We took a short holiday with Joseph and Samuel during the PSLE marking holidays from 14 to 17 Oct 2019. We visited Ho Chin Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam from 14 to 17 Oct. Esther and David did not go as they had regular school.
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We visited the Jurong Bird Park on Saturday morning, 5 Oct 2019, from 8:30am to 1:30pm. It was Samuel’s first time to the Bird Park.
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The weather was good, and Esther and Joseph had a great time taking photos of the birds, while Samuel enjoyed the shows and the birds, especially parrots.
We went for our regular swim, and our swim coaches bought us Tiong Bahru bao and lomaikai. Very nice lunch at the pool.
A look at our huge turtles. They are now about 30cm long at age of about 6.5 years. Huge indeed. A friend had a turtle since since young, and posted in Facebook that the turtle had died after 29 years! Very long life.
In the afternoon, football was cancelled due to the haze. The Yongs joined us in making the final batch of mooncakes. We had jackfruit, grapefuit, lime and coffee flavoured lotus paste, and some red bean paste.
Again, very colourful mooncakes!
In the evening, we cooked a simple dinner of lemon-baked chicken, clams in white wine soup and veges to go with pasta. We ate dinner over the Singapore Formula 1 race.
Very nice to watch F1 on the projector, big and exciting.
With the Indonesian fires causing haze, it is not so good to run. But we had a lower haze rating on Wed night, 18 Sep, so YowCH wore a mask to make his usual 2.5km run.
His run was quite slow, difficult to breathe through the mask.
190907: Grace, YowCH, Samuel and Joseph had lunch at Tiong Bahru Plaza Tino’s, eating two very smelly pizzas (4 cheeses and durian) and a rice.
Samuel was rather tired after lunch, he slept in the car.
190909: We had a late dinner (more like supper) at Sin Hoi San. Samuel enjoyed his gong-gong. We enjoyed the chicken essence bull-frog. We also had petai, venison, pork ribs, mushroom-vege and fried beehoon.
190915: After swimming in the haze (PSI 120) we ate at the nearby Mei Ling food court. Grace did 20 laps, YowCH did 20 laps + 1 lap butterfly, Esther, David and Joseph each did 10 laps + 1 lap butterfly, and Samuel did 5 laps (4 breast and 1 free).
YowCH has been running regularly (2x 2.5km each week), even when the haze from Indonesia is attacking Singapore. He ran a decent 12m50s 2.5km, which completed 2.4km in 12m15s (Napfa standard A for age 45+). The haze was about PSI 90, getting a bit high.
In the evening, for Church, YowCH, Esther and David lead worship. It was fun and exciting to have an uplifting worship with the children.
Samuel wore his Chinese suit for mid-autumn celebration in learning vision.
YowCH drove over after work, with Joseph, and joined the celebration.
Samuel performed several songs.
We had fun eating and we shared our home-made mooncakes, too.
We had lots of fun making mooncakes, with interesting flavours and colours.
Purple for lotus paste, orange for grapefruit flavoured lotus and brown for jackfruit flavoured lotus.
We shared them with our church friends!
Then Esther and David made some red (red bean paste) and blue (yam paste) ones!
And then Grace, YowCH and Joseph made some durian lotus and coffee lotus mooncakes.
And of course, for mid-autumn, Samuel had fun with lanterns.
We have shifted from Delta to Queenstown for swim because Delta is starting renovations (for at least 1 year)
The Queenstown main pool is deeper and wider (9 lanes). It uses salty water.
In the afternoon, we had our regular football training. Samuel is still not too interested, but Joseph is doing well. David helps out with coaching as part of his community service activity.
We bought readymix flour and stuffings and made mooncakes! Actually, Samuel was very interested to do so. After mixing shortening (vege oil) and water into the flour, we left it to rest for 30 minutes.
Then we rolled the stuffings into balls and wrapped with the flour before putting into the mould to make the shape.
David wasn’t really keen on this activity, but he helped with cutting the butter paper for storing the mooncakes.
The finished product:
We made about fifty pieces and game a bunch of them away to swim coaches and neighbours.
