Sorry for the long hiatus. If you are a blogger, I’m you sure you’d know that any form of quietness in the online space just means we are busy doing stuff and living life. Lots of news and updates to share. But first up, some snippets of Nathan’s big five birthday party bash. I wanted to have a really relaxed, chilled-out party. Just a chance for Nathan’s friends to pop over for a play. We had the party at the neighbourhood playground just around the corner from our house. Lots of space for the kids to run about, a chance to soak in the lovely summer weather and with minimal post-party clean-up effort. For the cake, to keep things easy and low-fuss, I put together a ‘doughnut’ cake. We picked up a couple dozen doughnuts from Krispy Kreme. I stacked them up together and added a few birthday embellishments. And there you go. A celebratory cake for our birthday cake! It was terrific because we didn’t have to worry about cutting it up and portioning it up onto plates wit forks and so on...

It’s that time of the year again… school is out and holiday season is here! I’ve been knee deep in year-end holiday season mode, clearing off all my outstanding paperwork and assignments before the end of the year, Christmas shopping and gift wrapping, planning Nathan’s birthday party. Before long, it will soon be time to start up my engines again preparing for the new school year. That means shopping for school supplies, books, stationery, uniforms. If you are a parent of a school-aged child, you would know that one of the most arduous tasks is labelling every single school item with your child’s name. From school bags, lunch boxes and drink bottles, to school hats, shirts, jackets, even shoes. So it was good timing that I received this opportunity from Stickerkid to try out some of their most popular essential sticker packs. I jumped onto their website and selected the colours and designs I wanted for each type of sticker and customised the stickers with the specific names and f...

Today’s entry is not so much a post as it is just a way to showcase the latest addition to our outdoor play area… Our new mega sized outdoor chalkboard! It started out when I was cracking my head to think of a project for my sustainability practices assignment. (As some of you know, I am currently back at ‘school’ studying Early Childhood Education as part of my big venture into setting up my family day care ). One of the projects in the assignment was to create an outdoor play space made from recycled materials. Thanks to the labour of love from my dearest hubby… And my ‘expert’ painting skills… We converted an unused wooden door (we happened to have sitting around in our garage gathering dust) into this fantastic new play space in our outdoor area… The children absolutely loved it! They were so excited to see it when they headed outside the first day after it was set up. And I had half the morning ticking away smoothly with all very busy and fully engaged children, drawing...

This past week has been all about snails. The children are always fascinated by the snails in our garden and ask endless questions about them. A couple of weeks back, one of my boys stumbled across a snail crawling along the ground. He excitedly announced his discovery to the rest of the kids. Everyone hurried over and spent ages watching it slowly moving across the ground. Then one of them picked up a small rock and placed it right by the snail. Grace followed suit and picked up another small rock and placed it next to the first rock. “I feed the snail!” she declared proudly. “Hmmm…Snails don’t eat rocks… they eat plants” I gently told the children. “Oh! This one?” said one of the kids, plucking a blade of grass and then attempting to feed it to the poor snail. I decided it was probably a good idea to focus on snails in our next learning plan to set some snaily facts straight with my kiddos. We started off by reading a few books about snails…. Where Do You Live Snail by Petr...

A few nights ago after saying goodnight to the kids and tucking them into bed, I settled in for a solid evening of working on my assignment. It had been a long day and I was feeling kind of moody and headachy. But I knew I had to keep ploughing through my assignments if I was ever going to get through them all in time. After a few minutes of typing, I heard the soft padding of little feet coming up through the hallway. A little face peered through the door and the little person tip toed up to me. “Mummy, just now I was thinking about the monster” “Which monster?” “The one on Winnie the Pooh” “You mean The Backson?” “Yes. That one.” “I thought he was a funny monster. And it was a pretend one, wasn’t it?” “I don’t like it.” “Okay. We won’t watch that Winnie the Pooh show again, then.” “Okay.” (Silent pause) “Mummy?” “Yes?” “Can you come to my room and put the medicine for the monster in my room?” “We did that already, didn’t we? And I think it’s time you went to bed. Mayb...

This is yet another ‘sorry’ post. Sorry for the lack of updates and proper wordy posts sharing the deepest thoughts in my soul. I am literally knee deep in my final batch of assignments to complete my Early Childhood Education studies. It’s been such a marathon year keeping up with all my assessments and projects for this course. These past few of weeks have been pretty intensive. Lots of writing and typing and squeezing of brain juices. By the end of it, I have barely any words or comprehensible thoughts left to spare for anything else. Also, it recently hit me that there are only seven weeks until Christmas. SEVEN WEEKS!!! That’s seven weeks until the end of the year. Seven weeks until everything on my 2015 ‘To Do’ list needs to be checked off. When should I start panicking? There’s the Christmas shopping to do of course. Gifts for my day care kids. My own kids. School teachers. Some close friends and family members.  Various Christmas party Secret Santa gift exchanges. From...

{This Product Talk is brought to you by Nuffnang and Spotlight IMK } Do you have a cooking pet peeve? I do. Onions. Don’t get me wrong. I love onions. Eating onions that is. I don’t mind loading up recipes with extra onions. And on hot dogs, I always like to pile on heaps of grilled onions. The more the merrier. But the thing I dread the most in the kitchen is… Chopping onions. I cry like a baby every time. It’s a love-hate relationship. I’ve tried almost every trick in the book. Image Source But let me share my fool-proof tear-free method for chopping onions… A mini food chopper. Just strip the skin off the onion, slice the onion in half, toss it into one of these little babies and voila! Finely chopped onion in 30 seconds. Here’s one of my favourite quick-fix healthy lunch recipes I cooked with the onions I just chopped in the mini food chopper…   Butter Bean and Onion Quesadilla Ingredients (Serves 2-3 adults or 4-5 children) 1 large onion, chopped 1-2 tbsp ...

A few days ago, Gracie and I headed out on a private one-on-one date of our own, sans the boys. I posted up this picture of us on our date. The comments we received? They were all about those irresistible pigtails ! Yes. We have reached the age of pigtails. We took a while to get here as we didn’t have much raw material to work with for quite some time. It all started one evening when we were watching Monsters Inc. and this familiar little character popped up. She reminded me of Grace so much. Just for fun I decided to tie up her hair in the same two pigtails. The resemblance? Uncanny! I never saw myself as a girly-girl type of mum. I always admired the intricate braids and hairstyles other mums did on their little girls’ hair. But it was never something I ‘got’. Well… now I think I have a bit of an inkling on what the fuss is all about. This is why you have girls.

Here’s a glance at one of our latest projects: Learning About Seeds. The children often encountered seeds… orange pips, grape seeds, beans in pods, fluffy dandelions… Nathan had asked me before about how a seed becomes a plant and where various fruits come from. So with the arrival of Spring, it was an ideal time to turn this into a learning activity and put our little green thumbs to work. We kicked things off during mat time/story time by reading a book about seeds (‘A Seed Needs Sun’ by Kate Riggs). We talked a little about plants and seeds and gardening. After that we transitioned to have some morning tea. I served up some fruit with seeds (take care if you have really little ones). I also showed them a fresh whole broad bean pod (which I had precooked) and let them try eating the beans straight out of the pod. We examined the beans and seeds as we ate our fruit  and snack. Then I showed the children the packet of broad bean seeds. I poured out the seeds on the table for t...