Humbling Experience

Just a few days back, I was down with a bad sore throat and running nose. I quickly took anti-inflammatory pills (Danzen) and cold medicine. It was effective but the healing process was too slow. So, I quickly bought the big bottle of Florida's Natural Orange Juice for me to gulp it down. It helped but though not fully recovered, I went trekking at Bukit Timah Nature Reserve.

I have been waiting for this day as we arranged a while back already. So as not to disappoint myself and my colleagues, I still agreed to go and was even pretty excited.

Went with 3 of my colleagues, 1 of whom is 50 over years old (Mrs Chan), while the other, is almost 70 years old (Mr Thoh)! Both of them walk in Bukit Timah Hill every Saturday. So you can say, there are lao jiao (meaning, an experienced person). The day before the walk, I asked Sarah if we would be able to keep up with them and Sarah said, "of course because of pride as we surely do not want to 'lose' to our older colleagues. Hehe..


Sarah and I were first timers to climbing Bukit Timah Hill and so, we didnt know what to expect.

We started at 2pm. The climb started off all too easy, even though the slope was quite steep.I even thought to myself, "This isnt so bad..I can do this. Mr Thoh and Mrs Chan aint that fast. "


Sarah was even leading and walking ahead of us

as the rest of us were admiring the trees and even the monkey with her baby which we happened to see.



But as Mr Thoh slowly overtook us and led us into the forest, he seemed to be in Gear 5 all the way, despite how dangerous the walk was and how many slopes and stairs there were!

Do you know how when you are in City Hall or Orchard MRT where everyone is shuffling their feets real fast, moving from place to place, or trying to catch the train? That was exactly how Mr Thoh walked throughout the whole climb! He seemed to be flying or using the skill of 'qing gong'-walking on air.


There were many occasions where the path was so narrow and if you slip, you might just tumble and fall down the cliff! So as we were trying to handle our stamina, we also had to be wary of not falling off.



So throughout the walk, Mr Thoh was way ahead, while I was behind him always trying to catch up with him and even running at times as he walks just to catch up. Sarah would be tailgating me while Mrs Chan was behind. All walking in a single file.



I remembered clearly how Mr Thoh prepared us in the middle of our climb that the worse is yet to come. When he made that comment, I was already panting and sweating like a pig. "What can be worse?" I thought.

Steps after steps...


after steps, after more and more steps...


Until..Sarah surrendered and said, she needed to stop. Initially, I didnt want as I felt more tired stopping as my heartbeat was so fast and I just needed to keep it moving. If I stopped, I would feel like fainting. So I carried on slowly climbing the huge giant looking steps. But eventually, I also had to sit down and rest! Sarah and I both thought we were going to die! hehe.

Mrs Chan overtook us and Mr Thoh waited with us. Oh man, it was a very humbling experience to be beaten by our much older colleagues. Hehe...



But at that point in time, we didnt care. We just needed to catch our breath. After a long flight of stairs each time, Mr Thoh would tell us exactly how many more stairs to go next. It didnt sound really encouraging as each time after walking few hundred stairs, Mr Thoh would then comment,"Oh, there would be another few hundred coming up. But its easier..so no worries." We didnt really hear the last part of his sentence. But we were definitely more sensitive to the words, "few hundred more". We kept having to push ourselves and go for it! Who knows, we climbed the fastest and hardest during our last hundred over stairs! Sarah was surprisingly fast and caught everyone up by being ahead. Way to go!



Finally, we made our way down by exiting the forest and going back to the main road.


We were all looking forward to a nice cold 100 plus after the walk!


I felt really accomplished and proud that we survived! hehe. I felt so pathetically weak. I had a phobia of stairs right after the walk as we were making our way down to our lockers. Sigh.

Eventually, I asked the Nature Reserve guy behind the counter about the distance we covered and he said that we covered almost 6 km and we climbed about 400 over stairs!! I was quite amazed at how much I actually accomplished. All that within 1 hour 10 mins!

There's Sarah all smiles definitely since we all felt that we almost died in the forest and now we're alive!



Feeling so accomplished and satisfied for such a good workout, we went to a coffeeshop in Sin Ming for some food as we havent had lunch.

The homemade yam cake was delicious! Especially with the special gravy!


And also ordered kaya toast as well as fried hokkien mee. Everything taste so yummy. Probably because we were all hungry.


Well, all I can say was, "So much for the earlier workout!"

Will I do it again even though it seemed like a near-death experience ? Well, yes I would still go. Reason is because if I give up going, then what happened today was kind of a wasted trip as I know that if I keep persisting and climbing that same route, eventually I would be 'flying' like Mr Thoh! So, in order to be able to reach that 'qing gong' stage, I have to go back!

Late happenings

Both children have been growing up well.

Both of them are intrigued by the guitar and the sound coming out from it. Caleb always begs me to allow him to play. So, I took out my cheaper guitar,which CT bought for me when we were one year in US to kill my boredom, for Caleb to play.




Usually, Caleb would play it upright since he is still too small to know how to carry it properly.


But because he sees me playing with the strap over, he kept asking me to help him strap as well. Sigh. He's really at the 'monkey see, monkey do" stage.



Then CT sometimes joins in and amuses both of them.


As for Danielle, she loves anything with music and dance. She can dance to the music by bobbing her legs and head up and down excitedly. She can also stand on her own for quite a while.



So because she can walk now with one hand as support, we decided that finally, it makes sense for her to wear shoes. So here's her Mary Jane shoes which CT got for her when he was in US a while back.



Danielle is also as active as Caleb when young, or even more so I feel.

Here's Danielle rummaging through my things below my study table. Sigh.


All I can say is that I have 2 very active, playful and cheeky children. They have really made my life more interesting!

Mid-Autumn Festival 2009

Mid-autumn festival should be more fun for the family as the kids get older since they can get to play with lanterns and get involved with fun activities with other children. The night before, I went to my mum-in-law's place for a celebration down at her block.

Caleb excitedly ran to join the rest of the kids in front of the stage as there was a guy telling stories and making balloon sculpture.



The next day, had lunch over at mum-in-law's place as usual, after church service.


My mum-in-law's style of cooking is very clean, straightforward simple dishes- A vegetable dish is just a vegetable dish with garlic and maybe fish cake. On the other side, my mum would add a lot of ingredients in one dish. So if she cooks a vegetable dish, you would find carrots, all kinds of mushrooms, fishcake, roast pork all in one dish. Haha.

Frankly speaking, I like simple, traditional food. So that is probably one reason why I eat lots of rice at my mum-in-law's place. I like my mum's cooking as well but because she cooks a lot, I do not usually eat rice at her place. I just drink her cantonese style soup and various dishes which would be enough to fill me.

In the afternoon, CT and I took the children for a walk to a nearby shopping centre.


After that, there was a nice playground on the way home and we dropped by to let Caleb have some fun while we sat down on the benches and ate our Old Chang Kee curry puff and fried squid heads, with bubble milk tea!





There's Danielle trying to escape from her pram.


At night after dinner, we had our mooncake with Pu Er Chinese Tea. Just a small, simple tradition which I have kept so far. Look how pretty the mooncake is. My mum gave that to me. Its not only pretty, but tasty.



I really do enjoy and treasure every minute with CT and the children. Thank God for bringing them into my life.

Old School Gatherings..

Recently, I met up with my Primary School classmates. We were in the same class from Primary 1 to 4 in Tao Nan Primary. The last time we met up was a year back and this time round, another one of our primary school classmate joined us.

We met at Shokudo at Raffles City. Its a Marche-like Japanese theme marketplace where you just go around with a card and purchase what you want to eat from various stalls. I bought yakitori and beef steamboat for my dinner.


It was quite expected what we would talk about the whole night during dinner-our teachers, our good old days, our other classmates, wedding plans, having children..etc.

To reminisce the past, we each got our IC out. It was quite amusing as we all looked so cute and small. My IC was changed once before as I lost my old one, so I didnt have my primary school photo on it whie the rest didnt bring along their IC.


Another amusing thing we did was to take out a writing pad and wrote down our handwriting as we could all remembered how each other's handwriting looked like in the past.


It was an interesting gathering.

Another recent gathering was attending Bernard's wedding, where all my JC mates, mostly swimmers, gathered and caught up with one another. His wedding so happened fell during the F1 night race. So he had to choose a hotel more convenient for the guests, which was at Sheraton Towers and there were F1 updates throughout the dinner.


My friends also wanted to sabotage Bernard by making him drink this up-red wine plus sweet sauce, plus chilli and orange juice, but he cleverly avoided us. Sigh.



I left before the noodles dish came as I wanted to avoid the jam in the car park. Still, I did enjoy myself as its always nice to catch up with old friends once in a while.

Learning how to smile

Its not easy to teach Caleb how to smile. Whenever he smiles naturally, I will always be not prepared to take a shot of him. That explains the blur image.


However, when I am all ready with my camera, just shy from clicking the button, he would give me the most 'forced' smile I have ever seen...

Sigh...


When will he ever learn to smile naturally each time I take a photo of him?

I really wonder..

Water fun at the zoo

Today, the family all went to the zoo. We do not really decide which day to go as CT has to book the zoo pass from his company way in advance and we just see when is the next available slot for us to book. The zoo pass allows us free entry to the zoo for 4 people (which is free for the whole family including Vicky because the kids are still below 3) and discounts at shops or restaurants.

I told CT that this time round, I want it to be relaxing. Usually, we would look at the show timings and make sure we go for most of the shows and feeding sessions that is available in the zoo. I found that rather tiring. So this time round, we just wanted to walk freely and focus mainly on letting the kids play in the water area as I heard that the water area is really fun.


We reached the zoo at about 10am. If we had a choice, we would have reached once the zoo first opened. But no choice in that sense as we had to go do my supermarketing first at Giant, rush back to dump our groceries and head off to the zoo after that. So reaching the zoo at 10am is no easy feat already!

Each time I go to the zoo, I feel quite proud of Singapore because I feel our zoo really stands out! It has so many animals and the interesting thing about our zoo is how the monkeys and some other animals can roam freely, even by hanging on the trees above our heads.

There's Caleb attempting to draw what he sees.


We manage to catch 2 shows as we happened to be in the right spot at the right time. So it wasn't intentional.







At Caleb's or Danielle's age, its definitely not easy for them to stare into my camera and smile nicely, especially when you want both of them to do so at the same time.

I tried, but failed. Both were looking down.


Tried again but only Danielle looked up.


And Vicky started attracting their attention for me which was a wrong move since both started to turn to her instead.


I gave up after 3 tries.

After walking to see most of the animals, we went to the kidzworld where the farm animals and water area were.



As I entered, I spotted the ponies. Love ponies because they look so cute and miniature. Talking about ponies...did you know most of us grew up with the impression that a pony was a baby horse? We were probably taught wrongly by our teacher or some misleading book taught us that. In actualy fact, a foal is a baby horse but a pony is just a different type of horse.



We went to grab some seats after that for our lunch. We brought along bread, cucumber, egg mayo, grapes as well as nachos. Aside from that, we also ordered 3 fried chicken from KFC to go with our sandwich.


While CT and I were enjoying our lunch, Vicky was taking care of the 2 kids at the water area! Thank God for Vicky that I can have a peaceful lunch with CT.





The water area really look so fun for the kids. I would definitely love to be back again, playing with them the next time round! Check out how the kids would know when to gather round the spot to get splashed by the gush of water!






After the swim, we checked out the rest of the kidzworld area. Caleb was feeding the guinea pigs and touching the goats. I was quite happy to see how loving and brave Caleb was as he patted the animals.





After leaving the kidzworld area, we visited other animal exhibits as we headed to the exit. Here's Danielle after a short nap!


Had a very enjoyable time with the family! Will definitely be back within 6 months' time.