Ashley's 1st Birthday

WARNING: This post may contain too much PINK!!

The birthday bashes in the Rose residence have started. We have all the kids birthdays within the next month! Busy busy busy! It's celebration time!!

I had thought about some options for Ashley's birthday venue. We could have done a nice picnic/BBQ party outside by the pool but since the management has introduced "no decoration around the pool/BBQ area??" It put me off the idea of having her 1st celebration there. Having more than 3 families visit our apartment is quite a challenge - I do miss the huge house we had in Brunei on these occasions. We have a great facility here - renting out a function room for only $20 for half a day (we ended up renting it for the whole day, but still very cheap!). We didn't invite many people but we thought it would give us more room and the kids will be much happier.

The function room is quite a good size but without something in the middle I thought it will be too empty. So - what did we come up with? Ha ha ha! A bouncy castle for the kids! I really wanted a girly PINK castle to add to the party theme but it was too tall :( We ended up with this one - the colour didn't matter to the kids of course! They loved it.

I have done lots of pinning on Pinterest to get inspiration and ideas for the first PINK PARTY. Despite the rushing last minute jobs I think it came together all right in the end.  Here are the proud parents waiting for the guests to arrive :)

The snack table:

The birthday girl? She was very excited from the morning and missed her morning nap so by the time we got her in her party dress she was too exhausted. Arriving to her party asleep...

While the birthday girl was asleep the other kids had loads of fun. They jumped, ran, screamed and enjoyed the games we played.

The adults enjoyed some afternoon tea:

 I am not quite sure why Stefan was on the floor...? I guess because he is Stefan!?

Finally I could relax!

I was worried Ashley won't wake up and miss the whole party. But she woke up quite cheerful and happy :) :)

She finally got to sit in her birthday chair:

The PINK guests: 

With mummies special friends:

Beauty and the beasts??

Time for the PINK birthday cake:

All the little friends helped Ashley open her presents:

Time to say good bye to the bouncer - even packing up was fun!

I fell in love with these gorgeous party favours when I saw them on Etsy - little PINK personalised bracelet with a tiara. So cute! You can even order the matching ones for the girl's little teddy bears or baby dolls too. I think I will place another order once Ashley is keen to play with her teddy.

I had only 4 boys at the party including my own ones. The older boys got some lego figurines and the little ones got mini airplanes. I think everyone was happy :)

So that was our daughters special 1st birthday. I am already looking forward to her next one. Don't get me wrong, I love doing the boys ones too but it was certainly very special to organise a PINK girly party!!

Happy Birthday our beautiful Ashley! We love you so much xxx

Time to say good bye

Boooooo :(

Isabel left this morning...
I am already looking forward to our next catch up. It was so nice to have you here again.
Thank you so much for visiting us xxx

Isabel

Yes! She arrived here on Tuesday morning from Brunei. She was here to do some more self enrichment courses and of course to attend Ashley's 1st birthday! Hooray!

Straight away it was time for us girls to hit the shopping malls!

We explored VivoCity which is one of my favourite places to shop here in Singapore. The mall is huge so we needed to walk around a bit to get to the shops we like but it has all the same shops we want on Orchard. Plus we are in the aircon all the time instead of sweating away going up and down the road.

We started off with Desigual, my favourite (and Isabel's). It is a Spanish label and their clothes and bags are unique and the colours are so gorgeous! They have redone the little girl's section. Full of super cute things! 

I first encountered this brand when we were in Spain 4 years ago. The clothes I got at that time are still my favourites and I have got lots of complements wearing them. Since then I am in love with their products but they are very expensive here. I think in Spain things were almost half the price!

So we did some research and held off buying. I really hope we can get to Europe this summer so I can shop there instead. I think we spent almost 2 hours just doing this shop and H&M. We also looked for Ashley's birthday party outfit and of course Daiso, the $2 shop. We didn't have much on our lists but we always manage to shop for a long long time :)

Break time:

By the time we got home it was already dinner time. Lucky we have the food court downstairs so I didn't have to cook. The boys had Fish 'n Chips and us adults enjoyed some yummy Indian.

This time Isabel's course was only half a day so we had lots of time to hang around and shop more!

Ashley was showing off her newest skill - standing up by herself for more than 10 seconds :)

We spent another afternoon shopping in our area. Parkway Parade and i12 Katong. Isabel found this gorgeous  pink skirt for Ashley's birthday. It was exactly what I had in mind so I had to get it! I have seen the similar ones online but they were over $100 but this one was only $29.90. It was just wrong not to get it for my daughter's 1st birthday.

Last night we left the kids with Matthew and went out on a movie & dinner date. (thank you honey, so many days in a row you looked after all 3 of them).

Unfortunately the movie we wanted to see was at the wrong time. So instead we watched the silliest movie in a long while. It was called "Walk of Shame" and the story line is like this: 

"A reporter's dream of becoming a news anchor is compromised after a one-night stand leaves her stranded in downtown L.A. without a phone, car, ID or money and only 8 hours to make it to the most important job interview of her life"

See? already sounding pretty bad right? We also watched the trailer shaking our heads... but we just really wanted to go out and watch a movie together. So that's what we did (of course the movie was very very bad!).  

We had to grab a glass of wine afterwards - yes it was that BAD!

I so enjoyed our night out alone. We got to properly sit down and catch up (when we are shopping our minds are somewhere else, you know). I am very lucky to have such a great friend.

Ashley's birthday morning

Unfortunately Matthew couldn't give away his flight so he was already gone to work by the time the kids got up. I managed to put up the birthday bunting and decorate the dining table for the birthday girl. I cannot believe it has been already a whole year since I had her!!!!

We were in a rush to get ready for kindy so there wasn't much time to do anything. I was planning a nice pancake breakfast etc but it didn't happen :(

For sure they were very happy Ashley's birthday was finally here!

The birthday girl:

And the proud brothers:

It was very nice the boys sang Happy Birthday to Ashley :)
Before heading out to school they helped Ashley open some of her presents.

Oliver was very good at helping her.

She got a new teddy bear and 2 sets of clothes for it.

      

We had a nice morning together just the two of us playing with her new teddies etc. But I was very worried if I couldn't get everything done before the party started. I was kind of hoping Matthew wouldn't be flying and we could get most of it done in the morning together. 

With some help we managed to put it together in the end. Bear with me, I will upload lots of photos in the next post. 

Boys Day 2014

Having boys in the family we celebrated another Japanese tradition "Boy's Day / Child's Day" today.

You can see the boys in the previous years on both Singapore Roses and Brunei Roses posts 2013, 2012,  2011 and even 2010. I didn't realise this is my fifth year around to blog about this special day.

However, my last week was very tough so I had nothing organised. Ashley was teething badly and for 3 days she had a very high fever and was up every 20min through the night... and Matthew was away in Japan over the weekend plus I came down with some sort of flu on Saturday night. I was very miserable yesterday morning having all three kids on my own...

Today I am feeling better but still had no energy to do much for the boys. I feel really really bad... I have made some effort each year so that the boys do appreciate having this day :(

They made me smile by remembering two things from last year. On Boy's day 1) you are supposed to decorate the place with koinobori, and 2) sing koinobori song, which they learnt at Japanese kindy. Oliver and Luca sang the song very well.

Very ashamed of myself not doing anything on this special day, we just took them for special lunch at Parkway Parade. They got to order a special set meal each.

I couldn't finish this day without taking any photos of them in their Japanese outfits. So I quickly got them changed before it was Ashley's bedtime. She was a bit tired and wouldn't sit still with the boys hence she is not looking at the camera plus I had to give her a phone to distract her.

My gorgeous boys:

With their little sister:

I tried this new dress on Ashley today. She looked very cute in black & pink:
(familiar outfit Caroline?)

I promise next year will be an extra special one for the boys. Happy Boys day! May this year be another happy one for you.

My girl

I love putting the kids to bed. Of course it means I finally reach the end of my long day, but also I get to talk to each of them with nice cuddles. Them snuggling up to me makes me feel so special.

Luca is extra affectionate when it comes to bed time. Each night he uses so many tricks and gives me nice words to keep me as long as he can. But when it is time to say good night, I say "good night my little boy" - Tonight Luca straight away gave me the biggest cuddle and said "good night my girl,  I will miss you so much"

He is such hard work but he is very very cute.

Another weekend

Somehow Matthew is working most of the weekends at the moment. That means I need to make sure Oliver does all his homework on Saturday morning (it works better when he does all of it in one day and leaves Sunday completely free) and taking all the kids to rugby practice in the afternoon.

Oliver's attitude towards homework has improved so much so I don't mind doing it with him at all. He just sits down without complaining much when it's homework time and starts writing. The amount of time it is taking is almost half since he started at the start of the term.

His writing is getting much neater:

 He enjoys these crafty kind of exercises:

 I am just so impressed with his Chinese writing. Some of the characters he is learning is very advanced for his age if you compare that to Japanese primary school.

He still needs some encouragement when it comes to reading but he is definitely getting better. I have mixed opinions about homework at this age. But it is nice to see what your child is learning and being capable of doing.

In the afternoon someone was extra excited to go to rugby practice as he finally received his team socks (he is still waiting on the shorts) and we got him a pair of brand new Adidas boots. At the shop he was very concerned with getting a cool pair.

He was very cute when he said "look mummy my shoes are so cool and stylish" - yap that's my boy, style is very important!

When we got to the field we found only under 5 and 6 were practicing today. I think all the other ages were away playing games. So the little ones got to use the middle of the field.

 Until... the lightening warning came and we all had to stay by the stand.

This week there were only 6 kids in his team (last week there were 12 of them) which made the practice much smoother and practical.

Oliver just loooooves being a part of the team. We-are-Dragons!

Oliver's supporters enjoyed being outside in the fresh air too.

I really hope Matthew will get some weekends off soon. He is missing out on watching Oliver enjoy playing sports and smiling so much.