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Green zen baby

Baby Kai loves greenery. He loves to stare at trees and the rustling of leaves seems to lull him into a trance-like state. So it’s a good thing that we’ve got trees right outside the dining room window, and we took these pictures when we had lunch recently at District 10, and you’ll see how he’s completely engrossed, staring out the back window, leaving us to our lunch in peace. Botanic Gardens, next.

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This is the life

Kai has been going through a growth spurt, which is amazing given that he’s just come out of dengue and hospitalisation. He can’t fit into a lot of the baby clothes (that thankfully were hand me downs rather than bought) he was previously wearing, and he’s heavy enough to make my biceps ache after carrying him.

Its good to be getting back into work, and it’s good that there’s work. But when it comes to time outs, there’s nothing that beats watching my two favourite people (and rugby on tv).

My angels

Zombie

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Our baby boy Kai is growing bigger and louder every day, and we kinda sorta know what cry is for what even if the sound of it changes week to week.

This week, most of his cries are sounding like the chorus of a song by The Corrs.

More importantly, we have finally registered his birth, so our son now has an official name.

It took a while at the ICA though, and a very stern “tell us, where does it say we cannot have his name in this order?” from both parents, before we got Kai’s birth certificate signed, paid for and laminated.

Baby Kai’s Day Out

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OK, it was our day out. Having stayed home for almost a month (trip to Mum’s house for celebration not counted), Naomi and I thought it’d be good to get out and let Kai announce himself to the world, H1N1 notwithstanding.

And announce he did, with big, heartfelt cries when it was feeding time when we were almost done with the supermarket shopping at Tanglin Mall, which, by the way, if you’re with child and pram, is the place to be. There is a nicely equipped nursing room (although the wallpaper featuring a sofa was an unforgivable tease), and everyone else seems to be with child and pram, so they’re mostly considerate and forthcoming with all manner of advise (such as: no, you should not use your pram to hold the lift door open).

After too many hours out because our timings for running simple errands like eating lunch and buying groceries have gone slightly awry due to accumulated suakuness, we came home with a few cakes to celebrate Kai’s official one month day (Gregorian Calendar), but the little bugger decided he wanted to have a long snooze instead, so we’re having the cake today.

It’s good to be finally able to go out.

Second month confinement

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You’d think right after a month of recuperation and adhering to (some of the) traditional post-partum confinement rules, we’d be ready to go out and show Baby Kai off to the world.

H1N1 has put paid to that, and thankfully we had a small group of family and friends who came by and celebrated with us at my mother’s yesterday. We had a lot of food to celebrate with. We still have a lot of food to celebrate with. And it’s because some friends recused themselves from attending our little party because they’d been to flu-affected countries or they, understandably, couldn’t pry themselves away from the AWARE EGM which dragged into the night.

It was definitely not because people didn’t like the food. We had consulted with Loyal Reader Lincoln with regards to the food, and he arranged for us to get it from North Border. Best decision we’ve made (apart from getting the Ang Ku Kueh from Ji Xiang Everton Park).

If you’re planning some event – like a baby shower or full month party – give North Border a shot. They came and set up the food service, complete with labels so that people would know that crab cakes were crab cakes and stuffed jalapenos were stuffed jalapenos.

But of course, that didn’t stop a friend of ours from thinking the jalapenos were stuffed crab claws because of the similarity in shape (really?) and taking a bite into one mid-conversation, only for the extreme heat of the chili to completely derail her train of thought and run another express line through it, making her say “wow, this crab thing is quite… exciting”.

Some more, (American) Southwestern cuisine would be something different from your usual bee hoon spring roll siew mai har gao buffet catering, and honestly, having dined at North Border several times previously, you are not likely to go wrong with the food.

The only thing I’m sorry about is not having taken enough photographs on Saturday despite bringing two cameras out. So there aren’t any pictures of the food. You’ll just have to head down to 2 Rochester Park to have a look.

Probably the nicest touch to Saturday’s party was having Loyal Reader Lincoln, despite suffering from a crook wisdom tooth, playing ice-cream man with a huge carton of various flavours of ice-cream from Haato. Eat hot jalapeno, eat Haato, eat hot jalapeno, eat Haato. Now say that ten times quickly.

In all, everything was good enough to make everyone want to SHUT UP AND SIT DOWN and eat.