a spot of singapore

The kids have been battling the flu and feeling all miserable last week so yesterday, we decided to cheer them up with a cable car ride at Mt Faber’s Jewel Box. We’ve all never been on the cable car before and it was as much an experience for us as much as for the kids.

Apparently, Mt Faber was quite the hotspot for couples looking for some adult alone time back in the 1970’s and what do you know, the magic is still alive. Like even in this stationary display cabin, there was some action going on. Ok, I should probably clarify that I’m not the sort that intentionally intrudes on another couple’s special time. I didn’t notice they were there until I was editing the pictures.

Moving on, Truett was probably the most thrilled with the ride because he’s in love with all sorts of moving vehicular contraptions – roller coasters, cable cars, skyrides, gondolas, trains and even buses. He would make us ride it multiple times so it was a good thing there were 4 stops on a cable car roundtrip. It was like riding it 4 times instead of 1, which seems like a lot more.

This was literally how he looked the entire ride – with eyes filled with awe and wonder. Kirsten calls it “BIG EYES”.

Incidentally, there was also a Sky Art Gallery going on in conjunction with National Day, so the cabins were dressed up with designs created by different illustrators. My favorite was this one done by my friend, Eeshaun. We’ve been a big fans of his work since our NTU days.

If you’re planning to hop on the cable car ride, the best start point is at Mt Faber because The Jewel Box does have a spectacular view. There’s also a koi pond and lots of space for the kids to run. The cable car will take you all the way to Sentosa and you can just hop back on for the return trip after you’re done exploring Sentosa.

The moment we got off, my son was all “we need to come again next week, it’s very fun.” I have a feeling this is the start of several cable car rides.

Thanks to all your brunch suggestions on the facebook page, we had lots of new places to choose from yesterday. We’ll try to check out a new place for Sunday brunch every week and let you know which ones are good.

We started with The Tanglin Tree at Tanglin Post Office after a friend’s recommendation. The menu wasn’t extensive and the food was alright with the usual spread of eggs, bacon, toast and hash browns. I probably won’t be back for the food but then again, the best part about the place isn’t the food.

It’s the very cool outdoor playground area right next to the cafe.

It was like a little house playground with 2 rooms, a bridge, a slide, swings, and a sandbox looking all bright and happy. Baby girl was busy exploring the house playing peekaboo with the other kids.

While Truett headed straight for the sandbox. Seeing how much he loves sand, his middle name should be Sandy. Or Sandman. Or Sanders.

His eyes light up whenever he sees sand – he scoops it, pats it, pours it all over his entire body and rolls around gleefully in it. After every sand session, we’ll always find sand in his hair, mouth, neck, armpits and underpants, which amazingly does not bother him one bit.

Kirsten on the other hand, get’s a bit squeamish when sand gets into places it shouldn’t be in. Every few minutes, she’ll make me dust her fingers or remove the 2 offending grains of sand between her toes.

One time, some sand got into her eyes and she went a bit mental, shrieking at me to get it out. Except that I could only attempt to sweep it out with my already sandy hands and all that dusting made the sand fly around her face in a gigantic sand cloud. Which made her freak out and swipe at her own face with her even more sandy hands. It was not a pretty sight.

She obviously wasn’t keen to repeat that experience so she stood beside the sandbox looking exceedingly troubled by the prospect of touching that much sand.

She did eventually join in but it was with a lot of hesitation and scowling. It was too cute to watch.

All in all a nice easy Sunday morning.

PS. The winner of the Miele S6 will be announced later today. Stay tuned.

In the spirit of nationalistic pride, we did a little art and craft with the kids this morning. Me and the husband (ok, mostly the husband) squeezed out every ounce of our artistic talent and drew a beautiful picture of the Singapore flag, complete with the crescent and 5 stars.

The kids were all like “what’s that daddy, what’s that?” and we were all “What have you kids been learning in school? This is the Singapore flag la, like that also don’t know.”

Tru took one look at it and said “No, this is not the Singapore flag. It’s wrong.” So obviously their national education hasn’t been going very well or the husband needs to go for art lessons.

We wanted to teach them what the 5 stars meant but we figured it was more important to teach them to do the 2-finger peace sign while holding the flag (it’s now the Singapore sign, thanks to a certain MP). No matter how hard she tried, poor Kirsten could only muster the claw. Maybe we’ll get her a Kate Spade to see if it’ll help give her fingers some extra dexterity.

Happy National Day, everyone!

Peace out! (and this is me doing the peace sign, y’all)

Among the list of favorite indoor entertainment for the kids, the airport ranks pretty high. It’s great for us because it’s free, relatively quiet and it’s 5 minutes from our place. And they love it because they can ride the skytrain back and forth multiple times, practice coloring at the carved woodblock station, eat gummies and run from one end to the other.

Last week, at the invitation of Changi Airport, we discovered a whole load of other activities we’ve been missing out on. In fact, we ended up packing in 7 hours of fun at the airport, which is like a trip to the zoo, except free.

Here were their favorites.

1. Plane watching at the sunflower garden.

It was located next to a runway so they could get up close with sunflowers and watch planes take off at the same time. Baby girl was all “Look got flowers, OH SEE THE AEROPLANE CAN FLY!” She even found herself a nice ledge to stand on for a better view.

2. Koi feeding at the pond.

The kids are in a feeding phase now, they feed their stuffed toys, feed my mom’s dog, and from time to time, even each other. Evidently, feeding fish was right up their alley,

3. Window and Sand Art

Baby girl fiddled with the paints for a while and decided to go eat the sand from the tubs. Seeing that she’s already eaten a lot more than sand, I figured I’d let her express her creativity however she wanted.

4. Rocking the Singkids Indoor Playground

Being the playground connoisseurs that they are, they gave the newly launched Singkids an impressive rating of “VERY FUN”. It was a bit small but the activity stations were very different from the usual playgym ones that they’ve grown tired of. This one had stuff like special go karts and climbing structures and automated teddy see-saws.

5. Watching Santa at his post-Christmas day job.

I used to think that  Santa just sits around on his reindeer-mobile when Christmas is over but apparently, he has an off-season day job, which is to make chocolates by hand. We tried saying hi and humming jingle bells but he pretended not to hear us. I think he was trying to go incognito but I handed him my Christmas list anyway.

Part of my National Education curriculum involves bringing the kids down to Changi Airport’s Terminal 3 to do woodblock coloring. There’s this corner with paper, crayons and woodblocks carved out with semi-patriotic expressions of art. Like a picture of the Merlion (which can also double up as a science lesson about crossbreeding lions and mermaids) and one of the Vanda Miss Joaquim, our national flower.

While they color, I get to teach them about our unique cultural heritage.

It would have been more patriotic if not for some random pictures of coffee. I was trying to figure out how coffee was representative of our Singapore culture seeing that we don’t actually produce any. I suppose we drink a lot of coffee, but that’s probably less of a Singaporean thing and more of a Starbucks thing.

Speaking of, we should probably have a iconic national drink. Wait, we do have that awful Singapore Sling. We should definitely trash that and make it the Milo Dinosaur instead. That’s an intensely badass drink. In fact, I’m going to make myself one right now.

Happy Monday!

Universal Studios opened its new ride Madagascar: A Crate Adventure yesterday and we were there for a test run with the kids. I have several guiding principles in life and one of them is never to turn down an invite to a theme park. Unless that theme park is Haw Par Villa, then it’s literally over my dead body, which incidentally would fit right in with the place (the dead body, I mean).

Truett was very excited to be going to “newsal studios to see the big, giant ball with a lot of smoke” and he was even more excited to find out that there was a lot more to newsal studios than the giant ball, which you technically could see for free at the entrance. His first ride on the Madagascar Crate Adventure was like an epiphanic moment for him. The whole time, he sat looking like it was the most awesome experience in his life and after we were done, he made us go on another 3 more times.

I’m not going to spoil it for you, but suffice to say, it’s going to be a hit with the kids. And adults who don’t like the death-defying drops. Previously, they had only been on the carousel and teacup rides, which is basically like running on the spot, except with nice music and colorful animals.

This was their first proper theme park ride, with all the magic of themed characters, adventurous sets and a real moving boat. In short, they loved it.

In fact, it was so fun that Van Persie was there to try out the ride because obviously, Arsenal players have better things to do than lose matches now that Manchester United has taken the league. Sorry Arsenal fans, couldn’t resist.

Also, thanks to the folks at Universal, we had a very nice lunch at Casa del Wild. This is probably where I show you pictures of the food but my food photography sucks so here’s a shot of the entrance.

As usual, the rest of the park was lovely. Truett was tall enough to go on his first roller coaster ride and he went on that 4 times as well. I asked him if it was scary and even though he was all “It’s not scary, just FUN”, I had a really good time seeing the look of pure terror on his face during the drop.

I’m not very good at posing for pictures so left to my own devices, this is what I usually do. The husband kept saying it was boring and I should try out some new moves.

Fortunately for me, there were all these people with wonderful ideas on how to take a proper photograph and all I had to do was to watch and learn. What do you think?

Baby girl had some pretty awesome moves of her own so she showed me a couple of good ones. I’m probably going to leave the posing to her from now on.