1. I push life updates through my facebook account these days and so I have neglected the site for a while
2. my provider auto-disables blogs which are not updated to prevent security exploit on old versions

So well, this has been rectified now, wordpress is upgraded to 2.9.1, whose admin panel looks fantastic btw, inclusive a shiny new auto-upgrade tool, which should make my life a lot easier (not that it was hard to upgrade wordpress before anyway).

On life, well… Our 2 terrors just started school this week. Not a single tear shed! They are great kids! Although Tristan is having some problem with discipline and following the class when they do boring things: stay seated for 10mn for morning assembly, walk in pair, etc. The teacher’s gonna have a hard time for sure, because he is pretty strong, and she is quite petite.

Some other stuff I posted to facebook recently: kids love cartoons, but they don’t understand Road Runner at 2.5 years old . Yvonne reads books in English, I show them cartoons in French, hopefully that’ll be ok to make them multilingual.

The kids are definitely real French because they have started to say stuff like “pouf”, “hop”, “toc” when they do various things. We French love to say the sound of what we do

I blew my savings to buy a new camera and a couple of lenses, so hopefully I will have some nice pics soon. Pics may be posted on facebook, flickr or here. *sigh*, media management is a new age problem .

Till later!
Tim

It has started, they understand “buy” now…

Lucky at least we don’t watch TV, so they don’t know what commercials are, and all the crap toy-manufacturers would like us to buy for them. We will work hard to keep it that way as long as possible.

The same happens in reverse, when Tristan tries to get the glory for a fart by Celestine. That must be a Groleau thing .

Kids also do integrate stuff they do not understand: every night, when it’s time to prepare the night milk, BlutPaw asks us how much to prepare and we usually just respond: “240-180″ . Meaning 240ml for Tristan, and 180ml for Celestine.
With our recent food poisonning episode, we had to change, in particular for Tristan, we’d go: “180 with just 2 scoops of powder” (i.e. diluted: 2 instead of 3). At which Tristan would turn angry and yell:
“Noooo, I want 240-180! OK!?!”

And finally, learning on pronouns. Now is the fun time when don’t quite understand “myself” and “yourself”. So the conversation might go:
Yvonne: Oh, you want to do this by yourself?
Tristan/Celestine: Yes! I want to do by yourself!

Saturday is a special day: daddy cooks diner, we all eat the same thing together, and we all sleep in the same room. On regular nights, the kids have their own baby meal before us, and while Celestine sleeps with us, Tristan sleeps with BlutPaw in the other room.

So Saturday nights are fun… Except when erm, we realize the mash potatoes dad wants to cook are a bit expired, but still look good, so we give them a try… and then we all get food poisonning.

It all started ok: no sign or bad taste whatsoever during the diner itself, Tristan in particular ate A LOT. This boy looooves his mash potatoes. We took the babies to bed, they fell asleep, Yvonne was tired and stayed with them, I went back to work on the computer a bit. Around 11h30pm, Yvonne calls me urgently, Tristan had vomited all over: mattress, pillows, blanket, stuffed animals, everything. We take him out, Yvonne cleans him, I take the first pass at rinsing the vomit out of everything. He singled handledly soiled 3 pillows, inclusing Yvonnes because she was lying next to him at that moment.

We attribute the episode at Tristan eating too much, too fast. We get another clean mattress for him, he falls asleep again, fast. Yvonne stays in the room, I continue my stuff, we look forward to a peacedul night from then on.

Another 45mn later, Yvonne calls me again. Tristan had vomited again. Not so much, since he pretty much emptied himself the previous time, but enough to soil one more blanket.

We start to suspect the potatoes, but are not sure yet because, well, everyone else is fine.

I switch off the computer and join Yvonne in the room. Over the next 2 hours. Tristan wakes up several times to vomit. The terrible kind of vomit: stomach spasms with nothing coming out because there’s nothing to vomit. Just spitting saliva and feeling miserable. At least we are prepared: we have a pale in the room, that he uses cleanly. Yvonne tells me she’s starting to not feel good as well. Perhaps it’s just the smell of Tristan’s vomitus… We wish… At around 4am Yvonne rushes out of the room to vomit.

Luckily at that time, Tristan is stable. Yvonne rushing out wakes BlutPaw up. We carry Tristan to her room so she can take care of him in case he wakes up again (which luckily he doesn’t). Yvonne vomits another 2 rounds over the next 1.5 hours.

We manage to all wake up around 9am. I’m fine. Yvonne is down though, she will stay in bed and rest pretty much the rest of the day, enjoying an occasional dash to the toilet to attend to some diarrhea. Tristan and Celestine seem fine and drink their morning milk. Celestine has no energy though, and just lies on the couch all morning, we know something is up :/ .

Time for lunch, Tristan and Celestine refuse to eat their porridge. They accept some oat meal. Nap time comes, they both fall asleep in less than 10mn. Cool.

I go down to the market because I want to make a vegetable soup to cleanse everyone’s system. Being back , I start preparing.

1.5 hour into the nap (naps are usually 2.5 to 3 hours), Celestine vomits her morning milk and the oat meal all over, that’s another bedsheet soiled, plus her pyjama. I was preparing the soup at the time, so Yvonne is the one to attend to her first. We set up a sleeping station in the living room, where Celestine sleeps on the coach, and Yvonne next to her on the floor. They’ll both sleep another 1.5 hours.

Meanwhile diarrhea kinda hits me. I gotta go. Nice timing for Tristan to wake up. Blut Paw attends to him. In 10mn, he vomits all of his oat meal. One more bed sheet soiled. Beside that, he surprisingly seems in great spirit and shape.

When Celestine wakes up, she’s also in great form. Her energy is back and I spend time with her and Tristan. They want to draw, play, and even go outside.

Diner comes, they want nothing at all. they have a bit of my great soup but they’re not fans (these little ingrates!). The tiredness+sickness is hitting them. They cry for this, and cry for that, shout, and drive us crazy. Yvonne, being sick, is not in the mood to entertain their every demand either.

We manage to get them to sleep. Yvonne crashes with Celestine and sleeps right away too.

And, here I am, typing my report of the day. I’m pretty exhausted myself, and I’m starting to feel my stomach churning too. Oh boy, I sure hope I don’t vomit this night.

Worse thing: I have not managed to take a shower the whole day yet. I’ll do that after this post. What made it hard is that food poisoning gives you the cold chill, so Yvonne and Celestine’s condition prohibited the use of aircon, and even fans! And that doesn’t do well with me … In other words… I stink!

Ok, that’s it. Oh and by the way, we are definitely blaming the potatoes. I threw the rest of the box away. Don’t mess with expired stuff, it’s not worth it!

[edit Mon 3:15pm]
The nightmarish weekend wasn’t over for me after the post I did yesterday night. I did take my shower and went to bed at about midnight, only to realize that the moment I’d lie down, my intestines would go: “Hey bro, time to go, hurry hurry hurry”. Great. That happened about every 15mn, and that little routine lasted about an hour. I realized I couldn’t just go back to the room each time and risk waking Yvonne and Celestine up. So I set up a sleeping station in the living room. The routine continued up to 2am until at last, it stabilized. By the way, FatBoys are great to sleep on!

At 3am, Tristan had woken BlutPaw because he was hungry (not surprising). He ran into the leaving room where he kinda tripped over me, causing me to have a surprise startle, which in turn scared him so bad (realize it was very dark), that he started to cry, and cry, and cry. I comforted him as I could, BlutPaw made the milk and that was it.

At that point, since my intestines were leaving me alone, I decided it was ok to get back to the room. It’s around 3:15am now. Then at 4am, Celestine woke up and called us both because she could not find her pacifier. She wouldn’t go back to sleep without it. I wake up, take the lamp, look around, under the bed, spot it against the wall, we have to displace the bed to reach it. It’s 4:15am now. back to sleep.

Then at 6am, my intestines go: “Wakie wakie bro, time to go again”. Joy. The routine starts again until around 7:30am, then it stopped again. At 8:15am Yvonne wakes up, she has to get ready for work. She’s feeling MUCH better, which is great. For me, well, I’m kinda stuck in bed, barely able to move at all. The intestines bother me another 2 or 3 times in the morning but overall, they leave me alone, and all I can do is sleep. Working, was out of the question.

I woke up around 2:30pm, take another shower. And there you go, now I’m done writing the post update. It’s 3:30pm. I hope I can get some work done today :/

to that:

Other than that, everything’s cool over here. There is more and more talk going on, and we’ve seen the beginning of lies too, *sigh*. They’ve started to blame each other on stuff when they do wrong themselves. It’s not always easy to deal with it.

One funny thing they’ve also started to do is rat on each other. For example, I may be working in the study, when suddenly, I hear banging on the door, it may be Celestine (Or Tristan, just change the name): “Papa! Papa! Come! Koko pipi on the floor!”. It’s cute… for now

My parents were with us for 2.5 weeks for their holidays. Yvonne and I took a few days off to spend time with them, and be there with the whole family. Their stay has been great, if not very tiring for there has been many activities, daily! Indeed we visited the swimming pool (several times), Marina Barrage (several times), the zoo, Changi Point Coastal walk, Botanical garden for outdoor concerts, Jacob Ballas’ children garden, Bugis, Our downstairs playground (MANY times), etc… Below are some shots from these activities.

It’s getting more and more tiring to look after the kids, Tristan in particular. Because he seems to have endless energy and has started to just like running as far and fast as he can. In some instances, he will simply run loops around the playground, which is fine. In other cases however, he might charge straight ahead, wherever ahead may be, and that means we must chase after him to prevent him for getting into an accident. The chase is exhausting, as my Dad can testify! :p

This had not been helped by the fact that this month has been VERY hot in Singapore. Just yesterday we hit 37 deg Celsius, with 32 IN the house. We (well I, mostly and Celestine too) are literally dripping sweat drops just sitting around, doing nothing. Sadly we were not doing nothing, refer to the chasing above :/ .

On top of all these activities, we had planned several food pit stops for my parents (hey, of course, this is Singapore after all), including a Curry Fish Head (that even my mom has loved), pratas, Breakfast at Yakun (for runny eggs, kaya toast and local kopi), and a local Chinese restaurant.

Furthermore, we have celebrated a little early the kids’ second birthday. The whole family was there, and we managed to take a nice pic of everyone. The kids had many new toys and soft toys. I am very much for low tech toys (non mechanical, non electrical toys). So this year, they had several wood-based toys. Yvonne is fond of saying they are actually for me (which, I must admit, is a little bit true :p).

Finally, below are the customary portrait pics of Tristan and Celestine so we can all agree that they still are the cutest babies in the whole wide world!! Yes, that’s true! Who says I am blinded by fatherly love? That is only an obvious, perfectly objective, unquestionable truth I’m reporting…

Ha, lastly, having my parents around, meant that there are more photographers around. Inevitably, I ended up on some photos, like this one below.

Till next time! Hopefully the next update won’t take as long as this one.

PS: pending grammar review by Yvonne, please ignore the English mistakes :p.

The kids are growing well as you can see. In fact their language development is unbelievable! Both babies understand French, Chinese and English well. Although Tristan is making only moderate efforts to speak well (boyz!), Celestine is getting more and more fluent in all 3 languages. For example, if she wants me to carry her, she’ll say “Papa, porte-moi, s’il te plait” (French for “Daddy, Carry me please”). When Yuki, bites the christmas tree, she can warn the household by saying “Yuki Bites Christmas Tree!”, and if Tristan tries to climb on the table, she might say: “Koko pa gao gao die dao” (Chinese for “Koko climb high high will fall down”). Tristan on the other hand is devoting most of his energy in running and acting crazy. It is quite tiring looking after him given all this energy.

We are organizing ourselves better to make the kids have a variety of experiences. To this end, we are now trying to go to new places and parks, such as the newly opened Marina barrage, Sentosa island, the botanic garden, and other parks. It keeps the babies interested and brings us to nice places we sometimes had never heard of before. That’s always nice .

Wishing you all a wonderful new year 2009, filled with love, happiness and good health!

I used to be obsessed about taking as many pics as I could of the babies’ faces, just so we immortalize their cute cuddly little baby expressions. Now I realize it’s equally important to capture what they are DOING and how they are fascinated by the little things. In some of the shots below you can see the babies playing at an exercise ground for old people. There is a stepper with platforms, and the platforms have tiny holes (for water drain presumably). The babies were contented shoving tiny branches into the holes, realizing the branches actually drop below the platforms, picking them up again, and doing the process all over again . This is actually a GREAT change because it means that, instead of me running after them all over the playground, I could for once sit there and observe what they were doing, now THAT is a lot more relaxing