YowCH & Grace

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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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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We went for swim again today, and took a pair of goggles from swim coach for Samuel. Matching colours with his swim suit.

He really didn’t like it.

Here are some photos of Esther, David and Joseph in the pool during lessons:

And that’s coach Francis Tay, nice guy.

We noted that some condensation formed inside the underwater casing of the camera, but it wasn’t a leak. Probably due to moisture trapped in the case when we sealed it, and then the heat from the camera body cause the condensation to happen at the coolest point, that is the lens area which is furthest from the body.

Tags: David, Esther, Joseph, Samuel by yowch
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We introduced Age of Empires to Esther and David about 2 years ago, but they were just too young then. Now, David started again, and plays reasonably well. The game teaches management of resources, manpower and battle strategies. Very good for mental development.

We had a nice dinner at Tiong Bahru, Two Face. The pizza was great.

Tags: David, Family by yowch
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Due to Esther’s baptism class on Sunday lunch time, we shifted our swim to Saturday night for the month of September. Rather chilling air at night.

An update on the terrapins, they have certainly grown up over the past 1 year, and one of the two actually grew really huge.

Compare against the same pump/filter.

Joseph is now able to help us go down to the coffeeshop to buy coffee.

This is Esther in her baptism class.

On Sunday afternoon, Grace was at work, so YowCH brought all 4 children to soccer. Esther helped look after Samuel while Joseph had training and David had a friendly match against ACS.

Joseph trained well and played well in his game.

David was playing goalkeeper and defender, didn’t concede any goals during his time on the field.


Seems more like having a picnic between the Lims and the Yows.

Tags: David, Esther, Family, Joseph by yowch
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A little update on the swimming progress.

Grace is now swimming her 10 laps in breast-stroke every week. YowCH was having bad back-pains since last Monday (probably due to work stress), so he didn’t swim laps, but was floating and diving in the water to help relieve the back pains (and it helps!).

Samuel is more tolerant to the pool now, and quite enjoy the swim. Drank some water, though, when we threw him about! He can kick himself back to the surface from under water.

Joseph is practically swimming now, but the stroke is not perfect, and his playful nature makes it hard to teach him. David is as playful as ever, also making it difficult to teach, but he can swim well now. Esther is swimming great, but needs more build on her muscles to carry the distance, and she can handle the life-jacket, clothes and somersaulting 4 times in the water.

And here are our non-Dinobots from Transformers 4 range:
Bumblebee, Hound, Drift, Crosshair and Lockdown (the Lamborghini Aventador).

We are probably not getting anymore, perhaps rusty Optimus Prime and Stinger. Galvatron is not very nice as a toy. With recently gotten Slog, we are short of 1 more Dinobot, Snarl, and the set of Dinobots will be complete.

Tags: David, Esther, Family, Grace, Joseph, Samuel, YowCH by yowch
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David climbed a tree near home! This is really fun.

We bought a plastic planter box in Malaysia and transplanted our mint plants. With fertilisers and soil, we hope that the mint will grow and gives us endless mojitos.

Dinobots! We got Slog (silver), the tall guy on the right. This adds to Grimlock (brown), Strafe (blue), Slash (cyan), Slug (purple) and Scorn (red). Last one to get is Snarl (green) which is not yet on sale.

On Sunday morning, we went to Shuqun Sec School at Jurong East for friendly football match with Yuhua and BB East View. A nice cool shady morning and had great fun playing. Esther was helpful in taking photos.

Samuel had a great time rolling about the artificial grass. And the football friends were all very happily playing with him.


David and Joseph both played very well. David was either defender or goal keeper, and defended very well. Joseph was playing striker and scored a goal!

After football, we went for our swim. Grace is regularly doing 10 laps now (with rests in between) and YowCH is pushing for 10 laps in less than 15 minutes, but so far only got to 15’35″.

In the afternoon, Esther had ballet for 2 hours and we shopping in Funan Centre. Then we had Brotzeit dinner at Star Vista.

Thank God for a nice weekend.

Tags: David, Esther, Family, Grace, Joseph, Samuel, YowCH by yowch
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Esther received her Stage 2 swim cert today. Cool!

Here is are photos of Joseph practicing dribbling and shooting goals, and David playing in a friendly game of under-10-years 9-a-side against Anglo-Chinese School. We won 3-2 in a good and nicely matched game.

And here is a photo of Samuel crawling up the stairs at the playground! No stopping this guy. (Sorry about the poor photo, it is a screen capture of a low-res handphone video.)

In the swimming pool today, he was also able to lie on his back in the water and kick to stay afloat!

Tags: David, Esther, Joseph, Samuel by yowch
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