islandhippy

Runaway pram! Last seen speeding down Portsdown Road towards Colbar.

Look out for a huge pram driven by an unhappy pouting baby sporting a mohican (mohawk).

Olive will be three months old on Tuesday. She’s the best baby ever! She’s sleeping better, chatting, smiling and she can entertain herself for half an hour or more watching Kari’s mobile or playing in her house. The biggest change to our routine has been Olive’s improved sleeping habits. After three months of waking every couple of hours, night and day, she’s suddenly started sleeping eight hours at night with a couple of naps in the day. Sandy is understandably relieved -- she can almost get a regular night’s sleep now. We’re not in the clear yet though, Olive still needs breastfeeding or rocking to sleep but we’ll get there eventually. For now we’re just happy she can sleep through the night. God, there were times when we thought we’d never get here! Well done Sandy.

Olive is also a real chatterbox. Her vocabulary doesn’t include many consonants, it mostly just OOHs and AAHs, but we do get the occasional AAH GOO. Both Sandy and I speak English to Olive and we’re concerned that we should be talking to her in Mandarin as well. She needs to hear the different sounds and speech patterns as early as possible. Not to worry, she’ll be up in KL next week to visit her grandparents so she’ll only hear Chinese spoken there.

John and Annie and kids Naomi and Alex are back in Singapore for a short holiday from Shenzen, China, so we met them for dinner with Andy and Claudia at Red Dot Brewhouse in Dempsey Village. Housed in a converted army quarters, this microbrewery offers half a dozen or so home-brews, from Pilsner to a novelty green beer, lime wheat beer to English ale. I couldn't decide which to drink so I ordered all of them.

English ale was the best of the lot although the green beer was fun to entertain the kids with.

My auditor/babysitter Andy

The food is not-so-cheap and not-all-that-cheerful but we soaked up the beer with barbecued sausages (and mash), pork ribs (and mash), satay (and mash!?), cod fish, chicken wings, prawns, pizza, spring rolls, fries ... healthy smealthy!

Do check out this wonderful new site, Do Me A Favour, offering beautiful customised foodie gifts for weddings, births, birthdays, anniversaries, corporate events, etc. The company was established by a former Wine & Dine colleague of mine and I can't wait for the next big event to give these as gifts. So, you all know what you're getting for Olive's first birthday! I've got my eye on the almond biscotti, the Thai honey, the Italian baca di dama and the classic sugar-coated almonds. When we got married in Penang we wanted to place a small bag of sugar-coated almonds next to each place setting at dinner for the ladies but we couldn't find any smart suppliers ... I'll just have to get married again and do it properly this time around, with almonds!

Do Me A Favour

Everybody's having babies! To round off a weekend of visiting babies, we popped in to see Terence and Vicky who gave birth to Ethan Gareth Su-Fernando two days ago. Ethan is tiny (or is Olive just big?) and really adorable. Congratulations and we hope Terry gets some sleep soon!

Steve, Katrina and Thalia flew back from Dubai for a holiday and we joined them at PS Café in Dempsey Village to celebrate Thalia's third birthday. Sunday brunch at PS Café is a real family affair, every other table has a buggy parked next to it. Olive bought a dress for the occasion and carried a frangipani flower in her (sparse) hair. Food portions tend to be on the large side at this place and Phil's feasted on a huge wagyu burger with Camembert and a glass of Champagne, which seemed to go down well; I saved myself for a sinfully sweet slice of sticky date toffee cake with ice cream.

Olive keeping daddy occupied.

Congratulations to Olive, who slept for eight hours last night! She went down at 9.30pm, talking herself to sleep, then woke at 5.45am.

Her ladyship waiting for breakfast to be delivered:

Hashi and Hooi Hooi gave birth to Yukie (pronounced "yookie" with a very short "air" on the end) so we dropped in for lunch to see the baby. Yukie is tiny! Half Olive's size. Luckily, Hooi Hooi has had no problems breastfeeding problems; she's attending breastfeeding classes and all the other nine mums in her class are having difficulties.

Since Sandy and I can't make it to any of the official Singapore Foodfest events, we decided to hold our very own foodfest this weekend.

On Saturday morning, Olive and I sneaked out early to the local hawker centre while Sandy caught up on some much needed sleep. We bought roti prata with fish curry, and laksa for Sandy. For lunch we finished off some scary looking bacon and cheese in omelettes with freshly baked caraway bread. In the afternoon, Agnes, Cindy, Irene, Eric and baby Cheyanne came for tea laden with durian Swiss roll, cheesecake, chocolate cake, Key lime pie and apple crumble. I baked chocolate brownies but somehow managed to burn them so that was a bit of a disaster! After digesting the durian cake, Sandy and I went to dinner with Chris, Pat and Petchara and had a fantastic steamboat of prawns, fish, dumplings, Chinese veggies, noodles and a very tasty homemade Thai dip. Followed by ice cream.

(Portuguese pig stew about to go on the stove.)

Sunday is traditionally a day of cooking for us. We buy sufficient ingredients for the coming week's meals and, especially now we have Olive, try to cook a couple of big dishes to last several meals. I must have had a dream about smoked Hungarian paprika the night before as I managed to pick two dishes based on this spice. Portuguese pork and bean stew basically involves cooking as many parts of a pig as you can find in a huge pot with beans and smoked paprika. Belly pork, bacon, pork hock, illegally imported spicy Spanish chorizo ... the Le Creuset was too small so we had to transfer it all to a large aluminium stockpot. The pig stew should last three meals at least. The second dish I chose was chicken baked with green pepper and smoked paprika. I think we'll start with this tonight, I can't face any of that pig yet.

Sandy's two sisters, Hueh Hueh and Ah Ngae, drove down from KL so we packed a picnic and headed off to the Eco Lake at the Botanic Gardens for smoked salmon, cold cuts, roast beef, couscous, potatoes in salsa verde, strawberries and cream, and freshly baked lemon drizzle cake and chocolate brownies. Hooi Hooi, nine months pregnant and 21 kg (46 lb) heavier (!), and Hashi also joined us. A big thank you to the Singapore Air Force for putting on an aerial display just for us (or were they practicing for National Day?).

Singapore held its first 'opera in the park' at the Botanic Gardens on Saturday. The Singapore Lyric Opera and Singapore Lyric Opera Children's Choir performed a selection of operatic favourites to a healthy mix of Singaporean and expat families with loads of kids, dogs and trailing maids playing in the late afternoon sun. Afternoons such as this restore my faith in Singapore and make me want to stay here longer. Let's hope this was just the first of many operas in the park.

Mozart: Magic Flute & Don Giovani & Le Nozze de Figaro

Verdi: Rigoletto & La Traviata

Puccini: Gianni Schicchi & Turandot

Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana

Delibes: Lakme

Bizet: Pearl Fishers

The house is full of baby toys. And babies. Holly and Oscar flew in from London so there are six of us in the house at the mo. Some random photos:

Sandy, Mum and Olive enjoyed a tai tai lunch at Marmalade Pantry in Holland Village. Dinner was more casual down at the local Chinese seafood restaurant with dishes of sambal stingray, crayfish in cereal with curry leaves, sambal sweet potato leaves and an onion omelette. I knew there would be an argument over which cake to order so I bought three ... one for each of us.

[Above: Grandmother and granddaughter's hat parade. Olive's little pink number is from Petit Bateau, thank you Shah and Jonathan.]

Singapore's National Parks Board recently opened HortPark, a 23-hectare "gardening hub" -- we like hubs in Singapore -- just down the road from our house. We took a stroll there this morning and found the place buzzing with people (including Lee Kuan Yew) out for a Sunday walk ... or sweaty wedding shoot. The gardening hub features 40 sample eight-square-meter gardens, each designed by a different Singapore landscaping shop effectively advertising its services. We got some great ideas for our "garden", which has, er, lain fallow for the last eight years.

The entrance to HortPark, and the new bidge and treetop walk that connects Kent Ridge Park to Mount Faber ...

Picnic in front of our dream house ...

Mickey Mouse plant (ochna serrulata) ...

Somebody collapsed with the effort of writing my father's day card. Thank you Olive. Those look like Mummy's favourite truffles, what a coincidence!

A big thank you to Kari and family from Rødding in Denmark for sending Olive her first mobile. Kari was Phil's au pair 30 years ago. The mobile reached Singapore just at the right time - Olive has finally begun to focus more on her surroundings and loves to lie back and gaze at the ladybirds (ladybugs if you're American/Canadian).

Mum celebrated her birthday here in Singapore. Sandy, Olive, Mum and I had a great dinner at Halia restaurant in the Botanic Gardens. Olive was a star, she was well behaved the whole evening.

Seared blue fin tuna for Sandy ...

Javanese spice-encrusted rack of lamb for Phil ...

Lait frais de la bossom for Olive ...

No dinner for the birthday girl, she was babysitting! We try to give Olive one evening bottle feed of expressed breastmilk so she doesn't forget how to drink from the bottle, the rest of the time she's breastfed.

I'm so sad cousin Oscar will miss his flight to Singapore tomorrow . Please get better soon Oscar and fly over to visit me.

Just in case this Sunday's Paris Open men's final and Montreal F1 grand prix aren't exciting enough for you, you could always head down to Willoughby on the Wolds for Mum & Dad's open garden! I hear there's free flow of Earl Grey.

Walking to Malaysia ...

Sandy and I are both walking around like zombies. It's Night of the Living Dead here in Jalan Hang Jebat! We're finding it difficult to put Olive down to sleep. Carry her and she's out like a light; put her in the cot and she wakes up and screams. Naturally we've had plenty of suggestions from the bar, ranging from placing a vibrating prosthetic arm in the cot to inflating Dolly, Sri's blow-up doll. I haven't found either method mentioned in any of our baby books. In fact no two baby books say the same thing anyway. If one book says let the baby cry, the other will suggest picking up and cuddling baby. It's poor old Sandy who has deal with it most of the time as I'm working during the day and I can't help with the feeding anyway. We were rather too successful with our breastfeeding attempts ... now Olive doesn't like the bottle at all. Also, Olive hasn't fallen into a routine yet, which makes it tough for Sandy. We'll have to take lessons from Holly and Oscar next week when they come to visit from London, Oscar sleeps twelve hours a night!

At least there's one thing we know Olive loves: a good soak in the tub ... or plastic bucket.

I'm stuck in Cultural Revolution mode. I finished reading Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem (scroll down or click here to see earlier post) and loved it. I then travelled halfway round the world to present-day Peterborough (!) with Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother and really disliked this book (but enjoyed his first book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time). I'm now back in 1970s China once again heeding Chairman Mao's call to go "up to the mountains and down to the countryside", this time with Di Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. As with Jiang Rong's book, this is a semi-autobiographical novel which tells of the author's experiences being re-educated by living among peasents. But no longer are we on the vast Mongolian steppe, this book is set in a remote village located halfway up a mountian in Sichuan. The protagonists -- two teenage boys with a couple of years of high-school education, making them undesirable intellectuals -- meet a tailor's daughter in a nearby village and discover a collection of translated Western novels hidden by Four-Eyes, another boy sent from the city for re-education. As the boys get to know the seamstress and secretly read the banned books, they are able to transcend their pitiful surroundings and dream of lives and places they have never been exposed to before.

Wow, look what Kathy made for Olive! A beansprout baby pillow, two burp cloths, a hanky, a bunny rabbit with "Olive" felted on and a passport cover. All in a beautiful apple floral fabric. Thank you so much. Kathy is a former publishing colleague of Phil's here in Singapore; she also designs and sells her own handicrafts here. Learn more about Kathy, her beautiful family and the fine art of beansprout drying here.

This afternoon Olive cried for about five hours nonstop. It's so distressing but having re-read all the books I guess it's normal. Evening fretting seems to kick in around the third week and last for a couple of months (too optimistic? longer?). We fed her, changed her nappy, burped her, took some layers off then put them back on. We took turns to hold her in every conceivable position, sang to her. She finally drifted off in time for us to catch the F1 qualifying stages in Monaco on TV. Very decent of her. Maybe Olive was just knackered from watching Sandy eat buffet lunch at Swisshotel Merchant Court. Evidently mummy ate quite a lot as she could only manage a slice of toast for dinner. Come to think of it, that's why Olive was crying ... after seventeen bowls of durian pengat Sandy was probably breastfeeding Olive durian milkshake.

I saw this funny shipping note stuck to the side of a pallet of goods sent from USA to Singapore and stored in the same warehouse that I use. The delivery address has Singapore belonging to the Republic of USA.

Olive's going to be in the international press! Today a writer for The Weekly Telegraph, the overseas edition of the UK's The Daily Telegraph, interviewed Phil in Singapore and she noticed Olive's photo on his desk. She took down Olive's name and asked whether she could mention the new arrival in the article. Of course! The less written about Phil the better. The article should be out in a couple of weeks. How exciting!

Phil's office photoframe:

Happy Birthday Olive! Our little Buddha is one month old and according to Chinese custom we must give family and friends red eggs and chocolate cake (er, surely not chocolate cake?!).

I tried asking mother-in-law the significance of red eggs.

"Red"
"OK, I know red signifies happiness and good luck in Chinese culture but why eggs?"
"Just give-lah!" (Eyes raised to the heavens in a what-misdeeds-have-I-done-to-deserve-this-kan-cheong-wants-to-know-
everything-foreign-devil-of-a-son-in-law kind of way.)

Having turned instead to Google, it seems we should be giving red eggs and ginger, the eggs symbolising fertility, the ginger because that's a vital ingredient in all Chinese confinement food, offering 'heat' (yang) to a weak and tired (yin) mother. I'm sure chocolate cake is yang too.

This is also the day when most Chinese babies have their heads shaved.

"Don't touch my hair, I don't want to look like Daddy."

Sandy refused to let her mum to shave Olive's hair but will allow her to snip off a lock as a token gesture to six thousand years of Chinese culture. **Don't forget to vote in the poll located at the top of the grey sidebar to the right of this post.**

I woke up this morning to find a tray of red eggs in the kitchen. Has mother-in-law been out early stealing the eggs of Singapore's elusive red jungle fowl? Or could the eggs be for a certain chubby baby's 1st month birthday celebration tomorrow? Check back soon for more details ...