Singapore Night Festival 2016

This is my first visit to the Singapore Night Festival 2016. If not for my neighbour and friend, Vanessa who asked me if I was interested to go, I would not have gone on my own lol. Juliane also came along with us. :)
We first had dinner at Paper Crane at Waterloo Street. The Southern Fried Buttermilk Chicken with slaw and chips is great comfort food! Real crunchy outer layer but juicy and tender chicken within. Yum! 

From Waterloo Street, we made our way over to our first pitstop, National Design Centre.

We proceeded to Armenian Street where we caught street performance, Monuments by Moonlight at Armenian Church - a really lovely interactive light installment and The Peranakan Museum Variety Show by Main Wayang which sang old favourites with new lyrics which got the crowd going wild.

Juliane interacting with the light panel to create the different lighting

Next pitstop was the National Museum of Singapore for the light show and thereafter to Singapore Management University for drinks.

We finally left for home at 10pm as the crowd was getting too much for us to handle lol. It was a fun night of lights.

Unforgettable Cavalia

I got my girls and myself a special treat - to watch Cavalia! 
Cavalia is a Children's Day present for the girls, a post-PSLE reward for Marieann and a de-stressing treat for myself. However, Marieann was running a low-grade fever. :( I decided to let her rest and it was just Juliane and I going to the show tonight.
We arrived just before 7pm, took a few photos and launched straight into shopping of Cavalia merchandise before our show at 7:30pm haha. :P 

Just before we entered the big tent for the Cavalia show

From the moment Cavalia started till it ended, it was pure magic! :) The acrobatics, the aerial stunts, the music, the horses all integrated seamlessly together to bring forth a breathtakingly beautiful, haunting, and dreamlike show. My jaws dropped in awe when the horses first appeared. They are so beautiful! :) 

Show about to start soon :)

The end of the show. No photography during the show. 

The area between the performance tent and the shopping tent

Getting the performers to autograph on my Cavalia programme

Beautiful photos of horses surrounding the big tent

I went a little crazy with my shopping haha. Spent about S$250 :P

I definitely won't forget Cavalia anytime soon. In fact, it brought back my childhood memories of circus and animals and also my first horse ride. :) I thought I enjoyed Cavalia a lot more than Juliane did lol. I doubt the children nowadays know how to appreciate such shows. 
PS. I also had a pleasant surprise at Cavalia, I met my friend and former colleague, Yee Zher and his lovely family. His son is 

Performance Day

The Primary 3 in SCGS had a Performance Day on 24 May. Having missed Marieann's P2 Performance Day, I made time to catch her P3 class performance which was Jazz dancing. At first, I couldn't see her at all. It was only towards the end of the performance that I saw her lol. She was in the back row because of her height. Being the researcher I am, I took a video of her class performance as evidence that I attended her P3 Performance Day haha. :P

Honeymoon's Over!

It is official. P1 honeymoon is officially over.

Marieann came home with lots of homework. There were work from the Chinese activity book, the Math workbook, and English worksheets. On top of that, she has spelling tomorrow which she still has to revise. I was a nervous wreck when I saw the amount of homework. I just don't understand why she doesn't seem frayed by it all and why she could take her own sweet time to do her homework.
I don't remember assigning children that much homework when I was a teacher. A former SCGS colleague of mine and I both lamented about today's volume of homework as we had to supervise and rush our girls to complete their homework. Pressure to perform academically is catching up, however more with us than our girls who are the happy-go-lucky kind. Sigh.

P1 honeymoon is over! :(

Performance Review II

I had my work review with my PI today.
All I can say, after my work review, is :) :) :)

Kid's Performance Arts Concert

I attended my older girl, Marieann's performance art concert in school. Her class performed 2 items - Chinese Dance and Chinese Speech and Drama. She looked quite natural up on stage and seemed to be enjoying herself. Well, she is no stranger on stage as she has been performing since she was in N2. I took videos of Marieann in the dance item as well as the speech and drama item so that Juliane can watch her sister's performance. Juliane certainly enjoyed watching her sister performed and also wanted to perform lol. :)

Marieann's Pre-School Concert Performance

Today is the girls' Pre-school Concert Day, 9:30 to 12:30pm.

As Marieann was involved in the concert: two dance items, she had to be at the NTUC Building auditorium by 8:30am. That meant everyone had to be up early and were so by 7:15am. Marieann needed to have her breakfast first before putting on her make-up for her performance. Juliane watched as their grandmother applied make-up on her sister. Sorry, their mother, i.e. I am just hopeless and clueless about applying make-up. Lol. By 8am, we were out of the house.

We arrived at the auditorium real early at 8:15am. Maybe because it is a Sunday, it was so early in the morning, and the venue was in Shenton Way, there were hardly any traffic on the road. Marieann went backstage with her teacher while Juliane and us waited around. More and more parents with their children started arriving. While waiting, (time passed really slowly) I took a few snap-shots from the Sky Terrace of the buildings around. Finally at 9:10am, we could be seated in the auditorium. We were seated in Row K, 11 rows from the stage. Not too bad, not that far away, we could see the stage quite clearly. Anyway, we weren't allowed to take photos as the camera flashes might distract the young performances.

There was a Graduation Ceremony, followed by performances - 12 dance items and 2 Speech & Drama items and a Grand Finale "Heal The World". Marieann danced in two items: Sway/ Rock 'N' Roll Soniye and Honey. My oh my, I never realised that Marieann can dance so well! She refused to dance at home when we asked her to practise for us. She has must gotten my genes. LOL. Only joking. :P

The concert ended about 12pm. We went home for lunch and for the girls to rest. Tonight, we have another appointment at Vivocity for dinner. Busy, busy, busy. :P

Saturday Performance

Marieann has a performance at Tanjong Pagar GRC Fiesta, Ngee Ann City for GOH, MM Lee, at 6 pm. She has to report to her kindergarten by 4:30pm for make-up and stuff. So we decided to go for an early lunch and let her rest a bit at home before bringing her to kindergarten.

We went to a Japanese place, Minori Dining & Sake Bar at UE Square. We had the A la Carte Japanese buffet. The buffet concept is a good one. You can get to taste different dishes and the portions are small so you won't get too full with just a few dishes. Between the four of us, we managed to sample 16 different dishes and we also had Sorbet Yuzu for dessert. If you like Japanese food, this is a good place to go. If you are feeling a sense of deja vu about this place, that's because the owners of Minori used to be from Hanabi Japanese Restaurant, thus the same buffet concept.

We brought Marieann to her kindergarten at 4:30pm and we adjourned to Ngee Ann City. Since we had to pick her up at 7pm, we might as well wait around the same area. My plan was to do work at a cafe while hubby goes shopping at Best Denki with Juliane. Unfortunately, the little one fell asleep. So I took her with me to Coffee Bean. She slept on my lap while I tried to do work. Work didn't get very far as it was too noisy. I ended up reading a graphic novel which a good friend passed to me, Revelations. Lol. It was pretty intriguing, along the line of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. I managed to finish reading it in time to return it to Library@Orchard along with J. Butcher's Dresden book before we went to pick Marieann up at 7pm, after her dance performance.

My Moroccan Mint Tea

Marieann (in her costume) & Juliane

Since we were still quite full (from lunch), we decided to call it a night and went home.