Goodies from Taiwan

Jake brought back a lot of goodies from his Taiwan/HK trip few months back. As I promised K, this post is ultimately for her.
heheh. I photographed the ones that I could and some were eaten before I could photograph them.

A trip to Taiwan can never be complete without the pineapple tart, also known as 凤梨酥。Apparently the ones here are from some famous shop (or so they claim in all their shops;P )
Then Jake brought me my beloved cuttlefish snacks, in 6 formats, like barbecued, chilli, shredded, etc...HMMMMMM....I can feel the pimple surfacing as I type this.

Then he got some Wing Wah mooncakes from Hong Kong before he came back. The turqoise and purple boxes are new format in 'bite size' format. It was aptly named in Chinese /Cantonese 一口饼。The tin box is of coz their traditional mooncake. Just lotus paste as we don't want the mooncake to get confiscated at the customs. Btw, the flavour for the bite size format were green tea and black sesame flavour.

Then it is some lion biscuits. It comes very attractively packaged, and inside, it was a lion mould with red bean paste filling. Pretty nice. (see picture below for the biscuit itself)

There's also the beef jerky. Yum...so juicy and sweet. They were gone in no time.

Finally below is some prawn crackers from KaoHsiung or Tainan if I am not mistaken. They are pretty good. It comes in dry format and has to be deep fried much like the ones we buy from Mukah. These ones have a very different flavour from the Mukah ones. They also disappear as quickly as they appear.

The Making of the Kitchen Pt 2

Found this photographs I took of Dad building the kitchen for N. Initially he built it the counter top to be 30inch high (we didn't think 30 inches was high but in reality it was way too high for N). He would have to stand on at least 2 steps to play on it. So Dad modified it to fit to N's height better.

Blocks

Jake got Abel a bucket of these blocks from Kmart. They came in various shapes and the lid also functions as a shape sorter. On this ocassion, Noel actually sorted all the cylinders in a straight row and started counting and saying the colours of the cylinders. then he sorted out the squares and built some sort of fort. It was fascinating watching him concentrate in his play.

It all started with this...

This year I have done a lot more baking than my previous 2 years combined. It all started with this self-crusting tart (I've written about it in the blog before). Anyhow, the ex-workplace was organising a Masterchef bake-off at work. One can either enter sweet or savoury category. Butter, Block cheese or ricotta cheese are provided. To cut story short, me and A were enlisted into the bake-off. So I baked them the night before and brought it to work to be judged by internal judge-s and the internal judges picked 5 shortlists for each category. The tart made it through the shortlist and then I found out the final judge was Simon Gault (one of the NZ masterchef judge) EIks. He told us to bring each of the dish to him and we were to pose just like the contestants in the TV show. He asked me a list of questions. I was very flattered when he said he would happily eat the tart on his lunch time :) I came runner-up. *grin..

Tunnel

Lots of laughter can be heard when they crawled through the caterpillar tunnel.

Toy Story ride-on

Abel received this cute ride-on from Aunt L for his first birthday.

Abel's 1st birthday

after 8 months delay ;P here's a snapshop of abel's 1st birthday. it was to be held at the beach but it was rainy the day before and very windy on the day so 3 hours before birthday started, we decided to have it at home. After plenty of sms-es, and phonecalls, emails, everybody arrived at our place. because his birthday was very close to chinese new year, we dressed the boys up in the chinese costumes.
p/s: sal, thanks for your banner template !! I got lots of comments about the banner.

Blue Hippo

I noticed there's only a handful of posts about Abel :P we took lots of picture of him but it just never got to the klog.
Abel here practising to walk on the Blue Hippo. I am not usually fan of plastiky toy but have to admit this one attracts the little ones. it chomps on things to and will come through its stomach.

Fireman Noel in action

This picture is taken late summer. Noel had been asking me to get him a fireman hat and I found one from Bargain City. Here, he brought it to the playground and pretend he was Fireman Noel in action.

Thomas, Lightning McQueen or...

Me: Noel, would you like Thomas or Lightning McQueen scooters?

N: or Dora? I saw Dora in there (referring to the Toy brochure)

Me: But Dora is pink.

N: I like pink, Mum.

Me: Pink is for girls.

N: (no answers, just busy slathering more bubbles on himself)

Now, why is it okay for men to wear pink shirts but it sounds or look so wrong for little boys to use pink bicycles or scooters? and Why do the manufacturer had to colour the scooter all pink and put picture of Dora on it? Why can't there be green scooter with picture of Dora on it.

Thanks Godma for the awesome car

I am sitting on 9 months of backlog. Yikes. Here, Noel is enjoying Godma's present. A little sporty racing car.
Unfortunately, the poor car didn't have a very long life. First, N found out where I hid the remote and got hold of the remote and played with it (of course when I was not home) and he broke the antenna. Anyways now he or Abel played with the remote and the car on separate occasion. Pretending it's one of their tool ...

Rite of passage

You might recall Noel used to tag along to the ocassional orchid meeting and he used to keep himself entertained with this trolley.
During my last meeting for the year (Christmas-do), I brought abel along, and it was almost like a rite of passage for them. Abel also checked out the trolley and he tried to push the trolley and follow what his big brother was doing.

BD Kindy

One of the kindy that N is attending. Some of the features that he loved was the zoom slider, and the giant sandpit. When I dropped him off one afternoon, he showed me around to the animals, and music corner where his favourite cymbal is. There're lots of animals at kindy too. There's the guinea pigs grotto, Lucy the rat, the budgies, Franklin the tortoise, the big gold fish. Above, pics of some of the resident pets.

Piano duet

Piano duet featuring N and C. (more like banging the keys) I am secretly hoping that both my boys will be able to learn piano and someday play a duet for me.

Kindy's Birthday at cockle bay

Noel's kindy celebrated its 15th birthday at the local beach. We had fish and chip for lunch followed by playing at the playground. At about 2pm, they had cake cutting. N was thrilled with it. A did pretty well. They both climbed trees. And N had a piece of birthday cake.

N's automobile

N has been asking me to make him a car. So here's my attempt. It survived his driving for good number of weeks before he told me that A has tore parts of the car off. He now wants me to make him a fire engine. It's still sitting in my to-do list as I can't find my pen-knife.

More sightings of Spidey...

Sightings of Spidey in the house

N received this Spiderman suit from his uncle and R during his birthday. He's donned the costume and did all sorts of things in it.

Arrrrr....

I was putting the laundry on the clothes line on the weekend. N was entertaining himself near me. He then said the following which made me laugh.

N: Mom, look, I found some money. (10cent coin from the lawn) It is a treasure. I am like a pirate. ARrrrrr...Arrrrr...

Pulling up

Abel pulled himself up in his cot. It was the first time I saw him pulling himself up. I quickly ran to get my camera and captured the moments. Oh boy, they are growing so fast.


Note: Pic taken in late November

Jesus, there's something about that name

This year the choir did a cantata called Jesus, there's something about that name on Christmas eve. Our theme was black and gold. Praise the lord, the turn out was nearly 400. I took this pic off another choir member's facebook. The pic brought back memory of when I was in the St Rita choir. Any one of you recall the presentation we did at the Public Library?

Trip to the Hardware store

Who would have thought you get so much thrill from going to hardware shop? Not just any hardware store. It has to be one that comes with kid-sized trolley. I managed to talk dad into building a kitchen for Noel so we made several trips to Bunnings buying materials. We get our ideas and inspiration from Ohdeedoh Here we were shopping for some nails, woods etc.I 'll be posting more pics of the project.
(Project completed last April). Sorry I had been super slow at posting things. Resolution for the year, to post /update blogs in a more timely manner.

Counting and Sorting

I didn't really use flash cards with Noel when he was younger. I read in several places that flash cards don't necessarily work. Anyways, now that N is older, flash cards are good. He would sort them and tell me about the card. Here he sorts out the 3 sets of cards he has and he recites the number as he sorts them. After he completed the task, he said to me, "Mommy, say Good Counting, Noel"!!!!

Trip to the library

Brought the boys to the library and above N doing the puzzles. Abel is busy playing with the bead counter thingie. Pic taken when N turned 3 and A would be 9 mths then.