Maternal Feelings

I find myself gazing endlessly at Dylan as he sleeps, completely oblivious to the emotions he's causing in me to emerge.

I watch him... and my heart floods with love.

Never felt this way about anything, or anyone before.

I suppose I can put it down to the fact that at 6 months plus, his personality is now more formed, and his individual uniqueness as a little person dawns on me more now, than ever before.

The fact that at six months, he demonstrates an awesome receptive vocab - when grandma asks "Dylan, where's the butterfly?", and he turns to look at the two fake butterflies clipped to the bamboo blinds in our porch.

And when I ask him "Dylan, where's the banana?" in the kitchen, his eyes turn to the bunch of yellow fruit hanging by the side of the kitchen.

Different Faces of a Visa Mug Shot

Quick one - two wednesdays ago, we went down to the embassy to be interviewed for our J-class visa application.

Before you can make an appointment electronically via the US Embassy website, you first need to fill in a thousand and one forms. And no, they don't accept just any passport photos. The ones you submit must be 5cm by 5cm, so that you can be seen from chest up.

Try taking a visa photo of a frisky 6-month old, and you'll be rewarded with his many facial expressions -

"Watcha lookin' at?"

"How long is this going to take again?"

"I can look cheerful... if I want"

"My impression of Grandpa without his teeth"

"Haha.. stop that! You're making me laugh!"

Nike!

According to Elder Ernest Chew, the word "Nike" originates from the Greek word that means "Victory!". Incidentally, it's also the name of a Greek Goddess who stands for Triumph. Suddenly, images of women's underwear and athletic apparel incongruously flood my mind.

Anyway, victory!

Finally managed to figure out how to expand the width of the blog, so that I can select "medium" for my Flikr pictures to be shown in their entirety.

Dylan's first junk food

I know.

We've been really naughty, but the truth is which parent won't indulge their little one in a just a smidgeon of junk food here and there?

For e.g., a taste of delicious red bean potong ice-cream:

Still, soba buckwheat noodles from Sakae don't count as junk food, I hope?

An Ode to LSCs

I wrote a poem today. We're busy preparing for MOE ExCEL Fest next Friday, and the Learning Support Coordinators and their EL teacher counterparts were hard at work perfecting the presentation.

Mary Poppins Couldn't Have Done It Better

A Learning Support Coordinator is like Mary Poppins
With her inimitable black bag.

She greets the class with a great big grin,
And out of her bag pops

All the tricks and tools a child needs
to read

The sentence maker, with its bits and bobs
Great big charts, the Elkonin box
And out comes the cue cards
The "-k" and the "-cks"

Vowel sounds,
The syllables they count,
Both long and short.

Magnetic tokens, please,
Before you see print
To help the weakest in our cohort!

"Blend to read!"
"Segment to spell!"
So says Ms LSC with an excited yell.

She waves her fingers in the air
And says, "Children,
Spelling is NOT a nightmare!"

It's the way she sprinkles her words
With her winsome smile
Like sugar in the medicine
That's my Mary Poppins,
LSC-style.

Bangkok Traffic

What happens when you seat a group of friends at Thai Express who all agree that its "Kao Niao Mah Muang" (Sticky Mango Rice) is inconsistent?

A last-minute snap-decision to fly to Bangkok for the real deal, the very next weekend!

That's what happened last Sunday after church when a group of us had lunch at the Siglap Thai Express. Before you know it, we were up, up and away to the land of smiles!

Flew in on Friday night to check into a dodgy-looking three-star hotel with HDB white lighting, and back on Sunday evening.

This was my very first trip into Bangkok, so I didn't really know what to expect. Much of central Bangkok where we stayed is dominated by 2-tiered roads, the bottom tier for the tuk-tuks and cabbies headed towards the eating and shopping districts, and the higher tier for fast-moving vehicles headed out of the city.

Very grey, very concrete. Badly-maintained pavements which were a nightmare terrain for Dylan's stroller to manoevre over. Reminded me a bit of the less glossy parts of KL.

But what an adventure it was! After midnight Singapore time, we found ourselves braving the traffic in tuk-tuks, bundling little Dylan in arm, and headed for seafood at Song Nam (did I get this name correctly?)

The following two days saw 6 of us squeezing to the back of cabs (dear hubby's the biggest sized, so he gets to go the front passenger seat!). Quite an experience, but I wouldn't recommend it if you are stuck in an hour-long jam - my entire left leg went completely asleep at one point, and so did Aihua's, I think!



This trip is also significant because it is the first time we're taking Dylan on a flight. I've been advised to nurse him during take-off and landing so that the pressure-change won't cause him ear pains, and it seemed to work like magic.

SIA also served delicious baby bottled-food. Dylan had "Pumpkin, parsnip and roast beef". Yum, doesn't it sound gourmet?

He really didn't enjoy being confined to the baby bassinet, though. So E. and I couldn't enjoy our airline food at the same time cos one of us had to attend to him always.

Mommies out there who have travelled with their babies, let me know what you can do to coax the little ones to sleep in their bassinets!

Some photos to share, will post more photos when we get to download them from our phones. These are courtesy of Aihua and James, the lovely newly-weds (we joke that this is their first unofficial honeymoon!):



At Don Wai's floating market, we had duck & pork noodles, and thai otah for breakfast -



Sunday afternoon, just in front of the MBK mall, along our final walk back to the hotel from all the shopping, before flying home (and Dylan looking a little grumpy after having his cheeks pinched by the 50 millionth Thai shopkeeper):