We had a session of crayon messing today for playgroup. The kids are old enough to handle some colouring media, so I thought we shall have a doodling session.

I have got this roll of drawing paper from IKEA which is really useful. 40m of the paper would last us a long long time.

The younger children were rather excited in the beginning,, but lost interest very fast after we tried our best to hold their hands to doodle. Never mind, they are babies after all. Short attention span, and probably couldn’t find any thrill from drawing.

Yauyau really couldn’t be bothered about drawing. She was seen busier taking out and putting back the crayons into the box. Littly said this girl was more interested in organising. What a positive comment

I have also learnt from other moms to use wax crayon instead of oil pastels. Though oil pastels are easier to draw with, they chip and break easily, and always leave behind huge amount of mess for us to clean up. It is really more for older children. Luckily I was kiasu as I always have been, I bought both kind crayons. I have got this interesting box of finger crayon from Kiddy Palace. It is shaped in such a way that allows younger children to grab one in their palm for drawing. The best part is, the kid threw the crayons all over the place and they never leave any ugly marks on the floor, neither do they break into a thousand pieces.

My insistence to hunt down the original toasted whole grain oat cheerios has worn out. I decided that Tangling Mall’s Market Place will be the place I end my search. Luck wasn’t on my side, I didn’t manage to get one there too. Well, there were lots of Multi Grain Cheerios though. Daunted, but determined not to return empty handed, I convinced myself to give the Multi Grain Cheerios a try. After all, the packaging described its content as “lightly sweetened”.

I took a closer look at the label to verify. The sugar content is 6g. I thought 6g seems to be a negligible single digit. It turned out to be too sweet for little children. I was blinded by the “lightly sweetened” and failed to realise that it is actually 6 times sweeter then the 1g sugar content original Cheerios.

Not too sure if the sugary Cheerios was the culprit, but the kid turned hyper after eating a handful of the snack at the restaurant just now. She was almost running wild in the department store after we released her from our hands.

Though I failed miserably in my search for Cheerios, I found my prize in something else. There is this toy shop in the upper floor of Ngee Ann City that carries very pretty toys. Not those fanciful or buttonful electronics type of toys, but mainly soft puppets, wooden toys, doll house etc. If I am loaded, I think I will sweep every item from it.

I have more or less done with Yauyau fruit basket and am looking for animals. It is kind of weird that most toys shops sells plastic bags full of scary looking sea creatures, dinosaurs, spiders or horses/dogs of different breeds. Where are those farm, forest or savannah animals that we are more familiar with? Anyway, this shop carries animal figurines from Schleich. They are pricey, but extremely well made. I wouldn’t leave without adopting a few of them. A check with foreign shopping sites shows that we are definitely paying much more. But until I manage to find ways to get it from overseas, I will go back for more slowly so as to minimise the pinch. My urge to start my collection is biting me again.

This toy is for me, not the kid, but I will let her play with it if she doesn’t break the animals’ legs or head.

I have long run out of Cheerios for about month, and is still unable to get hold of a new box. I am not desperate. Not being to find it anywhere just makes me more insistent to track down one, I just refuse to give in to idea of it being as precious and scarce as some rare gem.

I have been to Guthrie House, the place where I gotten my first box, but it was out of stock. That was about a month ago. Later, I made trips to Rail Mall, then Causeway Point, Holland Village, Bugis Junction, Raffles City, and today just checked out Ngee Ann City and Paragon… rotton luck! Last Thursday, Dory told me Guthrie House has restocked Cheerios, she has bought the Cheerios as proof, and Yauyau ate a lot and certified her statement as a valid one. So I made another trip to that gourmet store again. Argh! The store assistant told me it was out of stock (again!) and new ones will arrive in May. I nearly wanted to give him my phone number and beg him to tip me off when the Cheerios are up on the shelves again.

I decided to order online, but it was out of stock too at the Cold Storage’s online shopping site. I really really don’t understand. If it is so so popular, why isn’t the supermarkets bringing in more of it? What is the problem? Profit margin too low? Unable to gauge the market demand because of its more expensive price? Or what?

Next time, maybe I should just buy one big carton of it and sell them to friends who suffer as many similar failed purchasing attempts as me. Or help me find some other less sugary bits size finger food suitable for children and get me out of the cheerios search.

Yes, we finally agreed upon a name. We had our very own conclave, we nominated some names and also we tried our best to smoke out some great ones. We didn’t use any secret balloting system, so most of the names just got shot down soon after they were blurted out.

We started with the name Maysprings playgroup. It is definitely appropriate but doesn’t sound catchy enough. Gillian shortened it to May Babies. Nice, and somewhat related to our location, but we have only got one May baby. Spring Babies is out too, since we don’t even have springtime here. We still like May Babies, and therefore have it change to Maybe Babies, and in the end, decided on May-Bee Babies. The busy bumblebee shall be our mascot.

I like that name. It is cute and could just mean anything, everything. Hope this group will continue to grow and develope.

A bunch of Singapore bloggers has launched the Tomorrow, a mosaic of linkages to interesting blog entries that is related to Singapore. As we know too well, parents display certain abnormal behaviour when their children are concern. Parents do weird things too, like sucking mucus from their child’s blocked nose, or digging into the child’s poo looking for swallowed objects. There must be some interesting articles to point to.

There have been an ever increasing number blogging mommies (and also daddies) from Singapore, and I have been collecting their url for sometimes. So far, I have gotten about 70 of them, but I am sure there are much more. I don’t know what for I gather all the urls, I just feed them into bloglines and see if there are any useful tips to pick up or read about the happenings of some oddball parents/children. Hopefully I could sort them out this weekend, upload them, and let helpful readers point me to those blog sites that I missed out.

It was a bad bad night yesterday. I hate Tuesday, because the server for world of warcraft must shut down for their weekly maintenance for six hours, starting from 9pm. I was smiling in joy when I successfully put the kid to her sleep before 9pm, and thought I could enjoy myself for the next 3 or 4 hours, but the damn server has to be down, at this golden time.

So we decided to turn in early, and wake up at 4am. I must have overloaded my mind with the waking up issue, and had a series of nightmares, all related to the kid. First, I have to dream about her climbing up some metal bar like ladders in a playground with many other toddlers, and then suddenly, she fell from the top onto the ground. Phew, luckily she fell on her chest, and didn’t smash her head.

Then another dream. This time even more dramatic, it was war time and we had an attacked by some guerilla troop. There were gun shoots everywhere and suddenly I heard a roaring tank approaching. I couldn’t find the kid anywhere and had to jump into a river to hide myself. And I kept on hearing the tank firing shoots, boom boom boom. Before I could find the kid anywhere, I woke up from the bad dream, and continued to hear the “boom boom boom” sound. Chey, it was the sound of the kid’s heavy breathing. Almost scared the hell out of me.

I gather that there is a reason behind her favourite activity of picking out her toys and emptying them from the toy box/basket. The little hen is preparing and building herself a nest to hatch her eggs. Perphaps little children love the idea snuggling themselves up to something the like, like the parents, or their favourite container, or their favourite toys.

I think the phase that Yauyau hates to be pinned down while I change her diaper has passed. She has been most cooperative lately. Of course, she still tries to struggle to sit up or roll over, but when I tell her to give me a minute, wait a little while longer, she seems to get the message and relaxes her muscles to lie down again. Upon hearing me saying “OK, done!” she immediately flips over and is on her way to her busy businesses again. It is nice to know that she is able to understand some simple instruction and learns to be less impatient.

This morning, I dozed off on the sofa while the kid watched her favourite show. I woke up to realise that she was parading herself bottomless in the house. Later, I found her diaper thrown into the rubbish bin. Ha, she had removed her diaper herself and dumped it at the correct place. James said it would be nice if she could learn to change her diaper herself, it might be possible afterall!

We have to miss the playgroup session this morning. The kid’s nose erupted yesterday, and it got worse today. No wonder she woke up so many times crying during the night for the past two nights, the stuffy nose must have sort of suffocated her somehow.

It is always ultra messy when kids have running nose. The watery stuff kept pouring out of her nostrils, and she will always reach out for her nose and give it a rub rub rub, then rub her eyes, rub her checks, until all the face is sticky and yucky. Or worse, you see mucus dripping and flowing towards her mouth and she sticks out her tongue to lick it. Mmmm…salty. Gross, but we can understand, because we were children once, and I am sure we did that before too.

I am going to try administering breastmilk down her nose to see if it can kill the whatever bacteria or virus inside. It isn’t a crazy idea, but a tried and tested method attempted by many moms.