Holiday Activities For Teenagers And Tween

Cass had to attend half day school for the first 3 days of the school holidays, special thanks to her dedicated class teacher who volunteered to provide free Mandarin tutoring to the class. Cass also stayed back in school with her team members to work on their History project.

At home, after grandma plucked spinach (organic ones) for dinner preparation, I gathered a few stems with roots for Cass to plant in our little balcony garden.

 
Eager beaver Cass ~ her first time planting vegetables on her own and happy as a clam.



No prize for guessing who baked this chocolate brownie eh?

 

It's super yummo!  Drama Queen can bake while her mummy can't, more of lazy and no interest. I can get her to bake any cake or cookie that I feel like eating and she'll run to her phone to Google for a recipe and start working on it. My job is to buy her the ingredients and her job will be to experiment in the kitchen. She even cleans up after her mess.   She's going to grow up to be a fantastic baker and cook.  And a foodie too, just like her dad.

Yesterday Drama Queen whipped up Guacamole (avocado, tomato, black pepper, salt, onion, garlic and cumin) for breakfast and it was a hit with her sisters. Today she made it again and dipped it with 3 types of crackers.




After breakfast, Berlyn - her bff's mum came to our condo to pick her up for a day's outing at Sunway Lagoon.  Drama Queen and Berlyn have been bff since they were toddlers in pre-school.  Today is their belated birthday celebration. Their birthdays are a day apart ~ Drama Queen's on 16th and Berlyn's on 15th of the same month. Though they are in different high schools now, they are still besties. 

I've read that if you and your friend have been good friends with each other for 7 years, chances are the both of you will be friends forever. I think it's very true. I am still friends with my pre-school, primary and high school friends and we still keep in touch via Whatsapp, video call, Facebook and meet up when we have the chance to. When two of my ex classmates went to the USA recently to visit two other classmates who are now living there, they Whatsapp video called me and we had a great time chatting for almost an hour.

Baking & Craft Saturday - 19 Nov 2016

One likes art and craft and the other likes baking and cooking.  Now that exams for this year are over, Cass and Drama Queen have started to indulge in their hobbies.

On Thursday evening, I brought Cass to the stationery shop to get art supplies for her to make burger pinatas with tutorial from US You Tuber Rachel Fong.  She spent the entire Thursday evening making burger pinatas.

Yesterday the magic clay that I ordered from my supplier arrived. Cass was delighted. Even I could not help burying my fingers into the super soft magic clay to sculpture something funny!

Cass spent her Saturday today sculpturing emojis and social media icons after practising the piano.





If you have an art and craft fan like Cass, you can get the magic clay from my online store too. Just give me a tinkle at shireenyong@gmail.com OK! :)




While Cass kept herself busy with clay sculpturing, Drama Queen spent a couple of hours in the kitchen baking a gluten-free cake, using the remaining gluten-free flour that we bought to make my mum a cake for her 70th birthday two months ago.

Picture below shows her heating up some chocolate chips in the microwave oven to make chocolate sauce to drizzle on her cake.




While I was in piano class with Cass, Drama Queen Whatsapp-ed me the picture of her cake and asked me if it looked ok and I said it looked awesome!





This girl's got so much talent in the kitchen yet she tells me that her ambition is not to be a baker or chef but something else.   Err... an architect or interior designer.





And this sugar-reduced gluten-free cake with chocolate sauce, fresh orange slices and kiwi slices is just fantastic. Soon, she'll be able to sell her bakes too.

Kids' Indoor Activity In Auckland (5 - 24 December 2014)

My girls had never played this many board games in their lives as they did when they were in Auckland.  When we arrived in Auckland, it rained quite a bit.  Everyone was saying that we brought the rain from Malaysia to Auckland!  And after we left Auckland, it was hot and dry!  Can you believe it? haha!

So on rainy days, we had to shelf our plans to do outdoor visiting. Due to the wet weather, we did not manage to visit Rotorua, the farm to see farm animals and to the strawberry plantation to pick strawberries. The girls would play board games like UNO, Monopoly, etc with their cousins on wet days.

One of the indoor activity that they did was decorating their own gingerbread house.  The girls' aunt Sarah from Hawaii bought a few packs of gingerbread house from Hawaii for the kids to work on.  And here they are at work, a few days before Christmas...





Cass decorating her gingerbread house with colorful candies. Well, I think the house structure was made of ginger biscuits and they smelled really good too!




Sherilyn and Cass applying edible cement (made of really gooey and sticky icing) to the gingerbread house.









The final product - 7 colorful ginger biscuit houses. The inviting aroma of ginger biscuits wafted in the air in the living room...  so inviting that I was so tempted to pinch out a part of the roof or the walls to pop into my mouth!