Yummy desserts made of fruits!

We haven't been sick for a whole year! Ever since we started eating 50% raw food, we haven't had any medicine or seen any doctor. It's a far cry from how we were two years ago, all of us sick practically every month and having permanent runny noses and chesty coughs. But raw food! Isn't that a little extreme, people ask? Just apples and bananas and salads? Doesn't that make you feel always hungry and cold? And how about cakes and desserts? Well, we do enjoy our occasional beancurd and aloe vera desserts. And there's no shortage of raw desserts! It just needs a little experimentation! Just...

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DIY Toys: Vegetable Dye Playsilks

Playsilks are wonderful open-ended toys. These quintessential Waldorf toys can become dress up toys, hoods, capes, gowns, swirling magic, blazing fires or flowing rivers. We made our own at home, using vegetable dyes. We used: Beetroot (red) Tumeric (yellow) Purple Cabbage (purple) Purple Cabbage and baking soda (green) Here's the tutorial: Bluebirdbaby natural vegetable dye playsilk tutorial I bought the silks from Thaisilks.com and Dharmatrading.com . Thaisilks has 20-25% sales every now and then, if you can wait for them. The 8mm Habotai China silks work...

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The Best Gift a Mother Can Give Her Child

Nope, not breast milk. Not any new-fangled educational toy. Not expensive enrichment brain-boosting classes either. The Best Gift a Mother Can Give Her Child is... a Happy Mother. It sounds simple but it is incredibly hard to do. I learnt it the hard way. And like the last-in-class student, I keep having to re-learn it! When my little girl was born, I thought that by sacrificing my rest/hobbies/me-time/enjoyment,  I was loving her. The resulting stay-at-home-monster that was created soon taught me otherwise. I wondered why I was turning into an frazzled, irritable maniac. So much for...

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Pierce Reservoir

If we haven't already fulfilled our outdoor/nature quota for the day, The Place to go would be Lower Pierce Reservoir to watch the sunset. It's not a far walk from the main road or car park to the grass and water. We like Lower Pierce Reservoir because it has a cosy, kampong feel.  Most of the people there are regulars who go at the same time every evening, so after a while, you'll start to recognise some of them and smile at them! Children will usually be hopping on the rocks, peering at small creatures hidden among the rocks, or rolling on the grass. There are always some men...

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A train-themed birthday party

We had a Gruffalo-themed birthday dinner earlier this year. For the little boy's birthday, he requested a train-themed dinner! It was fun and easy to make using construction paper, a loo roll, 4 bottle caps and a full tissue box - so the tissues could be the smoke! Our tissue-box train pulled carriages of food, chugging over edamame train tracks and past vast banana leaf meadows. After dinner, the children had a craft session to make their own tissue box trains!...

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Mid-Autumn Festival and making snowskin mooncakes!

I'm so blessed to be part of a loving and multi-talented homeschool co-op! We made vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free Snowskin mooncakes during our Mid-Autumn-themed lesson. Each mum contributed something - I did the Chang'E and Mooncake Rebellion stories while the other mums prepared the ingredients, the lantern-making craft, the poems, songs, and food. On my own, I would NEVER have attempted to make mooncakes, but the other mums prepared the glutinous rice snow skin paste and the lotus paste, and all we had to do we to knead them, shape them and put them into the molds. It was so therapeutic...

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How do snails do it?

How do snails do it?  Very. very. slowly. Sometimes, I'm amazed by the little things that children observe but adults miss. The little ones are constantly pointing out the squirrels, garden lizards, frogs, insect nests, and critters that are all around us in the neighbourhood. We spotted this amorous duo making love under the pale moonlight near our apartment. We watched them for a good 10 minutes, but they barely changed position! We often go for slow nature walks together (covering 200m in 30 minutes!) and we take our time to drink in every detail and see who can point out...

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Study: Too Many Structured Activities May Hinder Children's Executive Functioning

Good news for laid-back parents. Study: Too Many Structured Activities May Hinder Children's Executive Functioning  When children spend more time in structured activities, they get worse at working toward goals, making decisions, and regulating their behavior, according to a new study. Instead, kids might learn more when they have the responsibility to decide for themselves what they're going to do with their time.  Psychologists at the University of Colorado and the University of Denver studied the schedules of 70 six-year olds, and they found that the kids who spent more time...

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Affordable Organic Eatery - at last!

We do have bad days. You know the kind of day where everyone wakes up grouchy, anything that can go wrong does, anything that can be broken, spilled or lost does exactly that, the laundry pile towers over us and the sink is so full of dirty dishes that nothing else can go in? On those kinds of days, we eat out. It used to be a tussle between expensive but healthy food (Cedele, SaladStop, Real Food) or cheap but unhealthy, MSG-filled hawker food. We've finally found a vegetarian hawker stall that serves organic food! They serve brown rice, veggies, curry, tau kwa and egg. They use sea salt...

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iHerb shopping list - free shipping to Singapore till 31 July! (Gluten-free, Dairy-free and vegan food)

When I first discovered that my children were allergic to wheat/gluten and dairy, I was at a loss. That basically ruled out almost all biscuits, cakes, pastries, ice-creams... everything that I've thought of as yummy! I scoured the organic and gluten-free sections of Fairprice Finest and Cold Storage and came to the conclusion that wheat-free, dairy-free and nut-free products were usually also TASTE-free and would eventually render me SAVINGS-free. The next few years were spent doing lots of research on diet, health, digestion and recipes, and I came to the following conclusions: 1. iHerb...

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