What happens at Atrina every night

K was back late from work tonight. His 1st reaction when he saw this "tsk tsk!!!". Too bad la his lazy wife took the opportunity to sit in front of the pc as soon as the little one gone to bed instead of clearing the mess. It's not that we don't want to train her to keep her toys. She was very lonely when mama busy preparing dinner in the kitchen and she went to play alone. Notice the Fisher Price push walker not at the usual parking place? Bingo, she pushed it to the kitchen :)

*Pic taken using the panoramic function on my cam, hence the jagged line somewhere in the middle.*

Xiang Ying takes instructions from Daddy

Recently she started this cute action by seeking our "approval" before dumping the hoop. Usually she does it with sounds effects like "Ah" with eyes opened very big like really asking yes/no. We really enjoy it very much :)

Sorry ah this is the best angle I could take from. I tried taking front view and she immediately dash towards my camera. She has this obsession with cameras you see...

Christmas 2010

We didn't go for buffet feast this year. Just a small gathering with the girls and our partners at Punggol Park and we had a BBQ session on our self-made pit. Um very sadly I have no pics of the BBQ scene except for 1.



Very obvious who are the ppl doing most of the work. *Eating and running around not counted!*

This year we bought a set of Lego Duplo for the little one. This is good for her fine motor skills and hopefully can train her concentration span longer. Hope she enjoys playing with it though I'm very sure every night after she has gone to bed I will be the one picking up all pieces...



Following pics of her 1st encounter with Duplo :)

Guess what she was doing in this pic? There was a white fence thingy and she insisted it must be a comb and imitate the way I comb my hair.

Finally she started to dismantle piece by piece. It's supposed to be a good thing but I'm worried for myself about the picking up part.

And here's my present from K. Took me 1 look to fall in love with the bag and weeks of hinting, persuading and whining to buy it :)

Just love the circle quilted velour!

Yes yes born in the glamourous USA but not Made in USA...

No idea why this pic is self-rotated when I upload it on blogger.

I had something from JC last year for my Christmas present too. Maybe we should make it a yearly thing hehe :P

Recent cooks

I think my cooking for dinner enthusiasm has died down somehow. From 2 soups weekly down to only 1 soup... And I even stopped pan frying my meat. Just pop into the oven for less cleanup. Anyway I just can't miss sharing with my readers whatever simple meals the family had :)

For 1 of my lonely lunches, I made my own garlic bread and ate with canned mushroom soup. I resisted many times to buy off-the-shelf garlic spread cuz I don't know when I can ever finish the bottle (just like my jam and lemon curd!). Just nice saw Wokking Mum's blog on homemade garlic spread and I decided to try it. I didn't follow her recipe exactly but it wasn't difficult to do my own based on estimation. Baguette was from Fairprice Xtra at NEX. There is no Delifrance nearby and that is the next best solution. Cheap and good baguette. K was surprised garlic spread could be made in a mere 5min and another 5-8min of baking, we have hot and crispy garlic bread. Yes this happens to a man who don't step into the kitchen at all. I don't normally praise campbell soup (MSG laden) but the Wild Mushroom flavour was good.



My attempt at Japanese-inspired dinner. Again, I didn't want to buy Teriyaki sauce so I googled for recipes and somehow managed to get 1 which was easy and quite close to Teriyaki taste. Was a last minute decision so whatever was served was whatever I had in my freezer/fridge. Quite proud of my attempt :)

A close-up of Yakitori, mushrooms and mid joints. This is a trial run. I will make more next time.



Still had many slices of pineapple leftover from making pizza and what I do I with those? Pineapple rice! Hehe.. LP was visiting 1 of the weekdays after work so I decided to cook pineapple rice for her. Easy, no-brainer thing since I was using pre-packed sauce. Except that somehow the end product turned out a little wet. No idea why! Sorry no time to do nice presentation.

Stir-fried veggies to go along. Also served peanut lotus root soup (not pictured). This soup has become 1 of my favourite soup now :)



For supper 1 of the nights, we had instant noodles and baked fries. Do not be surprised to see me getting more and more meaty. Don't even attempt to look surprised when you see K's rounded tummy. He even sniggered at me for cooking 1 pack of noodles to share. He tells me he is undergoing another round of 发育时期, hence every night hungry even after a full dinner.

I'm really getting so domesticated that I feel sad to serve plain instant noodles. Must dig the fridge for more ingredients then happy. Die... I think I am obsessed...

So obsessed that I can't eat the fries as they are. Must season with salt, garlic powder and herbs then bake. Ok, another Wokking Mum inspiration to season fries.

Haha what do you think this bowl of brown thing looks like? Peanut porridge la. In fact it was cooked with peanut and chicken stock. Taste of course is good. As part of my frugality plan, I made this porridge. Um ok, maybe it sounds complicated but I'm too lazy to re-phrase my sentence. I bought a cheap roast chicken from Fairprice Xtra the day before. Cheap meaning it doesn't really taste good. K and me only ate the wings and thighs. Most of the breast meat were left and I found it very wasteful to dump it away so I kept it. Some parts of the chicken breast I shred it up, the rest of the chicken I used to boil stock with peanuts. After boiling for 2 hours, the stock is very tasty. Just remove the chicken and pour in the pre-soaked rice, boil and we have nice porridge :) Didn't even need to add any seasoning. It was tasty on it's own. So next time you have chicken leftover like us, don't throw it. Nice as it was, I didn't dare to let XY taste it eventhough she was coming to us at the dining table.

Food for the little one:

Old cucumber soup with chicken porridge and shredded chicken for her self-feed. Her favourite food in the world is chicken and soup so needless to say she enjoyed the meal very very much :)

1 of the good days I didn't have to cook her meal separately. Just soak some cooked rice in the soup we were having for a while (soaking softens the rice) and she can eat it. Of course she must have a side dish to go along - Steamed fish with broccoli.

Xiang Ying plays with colourful hoops

Sometimes I can't help but think that my little girl has grown up. Remember the Fisher Price stacker hoops which she could not get it right 2 months ago? All this while we never knew she "secretly" mastered the skills till 1 fine afternoon I was cleaning the floor with Magic Clean swipes and just random picked up the toys lying around and place them on the bumper mat. After I was done with the cleaning, there stood in front of me the stacker, with the hoops in order. It wasn't me and K was at work so it definitely was XY's work. Shocked me and I didn't even notice when she stacked it! So I tried to lure her to do it again and tried to film it down but then not as easy as I thought. She simply anyhow stack for many times till finally she willing to stack correctly. So it's still a hit-miss, depending of her princess mood...

P/S: I texted K to tell him about it and he said must be coincidence. Last night when I was out, she did it again and now he is convinced :)

Video 1 shows her very happy of her achievement :)



Video 2, she seems like able to understand what mama was saying but I think that is a coincidence :P

1st time at T3

This post is slightly behind times.

After Alden's birthday party, the family went to Expo to see the IT fair and Baby fair (I bumped into Sean Lau at the Baby fair who did XY's photoshoot and he commented both mama and baby looked very "hip" on that day. I wonder what does "hip" mean?) and I suggested to go T3 for dinner since we were nearby.

XY seemed hungry and it was running late so I fed her the homecooked porridge in the car on the way to airport. Surprisingly she ate without fuss and finished everything within 10min! Ok this proved that I was right about her being hungry. I jokingly told K next time she has eating problems I will say to him "Let's go to basement" and he should know what's going to happen. Meaning in future she got eating problem, we will go to carpark and put her inside carseat to feed. *LOL*

There isn't much pics taken at the airport but here's my favourite shot of her doing 危险动作 which pretty much pissed her Daddy off. Haha...

There really isn't much going on at T3. I was expecting much more but really, nothing much. Dinner was quite a nightmare (after so long I still remember). Out of the 3 dining outlets (Earle Swensen's, Crystal Jade and Xin Wang HK Cafe) we saw, all were having long Q. After Q-ing for Xin Wang for 15min, we finally gave up and look for other alternatives. Finally saw a desserted The Pasta Shop by Sakae Sushi. Not really keen to eat that but simply too tired and hungry to walk anymore. What a good and bad choice. Bad in terms of service. The shop space wasn't very big but there was only 3 wait staff, including 1 lady who was wearing a black blazer. I assume she is the captain. Ok captain also doing the same things as the other 2. So meaning only 3 staff doing everything from taking orders, serving, billing and clearing the tables. Um.. XY was very restless and cannot sit still on their swivel chair (which toddler can?) and they didn't have any available highchair. I think they have a total of 2 highchairs in the whole shop. So 1 of us was seated waiting for service and food and 1 had to bring her to the play area. She also ventured into a poor shop which stocked lots of children's stuff and toys. Poor shop cuz XY was inside touching and pulling lots of things and we had no intention to buy anything at all. And our food took forever to come. When it finally came, I was impressed! Very very nice meatball spaghetti. I don't order this much but their version was very nice. No time to take any pics. We were busy juggling the litte one and as usual we took turns to eat. Something quite amusing about 1 of the lady staff. I requested for 2 glasses of iced water. I could see she was very busy but I could only ask her since she was the only staff in sight. Requested twice and waited for long time but no water served to us. K said they probably don't serve it then but this wasn't conveyed to me. The lady agreed to serve me. So when I finally saw the guy staff I asked him again and he served to us immediately. I guess it's no one's fault. Probably someone resigned on the spot and hence very short staffed that night. And we witnessed an amusing scene. The captain was walking towards 1 of the tables with check on hand but when she looked up, the table was empty. The patrons had left without paying. Shocked right? But the captain wasn't very surprised. Nor did she look around. She just walked back into the kitchen. Me very bad. I told K maybe not the 1st time that day so she kinda used to it. Haha.

Here are some random videos taken that night...

1st one we have her acting bai ka (crippled). For don't know what reason she kept acting cannot stand up. K said lots of ppl looking but I continued filming.

Another precious one. She was roaming about happily till her beloved Daddy disappeared for smoke break and she turned back wanting to find him.

Going home time but couldn't resist playing "catching" behind a pillar.

We were at Alden's 1st birthday party!

It was Clarice's darling's big day. Yes, Alden finally turned 1! The family turned up late and missed the cake cutting session :(

Clarice was so nice to rent the toy vehicles for the kids :)

XY didn't seem much excited though hehe...

Greedy girl eating Alden's birthday cake.

Cannot sit still for a moment.

Yeah finally a pic with my gal. So happy :)

All the ex-GEHCians kids :) (Oei Ryan not inside)

Birthday boy on the left.

It was hard to get all the kids to look at the camera so I'm posting 2 of the best shots. Hope the mummies like it :)

NEX is our new Compass Point

Preparing to go out for lunch. Yeah no need to cook lunch cuz XY can eat Yoshinoya beef bowl now. She is still very obsessed with balloons and we bring home a balloon almost every trip out.



While XY was sleeping in the pram, mama took the train to NEX just to see just how good it is. Imagine the biggest mall in the NE and just 3 MRT stops away from us. How can AJ not check it out right?

Well she only managed to nap for 1hr in the pram but it was enough peace for me already. Cannot ask for too much right?

As usual my maternal instinct told me we have to go to the children's section at Isetan. Just as well since I had to get a gift for a friend's baby girl's full month party. Bought a sweet dress from Gingersnaps which I would very much love to buy for XY too but I did not. She has enough clothes for CNY already. So sensible AJ has become!

While mama was waiting at the cash counter for the gift to be wrapped, XY was free to roam about on her own. It's quite disastrous sometimes with her chiong-ing towards random shelves and picking random "stuff" which she is unwillingly to put it back. On this day, she did her usual thing. Picked something from the Avent shelf and run towards mama, wanted to pass to mama. There was this middle-aged auntie very cute. She held XY hands and signalled to me "keep quiet" just to test if XY willing to let her hold. And indeed XY let her. Even let her carry. Hahaha...

Then we went on to even more evil experiments. The lady let her grandson (I think) walk along with XY and hold her hand. So cute!!!

My god. So matching hor!

Evil mama even filmed it all down. Honestly they look so cute together. Even passers-by stopped to comment or stayed to watch :)



Just as we were leaving, I saw K's colleague's mum. I super like this auntie. Went over to their place for eating session twice and she's the most bubbly auntie I ever seen and so friendly too.

Second visit to NEX with K along this time. Dinner was very messy. Food Republic was so tiny that we don't think there was much hope in getting a seat. We just went to Mac Donald's which was quite deserted haha. He ate a meal but not me. I had a bad cough and bad throat so I fed XY her dinner which she wasn't very willing to eat. Hello french fries in front of her leh. So after they were settled, I saw a new Ramen shop - Ramen Play which had no Q and seemed pretty nice. This was my dinner. Nice. Also had a yakitori which was full of fats but I ate it all the same. Of course my little girl had some nibbles of the noodles and the chicken meat. To console her of something that happened while mama's eating and she and Daddy were outside the shop playing "catching".

Can you spot the tiny family in this pic? :)

So what happened earlier? Well while running to "catch" Daddy she fell on her face and had a real "Bualuku" on her forehead. I could even hear her cries inside the shop. To think that K always tells me to be extra careful when bringing her out!

Her new trick: Offer water to whoever near to her after she's done with her drink.

We were back again today! Nowhere to go and I didn't feel like cooking dinner so I suggested to have 鼎泰丰 which K won't reject the idea. His first love is 小笼包. He can eat more than 10pcs on top of the fried rice and other small dishes.

Little one of course enjoyed her dinner. She got to try everything we ordered, including the mixed pickle cold dish which was slightly spicy. And she loves the soup from the 小笼包 so much.

Oh and she yelled to drink K's tea. Strange huh likes tea taste at this age.

Recent cooks

Not much of cooking recently and not much of nice presentation = nothing much worth posting. Anyway want to keep a record of what I had served for the family so there :)

Another experiment with pita bread base pizza. I used sausages and hard boiled egg. There wasn't really enough surface or space to lay the ingredients. Only 1 and a half pce of cocktail size sausage for 1 pizza but it was a good combination though.

Um.. more pizza experiments to come. I wasn't planning to cook dinner that night since K was attending a wedding dinner on that day. He was home to change before going. Surprisingly he requested for some food to temporary fill him up since typical wedding dinners start at almost 9pm. And so after rummaging my fridge, I decided to make pizza since it was the fastest and easiest thing to do.

Found a squeeze pizza sauce from Cold Storage. So happy with this. So easy to use.

I find this pita bread nicer than the one I got previously. Very soft and fluffy.

Ta-dah! With spinach and sausages pre-baked. My daughter was having spinach in her porridge for dinner and so I might as well use some of the greens right? Did not cook any green leafy veggies for weeks now.

The results was good. I think you can never go wrong with pizza. Anything goes. Really. Ok and I have to add here: AJ had 1 of these pizzas for my dinner and K had 1 BEFORE he went for wedding dinner. See how much he eats these days.

Poor mama is (still!!) having a bad throat which triggered a bad cough. My late mum used to make steamed apples for me since young whenever I had a cough. It is supposed to be nourishing for the lungs. Now that I have my own family I'm going to do the same. Except that I'm the only one in the family needing it haha...

Trying out my new sandwich maker. A manual one to be specific :)

(This is the result of surfing too much Singapore Motherhood Bulk Purchase forum. Widely known as SMH BP in the mummy's society.)

K saw my new toy but he doesn't question me about it. I guess he either resigned to fate (hopeless wife) or he rather pretend not to know about it.

Ok I couldn't get a good shot of the sandwich so this is about how good it can get. Nice right and not much of wastage. Just nice to get rid of the bread skin.

*Meanwhile my daughter is pretending to crawl in the background.*

See? AJ always makes good sandwiches for the husband but he is not appreciative at all. Always complaining don't like to eat breakfast.

Failure jacket potato. I was trying to make one but I think I baked for too long and hence it turned out like that. Should have made 1 to share with K. Mr Potato-hater only ate half and me too only ate half (I'm a small eater for my size). I like to make sure everything I cooked is finished up but this was an exception.

Mixed veggies with chicken fillet. Simplest cheater dish I could ever think of. Blanched broccoli and carrot tossed with a yummy japanese dressing and topped with supermarket-bought meat. I was checking out NEX in the day and so happened to see that the Fairprice Finest selling this and I tried some. Was good and decided to buy some back for dinner. This, the potato and a can of Borsch soup completed our dinner. AJ is so good with convenience food :))

As usual, I must show my readers what I came up with to feed my daughter.

Steam threadfin with tomatoes in miso paste.

I got sick of cooking threadfin. Imagine she eat the same fish for almost every meal? I felt bad to do that to her. I decided to switch back to red grouper which was anyway cheaper. And if only changing the type of fish but cooking the same style, it doesn't make much of an improvement right? So I tried out other possibilities. K tried a small nibble and he said it was DELICIOUS! (I am personally quite scared of fishy smell so I don't test the fish before feeding her.) My satisfaction in life has changed. It used to be every 25th of the month (salary), every Dec (AWS) or being praised by boss for doing the right job (That's a lie. It never happened for the past 3 years I was in Coperion. I was praised a lot only when I was in GEHC ok.) And now, simple things like K praising my cooking or even XY finishing up her meal would make me happy. Stepping on freshly wiped floor also makes me happy. Crazy isn't it? I know I cannot be doing this for the rest of my life but at this stage, pls let me enjoy the moment :)