Hello from Liverpool!

Here we are on our annual balik kampung trip to my in-laws.  Our summer holidays.

Of course we had to choose to come back to the UK during the wettest summer ever.  The skies outside are grey, there's water everywhere and people are walking around wearing Ugg boots and jackets.   There is a fine misty rain outside since erm... last week?

We were last here in winter 2011 and boy, this looks exactly like winter still!

At least we were smart enough to book a 10 day break in the Algarve, Portugal.  My sister-in-law has a holiday apartment there and we hurriedly escaped there for some sun and fun.  That's smart, isn't it.  We live all year round  in the tropical sunshine, fly 13++ hours here... and then run to sit on another plane for 2+ hours to go sit in the... sunshine.

But KL doesn't have cute Portuguese guys, beautiful beaches, a cool sea breeze that tempers the sunshine... and fresh cherries!  Ooh la la!  I ate so many of them!  The cherries I mean... not the Portuguese guys... *sigh*  Don't get married before you go to Portugal, that's all I can say.

We spent a day at Slide n Splash, Lagoa.  Entrance was 22 euros each (got a discount) and kids were free.  We arrived at 11am and didn't leave till 4pm.  It was SO great.  Connor had a great time in the kids' play area and even went down with Daddy on the big slide.   It was worth every euro we paid when we saw what fun our son had.  The only downside was he spent the next 2 days crying about going back to the "special swimming pool".

Today we boarded the plane to fly back to the rain and mist that is Liverpool.  We're going to be here for a little while longer before going back to KL.  We've found out about another "special swimming pool" here so we'll be visiting that soon, I guess.

Hope everyone back home in KL is having fun too.  I am starting to dream of nasi lemak, dim sum and nasi briyani every night so I can't wait to get home soon!

Baby Sign Language: Eat and Drink

One of the earliest signs I taught Connor was "eat" and "drink". They're very useful signs and very easy to teach because there is no motivator like hunger. (Money hasn't quite entered Connor's realm of thought yet)

On our first night in Luz, Connor refused his dinner. He'd not been eating well that day as well as we were travelling. It was very frustrating trying to feed him and having him just clamp his mouth shut or spit everything out. Finally I gave up and put him to bed. I thought he'd wake up multiple times in the night crying for milk but he didn't.

The next morning, Dear Hubby and I were woken up at 6am by our little monkey. "Mummy, Mummy!" he said and signed "Help". I replied "Yes Connor, Mummy will help you. What do you want?" He said again, more desperately this time "Mummy!" and in quick succession signed "eat" and "drink".

We burst out laughing. Dear Hubby said "Well I guess someone is finally hungry!" And he was. He ate a whole lot of cereal and yoghurt that morning.

Eye Candy: Who's afraid of the big bad waves?

(I don't know how to rotate the video. I'm looking for programs to rotate it but the one I found was virus-infested and was removed from the download site. If any techies out there can help me out, I'd be very grateful)

This is Connor, aged 19 months old and at the beach for the first time ever in his life. He'd never known a pool so vast and surely never imagined a pool with water that could play chase with you.

This video was shot on our 2nd day in Luz so Connor was still unsure about how waves worked. Tell you what though, he worked out very quickly that he could gauge the size of the waves hitting the spot where he was standing just by looking down the coast. He noticed a bit of the coast where the waves hit first and worked out that if the waves were big there, it would be big where he was too. We only realised what he was doing because we'd noticed he was looking off in the distance and sometimes he would start shrieking and running back to me before the waves even rolled in where we stood. Each time he did that, it would turn out to be a big wave. I was quite impressed by that... because Dear Hubby and I never figured that one out at our ripe old age! It made me think that children learn best through experience because that's how it was for our ancestors. They sure didn't have flash cards while struggling to survive in the wilderness and don't we all learn better when we experience something vs just reading about it? I could have shown him pictures and videos of waves and beaches but nothing would trump taking him out to an actual beach.

We had a brilliant time. Even if it had rained cats and dogs for the rest of the holidays or the stupid ash cloud had returned, it still would have been brilliant because Connor had so much fun. I've had fun on the beach before but nothing beats seeing our son getting so much joy out of chasing and being chased by the waves.

Back in KL at last

Well actually we were back in KL on Wed evening.

After a drawn-out tearful goodbye to Nana and Dada (that's what Connor calls his Grandad), we hopped into a cab to get to Liverpool John Lennon Airport. It's not too far from where Lennon grew up and our helpful cabbie pointed the house out to us. It was quite weird during the family reunion where I listened to Dear Hubby's aunt talk about how they used to watch the Beatles play the local clubs and community halls when they first started out. It reminded me of our trip last year where HMV in Liverpool One filed the Beatles boxed set under "Local band" and I thought "Isn't that something... one of the greatest bands in all of music history is your local band."

A few hours later we were in Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. We had 4 hours to kill before our connecting flight back to KL so we wandered around the shops. I stood and pondered for a long time over the Longchamp bags but didn't buy them in the end.

After a 12+ hour flight during which Connor was awake/fretful for probably 70% of the time, we were back in Malaysia. It is now 1am on Sunday and Connor still hasn't adjusted back to KL time. The first night, he went to bed at 10pm and stayed asleep until the morning. I thought, "Whee! NO jet lag!"

Wrong.

The next night, he refused to sleep till 3am. Last night, he fell asleep in his dinner at 6:30pm, woke up howling at 9pm, ate noodles and had a popsicle at 10pm and pranced around till midnight. When the Ned-Bra match was over (GO ORANJE!), we picked him up, put him in our bed, ignored him and fell asleep to his protests.

From experience I know it takes him about a week to get his rhythm back so I'm not too bothered. Yet. Ask me again next week if he's still acting up. What a good thing we had a wonderful holiday or I'd be nuts now.