My sister’s maid has gone back to the Philippines for a month’s holiday. To ensure my dad (who lives with her) has proper lunch and dinner prepared for him, I’d been going over to her place 3 times a week to help out. I’ll work from home half a day, and then I’ll pick the girls up from school with Jelly and then go to my sister’s place and work from there for the rest of the day.

On one of the days that we were not going to my sister’s place, I picked the girls up from school without Jelly.

In the car, this conversation took place.
Zaria : (seeing Jelly didn’t come with me) How come Aunty Jelly didn’t come today? Today we’re not going to Karen Yiyi’s place?
Me : Ya. Today we stay at home.
Zaria : But I want to go play with my kor kor.
Me : Huh?
Zaria : I want to go play with Norman kor kor. (Norman is my nephew)
Zara : (chipped in) You know what this means?
Me : What?
Zara : You should get married to Daddy again, and give us a didi. (I told the girls they have to get married to give birth to babies when they asked me how babies were made)
Me : *TING! Light bulb litted* Oh, you want a didi?
Both : Ya!!
Me : Can…. To get a didi, mummy and Daddy need to go pak toh (Cantonese : Dating) and go for holidays alone without the two of you. Then after a few times of pak tohs and holidays alone, then only we can get didi.
Both : Huh? Go pak toh?
Zara : I don’t want you to go pak toh and holidays without us. I don’t want didi already.
Zaria : I also don’t want.

There goes my chance to get my permanant going out visa.

In case it gives you wrong ideas, pak toh or not, holidays or not, definitely there won’t be any more didis or meimeis. We’re quite sure about that.

My girls are too small to know when Mother’s Day is, but they talked about it, because the school has prep-ed them by teaching them to sing different songs related to love for mothers.

On Saturday I asked the girls, “So, tomorrow is Mother’s Day, what are you girls going to do for me?”

Instead of getting me toys per their earlier agreement, Zara said, “I’ll let you go pak toh (Cantonese : Go out dating) with Daddy.” (if you know how difficult for me to apply for visa to go out, you’ll understand this is indeed a very precious gift) and if this is not enough, she added,
“And then you can go do your hair, you can spend a long long time to get your hair done.” (I’d just told her I haven’t had time to get my hair done, because I spent all my time with them).

For Zara, granting me Me-time is her most ‘valuable’ gift.

For Zaria, she said, “For mother’s day, I’ll order cheese and bread (from Auntie Jelly) for you in the morning.”

Such innocence.

But then, something happened in the afternoon, which made me seethed with anger for the rest of the day, so I didn’t have any mood for a celebration.

Daddy wanted to have dinner with his mum, so a simple dinner with my in-laws at a near by restaurant is how we did it.

If you are my FB friends, you would have heard the songs the girls sang for me.. Their serenading voices, is the best gift to me.

Hope you have a nice one.

Every day when I wash my hair, I get a bit upset seeing my hair which has fallen off with every rinse. I’m tempted to invest in those hair tonics available in the market, but then when I read the ingredients of this product, I can’t bring myself to get it.
I’m very much into natural product, so if there’s any herbal hair loss treatment that you are aware of, can you drop me a comment and let me know?

Daddy is always watching his budget when it comes to choosing faucets, so we always end up having some cheap China made ones which last us just for a while until it starts complaining with a leak, or a pipe whistle (which the kitchen faucets are facing now)
I really like the Moen kitchen faucets, and hope Daddy will get them to replace the faulty ones.

I’m again met with a typical insurance agent. When she’s doing her insurance marketing, she’s very diligent in writing emails to me, sms-ing me, even calling me. She was making her presence felt.
After I’d bought from her, all these stopped. Guess she’s moved on to work on her other client, one less one to update daily. Just hope she won’t disappear from the face of the earth, like my other earlier agents do once the commission stopped going to her.

Every time when we go to a super market, one of the girls’ favourite activities is to bring different items which they are strong enough to carry to the available barcode scanners
set up as price checkers. They will say, “I need to check how much.”
That will keep them occupied for some time and we’ll have to wait for them until they are done before we can move to the next aisle.

Daddy and I hardly go out alone, we always bring the girls everywhere we went. In a year, we probably go out for dinner 5 or 6 times without them. The girls, who are hardly left at home without us, had to be informed in advance, it’s kind of like having to apply a going out Visa from them.

Over the weekend, we wanted to go out for dinner alone (first for this year), so here is the Visa Application process.
I asked, Zaria, “Zaria, mummy and daddy go out for dinner tonight, you and jiejie stay at home with aunty ok?”
She replied, “Ok mum.” That was easy.
Zara was upset, and she said “No. Why must you go out without your children?”
I had to explain to her, parents have sometimes spend time alone, etc etc, and I’m not really asking her for permission, but rather giving her advance notice we’ll be going out.
“You think leaving your children behind and locking them up in the house and then you go out is a nice thing to do is it?” o.O”
I have to tell her we’re not locking them up, they are free to roam about, choose what they want to do in the house, and we’re just going out for dinner, not leaving them that long.
“You have all the bad things (thoughts) in your head, that’s why you said this.”
o.O”
(She’s very capable of attacking you using words.)
When I told her that’s not something nice to say, tears was welling up in her eyes, and she said, “I want you to forever stay with me.”
“But I’m staying with you forever, it’s just that Daddy and mummy had to go out for a few hours for dinner to spend time alone, then we’ll be back. You can have your favourite spagetti for dinner, and then you can watch a show after dinner, and then we’ll be back already.”
“What time are you coming back?”
“By ten.”
She thought for a while, and then, Visa approved!

Oh, this is not all, we had another check point. When I told Jelly, our maid, we would be leaving the children with her for a couple of hours while we went out to have dinner, she put on her black face.
Daddy was so annoyed, he gave her a lecture, “What do you expect? We cannot get you to take care of the children when we go out for dinner is it? How often do we go out without them? Just this one time you want to give me black face?”

See, not easy huh? To just want to go ‘pak toh’ (Cantonese : dating). After all these, when we reached the restaurant, Daddy said, “I really don’t like to let the girls miss out on such things.”

Aiyo.. like I’m the bad one, who likes to go out without them, and do not feel bad about it.

A few of the girls’ latest favourite.

Their favourite drink, TEA.
Pokka Green Tea, and after the Singapore trip, they are ordering Teh-C everywhere they go (even at home!).
Both Daddy and I are tea drinker, I guess we kind of influenced them.

Their favourite food, pan-mee or any doughy noodle (lamien, farfalle). They could hardly finish half bowl of rice, but give them lamien, they can finish a full bowl, no problem.
And Zaria recently just loves corn.

Nail art is something they have discovered, and love.

And of course, they love drawing and painting.

Animals,

Butterflies,

Heartshape butterflies.

And sometimes drawing things they do, like Zaria’s hand with nail art, spot that?

This is their current phase.

When we read on newspaper that the National Museum of Singapore will be cooperating with Kunsthistorische Museum Vienna, Egyptian and Near Eastern Department to display some artefacts from ancient Egypt early this year, we’d already planned to make a trip down to Singapore as Zara has a lot of interest in pyramids, mummies, etc.

I never knew it was under such circumstance that the trip finally materialised. Daddy drove the girls down together with Jelly (my insistence) on 18th March. Luckily my dad recovered well after surgery, or I think we won’t be doing all the sight seeing.

♥17th March, Thursday♥
Girls and Daddy arrived. Girls were so happy to see me after a week. They were hugging me and kissing me, and Zaria kept telling me, “I love you very very very very very much, mum.”

Daddy was showing sour face the whole time because of the sleeping arrangement, and also his inability to get tickets to Universal Studio (as if it’s my fault!)

♥18th March, Friday♥
I cooked a hearty breakfast for everybody. Scrambled egg white for my dad, egg and bacon for the rest. I had Greek yogurt and honey instead, something I can’t find or cost too much in KL.

After instructing Jelly what to cook for lunch, Daddy, the girls and I left for the National Museum. Girls got all excited when they saw the Quest of Immortality posters in the ticketting hall. Finally, they could enjoy what we’d talked about since the newspaper reading.

Zara then pointed, “Mum, look, Hieroglyphic!”. I had no idea what it was, and had to follow her gaze. You can imagine how much interest she has in all things Egyptian.

After the Quest of Immortality, we went on to visit The Singapore History Gallery. Seriously, how much history does Singapore has? But they did it in a story telling way, with free multimedia handheld device given out which guides you around the gallery, it made the whole thing so interesting.

I left the gallery with the girls first (because my device broke down half way) and proceeded to have lunch. Daddy turned up 30mins later. He said he thoroughly enjoyed the visit.

After lunch, we went shopping at Sommerset 313 and later met up with my brother and his family, my dad and sis for dinner.

♥19th March, Saturday♥
My brother brought my dad for his check up, and left my nieces with me. Again, I made everybody a big breakfast, and I continued to have my yogurt.

We went to the zoo after breakfast. It was actually pouring, but since we didn’t have any other day to do this (my nieces were going home the following day), we just braved on, with raincoats bought from the zoo.

That’s how silly we looked.

Even in this weather, the walk around the zoo was very pleasant. So green, so much to see, so informative. We could see almost all the animals up close.

There’s the outback section where girls can pat kangaroos.

My favourite, the polar bear.

Zaria’s favourite, the baboons. She has a book about June the baboon, so she was very interested to see a baboon real life.
After that, she told everyone “Baboons have heart shaped backside!”

We left the zoo in the evening, and then straight on to dinner with the rest of the family, and off shopping again.

♥20th March, Sunday♥
We had breakfast together at Tiong Baru Market. Probably the only market we know how to go, and my dad’s favourite eating place.

After breakfast, my brother and his family, my dad and my sister left home. We had to sort out with the ‘hotel‘ on the refund we wanted since we were leaving earlier (as my dad has been given permission to leave Singapore by the doctors earlier than planned), and also moved to a new room. (When I wrote this post the refund is still in progress)

We then brought Jelly along and took a taxi and went to Suntec City. Big mistake! Nothing there, not much to shop. We made the girls walked from Suntec City to Millenia Walk, then to Marina Square, and then later to Esplanade.

We then headed back to the ‘hotel’ to rest. At night, it was another round of shopping, this time at Ion (which I think where we shopped most).

After shopping, the girls played at the water fountain at Ion, and had a lot of fun.
Luckily we brought them spare clothes.

Daddy then suggested we took the MTR to Raffles Place to look at the Merlion up close. Zara and I were so tired, we didn’t really bother, Merlion or not. Zaria was however very keen. So off we went again.

♥21st March, Monday♥
We woke up late, had a lazy morning, then went to Wisma Atria for lunch, and then headed home.