It's our first time there. Main objective was to watch Wonder Full, the Light and Water show. Have to add, what kind of name is that?
After dinner at Marina Square, we managed to find our way to the Helix bridge. Whew. The night scenery is really quite magnificient. Too bad, we didn't have time to dwell.
I have a grouse. Both lifts (indoor and outdoor) at MBS were not working. We had to go down the escalators with our 2 strollers, which was not a problem. But I know of some parents who will have a problem with that. What about wheelchairs?
Finally settled down at Events Plaza.
While waiting for the show to start...
The boy cannot hold his smile very well huh? Hehe.
The kids also ran around the place, jumping up and down the steps. We saw disco lights in the distance and ran over to see.
It's Avalon, which I later found out to be a club. Pretty cool.
Then the show started. As with ALL shows, the kids got nervous. Mandy covered her eyes and then lied on my lap with her eyes closed. Barry was terrified of the mist that was coming out from the sides and at one point, tried to run away while yelling NOOOOOOO.
I really don't get my kids sometimes. It's just a light and water show.
They were very relieved at the end of the show. I got them to drink there milk there. Barry drank half and wanted to leave, afraid that the next show was going to start. Ha.
We then walked in the other direction, all the way to Raffles Place station to go home. What a workout!
The blog is still under construction. I'm liking the super cheery look. But that might change. And change again. And again. Anyway, thanks for visiting this blog and I look forward to seeing you at the other one! :)
Food. It's about the only way to get through to Barry. I'm not kidding.
Barry has some impulse control problems. I know all kids do. But... (ok, I'm going to do a very wrong thing here) compared to Mandy, his is very very serious. And then again, it might be because his a boy.
I realised I just compared my kids and gender stereotyped them. Oh well.
Anyway, he HAS to do what you tell him not to do and no threats work very well. EXCEPT the threat to take away his sweets, or toy foods. You see, he has this precious bag of stuff. They'll be toy food carefully selected from the kitchen set toys or sweets collected. Recently, he had a windfall from Philson's birthday party. About that later. Or some other toys, say beads or bricks which he pretended to be food.
I cannot keep that bag of stuff. It has to be there on the mat, even when he naps or sleeps at night. His precious.
Sometimes, you might find books strewn open on the floor of our place. DO NOT close them. He has painstakingly flipped to a page full of pictures of food, and place the book on the floor, so he can see food everywhere. He'll scream if you close the book or take it away.
He listens to story quietly but when there's a page with picture/s of food, he'll snatch the book away from me and ask to hold it.
He hated drawing. Had never shown any interest. Until one day, I exclaimed that what he had casually doodle on the doodle board looked like a cherry. What do you know? He sat there for the next 15 minutes, drawing cherries, apples, watermelons, oranges. He has a drawing book. Inside there, you'll find nothing but pictures of food and vegetables (mostly drawn by me). He only wants to colour if the picture is a food.
Only just 2 days back did he go to bed without some 'food' in his hands. He used to insist on holding sweets to sleep when he got his hands on some. He would clutch the sweet/s tightly. In the middle of the night, he would jump up, asking for his sweets. Most times, he would have dropped them. If we don't find the sweet/s or get him a replacement, he would throw a tantrum and wouldn't sleep. Other times, when he didn't have sweets, he had to hug a food pictorial book to sleep. Either the Lunchbox book or the Fruit and vegetable book. Once, he took fancy to strawberry picture in a huge hardcover book and insisted he wanted to sleep with it. Gosh. Oh, the first night we got our Mother Garden picnic set, he brought the whole (very big!) picnic basket filled with toy food to bed. *faint*
When we go grocery shopping.... gee... he just HAD to hold something. I usually give him an orange since it's more hardy than most other fruits and vegetables. The moment we reach home. it's war because I'll need to get him to let go of the whatever food he's holding in his hands. Once he held lemon in his hands, almost 24/7, for 2 whole days. Until it turned brown and I threw it away.
And no, he doesn't even like the taste of lemons or many of the stuff he insisted on holding, Sweets? He's never eaten any before, except one candy at the Halloween party though his craze started way before then. And he's never asked to eat them. He just simply loves anything that's food.
So.... I thought very hard about how to get to him. How to teach him. Because I was really having a lot of trouble getting him to stay at one place to complete something.
Came up with.... FOOD ALPHABET!
I have a stack of worksheets collected from Mandy's and Barry's time at the playgroup. These were the ones the teacher kept for me when they were absent. There were so many! I had an almost complete set of worksheets for the whole alphabet! Haha. Tells a lot about their attendance.
The objective is letter recognition and their sounds. Every week, I get him to do one worksheet.
He has shown considerable improvement in his colouring. Hurray! At least he knows what he's supposed to colour and has stopped coloring everywhere but the picture. He had to match the big and small letters and stick them.
Then, for the week, I bring his attention to the letter of that week. I also ask him to pick out the letters from the alphabet magnets. We match the magnets to the worksheet on the fridge again.
The finale is his favorite. The food book,which I do with Mandy too.
I place about 8 food items on the table and recapped how the big and small letters look like by referiing to the fridge magnets and worksheets.Then, we make the letter sound. The kids, each holding a big container, are to take turns to find a food item that starts with that particular sound.
Then, of course, they have to eat one of the item. Ha. For A, they ate dried apricots which they love. For B, they ate biscuits.
Once found, they colour pictures of the foods and do their food book! We've done 2 letters so far
I have Barry look for the letters among some others and stick them in the book, which is actually still a piece of paper now. Then he sticks the pictures of the food into the book.
Mandy writes the letter herself. She also cuts the pictures herself. She's getting better at it! Then she sticks them.
It's working pretty well. At least Barry recognises his As and Bs.
Alright, now I'm going to write about his windfall.
We attended Philson's birthday bash on Sunday. There was a pinata full of candies. The boy managed to squeeze 15 gummies, 3 chocolates and a jelly in his 2 pockets and brought them all home. How did he do that?
(I've already posted the pictures on FB so the captions are going to be the same. Hehe)
First, stand in line and wait for your turn to hit the pinata
Hit hard and wish candies fall on you
Jie jie has no luck too. :(
Candies galore. Rush in to grab. Know no shame.
Hands too small?
No problem
Maintain the pose till somebody pities you and gives you a plate. Continue piling on the candies even though everybody's gone!
Realises mom would not bring a plate of candies home. So it's stuffing time. GIN at anybody who tries to take your loot!
Actually, when Thaddeus came along, Barry, while still stuffing sweets into his pockets as fast as could, said "Ay. Wei. Didi! CanNOT. Cannot take ar. AY." Serious. It was so funny.
Lastly, engage help.
A lot of people were laughing at him that day. All the other kids just took a few and left. He was the only one so serious about his candies. Haha.
On the way home on the train, he took out his candies one by one, to admire. Then, he held up the jelly and went JELLYYYYY gleefully. Just had to record it.
Ok lah, rest of the pictures from the party. Very few. Hubby didn't go so no sard sard camera, which also meant I had to jagar both kids myself.
I was telling Audrey that this is how a modern party looks like. A Wii party.
Honestly, I would prefer the kids to play toys and interact. Constantly needing to ask the kids to let go of the remote or whatever that is, and to ensure fair play is so annoying! Especially when some parents help their kids hog the remote. And hearing your kids whine for a turn is.... argh!!!
Mandy with the birthday 'crown'. I don't know why Dee's dad put it on her. Heh.
I helped some mummies buy ukeleles for their kiddoes and brought them there that day.
Now, 6 of the kiddoes own the same uke. Cute.
Mine have learnt the correct way of holding the uke. Although hubby kept saying it's too young for Mandy to learn but he taught her one chord today. And she played it! Ha.
Well, we've been sick, there've been parties and outings.... And I was so lazy. Hah. Actually, it's because I'm very disorganised and very bad at multitasking. So if I needed to, say, plan for something, or work on something, I need to do that one thing at a time. It just happened I had quite a lot of issues I wanted to clear that past few months. Haiz. I wish I was better at organising my life.
Anyway...
Keywords:
spider, sail, sun, sky, sea, slide
Projects:
Spider
We read a couple of books about spiders. Their life cycles, how they live, what they eat etc. I emphasized on the number of legs spiders have and reiterated that spiders are not insects since insects have 6 legs.
Then, we made spiders out of crushed unwanted magazine paper, garbage bag, pipe cleaners and paper. Most steps were easy enough even for Barry.
Mandy's:
Barry's
I had them draw on the eyeballs and stick the eyes themselves. Then, they counted out 8 legs for their spiders. Mandy could poke the pipe cleaners through the garbage bag. Wow. I couldn't!
Then, I drew a big web for their spiders to play on. They were so thrilled, pretending my fingers were worms, flies, dragonflies etc, getting stuck on the web so their spiders could gobble them (my fingers!) up. After that, I wasn't free to play with them so the girl improvised. She started tearing pieces of papers of the magazines as insects. When I finally got back to them, the whole floor was full of tiny pieces of papers! Gosh!
We also sang the song "Incy wincy spider" and they made their spiders act accordingly to the song. Ha.
Up the 'spout'!
Sail
Previously, they did rowboats for their project, so I thought it'd be good to introduce to them another kind of boats - sailboat. First, we read a few books with sailboats as the subjects. They particularly loved "Sail away, little boat" by Janet Buell.
Mandy still remembered how to get rowboats moving in the water. She told me we had to use oars. 'What about sailboats?' I asked, 'How do they move?' I told them that when the wind blows on the sail, the boat will move.
Mandy asked me how we make the boats turn. "We steer the sailboats by changing the direction of the sail. If we want the boat to stop, we roll up the sail." I asked them to recall the cartoon 'Up' which they've watched umpteen times. The house has 'sails' too! And Uncle Carl steered the house too. The girl said she understood. The boy had long gone somewhere else. Ha.
They cut their own sails out of cardboard. Barry needed a lot of help. I tried my best to let him think he did everything himself. Ha. They stuck on the sails onto a disposable chopstick and I stuck the sail onto a shallow uncovered container.
Then, they experiment with their sailboats on the water. Mandy blew and was excited when her boat started moving! "Can! Can move mama!" she exclaimed. Barry destroyed his within seconds. Ha.
Then it was half an hour of splish splashing fun! They loooooove that.
Sea
I was way too ambitious for this project. The idea is simple. They had to read this book:
It has pictures of all kinds of sea creatures and their names in it. They had to look for a creature with a name starting 's'. Once that's done, we coloured, cut, laminated them. There were soooooooooo many pictures to do, so I had to help colour. Mandy insisted on cutting and I must say, she did quite a good job. Then, I laminated them so that the kids could play have some imaginative play with them.
Before this, they also sponge painted a big sea, which I also laminated. Mandy had lots of fun with this on the floor. She would pretend the seagull was perched on a rock, a salmon would swim by and the seagull would swoop into the water to eat it. Or it was the seal diving in to find fish. Or the swordfish or sailfish poking other fishes with their sharp noses etc.
She's a diehard animal documentary fan (she's concentrated through the whole Planet Earth series, whole Life series, whole Galapagos series, whole Nature's most amazing events series, and some others..) So, she knows her animals names, predators and and prey pretty well.
Now, the sea is on the wall, free for the kids to draw on, using whiteboard markers, or stick on pictures of the creatures.
Mandy's drawings on the 'sea'.
You cannot really see them but she drew fishes in the water. She said she wanted a 'big school of fish'. She also drew a sun (which looks like a rambutan hehe) and a big bird flying in the sky.
And also, one day, she decided to to add some pavements so the seagulls, seals, otters and sealions could rest. I suggested rocks instead. Ha. She cut and stuck all the yellow rocks herself.
These are the creatures.
Can you imagine all the work we did? Especially me? Tedious! At least, they had fun and learnt from the project. The girl remembers all their names. I bet you don't even know which one is sunfish! Ha! And she knows the difference between a sailfish and a swordfish. WOW! (oops, I just realised the sailfish is not in the picture.) She said she learnt that from Planet Earth.
The boy learnt some names too. :p
Slide
Included this because I knew they would love it. I asked them to imagine playing on the slide at the playground. I asked them why they could go down a slide so fast. Why can't we slide down the floor? This was Mandy's answer "Because slide got slope mah!" Although grammatically incorrect, but I was quite pleased. :)
We looked around for things that could make good slides. Settled on this:
Very soon, they were running around the house in a frenzy, looking for objects to go down the slide. They tried toy cars, beads, balls, soft toys etc. Once in a while, I stopped them make them guess which of 2 objects would slide down faster. The squarish brick or the round ball? The light or the heavy ball?
Then, I left them to do my chores. To my alarm, when I turned back to look, the boy was trying to slide down the table. Haha.
I love easy projects like this. :)
Squirrel, string
These are actually filler projects. The kids were sick for 2-3 weeks. And when they're sick, they're the whiniest, clingy-est creatures you've ever seen. I could hardly breathe with them whining and sticking to me 24/7. They couldn't even lift a pencil to do anything.
They totally drop dead on the table before they could finish sticking the squirrel. This is what the girl managed to complete after 2 sessions. She drew a sun and a tree at the background.
We also did string art.You know, dip string in paint and create a picture on paper.
They did this without their usual enthusiasm. Heh.
Sun
Wanted them to learn about sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset. Just the basic cycle. So we watched a few youtube videos. Search for the timelapse ones so you can see the whole process.
After that, they used paper plates to make a sun and a moon. Mandy chose to make a moon, and Barry a sun.
They drew and colored all by themselves! I must say I'm so proud of the boy. He drew a face!!!! Granted, the nose was accidental. He was drawing the mouth but turned out looking like a nose. So I asked him to draw another mouth. Otherwise, he did everything himself, except the sticking of the cellophane. Previously, he wouldn't even be patient enough to fill up the plate with colours.
Way to go Barry!
See what we did with the sun and moon.
Again, if it irks you to not see the whole screen, please watch it on Youtube. Just double click. I think. Hehe.
This was the 4th take. Barry was tired. But Mandy wanted to do it again and again. They were supposed to be behind a sea... or was it mountain? Ah, not important. Did you know Mandy was tiptoeing when I said 'highest at noon'? She told she was trying to go as high as possible. So funny. :)
I probably left out some details in my narration but well, they get the idea. I thought it was cute.
Sweet, sour and salty
I let them taste sugar, salt and vinegar and asked them to describe each taste to me. Then, we tasted tomato sauce and soy sauce. All in tiny amounts of course.
The next day, I engaged their help in making the sweet and sour sauce for my fish dish. Basically, we mixed sauces, sugar and salt together. They tried and gave me suggestions. "Too sweet". "Too salty". And I adjust the mixture accordingly. A very simple project.
Songs:
Incy Wincy Spider, Oh Mr Sun (no chance to do The big ship sails)
Mandy also did this:
I'm trying to get her to recognise english words since she can do it for mandarin. But somehow, it's much more difficult in english. She could tell me S-U-N is 'sun' by using the phonics method. But when she comes across this word again, she won't know it anymore. We have to start sounding all 3 letters again. Sometimes she gets, sometimes she doesn't. For english word recognition, is it more phonics, the look of the words, or the spelling? I suspect it's a little of everything. You cannot deny phonics help, but not for all words. Memorising spelling is quite tough for a 4 year old. Then, what?
I've read about the whole words method but don't really get it. Hehe. Not very smart lah, what to do?
Her teacher says she can read the reader books but when I take apart the words, ie out of the context of the books, she cannot read them. So was she just memorising the content? Or she could recognise the words somewhat but when out of context, she couldn't 'switch on' her word recognition mode?
We had a small celebration with hubby's family on wednesday, and another bigger one with my family on saturday. Well, hubby's family is small, and mine is big!
We saw this flower at my mil's place. She said they only bloom at midnight. Hubby was intrigued.
When Mandy heard she was going to have a birthday party, she asked me to bring along balloons. Ha. To her, no party is complete without balloons. I gladly obliged. Well, she did not ask for a cake, did not ask for any party decorations, did not specify any themes or venue or even food. All she wanted was balloons!
Hubby got her Swensen's ice cream cake. Custom made Toy story one. They were quite thrilled.
There were only 8 of us to share the pretty huge cake. Mandy couldn't even finish her piece while the greedy Barry kept asking for more, more, more!
Barry was so happy to sing the birthday song. He cannot sing it very well yet but very adorably nonetheless. Mandy was finally able to blow out all the candles by herself. Still shy though. :)
(please watch the video on Youtube. I realised Barry cannot be seen half the time here)
Then came saturday.
I went early to my mum's to help out. She was preparing quite a lot of food for the party. Thanks so much mum!
Hubby brought the kids there after their very very short nap. They mucked around, playing with presents from my mum. Ukelele for Mandy and a train set for Barry. But in the end, you know... Everything is hers and everything is his.
The guests came.
Fifth aunt and Uncle Roger, thanks sooooo much for your help for setting up the fire and preparing the food! Then, for sending us home! Kam sia!
We had the bbq at a pit near my mum's block. It was my first time holding a party at a neighborhood bbq pit. The place was great. Very spacious, and my mum's place was just 5min away.
There was also prawns, crabs, sweet potatoes, sweetcorn, salad, fried beehoon, fried nuggets and seaweed chicken and assorted balls.
Their mobile nannies (aka Felicia, Ivan and Irwin) came! That's when I got my FREEDOM! Haha.
I tied 3 balloons to the lamppost and they provided the kids with much entertainment. Ha.
You might be wondering why Mandy was wearing flip flips instead of nice dress shoes. Well. I left the kids to the hubby to dress. While I remembered to specify the clothings, I forgot to specify the shoes and hair accessories. Sigh.... Hubby said "Well, she chose the shoes herself. They're pink what!"
With my cousins there to play with the kids, I could go bbq in peace. My favourite part of a bbq party is to bbq! But I can hardly do that with 2 clingy kids. So I was very happy that night.
See how entertained they are?
Oh yes, we 'borrowed' the NTUC trolley for all our stuff. I thought that was real clever of my mum. She said she felt so paiseh to be pushing the trolley home with a single rockmelon inside. Haha.
Despite the lack of sleep, they could still run and run and run. Non-stop.
The guests eat and mix.
I look odd as usual.
Anyway, the boy was totally stoned around 8pm. He could hardly walk! So I brought down the cake.
I had previously let the girl choose her favourite design from Bengawan Solo website. She also chose her favorite longan as the filling for the sponge. I thought the 'artist' did quite a bad job. The doggie on the right looks so weird and the handwriting was.. bad. But well, it's just a cake. The redeeming factor was that it was YUMMY!
The kids sang and clapped along with much gusto! So cute!
We tried having an all-kiddoes photo. But Wan Ting wanted out. Hehe.
After cutting the cake, Mandy was asked to make a wish. I know she totally didn't know what they were talking about. Haha.
Then it's every kids' favorite part of the evening. Eating cake!
The relatives helped so much with the bbq-ing, cleaning up and everything. I'm so lucky to have them. Oh, and because my kids love longan and kept asking for them, a group of my cousins and aunties actually spent the whole time picking out longans from their cake to give them. So nice. My kids are so lucky too. :)
