Abby's Birthday Party

Yesterday, we celebrated Abby's 4th birthday. It was a pool party @ Cool Bananas.

Anyway, we arrived a little past 3p.m. and all the guests were already inside the pool, splashing at everyone. We'd also packed your swiming items in case you wanted to join. Daddy brought you to the pool and you said that you wanted to join. So he got you changed and went into the pool to join Abby and her classmates. There were 3 adults in the pool who supervised the children playing, with water guns and balls.Then came the clown. He was splashed by you kids and after a while he managed to persuade you all to leave the pool for the hi-tea buffet (which was for the kiddies).

As it was time for food, you decided not to join the other children who were having the buffet near the beach. So we joined Ah Kong and the rest of the family in the restaurant area (which had air-cond and fans.. not very much cooler but better than outside).

Here's baby Ian.. he's growing so fast.

Tou-tou also seemed to be having a good time, judging from her smile.

And here you are enjoying the food. In the end, you digged at all the cheese which was the topping for the Nachos. By the time we left, it was already past six. The initial plan was to attend this party then go back to BM to celebrate a perpetual 18th birthday. But the BM dinner was postponed. So we stopped to buy dinner for Ah Kong and you (the food served didn't suit Ah Kong and we worried that you may be hungry later on) then headed home.


Despite it being a day without an afternoon nap, you managed to last till close to 11pm.

Happy Birthday, Abby!

A Song Just For Me...

And in Bahasa Malaysia too. Wow! You were not too sure of some of the words (you just mumbled or changed the lyrics althogether) but hey, it made my heart melt listening to this song. You even wrote the word "ibu" everywhere.

Happy Mother's Day

Of course with Mother's Day today, you had something special for me when I got back home after a department event on Friday. You had "hand carried" the precious cargo from school. I was told that Teacher Sharmine had told you all not to keep it in your bags in case it gets spoilt.

So what was it that you had brought for me? You asked me to go downstairs and this is what you gave me:

.. A handmade flower along with a "I love you, mummy" and a kiss.

As the flower could not stand on its own, we made a "flower pot" this morning. You decorated the paper and I helped you stick it to the container. We collected some stones from the garden to fill into the pot. Washed our hands and poked the flower into it's pot. You proudly showed the pot to kakak. Then you moved Ah Ma's money plant aside to make place for my pretty flower.

Thank you, sweetheart for such a pretty flower this Mother's Day.

P/S: This year you have relieved daddy of his "duty" to get me a card. A task he has not missed for the past 4 years. Muakkssss to daddy for his thoughfulness.

So Early???

Gosh.. I was up till late at night and on Saturday morning, you decided to wake up at 7.30am (you had a rather late night too.. you seem to know that Fridays = no afternoon nap and late nights too). What did you want to do?

You insisted that you had homework which you needed to do IMMEDIATELY!!! Thank you very much.. I had to get up, turn on the lights and bring your table and chair over to my room for you to do your homework.

While you did your writing (only a few more "C's" left to write) I dozed off. And after you were done, I woke up for a few seconds to check if you wanted to do something in your activity book and went back to sleep.

We even woke up, went down to have breakfast and got back to the room to continue with your activity book while I continued with my sleep.. till around 10 am. All this sleeping and waking up only gave me a bad headache which I had to put up with the whole day. Didn't even get a chance to take an afternoon nap.

And what was daddy doing while you were busy with your homework and activity book? Sleeping like nothing is happening around him!!!

Hot! Hot! Hot!

This morning you screamed shortly after I started to brush your teeth. Yup, super blur mummy put our Colgate toothpaste instead of your children's toothpaste for you. Not too sure why this happened, but I do recalls several times when I almost picked up our toothpaste to put on your toothbrush!

I was telling a friend and she commented that good thing it was Colgate and nor Darlie toothpaste. Wow! That would be even spicier.

Funny thing is I think you can take a little bit of spicy food. There was once when you came back from school with black Hacks. Wow! That's the spiciest of the Hacks sweets. I told you that you could not take this as it was very spicy. But you insisted that you wanted it (Samantha from school gave it to you.. ). Ok fine, so I gave it to you. You were very happy to take it. Daddy even commented "Wow! He can take it".

By the time daddy went up and came down, the sweet was already spat out. Hehe.. you could take it for a while until the spiciness set in! Could not wait to spit it out! See? That's the easiest way to convince a little boy that mummy is telling the truth. Let him try it! Let's see what else you want to try next time (as long as it's not something dangerous...)

12 hours

That's how long you slept from last night till this morning. Reason: because you did not take your afternoon nap. You had followed Ah Kong and Ah Ma to run some errands then had to go straight to Annabelle Che-che's house to see how Tou-tou was doing. He had fainted earlier on.

Daddy and I also had to leave work a little earlier to drop by to see how Tou-tou was doing. You were there playing by yourself as Anna Che-che was having her Mandarin lessons. We left about an hour later and when daddy asked if you wanted to nap, you said "No".

As Ah Ma did not cook, we went out for dinner and on the way back you fell asleep. And slept right through until this morning. For once you woke up in a happy mood, without me having to spend at least 10 minutes to wake you up. Hhmm.. note to self: make Evan sleep earlier.

Good thing you even managed to wake up at around 5.30am to wee wee (although you had wet your pants a little already) and continued to sleep.

Oh no...

I just mentioned about my biggest fear and this weekend my biggest fear comes true. You brought back a Chinese book. It's got pinyin, but I'm not too sure of the pronunciation still. So Ah Kong read the book with you yesterday evening.

After reading I asked you if you understood what the book was about and you said "Yes". I wasn't there when Ah Kong read the book to you... Oh well...

Even you asked me why you were given a Chinese book to read!

Si Cantik dengan Si Hodoh

.. what a mouthful. And how do you tell this story to a little boy who doesn't understand much Bahasa Malaysia? Every Friday the school will give you a story book to bring home which we'd need to read with you. The first time, you also brought back a BM story book. Yikes! I had to read in BM and translate it to you. That time it took me quite a while to read and you showed no interest in the story at all. I had to read 2 pages, stop and let you play and continue several times.

After that you brought back several English story books. We'd read them on Sunday nights. Last night after doing some activity books which we'd bought in the afternoon, we took the book out to read. Boy is it a long story... you got bored and distracted easily, just waiting for the story to finish so that you could do a bit of drawing before you went to sleep. Worst of all, I had to get daddy's help to translate some of the words.

I wonder what will happen if one day you bring back a Chinese book!

One-Wheel Drive

You like it? Ah Kong told me that it's called a one-wheel drive. You know, it's very tiring when I ride on my one-wheel drive. But mummy and daddy who followed me out on Monday with my one-wheel drive said that it's more tiring for them than for me because I take forever to ride to the end of our road. And when I stop, daddy has to put his foot behind my wheel to stop me from rolling down the road.

Whenever I go for a ride on my one-wheel drive, I ride up to the end of the road in front of our house. My friend Isaac and his cousin lives near the end of the road. Sometimes if they are around, they will bring out their bicycles to join me. We'll race to the end of the road and ride over the speed bump like daddy's car when he goes over the bump.

Some days they don't join me, so I will ride around with my Ah Kong up and down the road. My mummy says I'm a chicken. I don't know why, because I thought that I'm a boy. But I overheard her telling daddy that. She said I'd abandon my ride in the middle of the road the moment I see a car coming. Who wouldn't do that? Sheesh.. It's a car you know, mummy. What if the car driver didn't see me? It's faster for me to leave my ride and run and let daddy push my ride to safety, don't you think?

If you're wondering what my one-wheel drive is... Ta-da..

.. now you know. It's me and my bicycle. Hehe..

Swimming

I'm so proud of you. After missing swimming classes in school for so long (to be precise, you only went swimming a grand total of ONE time from the time you started in this school till last week), you finally agreed to join your friends in the swimming lessons on Friday.

We did not ask you to join the classes as from November till around February this year, you had a cough and runny nose on and off all the time and Dr Mary had advised not to let you swim for a while. When we went to meet Teacher Sharmine during the parent-teacher day, she had mentioned that she was trying to convince you to join the swimming lessons too.

Since you already had the green light from Dr Mary, we decided to work on you to convince you to join the swimming lessons. It all started when Ah Kong brought you swimming once during the school holidays. So to convince you, I told you that when you learn how to swim properly, you will be able to swim faster than Ah Kong.

Today is the second time you've joined the lessons in school and you seemed very happy to have attended the class. Good on you!!

Birthday Present

So what exactly is this? It's your birthday present which had to sit in the front passenger seat of Ah Kong's car.

What else can it be? A train set, complete with table for the whole trackes to be on. A gift from daddy and mummy.

You got to play with it even before your birthday. When the kids played with it during your party, you seemed ok. Until someone tried to put a bus on your tracks. You exclaimed "bus cannot drive on the train tracks!!!".

I hope this train tracks will give you hours and hours of fun. Now what's going to happen to your die-cast Thomas set?

Thank You

Your birthday has come and gone. As with previous years, I had prepared a simple thank you gift for our guests. Every year, my "sifu" would suggest something which I can make for my guests. A big thank you to her for her amazing and interesting suggestions. I hope our guests liked the little token which they brought home.

We had to buy a lot of color pencils. I think anyone who saw us buying at Tesco must think we open a kindergarten! Haha...

And that's the reason why we went to the Bukit Dumbar playground to take pictures the Friday before. This is the latest if taken to complete the gifts. I was still sticking on the magnets on Saturday!

I had improvised from the original design which was to be hung. Instead I added a magnet at the back.. so it's now a fridge magnet.

Birthday Party @ School

As you were not well yesterday, we had the party today. We went downtown to Maxim's to collect your cake. It was the last cake to be collected in the shop that night.

Ah Ma and I dropped you off at school with a promise to be back later on with the cake. At 10am sharp daddy and I were at school. Principal Lilly was there to greet us and brought us to your class. When Teacher Sharmine announced that it was time to celebrate your birthday, everyone in class got all excited and crowded around me to tell me about birthday cakes and someones birthday celebration. Before the celebration began, everyone had to go to the bathroom to wash hands. Then everyone got back and crowded around the cake to take a look.

When your teacher got back, she got everyone to take a seat and brought the cake from table to table to show them the cake.

You got to sit in front with the cake. And when everyone had seen the cake, Principal Lilly got them to stand around the cake and you and started to sing the birthday song in English, Malay and Mandarin.

As you could not blow our 4 candles at once, everyone helped you to blow it out then they all went back to sit at their own places.

Teacher Sharmine cut the cake while you and I helped to distribute the cake to your friends. She asked if daddy and I wanted to have some cake. We said "no". Later on daddy said he's not dare to eat any as everyone had "helped" to blow out the candle, there was bound to be "extra ingredients" on the cake!

Teacher Sharmine had not cut very big slices for all of your classmates. But when I'd asked why not, she said not to worry as your friends will know to ask for more cake if they wanted any more. Which they did. I'm glad they enjoyed the cake. I know you did. You had 3 slices. After all you picked the design of the cake and also ensured that there was "colourful hundreds and thousands" on the sides of the cake.

Before we left, you distributed the party packs to your classmates. The boys got the party pack with a green ribbon (with Transformers stickers) while the girls had the party pack with pink ribbon (with princess or My Friends Tigger & Pooh stickers). I had checked with your teacher on the number of boys and girls and never thought of packing any extra (Note to self: next time pack extras). Thank goodness although there were new students, there was also absent students, so in the end my 17 packets were just enough. You had to give up yours and I had to promise you a party pack at home so you seemed happy with that arrangement.

You were so happy throughout the celebration, being the center of attention for that 30 minutes or so. You kept hugging and kissing us, showing your happiness.

We went home and had lunch then picked you up from school after that.

What's in the Loot Bag?

We woke up early on Sunday morning despite having a late night. Of course, I'd have continued to sleep if not for this little worm sleeping next to me. Sheesh.. it was only 8.15 am!

Well we went downstairs, had breakfast and started to open the presents. So many presents. You are one lucky little boy!!! Here you are opening all the presents. Too many for you to play with or read all at once, but you've been reading or playing or learning with the new items.

A big THANK YOU to everyone for their thoughtful presents and wishes for our little boy.

Happy 4th Birthday

What a way to start your birthday. Sigh. Today is your birthday and you woke up at 6am.. with a fever. I put the thermometer on and I could see the temperature rising and not stopping before the temperature was confirmed, I was already downstairs bringing up the Paracetamol.

The moment you saw the bottle, you insisted that you did not want that. After a promise to give you strawberry yogurt drink, you drank and promptly asked for your strawberry yogurt. You even allowed me to put the fever patch on your forehead. We gave you a wipe and all fell back to sleep.

When I woke up, you also woke up and after much persuasion and many promises, you agreed not to go to school today.

So we will be celebrating your birthday tomorrow in school. After that we will be having your favourite fish and chips for dinner.

I hope you get better, sweetheart.

A Mouseriffic Party

Yup, the party theme is "Mickey Mouse". In advance, we'd gotten the bunting printed out and cut. On Friday night, I got it fixed to the string and with your help, daddy and I put it up near the kitchen.

On Saturday, we left you at home with strict instructions to nap by 3pm (Especially since you woke up a 7.30am to go to the market). Of course, you should still remember the "threat" so even before 3pm you were already asleep in your room. When we wanted to go out to pick up the cake and balloons, you had insisted that you wanted to go along. But after telling you that you had to take a nap and mummy and daddy had to go out to make sure your party was fun, you agreed to stay at home with Ah Ma.

Went to a shop to buy party favours, picked up your cake and headed to the balloon shop. We had ordered over 30 helium filled balloons in Mickey colours: black, read, gold and white. When the balloons were filled up, the lady helped us fit all the balloons into the back seat area of daddy's car and we headed home, driving carefully as daddy could not use the car's rear view mirror while driving.

The balloons all bunched up. And below is the balloons all arranged in the living room.

Got home to rest a little, put the finishing touches to the party favours for our guests and decorations. Soon it was time to get ready. You'd woken up all refreshed and rested. Had some tea-time snacks and soon it was time to get ready for the party. For once, we were all ready before our guests arrived. Daddy was already busy at the barbecue, starting to cook the food for everyone.

Daddy's and his assistant, Minnie Mouse and Uncle Peter

Yvonne Kor-kor & Uncle Peter

Soon our guests arrived and you had fun, keeping everyone entertained. Then when Kelvin arrived, you played with him. Managed to take a few pictures of our guests as daddy was too busy at the BBQ grill. Including one of you with your presents.

Mosts of our guests came in Mickey attire. Of course that included you in the yellow Mickey T-shirt which you had picked yourself for this special occassion. We also had a special guest that night. This is the first time you got to meet Mei Lee Ee-Poh. She was back from Australia for a few weeks. So she dropped by with Nanna to the party.

By the time we cut the cake and sang the birthday song, it was past 10pm. Everyone had a leisurely dinner and even daddy got to relax a bit after his "BBQ duty" was finally over. Here's the cake:

When everyone sang the birthday song, you also joined in and sang the song for yourself. The party continued with cakes, ice-cream potong and coconut jelly. By the time everyone left, it was close to 12 midnight. We did not open the presents that night except for one. I let you pick a present to open and you picked the present which was given by Ah Ma and Ah Kong.

After your shower and a book, you KOed almost immediately.

Countdown: 1 day to your birthday.

Yucky Mouth

Every time we pass that doughnut shop in Gurney Plaza's basement, you'd insist that you wanted a doughnut. And when showed the big variety which they have, you'd get all confused and cannot decide on which one you'd like to have. And as most of the doughnuts have coffee in one way or another, you'd only actually have a few choices which you can pick from.

Here you are enjoying the doughnut which you picked:

As you can tell from the picture, it was full of chocolate.

Countdown: 1 day to your party, 3 days to your birthday

Mr Grump

What happens when a little boy misses his afternoon nap? He gets super grumpy. And that's what happened to you on Tuesday. I had already noticed that you were super grumpy and weepy at dinner.

We had to go out to Tesco for a while to buy some things which we need for the party on Saturday. When we got back, you got all angry over something and started wailing at the top of your voice. I was also tired and it was close to 9p.m. What to do? Threaten you lo... I was going nuts too... "Stop crying now or I will throw out your train set and I will cancel your party this Saturday!!!!"

Almost instantly there was no more sound from you. Took you up, gave you a shower, read a book (finished reading in record time) and in less than 5 minutes you were fast asleep. The next morning, I asked if you'd be taking your afternoon nap. Of course, the answer was "Yes". And when asked if you did not sleep? You could answer me with what I'd threatened to do the night before (not that I'd really do that!!) Hehe...

So did you have a nap on Wednesday? Of course...

Countdown: 2 days to your party, 4 days to your birthday

Off to the Playground

It's been a while since we've been to the playground. And since we were off yesterday, we decided to head to the Bukit Dumbar Reservoir. After all, it was nearer to where we are not than the Youth Park... although to get there also took us quite a while, since it was a Friday and there were loads of people on their way back home.

One thing about this is there are fewer things to play on as compared to the Youth Park, but most of the kids are well behaved (do not jump queue when going up or down). And as you've been told that you cannot climb up the slides, you got really angry when you tried to go down the "tunnel" slide and a little girl tried to climb up the slide!

Here are a few pictures of you playing..

Wow! So many things..

Ah Ma and Ah Kong left the house at 6.30am this morning to go to Ipoh for Cheng Beng. As daddy had some work to do, we took leave and stayed at home with you. Daddy logged in for a while in the morning and also a while later when we came back from going everywhere.

Ah Ma came back with many goodies. There were presents from Jack Chek Chek, Jackie Ah Chim, Kor Poh and also Natalie Kor-kor.

You are a lucky little boy..

Is it a surprise?

Not really... We all went together to buy your birthday present. Something which you already knew about. No surprise there. The box was too big and heavy we had to get someone from the shop to put it on a hand truck to bring it to the car.

We were driving Ah Kong's car that day and it could not fit into the boot! Imagine that. Daddy and I were wondering before that if the box could fit in the car while we were in the shop, and we thought that it could seeing that it was around the same length as a golf bag. Looks like we misjudged the size.

In the end, the box sat in front at the passenger seat and even got to "wear" the seat belt... much to your amusement. Here's a sneak peak of what we'd bought:

Countdown: 8 days to party, 10 days to your birthday

Last Minute...

... well almost anyway. Ah Ma called me at work on Tuesday to tell me that Cheng Beng was to be on Friday instead of the originally planned 28th. So what does that mean? We would be better off postponing the birthday party...

So it became this:

School Holidays

Yesterday was the second day of the school holidays and I think you're already very bored. Following your insistence on going to school when I'd let you sleep in, I had to prep you many times over the weekend that there would be no school for a whole week. And you kept asking me if I'd be on holiday too. The next question was "How come you don't have work holiday?".

And yet, yesterday you told me (several times) that you wanted to go to school the next day. In the end, I had to tell you that yesterday was Day2. On "Day8" you'd get to go to school again. So for now you seem contented.

Maybe with the "special thing" at home you'd be more contented to miss school this week now. We'll be going to school on Saturday to meet with your teacher for "Parents-Teacher Day".

Missing...

Ah Ma brought you and Ah Pek for breakfast in a coffee shop on Monday and she forgot to bring your water bottle with her when you all left the coffee shop.

When they went back to look for the bottle, it was not there anymore. The shop people also denied seeing the bottle. Sigh.. So now you don't have your favourite Thomas water bottle anymore. But lucky you are ok with the other older bottles which you have and didn't make too big a fuss over the missing bottle.. I've spotted one Thomas bottle in a shop in Gurney but we've not decided if we want to get you that because that bottle design is not easy enough for you to drink from yourself. You'd need someone to help you with it.

How come there are such people who want to take a child's bottle?

Car-azy

One of the first words that you could say was "car" and till now, you still go crazy over cars... and lorries.. and buses.. and taxis. Now you are able to identify some car brands: Audi, BMW and even Honda.

So which car gets you all excited when you see it on the road?

Source

It's funny that you get all excited when you see all those Myvi on the road. But when we went to Nanna's house you somehow never noticed her Myvi parked there in the house!

Then there was one day when we were talking about the Porsche and you decided that this was a Porsche.

Source

And when we corrected you, you still insisted that it was a Porsche. Sigh.. but this weekend you finally decided that it was a "Proton".

And you also decided that little yellow cars are classified as "toy cars". All because Uncle Dennis and Ashley Kor-kor told you that this is a toy car (it's parked in their condo car park)

Source

When Ah Pek asked you which was your favourite car? It turned out not to be Myvi, but Audi. I wonder why...

The Last Day of CNY

Nope no more BBQ to last us for.. um.. a month.. *grin*. This round, we headed to Uncle Sin Jeow's house for "pun choi" (盘菜). Aunty Ean Na slaved the whole day and when we arrived, she was putting the finishing touches to the dish: arranging the food nicely..

On top of the pun choi, Bo-bo Poh also cooked some lam mee which is especially for the children (in case you guys could not take th food in the pun choi). Of course in actual fact, all of us ate the noodles on top of the pun choi. We all ate at a slow pace, enjoying the food and the good company and eventually most of the food in the cooker was gone.

Ian and your two Tou-tou

It was Sunday again, but we left earlier that day so that you could sleep early and wake up for school the next day. I didn't want to have to receive a phone call from you crying and insisting on going to school at 10am.

Another BBQ Party

Before the 15th day of CNY, it was time for another round of BBQ. This time it's with daddy's friends. Simpler food was on the menu as compared to the one we had the week before. Here's some of the food which we had.
There was only 1 other little kid for you to play with. But Chloe is younger than you and you weren't too keen to play with her. It was worst when she took your carrot drink and drank it. You cried and cried and since there was no more carrot juice left, someone passed me a box (I'm not too sure who it belonged to.. or was it yours?) and you finally stopped crying. But since she was given her daddy's phone to play with, you willingly sat next to her and watched her play with her games. After that, you took my phone and started to play with the games too.

When you got bored you'd walk over to the dinner table and go "bang bang" with the che-che's.

"Bang Bang"

Chloe

Everyone chatting

What did we do with the leftover food? There wasn't too much left. Cynthia Che-che had to leave early, so she was given the honours to bring back some garlic bread. And how about the chicken and sweet potatoes? Hehe.. they played "Indian Poker" and finished off most of the food!