Do You Read Your Old Blog Posts? I normally don’t. After writing, I promptly forget about it. The only time I go back and reread is when I have to use my personalized Google Search Box to find out when my children and I fell sick! How convenient to have a diary with a search box. That reminds me, I haven’t added two of my blogs in my search box. At the moment my search box yields results from 3 of my blogs because I forgot to add the other two.

Anyway, I went back to read one of my old blog posts written way back in 2006 because it keeps on appearing on my Statcounter. It is this post: Why Women Nag and Men Don’t Listen. It appears No. 2 on Google for the search term ‘Why Women Nag” so that is why I get the visitors but the funny thing is Why do people keep on searching for this?

I wonder if the people searching for it are male or female. I have a strange suspicion that they are men.

I reread the post and had a good laugh. However, it also serves as a reminder to myself to listen more to the kids rather than nag. That is a tall order! I am afraid I haven’t been very successful in that area since 2006 till now. If anything, I’ve gotten worse!

What about you? Do you read your old blog posts? You should. It may make you cry or laugh.

All work and no play makes kids extremely restless. The kids had a week off from school but I had to make sure they did lots of work. They had been sick a lot recently and missed a lot of lessons. The boy especially. It is no joke learning 3 languages in school. We speak English at home and he reads a lot of story books so he can get by. They teach him a lot of Chinese at school so he can get by. However, the standard of Malay is rather high and with little emphasis in school and at home he is swimming in a deep blue sea on his own. So he has a lot of catching up to do, especially in his Malay vocabulary.

As for the girl, she hardly has any time to do revision during school days with the amount of homework she has to do. We have to consider the homework as revision. So it was time for work for both of them on their one week off from school. The previous week off was mostly spent in bed and taking medicine as they were both sick. So, this week off, they had to do a lot of studies.

Studies aside, they still managed to …

• play with candles and lanterns on Mooncake Festival Day
• watch several dvds for shows they had missed out on when they were sick
• plant their brocolli and asparagus (I wonder how those will turn out!)
• bake their bat shaped cookies and other shaped cookies
• play monopoly
• play computer games
• start on a manuscript for a book by typing it out (the girl dreams of writing a Chinese storybook)
• read several storybooks and comics
• play card games
• learn to play a duet on piano
• make ice lollies and eat them too

I’ve been really busy trying to make sure I get all of the above done in addition to helping them with their homework and studies I hardly have the time to be online. So, now it is time for me to play catch up with my blogs.

When is mooncake festival 2011? This year mooncake festival or mid autumn festival falls on 12 September 2011. The stores are busy cashing in on this with many displaying and selling mooncakes and lanterns for children from as early as the beginning of this month. These days the mooncakes come in all sorts of flavours and packaging. Sometimes I wonder whether they are selling the boxes or the mooncakes!

Then there are the flavours. There are chocolate mooncakes, ice-cream mooncakes, green tea mooncakes and …. and….. did someone say angry bird mooncakes? Yes. Now you can eat Angry Birds Mooncakes too! Rovio has released Angry Bird Mooncakes just in time for this year’s Mooncake Festival on 12 September, 2011.

Angry Birds Mid Autumn Festival

Picture Source: M.I.C Gadget

Angry Birds Mooncake

Picture Source: M.I.C Gadget

And while you are busy munching on your mooncake, you could sit back and watch your little ones play with that Angry Bird Lantern under the moonlit night.

Angry Bird Lantern

Picture Source: SueM11

Help! The Angry Birds have taken over earth! And now they’re headed for the moon!

Happy Mooncake Festival Everyone!

I remember we used to have Home Science classes when I was in lower Secondary school. Oh how we loved those classes! What did they teach us during Home Science? We had to split ourselves into two groups and alternate. One group would learn cooking and baking while the other group learns tailoring.

For the tailoring class, first, we had to learn to make an apron and a cap for our cooking class. Then we learned to patch torn clothing, we learned to sew zippers and buttons and how to cut and sew a blouse with embroidery and lace. We even learned smocking and made a little girl’s dress and our tailoring class teacher taught us cross stitch. It was amazing how much we learned. And it was so much fun. Our sewing class was just upstairs from the cooking class which was fully equipped with many ovens for baking cakes. The sewing class had many sewing machines. Towards the end of the class we would be able to smell all the foods that the cooking class group had cooked up as the smells wafted in through the windows.

For the cooking class, we had to first learn some simple housekeeping. We learned to make beds, hospital style, we learned to polish silver and brass, we learned the way to wash and dry different types of materials with special care for wools and silks. Then we learned cooking. We learned to cook all sorts of dishes and we learned to bake using different styles. I remember I was cooking sweet and sour fish once and my fish was undercooked. Before the teacher checked my fish, I quickly slipped it into the fryer for a second round of frying secretly. Haha. We learned to make all sorts of local foods including nasi lemak wrapped in a banana leaf (we had to go hunting for the banana leaves, then we learned that we had to quickly dip them into hot water so that they became flexible and would not break) and local delicacies or kuih.

Another time, my cupcakes was overbaked. We learned to hide our burnt biscuits etc. It was very enjoyable. We even had to sit for a cooking exam. My question was to cook for a cooking competition so layout was very important. Dad had to go and buy me some special plates so that I could present them nicely. I still have the plates to this day! I cooked my sweet and sour fish then but by then I had mastered it. Then I carefully decorated my food and placed them at different heights during display.

I really miss my home science classes in school. It has given me many lovely memories of school.

My favourite subjects in school were Home Science, English, Art, Chemistry and Biology. I hated History and Physics. What is your favourite subject in school?

Now that the kids are older, they are able to watch many more types of shows than just Barnie the purple dinosaur types of shows.

So, what we’ve done is buy old movies that we used to love watching and watch them with the kids.

At the moment, we’re watching Star Trek. We’ll be watching Indiana Jones next. We’ve watch ET and some others and we would probably get The Neverending Story, Ghost Busters, Star Wars and more.

Most of these movies are 80s movies but they’re still nice to watch.

It is really enjoyable to watch old movies with the kids. Not only do they enjoy it, we get to enjoy it too.