had to be separated from Jie-Jie each morning when they arrived in school, I had no problem getting her onto the bus.  She’s all smile and willingly changed into her school uniform, no whining or protest.  We are very lucky that she’s reacting positively to school.  When other parents had to accompany their kids to school or stayed in school for the first week, my little baby was all by herself.  The fact that Jie-Jie is in the school and her frequent visits helped big time.

Her teacher feedback that her separation anxiety only lasted a week.  By the beginning of the second week, she was able to wave goodbye to Jie-Jie without shedding any tears.  Jie-jie had stopped visiting for a week already and Mei-mei is doing real good, interacting with friends and teachers.

For two days already, she’s been reminding us that she wants to go to school.  I’m a happy mother!

Assembly time for the older kids.

Yu-En and classmates learning through playing with blocks and shapes.

When we woke Yu-En up this morning, she sprang up immediately like a Jack-in-a-box.  Laughing, playing and running around….we happily sent both the girls off in their school bus.  Then Yu-Xin came back after school and “reported” that Yu-En broke down in tears several times in her class and Jie-Jie was asked many times by her teacher to go visit and pacify Mei-Mei.  LOL.

We are hoping that Yu-En still wants to go to school tomorrow. 

We first had this Christmas tree when my nephew first visited us in Dec 2004.  We brought the same tree back when we moved back to SG this year.  Kind of cool to be able to enjoy the same old tree we had from Phoenix.

We had our 3 angels to help set up the tree.

Ta-da, the 3 tiers had been put together.  Now comes the decorations part.

Hahaha, Yu-En broke one of the red balls almost right from the start.

Took a free shot with Santa at 313 Somerset.

Yu-Xin had another shot when she revisited the shopping mall with gu-gu.

Our Christmas gathering on Christmas eve with the MGD gang and the Crossman Family minus Dillon.

Christmas gathering with my family on Christmas day afternoon.

Christmas gathering with my Dunman High gang at Yuqing and Chakri’s house.

Anil and Chakri were our bbq men.

Zhiyi is 1 yr older than Yu-Xin.

Christmas gathering with the Choos.

Saw a new born pig at my in-laws’ farm last week, “fresh from the oven” Probably only half an hour out from the womb of its mummy, feet were still wobbly and unable to stand and move about.  The mother pig was still in labour and could tell that she was not comfortable with the contraction pain.  Hence we decided to leave her alone so that she could work on bringing out all her babies, at least another 7 little piglets.

We always love to walk through the “delivery ward” as there are so many cute little piglets, so small and pink.

Jie-Jie and Mei-Mei giving a lucky chosen piglet a pat.

When asked if they would dare to hold a baby pig, Yu-En said YES without any hesitation.  Yu-Xin backed away immediately when gong gong handed out the little pig to them.

Born in the year of the pig, our little Miss Piggy finally got to hold a real little pig.

Can’t remember when we had our last Neo Print made.  It’s been a long time since we stood in front of a Neo Print sticker photo booth.  If I think those we had before from couple of years back were creative enough, the Japanese had certainly taken the technology to a whole new level.  Unfortunately, both the written and verbal instructions were in Japanese and we would not have our prints nicely decorated if the sales attendant was not there to assist.

It was definitely a fun experience.

While mama was out catching up with her girlfriends one Sunday afternoon, the girls and papa had their own program at Pasir Ris beach.

The Crossmans are in town!  We invited them over to our place on Saturday for dinner.  It was terrific to see them again after 11 months.  Dillon and Yu-Xin appeared distant with each other.  Although they did warm up a little to each other after a while, they did not pay too much attention to each other.  Guess the presence of another little girl, Joey, got Yu-Xin distracted.  Also, Dillon was tired as he was still trying to cope with the jet lag since that was only their third day in town.

Joey who is about 3 months younger than Yu-Xin is the daughter of TseWang and Evonne.  The Ngs are good friends that we haven’t had a chance to meet since we returned in January.  Thus we were glad that we were able to have two families to catch up with on Saturday.

The photo taking session took place a few months ago in school. I must say that I’m happy with how the picture had turned out.  It’s a nice way to let the children remember their class and their teachers.

The following pictures were taken during the full dressed rehearsal 2 weeks before the actual performance. These were just received couple of days ago via mail.