What Have I Been Up To?

In DH's words - "I've never seen you so stressed before. You weren't even so stressed when you were doing your Masters (and at the same time being a full-time stay-at-home-mum to DS with no domestic help)". Yep, I think I should get a PhD for this. :)

Since arriving back in Singapore on 8 October, we've had so much running around and "projects" to do. Besides these being part and parcel of settling back into our home and back into Singapore, some "projects" had to be undertaken because we need to fit 2 children into our home. When we left Singapore a year ago, it felt like we only had one child because DD was barely 8 weeks old. She didn't take up much space at 8 weeks - yes, literally! As such, we had to re-arrange the furniture in the house and also re-organise our wardrobes to fit a 2-child household. Also, since the children grow so much in a year, we also had to pack away all the clothes that they have since outgrown.

Here are some home improvement projects that we did in the last 5 weeks:

- added shelvings to both utility room and built-in wardrobes

- packed away all baby stuff including crib, clothing and also maternity clothes

- custom-built a gate to keep our cats out of the bedrooms (we previously had sort of a home-made one, thanks to my handy daddy)

- installed blackout curtains in the kids' room (DS and I would love to sleep in but DD wakes as soon as the sun rises)

- installed insect screens on all bedroom windows

- got someone to service my oven

- packed up our storeroom

- bought a new TV console and cabinets

- bought new cordless telephones (I can't live without cordless phones!)

- bought new stainless steel hanging dish racks to replace those cheap rusted ones that came with the apartment

We also bought a car (woohoo - we ended up with a 7-seater - the Toyota Wish), bought the kids to catch up on all their jabs and brought DS for a thorough eyesight check. Oh, and we also checked out the preschools nearby since we'll like to enrol DS in Nursery 2 next year (he'll be 4 years old next year) and also registered DS for Yamaha's Musical Wonderland, which starts in January. DS has been so excited about his music class and asks me almost everyday when he can start his music class.


Oh, we also re-employed our domestic helper who used to work for us before we went away for a year. We brought her back as a direct hire rather than going through an employment agency and had to do the legwork (eg medical checkup, paperwork with MOM, etc) ourselves.


So, that's some of what we've been up to in the past 5 weeks. The tidiness of our home is still a work in progress and there's still so much to be done. I hope to get most things out of the way by end November, so that we can spend December catching up with friends and family since DH has a week of annual leave then.