had a last-minute inspiration about oh… five days to her birthday.

cookies and cake by NCakes.

owls often symbolise intelligence, wisdom, knowledge – plus, they’re REALLY cute. (and ok yeah, there’s a literary reference too: Owl Babies is one of my favourite children’s books, makes me teary every time, sniff.)

pink (her favourite) and black (my favourite) hoot loot. well, i had to compromise.

treated the kids to a stay at royal plaza on scotts over the weekend, and had close family members over for high tea at carousel.

just a commoner… ;p

cake compliment of Carousel.

the brother who still refers to his sister as “my baby”.

the coincidentally colour-coordinated grandparents, heh.

many eligible princes.

the maids-in-waiting.

yes, even he likes to squeeeeeze her. a lot.

the royal plaza people were so kind as to help set up some chairs and a table at the pool side for a small party in the evening.

night owls.

sleeping beauty was forced to wake up from her slumber power nap to blow out the candles…

and pose for insufferably many pictures.

the mommies.

the children.

kate middleton she may not be, but marry a prince… who knows?? :D

happy turning terrible terrific three, my owl baby.

ps: thank you guys for celebrating with us!

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Untitled, originally uploaded by izadd.

… and i still won’t blow my candles out! :D

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the girl seems to have a knack for recognising letters. she’s picked up a few by associating them with the way the letters look… e.g. ‘A’ looks like a mountain; ‘B’ looks “boncit” (big-bellied); ‘C’ looks like a moon; ‘E’ looks like a comb; ‘S’ looks like a snake, etc.

well, whatever works for you, honey…

spelling out ‘OLIVIA’, our current favourite read. they love the fact that Olivia and her mother negotiate for bedtime storybooks the same way we do. :D

ps: turning three in about 2 weeks’ time!

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my first thought was: “sure or not? so effusive ah…”

i had a favourite english teacher in jc, as in, english english, from sheffield, UK, kind of english; the Mr Sheffield from The Nanny kind of english. he was also effusive when he marked my assessments. it made me love literature. (and him, lol.)

as for the boy, is there hope yet…?

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This, the scene from Forgetting Sarah Marshall I was referring to (when the spouse said he wants to try yoga at the holiday resort)… “I’m doin’ a headstand m*f*ka!” Lolz. (<3 jason segel.)"

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so the eldest in our clan reached 34… yeah, we’re not ashamed to claim our age. we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – we’re loving our 30s! we were saying how we’d occasionally look through old photos of us together.. how fun it is to see how we’ve evolved over the years…

(77clan, est. Dec 03)

so what do we possess now, more… confidence? maturity? wisdom? grace?
(well, i guess you qualify for all that when you go around with a koyok plastered on yourself and *still* have someone ask if you’re a model, and have a tube of tiger balm handy in your gucci bag for random moments of muscle aches… :D)

“all u need is effort to keep the friendship going… best is to have friends who are easy going.. and no feelings of trying to outdo one another” – wise words from back-then 30-yr-old esah, dec 2007 (from an old blog post)

ps: happy birthday to the two Arians in the clan!

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where you’ll find me sweating it out… :)

Singapore Kopitiam – WhassUp, Dog?.

@ updog studio

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an excerpt from “Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses”, Claire Dederer

“God, this is such a one-child household.”

I looked darkly at her, disliking her implication that I only kept my kitchen clean because I had just the one child. Troublesome undercurrents flowed between us at all times, and indeed between myself and all other mothers.

I judged Lisa and any other mother who came within my range. The next-door neighbours put their kids to bed too early; the people down the street put their kids to bed too late. The friend who lived near Green Lake was overly fussy about organic baby food; the friend on Queen Anne Hill was not fussy enough. Friend A dressed her baby in designer clothes, which was ridiculous. Friend B let her kids go around looking like slobs. I felt there must be a happy medium to parenting, and I felt that I was the very barometer of that happy medium. Anything that someone else did that I did not do was, to me, excessive and probably crazy. My strongly held opinions about parenting were like an elaborate carapace for my insecurities.

Bruce called it “the loathing of the half degree”. You despised or looked down on or envied those who were most like you. The moms who were like me, just a tiny bit different: I hated them! They infuriated me.

Bruce seemed to take my motherhood travails quite lightly. In fact, Bruce was not getting with the program as I might have wished. He did not always buy organic milk. He had vetoed cloth diapers. And there would be no sharing of the bed with the baby on his watch. These were political, moral, and ethical stances for me. For him, they were inconveniences.

Ideology, in my experience, had always been unmoored from real life. The activist or political movements of my youth were to me somewhat abstract: support for the guerillas of Nicaragua; shanty-towns built on the college lawn that were meant to urge the administration to divest their holdings in apartheid-era South Africa. However worthy these issues might have been, I didn’t have the political imagination (or the compassion) to connect them to my own movements. They affected not at all what I ate, where I slept, what I did all day. This is what I learned: Politics are for talking about. Politics might affect people who live halfway across the planet, but they will never, ever affect you.

Until you have a child. Then, all of a sudden, ideas are tightly zippered to action. The personal becomes unrelentingly political, whether you like it or not. It starts with pregnancy: Do you hit the KFC or do you eat bulgur? It moves on to birth: Do you believe in natural childbirth, or are you flipping open your cell phone right this minute to schedule a C-section? Home birth or hospital? Breast-feed or bottle-feed? Continue working or stay home? Let the baby “cry it out” or sleep with it in your bed? Stroller or sling? TV or no TV?

Regular life seldom presents us with dichotomies, especially dichotomies that are so fraught with philosophical underpinnings. These choices could be overwhelming. A huge number or the parents I knew were mostly reliant on a single approach that solved all these problems and answered all these questions: attachment parenting.

Attachment parenting – the general name given to the kind of parenting that involved co-sleeping and breast-feeding on demand and toting your baby around on your person – had the mothers and fathers of North Seattle in its grip.

Attachment parenting was like a constant reminder that the other mothers were better. No matter how consumed I was, other mothers were more consumed with their babies. Although I didn’t practice attachment parenting, it had a powerful hold on me; the idea of it hovered around my parenting like a cloud.

Even its name was a taunt. It implied that the rest of us didn’t care if our kids became attached to us or not. And so I hated the attachment mothers and suspected that they were judging me.

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