Gareth's day part 1

Alright! Finally got round to writing about the one-on-one days that I had with my kids!

First up was Gareth, on the Tuesday of my week of leave in September, during the school holidays. His day was broken up into 2 halves, a Tuesday afternoon, and a Saturday morning, because I had gotten tickets to the Singapore Toy, Game and Comic Convention on that Saturday, but we couldn't stay the whole day because he had guitar lessons in the afternoon, and we had church in the evening.

So at about noon on Tuesday, full of enthusiasm and excitement, we drove down to Vivo city, planning to get a quick lunch, then go down to Sentosa, because Gareth wanted to go to the beach(the boy can't get enough of it). After we parked, he happily opened the car door and swung it open.....hard. I heard a bang and felt my heart sink. The car door on his side had hit the adjacent car, and made a significant dent in its door. I tried my best not to explode fully, and I think I did a pretty good job, I didn't shout or scream, but I couldn't really hide my dismay, and the poor boy looked downcast. I left a note on the windscreen of the said car, we finished our lunch, and then came back to the carpark. At the time, the owner had not returned. Just as I was inspecting the note again, to make sure I had written it properly, the owner came back. I explained the situation, and all things considered, he didn't take it too badly, but I could see he was upset. Well, who wouldn't be? Anyway, he said he would bring the car to his workshop, and would inform me about the repair cost. I was painfully aware that it was a pretty new car, and had an idea that it was going to cost a fair bit.

But at least there was some resolution in sight. I tried to be more positive, and it must have rubbed off on Gareth, because soon he had practically forgotten about the whole thing. We got to the beach, and had a great time. The thing about one-on-one outings with your kids(especially when you have a lot), is that you get to focus all your attention on that one kid, and it was great! I built sandcastles with him, buried his legs in the sand, and basically just spent a great time together.

We even found time to cross the bridge to that little island on the lagoon, billed as the southermost tip of the peninsula.

There were many great memories, even the little things left a great impression, like catching sight of schools of fish in the water as we were walking across the bridge. It was interesting because there were 3 distinct schools with different sizes of fish, one school with tiny fish, one with slight larger, and another with larger still fish. And there were a couple of big fishes swimming around. So we made up a story about these fishes being in primary school(school? get it? huh? huh? clever right?), secondary school, and JC, and the couple of big fishes were teachers. And the schools of bigger fishes looked like they were "scaring" the tiny fish, chasing and scattering them intermittently. It was just a silly moment, but it was a great memory.

I think when there's only one kid, and I'm devoting all my time to him, the memory of the time spent becomes deeper, sharper, whereas with all the kids at once, everything's just a blur. 

Anyway, in the later part of the evening, we still found time to take the skyline cable car(or whatever it's called), to take the luge ride.

The cable ride was crazy scary. We only had an iron bar thingy protecting us from falling to our doom, with our legs dangling in mid air. There was once a time when I would have found this thrilling, but I'm getting too old for this.

The luge ride was quite fun. We bought tickets for 2 rides(that's the minimum). Gareth caught on quickly, and he went very fast down the hill, almost overturning a couple of times in his attempts to stave off my pursuit. In the first ride, I could catch up with him quite easily, but on the second ride, I couldn't overtake him. 

By that time, it was late evening, and after stopping for some ice cream, we drove off to pick up the rest of the kids and mummy. I could see that he really enjoyed himself, and truly, that was a wonderful feeling. The car dent didn't really put a dent(heh heh) on the day's fun.

Checking in

Arrgh, not again! The time flies swifter than the dragons in Game of Thrones. It's been almost 2 months since I last posted. There's just been so many things happening. On a normal day, there's already hardly much time for anything else. On top of that, responsibilities at work take up a significant amount of time, and recently, the kids have started falling ill with viral infection one after another. Everything's a blur at the moment.

We did an interesting thing recently, though. I took a week's leave early in September, and my wife and I, we were trying out this concept about me spending one-on-one time with the kids. They don't get to see me much in the weekdays because I'm at work, and when we do have time together, we largely spend it as a whole family. So we were thinking, I would spend some individual time with each of the kids during the week I was on leave. We would plan what they want to do, and I would  do it with them the whole day, each kid having one whole day.

It was a wonderful success.

A lot of great memories were made, it was amazing. We all had great fun.

I'll write about this in the next post. Want to put in the pics that we took, but it's late now, there's another long week ahead, so I'll have to put this off a bit longer. Will come back soon, though.