December 2016

Since we got married, SO and I had only had a couple of Christmases in Australia. But after Jay came along, we decided to try to go there as much as possible. This year is only the third time that we haven’t gone back since he was born. The first time I’ve already written about. The second was the year my brother got married in Canada and we spent a month there with him and his new wife earlier in the year and didn’t want to take more time off work. This year we were just too busy to take time off and travel. This post though, is about times we did go there. read more

Since it’s almost Christmas, I’ve been thinking of the past and specifically of Jay’s first Christmas. Since he was born in the first half of November, he was only around 6 weeks old when Christmas arrived that year. Also, since he was adopted, we had spent most of that time finalising the adoption and organising his trip to Singapore to join us here.

As it turned out, his adoption was finalised about a week before Christmas Day, but then we also had to get him a passport so that he could actually travel. Because of work, this task fell to SO, while I stayed in Singapore.  SO went to Jakarta, where Jay was being looked after by her family, and went to work getting all the paperwork organised and applying for his passport. By some miracle, and SO’s extraordinary powers of manipulation, I mean hard work, she’s not manipulative at all, she managed to get the passport on Christmas Eve. read more

In last week’s article I started to talk about our trip to Legoland Malaysia, if you haven’t read it yet you can check it out here.

When I left off we had just headed down to dinner. There’s not much to say about it other than it was a buffet, which is something Jay always likes. The food was okay, but not as good as you would expect from an expensive hotel, particularly the western dishes. The Asian dishes were better, which is common in Asia with the western dishes never as good as what we get back home, unless you’re really willing to pay for it. read more

Jay’s school holidays started a few weeks ago and as an extra birthday present we decided to take him to Legoland just over the border in Malaysia. For those who don’t know Singapore, it has their long summer (it’s always summer here) holidays in November and December, 6 weeks of no school, and return to classes at the beginning of January. We’d taken him there earlier in the year on a one day trip, but this time we decided to spend the night at the Legoland Hotel and spend one day at the theme park and the other at the water park. read more