Had an early birthday celebration for the daddy today. The cake was an Awfully Chocolate fudge cake and as usual, he was his messy self as he gobbled slice after slice of the cake. In a moment of inspiration, I decided to swipe some fudge on his lip and there he is! Mr Charlie Chaplin!
Had a little fun this morning drawing on the newly cemented floor just outside our house.
See? I'm so proud of Kieran's drawing abilities. He sure had a lot of fun drawing on such a huge canvas!!
This was the completed drawing. It was a rocket with an astronaut standing next to it. He even drew the platforms (white) that the astronaut would use to climb aboard. The orange scribbles were the fire when the jet took off and the pink was the structure that held up the rocket. Creative huh? He also spelt out both his and Kiefer's name at the end. :)
We bought four caterpillars for the boys last week so that they can learn a little about the life cycle of the butterflies. Bought them from Oh Chin Huat Hydroponics Farm for $3 a set. The farm had a tiny enclosure (Butterfly Lodge) where they had a fair number of different butterflies.
Anyway, the caterpillars took a couple of days to pupate and the first pupa only remained in the chrysalis for about 1 week. Our first leopard lacewing emerged yesterday and it was just beautiful!! And throughout the week, we've been reading Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. What a perfect match to their caterpillar watching!
The boys and their daddy trying to catch a photo of the butterflies in the lodge.
This is either a Mangrove or Common Tree Nymph.
A blue spotted crow I think.
Our leopard lacewing caterpillar. The colours on the caterpillar is just beautiful. Love the vibrant red and yellow stripes. And this little fella just feeds and feeds. It's quite amusing to look at it chew off the edges of the leaves and leaving a trail behind. And these guys really poop quite a bit. See the little black ball? That's the caterpillar's poop.
Our beautiful leopard lacewing when it emerged yesterday morning. We took some photographs and videos of it and then let it go. We didn't want it to die of hunger.
This little fella lingered on the palm for the longest time before it flew away! Its wings were already long dry when we opened the container. Think it's just trying to get his GPS working!! :P
Kieran found my Disneyland pirate's hat and started jumping around like a pirate. So we decided to make a eye patch for him. Well, it's blue cos I didn't have any black felt with me. It was either blue, white or pink. And since we don't allow swords and guns in our house and thus that make-shift longish box was his little sword.
As for the little one, I only had 1 hat in the house, so I had to grab a hanky and tie a bandanna over his head! :P Aye! Aye! Captain!
Ahoy! I be damned if I go down w'out fightin' yer!
Rawr!
The captain and his deckhand. Go scrub the decks! :P
Now that our Flyer pass has expired, we've decided to get the zoo annual pass for this year. It looks like we'll go visit the animals very often this year! :P
Thank god for the great weather this morning, tho' it got a little warm by noon. The boys had lots of fun looking at all the different animals. I think what really caught Kieran's attention today was the proboscis monkey. He even said that the monkeys were beautiful. :)
We also met Blee there and the moment Kieran saw him, it was "Hi Uncle Blee"!! haha.. he really does like Mark and Bernard. These are the only two "uncles" that he calls spontaneously!!
As it kinda got really hot as we approached noon, we left the zoo at about 1pm after the boys had some fun at the water play area at the children's world.
It was really great that the weather held in the morning. Gosh, what a glorious thunderstorm it was at about 4pm!! It's been a while since I've experience such lightning and thunder. You just can't help marveling at the awesomeness of nature.
It's been a while since we brought the boys out on a excursion-type of outing. We were toying with the idea of bringing them to the zoo but they both woke up with super phlegmy coughs and the sky just didn't look too inviting. After some Google-ing, we found out that Science Center is currently having a Pixar - 20 Years of Animation exhibition and so off we went.
It was great that we arrived at SC rather early (before the crowds came in) despite the crazy jam on the CTE. They had a discounted package price for SC entrance and the Pixar exhibit entrance if you have the NTUC card/ Popular card (and some others that I cannot remember). The tickets were $18 for adults and $13 for kids above 3 year old, with the discount.
Both of them were afraid of the huge mechanical dinosaur at the entrance, especially Kiefer. Just look at how Kieran is tugging at Kiefer's shirt! :P
I would say that the exhibition is not exactly for little 4 & 2 year olds, but the boys did enjoy looking at the various sculptures, drawings and animations displays. Even Kiefer recognised most of the characters and was happily rattling off the names in his cutsie mispronouncing way!! :)
Still, we were really glad to have gone as they had the Toy Story zoetrope on display. We didn't manage to show Kieran the zoetrope on our last visit to Disneyland as he was asleep while we were outside the exhibit. Thus we were really excited to show it to him today!! :D
This is the exact zoetrope on display:
After lunch, we went to the regular Science Center exhibits for awhile before we left. Kieran managed to watch the lightning show, to which he exclaimed, " no mummy, I don't like it. " :P This was because in the finale of the show, they put up 2 hydrogen balloons and set off some electricity and the 2 balloons burst into flames all of a sudden. :P But I'm sure he learnt something about lightning and fire today. (On a side note, he saw a bus on fire yesterday and thus this kind of adds on to his learning.)
And definitely we went into the souvenir shop to look around and I realise that they do have pretty fun science related toys there.
Here are some pictures of the fun we had today: Kieran had fun creating an optical illusion for himself.
A hilarious digital superimposition
Kiefer loved this spiraling moire pattern illusion
Kieran is down with a runny nose again. They go through bottles of Zyrtec and Sinupret like drinking bottles of juice! Was at Guardian yesterday buying new bottles of meds and spent about $73 just picking up the kiddos' standby meds!! Gosh!!
That's the silly boy with a tissue up his nose to stop the mucus from coming down!! He's taken to wearing this hoodie when we are out shopping. And he wants the hood up to cover his head every time! *eyes rolling*
Some itsy bitsy cuteness from #2:
Some mischief that His Royal Cuteness was up to this weekend. He loves to climb up Daddy's swivel chair and then start tapping on the Mac. Well, he somehow managed to slip his legs through the armrest and got stuck there. He started yelling for help and when I saw it, I couldn't help but quickly whip out my trusty Ixus to snap some shots of it. And you can see, he's actually rather happy about it!!
The boys helped the daddy with the car wash on Sunday night. Needless to say, what we got in the end were 2 rather wet little boys and lots of trying to get them not to scratch daddy's precious...
The boys had to go 外婆's house on Friday morning while we were at work. I stayed with them till about 10am and then left for work. Both the boys had loads of fun there. I guess it was just something new for them.
Kieran had a great time with all the toys (Josh and Janelle were at school, so he had all the toys to himself!) and Fer, well, he was happy with the tissue papers!! :P
Had to stay home with the boys on thur and had marking to do, since the MYE is here. I remembered that we had a inflatable pool in the cupboard and thus decided to blow it up for them. I didn't realise that the pool was so huge! I thought it was the same size as the one we previously had (which was probably 1/3 in size only) and I nearly blacked out from blowing it up cos the electric air pump wasn't at home. Anyway, they had fun in there for about 1hr while I sat outside the bathroom door marking. I think it was quite a great way to spend the morning! The boys had fun while I got work done!
Kieran finally sat on his own for a haircut!! No crying, no whinning. In fact, he was really happy to get his hair cut!! We've come a long, long way!!!
Since we had the Family Pass for the Singapore Flyer, we went there a couple more times this holiday. (We are at ride #12 already!!) Brought along out Nikon today and thus, some nice photos for memories (and scrapbooking!! :D)
No swimming on sat cos Andria's mummy wasn't free and since we haven't been to the beach in such a long time, we've decided to go and have some fun in the sand.
K hasn't been playing sand in a long while and thus he felt yucky standing on the sand. He didn't even want to put his feet into the water! He simply sat at the edge of the mat and dug away at the sand!
It started as something silly to get Kieran away from my scrapbooking stuff. I had some strips of paper leftover from cropping the photos and so I thought I'll make a fish for him to play with.
Then I decided to make another so that Kiefer could have 1 too!
Then it became many because I couldn't sleep that night and woke up to scrap a little more and decided to make a starfish, a turtle and some more fishes for Kieran to play with the next day.
Then we decided to make a fish tank for all of them to live in. (Ok, that was the only box that I could find in the quickest time possible...) That was Kieran pointing to his turtle!!
Sadly, the tank was destroyed by the end of the day because he decided to bring it out to dinner and shopping with him.
