Busy busy busy, very busy...

Happy 2011!

My days are filled with sorting, packing, clearing, cleaning, painting....I'm so so tired, my fingers, arms and feet are aching but I must perservere....Moving into my new flat soon :) Will let you in on our slow but surely progress when this busy-ness is over.

My boys helped paint the flat as well. They get better and better everyday. This was what happened the 1st time they did and it was overwhelming for my 9yr old physically.
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Yea..my new teenager has new ways of thinking these days... He surprised me regularly :)

A Christmas gift for you?

I really enjoy creating comic strips at stripgenerator.com, and I would love to make a strip for you. For Christmas 2010! Just send me a short story of how you want your story to be told. It can be something funny, something touching, something interesting....No strings attached just as long as you allow me to share your strip freely. You can use it in your greeting cards, gift tags, desktop, cd cover, book cover, diary cover, scrapbook, etc....

A friend told me this story of his experience when he was a cabin crew more than a decade ago.
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He made sure his passenger got more than he had asked for. Yup, he went heavy on the alcohol. And the poor passenger was knocked out for the rest of the 12 hour flight! Don't worry, he has quit long time ago....which means you will not be served by him by any chance :D

Send me an email eileen@budgetestore.com . Will accept last request on 15 Dec 2010. Hope to hear from you soon, cheers!

Honesty, the best policy?

This happened earlier this year when the primary threes are choosing their CCAs for the year. Being unathlete Jonah avoided the sports. Uniformed group was too much commitment just in case he didnt enjoy it in the midst of it so he opted for clubs. The comic below tells the rest of the story....
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Poor baby was too afraid to tell the truth so I coaxed him into writing how will the Gradening Club benefits him instead. After attending almost a year of gardening, he has learn to pull out weeds, prepare a pot for planting chili seeds (yes, the chilli plant is still alive seating in our corridor :)), attempted many tasks like leaf pressing, make a dried seeds collections, poster, making a silly poem about plants, he was awarded a Young Botanist Badge organised by the Science Centre Singapore!

So I asked him if he would like to switched to another club next year and he said he's happy to stick to this one :)

Daddy Long Legs

Our bookshelves are bursting with books! It was time for me to clear some but I found it hard to lose some of them like this one by Jean Webster.

I won this in 2nd prize for my school's geography quiz in the secondary one category back in 1982! Yes, truly a long long time ago :) I left the other books lying on the floor and went into reading this one all over again. Typical story that teenage girls would love and it tickled me all over again. I felt like a teenager during that couple of hours reading by the terapin's pond. It would be nice to be able to share it with a daughter, I guess, I'll have to wait for a grand-daughter in the future. The book is so old and yellow already, actually more brown than yellow.....I hope it won't fall apart when the time comes.

Do you have a book that is sentimental to you?

Sex and the Kiddy

Yesterday I attended the third lesson in the Parent Facilitator Course. It's a 40 hour training for parent volunteers which empower us to facilitate the running of SFE programmes and the formation of parent support groups. It's subsidised by MCYS and module 1 covers topics like family life cycle, developement stages of tweenies, how marriage can affect parenting, challenges of teenagers and family wellness. I learn something new about parenting and my children on every lesson. Yesterday we touched on a topic most parents avoid discussing with their children. Yes, it's about sex and not 'that thing'! LOL....As for me, I'm pretty comfortable talking about it with my 2 boys since I started reading them books about where do babies come from when they were just toddlers. "Mummy laid an egg" by Babette Cole is one of my favourite. It's funny, factual and very frank.

Whenever the boys ask any questions concerning sex, hubby and I would try to answer them as honest and factual as possible. I remembered when I was in preschool, I asked my mom about how did I come out from her tummy  and she said through her armpit! That led to another question of how was that possible and she said she had actually found me in the toilet bowl! I knew she was kidding because she was giggling but it puzzled me for the longest time. What kind of other silly answers did your parents give you when you were young?

But I guess some questions are hard to answer like this one from Russell when he was 10.
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Elder Wise

I respect my mom-in-law. She's great at time management and is a fabulous cook. She could babysit 2 toddlers, clean her home and make 3 warm meals a day for her family of 5. She could even find the time to read the papers and scrutinise the property market. Through her encouragement, savings and hard work of moving from a HDB  flat to a HUDC apartment to a terrace house, both my parents-in-law eventually sold their landed property to become millionaires and now living happily in an EA flat with little to worried about. She is a wonderful mom-in-law and we get along very well. Although I respect her a lot, there are times when she's a tad old fashioned in her thinking, well to me at least....

So when she whipped out this advise on how to be a good housewife, I thought it was joke until I heard my hubby mentioned a conversation they had on a guys' night out 2 days ago. I was stumped and my mom-in-law's words slammed into my head at that point. The sequence of the actual event wasn't really like that in the comic below but the words are real.
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LOL! Well, my fellow homemakers, how about you? Do you try to finish your chores before the hubby is home or do you start only when he gets home? Maybe I shall surf Bloggers until hubby gets home before I start sweeping and mopping that darn sticky floor! hee...

It's a Ferrari or something!

Last Sunday, I went to pick Russell and his 3 friends up from their Junior Youth Group meeting. It was my turn to send the boys home and I was driving my van. This was the conversation they had....

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Of course it's not a Ferrari! LOL! Gotta love kids : D