Mich’s Journeys

G’day from Sydney! Here for about 3 weeks now and slowly getting familiar with the place. Almost done with the unpacking of our shipped items from SG, just need to figure out where it will all go. Mum is also here helping us ease in to our routines, she’ll be flying back to Manila next month. One drawback to our place now is that there are no malls nearby, the nearest mall is three stations away by train but we do get most of our food and supplies in the neighborhood stores.

Some of the stuff in out things to do list:

• buy a dresser, tv stand, altar stand, book case, shoe racks
• finalise preschool for E, check into the other preschool which is a bit further away
• research car options

Some of our pics:

Braving the cold while waiting for the train. Di naman halatang nilalamig na kami di ba?!	market day
Still a train station shot, this one on our way home from Ikea. Parang naglalayas si E.	@ North Sydney, waiting for Ichi to finish work
Posing muna kahit hirap na sa maraming dala!
Train station pa din, this time with mumsy.

Nowadays, this is one of E’s favorite phrase.

Me: E, time to take a bath
E: mommy. 5 minutes.

Me: brush your teeth
E: 5 minutes

Me: playtime is finished. put away your toys.
E: mommy, 5 minutes.

It’s becoming his standard answer. If only he really knew how long a minute is.

E likes to help us “clean” around the house. These pics were taken during a break from sorting our things for packing. Some times it’s funny to see him do these things but other times it’s a test of your patience especially when you’re trying to finish all the chores and he ends up making you do more cleaning. I just hope that when it’s time for him to do chores around the house he would be just as eager.

Disclaimer: No child was harmed in the making of this blog entry.

Panalo ang passport pic ni little boy. Whenever someone sees it, they always comment on how cute he is. They can’t help it! hahahaha!! di naman obvious na proud ano?!!

Been tagged by marikit mom, Thanks Tin!

Here’s the drill started by Mitch of When Silence Speaks:

If you still keep your baby’s first 3 days photos, I We would love to see them. Label them as 1st, 2nd or 3rd day (as shown below). After that, please post the most recent one, one photo will do. You can post as much as you want though. I’m sure you will realize and tell yourself “seems like yesterday“.

THEN

Day One - getting cleaned up.

Day Two - at the nursery, he already scratched his cheeks.

Day Three - first day at home.

NOW

opening his presents last christmas

playing with his dada @ changi’s budget terminal

at our condo

tagging margaux & bianca’s mommy jody, franco & simon’s mommy april, and asha’s mommy nympha.

While in Manila last January, my mom took us to dinner at Metrowalk and we saw that they had a dolphin show there (Wonderful World of Dolphins) and of course E wanted to see the show. It was a bit pricey though at P300/head, and at the same rate for both adults and kids but we still watched since the guama wanted to please the apo hehe. So we watched the show with I think about less than 40 people in attendance. But the good thing about it was E got chosen to go up for the sea lions, he didn’t know what was gonna happen that’s why when the sea lion kissed him he didn’t like it. As soon as he stepped off the stage until he got back to his seat, he was wiping off his cheek with his hands and saying “eeww!”. After the show though when they were announcing that you can have your picture taken with the dolphin, E immediately told me that he wanted to do that. And after asking him a number of times if he really wanted it (obvious ba na ayaw ko nung una kasi may bayad eh :p) we queued up. And yes, we ended up buying his pic with the sea lion as well.

We celebrated E’s birthday last January in Manila. At first we thought of planning a big party (this would be the first time we would celebrate his birthday in Manila with our families) but we opted to just throw him a simple birthday dinner. Good thing my BIL’s wife has a restaurant (Tony’s Bar & Grill along Mindanao Avenue) so we just reserved the function room and ordered a buffet dinner.

One thing we had to take care of before going home to the province for the new year was to order E’s birthday cake. So off we went to Goldilocks at Trinoma. After going through the cakes album, we decided on getting him a Cars-themed cake and had E choose which design he wanted.

On the day of his birthday he was so excited to get his cake that when we loaded the cake in the car he kept peeking around the tissue cover. He had lots of fun at the party running around with his cousins and playing with his uncles. I think the most fun was when blowing out the birthday candles. He had so much fun hearing everyone sing him the birthday song and knowing that once the song was finished he would get to blow out the candles that we did it five times.

Here are some of the pics:

with ichi’s fam	with my fam
with my cute goddaughter A	e with his godsister T
singing happy birthday	blowing his cake
E was super happy with the birthday song and blowing of the candles that we did it 5 times
birthday boy	family pic
family friends	with hs friends
lim cousins
getting the cars	E with his uncles, cousins and godsister

more pics here.

Last Saturday, we brought E to a trial class at My Gym. I was a little concerned with how he’ll do as this is the first class he’ll be attending but as it turns out he had fun. He did look a little confused at the start, trying to take everything in but he slowly loosened up and you can tell that he really liked his teachers. But the most fun he had was with the puppet fishes the teachers were using to signal the end of the class. He was really laughing out loud. Hopefully with this he can get used to attending a class for a specified time and learning to get along with other kids too. We did enroll him and next week he’s already looking forward to the stamps (on his hands) he’ll get after class.

I last posted about this a couple months ago and I was really hoping then that by now we would be done with the diapers even if only for daytime. Unfortunately at the time we weren’t able to continue with the training, i think we stuck with it for about 2 days only. Stuff came up along with our preps for our Manila vacation that we postponed training, excuses excuses I know!!!

Anyways, since we got back from Manila, we started trying to train E. So it’s now been 10 days of bringing him to the potty every hour or so to try to get him to pee and poo in the potty. And yesterday was the first time that I got him to pee in the potty with the whole day “accident”-free. You should’ve seen me with the praises that I heaped on him, grabe after all the recent days’ frustrations about it. But you still have to anticipate when he’s going to go or you’ll end up wiping the floor. Still it is a step towards being diaper free. Hopefully, tuloy-tuloy na ito kasi pag hindi maloloka na ako! hahaha!

We spent new years in the Philippines this year and on my mother-in-law’s side of the family the tradition is to ring in the new year at ichi’s grandfather’s province in Nueva Ecija. Growing up in the Philippines you always ring in the new year with firecrackers and fireworks and with ichi’s side it’s no different. Every year my brother-in-law (BIL) is tasked with buying the fireworks, the aunts and uncles would just give him a budget but this year they forgot that my BIL and his wife were not going back as they’re on their 8th month of pregnancy. So some of the cousins made a quick run the afternoon of December 31st to Bulacan to purchase some fireworks. E had a lot of fun watching the fireworks, he wouldn’t even let me cover his ears, telling me that it wasn’t loud at all.

Here’s a short clip of one of the fireworks.