1 Day Trip to Taiping

After much procrastination, we finally made a day trip to Taiping on last Saturday. It was definately a worth while drive there as we managed to visit a few interesting places with the help of hubby's colleague whose hometown is in Taiping. We started our journey from Penang before 9am as we wanted to reach Taiping Zoo before 10am to join the animals feeding session. However we only managed to reach 15 mins past 10 oclock due to some traffic congestion. The crowd was quite big that day due to school holidays and also the Raya break. We decided to take the free tram ride around the zoo as Jared has not been on one before. He sat quietly on hubby's lap throughout the journey, looking very curious and also excited to see some of the animals. Emily was really excited too as she has never seen most of the wild animals in real life. After the ride, we decided to walk around to visit some of the interesting animals like the elephants, lions, tigers, tapir, giraffes and many others. We left the zoo after about 2 hours.

Hubby's colleague came to meet us after that, he brought us to a seafood restaurant quite far out of Taiping town which is a fishing village. It was already after 1pm but there was still a big crowd waiting to be seated in the restaurant. We waited for almost half an hour before we got a table and another 1 hour for the dishes to arrive, phew.....

After lunch, we went to visit a charcoal factory, which was a good experience for everyone especially Emily. There was a worker who helped to explain the charcoal making process. Emily definately enjoyed herself here as she got to experience removing tree bark from the tree trunks.

We then headed to the mangrove forest reserve nearby to the charcoal factory. It was a big area where there were wooden platforms extending out to the mangrove swamp area where we could walk. Another good experience for Emily as she has been asking me about how mangrove trees look like.

It was almost evening, so we decided to go to the Taiping Lake for a boat ride before heading home. After the boat ride, I met an ex-USM friend who was there for a holiday too :).

A very tiring day for everyone but we will surely be back to Taiping again :)

Jared At 17 Months

Weight : Did not weigh since 15 months old

Teeth : 8 incissors (4 top and 4 bottom) and a few premolars.

Developments

- Able to say cheese, egg, apal (for apple), book, eye and ear when we show thee items to him.

- Keeps babbling A, B, C, J and some "alien" words when flipping his storybooks.

- Able to point to his toes, nose, face, mouth when we mentioned these words.

- Imitates some of the steps performed by the Riverdance dancers such as tapping his feet, moving his hands and tilting his head up and down just like how the dancers did

- Can now fit the wooden number puzzle for most of the numbers.

- Says "Hi" to anyone who greets him with a "Hi". So cute when he does that.

- Whenever we scold him for not behaving by raising our voice, he will show his sulky face and starts to cry...

- Holds his own bottle while drinking milk.

- Refuse to sit in the stroller most of the time when we bring him out, instead he prefers to walk without wanting to hold our hands. So it can be tiring to bring him out as we need to follow everywhere he walks to.

- Likes to scribble using crayons, so we need to be extra careful so that he doesn't simply scribble on our house furniture.

- Loves to play peekaboo with us.

- No sign of calling mummy yet :(

Food

- 4 feedings of formula milk (gain plus).

- Loves to eat noodles. This evening, he refused to eat his porridge and wanted our fried homemade noodles instead. I had to lure him to eat his porridge using the noodles. Wonder how long I can use this method before he knows that he has been tricked :)

- For breakfast, I feed him either cereal or bread with cheese.

- Can eat spicy food such as tomyam noodle, according to his babysitter... pengsan!!!

Another Funny Scribbles of Hers

I didn't know if I should laugh or what when I found this little note in her school bag. Funny little girl, isn't she ?

Close Encounter

Last Sunday, my family and I went over to mainland to visit an old friend. After lunch we decided to be a little adventurous by going around Juru and Simpang Empat area to explore their housing projects. As we were not familiar with the road directions, we could only depend on our GPS to guide us.

While heading towards Simpang Empat township, we encountered a cross traffic lights junction. There were 2 lanes without any signboards of which lane to use if you want to turn left, go straight or turn right. As we need to go straight, hubby's instinct was to follow the left lane as right lane is usually for those wanting to turn right. But as we got nearer to the traffic lights, hubby realised that left lane is only for turning left. As we did not want to miss the directions given by our GPS, hubby took a quick shift back into the right lane. And guess what, right after the traffic lights we saw a few traffic policemen standing at the road in front waving to some cars to drive to the side of the road. And we were one of them :(.

Hubby winded down his window as a policeman approached our car. He immediately told us that we had voilated the traffic rule by jumping lanes. Hubby was quick to defend himself by saying that he didn't know that the left lane was for turning left only and there were no road signs at all. He also gave reasons that we were from Penang Island who are not familiar at all with the road situation there, but the police officer insisted that we shouldn't have shifted back to the right lane once on the left lane and demanded for hubby's driving's license. However hubby kept defending himself over the same reasons and refused to pass his license to the officer, trust me he was really good at defending with all the reasonable facts, to the extend of telling the officer why would we want to cross to Mainland to voilate traffic rules. :)
While the two of them were still debating, it suddenly occured to me that I should use the gps, which was still in my hand, as evidence. I showed him that we are relying on the GPS to guide us, how on earth would we know which lane to use, and we didn't want to turn left as we were afraid we could get lost. I guess the situation did change a little after that, instead, he asked us where we were heading to, we quickly gave him the name of the place which he doesn't know either. That's when we quickly took the opportunity to ask him to give us a 2nd chance :). He still insisted on getting hubby's license, I guess for validity checking purpose. When hubby passed it to him, he kept reminding the officer not to issue any summon :). Then the officer told us to remain in the car as he couldnt let us go yet since the lorry in front of us had also been summoned for the same voilation. After the lorry left, he came back and let us go.. phew.....
I guess Emily and Jared were also very tensed during that time as I didn;t hear them fussed at all and were totally behaved :).

What would you have done if you were us ? :)