YowCH & Grace

Grace is off today, and YowCH took half-day leave in the afternoon to bring the children to Sengkang Swimming Complex. The place was very nice and fun, with many water-based play areas. However, the fun was cut short by lightning risk, we spent only about 45 minutes there, having driven for 30 minutes from home.

Being a weekday afternoon, the place was rather empty of people. This swimming complex has indoor Olympic-sized pool, training pool, children play area, baby pool, water slides and jacuzzi.


Samuel had so much fun that he kept running back to the water-play area even when the lightning warning was on.

After the water-play session, we drove to Tampines to pick up a second hand (practically new) Takamine 3/4 Acoustic Guitar GX11ME-NS for Esther. This is partly given to her as birthday present, and partly paid by herself.


At $330 with a nice padded bag and strap, it is a good buy. The “Taka-mini” sounds very bright and the pick-up works very well.

Here’s a photo of the guitars on the rack (5 total, Takamine 3/4 acoustic, Ibanez acoustic, Congress 3/4 classical, Aria 3/4 electric, Ibanez electric)

Tags: Esther, Family by yowch
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We spent some time at the Church playground after Good Friday service.

Samuel really enjoys the slides. But he likes to slide head down!

Here are the children playing.

The 4.

Esther invited her friend, Chloe, over to our place and practiced baking cupcakes for her school exams.

While waiting for the cake to bake, they played Wii for a while.

David was also inspired and he did some crepes, filled with Nutella, peanut butter or marmalade.

Tags: Church, David, Esther, Joseph, Samuel by yowch
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Today is Samuel’s first day as Toddler. He must wear uniform now, but we let him wear the very old design (David’s time).

Esther ran in her school’s cross-country race last Friday at Macritchie Reservoir, and got 6th place under Sec 1 Girls category. She’ll be training more to improve her time and position in running.

Tags: Esther, Samuel by yowch
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We bought a manual slow juicer. It works, but the user works very hard, too to grind the fruits. Particularly hard fruits like apples. But it is slow, in order to squeeze the juice out. From Brand name is GDL, Gao Dalai.

But it works nicely.

Esther got second place at her school Scrabble competition and got a $10 Popular Bookstore voucher. She also won the school Instagram for food photography, she submitted 6 entries, and there were total of 42 entries.

Tags: Esther, General by yowch
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School starts on 2 Jan (Friday). Here are photos of Joseph and Esther in their new school uniforms. Esther at Queenstown Secondary School, and Joseph follows his sister and brother to Gan Eng Seng Primary School.

And here are all three school children all ready for 2015:

YowCH first dropped Esther, at about 7:00am, and then brought the boys to school at 7:05am. David led Joseph into the school.

Thank God that Joseph is so independent and David can lead him; the rest of the P1 students and parents were very much queuing to register and get into the school. Car and school bus traffic was very heavy, too.

UPDATED: 3:30pm
YowCH drove over to pick Esther, then the boys as they all ended at about lunch time. You can see that all three are very happy with day 1.

Tags: David, Esther, Joseph by yowch
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31 Dec was a busy day. Grace went with Esther and parents to renew their phone contracts, and got away with new phones.

Dad took an iPhone6+ (huge!), so Esther gets the older iPhone5 that dad was using.

Grace went for the Samsung Galaxy S5 4G+ (16GB) for $168 with contract.

The S5 comes with a free Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite (7.0″, Wi-Fi) tablet, which we will redeem later, and sell, probably about $150. Her old HTC One SV LTE went to David.

In addition, having gotten a new line for David, we got a ‘free’ blue HTC Desire 610. Nice. We will sell this phone.

After buying phone the phones at Singtel Com-Centre and setting them up at home, and after a day’s work for YowCH, we went to church for the year-end Thanksgiving Bi-lingual service. After service, we went for supper with the Leongs, the Lims and the Behs. We had great frog porridge at Sin Ma (Cheong Chin Nam Road, off Bukit Timah Road).

Thank God for a wonderful 2014.

Update 6 Jan 2015: Collected the free Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite (7.0″, Wi-Fi) and sold it to a friend.

The HTC Desire 610 is also sold to a buyer from internet.

Tags: Church, David, Esther, Family, Friends, Grace by yowch
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Esther is now registered with Queenstown Secondary School.

We had parents and students briefings today, and bought the school books. Uniform will be another day where is no crowd.

For dinner, we ate at Tunglok Signatures at Vivocity, to jointly celebrate Grace’s dad’s birthday and Christmas (both in advance!)



Among the many good food, we ordered fish-skin fried with salted egg yolk, duck’s tongues, roasted pork belly, and referring to he photo below: “Dragon’s Paw” (crocodile hand), fresh scallops (3 sets), and Kurobuta (black pork from Japan) with brinjals. Samuel was really enjoying himself eating fancy food.

Tags: Esther, Family by yowch
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Tonight was Esther’s ballet performance at the University Cultural Centre (NUS) together with the rest of the dancers under various classes at Dance Arts. Held once every 2 years, Esther performed 4 years ago, but missed the one 2 years ago due to the bicycle fall injury. This year Esther’s performance was much more precise, well coordinated and graceful.

Tags: Esther by yowch
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YowCH painted some henna tattoos on the children.

After the henna dried, we rubbed the stuff off, but the stained part wasn’t very dark.

Tags: David, Esther, Joseph, Samuel, YowCH by yowch
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For YowCH’s Facebook “Close Friends”, you can watch this video of Esther, David and YowCH doing “That Thing You Do” with Joseph handling the video camera.

Tags: David, Esther, Joseph, YowCH by yowch
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