The Bub in the Belly

We celebrated Mother's Day a day early, with a small gathering with friends on Saturday. There was Ee Fann/Shann/Rou Ern's family and Chris/Alicia/Brayden's family, plus our little family. Three families hung out at our home from 5 pm till about 11.30 pm! I'm still amazed at how well everyone mixed and matched to stay happy for more than 6 hours hahaha!

The adults had their adult-time, the mummies had their mummy-time, and the daddies had their daddy-time. The three children (all three year olds) were together all the time! There was also a lot of "everyone together" time because the children's laughter and merry-making usually attracted the adults to gather around them. Everything flowed naturally and freely. It was a relaxed, stress-free, happy and fun event.

Er... not so relaxed that the children fell asleep of course! The photo above was taken when they were pretend-playing at going to sleep and watching the stars above.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here, let me start at the beginning. We started the gathering with a painting session for the children.



It was interesting to see the different approaches that each child took. You can tell which child painted which piece just by looking at the piece. We are hoping to get the finished paintings scanned and printed onto mini T-shirts for the children! It will be their "club" T-shirt!

The mummies exchanged home practice/learning materials plus little gifts for the children. I always feel so blessed to receive such goodies, prepared with so much thought and care.

What would a gathering be without FOOD right? As usual, we had more food than we could finish! The main attraction was the DIY popiah party package from Kway Guan Huat although the men turned their noses up at it, preferring to flex their manliness by devouring the Ramly burger patties which we brought back from Malaysia. So the men were more than happy to take charge of the grill while the ladies were more than happy to take charge of the popiah-wrapping.

We prepared the usual accompaniments for the burger - onion, cheese, tomato and bacon (although the bacon was ignored - I guess it would not be right to put bacon on a Ramly burger?). I made a big boo-boo - I forgot to pick up the buns for the burger!!! Which may have turned out to be a blessing in disguise as otherwise, everyone might not have eaten as much of the other food. The men improvised by wrapping the patty and its accompaniments in the popiah skin! There were other items for the grill - cocktail sausages, luncheon meat, corn, plus pork chops. I made some chicken soup with alphabet pasta for the children, oven-roasted some veggies and made twice-baked potatoes. The pork chops and roasted veggies were a little on the salty side (perhaps because I used sea salt instead of my usual salt, luckily I used my usual salt for the potatoes). Alicia brought a refreshing fruit salad and Shann brought drinks and little jellies for the children.

Of course, there had to be a cake! It had three candles for the three mummies, which were blown out by the three children three times!


Sorry that there aren't more photos to share, especially of the food! I was having too good a time eating and chatting with everyone!

Hope your Mother's Day was fabulous!

Free play with blocks.


Playing with beads (fine motor skills).

More play with beads - here he is rolling the beads around the cardboard lid, taking pleasure in the sounds generated.

Finger printing.

Painting with pastels.

Swimming class.

Building train tracks.

Another piece done with watercolours.

Ryan's nanny is taking a family holiday so I have Ryan all to myself this Thursday and Friday. On Thursday morning, we went to the market for a simple breakfast and spent the rest of the morning at home, playing and reading. And dancing, of course.

While we played, we incorporated some Shichida home practice as well - we pretended to be airplanes for image play; we did some ESP games and some memory games (Ryan aced them all); and we did some dots cards.

I mentioned that Ryan has a new sensei for Shichida class this term, after two years of being with Teacher Nuraini. Last week, after class, Ryan's new sensei heaped praises on Ryan, saying he is such a bright child. She said that Teacher Nuraini had told her that Ryan was a bright child and that she could see it too. It reassured me a lot that Ryan's sensei believes in his abilities. I was also grateful to Teacher Nuraini for looking out for Ryan and passing on a good word.

We played a few games with letters and words today, working with different materials. I mentioned in an earlier post that we use stickers quite a lot when we play, and we did today. I thought I'd share a couple of these games with you.

The first one is very simple. We got stickers of different types of vehicles and we put their names together with stickers. Here's Ryan with bus and car on his hands - these were subsequently transferred onto paper together with the rest of the vehicles. Placing the stickers on himself made it kind of special, I guess. He did a dance while he had them stuck on him!

Next is this matching game. If you look closely, you can see letters on the sheet of paper. Ryan stuck each one on and then looked for the corresponding animal. The animal then gets placed next to the letter. We ran out of animals so we couldn't finish the alphabet - where can I get an animal that starts with X?


In the evening, it was painting again! Ryan couldn't wait to get started - he was hurrying Richard to set up the table!

This time Richard brought out his old acrylic paints. Yes, Richard's paints, not Ryan's! Richard used to take Art as a subject in school and art has always been an area of interest for him. He loves to buy books on artists and their work. Still, I think he has not touched these paints for years!

Here's Richard helping Ryan with the brown paint - it was so hard! Some of the colours were still soft though, funnily enough.


After some free hand painting, Richard guided Ryan to paint The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Looks good! Ryan kept saying, "Hungry Cat-per!"


Next Ryan picked an animal to paint from Eric Carle's "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" - he picked the brown bear. I don't have a photo of them painting the brown bear though. I only have a photo of the final product. I'll put up a post with all the pieces done over the past few evenings - some are not too bad!

Ok, that's it. See you tomorrow!