Sophie loves dancing so I signed her up for a weekly dance class in town.

It's held in the same venue as our church and her teacher is our pastor's wife, Stac! Her sister, Tammy, runs the dance school. It's a serious dance school for jazz and hip hop for the older kids and adults but they started a preschool class (mostly 4 yr olds) this term. The aim is for children to gain performance confidence and learn to listen and follow instructions. They learn things like expressing themselves (Sophie likes this coz she gets to make funny faces), movement and tempo. Very cool.

It's only for 1/2 an hr but it's so good for the kiddos coz they need to be fast, follow and learn to be independent. Parents can watch from a window that can only look in.

I'm really thankful for this outlet for our little entertainer.

Since we returned, we've been going to a playgroup at church on Monday mornings. It's called Monsters! It's a bit like our church's mums group back home.

We are only a very small church with about 50-60 people on a regular Sunday plus 10-20 kids. So, our very creative Pastor's wife Stace plans most of these gatherings. The best part about this playgroup is that most of the people that come are not from the church! What amazing place for outreach and just hanging out with people from the community. It's not just for mums and kids, dads that are free also come along!

This week we had a special theme party called Rainbow Monday. Sophie won the best dressed award! Haha she looked most like a rainbow thanks to the top that Mama sent last week. She didn't even realise what was going on and why she got a prize. She was too busy decorating cookies, eating rainbow fruit and candy sticks and playing!

It was really great fun. I'm so thankful for the effort that Stace and the others put in to make it such a wonderful time for the kids!

We've dried up all our PlayDoh stuff after frequent playing over the past year and I finally allowed Sophie to mix all the colours up and of course, it looks awful!

So I finally decided to junk all of them and MAKE OUR OWN!

The recipe looked really easy but it took a lot more time than I thought. But the results were AMAZING! The texture is even better than PlayDoh! We love it!

Got this recipe from the Freestones:
(To be cooked in microwave)

1 cup of water
1 cup of flour
2 tsp tartar
1 tbsp oil
1/2 cup salt

1. Cook for 1 min. Stir.
2. Cook for 30 seconds more, or until the dough rolls up into a ball nicely. (I found that it took at least 3-4 minutes more of cooking for our microwave)
3. Add food colouring (Sophie's fav part! It's fun!)

Now we've got 3 good blobs of playdough and it hardly cost us anything! PlayDoh is just too expensive to upkeep.

Sophie also inherited our tiny wooden chopping board (YA! Can't imagine how we used this tiny chopping board over the year. We finally got ourselves another bigger one for this year.) and I got her a rolling pin from Melissa and Doug (love their stuff).

Love how happy she is!

Last week, we went to visit the much talked about NZ Fieldays (about an hr's drive from where we are) – it's Australasia's definitive agri-business exhibition! The exhibition is to the local farmers what the IT expo is to Singaporeans. Where everyone goes to, whether or not you're into IT and where the gadget lovers gather once a year.

Most of the expo would have been boring to city people like us e.g. tractors, milking machines, tools and stuff. But the atmosphere was amazing! I've never seen so many Kiwis gathered at one place before! It's like the whole of NZ was there! Most times when you drive along NZ roads, all you see are cows, horses or sheep so it was pretty unusual to see so many cars and people. Even got traffic jam!

Sophie got to ride on a real huge farm tractor, ride on kid sized tractors, see horses and other farm animals (we even saw a real highland cattle, not cut up in the supermarket! It was HUGE!), eat an ice cream, sample NZ's latest gourmet food and beverages (my fav part!) etc…

In a world where many are growing up without fathers or absent fathers, Sophie is most blessed to have James as her Daddy!!!!!!!!

Happy Father's Day dear one! You are so precious to the both of us and we're SO glad you've come home just in time so we can celebrate you!

Mama and Yeye, thank you for the Strawberry Shortcake books! Sophie likes them VERY MUCH. She's been reading them everyday.

Sophie is really into Strawberry Shortcake, princesses, dress ups, make up, jewellery and being Cinderella at the moment. I donno how many times we've had to act out the Cinderella scene where she drops her shoe and the prince asks if the shoe belongs to her and they live happily ever after. Btw, she's dropped her shoe on purpose in public many times so that we can reenact this scene! It's super funny!!

She's also been asking me to get her a ballerina outfit! I'm starting to get all influenced and attracted to fairy costumes and frilly frilly things I see on Trademe (an ebay equivalent here)!

Oh my! Oh my! Never thought we'll get here – the day when pink is the only colour on earth.

Thank God she's still wearing what I choose for her to some extent. (Love the tights that the Sept Mums got for Soph! Thanks girls!)

The weather was wonderful today! It was 15 degrees but the sun was shining bright and strong.

I took the opportunity to bring Soph out for a sun bathe! She played in the sand pit with Toby and Eli for a long long time before lunch. We spent most of the day outside. It was great fun.

They are not babies anymore!

It's so great to see them all grown up and having their own characters. What a blessing it has been to grow up together.

We're going to miss all of you. Thanks girls for being such good friends over the past few years. We promise to bring more mamee the next time we meet.

We live in NZ. My dad works in Brazil. My sis goes to Uni in Brissy. My bro just moved his family back to Singapore from Brissy last year. So, to get everyone in the same country at the same time is almost a miracle in itself!

We almost made it this time. Only person missing is Rachel, my sis.

To make full use of the occasion, my mom booked all of us in for 3 days in Bintan Lagoon Resort. Bintan, Indonesia is only an hour's ferry ride from Singapore. Very doable for short holidays for those with young children.

We had fun, even though it rained everyday! Sophie had fun at the pool and hanging out with Grandma and Grandpa and little Janice. Sophie hasn't seen Grandpa for a year and a half so she was really thrilled to hang out with him.

We even bumped into our distant relatives. They too were having a big family gathering – 2 grandparents, 2 kids and their other halves plus 6 grandchildren! They invited us to their villa for BBQ. I haven't seen them in ages although we are about the same age and grew up together. It was really good to catch up.

I love family holidays!

We went to Universal Studios on Monday. This is the first time in history that Singapore has its own international theme park! How exciting! It's not as big as most in other countries but I guess it's proportional to the size of our country!

Over the past few years since we've had Sophie, we've been to 3 theme parks – Hong Kong Disneyland, Movie World Gold Coast and now Universal Studios Singapore. Comparing them, I think the first two are more suitable for kids under 7 and Universal Studios is more for older kids and adults. It's probably coz Sophie was more familiar with the the disney characters and Looney Tunes characters. US only had Shrek and Madagascar. Most of the shows were quite scary too. Mostly effects and monsters.

That said, we still enjoyed it very much. There were lotsa of shows like the Shrek 4D movie, a Monster Rock Musical, Madagascar characters dancing live show (the girls enjoyed it a lot). Sophie sat on only 1 ride coz she is still not big on rides. But Skyler who's almost 3 went on the carousel, a dinosaur ride and a shrek ride with her daddy. The guys enjoyed most of the roller coaster rides. Sue and I were happy just walking, enjoying the shows and sights and hiding in air-conditioned cafes while the guys went on their rides. It was so funny how the staff told us that if we need to rest, we could sleep in the baby's changing room! Apparently some pregnant women had fainted in the queues coz it was too hot! We had to remember to drown ourselves with water throughout the day.

It was really fun to go with another family coz we could keep each other company while waiting. Even on a Monday, we spent a good amount of time in queues. I think it's going to get worse during the school holidays! For the month of May, 3 of the rides are not available so they have compensated us by giving us a $10 food voucher and $5 retail voucher.

The kiddos have all grown up! They are all in preschool and speaking like bullet trains and very expressive and their personalities are all shining through.

But when it comes to taking photos, nothing's changed. They still can't sit still and smile at the camera all at the same time.

P/s R tried to hide his face with a bag coz he was tired and wanted to sleep in the pram but James snatched it away and he got a shock!