Weekends & holidays | Hip to be Mom

Between then and now

Posted by Clairity Comments Off

Jan 262012

I was pretty much stuck in this chair all of yesterday. You may have swung by recently and noticed a bit of a mess here. Maybe we were missing a sidebar here, some graphics there. Pretty much the sort of stuff you expect when you’re moving to a new “home”. Been working very long hours with the most patient support guy ever (thanks again, Scott!) to get stuff ironed out.

Apart from that, we’ve just been hanging out. Food is the really big thing this time of year. For us, not so much. We haven’t been out to a restaurant yet. Instead we’ve been feasting on these incredibly scrumptious leftover turkey sandwiches. Never mind that we ran out of tomatoes.

And we got to the gym yesterday which was near-empty. A gym where you can actually make out each piece of equipment instead of seeing a blur of movement – priceless! Great workout yesterday, so happy about that. And planning to hit it again early tomorrow morning .

Got a few more hiccups to sort out, then we’re out of here. Going to make the most of the rest of the holidays and just kick back before the insanity starts all over again Monday.

Snippets of our weekend

Posted by Clairity 2 Responses »

Jan 162012

What a Sunday! The girls and I were up early and we got to work right after breakfast. Yup, 5 hours in the kitchen baking up a storm. Nevertheless it was a long morning well spent. We baked granola bars, 2 huge loaves of wholemeal bread that’s going to last us a week and chocolate chip cookies (recipe here) which I was planning to give away as a gift but we’ve already munched through half the container.

The bread and granola bars are for my girls to munch in school. Homemade bread is much more substantial as a breakfast food than the airy bread sold at the store. The granola is to tie them over the long school hours.

Saturday, we trawled the mall. I know, I know, we have nothing to buy and we really should try to avoid the malls on the weekends from now on because Chinese New Year is next week and the malls are busting with folks trying to get their last-minute shopping done.

But when you live in this city, there’s practically nowhere else to go on the weekend except… the mall. We just need to get out of the house for a few hours. So that’s where we had both lunch and dinner out Saturday.

And now we’re ready for another crazy week ahead. Bring it on!

By the way, what was your weekend like?

A place to destress

Posted by Clairity 3 Responses »

Jan 132012

For the past couple of weekends, the girls and I have been sneaking off to a little Japanese place which serves these gorgeous dragon rolls. Japanese is one of our favorite go-to’s for stress relief, and these weeks have been kinda stressful. So what the heck, right?

Quite honestly, we can’t decide which one of these dragon rolls we like better. They taste different but they both taste so good. I love drenching my roll in wasabi even if it makes me sneeze sometimes when that powerful pungence travels up my nose .

Skye’s favorite is this unagi rice. Unagi is Japanese for eel. Well, I try to think of this as fish, not eel when I’m eating it. It’s not hard because it smells heavenly. And I would dab my spoonful all over with wasabi.

Raine loves this beef rice and I have to agree. We rarely eat beef at home so this is kinda a nice little treat for us.

And let’s face it, we all love tempura. For me, it would be a sin to go to a Japanese restaurant and not order tempura. So ebi tempura (shrimp) and yasai tempura (assorted vegetables) is a must.

Not to forget that piping hot green tea. Looking at these pictures is making me drool. We definitely need to do this more often.

The sandwiched week

Posted by Clairity Comments Off

Dec 292011

So Christmas is over. Just like that, huh? I’m feeling a little cheated this year because the lead-up to Christmas was so short and stressed (what with the semester ending in mid-December and all the crazy stuff that’s been going on around here) and Christmas was somehow gone in a flash and we only have one more box of leftover turkey and brown gravy to show for it.

We slept in on Boxing Day. Sleeping in is a rare luxury around here. We’re usually up at the crack of dawn but lately it’s been cold which makes it even harder to drag yourself out of bed. It’s easier to just slam down that alarm clock, let that annoying beep float over your subconscious state and roll lazily out of bed at 8:30 than be up at the stroke of 6.

Ten, eleven hours of sleep is great and all but it sure is disruptive on our workout routine. Tsk tsk tsk! This morning, we set 3 alarm clocks to get ourselves jumping out of bed into our gym pants. How’s that for motivation? That plus this… best thing ever!

Here’s to one amazing leftover turkey sandwich before a new year rolls in. Cheers!

On a roll

Posted by Clairity 2 Responses »

Dec 192011

You would not believe how I spent the whole of yesterday! Well, whoever said Sunday is a day of rest is wrong. We slaved from 8:30 in the morning till 9:00 at night. I baked 4 loaves of bread and 2 fruit cakes! With the help of my 2 budding bakers, of course. We worked so hard we darned near broke our backs. But it was fun.

Well, if we’re not going anywhere for the holidays, we might as well be baking up a storm, right? If you recall, I recently worked my flimsy little whisk to death. Today, my hand mixer broke. We’re on a roll here (literally) and had to take turns beating the batter by hand. My biceps are thanking me now and I’ll be showing off my toned arms tomorrow .

Of course, there’s nothing like homemade wholemeal bread bursting with flavor and goodness! Photos of our hard work coming up as soon as I get them downloaded.

Racing with Murphy

Posted by Clairity Comments Off

Nov 282011

The girls and I have been mostly cooped up at home all weekend. I think we may well have run out of malls to crawl, if that’s even possible and we’ve moved on to greener pastures? That’s a story for another day. In other news, the weather’s been weird this year. Anyone noticed that?

This is the morning sky that greets us as we head out to the gym just before 7:00 in the morning. For all intents and purposes, it looks like the beginning of another blazing hot day in Tropical unParadise.

By early afternoon, the grey clouds are having a face-off with the white. It’s hot and sunny up till this point so it’s anyone’s guess which way the weather will go.

By late afternoon, there’s no mistaking who is winning. Thunder is a lot like labor contractions. The first rumbles are spaced fairly far apart. As the flashes and growls grow closer and louder, the skies unleash bucketfuls sending us on a mad scramble to unplug our precious modem before it gets fried.

Today we raced through groceries hoping to beat the rain. But Murphy beat us by 20 seconds. But of course! It was pouring elephants and tigers when we got to the exit. We’re city folks which makes us terribly impatient. We couldn’t just stand there like normal people and wait for the rain to ease up.

We had to make a run for it, make a mad dash to the car with our just-bought tissue boxes over our heads. That’s us ! Smack in the middle of the downpour, we were throwing everything (except the eggs!) into the back of my minivan and just as we were pulling away, the rain trickled to a bare drizzle! Thanks, Murphy, that’s real considerate of you.