YowCH & Grace

On Saturday morning, while Grace is at work, YowCH mounted a new wall fan in the bedroom with Esther’s help.

We also update on some of our Skylander figures, which Grace manage get through 2nd-hand sales, all of good value.

After church, we also picked up a 2nd-hand digital drum set, the Yamaha DTXplorer from our church friend, Theolynn, for $500. A good buy, as the set is low-usage and in fantastic conditions. David and Esther did most of the assembly.

The set sounds great when connected to our Fender guitar amp.


Here’s David playing the drums. Samuel likes the drums, too.

The old acoustic set shall be sold, all packed and ready.

On Sunday morning, YowCH took part in the HometeamNS REAL run at Sentosa, successfully completing 10km of road, trail and sand. Click the photos below for the page.

Tags: Family, General, YowCH by yowch
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This is the first time YowCH managed to cover 10km in a run. Well, there was included about 1.2km of walks (should have persevered and walked less for better timing).


Just short of 2 minutes and 37 seconds to keep the 10km under 1 hour.

The target was originally 8km, but along the way, high in adrenaline, he decided to push to the 10km.

The swim with the family after the run (and breakfast) was very relaxing!

In the afternoon, Joseph and David went for soccer while Esther went to ballet. The boys had new shoe bags, matching colours with their water bottles.

For dinner, we went to Star Vista. Samuel carries his own backpack with water bottle and diapers and changing stuff.

Dinner was Thai food at Porn’s (Pornsak’s). Very nice!

Tags: David, Family, Joseph, Samuel, YowCH by yowch
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In preparation for the run, YowCH got some useful stuff:
A belt pouch to hold essentials, a clip on blinker light (from his bike, for night runs), a small water bottle (advice from friend, the water point is often too crowded with people), and glucose tablets (advice from CCK, wrap in paper for ease of access).

Grace got a nice second-hand ($8) Fisher-Price iPod/iPhone holder for Samuel, nice handles and he can be prevented from pressing the screen accidentally.

Tags: Samuel, YowCH by yowch
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We collected the Hometeam NS RealRun 2015 race packs at Novena Square during lunch time, meeting up with YowCH’s colleague, Geoshua.

YowCH is no. 0980.

As there was no queue, all 24 packs for TYLin (including 1 for Gene), each with T-shirt, bib, radio-tag, and some goodies, were very quickly collected.

In the afternoon, we visited the Salvation Army Thriftshop at Tanglin (near home) and bought ourselves plenty of cheap stuff – bags, umbrella, CDs and DVDs and coffee cups.

For dinner, we went out to collect some second-hand Skylanders and ate at UE Square, Vietnamese Restaurant. This is the second time we ate there, nice food.

Here are the Skylanders, together with the Wii game. All second-hand.

Tags: Family, YowCH, YowCH's work by yowch
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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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Firstly, we bout the new school uniform for Samuel, the smallest size XS, and yet he is too small to wear. We’ll keep them for later.

As YowCH started running again, the building up progress is good, with records up to this morning as below:

Here are some selfies of the very sweaty YowCH after this morning’s 6.0km.

Target to reach 10km before the HomeTeamNS REAL Run 2015 Sentosa run on 17 May.

Yesterday, we got ourselves a second hand drum set, Fender Starcaster, with hi-hat, snare, bass, floor tom, 2 tom-toms and a crash. All for $180, not too expensive, but taking up lots of space at home.

Esther can play pretty well, David is picking it up fast, and Joseph is keen.

Samuel was also very excited over the drums! Very loud.

We will need to sell the set and buy digital instead (for space and also lower noise).

We got ourselves Superion (Aerialbots) and Menasor (Stunticons), for Joseph and David respectively. The models are not too nice, but simple and fun enough for the boys, and rather affordable (each set about $140). Both can be posed very nicely.

Tags: Family, Samuel, YowCH by yowch
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The usual of Sundays, we went for our swim, and Samuel is now wearing a new and bigger swim suit. He loves it.

Esther and David can swim butterfly now, but will need more refinement. Joseph’s frog-style is good, and he can swim non-stop now.

Samuel enjoys being in the pool, plays well in the water and no longer cries.

Other than swimming, YowCH has started training his running after 6-year stop, for a 10km run in mid-May. He started 3 weeks ago, and can now run for about 3.5km. Long way to catch-up.

We had dinner at United Square with YowCH’s sister and family. The Yong-children are very grown up now, and able to interact very nicely with the Yow-children over dinner, at Bangkok Jam.

We ordered a nice selection of food, and desserts. Grace had petai spaghetti (weird), YowCH had phad thai (kuay teow), Esther had olive fried rice (no photo) and David had chicken kebab. Joseph had the free kid’s meal of a rather miserable burger. For desserts, we had coconut ice-cream with red-rubies, mangos with sticky rice, and durian pannacotta.

It is always nice to have dinner with family.

Tags: Family, YowCH by yowch
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As Samuel dislikes the confines of the baby cot very much, we decided to upgrade him to a bed. Grace found a second-hand IKEA Kritter bed ($89 new) with Vyssa Snappna mattress ($40 new) for $50 at Tiong Bahru, so we drove over to the place after dinner and picked up the bed. It is in very good conditions as the owner (small boy) did not want to sleep on the bed so the parents sold it off. The mattress is cheap and soft foam, but for Samuel, it should be OK.

It fits just nicely into the car, with all 6 of us, too! The older children were very helpful in carrying and loading/unloading it.

Upon reaching home, and while we prepared the space by clearing the old cot, Samuel was already taking to like the new bed.

After cleaning the bed and the room, we moved the bed into place, under the close supervision and occasional help by Samuel.

That’s Samuel on his new bed. He likes it. We added some cardboard under the mattress as we can feel the bed planks under the soft mattress (cheap foam).

Here’s a little story about the cot. We found the cot thrown away at Redhill Close a few months prior to Esther’s birth in 2002. Thanking God for the free cot, we took it home and cleaned it. We had to find a piece of ply-wood and cut to size, and also bought a mattress from IKEA and cut it to size. The door rails were also damaged, which YowCH repaired. Esther was born when the new paint we applied was still wet! After 13 years, we left the cot, the board and the mattress at our Rumah Tinggi ground floor, perhaps someone else can make use of this cot.

Tags: Samuel by yowch
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This is Samuel in the Learning Vision uniform, the old design.

We need him to grow bigger (much bigger) to fit into the new design which we bought for Joseph.

Tags: Samuel 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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