Jumping Jennabean!

I don't think I've ever shared this particular nickname of Jenna's.

If you've ever seen her jump, skip, hop or otherwise lift off from the ground,

you'll know why we picked this nickname for her.

Here she is just before gymnastics class on Monday. 

Way to go, Jenna!

Photo(s) of the Day

The hot, dry summer is finally here. The rainy days are over. 

But some of us miss them a little bit.

Backyard Beautification

Pleased to report that the landscape people arrived to start work today. Woke up this morning to foreign sounds just below our bedroom window - metallic clangings and sizzings and plonkings. Very excited. Entire chunks of grass were removed in neat rectangles all over our back and side yards to make way for new grass. Lovely shrubs and trees were planted all around the back of the house, some of our big trees had a hair(or leaf) cut and, overall, it was fun to watch the transformation. Tomorrow the work will continue with sod laying and other interesting new developments.


On the kidfront, we got Jenna's bike tires re-inflated so she's been riding around the block and learning to use the brakes. Summer has returned after a week's relapse into some kind of wet and desperate spring/late winter idiocy, so we are very glad. 


Yesterday we went to the annual Eagan Art Festival after church. Bought one cup of lemonade and walked around, admiring everyone's work and also feeling somewhat sorry that they weren't better patronized. Art is such a hard way to earn a living. I hope most of those folks do it just as a hobby.


Will post some photos soon. Too lazy these few days. 


In the meantime, I leave you with a quote I read recently:


"Cleaning the house while the children are in it is like shoveling the driveway while the snow is still falling."


Incidentally, I don't think my plan to have Emily cook our meals is going well. I asked her today if she'd like to cook porridge for us for lunch. Made it sound like it was

1. very easy
2. a great honour
3. the funnest thing on earth, more fun than even whatever she was playing with at the time.

She said, "no, thanks".
Drats. Drats. Drats. Drats.

Emily Cooked Dinner

Shocking, the lengths the mother will go to, to avoid cooking.


Sunday evening suppers are always strange because no one is truly hungry after a full lunch following a late church service. We often eat breakfast-like foods during this meal, including pancakes/waffles and scrambled eggs with cheese. Emily made oatmeal and raisins on the stove this evening. She measured out oatmeal, water and raisins in a 2:4:1 ratio, put them in a pot and stirred till everything was cooked. I showed her how the stove top dials worked, and warned her not to turn them on herself unless an adult was around. She carried the pot to the table, we mixed in some milk, and she apportioned it out in little bowls. Then she cut apples up with an apple corer/slicer, set the table, dished out a little communal bowl of brown sugar and invited everyone to eat.


She said she felt very proud that she'd cooked dinner for her sisters (Dave and I had canned soup). And her sisters said she made good oatmeal. She can already make sandwiches, so I'm thinking of new things to teach her to cook, now that she's tall enough to stand at the stove. Maybe eggs. And instant noodles. And porridge. And when she's ready to read recipes, she can do french toast and pancakes. And then ribs! And mee siam! And meatloaf! The sooner she takes over my job, the better, so I can put my feet up on the sofa fold the laundry. Yes! 


P.S. Reread this post today and it is rife with typos! This is what comes of trying to dash off a post in the minutes between the end of supper and the start of our evening walk around the block. I've corrected all the rubbish - hope it makes sense now. My apologies!

What Do You Do With Your Days Off?

All three girls are at Vacation Bible School (aka half-day Bible Camp) this week. Jenna and Emily tried it out last year and loved it, so we signed up all three this year. When it dawned on me that I would be childless for 2.5 hours x 5 days, I was simultaneously ecstatic and bewildered. What would I do with that time? Would I stay home, put my feet up, make a large cup of tea, read a book and wolf down vast quantities of chocolate? Would I leave the house for adventures all-by-myself? 

I made a quick mental list of what I would NOT do:

(i) chores

(ii) cooking

(iii) reading (newspapers, books, email, internet, anything)

(iv) sewing

(v) cardboard crafting

(vi) shopping (fabric, groceries and everything else)

(vii) errands

(viii) paint nails

(ix) gardening

(x) eating

Utter waste of time, since these are the things I do with the girls now, anyway.

Want to know what I picked, finally?

(i) swimming

(ii) running

(iii) haircut

On Monday, I put my plan into action. I had to do some research just to find a pool at which to swim laps. Minnesota is a glorious place to live, but it is incredibly useless when it comes to public swimming facilities. There are very limited real public pools, and often these are outdoor holes in the ground in odd neighborhoods. School pools are used by the school district for swimming lessons, and you can only get into a pool if you are in a class. The waterparks allow you to swim only from 7 -8am (!!!!!!!!!!). Swim schools have no open swims in the summer.  I was ready to pay $10 just to swim for 40 minutes, but it looked like my best bet was some rancid lake with algae. 

After an hour calling various aquatic organizations, I called Dave to complain. "Why is it so difficult to find a place to swim on just one day without having to get a gym membership for a whole year????"

"Try the YMCA" he said. So smart. Went back online and found that they had a free 5-day trial pass. Excellent! Oh, wait, it was time to pick the kids up from Bible Camp. Vacation Day #1 - gone. 

So yesterday I went to the YMCA. I walked around the entire building with their membership officer and was given the grand tour. I was slightly tempted to sign up there and then because of the childcare opportunities they offered - imagine dropping off three kids on a regular basis while I swam in their pool! But no, not when I didn't know the next time I'd be able to do this. 

Came home with enough time for a run. It was raining, but that's a small inconvenience when one is kidless for the morning. Left an empty house, returned to an empty house. No children to say, "why must you go?"  or "but it's raining, Mum!" Fabulous. 

Today I lugged my basket of swimming stuff into the car, dropped the kids off at camp, and went to the YMCA. It's been 6 years since I swam, and even more since I did real laps. I was amazed that I even had my old goggles. My old swimming cap had melted years back in Singapore, so I went capless. When I emerged from the changing room, I found that there were two lanes (just two!!!!!!!!!) for lap swimming. And it wasn't an Olympic-size pool. Ridiculous, given that this was the YMCA, not some private gym, but beggars can't be choosers. 

So I swam. I cannot begin to say how lovely it was to be in the water again. Not just to splash around with the kids and throw water toys at them, but to really swim. It took me a while to catch my breath because a person's body just loses coordination after so long away from a sport. And I was watching the clock the whole time to make sure I wasn't late to pick the kids up. But I did 26 laps (note: not Olympic-size pool, remember) before I had to give up. I thought pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing would work every muscle in my body, but I was wrong. Swimming today made me ache in places I didn't know I had any muscles in. 

Here's a scanned photo of the swimming pool I spent a lot of time in while I was in Singapore. I'd swim here at least once a week after school (when I was a teacher, I mean), every week, even in the rain. 

It was on a cliff overlooking the sea (another scanned photo).  And when I wanted to rest between laps, I would sometimes sit by the wooden fence (the one that prevented people from plunging to their deaths) and just stare out at the ships. 

I swam a lot in the Uni, too. Whenever I joined a new educational organization, one of the first things I hastened to ascertain was the location of their aquatic center. Then I'd plan my time-table so that I had sufficient time off to go swimming. In those days, I was burnt a uniform brown and my hair was bleached some weird semi-auburn color from all the chlorine. Today in my swimsuit, there were clear lines between my curry-coloured arms and my ivory-white (not very toned) biceps who spend all their time in sleeves. It's hard not to think I've lost something other than food and family, moving here. 

BUT today I got to swim. It is a million times better than going running! And now that I've done it once, I need to do it again. It's like a drug, swimming is. I think the school pools let people swim after bedtime.  New reason not to sleep. 

Notes by Emily

Thought I'd share some of the notes Emily has been writing. She scribbles them on all kinds of paper and even occasionally carries around a Post-It pad and a pencil to write messages to us when she feels like being secretive. This is a note she wrote to Jenna in preparation for one of their homeschool sessions. 

Translation: Dear Jenna, you are the Super One* tomorrow. Bring a picture of your family and a picture that you drew.

I love how she spelt "drew"!

This was a note to me, written much earlier. Emily spends a lot of time planning her birthday parties. She changes her mind about the theme and activities multiple times but each plan is elaborately described either in text or pictures, or both. 

Translation:

Dear Mom, I want a stationery birthday. We can buy stationery like Post-Its and little note books. The craft can be getting plain orange pencils and colourful paper and stickers. If the kids do not want orange pencils they can wrap the colourful paper around the pencils but before decorating the pencils we must sharpen them. The kids can stick stickers on the pencil. The game can be you must write a poem or a note about stationery in 15 minutes. Whoever finishes first wins a sucker**.

I often mention my childhood and time as a teacher but not so much the years in between, especially my time spent in the university. I studied four years in the University of Singapore, and another year in Teacher's College before joining the education service. In the U, I studied Physics, Mathematics and English. I really only liked English, because it was easy compared to Physics and Maths. Phonetics & Phonology was one of my favourite classes. It was so much fun to analyze languages! Anyway, while reading Emily's notes, I found myself analyzing her word constructions and imagining how she translated the sounds in her head to the consonant clusters and dipthongs in her text. All the weird and inconsistent rules of English spelling don't apply to her words, which are in many ways truer to their real sounds than what we are used to seeing in dictionaries.

For instance, "stik" (stick), "by"(buy), "pensl"(pencil), "droo" (drew) and "arawnd"(around) and "ubawt" (about) are clearly words she spelled by sound. But words with silent letters like "note" and "wrap" must have been at least partly helped by memory or sight recognition. It makes me want to watch for the exact moment in her language development when sight recognition overtakes sound recognition and she starts spelling "stick" and "drew". Fascinating!

* like Special Person/Star of the Day

**lollipop

Random Summer Portraits

Last week we went to our favourite plant nursery with the grandparents.

This is what the girls do when we ask them to "pose".

On one of our summer walks around the block.

Father's Day

We celebrated Father's Day yesterday. The girls made Dave several gifts, including a cardboard moustache on a stick, for disguising purposes. This mosaic stepping stone was another - we worked on it earlier in the week. Do you see the orange D? It reminds me of those red-green color-blindness detection charts.

In the afternoon we ate chocolate peanut butter banana cream pie and opened some gifts.

Our New Look

Warning: Post contains hideous pictures of old curtains!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to announce that we are finally rid of the appalling swag drapes that we inherited with the house in 2005. Are you ready for the "Before" photo?

Here it is - Before

Don't say you weren't warned.

This is After:

Already an improvement, we thought.

And this is After-After:

Hurrah!

But wait- there's more:

Remember our deck? 

It had a makeover, too.

Here it is in progress:

Some Before-After shots -

Before

After

Before

After

Oh how we love the new unsplintery boards! 

New deck, new blinds - 

it's almost as if we've just moved in, all over again!

Jenna's First Day in Gymnastics

We would like to have shared a photo of Jenna in her gym leotard but she declined to pose, so here is a shot of her in normal day clothes from a few days ago instead.

Jenna has been very interested in Emily's gymnastics school since her sister began classes last fall. Emily was part of the regular school program, meaning she had weekly classes from September to May. Jenna wanted badly to go, too, but there was no time slot that accommodated both classes. Since I didn't want to add a new assignment to my already very tiring list of chauffeuring duties, we decided to have her wait till next year. This summer, however, Emily was not doing classes, so we signed Jenna up. When we first told her, she was very excited and immediately did rolls, tumbles, cartwheels and an assortment of other death-defying acrobatic stunts in the living room. Clearly, this summer class was the right move.

Today she got into Emily's old leotard, let me put her hair in ponytails and went for her first lesson. She was very, very anxious that Kate and I stay throughout the session "until I get comfortable", so we did. She waved to us every five minutes and gave us big grins and thumbs ups whenever she did something well. And well she did - she was very coordinated in spite of having had no previous gym instruction. We cheered for her unabashedly. She told us afterwards, "I like gym better than swimming lessons." 

The real hero of the day, though, was Kate, who watched Jenna for an entire hour without any entertainment other than moulding my face a la Playdoh. 

Unrelated, the entire family went to the dentist today. We like to monopolize the dental clinic by all turning up on the same day, so the staff is forced to learn all our names and get to know as as one forceful entity. It's also a good way to see, first-hand, the family dental history and spot any genetic trends, we think. So what with the workers tinkering with our deck, and people learning to cartwheel and all five of us participating in a complex arrangement of you-drive-so-and-so-while-I-stay-home-with-so-and-so-and-later-meet-you-at-the-clinic-to-swop-cars-and-children, we had quite the exciting day.

Kateisms: A Name By Any Other Name

Kate has been learning all her names. The concept of her first, middle and last names being distinct from each other is very fascinating to her. She has since correctly registered that her middle name is "Margaret" and is happily generalizing this to all and sundry.


Kate: Where's Dave Margaret?
Me:   Who?
Kate: Daddy.
Me:   (slowly fathoming her thought process). What's your middle name, Kate?
Kate: Margaret.
Me:   Right! And what's Dad's middle name?
Kate: Margaret.
Me:   Mmm. And what's Jenna's middle name?
Kate: Margaret.
Me:   And what's my middle name?
Kate: Margaret.


She has, however, been able to draw a distinction between families. The other day, she explained this to us about the neighbor dog, whose name is Tyson, but whom we privately nickname Beauregarde, and who belongs to the Brown family next door:


Kate: Tyson's first name is Tyson! His middle name is Beau and his last name is Brown!

Deck In Progress

The back of house is still a mess, but it's heading in the right direction. Today our deck got taken to pieces. This is our deck before work began:

and this is our deck at the end of today:

That's right - no er....real deck to speak of.

Here's a more exciting shot:

See that colossal grassless patch of dirt underneath the deck? That whole area is our sinkhole. Not just the small holes the deck posts are in. It was a huge and deep depression in the ground, like a small meteorite had crashed into our backyard. Other suitable nicknames: "The Crater", "Valley of The Fallen Leaves" and "Waterless Swimming Pool", among others. Needless to say, we are extremely glad it is being fixed.

And while on the topic of home improvement, did you notice the lack of hideous swaggy drapes in that first photo? We took them away!!!!!!!! Actually, Dave took them away, and then repainted the entire wall, after seeing how dreadful it looked without the drapes to cover up all the icky bits. Almost all the home improvement in this house (and outside) is done by him. All I can claim to my credit is having knocked three nails into our bathroom wall and hung three picture frames. True, I used a spirit level and everything and was therefore, to the undiscerning eye, quite the handy(wo)man, but it is really Dave who does all the real good stuff around the house. 

But I've digressed from my main point. Which is: tomorrow our blinds are coming!!!!!!!!!! Well, more accurately, the blinds are already downstairs in their boxes. It's the installation crew that's coming tomorrow to bring those blinds to life. Either way, hurrah!

Last Day of School

Today was Emily's last day of kindergarten. This week her class has been preparing for the transition to first grade. 

On Monday, the kids practised going through the food line in the cafeteria and eating lunch like the "big kids". 

On Tuesday, they got to visit a first grade classroom, each kindergartener paired with a first-grader mentor to give them the grand tour. Emily was in awe of her tour guide, even though she was just a few months older. 

Yesterday her bus driver gave her a parting lollipop and the kindergarteners participated in a talent show (Emily did am optical illusion trick) and watched a puppet presentation by the third graders. 

Today her class had a farewell picnic, and signed autographs in each other's yearbooks. All through the week she brought home bits and bobs of her life as a kindergartener this year: painting smock, pencil box, art supplies, school folders, artwork, progressive portraits. I had labeled her supplies back in September when she started school. When I looked at my handwritten labels on her stuff yesterday, I was overcome by the sense that time, when it involves my children's lives, is swiftly and consistently sucked into a black hole. I can still remember driving out to buy emergency diapers at the Cold Storage in Siglap Centre days after Emily was born. Today she came home from school, a fluent reader, a mischevious writer of little notes to all her family members, a meticulous little accountant of her weekly allowance, a shopaholic in her own right, and a teacher dying to be unleashed upon the next generation.

She stepped off the bus, ran into my arms and cried because she was so sad that school was over. "I miss my teacher," she said. "She misses you back," I tried to tell her in not so many words. Tonight as I sang her songs at bedtime, she said she felt sad that she didn't have to go to school anymore. We talked about how strange it might feel at first, and how good it would be to run free in the summer sun. We went out for lunch (she picked McDonald's), did a wee bit of fabric shopping, came home and had ice cream with our neighbours, and took a long walk to the library. Emily wanted to sign up for the summer reading program and, some weeks ago, also asked me to assign her a Math worksheet each day in the summer (I groaned at this). I think this is how she self-regulates her transition from school to school-lessness. 

I gave her a watch that I'd bought three years ago and saved because she was too young then to understand the concept of time. She was more interested in the nifty box it came in, not realizing how much she was going to enjoy learning to tell time. She'd done tally-marks and learnt to count by fives in school, so she caught on quickly. By lunchtime she was saying, "It's 12:20 now, Mum!" By dinnertime, she was asking, "Is it 40:10 now?" I was relieved - if she could learn to tell the time in half a day, she was growing up much too fast. 

I also gave her (and Jenna and Kate) this game to kick-start the Time-Telling Lesson, and even Jenna could do the "o'clocks" after just one round.

Tonight we had a puppet show of sorts - Emily did all the puppets and she had all of one audience member. Lots of enthusiasm from both sides of the curtain. 

Tomorrow we are going out for breakfast, partly because I get to eat food prepared by other people, but also to commemorate the beginning of a school-less summer. It's our simple ritual for transitioning from a rich and wonderful school year to the free-and-easy next few months. 

It was like yesterday when we first watched Emily get on the yellow school bus. Where has the time gone?

The Mess In Back

This is what our backyard and deck look like now. Our wretched sinkhole is being fixed and the deck posts are being reinstalled and stabilized. Imagine how it will look when everything is flat and level again!

Even hotter

105 (40.5 C) degrees today. Having grown up in Singapore, I should be used to furnace-like temperatures, but today was quite unpleasant. Being stuck indoors in minus-30 January is one thing, but being stuck indoors in the summer because we (OK, I) were cowards was another. So we packed up and went out for ice cream. We also stopped by Target (air-conditioned, thank goodness) so the kids could spend some of their allowance.

They bought a swimming pool for their dolls and sat our on our deck and played. It was too hot even for water balloons.


Tomorrow it is supposed to be 30 degrees cooler so we might go to the zoo. 

Kateism

Kate ran into the kitchen yesterday, yelling, "Mum! I hurt the wrist of my leg!"


We all knew exactly what she meant, but couldn't help smiling, nonetheless.

The Heat

It is safe to say that summer has descended upon us. Without warning, I should add. Suddenly, it was 90 degrees and the AC was on, full-blast, and our appetites were gone and all we wanted to do was sit in the shade and wear swimsuits and eat lemon sorbet. 

It was therefore also time for water balloons and backyard games.

This was a busy weekend - Ovo on Friday, visiting a garden center, planting a new bush and spending the evening at the neighbourhood block party on Saturday, and then a nature hike on Sunday. All in the blazing sun. We refuse to complain (except about the rabbits that ate our sunflower seedlings), but we are wilting slightly and nursing humidity headaches. Also, because I am a coward, I have temporarily halted my running, until the weather cools a little. It feels too much like Singapore now.

Ovo

Continuing with the theme of bugs, we went to watch Ovo this afternoon. 

The girls were very excited that they were going to the circus. 

And it was very good, particularly for Emily, Dave and me. Jenna and Kate would have liked it more if they were a couple of years older, but there were some very exciting and colourful portions that captivated them. Emily was very inspired by all the gymnastics stunts that she came home and played circus.

This is the third Cirque Du Soleil production I've seen, and I've loved them all. I tried not to be distracted by the amazing costumes this time, though. But I am slightly tempted to adapt the butterfly costume for something in the future. 

Another bug-related account: yesterday we were at a park and the girls found two caterpillars (we sometimes call them caterpiggles) on the play equipment. They made it their duty to "rescue" them by transporting them via leaf and twig to the grassy parts of the park, where they could possibly find food and shelter. They are calling themselves The Caterpillar Rescue Squad. This is not a new thing - last year Emily listed this vocation on her "To Grow Up To Be" list. 

Art by Kate

"Bug"

"Spider"

Yes, I counted the legs. 

P.S. Her "bug" is very creepy. I think it is a very good piece of art, not the least because it so excellently captures the centipedey/caterpillary sense of crawlythings, but it does make me prefer looking at something else. Still, brava, Kate! 

All Hail Salt

Have I ever mentioned here that I use box mixes for cake? Love them, those Betty Crocker mixes. I also use canister frosting. They do taste better than the cementy stuff served on real cakes from bakeries. Growing up in Singapore, we never ate dense frosting. It was fresh cream or nothing. And even now, I scrape the frosting off cakes (unless it's chocolate frosting or has cream cheese in it) and eat the cake part. 

However, I have been on the hunt for a good homemade buttercream frosting that doesn't taste like plastic. All I've tried so far (yes, even Betty Crocker's recipe) have failed. Today, however, I found one that was actually lovely. The ingredients and proportions are pretty standard: some kind of shortening, powdered sugar, liquid. However, there was an extra ingredient I'd never noticed before: salt. And not just a pinch of it. I tried it, adapting the recipe as I always do, and it was marvellous. Truly good. Amazing what a good helping of salt can do to reduce the plasticky powdered-sugar-cornstarchy-vanilla-essence taste. Even Jenna said, "Now that's gooooooood frosting!"

We tinted some in rainbow colors

and turned the rest into chocolate. The frosting was light and mousselike and very, very good.

Recipe (adapted from I Am Baker's)

• 2 sticks salted butter, softened
• 4 cups powdered sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• heavy whipping cream (add to get the frosting to desired consistency)
• 3 Tbsp cocoa (or to taste)
• vanilla essence if desired (use less than you normally do and omit completely for the chocolate version)