Of CATS & Duh...

We went for the Cats muscial yesterday. For all the publicity and after watching it, WF told me I must write a review of this musical in my blog.

I think it was the brand name of Andrew Lloyd Webber and the 'many years running in Broadway' that attracted so many people to watch this musical. It was a sold out last night.

I can only say, it was a total disappointment. And I wasn't the only one who felt it. During the recess, we overheard people commenting that it's slow or the songs sung weren't clear that they don't know what the characters are singing and worse, one lady called her friend in the washroom to say she fell asleep. In fact, WF fell asleep too during the second half.

You might ask,"That bad huh?". Well, I can say, it is a disappointment.

The plot was weak. There weren't so much of a storyline and most of the time, they're just introducing the various feline characters through singing. WF felt it was more of a dance and acrobatic show than a musical.

There were a lot of unneccessary scenes. Like towards the end of Part One, there was a total of 15 minutes of pure cat dancing and nothing else. Just need to ask, how much variation of dance can you do if you're a cat?

And the part on Growltiger's Last Stand. I find it totally meaningless and almost irrelevant. And the act was silly too.

The singing was bad... bad bad and just bad. Except for a few characters like The Rum Tum Tugger and Jellylorum, the rest of the casts' singing fell way short of expectation. Like I mentioned, most of the casts singing was so bad that a group of audience behind me commented that they couldn't catch what they're singing. I do not think its the accent or what because we can definitely understand what Rum Tum Tugger, Skimbelshanks and Jellylorum is singing when its their turn to sing.

If Ning had heard the two feline singing the 'Macavity' part she would've tell you its lousy. The two cats couldn't portray the evil-ness of Macavity through their singing. They sounded like rushing through. And the last part where they're supposed to 'meoooowww' the word 'Macavity', they did a half bucket job. They should've listen to how Sarah Brightman sing this song and they'll know why she's good.

There were so much hype about Delia Hannah and when she sang the song "Memory" we were so disappointed. Especially when she sang it again in Part Two. She was practically shouting towards the end and that woke up WF.

Ok, enough of negative comments. Here are some positive ones. The choreography is good. The dancers can portray the felines really well. The entire company dances in accordance. And the characters do mingle with the audience during the show and recess.

Needless to say, WF went back feeling he had wasted his time and he almost wanted to 'cut loss' and leave during the break! We had really good seats, right in the middle of entire seating plan (the ticket agent recommended me this pair of seats and tell me the eye level to the stage is just right and it faces the centre of the stage etc). To think I had bought the tickets last Nov and had been looking forward to it so much! Yet.... Sigh....

Easter Celebration

Our church celebrated Easter Sunday today. And the Sunday School had an Easter celebration titled "Jesus is My Rock". So the theme for the celebration is 'Rock n Roll'. All the children are encouraged to dress up with some 'Rock n Roll' Theme.

Being a girl, its easier to dress up Ning than Zhi. And since she had a few accessories that can go well for the theme, I gamely dressed her up for the celebration. Here's a picture:



Coincidentally, I got the free toy guitar from exchanging the Huggies diapers barcodes last week. So it came in handy for this dressing up event.

For Zhi, I couldn't do much. So I just got him Ning's old sunglasses that's all.



Eventually, Ning (together with some other kids) won the best dressed awards and she walked home with a medal and certificate.



Kids listening to Teacher Angel sharing the Easter story and awarding the best dressed kids and teachers.

An Eventful Week

Two things happened in the past 5 days.

First, true to Dr Henry Ho's (my orthodontist) promise that I only need to wear my braces for 6 months, these were taken off from my teeth on Wednesday. Now, I'm onto my retainer and will start the 2nd phase of my oral correction (with another Dr Henry Ho, a prosthodontist) soon.

On Good Friday evening, Zhi had a fall and knocked against his "good friend" Thomas the Train and suffered two bad cuts on his eyebrows. Ning was "holding" him while we walked out of the lift lobby but I supposed she became impatient with his slow walking and eventually exerted some force that made him tripped. He was holding his train at that time and fell onto it.

There were bleeding and he was crying in pain. Thank goodness, East Shore hospital was only a 5mins drive and there weren't any queues. Even if there is, he's would've been given priority.

The doctor had to clean up his wound and he was crying like mad. I couldn't bear the sight and so I went out with Ning and waited while WF was with him. The whole 10mins while doctor was trying to "glue" (advance medical practice instead of stitching) back the wound, you can hear him screaming 'mama'... aiyo... really heartache.

WF told me, Zhi was struggling quite badly so they had to use a blanket and wrap him to restrain him. Poor Zhi...

But thank goodness his cuts were on his brows. If its anything lower, he might hurt his eyes. At the moment, he's got these two cuts on his right eyebrow and swollen eyelid with whitish glue.



He's quite conscious about his eyebrow at the moment, so this is a badly taken shot and the only shot I took of his injuries.

Interestingly, now that we've come to terms with his injury, we started to worry about his appearance. WF is concerned if Zhi'll have keloids and thickened eyelids that causes him to have a smaller right eye to left eye. While I'm worried if he'll have two scars for life. Maybe I should take heart. As like the author wrote in the book "Man and Boy" said,"...help him get girls in fifteen years' time. Scars are quite attractive on a man, aren't they?"

I wonder which girl would be impressed if he tells her he got his scars by falling onto a toy train???!!!

Zhi & His Milestones

Zhi is now past 2 years old and I must say, he's achieved quite a few impressive milestones that neither WF nor I were prepared for. Frankly, he's very different from Ning in terms of personality, character and interests.

In the past four months, his developments were achieved at amazing speed. When prior to that, I was still worrying about his speech and learning abilities even though WF assured me boys are slower in their developments as compared to girls.

Now I am proud to say he goes to his twice weekly independent playgroup without crying like crazy for the 2 hours.

And I finally weaned him off his 2am milk feed, effective 1st Mar (that when he's 23months old!!!). He used to have milk at 10pm, 2am and 6am. I thought by 2 years old, he should stop this 2am feed. It took us more than 3 weeks of ignoring his cries/screams in the middle of the night and few times of argument whether to give in or not.

Here are some of the things he is capable of. Able to:
- Speak more than three words and in a proper sentence. Like 'xie xie ni" or 'How about you?' (the latter really threw me off the chair when he asked me).

- Verbalize & identify ALL the 26 big alphabets. And most of the small alphabets except the confusing ones like q & g.

- Verbalize & identify numbers 1 to 10.

- Verbalize & identify shapes like: circle (his favourite), triangle, square, oval, star, rectangle, heart and amazingly hexagon (don't ask me how he did it, it caught me by surprise too!).

- Verbalize & identify colours: orange, yellow, red & pink. Noticed these are common colours in a girl's items? Work-in-progress for other colours.

- Best of all, he can identify a lot of Thomas & Friends characters from Annie to Whiff. We ourselves weren't as good as him.

He's now showing some signs of self feeding but only occasionally. And totally refused the potty. I wonder how come this potty thing is such a huge obstacle for him.

Here are some pictures of him:
Going to school.


See how a Thomas & Friends VCD & a Mickey Mouse schoolbag can excite him so much.


Having a go at feeding himself to the cut watermelons.

Zhi & Thomas the Train

I supposed every kid has their favourite character at one time. Like when Ning was 2 years old, she was crazy about Hi-5. So much so we went for the show at the EXPO with her in 2007. Now she's into Disney Princess and to date, we've gone to two shows with her. Until the last show, WF said its enough "princesses" for him, he's not going to any more of these "princess" shows this year.

What about Zhi? Well, like a lot of boys, he loves anything that has got wheels: cars, trains, buses, trucks etc. Even books. He simply refused to read those animal or babies themed books which I had gotten for Ning when she was younger. And the cartoon character he can associate with wheels at the moment is Thomas & Friends.

During the March school holidays, we were crazy enough to drive for more than 30mins to Boon Lay to watch the Thomas & his Friends' performance at Jurong Point.

My my... My son is not the only kiddo crazy about Thomas. There were A LOT of other kids and crazy parents like us too!! We could'nt get a spot on the stage level so we were stuck to watching the TEN minutes performace from the 2nd level. Yes, drive 30mins to watch a 10mins performance. I must be out of my mind!

And for the 10mins, the only interactive character was the Fat Controller. Thomas was stuck to the floor and there wasn't any Percy nor James nor Toby. I am really out of my mind.



Nevertheless, Ning & Zhi were quite excited when they saw the Fat Controller and Thomas. This sort of make us feel the trip is worth the while after all.

I hope he sticks to Thomas for the next few years (kids of K1 & K2 are crazy about Ben 10 at the moment) because he's accumulated quite a lot of Thomas' toys at home.

Marina Barrage

By next year, the Marina Reservoir will be turned into a freshwater reservoir to meet 10% of Singapore's daily water needs. That's 114 million litres. And I didn't even know this reservoir is our 15th here.

We went over to the Barrage during one of the Saturdays and the place has a pretty nice view of the sea, flyer and city centre. So nice that we found a couple taking outdoor bridal photos there.

They have a lot of exhibitions that talks about water and recylcling. Its really like a "school trip" for WF and I. For the kids, I think they're too young to understand those information, charts and graphs. But nevertheless a good way to spend the Saturday morning for them.

I'm not sure if they still have these. But when we visited, we got free Newater. Of course, Ning and Zhi didn't know how these water was "made", so they had a fun time drinking it.