The fine city of Singapore

Our trip to Singapore was fun, though low key; it's not that easy to get big adventures together with your boeties being this age - they are very explicit about their needs, without hint of patience, and in Ev's case, need to eat, sleep and take a dump in the nappy somewhat more frequently than helpful. So you shlepp around a lot of stuff, do things in controllable bursts etc. The flat that Jeff and Gill lent us was great; it had a fab pool complex, gardens and a playground.

Big lawns are rare in HK - so the snappers sped around, Ev in particular - did a couple of serious face-plants, which would have cost yards of skin back home - but here didn't matter. We got some pool kit, balls for Ev, goggles for Aiden, and some squirting devices. Other kids took over the squirters, Aiden punted the ball out, and Ev took a shine to the goggles; though he can't swim, or even put his face in the water, so he just felt cool (and wanted to wear them as much as possible. It's a nice pic - see the green eyed monster in the pool behind, waiting. Duuuh dum, duuuh dum, duuuh dum....

We went to the Singapore Zoo which has this huge reputation; I thought the Pretoria Zoo was better, though it was a good zoo. The only pic I got was at the bus-stop - had my hands full making sure Ev didn't pat a Tiger, and stopping Mainland tourists from walking up to where we were sitting and then standing directly in front of Aiden when he was trying to watch the seal show. Grrr.

At night it was pretty straight forward. Get back, shower, give the kids a dose of Sesame Street, sleep; we all slept like logs after all the charging around.

The last night we stayed in a cool hotel on Sentosa Island so that we could clean the flat and still make it to the airport. Aiden and Ev went wild, gave the bed a good jumping on as soon as we arrived. I got Ange in for a pic too. Then later, surprise surprise, it turned into a bit of combat.

The hotel beach was very cool, though manufactured, as it turns out. So the sand was coarse, and not very deep - like if you dug down to build a decent moat for the castle, you hit other sorts of soil - huh?! I've had to travel a long way from my home to really get what is so special about it. Off the "beach" there was a lot of shipping - a LOT of shipping. I like shipping, so no problem, but it kind of clashed (along with Malaysia's petrochemical industry in the background) with the paradise beach look.

Ev pretty much thinks that everything is very cool. He likes "ja" - its his big word - he's up for anything, will try anything, so here's a big holiday smile from the little dude.