A Very Special Carrot Cake

12 October 2012 Friday

It has been a long while ... something special happened today. Peanut came home from school with this:

A piece of carrot cake he bought from the school canteen and brought it home for mummy, daddy, didi and Auntie because it is yummylicious! So sweet, that's my Peanut.

And this is a short conversation with S.P a little later in the evening:

"Your gor gor is so funny and sweet"
Silence
"Are you sweet?"
"No"
"Are you evil?"
"No"
"Then, what are you?"
"I'm just OK."
"You are the funniest 5 y.o. I know!" (Well, not that I know many - only 2...shh)

Peanut has just celebrated his birthday and here are some photos:

If you can count the candles - 5 of them plus 2 invisible ones (don't know why I asked for 5 candles from the cake shop?!! Freudian slip that I am having trouble believing that my baby is all grown up?)

Peanut's best friend from kindergarten: 

 

His first bd pinata:

And here are some of his presents from his friends:

He's into making collecting these Gundams (model kits) .. this makes no.5

Never go to the zoo without a camera

12 June

... matters not that we must have been there at least 4x.

The boys became park rangers

We watched with amazement how this smart ape figured out the way to get his (her?) food

S.P played with the water slide for the first time

We made new discovery of this playground next to the waterplay. Peanut had an exhilarating time - his first on a flying fox play equipment.

A zoo visit is not complete without feeding the animals. This time it's manatees.

Did you know that manatees are cousins of elephants and each can weigh up to 600 kilos?

Look mum, I came in first in the race.

The outfit is no coincidence. This boy has consistently liked to be Spiderman.

We will have to figure out a way to bathe these boys without getting their left hands wet ....

It takes a genius (or a crook) ...

11 July
This is what greeted me on a Monday morning:

Photo 1: A shot of the whiteboard - S.P pointed to the string of 'writings' in green and tried to had me believe that they were Chinese characters. No doubt, they were highly complex ones made up of many strokes!

Photo 2: These were written by Peanut with chalk on the blackboard - practising for his spelling - both English and Chinese, complete with han yu pin yin.

"Cool man"

2 April 2011

Photos taken minutes before we left for a movie, I think it was Rio:

How to recover from a cough

Warning: This post starts off rather innocuous and light, like all my other postings but gets unsuspectingly heavy toward the end - not for the faint hearted. But adversity is part of life and we all get our fair share at some point or other.

Last evening, I learned something new - on what to eat to get well from a cough that has lasted more than 2 weeks - from none other than my wise 4 y.o-to-be.

"Mama, I eat one M&M and then I sleep. I wake up, no more cough already!"

I do not promise that it will work for you. But if you want to try, you must first do the following for 2 weeks:

- Abstain from banana, orange, chocolates, ice-cream and all things cold
- Abstain from fried food
- Get lots of rest (including forced afternoon naps)
- Drink lots of water
- Finish a bottle of Prospan (herbal cough mixture)
- Stay away from the fan
- pop Vitamins C

And you ask, "He did all of that?". Yes, isn't he just wonderful? I just couldn't bring myself to chide him for taking the little indulgence with that M&M.

You think I'm being strict with him? Well, I believe you are not alone. My mum and parents-in-law happen to think so. Slightly more than 2 weeks back, my parents-in-law indulged S.P with chocolates. The following day, he got an ice-cream from popo. Then a stubborn cough followed. I highly suspect that they would need little persuasion to resist being indulgent with snacks after this. And I can finally give up my incessant nagging which honestly is making me unpopular with myself - how nice.

Did I also mention that you should get someone to cover you with a blanket in the early hours of the morning when your hands and feet are cold?

Btw, if you think I'm paranoid. Yes, you're right. The stubborn cough, irritating it maybe, I can cope with that. What scares me is the fever. This child, unlike Peanut, had an episode of febrile convulsion - fits or seizure is the more commonly used word. It happened in Dec 2009 at 38.6 degrees at 11.30pm. For that 5 minutes which seemed like eternity, I went berserk - I thought he was going to die on me. He was stiff, shaking in spasms, his eyes rolled up, I could only see the whites, he did not respond to my cries (I think I was yelling, "Don't scare mama". I was totally incapable of giving any assurance to my child) and I could not tell if he could breathe... It's an experience I would not wish on my worst enemy. So each time he has a fever, I would drop everything at work and stay home with him. It doesn't matter that the PD (plus all the medical literature scoured from the internet) had assured that a febrile convulsion, though frightening to observe, is nothing serious and definitely not life threatening.

I love being a mum. The only time I remember hating being a mum was during those 5 minutes of helplessness, succumbed to an overwhelming fear of loss of my child.