The Apple's Diary!

Photo Credit : Sophessa Cakes This week, we had our Jon turned 6! How fast can the time fly and just like that... like a snap of your fingers, he is 6 and going to the next leap in his life. He is one year older and hopefully, a year wiser. He makes interesting observation at the most unexpected moment and is sharp eyed. This year, he requested a Spider Man cake for home celebration and a Cruise Ship theme cake for his class celebration. We did consider having a party at Waku Waku but with the renovation, it would be too tight to plan such an event. So we settled for Bengawan Solo's Spider Man cake, held it last Sunday together with our mini house warming (house is not completely furnished so I shall hold on posting first). Simple Home Celebration Family Shot For his class celebration, he specifically requested for a cruise ship theme because he said his friends asked a lot of questions on his May cruise. So he wanted to show them what a cruise ship is l...

Who likes renovation? Not me, certainly. The packing and unpacking, the dust, the number of decisions to make, the coordination etc.. there are enough to drive me crazy. So I managed to pack our stuff into 14 small boxes and 8 big boxes which we barely made it onto a 15" ft truck. The 3-men mover team took almost 2 hours to bubble wrap our furnitures and my piano and another 1 hour to loan everything into the truck. the mayhem of moving out loading into the truck And that were only 3 rooms of belongings. On side note, I would have better gauge when we move again to new place, it would probably be 2-3 trips of the truck and probably 50 boxes in all! So the first stop was to IMM Extra Storage to deposit our load and then to my parents' place. Their place was our temporary holding site for us while we tide over this renovation period. mid size storage also packed to the brim Renovation started on Monday. We engaged Kass Design for Project Reno II...

And so... just like that, exciting July rolled over and P1 registration for 2018 ended last Friday. The results came out to be eye popping! Ah boy's school was highly oversubscribed with 94 applicants for 26 places. Actually this is not the only school that ended up with such result. A total of 88 schools require balloting and you will be surprised neighbourhood school eg. Northland Primary in Yishun had garned 200 applicants for 51 places. Most schools that enter balloting situation were for Singapore Citizens within 1km. From this round of exercise, I would really advise parents to get into alumni or affiliation. Best is to stay within 1km from school of choice, at least you get a chance to ballot. Otherwise, you are directed to the back of the queue again and there would be very limited choices left at Phase 2C supplementary. And good luck to all who is balloting!

I didn't expect we would actually make this move. Instead of moving to a new place, we decided to renovate current place. 2 factors propelled us to make this decision. Primary school and unable to find a better place to move. So we decided to bite the bullet, vacate current place and do a major overhaul for current home. And this is no fun at all. We got Kass Design to assist us in our Project Reno II. The objective is simple. Refresh the look so we can easily stay for another 5 years. Project Reno II consists of re-doing the 3 bedrooms flooring, whole house painting and carpentry work. To allow the renovation to take place, we rented Extra Space (a 66sqm storage container) at IMM. Then we have engaged mover to help us move most of the furniture and our stuff to IMM. For our temporary holding place, we are migrating west-ward, back to my parents' place. This project is crazy and tedious. We are back to the pre-reno days which we have to make many decisions within a sho...

2017 P1 registration has entered the final phase 2C. So after we had registered via 2A1 under Alumni priority, we were still monitoring our "stock market". Not surprisingly at alma mater, it entered balloting at 2A2 phase with 23 applicants vying for 19 places. So 4 parents were balloted out at this phase. But at 2B which is meant for clan, church association, parental volunteers and grassroots, it was relatively quiet and peaceful with 5 places left over from this phase. We got to know Jon's classmate who was successfully enrolled into the same school via 2B and it must be a huge relief for the parents. But for us, phase 2B turned out to be the biggest upset. As most would have known, our preference is with another school. So at the end of Day 1 of 2B, a check at MOE website showed a total of 22 applicants for 28 places. With only 6 places left, the school also did not reveal the number of parental volunteers they have, it was anyone's guess whether the...

The day has finally come so close to registering firstborn in the family for Primary One. If you are parent with young children, you would probably realise by now, the P1 registration is quite an unnerving event which needs to be strategised well especially if you have a baby in a popular year eg. the Dragon year or SG50 which reported a surge in live birth rate. So my firstborn was born in the bunny year and there are 2 schools which we have in mind. The most coveted choice had us originally in Phase 2B with Church affiliation. But alas, we change Church last year and we lost the privilege of Phase 2B. Should we go ahead, we would be competing in the Phase 2C and the tricky part is that we are out of 2km, according to onemap.  It doesn't help when almost half of the vacancies got taken up by siblings. Coveted Choice Plan B was my alma mater. Somehow when we were looking for our own nest, we ended up buying this unit that is of walking distance to the school. Coinci...

Before the school holiday ends and using the long weekend opportunity, we thought of traveling to neighbouring country for a short getaway. I booked the train tickets online, thinking that many would have thought of traveling out too. Ha, plan aborted the last minute and we took off to Garden by the Bay to enjoy the last few days of Blue Danube. Agapanthus a wefie a selfie by himself We also enjoyed morning brunch at Cafe Melba at Mediapolis. This was indeed a good choice with the spacious area outside the cafe and a bouncy castle for the children. We met up with the mummies group and the kids scoot away happily. Good food although on the pricey side, it was very filling and I liked it. eating chocolate ice-cream is the most happy thing for a kid! Play a game of tic-tac-toe awesome photo taking skill by Jon I also managed to take a cake class at ABC cooking studio, doing a Carre au Chocolat. I described the cake as chocolate...