Browsing Tag

PLAY

Everyday fun! Family life as we know it Happy days Milestones and growing up The Kao Kids

It’s beginning to look a lot like… fun!

November 16, 2012

The sniffles are clearing. The laughter is back.

At three-half, two years four months, and nine months respectively, the kids are beginning to play together. They now monkey around a lot. The older kids have taken it upon themselves to entertain their baby brother. It’s like an unspoken competition between Ben and Becks; everyday they try to make Baby Nat laugh and see who can successfully do it, and who can do it more. They play catch with him, throw balls his way and prance around him with peek-a-boos and butterfly kisses. In the evenings, before they all go to bed, they would hang around the little one to cuddle him and make him laugh. They take turns to be his little pony and rocking horse. They impart their planking skills. They do the tehee giggling together. They make cacophonic sounds of merriment and glee.

Life just got better.

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Becks Kao Ben Kao Everyday fun! Family life as we know it Milestones and growing up

“Your mother here. Over.”

October 14, 2012

There’s a new calm in the house lately. I’ve stopped shouting and barking orders in the house. I think my children are also happier without the yelling.

My husband bought me a set of walkie-talkie.

There’s something about speaking through the walkie-talkie. You don’t scream into it. You stay composed. You speak slowly and clearly. And you say “over” when you are done in a cool, collected way.

“Ben, come to the kitchen now for your vitamins. Over.”

“Aunty M, please make milk for the children. Over.”

“Becks, I want you to come back to the room. Now. Over.”

No more yelling. No more “COME OUT AND PACK YOUR TOYS THEN GO DRINK YOUR MILK AND STOP JUMPING ON THE BED — AND DO I HAVE TO SAY A MILLION TIMES DON’T YOU THROW MY PILLOWS AND BLANKET ON THE FLOOR WATCH IT YOUR BABY BROTHER IS NEXT TO YOU PUULEAZZE YOU GUYS JUST COME OUT AND PACK UP!!!!!!! NOW!!!!!”

You just can’t do that over a walkie-talkie. It’s not cool.

Over. 

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Becks Kao Ben Kao Learning fun! Milestones and growing up The darndest kid quotes and antics

Animal madness!

October 9, 2012

It’s been noisy in the house lately. The Kaos are officially living in an animal farm.

He led the others with his “quack quack quack”.

She’s the little monkey jumping on the bed.

One little monkey jumping on the bed. 
She fell off and bumped her head. 
Mama called the doctor and the doctor said, 
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed!”

Six little ducks that I once knew
Fast ones, skinny ones, fair ones too.
But the one little duck with the feather on his back
He led the others with his quack, quack, quack.
Quack, quack, quack-quack, quack, quack
He led the others with his quack, quack, quack.
Down to the river they would go.
Wibble wobble, wibble wobble to and fro.
But the one little duck with the feather on his back
He led the others with a quack, quack, quack.
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Going Out! Milestones and growing up The Kao Kids

Not ready for a vacation YET

October 8, 2012

I don’t know why we do it again and again. Ever since the kids came along, we no longer go to get refreshed and recharged. Instead, we’d always feel more drained and tired.

There was even once I attempted to do it without the domestic helper — in the name of “more quality time” with the kids. Who was I kidding? Fatherkao and I were totally bummed after that one.

I’m talking about going for a staycation.

We have a membership going on with the Copthorne chain of hotels and decided to redeem our complimentary night stay last weekend at Grand Copthorne Waterfront to celebrate Children’s Day. Of course, we had to book another connecting room to make sure everyone could sleep comfortably.

Now, a staycation with three kids in tow is like a simulation exercise for a family holiday. With every staycation, I learn to a) pack better, b) shush my kids up quicker for fear of the hotel management knocking at my door, and c) occupy them with available resources in the most creative way possible.  Last weekend’s exercise had a new quickfire challenge: the baby was having a cold and a mild fever — so I had to pack medicine, nasal sprays and my mucus shisha, and made sure he was carried and snugged all the time so he wouldn’t be crying the hotel down. Then it poured on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, so we couldn’t check out the swimming pool and were stuck in two hotel rooms for the whole time. We had dinner, breakfast and lunch at Cafe Brio’s and only managed to take a short walk down Robertson Quay on Friday night when the skies cleared, but had to hurry back because my daughter decided to poop as she walked. Throughout the stay, the kids just ran from room to room, played with curtains and jumped on the beds, “swam” in a tub of warm water, while I nursed a cold and fatherkao watched movies on the iPad.

Every staycation just leaves us with the conclusion that we are not ready to fly and travel as a family yet; and we probably need more practice like this one before we go.

Till the next simulation.

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Going Out! The Kao Kids

Zoo: Default place to go if it doesn’t rain

September 15, 2012

We’ve been making good use of our zoo family membership to zip in and out of the zoo for one to two hours on weekday afternoons and weekend mornings. My eldest son, would lead the pack, by deciding which exibits he wished to see for each visit.

So far, we’ve had breakfast with Ah Meng’s descendants

Said hello to the parrots at every visit

Watched Stan the Sealion somersault and splash around

Gone on horsey rides and learned the difference between horses, ponies and falabellas

 

We can’t wait for Kai Kai and Jia Jia (not just because I can point out the similarity between them and me) so we can see some real kungfu panda moves!

 

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Everyday fun! Product Reviews

More stix-ky fun [and a discount code for you]

September 15, 2012

I posted some time ago about how my kids made little crawlies out of the Wikki Stix Mini Play Pak sent to us.

I left the Wikkis at our bomb shelter and told them to fiddle with them to create whatever their imagination takes them whenever they want; and when I last checked, this was what I saw:

Something about a monster having his heart locked up in a box. Uh-ok…

*Good news for readers of this blog*: You can now enjoy a 10% discount off any online purchase of Wikki Stix this month. Just quote the discount code Blog1209 upon checking out. They deliver worldwide with no minimum purchase. There are Wikkis in 3 lengths: 6 inch, 8 inch and 3 feet-long ones called Super Wikkis! Check out Wikki Stix here.

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Everyday fun! Product Reviews

Stix-ky shapes and letters [Product review]

August 28, 2012

Recently, the good people at Think Thank sent us a Wikki Stix Mini Play Pak that consists of eight Wikki Stix in assorted colours and an idea sheet on how to use and play with these sticky things. Wikki Stix are yarn-like sticks for creative play made in the States that’s totally safe, non-toxic and allergy-free. They are made from acrylic hand-knitted yarn and a food-grade, microcrystalline wax, derived from the petroleum refining process (which is also found in lip balm and cheese) and are great for independent play and learning.

When Ben and Becks saw the Play Pak, they’d thought they were in for a gummy treat! When they realised they couldn’t exactly eat them, they took the Stix apart and clowned around with them. They didn’t actually manipulate or mould them into anything immediately. We were learning a lot about animals the past week, so it was no surprise that they first imagined them to be colourful worms, and then proceeded to stick the Stix on each other’s bums and laughed at their “tails”.

I took the chance to teach them colours and shapes. Since the Stix adhered to any type of smooth surface and are self-sticking in nature, I turned an Ikea box/tray over and got them to make the shapes they knew.

I wished we had more Stix in the pack and that they were longer in length to mould and twist. At some point, the kids were snatching each other’s Stix because there weren’t enough to go around.

After playing with shapes, we wanted to see if the Stix could stick on glass surfaces too, and since we had a glass kitchen door, we used some Stix to make the first three letters of the alphabet.

Again, I wished we had more of them to go around so I could complete my lesson on the 26 letters of the alphabet. But who was I kidding? At three and two, as you can see from the last picture, they were more interested in making worms of all sorts – spiny worms, curly worms, all-bunched-up worms. They had more fun with worms and tails than shapes and letters with Wikki Stix!

MORE DETAILS:
  • Wikki Stix is now in Singapore! You can check out their facebookpage here.
  • You can also contact Adeline at info@thethinkthank.com or visit the Wikki Stix website for more details about the product and where to get it.
  • *UPDATE*: Good news! Readers of this blog can enjoy a 10% discount off Wikki Stix come September! Watch this space for the promotional code!
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Going Out! Motherkao loves...

We heart the heartlands

August 15, 2012

If the wet markets ever vanished from the face of this city, I’ll pack up my bags and go for good. The heartland neighbourhoods with the all-too-familiar wet markets and hawker centres reveal such a paradoxical mix of the old and new. They showcase the richness and complexities of our heritage, culture and traditions and what truly is Singapore. It is one place you must visit to see the Singaporeanness in Singapore. It is in the heartland neighbourhood that you will find the original kway chap, wanton mee and fried carrot cake (forget about foodcourts!). Here, you can get a big glass of soybean milk for only sixty cents and order “Michael Jackson” with a straight face without being laughed at, with the same amount of money. “Michael Jackson”, for the uninitiated, is plain grass jelly (known as chin chow) mixed with soybean milk. It’s only in Singapore we find such humor and inventiveness.

We’ve been exploring the wet markets near us lately, mainly because we needed to hunt for shrimps, water snails and tubifex worms for the puffer fish and terrapins in our aquarium. And what better time to show our kids the real Singapore beneath the shiny veneer of our bustling, commercialised city, with this month being Singapore’s birthday month.

During the National Day weekend, we checked out the wet market at Ang Mo Kio Avenue 4 for brine shrimps to feed our puffer fish. We found an old uncle running a pet stall in the wet market, selling all sorts of tropical fish, shrimps, mealworms, mice and dwarf hamsters. Just next to him is another lady also selling pets. She has goldfish, puffers, terrapins and more dwarf hamsters. There, the kids squealed and jumped around in excitement looking at pets in a wet market. They also drank sugarcane juice, soybean milk and ate soursop ice jelly.

And only in the heartlands do you meet people who think they’ve known you forever. A few grannies smiled at me and approached me (at different times of our stroll there) to check if the two kids running around were mine; and upon seeing another one being strapped to my chest proceed to exclaim in disbelief that I was a rarity on Planet Singapore to have three kids so close together. It is in the heartlands I get a pat on the back for boosting the national birth rate.

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Everyday fun!

Eh, fishy fishy

July 9, 2012

I think we spoil our kids silly. First we got them an extensive road system (actually it’s really for fatherkao and Ben). Now they have an aquarium.

On Saturday we went to Kid’s Kampong at Pasir Ris Farmway. It was Becks’ first longkang fishing experience and Ben’s second. He went there with his schoolmates last year and had a smashin’ good time. His stories of scooping fish, feeding rabbits, turtles and ducks went on for days after that school trip. He’s been asking if he could go again since last year, so we decided we should make a trip there as a family to check the place out.

At the longkang fishing area, the kids were excited with the idea that they could catch their own fish. They went round chasing the fish with their tiny fishing nets. But the guppies and swordtails were no fools. They were fast. So fast that after ten minutes of squealing, both Ben and Becks were pleading ‘Mama, catch the fish for me’. So guess who did most of the squatting, bending and strategizing.

 

After catching a miserable number of ten fish per bucket, my thighs were aching so bad, we had to stop and do something else. The kids went to feed the hungry koi-fish, bunnies, turtles, ducks and chickens. Actually only Ben was brave enough to go throw food at them. Becks shared my disinterest (and fear) of small animals, and was contented to just skip around the pond and pose for her photographer dad.

After lunch, I had this crazy idea to get terrapins to finish off the fish that we were bringing home (insert evil laughter), and fatherkao entertained my crazy idea by driving to Nanyang Aquarium at Seletar Farmway which was just a stone’s throw from our place to see what we might be able to get to house the fish since things are really cheap there and they are moving out at the end of the year. We ended up buying a glass tank, complete with a filter and LED-lamp, two terrapins, five-kilos of white gravel, a beautiful wooden log, a pot of water plant and a tin of krill to feed all the swimming ones.

The last I heard this morning from the observers of the fish tank was that the terrapins were too afraid and too small anyway, to be eating fish, and one pregnant guppy gave birth to a fry. Oh well, exciting times. Let’s see what this overcrowding would do to the inhabitants of the tank. For one, I’ve got science 101 covered for Ben and Becks.

 

MORE DETAILS:
  • Kid’s Kampong is at No. 11, Pasir Ris Farmway 1, Aqua Fauna Centre. It costs $10 for one child to enter the longkang fishing area and to fish for an hour. You’ll have to pay $4 for their bucket and fishing net. Because Ben has a net from the previous visit (he didn’t bring his bucket), he paid $2 for the bucket, on top of the ten bucks.
  • One adult goes in free with every child. For my helper to enter, we had to pay an additional $1 for her to sit around.
  • The admission fee comes with three packets of feed for the fish and small animals, and one packet of feed for the rabbits. You get to keep your longkang catch. If it’s too miserable, the uncle there would add in more fish for you to take home.
  • The kids got a bottle of mineral water and a cup of Paddle Pop ice-cream after their experience.
  • Nanyang Trading Aquarium @ Sea View Aquarium is at 2, Seletar Farmway 2. You can get everything related to aquarium fish from tanks to tubifex, as well as almost any type of tropical fish .
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Going Out! The Kao Kids

Not so fun day out

June 23, 2012

I’m convinced after today that my kids are somewhat different from other kids. I’d had always thought all kids loved crowds, carnivals and carousels. Not mine, apparently.

Fatherkao and I have an aversion to crowds and queues. As far as I can remember, we’ve never stood in a queue for anything for more than three minutes and generally avoided crowded places. We would never queue to eat at any restaurant or stand in line for a taxi. If we had to queue to pay for groceries at the supermarket, we’d rather put everything back and order stuff online. We don’t even queue to go to church. We just head straight to the Overflow Room. We don’t go to town and we don’t like waiting for a parking lot. We avoid the heartland malls in the weekends and find respite in the airport terminals where there’s plenty of space for the kids to run, lots of restaurants which we don’t need to queue to eat at, and GST-free shopping. We weren’t always like that, of course, but as we got older, we just felt that life is too short to be wasting time doing unproductive things like queuing up. If we needed to pay more to save on time, we would. If we had to queue to get something free, we’d rather not. Yes, not even if they were giving out free handphones and iPads. Or houses. Or cars. But I digress.

So it appears that our kids have taken after us in that way.

I won priority passes to the Drypers Little Day Out at East Coast from the giveaway at Daphne’s blog  and thought it would be nice to take the kids out to a carnival to have some fun before I officially start work on Monday. So when I told the kids that we would be going to a carnival, they were all yay and hooray; but when we arrived there, they started looking like the Grinch stole Christmas. They didn’t want to queue for the kiddy rides or the carnival games. At the bouncy castles, Ben asked me if I could make all the other children go away so he could play. They didn’t share the enthusiasm other kids had for chasing bubbles. They headed to find open spaces and stood there to watch the crowd, mostly for the one hour we were there. I actually had to tell Ben and Becks that we would go home if they continued to be so grumpy to get them to ride the carousel.

There you have it, signs of crowd aversion, just like their parents. I’m sure other kids had much fun, going on unlimited rides (they were free), playing carnival games, eating popcorn and cotton candy (they were free too), dancing with Alvin and the Chipmunks and watching the outdoor movie screening Chipwrecked.

Mine were just grouchy, until dinner time at a quiet restaurant. Only then were they back to their usual selves – when away from the crowd.

 

 

 

 

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