The Bub in the Belly

Happy Mother's Day! Hope you had a good day, whether you were celebrated or celebrating someone.  We had a lovely afternoon at the Bale Equestrian Club, where there was a Mother's Day programme for the day. We enjoyed a good buffet lunch and there was also a range of activities for the kids.

The highlight of the afternoon for the kids were the pony rides. There were a couple of horses too but our kids were much too short for them. The kids have been on ponies before so they were pretty confident in the saddle (of course the pony was led by a handler). There were also a couple of friendly donkeys roaming around and the kids were delighted to be able to get up close to them and play with them. Babydoll declared that they all belonged to her - "MY donkeys and MY horses".

There was a "Dress Up Your Mom" event, which Ryan asked me to participate in. The kids got to choose three accessories from a range of hats, scarves, flower leis, and other stuff, with which to adorn their moms with. Here I am, all dressed up!




Yes, babydoll is in make-up! That was from the face-painting station. She asked the face-painter to give her "Elsa". I was expecting that there would be some snowflakes on her face or something like that, so I was surprised when she came out with make-up instead! I guess this is a literal interpretation, huh.

We were there for about three hours. Well spent, I would say. The kids had a great time playing with the other kids there and I, of course, had a wonderful time being the guest of honour (ok, one of the guests-of-honour, if we must be accurate, heh). Happy Mother's Day!

Babydoll was born in the Year of the Dragon and, yes, she breathes fire.

Some more catch-up today. This is about Ryan's birthday with the family in KL, back in January.

Richard had some business meetings in KL which coincided nicely with the weekend before Ryan's birthday so we tagged along to KL with him. Ryan had a grand weekend, as he always does when he's there.


For his birthday cake, Margaret got his favourite cake ringed with Kit Kat! Yum yum. Plus marshmallows...yum yum yum.

Before the birthday cake at home, we brought everyone out for dinner at Naughty Babe Dirty Duck in Desa Sri Hartamas. We thought that we ordered quite a lot of food but I think we still didn't get enough to feed the hungry horde because the portions were quite small. Every time a dish of food hit the table, the food was gone in seconds!


Babydoll wasn't too interested in the food at the place. She got my brother to take her out to a bakery nearby to buy a doughnut! Babydoll is wearing a dress I made for her back in September 2014, which you can see better in this post.


Here's the birthday boy in his new jacket, which was a present from his Aunty Margaret. Margaret and her family had just got back from a holiday in Japan so there were plenty of gifts, birthday or otherwise, for him (and the rest of us).


Ryan's birthday was in late January, but he is already telling people now that he is "six and a half" and he asks, quite often, whether he will be turning seven soon. Oh my, how fast it goes, huh. Happy birthday love! We love you to the moon and back, always and forever.

A quick post on what we did for Ryan's 6th birthday celebration at school. I kept things very simple this year. First order of things was his birthday tee-shirt. Last year I spent too much time making the gifts for the class that I didn't have time to finish his birthday tee-shirt. This year, I whipped it up on the sewing machine the day before. It has a large number 6 on the back, as you can see. I actually made a similar one just a few weeks prior to this one - it had his name RYAN in a curve above the number '5' at the back. He really loves that he gets to display his name and his age, so I really should make more of these things.

For his little party in school, we made crowns for his teachers and his classmates. Initially I was planning to sew the crowns but after sewing a couple, including sewing twenty tiny jewels onto each one, I succumbed to practicality - I could not imagine sewing 24 of those. So I opted for this version - I just cut out the crowns from stiff felt and sewed an elastic strip at the back. For embellishment, we used adhesive felt letters which are ready-cut from the store. The letters correspond to the first letter of the recipient's name.


Here are the completed crowns! The two green ones in the front of the pile, with the red R's, were for Ryan. I like the one with the fancy cut but he chose the other one, with the jewels which I sewed on, because that was the one that I presented first to him. The red one with the jewels but without a letter is an extra.


For the birthday cake, we ordered mini eggless cube cakes from Emicakes in six different flavours (one of Ryan's classmates is not allowed to have eggs). We arranged them on a cake board in the shape of a '6', stuck candles in them, handed out the crowns, sang the Happy Birthday song (a few versions), blew out the candles and distributed the cubes. It was so efficient and went really, really fast, mainly because there was no need to cut a big cake and plate the pieces. I didn't snap any photos though. I really should have!

Anyway, that was that for this year. Simple and easy. If you're interested, here's a flashback to what we did for last year's school party.