My DIY Project 3 - Multi Purpose Hanger

After making the magazine holder , I realised that it was still not enough to place my other miscellaneous items like waste papers for wrapping food waste, some toy brushes for my gal, recycle bags and many more. 

I looked through my recycle box and found this wooden dish holder which I bought from Daiso many years ago. Then an idea struck me that I could use it as a multi purpose hanger to put my miscellaneous stuff. 

What I did was to use some hooks to hang the item on the window grill besides my magazine holder. It just fits nicely to occupy the rest of my window grill. It was easy to install and very useful too. I can also use it to hang my recycle bags for my grocery shopping too :)

Effort Required: 1/5 

My DIY Project 2 - Magazine & Newspaper Holder

After I started with my first DIY project, a cutlery holder , my DIY ideas keep coming. 

While I was re-organising my dinning table area, I realised that my dinning table was too cluttered with all sorts of things like newspaper, magazine and many others. During meal times, I need to clear the table for a proper meal. Due to a lack of space, I got to put the newspapers or magazines on the floor which was very unsightly. I need a magazine/newspaper holder. 

I looked around the house and found a clothes hanger holder which I bought many years ago. I bought it previously thinking it would be useful to hang my clothes on. But in reality, I don't need it. So it was lying around the house with no uses at all. Therefore, a lot of things which I bought previously was in a spur of moment thinking that I may be able to use but in fact not. This also taught me a lesson to think through how to utilise or apply an item before buying it going forward. 

I tried to put the clothes holder below the window grill next to my dinning table and it fits perfectly. Then I tried to think how should I used it to put newspaper or magazine holder. An idea came to my mind that I could use a recycled fabric bag. I remembered I had a big recycled fabric bag previously but was torn. I did not throw it away as I felt there could be some uses in future. Therefore I put it into my recycle bag box. 

I dug it up from my recycle bag box pile and it fitted my clothes holder perfectly.  I just need to do some alterations and sewing to put it in place. It was hard work to sew them together. I was not good in sewing I admit and it was a struggle for me. I sewed some buttons on the bag so that it could be easily attach and remove from the holder. I took almost half a day to do this up and the end product was surprisingly good! 

The size fitted well and sturdy too. I can now put my newspapers and magazines into this holder without cluttering my dinning table! :)

Effort Required: 4/5 

My DIY magazine/newspaper holder made from recycled materials! 

The capacity is quite large too. 

My DIY Project 1 - Cutlery Holder

Recently, I am flooded with many DIY ideas. I think it was also inspired by my goal to "Go Green". I had always kept my recycle box for the longest time in my storeroom, thinking one day, these things can be used. And yes, finally this day came. 

While I was doing some re-organising of my kitchen to clear up some space, I realised that my existing Ikea cutlery holder had turned rusty. That's the problem of stainless steel. Once they are constantly in contact with water, it will turn rusty and quite difficult to maintain. Therefore, instead of throwing it away, I clean it up and used it to put washing detergent dispenser so it would have lesser contact with water. But I need a new cutlery holder to put my cutlery. 

One thing I don't like about the Ikea cutlery holder is that the excess water will drip on my kitchen sink surface area and I need to constantly wipe it. I wanted a cutlery holder which can hold the excess water without dripping and allow me to drain it off easily. I looked at the cutlery holders available in the hardware shops, but couldn't find one which fits my requirement. 

Then suddenly one idea come to me. I looked through my recycle box and found this perfect used clear plastic chocolate container. The size is just right. I measured the height of my cutleries, and cut away the top part of the plastic container with the cap and fitted it back onto the bottom of the container. 

I poke some holes at the bottom of the container to allow the water to drip but the excess water will be hold up by the cap part. The excess water will be retained by the cap. I can easily drain the excess water by opening the cap and pour it away. 

I used some tough nylon thin ropes (also recycled), tied up the cutlery holder and hang it to free up my table top space. 

I'm happy with my DIY end product. It fits my requirement and I got to use all recycled materials without costing me a single cent. It looks good too and can blend in with my kitchen nicely :)

Effort Required: 3/5 

My DIY clear plastic cutlery holder using used chocolate plastic container.

The cap at the bottom hold the excess water without dripping. I can just removed the cap to drain away the excess water conveniently. 

Ting Ting development updates @ 33 months

It's been a while I updated this blog. Been so busy with everyday life. But when I read back the previous development milestones blogged, I realised that we came such a long way and it be a great pity if I don't record it.

My gal is @ 33 months now. She developed so fast till I lost track too.

She's officially a scoot racer! 

1) Speech

She can now speaks in complete sentences, knows how to associate and link things together. For example, when she saw a lily pad in a pond, she would ask "Where's the frog on the lily pad?"

2) Jigsaw Puzzles

She love jigsaw puzzles. She can now complete a jigsaw puzzle of 28 pieces by herself. Every time she completed a jigsaw puzzle, she would look at me and beam, waiting for me to praise her. That expression on her face was priceless :)

3) Blocks building

She loved to play blocks and build house. Just this morning, she managed to build a house with a slide using 30+ pieces of blocks by herself. 

4) Pretend & Role Play

She loved playing pretend play with us and with her soft toys, pretending to ride a train, a car, a plane, cooing her toys to sleep and wake up. She also loved playing selling and buying ice cream with her play mates. 

Just yesterday, she was playing the ice cream game with me. When I asked her for an ice-cream, she asked me "Money please.". When I asked her "how much?", she said "nineteen dollars!" lolx. 

5) Plasticine

She loved plasticine too. She enjoyed making all sorts of things like cakes, noodles and even Christmas tree with her plasticine. 

6) Drawing and colouring

She loved using her coloured pencils and draw all over the papers, books and basically anywhere which she puts her sight on. That includes our walls, floor, cupboards and everywhere in the house. Her daddy was so proud of her drawing on the wall and see this as a form of creativity. But I rolled eyes cos that means cleaning up will be so messy! Anyway, I reinforced to her not to draw on the walls, table and even the floor, she can only draw on papers on drawing books. 

Just a few days ago, she drew her first drawing. This was the first time she drew something. When I asked her what is it, she said "Monsters!". When I asked her how many monsters she drew. She said "3!".

Her first drawing - Monsters! 

She also tried to colour within the lines in her colouring book instead of colouring all over the places.

7) Matching shadows
She can match all the animal picture shadows and put into a box after she completed the matching. She can do this exercise pretty fast.

8) Counting
She can count 1-20 and sometimes beyond 20 depending on her mood. But I can see that counting is not her forte as sometimes she tend to count wrongly or show no interest in counting when I played counting games with her. This is one area I need to work on but with a delicate touch as I don't wish her to resent counting in future.

9) Reading
She loved reading. This is one activity which we do everyday. Reading books before her night time sleep is a routine which we enjoyed. She will sit on my lap and we will cuddle together to read books together. She loved to read Dora the Explorer and Peppa Pig. Sometimes Thomas the Train or some other books we get to borrow from the library.

We will go to the library almost every week to borrow books as we completed reading the books pretty fast. This is one area which I hope we can continue to do together as she growing up.

10) Creative shapes/blocks
She likes to put blocks of different shapes together to create objects. For e.g. putting 2 squares to form a rectangle, 2 triangles to form a diamond shape. She can put the shapes together to form a Christmas tree and many others. But of course with some guidance and help from me ;)

11) Musical instrument
She can play some piano but still at the crashing stage. So far she spoilt the drums and the toy piano barely survived. But she can play the trumpet pretty well. She can blow the toy trumpet making some loud sound (not music :)). So far she did not display any keen interest in playing music. Some of my friends started to introduce music learning for their kids at a very young age. But for me, I will only send her to music lessons if she do display some interest.

12) Singing
She loved singing and can sing quite well. She can now sing many songs like baa baa black sheep, wheels on the bus, itsy bitsy spider, ten little animals which she likes to replace lyrics to change the song and many others. She also like to sing our national anthem Majulah Singapura and was beaming with pride whenever she sings it. I think she can now sing about 20 songs or more in full. Surprisingly she can sing according to tune.

13) Motor skills
She can now climb up and down the stairs by herself holding on the side rails. She can scoots well too. Now we have upgraded her from scooting at the playground downstairs to scooting freely at the park. Last weekend, when we went to Punggol Waterway, she managed to scoot for quite a distance I think about 1-2km while we rode on our bicycles following her.

As she showed keen interest in riding bicycle, so we bought her a kid bicycle recently too. Hopefully she will be able to ride on it smoothly and we can go riding together :)

14) Cup drinking
We have successfully migrated her from bottle to cup drinking from 30 months onwards. So she no longer drink from bottles now :)

15) Potty trained
Well, she is not potty trained yet, sad to say. She managed to use the potty once or twice but later on continue using diaper. This is one area which I need to work very hard on :(

16) Colours

She know almost all the colours and can associate colours with the food she eat. For example when she used a brown colour block to make me an ice cream she would tell me it is chocolate favour. 

17) Alpabets

She can recite from A to Z and identify items associated with alphabets. She can sing the alphabet song well too. 

18) Feeding

She will feed by herself when she is hungry. But once she is about 50% full, she will move and play around and only eat if I feed her. Previously I only took about 30 minutes to feed her but now it becomes one hour or more. So feeding time can be a chore.

She is not choosy in food so far. But she began to prefer certain food over others. For instance she will point at vegetables and said 'not nice!' and refused to eat. I rotated the vegetables selection almost every day and cook in different ways so as to encourage her to be receptive to eat vegetables. This is something I insisted. She got to eat whatever I cook and no choosing. She must learn to eat vegetables for her well being. 

I witnessed some parents tend to feed their children only meat or things they like to eat. So when they grow up they don't know how to eat vegetables and fruits which is very unhealthy for them. 

19) Oposites

She is quite good in identifying most of the opposites. She knows opposites like big small, tall short, high low, young old, day night and many more. 

20) Feelings

She can identify feelings and can relate and express them. For instance, she will make different facial expressions when I asked her what is happy, sad, angry, surprise and etc.

21) Dressing
She can wear socks and shoes by herself without any help now. She is still struggling to learn how to wear clothes but she is able to pull down her bottoms for now.

Watching her growing up everyday makes me happy and contended. I am thankful for the opportunity to be able to spend more time playing, bonding and learning with her. It is an enriching process. 

The Martian

I just watched the movie The Martian and such space exploration movies are my favourite.

It's talking about a botanist on a Mars mission got abandoned by his team mates as they thought he was dead. However he managed to survive and found ways to survive on Mars alone while waiting for help.

It was quite an interesting topic. It's a bit like Castaway except that the environment is an alien planet.  Seriously I think Hollywood over these few years had started to develop really good and thought provoking movies like Interstellar and The Martian. The movie makers actually collaborated with Nasa to try to make movies closer to the reality of the space travel concept and technology.

The acting is superb especially Matt Damon. While the movie promote positivism and optimistic views of the never give up and helping one another spirit, but in reality, I am skeptical. Anyway this is a movie which is supposed to be entertaining.

Planting potatoes and making water on an alien planet seems far fetch idea, but it looks convincing in the movie. After watching it, I am quite inspired and some thoughts came to my mind.

Recently movies like Interstellar and The Martian are sending out messages that someday humans may need to migrate to other planets as Earth is dying. Yes, I believe that our mother Earth is dying as long as human beings continue our plundering acts. I believe that the resources on earth will run out someday.

Mars logically is one of the targeted planet since it is near to Earth. The Nasa released of the recent news of finding water on Mars had such an impeccable timing which raised the publicity of this new movie.

The thought of space travel intrigued me since young. I still remember many years ago during my junior college time, I wrote a GP paper about the gullies and canyon found on Mars which implied there's a possibility of water on Mars. Unfortunately I got a C or D for that paper if I remembered correctly. One of my bucket list is to be able to travel to space and see the earth. I think commercial space travel may be possible during my lifetime. I hope the space travel tickets will be affordable by then.

In conclusion, The Martian is a good movie. It is 2hours and 20mins long but I don't feel draggy. It is worth your pop corn money. But compared to Interstellar, I still think Interstellar is more superior in terms of the story, the directing, the emotions and the characters development.

My green project

I always wanted to do something about reducing plastic bags usage. Plastic is one substance which is  very difficult to be decompose, something that Earth cannot digest. Plastic and many other pollutants are hurting our mother Earth. I think if we human beings don't do something about it to stop our plummeting ways, sooner or later, we are heading towards self destruction.

But the sad fact is, plastic is present in almost every products and everywhere. Plastic bags, water bottles , baby milk bottles, plastic cups, disposable utensils and so many others. They are cheap, readily available and most importantly disposable which is hassle free and convenient. It is extremely difficult to convince the majority to ditch plastic and go for greener products as most of the people including myself are so used to using plastic.

Therefore I felt those green slogans about reducing plastic bags are quite ironic. On one hand they are advocating reducing the usage of plastic bags but how to reduce the usage when plastic bags are so readily available? One good example will be NTUC. They put up signboards to ask people to reduce using plastic bags. However, they give out plastic bags so easily and people can just self service and grab the plastic bags. They encouraged people to use recycle bags by giving a miserable $0.10 discount which is not effective at all.  Just one grocery trip to supermarket alone will get me at least 5-6 pieces of plastic bags. And every day I need at least 4-6 pieces of plastic bags to wrap my rubbish. To make it effective, they could learn from Ikea of not giving out plastic bags anymore. This will get people to think of ways to carry their purchase if they don't want to pay for the plastic bags.

I did try to bring my own reusable bags when buying grocery. But when plastic bags run out, it goes back to square one. What should we use to throw our rubbish in? The dustbin need a liner or something to hold the rubbish if not it will be so messy and smelly. That is why it is tough to break free from plastic bags usage.

To be plastic free, I think it can only be achieve with more education about the hazard of plastic since young and teaching people how to do things differently without plastic. While we can educate, it also boils down to people's willingness to try out alternatives other than plastic. To influence that willingness, there must be some initiative and support from the family upbringing, the government, the media, leaders, school, famous entertainers (e.g. TV/movie stars) to change the culture and mindset of the mass that it is cool to go green and a new way of living. Not just simply talk but taking actions of what and how they are going green. Well, I am just dreaming that this could happen some day.

So here I am trying some small steps to achieve my plastic free goal. It is challenging I think, but I am willing to give it a try. I always believe there should be a much better way which is more environmental friendly.

So I started search online and found some you tube videos teaching about making dustbin liner or waste paper bag using newspaper.

I tried out few methods and this is one of the best method I found so far.  I made this waste paper bag using newspaper and the size is just right to fit my dustbin. It holds the waste beautifully and is quite sturdy as I used 3 sheets of newspaper for each paper bag.

At the bottom of the bag, I put some waste papers to form a thicker base so waste water may not seep through. For those wet waste, I will just wrap it with waste paper or use those food wrappers which usually will be throw away after opening before throwing into my paper bag.

Once the bag is about 3/4 full, I will fold the opening and staple it to seal the bag properly before throwing into the rubbish chute.

Here's the pros:

• This waste paper bag can hold more rubbish. I only need to use at most 2 paper bags each day rather than 5-6 plastic bags. 
• It absorbs the smell and not so smelly as compared to using plastic bags. 
• I can now reduce my stacks of newspaper and waste papers instead of stacking them up high in my storeroom.

The cons are these:

• It can be quite troublesome to make the bags. I need to glue the edges and bottom to make it hold together firmly. But once you get the hang out of it, it is quite easy. 
• It takes time to make the bags. For my requirements, I need about 2 bags daily, so every week I will need 14 bags. What I do is to set aside some time once a week to make my bags. 

The review
I have used it for 1 week plus and so far it is working great. My newspaper and waste paper stacks are reducing. I am using my recycle bags whenver I go grocery shopping to avoid getting plastic bags.

I am still sourcing for better ways to do up my wastepaper bags. If you have better ideas, do share with me :)

My newspaper waste paper bag

This is how it looks like after putting into my dustbin

Some updates

It's been such a long time I updated this blog....Many things had happened, the good and the bad. Some of the memorable things that I had done during this long 8 months:

Trips
1. Perth trip
I went for a Perth trip in Jan15 for 1 week with my mom, cousin, aunt and my little gal. Bb did not went as he couldn't take leave. This was the first time ever we went for a trip together with my aunt and cousin. And it is also the first time my mom went to an Angmoh country and of course first time my gal took a flight of 4-5hours.

I did self-drive and it was fun. I really love driving but too bad cars in SG were so expensive. Yes, our trip were all ladies and we went free and easy without joining any tour and that's the most fun of it. If I got the time, I may share my trip.

2. Thailand trip
I went Bangkok and Huahin with bb and my gal sometime in Feb15 for about 10 days. It was an ok trip. May share more if got the time.

3. KL and Genting trip
BB, my gal and I went to KL and Genting in June during June school holidays for about 1 week. It was quite a nice trip and we managed to spend < $1000 for the whole trip for the 3 of us including transport, hotel and everything! Very worthwhile and I hope to share more if possible.

Little gal education
1. LICDO schoolhouse
I enrolled my gal to LICDO schoolhouse in Mar15 as we were busy travelling during Jan-Feb15. It is a childcare centre which she can stay for half or full day. Initially I thought I can leave her in the childcare then I can go back to work. I think I was too ambitious and miscalculated. She was too young to cope in the childcare centre and I couldn't bear to see her crying everyday even though I know it was an adjustment period.

In the end, I withdrew her from the childcare. The centre itself is good, teachers friendly and I like that it is non-aircon. But I was thinking since I am not working so why am I subjecting her to all these. I quilted from my job previously was to spend more time with her so this is defeating the purpose. The centre manager is a very nice and understanding lady who allowed me to withdraw and even suggested for me to put her in playgroup so she can get to mingle with other kids and at the same time shorter duration. Heeding her advice, I enrolled my gal to a playgroup near to my house which I am going to share later.

2. Talentplus Playgroup
It was really pure luck that I managed to enroll her into the playgroup. The playgroup was always full. But that day after bringing her back from the childcare centre, I thought maybe I should try my luck. I was lucky to bump into the teacher in charge and coincidently they have a few vacancies. I quickly signed up for my gal. It was a 2 hours session but the timing and duration was what I wanted. Initially she cried everyday as well but after a few days she calmed down realising that I be always there to bring her home. I may review the Talentplus playgroup separately if I got time.

Big Spring Cleaning
I did some spring cleaning and managed to clear away 50% of my excess items by donating, giving it away or selling it using Carousell. Carousell is really a great app. Besides selling away items which I don't need anymore, I get to buy items I wanted at a value price too. I am quite pleased with myself.

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The above events are some of the better happenings during this 8 months. Sad to say, I encountered a major event which changed my life. I went through a down phrase and perhaps still in it.

I don't wish to elaborate what I had went through, but things are not the same as before anymore.

I actually spending less and less time doing the classroom activities with my gal which I am feeling guilty about it. Previously I was full of plans what I will do with her and plan my daily activities. But I am doing less of it and I am losing focus of what I need to do everyday.

I am thankful to have my love ones supporting me. But I felt so guilty too feeling that I did not contribute much. My confidence and esteem is slowly depleting. I no longer cares how I look. Nowadays I don't even mind people called me "auntie". I am feeling really dejected and down. I think this is one of my downiest moment in my life.

I know I cannot keep going at this rate and something is not right. I need to pull myself together again for the sake of my gal.

Perhaps the only console is my gal. Seeing her progressing and growing up everyday. She is my joy and sunshine. I don't regret giving up my career for her and spending more time with her. In fact, I hope to be a full time mother for her until she go to Primary school.

But recently I am feeling extremely insecure about the economy outlook and got the urge to go back to work. I hope to earn more for my gal future education and my retirement needs. However, I think with the 1 year break from work, I somehow lose the confidence. I don't know how I can regain it, but I think I got to try.

I'm in a loss of what I want to do and I need to think through it what I want to achieve in my life.

Pray for me.