Christmas Holidays

My Christmas Present to Hubby

Time passes really fast. After XX's birthday celebration, we attended another birthday party the next Saturday, then a few days later, it's Christmas Eve already. It was a quiet Christmas Eve for us. We had a simple dinner of Chicken Rice. No roasted turkey, but it's still a bird nonetheless...hee.

Christmas Day, the kids opened the rest of their presents from the Grandparents and aunties/uncles in S'pore. They merrily ripped away while it's constant collecting and crushing of loose wrappers and boxes for us. They were the happiest and luckiest that day as we attended 2 gatherings and they collected more presents.

After breakfast, I started to get busy, making 'Lo Mai Fan' (Glutinous Rice) for the lunch gathering. It was well-received and we came home in the afternoon so XX can have a nap. While he was asleep, I made some Gingerbread Man cookies for the evening party. In between, I also made some Min Jiang Kueh for tea as a pilot friend of Hubby was in town and he came over to our place.

We were dead tired by the time we reached home at about 11pm. But I still can't go to bed yet. As Hubby sent his friend back to the hotel, I started packing. Yes, we're leaving for a short holiday the next day and we've not even started packing. Procastination is the word. I think we went to bed at about 1am that night.

The next morning, Boxing Day, I got out of bed at about 8am, awoken by XX. Which was just as well. Cos I'm heading for the Boxing Day SALES happening everywhere! I found out at the party that evening before that over here on Boxing Day, retail stores everywhere slashed their prices up to 70% for some crazy 'Stocktaking' 'Clearance' Sale. Many big stores even open early. In downtown Myers, people will start to queue up outside the store as early as 4am to wait for the doors to open at 6am. It's that good that some of the friends there were talking at meeting each other for shopping at 6 or 7 in the morning!

Well, I didn't go down to Myers as there wasn't anything much that I was looking to buy there. But I did go to Spotlight to try my luck for a sewing machine that I've been thinking of buying. The store was having a 20% storewide discount. Still not good enough to meet my budget. However I did end up buying the rotary cutter, cutting mat and quilter's ruler at 20% less. I also got 2 kids sleeping bags at 50% discount over at Big W's and some good quality chocolates at 40% off.

By 1pm, we've started our drive to our holiday destination at Ballarat. I was so tired that I actually slept in the car. (I don't easily fall asleep in cars these days.) I thought that these few days should be good for me to catch up a little on my rest but the first night here proved me wrong.

Find out what happened in the next post!

The Terrible Two

I can't seem to stay away from this number. For this post is BOTH about life with XX after 2 as well as the mischiefs of the TWO boys.

Seriously, at this moment, I'm thinking if God was a little unfair when he 'blessed' some mothers with 2 boys in a row. Because obviously they have got a lot more on their hands than say, compared with mothers with girls only or one boy, one girl. Boys are loud and play noisy games. Guns, swords, remote control cars, X-box....etc. Boys are boisterous, hyperactive, rowdy and not demure.

Well, one boy can still be controlled, but once 2 or more of them gather, it's mayhem! I've seen the way KK plays with his friends. It's just running around, laughing loudly at the same time, tagging each other 'it' and more running around. At the playground, boys who are complete strangers can bond and play together and there're only 2 things they do: 'chasing' and 'running'. At home, when KK is away in school, XX is pretty peace loving. But once KK comes home, they either fight over things or play rowdy activites. I have to constantly shout at them to stop before they hurt themselves or destroy something or I'll be scolding one or the other for hitting/throwing. XX especially, has this habit of throwing things (whatever he's holding or can lay his hands on) when he's angry. Either that or he'll thump you with his fist. He can be really naughty to his brother and is not one who gives in easily.

Ok, so I get to save on clothings and toys for the same sex but on the other hand, boys break more of their toys and dirty their clothes more often than girls. It's true! All the toy cars that are still not broken, none of them have their paintwork intact. Cheap toys don't last more than 2 days in my family. Yesterday, XX just broke the remote control tank when he threw the tank over his head for no reason. The X-box remote control has crashed onto the floor so many times but thank God for carpets. The cuffs on KK's blue uniform is often grey in colour. I have to use concentrated detergent and scrub like crazy to get them off. I'm sure his royal blue pants has got an equal amount of dirt, except that I can't see it. His shoes, I don't even bother washing them.

Here are more reasons why I think mothers with all boys family should form a support group and meet regularly to comfort and tell each other their hard work will be rewarded the day their sons get married.

1) You will never succeed in shopping for clothes for yourself when you bring the boys along. They'll be complaining till you leave the shop or they'll be playing hide and seek inside the racks of clothes. They have no constructive feedback to give when you try on clothes and you've got to watch that they don't accidentally wander into other women's cubicles in the fitting room.

2) You see all the racks of cute, pretty dressess on display and you can't buy any! You walk to the boys section but you don't like everything you see. Decision making for buying boys' clothes are no-brainers. Pants - long or short, black, blue or khaki. Shirt - their favourite cartoon characters on the front can't go wrong.

3) You feel like making a quilt for them and you have a headache thinking about the design. All the pretty floral quilt designs you like are too 'girly' for them and you hate sewing robots appliques.

4) You are the only one in the family doing all the gift wrappings for whatever occasions all year round. Because boys only know how to tear gift wrappers and they don't care how a present looks on the outside!

My No. 2 turns 2!

2 is the magic number yesterday as my XX turned two years old! We celebrated with a birthday party at our place, inviting all of our friends in Melbourne - which comes up to about 10.

The theme of the party is 'Cars', since XX likes 'cars cars' so much. We've got a Cars ice-cream cake, Cars paper plates, Cars-stickered plastic cups, Cars birthday banner, Cars goodie bags and Cars gift wrappers for the kids' gifts. I even ironed on a 'Cars' motif on a red t-shirt for XX to wear. We also booked a Disney Cars bouncing castle but unfortunately, it was raining cats and dogs the whole day, we had to cancel it in the morning. The rain had started on Friday and continued through the night to Saturday. It didn't stop at all for the next 24 hours....urgh!

Prepartion of food for this party can be considered the biggest challenge of my culinary skills. With a lot of planning and support from Hubby and friends, I managed to cook almost all of the food to serve our guests. I must say that if I was still in Singapore, this probably would not happen. I would not have had the time, experience and confidence to cook food good enough to serve people outside of my immediate family. But over the last 6 months, I've had the opportunity to sharpen up my cooking skills, testing out a few good recipes in the process.

As early as on Wednesday, I'd started baking about 30 Rich Chocolate Cupcakes. Thursday, I baked 60 Choux Pastry shells for cream puffs and cut/marinaded 1.6kg of chicken thigh fillets for the Satays. Friday, the Chocolate Ganache for the cupcakes and Shu Cream filling for the cream puffs were prepared. I used the chocolate ganache to decorate the Lemon Star biscuits and coated the tips of fresh strawberries as well. Approximately 60 sticks of satay were also skewered. In the evening, I even had the mood to make a Triple Chocolate Cheesecake, my first time making a cheesecake.

Lemon Star Biscuits with Chocolate Ganache strips

When Saturday morning came, I decorated the cupcakes with KK, filled the cream puffs, fried the sausage and prata for the Sausage Prata Roll, made the Tomato Pesto Puffs, skewered the cucumbers/onions for the satay and prepared the stock for the Fish Head Bee Hoon. Our friend Sherin helped prepare the fish for the fish head bee hoon soup while KK helped me wash the vegetables. Hubby collected the cake, chilled the drinks and we were all set and ready for the guests by 3pm.

KK has been waiting impatiently for the party to start all morning and when his friend Byran and his sister arrived, he was literally screaming with joy. XX, as expected, was totally oblivious to all the happenings in the kitchen. He was busy and happily running around with the other kids the whole time.

The satays were grilled when the guests arrived and were a big hit. I have to thank our sponsors 'Singapore Day' (and Sherin) for giving out the cans of Yeos satay sauce...haha!

XX behaved extremely 'big-boy' during the cake cutting, standing tall and blewed the candles, cut the cake when told, though I seriously wondered if he knew what it all meant. He had two cakes, the ice-cream one from Wendys and the cheesecake that mummy made. The cheesecake's triple layers turned out well. The only problem was the Oreo base was quite hard and I struggled to dig it out of the Pyrex pan....

There's one thing that I'm sure XX learnt that day - the skill of opening presents. By the time he opened his third present, he was an expert at ripping the gift wrapper away to reach the contents.

At the end of the day, only 6 adult and 5 kids guests came and there were a lot of leftover food, which I packed for our friends to bring home. By the time KK's buddy Bryan left at 10.30pm, I begin to feel some aching on my shoulders. The sugar rush from all the sweet cakes and the hype of the day's events slowly disappeared as I wind down with Hubby over a glass of wine...... 2 a successful party and till next year.

* I would like to thank all our friends who turned up for your presence, your contributions of food, your help and your gifts to XX! More pictures in Facebook!

Santa Wear Your Shorts

Click here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niadYXItV2U) for the video of KK's carolling performance.

See if you can spot KK in his red beach shorts!

Happy Tuesday Again

Today is yet another 'Happy Tuesday' for us.

It seems that even the plants outside the yard knows about 'Happy Tuesdays' cos the cactus plant's flowers chose to bloom today. Yesterday, they were still 'closed'. The rose, which was at the point of wilting, suddenly seemed to be revived today. And I spotted the first fruit of the strawberry plant today. I'm pretty sure this is a strawberry in the making. Question is: will it continue to grow bigger and ripen?

Monday....

Tuesday!


The resurrected rose

Strawberry #1

Petrol price was sighted to be 97.9 cents per litre. Although we didn't need to pump, I'm happy to see prices falling. But I bet those Arab folks and top shots at OPEC must be shaking their heads while putting them together at this moment, thinking of how to increase the oil prices and keep their profits high.


We ate Dominos pizza again, nope, not sick of it yet. Hubby went to buy 2 pizzas after he collected KK from school and we had an early dinner. The main reason for the early dinner was because KK had to go back to school again at 5.15pm for a carolling performance.



This is the highlight of the day and I've been looking forward to it for the past week. In fact, I seem more excited than KK, asking him how he sings the song and what were the actions, but the boy just can't be bothered. I even had to remind him after he came back from school that the performance is this evening.



His Prep class is gonna perform this song called 'Santa wears your shorts' and we're supposed to dress him up in colourful beach theme shorts. Luckily, some years ago in Bintan, KK's PoPo had bought him this red batik shirt and shorts which we've yet to wear until now. I took it out, give it a quick ironing and thought this is really very suitable for his song. Somehow, KK is a lot less enthusiastic about the costume.

Rain cleared up - after everything's over.

Unfortunately, the weather today was quite terrible. It's overcast, cloudy, chilly, gloomy and just 1 hour before the event, it poured. The school had invited all parents to bring along their picnic mat and food as they watched the carolling. I had envisioned a nice evening sitting down on the ground, eating pizza and drinking coke.


But all these didn't happen. What happened was, everyone packed into the gym, standing around or sitting on chairs to see their kids perform. We were late and were lucky to slowly inch our way into the hall, standing next to a Christmas tree by the side. XX was happy there, especially after a little girl kept offering bits of her food to him and I opened a bag of Nachos for them to munch. Later, a teacher offered a space in front on the floor for XX and I, but Hubby stood all the way. The poor kids, they could only come into the hall to perform and had to leave after cos there's simply no room to accommodate them.

I especially like this snowman costume

Nevertheless, it was a great effort by the children and the teachers who trained them. Most came dressed up to the theme and without a doubt, the christmas songs and singing does make one feel 'christmassy'.



I will upload a video of KK's performance later, after I edit the film abit. But guess what? Despite my front seat position, I couldn't see him at all throughout the whole performance.... :( He got rotated to stand at the other end of the hall and my view of him was always blocked. I couldn't stand up either to see him as someone was video-ing behind me. Sigh, I had to resort to watching him on the video recording playback. Thank God Hubby was able to move over there.

Happy Tuesdays

There are many reasons that make Tuesdays the happiest day of the week.



Firstly, petrol prices are at their lowest on this day (but don't ask me why). So most locals will try to fill their tanks on Tuesdays. Today, Hubby pumped at $1.007/litre. Cool!



Secondly, on Tuesdays, Dominos' pizzas are only $4.90 each, as compared to $6.90 normally. Second to MacDonalds, Dominos is our most frequented fast food joint. We call to make a phone order, and it's ready by the time you drive 10 mins to pick it up. Its pizzas are very reasonably priced (some supermarket frozen pizzas cost just as much) and most importantly, they are very very delicious, with generous toppings. We never knew Dominos was so good until we came here. Two large pizzas to feed the family (plus leftovers for KK's lunch the next day), for less than $10, where to find such good deals?



Thirdly, with Tuesdays being pizza nights, this means I don't have to cook! I don't need to think of what to cook and can use the time instead for baking or other hobbies.

Tuesdays are also 'walking days'. The local community hub has a walking group every Tuesday morning. Usually I'll put XX in a stroller and join them for a walk around the area, for fresh air, for exercise, for socialising. It is followed by morning tea at the hub. Even Hubby comes along when he's in town. The people in the group are quite nice and friendly.

Even KK has reasons to be happy. On Tuesdays, we give him some pocket money (20c) to bring to school for lollies!



To mark Happy Tuesday today, I made this Santa Claus cake! No lah, actually I've wanted to make this cake for a long time, after seeing its cute picture on Happy Home Baker's blog. The strawberries were on sale and they looked so beautiful I couldn't resist buying. This gives me the perfect kickstart and I finally plucked up my courage to try making a sponge cake again last night after the earlier failed attempt. Seeing that it didn't deflate, I went to get the cream and white chocolate today to decorate it. It wasn't very easy assembling the cake. The creaming was quite atrocious. Maybe I lack the right tools, I was using a spatula to spread it and the edge of the cake was the most difficult to get the cream on nicely. But thankfully, the end result still looks quite pleasing. Have you noticed that my santa's face is kind of tan? The original one is white but I used my leftover chocolate icing sugar (don't waste), so my whipped cream is light brown in colour.....haha....alamak, became asian Santa loh!

I couldn't think of any special reason for the cake so here's to Happy Tuesdays for us and advanced Merry Christmas to everyone!!