I'm a full-time mummy

We received a tube of Play-Doh Party pack recently and got ourselves busy to roll and flattened and shape creative stuff. Being a parent who simply loves to use whatever we have on hand and to teach whenever the opportunity arises, I immediately got our kiddos to do the following before opening the Play-Doh party pack. I asked our 6.5 year old boy to count how many mini tubs of Play-Doh there are in the party pack. Then I asked both our 6.5 year old boy and our 4 year old girl to name the colours of the Play-Doh in the party pack.

The usage guide for the Play-Doh is for children 2+ years but I do let our youngest kiddo (turning 2 years old on 30th Sept) try out since her older siblings are enjoying themselves with the Play-Doh. However, the attention span from our 2 year old is really short and she left our play table in few minutes time to play with other things hahaha.

This is what our 6.5 year old boy did...

This is what our 4 year old girl did...

And this is what their 35 year old mummy did.. don't laugh!

And this is the result of teamwork between all of us! Fruits you can find in Malaysia!

Durian, apple, mangoesteens, banana, strawberry and grapes!

Our kiddos rolled and mixed the dough colors while I made the harder ones like durian and banana.

Between 1st to 27th September 2015 at Ground Floor HighStreet 1 Utama shopping mall, adults and children alike get the opportunity to create their own Malaysia-inspired masterpieces out of Play-Doh. The most creative sculptures will get to win exciting Play-Doh prizes! On top of that, on 26th Sept, you also get the chance to participate in The Malaysia Book of Records attempt for the most Play-Doh sculptures created in a single day.

I received no monetary compensation for this review, I was provided with the products in order to facilitate my review. All opinions expressed in this post are my own. Please do your own research when purchasing products, as your opinions may differ from mine.  

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I came across this article which I must definitely share with you guys as I'm very interested to know your thoughts on this. For your convenience, I have copied the excerpts from the article here:

"...however tricky it may be to master the art of tying shoelaces, an expert has warned that parents should not take the easy way out by repeatedly buying their offspring velcro or slip-on shoes.

Ian Fieggen, who is known as Professor Shoelace, said children were getting worse at the practice because they were being allowed to avoid it. There was some research that looked into the fact that children were learning these things later in life because they were able to put them off," he said. "Parents are able to give their kids velcro shoes so they can delay these developmental milestones. "This is actually a problem because it's not just that they can't tie their shoe laces but they no longer have gone through a difficult thing to learn and found that OK, it does sometimes take a lot of work to learn something."

A report published in 2013 showed that few children had managed to learn the skill before the age of six, with many still having difficulty until the age of nine or ten when they started getting interested in sport. The findings represented a major shift in social habits. Just thirty years ago, being able to tie shoelaces was regarded as a skill to be learnt by the age of four, but changes in shoe design and footwear fashions mean the skill is no longer essential until much older.

Mr Fieggen, who has written a book on the subject called Laces and has a website dedicated to the art, acknowleged that children have different learning styles and that a technique that works for one might be too hard to grasp for another.

He advised parents who were struggling to teach their children to mark a pair of shoelaces so they know which parts need to be held and which parts need to be lined up with each other. He also suggested getting two different coloured laces to help those who struggle with left and right. "

I personally only started wearing shoes with laces in my teens years, in terms of convenience, I feel shoes without laces are far more easier to use and care for. I remembered the days of needing to take out the laces to wash the shoes and laces, scrubbing the laces hard to wash off the dirt and then threading it back.

As a parent to 3 kiddos with age range of 2 to 6.5 years old, I'm still comfortable with our kiddos wearing Velcro shoes. What more after reading articles where people get injured when their shoelaces get stuck in escalators. I guess for my stand, I'm not avoiding, just delaying until our kiddos are much more older (probably 8-9 years old?) But that's just my personal opinions.

How about you? What do you think?

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I have been sharing some of my favorite angpow pieces on an angpow collectors group in Facebook and some members have been telling me to continue sharing my memorable stories and so I thought, why not write it down, that way, our kiddos can read about it when they grow up next time, eh?

For those of you who are not familiar or never heard of the words 'Angpow' (also known as 'ang pau', 'ang pao', 'angpau'), here is a quick definition:

Angpow = Red Packet (filled with cash inside) given during festivals

So for today's angpow story, it comes from this piece of lovely angpow:

See that 2 stools around the table at the upper portion on the angpow? The one on the left is rounded, foldable stool with metal legs while the one of the right is a square wooden stool.

I remembered having one of the rounded foldable stool at my home last time. Very exciting as you don't know which direction it folded back to (well, I was young and not that genius to figure out the mechanism)

As for the square wooden stool, I don't think we own any as the ones we have were rounded base, but nevertheless, they were still a nice and simple furniture back then.

It was a luxury and prestige thing to sit on a rounded wooden stool when I was young every time we go back kampung as I was still very short and my late grandma had this giant round foldable table.

My family usually get to sit at the table during CNY gathering and I felt so grown up sitting on one but not able to pick up or reach any dishes on the giant table, so always ended up my late mum will choose my dishes and put on my plate - like princess being served hahahah...

** Note: I have disabled the commenting feature on my blog engine thanks to all the spammers who happily spam my blog every day. If you wish to ask me any questions, you can find me at my Facebook page (I'm there almost everyday) or just drop me an email if you wish to maintain some anonymity.