Make your own noodles

My kids tend to go through a whole LOT of homemade playdough. Yours too? How about we use that to our advantage and have them make their own lunch? hehe...

 The recipe is super simple. Only 2 ingredients. 500g of flour, and 5 eggs. Yup, that's it. Dump the flour into a huge bowl (pink bowl is a plus, obviously), make a hole and break the eggs into it. Mix it up. Knead. It makes a nice soft pliable dough. If you find it too wet, add a bit of flour. If too dry, add abit of water.

Then let the kids play with it. The longer you play with it, the better the dough will be.

Still playing the dough. Mia liked the texture so much that she asked for more the next day, just for playing.

Set your noodle maker on a floury table. I got ours from Giant, cheaply at around rm30+. It is very simple to use and the kids can operate it on their own. We were pretty much wrestling each other ( even me!) to get a turn to use the noodle maker.

When we're done this is what you get. Beautiful homemade noodles. Dry it on a kitchen towel.  You can use right fresh pasta right away or leave it to dry for a couple of hours, then keep it to use another day. It should keep for a week or two.

Freshly boiled pasta. Yum! It's a hit with the kids.

Oh, did I mention we go through a LOT of pasta too in this house?

First day of 'school'

My New Year's resolution is to blog more. Yup. Don't believe me? I don't blame ya ;)

The beginning of the year this year feels a bit..heavy for me. This year Adam is turning 7, which means that when the other children started school last Thursday, Adam is officially a Homeschooler. The weight of responsibility felt especially heavy on my shoulders. Am I doing something right? Will he turn out ok? All those voices of doubt started to creep in on me a little bit. So I decided to take out my camera, and record the little events of our regular day, to remind myself why we're doing this.

 Early morning, he and Mia decided to build Legos together. Without a fight ;)

 Then we made colored foam. Still in their pyjamas.

Recipe for those awesome foam: A squirt of dishwash/shower gel in your blender/food processor, a little bit of water, some food coloring and then blend! The longer you blend, the more foam it makes. Bonus; your blender gets a good clean.

He played Jengga. Made dominoes and then later robot armies.

They fed little sister Maryam..

This is our read for the day. Adam's choice. Oh yeah. We dig dino poops. Not your regular textbook that's for sure.

He taught Mia to read Furqan after prayer times..

Alphabet homemade playdough in the evening..

At the end of the day when I look at these photos and recall Adam's first day of unschool, I thought,

no..it's not so bad afterall. In fact it's a great first day. It is an ordinary day. Full of family time, fun, child-led learning. The children get to claim their childhood.

This feels right. Alhamdulillah.

Adam makes liquid soap

You can see how my blog is now filling up with talks of soaps and lotions and balms. Can you imagine all the soap talks, lipbalm talks and Mommy's Business talks going on in my house? Naturally the kids are very curious and interested and want to get involved. Soapmaking, unfortunately is an art that must be practised with supreme caution and without children. Oh yes. Imagine the frustration. Adam's frustration. He loves experiments and soapmaking sounds like the ultimate experiment for him (based on my description). 

So to let him in on some of the excitement, we made liquid soap together.

To make liquid soap, we used offcuts and soap slivers from the soap I made before. These soaps have fully saponified but are still soft and need drying time to harden before we can use them. But they'll be perfect for making into liquid soap.

To make liquid soap, we just chop up these soap and 'cook' it with some boiling water.

When it's all nice and melted down, we added some food coloring and essential oils for scent. I gave Adam full control of this 'experiment' and he chose his own colours and scents.

Tadaaaa!! Homemade liquid soap! From left - colored blue scented with sweet orange essential oil, original Milk Calendula Soap, colored pink scented with rose geranium essential oil (for Mia), and the last one colored purple but Adam didn;t like this one and decided not to scent it.

Someone's very proud of his soaps :)

Homemade baby cloth wipes

I'm 5 and a half months pregnant now and at what you might call a baby-moon stage where I'm somewhat more productive, feel healthy and am probably at the nesting stage too considering I'm slightly more organised than I usually am. Great time to be making something for the baby today, I thought. We have decided to fully cloth-diaper this time. With Adam and Mia, we only partially cloth diaper and didn't have enough CDs for fulltime. This time insyaAllah I am determined to cloth diaper Baby no 3 fulltime. Both my babies are fully toilet trained for a long while now so I have no ideas yet on the latest reliable brands of CD or how to cloth diaper a newborn, so if you have any tips, please leave a comment! I'd really appreciate it.

Anyway, I was thinking about CDs today and went digging in my sewing room to find anything I could use to make some CDs, maybe. I found this 2meters length of blue cotton flannel. I bought this at Adam's request a couple years ago when I was sewing a bed set for his birthday. He specifically asked for this fabric, 'to make into my selimut', were his exact words, which I thought at the time was pretty smart for a 3 year old because flannel does make great blankets. However I ended up sewing a quilt cover instead for him using another fabric, so this flannel has been sitting in my shelves ever since. I thought it would totally make lovely absorbent baby cloth wipes.

I set out to make full use of every inch of this 2 meters flannel. Afterall you can never have too many wipes, can you, especially with newborns. They pee and poop ALL THE TIME.

If you want to make these wipes too, basically what you need to do is just fold up the fabric to find the approximate size that you think might be good for wipes.You don't need a ruler at all. Fold up, look at it, put your hand on it to see if it'll cover your whole hand as you wipe and go by instinct. Then cut. They don't have to be exactly the same sizes either.

I ended up with about 24 pieces of smaller sized wipes which will be perfect for wiping bums and 16 medium sized wipes which can  I thought might be nice as burp or vomit cloths too.

Then all I had to do was serge the edges, and in less than an hour (from cutting to sewing), I was done! 40 wipes in total from 2 meters of fabric. Awesome. I know these will be so useful when the baby comes.

Adam made 4 of these for me and they look just as perfect as mine. He's not new to sewing. After watching me sew for practically the whole 5 years of his life, he has made his own pants, his own apron, some small toys for himself and even little gifts for Mia.

Recently he made these pink pillows for Mia's dollies. His idea and work from start to finish.

Back to the wipes, they would be a great first project for your child if they want to learn sewing and you own a serger.

I think I remember the flannel fabric being quite cheap when I bought it. Maybe I'll visit Nagoya again and buy some more plain flannels in other colours. More wipes in other colours and also, I'm thinking they'll probably make good absorbent kitchen wipes and swaddling blankets for Baby3. This was a very easy project and gives instant gratification. Try it!

I'm back!

Oh my it's been months since my last post. How have you been?

A lot has happened in the last few months for us. I turned 31 (waaaa!) and Mia turned 3!

She's the cleverest, cheekiest 3 year old you'll ever meet. Her vocabulary of both English and Malay has grown extensively and quite often what she says are funny, witty and bound to surprise you.

My boy Adam is a lot taller now, most his clothes are starting to look short on him but he's still as thin as ever. He is homeschooled and very proud of the fact. He's my little homeschool ambassador.

And there's another little surprise. Notice a, ehem, small 'bump' in the picture above? I'm almost 5 months pregnant! Hello Baby no 3! Wish us luck!!

*pictures are from Mia and my birthday trip to Cameron Highland a couple weeks ago.

Adam's birthday gifts

Adam's 5th birthday is coming up this Friday. Five! We're all excited, especially him. I made him some handmade birthday presents.

This is a puppet theater. It wasn't a surprise gift, I let Adam chose a project for me to sew. He loved it and chose all the fabric himself. It's not his birthday yet but we already enjoyed many performances this week.

I made him a pair of smart pants to fit. He always have a problem with bought pant - if it fits his waist, it'll be too short but if it's long enough for him the waist will be way too loose. Children pants are way overpriced here anyway so as long as he will wear them I shall try to make his pants for him.

The waist has a faux fly. It opens up but only halfway to allow the pants to be put on. The back has elastic for long-wearing.

Then I made a red shirt for him. Red's his favourite colour and if you ask him he wants everything in red.

When he asked me who i'm making these clothes for I told him it's for my 5 year-old friend. He said "I'm almost 5, but not yet. Can I play with your friend?"

These are not expensive gifts. The shirt costed me next to nothing because the fabric was a scrap from years ago. I only had to buy the buttons (less than 50 sen for all). But it was made with a lot of love and I hope he will appreciate that one day.

I love you, Adam..

p/s: we're going for Adam's surprise birthday trip tomorrow! stay tuned for updates soon!

Carnivorous plants alert!

A few months ago, Adam came across carnivorous* plants in one of his books. It was just a small section, but it sparked his interest. He asked if we could grow them. To be honest, when he first mentioned this I thought the plants only grow in the wild, possibly rare, not in Malaysia and there was no way we could grow them in our house. But I entertained his request anyway, and together we browsed the internet - videos, websites - looking for more information on them. He is fascinated by these plants and in particular the venus flytrap. It turned out these plants can be grown in the home, and that in Malaysia there is a local carnivorous plant - periuk kera!

We came across a website - Petpitchers - for Malaysian enthusiasts of carnivorous plants. There is quite a large community there and a lot of information about growing carnivorous plants in our tropical weather. Also, we found a few places to buy them.

This nursery is called 4ZE plant, in Ampang. The owner specialises in carnivorous plants especially monkey pots. He has more than 100 species here.

Close up of a beautiful monkey pot. Malaysia is home to many species of this plant. Its mechanism of trapping its prey is by baiting them with the sweet smell of nectar, then the insects will slip on its slippery wall and into the watery pots. The insects are then digested by the chemicals inside it and the nutrients are released into the plant.

This is a venus flytrap. Adam's favourite. The traps open up, and when a fly/insect goes in, it will automatically close up, trapping the insect inside and digesting it.

Look how happy this boy was! He walked around the nursery taking photos of everything. An early birthday treat for him :)

This one is another type of carnivorous plant. I think the name is sarracenia, and its trapping mechanism is similar to monkey pot.

This Atok was showing Adam around and helping him to choose plants to start off his carnivorous plant collection. He chose one venus flytrap, one sarracenia and one monkey pot. Now my husband and I are not particularly good growers, many of my plants tend to die on me unfortunately, but hopefully Adam can grow these well....

I was barely aware of these plants before but I think he's got me hooked, too...these plants are amazing!

*carnivorous plants are plants that lure, trap and digest small insects/bugs for growth and survival

Pigs don't sing

A few hours ago, I sat on the couch pretending to be The Pig while Adam shot Angry Birds at me using his homemade slingshot.




So some time later I came back to the same spot, breastfeeding my girl and singing mindlessly to myself...

Adam said to me " Mom, pigs don't sing... pigs don't sing at all...."

dreams

This morning. Adam just woke up...

me: Adam did you have any dreams last night?
Adam: yes!
me: what was it about?
Adam: i go to escalator, there's some friend.. then friend fall down the escalator. there's a police! then i said sorry....
me: ooo.....mia, did you have any dreams last night?
Mia: errr..... there's some police....
Adam: hey, that's my dream!

Sew as one

Yesterday Adam wanted to sew himself some traintracks (??!). He asked Mia for help..

rather good teamwork, i must say ;)

Later that day he wanted to sew some more and asked Mia to help. She said "Sorry, I'm busy!" . She was sorting out coins. Hey that's serious work too, you know ;)

Adam the hero

I heard little cat noises from the back window since afternoon, but thought nothing of it. In the early evening when I was about to start dinner Adam came in the kitchen with me and heard the noises too. I opened the back door to let him check out what it was.

It turned out there was a baby cat trapped in the drain. All wet and weak. Adam said "I have a great idea! I'm going to rescue him!". Now you see I felt a bit torn at this, because, errr...I'm scared of cats?! oh yes, the secret's out. But at the same time I felt proud and rather curious at Adam's determined announcement. So I said yes.

He climbed in the drain all by himself. Not one bit scared.

All safe and dry.

Then he proceeded to whisper to the cat, telling it 'Don't worry, I'm here..' 'Wait for Daddy to come home..we'll take you to your mommy' 'You're safe in our house now'. He carried on calming the cat for quite some time after that. I busied myself with dinner at this point, trying not to hear, hoping he won't ask to keep the poor little cat. But I did catch him singing Twinkle twinkle and Old Mcdonald to the cat. Oh dear.

The next day he rescued yet another baby cat, also from a nearby drain, which we concluded to be the first cat's sibling. We put them together with food. Hoping they will be safe.

Good job Adam.

(sorry we can't keep them! but he didn't ask, he knows mommy's secret)

Adam made pants

Probably spurred by his recent success in making his own apron, Adam declared out of nowhere;

"I want to make my own baju and seluar" (top and pants)

This mama was more than willing, as you can imagine. My baby boy, all of a sudden is showing interest in sewing? oh my, be still my beating heart.

He chose his fabric - red - his current favourite colour.

A little one's interest comes and passes in a blink of an eye, and you other mamas well know, so I quickly grabbed a pair of pyjama pants right out of the (unfolded) laundry pile, laid it down on folded fabric and let him loose. And by that I meant letting him draw and cut, using my very sharp fabric scissors. Not an easy thing to do considering how uptight I can be about other people touching my sewing things (ask my husband!). But I managed it and so did he!

As you can see the lines are roughly cut. But in the spirit of unschooling - So what? - that's gotta be my new motto now. After a while I find myself relaxing and and so did he. Boy what fun we had.

pinning

the little sister enjoying herself too

It's surprising what a four year old can do when given the chance.

Or rather, it shouldn't be a surprise. Children can do great things. Never underestimate them.