Technically we don’t celebrate Christmas. No Christmas tree in our living room and obviously no gift-wrapped boxes to trip over, though I do occasionally scare the neighbors with my rendition of a Christmas carol or two.

But ’tis something about the holiday season with its giant Christmas trees and glittery mall atmosphere that compels people us to buy up the shops and eat too much even if it’s none of our business .

But hey, celebrating is good for the soul. We’ll find any excuse to celebrate ! Over the years, it’s become customary for me to prepare a Christmas meal of something that our family of picky eaters love to eat.

This year, we decided to drool over photos of our previous years’ roast turkeys instead of actually filling our kitchen with the aroma of a real turkey roasting in the oven. I’m boycotting the rip-off price of frozen turkeys which has gone up 3x over what we paid 2 years ago!

Instead I roasted a chicken (recipe here) and 3 drumsticks with mashed potatoes and brown gravy, roasted baby carrots, corn on the cob and garden salad with ham and 1000 island dressing. For drinks, we had blackcurrant juice with lychee. Delish! even if I do say so myself, muahaha.

Today is Boxing Day. We’ve been good and stayed home all of yesterday. This morning, we decided to drop in at dh’s office. I’m not sure what happened while Steev and I were at the cafe bar, but by the time we got back, the girls had obviously charmed their Daddy into taking us to The Ship for lunch.

At The Ship, a cute surprise came with our lunch. The waiter popped a little Christmas present in front of each of us! You should’ve seen the girls’ eyes light up! Off came the wrappers and… snow globes!!! Aww, too cute!

Confession, I definitely ate too much. Now I feel like a pumpkin but who cares ? What I wanna know is what you did on Christmas and Boxing Day? Come on, share!

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This is funny, it feels like we’re on holiday somewhere, the way we’re going out every day from morning till night. Thing is we’re still very much in town with no place to go as Steev is stuck hanging out helping out at Dad’s office and Dad is too busy to get away.

But don’t worry, we really maxed out this long weekend and painted the town red like a bunch of tourists in our own city, bwahaha. Bintang Walk is a great place to play tourist. All you need is a couple of cameras and a lost look on your face and we were right in there with the touristy types.

We joined whole herds of pedestrians at the traffic lights waiting impatiently to dash across the street. Yep, it sure felt like we were smack in the middle of Tokyo. Pretty cool! Steev and Raine were snapping photos left and right. And we didn’t even have to pretend we were novices at dashing across busy streets. We are really that stupid !

I’m blogging from Morgan, my night-time PC so the photos’ll have to wait… patience!

Gone are the days when I had to make my own holiday cards with photos to show friends and family how big my kids have grown . It just takes too much time when there’s a much easier way.

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Last week was definitely my kind of hyperactive. I met a lady at the Jusco Sale grocery checkout as we were both complaining about the long lines and who later turned out to be the mom of Skye’s classmate. So that made for a morning of interesting chit-chat.

Right after I got home from the sale, I started feeling warm and achy-breaky all over. It couldn’t have been over-exercise because I’m so conditioned I don’t feel the muscle aches after my workouts any more.

As the afternoon wore on, my temperature rose and rose… till over 100 degrees. Between OD’ing on vitamin Cs, I drank a cup of hor yan hor in between, plonked an ice-pack on my head and went to sleep.

I jumped out of bed next morning, chirpy as the birds outside my bedroom window. The fever was completely gone and I was off on my taxi runs.

Friday morning, my girl friend from California was in town and I met her for a coffee and a two-hour chat. DH had promised to pick Skye up from school but he was stuck in a meeting so I had to cut short our visit and rush back. Duh!

Saturday morning, the girls convinced me to go to a book sale. Frankly I’m not keen on MPH book sales because their discounts are pretty miserable. We ended up with just a few books, enough to keep my bookworms off the computer for a few hours.

We were constantly out over the long weekend because we had so many free food coupons to finish up before they expire today. Free burgers, donuts, pizza, fruit juice, latte… no purchase necessary so what the heck!

You know what’s been refreshingly different about this week-long school break?

We stayed home more than we went out. On a couple of days, we only went to the gym or out for a quick breakfast, came back and didn’t go out again. This is quite strange for us.

Part of it has to do with Raine’s exams which are coming up in a week so she needs to act busy and look like she’s studying really hard so her mom won’t get all jittery and worried .

The other part has to do with me trying to impress on the kids that with the weakening economy, we must all try to cut back and be more aware of our spending. A good real life lesson for them anyways.

So what have I been up to if we haven’t been going out? Yes, cooking up a storm in the kitchen. I cooked this big pot of chicken curry to go with bread or rice.

I also made different kinds of pasta and roast chicken with potatoes and salad. Recipes are on my food blog.

I like cooking without the rush which is not something I get to do very often. I’m always putting meals together in a hurry. So this laid-back cooking was kinda nice . We must do this more often.

We’ve been talking about going to Penang for the school holidays but as it always happens, we talk about it and we talk about it and no one does anything about it.

I did a quick check last week and our favorite hotel is fully booked on the days that we wanted. Steev was saying that we really should buy a seaside condominium so we can go to Penang whenever we want, as last-minute as we want.

That would be like owning a piece of the Apogee Condo Miami Beach which I recently read about on the internet. A luxury vacation home with spectacular ocean views and beach activities for the jetset. Except we’re not the jetset!

Yikes, two weeks to the next school holidays. Have you got any vacation plans for the family yet? To the Riviera Maya Resort perhaps?? The weather’s so warm lately it might be good to get away for a while.

Yes, the Mexican beach would definitely be a good idea. You’ll probably need to be bathing in sunblock first before you even hit the beach though. There are so many fun things for the whole family to do.

If you’re bringing young kids, it’s always a good idea to have them wear floats before letting them in the water, and ensure you always have someone keeping a sharp eye out for them.

Quite honestly, I’ve not looked forward so much to weekends and school holidays as I do now for the longest time. Now it’s like I just can’t wait to get from one weekend to the next.

Maybe it’s because the kids are happier during weekends, especially Steev who’s still trying to adjust to college life. I’m sure it’s just a passing phase, or at least I hope it is because frankly if I have to listen to his rants for much longer, I think I’ll go nuts !!

Well, it seems no one wants to talk about school during the weekends. So I’m thankful for the quieter days when I can actually sit down and blog instead of perpetually running out because “my teacher wants this TOMORROW!”.

Thank goodness for the weekend. I’m bumped, seriously! We’ve hardly spent any time at home dashing from one end of town to another.

Like they say, one too many lunch and dinner appointments is bad for you :lol: though I have to say the kids enjoy the good food.

I’m starting to feel fat from all this eating. I may just declare next week to be Workout Week like I did last school holidays. At least that helped us all slim down :wink: .

During the last school holidays, I declared that one week to be Exercise Week. I’ve tried various ways to get the kids to exercise but without much success. So I had to come up with something more exciting, you know, like a challenge.

Teens love a good challenge most of the time though it’s sometimes hard to tell when that is, because they can be so moody.

But surprisingly my Exercise Week turned out to be somewhat of a success. We managed to work up a sweat at the gym for four out of the five weekdays. I consider that to be good *pats self on back*.

During the few weeks that Steev was having his exams, we all slimmed down due to various factors - exam blues, stress, eating out less and rushing around more.

But since the last day of the exams, we’ve shifted into school holiday gear - shopping, eating, playing computer games, sleeping late and waking up late and generally being lazy. So those extra pounds are coming back .

If your kids are turning a little pudgy too due to the school holidays, you might want to inspire them to do some exercise by declaring your own Exercise Week where you and them will engage in one physical exercise activity a day for a week.

My suggestion is not to be too ambitious. Many of our city kids are adverse to exercise and are hard to drag away from their online life. So see how you do with a week’s worth of exercise first .