Friday Last Week

R and I took leave from work on Friday last week. We got up early and brought WY and WF to Toa Payoh. After a quick bite at McDonald's (at WF's suggestion), WY sped off to his piano teacher's house for his lesson.

Then R, WF and I went to a wet market in Lorong 2 to grab some handmade 包子 for the colleague who had just given me (and another colleague) a treat at Shang Palace the day before. Whilst at the market, I also picked up a new potted plant for my office table and a bottle of flower-enhancing hormone for our collection of potted plants in my office.

After that, we returned to the piano teacher's place to pick WY up before dashing over to my office. My colleague, who is a big fan of the Toa Payoh 包子, was more than thrilled to receive the snacks for her breakfast. She later told me that she took some of the 包子 for lunch that day as well!

Then, we raced to KHS as fast as we could - WY had arranged for a meeting with his project partner for a discussion on their toy-making project (due for completion and submission soon after the March school holiday). R and I were scheduled to meet WY's form teacher for the Parents-Teacher-Meeting to discuss WY's performance in class and his progress so far.

Our original plan was to first send WF home to stay with Mother for the morning, before we all went to KHS. But somehow, we were behind time and so eventually, R drove WF back home only after dropping WY and I at KHS. R returned to KHS to join me for the PTM only later.

WY's project partner failed to turn up at the agreed time for the discussion. What a letdown! WY ended up playing hopscotch with a classmate in the school's parade square instead. Whilst waiting for our turn to see the teacher, I visited the book fair at the school canteen. The Chinese readers recommended by the CL Department seemed interesting and relatively easy to read, and so I bought 4 titles for WY to 'try'.

The review session with the teacher lasted about only 10 minutes, but those 10 minutes felt very long and 'heavy'. I don't know about R (who was on his hp half the time!), but I came out feeling quite crestfallen. Sigh, I hope WY wises up very soon.

On our way home after the PTM, we made a detour to the bookdrop at the library at GE. It is goood that these days, NLB allows us to return the library materials to any branch regardless of where we had borrowed the items from. This 24/7 bookdrop system is one truly useful improvement from the old library practice.

When we reached home, we got the boys to shower. When everyone was ready, R, WY, WF and I set off for the 3:20pm screening of the movie 'The Water Horse' at Kallang. The movie had a very touching story. I enjoyed it.

By the time the show ended, it was almost 5:30pm. Whilst driving out from Kallang, we decided to go check out Courts and Ikea at Tampines for 1) materials for WY's project and 2) ideas on how best to re-organise the room for Mother's occupation. We wanted to see if other options (apart from fixing built-in wardrobes) were available or more suitable for us.

Courts was a little disppointing - they had nothing much to offer because their range of wardrobes etc was rather limited. Quality also seemed rather poor. The only saving grace was that the service staff were quite polite and ready to answer our queries. We left after a while and headed for Ikea next door.

As we were all quite hungry by then, we decided to have our dinner at the Ikea restaurant before doing anything else. Prices of the food there have rocketed since the last time we visited. Sigh.

At Ikea, R and I browsed the many storage and wardrobe systems available. We even went through some options for bookshelves and tried to visualize if these could be adapted for use as wardrobes etc! Some of the systems we examined were attractive and affordable but we weren't sure whether they were really suitable for our purposes, and so we didn't decide on any particular item.

R and WY later also scoured the children's area and the home decor area for suitable materials for WY's project. By then, it was almost 10pm and poor WF had already fallen asleep in the shopping trolley. We headed for home soon after payment. The carpark at Courts was almost deserted by that time.

We finally went to bed after our shower about half hour past midnight. ZZzzzz....