The Apple's Diary!

There was a rampant outbreak of the dreadful H……. Hand Foot Mouth Disease (HFMD) in the children's preschool. The boys stayed home for most of January as a result. This was bad because we needed to take leaves to stay home with them too. Staying home is problematic because they need to exhaust their energy wisely, else there would be endless troubles. So I started to assign homework daily to keep their morning occupied. practice writing small boy also not spare from writing practice Thankfully my mum came over to help so she could supervise the boys doing their 笔画 practice and either one of us will guide them in Phonics. Since I had to be home, spring cleaning was completed early this year and the boys are ready to usher in Chinese New Year. lucky them The boys are blessed to be wearing Chateau de Sable label for this festive season. That's because there is an outlet at IMM which I stumbled upon one weekend. However, the maid remains a...

The preschool returned the 2nd semester progress report on Jonathan last week and although there is improvement in him, there are many areas we need to work on it. Two of the biggest challenge remain would be Chinese and the general pronunciation on words in both languages. Enjoying gym time How do we work on his Chinese? Besides sending him to Berries and the constant revision from what Berries taught, I realised that there's a gap. He has very little interest and confidence in using the language to express himself. To grasp a language proficiently, we must first "HEAR" , "SPEAK" and then "WRITE". For the Chinese medium, he has not heard enough, thus how can he therefore speak and write? Berries suggested setting a day every week as a "Chinese day". Everyone in the family must speak in Mandarin and parents must embrace the language with much enthusiasm so the child can overcome any fear. I am rolling this out soon in my family an...

And so we said goodbye to 2015 and ushered in 2016…. in the stillness of the dark while I was in la la land. I hadn't blogged much in December 2015, in fact, there's only 1 post?! That was rather unusual but looking at the options, blogging sat pretty low in priority. 2015 had been kinder to me. There were quite a few major changes and I couldn't say that my last few days of 2015 went smooth and well for me. Still, there were simple occasions to be thankful for as we transited to 2016. Matt's Inside Out Birthday Cake The youngest in the family celebrated his 3rd birthday with an Inside Out theme. I was totally awed by this creation by Cloud9 and was glad to hear the birthday boy exclaimed "Inside Out, my favourite!" There was no big party, just a lunch gathering with my family and a simple school celebration. Looking so grown-up School celebration took place in his new class, no longer the toddlers in N1 Clover but moving onwards as pres...

December supposed to be my favourite month because of Christmas. Somehow for this December, I'm feeling dismayed. The work pace has not slowed down and there is still a lot of outstanding work to be completed and I'm quite pressed for time. It has also turned out to be a month of unsure, uncertain and a lot of doubts. Unsure - should we move or stay put? The bedroom flooring is giving way. The laminated flooring has started to warp and it is deteriorating with each day. The biggest sore eye comes from the study room which has a bald patch (no thanks to the helper - you can read about the incident here ). Every other day, we would get something that is starting to give way or broken down. Coming to 6th year of stay at this address (since January 2010), it is either we do an overhaul or we move out. The hubby is more keen to shift out. But I'm holding back because there's the primary school to consider, the parental support I rely on during emergency, the convenie...

We completed the parents-teachers conference for both boys over the past 2 weekends. This round, the teachers did not prepare any powerpoint slides nor showed us much of their class activities. Instead it was in a free-style format. For the big boy, the Chinese teacher commented that the improvement shown was in leaps and bounds. Overall, the child has gained more confidence, whether in speech or work and even led the class in songs and dance. Even the English teacher who was only with them for 3 months, nodded her head in agreement. His weakness in pronunciation in both English and Chinese still need to work on, pencil grip needs further improvement. The sequence of strokes in writing needed attention too. I was also told that at this stage, it was not advisable to go beyond 5 minutes of writing per session. Something for me to bear in mind as I continue my daily revision with them. I also found out that at N2 level, numeral literacy was limited to 1-20 with no input on addition ...

We were lucky when we booked our coach tickets to Malacca. There was a 3-day promotion by the Malaysian Tourism Board and we paid $50 per pax for a return trip. Then we managed to book the premier junior suite at Hatten hotel for this trip with breakfast thrown in and access to their premier lounge. So we went last weekend and the boys were cooperative in our coach ride. They napped in the coach on both ways which meant peace, peace and peace. Arriving at Hatten hotel being ushered to the premier lounge at level 12 someone obviously enjoyed himself roomy lavatory to freshen up We dropped our luggages at my mum's suite (since hers was ready) and made our way to the connecting mall for Tang Shi Fu. We were raving about Tang Shi Fu for their superb double boiled soup and delicious healthy dishes at JPO outing during our March Legoland trip. But we had a hard time navigating our way there as the mall directory wasn't very helpful. After asking several...

We didn't had much travel this year. It was mainly to Malaysia which we covered the Legoland in March , Genting Highland in July and Malacca in November . The same number of causeway trips equal to the same number of staycation we had this year. We did a staycation during SG50 Jubilee celebration at Carlton. I was hoping by stroke of luck we got to experience fireworks display at near distance. But it turned out to be a disappointment. On National Day itself, the lobby formed a snake queue, all waiting to check in. The hotel car park was full. The husband had to drop us off first with all our luggages and the porter took it away. While queuing half way, the big boy complained his diaper was full and he wanted to change which of course, I didn't have any spare and I had to leave the queue. After a while, I relented and stepped out of the queue to remove his overflown diaper and he had to compromise by wearing back his slightly soiled pants. Once we re-joined the snake ...