Beetroot, my kids love them!  I first introduced to Chloe a month ago.  And she couldn’t get enough of it.  JD upon seeing how much his sister loves the beetroot, decided to join in too.  So now I have 2 beetroot fans.  They eat it is as part of their teabreaks, alongside other fruits, they have it as part of a side dish, they dig into it when I made it into a beetroot salad!

I don’t mind beetroot, but wouldn’t go overly crazy over them.

In Australia, the Aussies love to put beetroot on their burgers, along with lettuce, tomato, gherkins, cheese, tomato sauce!

One thing for sure, my kids are going to grow up more Aussie than me!  Well I was “Buatan Malaysia”, but they were Aussie made and would always be! 

Good on ya mate!

This is one of my kids favourite sayings.

Every morning, JD and Chloe would fight to stand on the stool, brushing their teeth.  And when that’s done, JD loves to rub water onto his sister’s hair, and shape it like this!

Chloe doesn’t mind at all, and would laugh out loud at her brother’s way of styling her hair.  I said before I have 2 very crazy kids!

My little man JD, at 4.3 years old is really into Lego.  And I must say he is really good at it.  I spend a lot of time browsing toy shops for Lego, all various sets, the aeroplanes, the ship, the airport, the warriors collections, the miscellaneous packs, and including his daddy’s 30 years old Star Wars Lego sets!

Somehow he has mixed up all his Lego sets into one big red box, and I have given up trying to sort it.  Still,  it doesn’t deter him but is probably more fun for with as he can build with all different Lego parts.  He spends many hours of his days, weeks, sitting among his pile of Lego bricks, slowly constructing an aeroplane, spaceship, robots, cars, helicopters, space crawler and etc. 

I also notice that his constructions are all very symetrical.  There’s always a set of wings, a set of claws, a pair of propellers, sometimes even colours matching.  And sometimes he can simultaneously build with both hands at the same time and it’s quite amazing to watch him. 

His passion with Lego is a great thing.  Since he hardly takes a day nap these days and while I still enforce a 1hr quiet time during the day, he is pretty happy to just occupy himself with Lego.  Sometimes, he would bring his Lego box into my room, sitting next to me on the floor while I take a rest.  Sometimes he would stay in his own room and I would hear him rummaging through his Lego sets until such time he will come out to ask he can join me again.   He is really great like that.

Last week, after my nap, I woke up to see this cleverly constructed spaceship!  I just said to JD “Wow! Wow! Wow!”.  I just thought it was so great and he has definitely got a really good visualisation of what he wants to build in his mind and follow it through in his head.  A true right brain thinker I think, hee!  Lots of visualisation! 

And when he takes a break from Lego, he would pull out the basket of Duplo blocks from the playroom to build robots.  In this photo, it was Optimus Prime he has built and he insisted on me taking a picture of it with all his other Transformers figurines.  He loves the Transformers! 

So we didn’t have any kitchen renovation work in the last week.  It was a relief as we could spend time at home a bit more and I didn’t have to keep bringing the kids out.

On Friday, the benchtop men came to install our new granite benchtop in.  Ah, it was so good seeing it and we made a good choice.  It looked really good, and I am glad we went for granite than the laminate benchtop.  It costed more, but it looks good.  It’s easy to clean, and I love the look of it.

And we got also the new undermount sink which gives the kitchen a clean and spacious look. 

It’s Saturday today, 2 more days…and I would have electricity, gas, power back in the kitchen.  The electrician and plumber are coming on Monday to put in the new oven, cooktop and dishwasher.

I can’t wait, to cook a proper meal again in the kitchen.  

I want to put all the plates, cups, food, fridge, snacks, coffee, tea, flour, sugar…everything back in the kitchen.

2 more sleeps…but it could still be a few weeks before everything is completed, like laying the floor tiles, installing the splashback…but the major part is almost over.

The new kitchen cabinet arrived on the 2nd day of the renovation.  This time JD wasn’t so sad about losing his old kitchen, but was very excited to see all the new cabinets being delivered.

By the end of the 3rd day, the kitchen looked something like this.

By the 4th day, it looked like this.

For now, we are still without a kitchen to use.  And we still have the whole of this week to go with the installation of a new benchtop, before the gas, electricity, water get connected again next week.  Oh, I am so looking forward to cooking in my kitchen again.

I have been cooking on the barbie, having lots of salads, sandwiches, doing the dishes in the laundry, boiling water in the bathroom, heating up food in the microwave, but I still managed to cook lots of meals.  We are eating a lot of one-dish meals like stir fry, fried noodles, fried rice and I even managed to bake a pizza on the barbie last week!  My husband thought I was the smartest woman to bake a pizza on the barbie, haha!

My outdoor kitchen!

On the first day of the renovation, we had all big and small trucks arriving bright and early at 7am!  It looked realy exciting and neighbours going to work that morning were all checking out the excitements!

This was the cool part, 7am in the morning, I have all workmen with their big boots, dressed in shorts, armed with their tools, drillers, saws, hammer, all sorts of demolition tools walking through my front door.  I have Ray the demolition man, Eddie the electrician, Doug the ceiling man, and a very very big guy reminded me of The Flintstone to rip out the floor tiles!  That guy was big, I only stood to the height of his belly button, told you he was a big big guy! 

JD was very sentimental towards the old kitchen and was a bit sad to part with it.  Honestly, I spent a few days explaining to JD what would happen to the old kitchen, that all the weeks of driving around with mommy was for a new kitchen and that we wouldn’t have to visit anoher kitchen showroom, but each time he just said “Awww, I don’t want the men to tear the kitchen down!”

We explained to the guys and they were really sweet to keep the noise to a very minimum.  So minimum that JD and Chloe slept through all the noises for over an hour.

There it was before…

In 30 mins….

In 2 hours, it was all gone

By lunch time, we had no kitchen.

But before the demolition, I cooked some Fried Bee Hoon to ”commemorate” my old kitchen for serving us over the years.  Like JD, I felt a bit sad to see it go too

While the workmen were working in the house, I packed the kids off to McD for some breaky.

And when we were home to supervise, the kids had to be kept entertained outside.

So I put a big tub, some buckets filled with water, bubbles, some pebbles, pegs, bottles, and they were entertained for a good hour.  They poured the water from one bucket to the other, filled the bottles with pebbles, used the pegs to try “fishing” for the pebbles, jumped into the tub and out again…it went on for a while till they got hungry and bored.

Remember I blogged about JD’s passion for Monster Warriors, and that he made this weapon out of some recycled paper rolls, balloon pump and a robot arm!

Well, not long after I blogged about that, I received a much surprised email from Katherine, the marketing coordinator at Coneybeare Stories - the maker of Monster Warriors. 

Now this was such a lovely surprise, because apparently one of the proud parents of the Monster Warriors saw the post and passed it onto Coneybeare Stories.  I was overjoyed, and my husband was just thrilled.

And this week, JD got a lovely surprise.  When we got home from kindy, we saw a parcel sitting at the front door step addressed to JD.  When I saw that it was from Canada, I knew JD would be thrilled!

Yes, he got a special present, a Monster Warriors backpack, a CD, lots of stickers…oh, thank you Monster Warriors, from the bottom of our hearts!  We feel so touched and so blessed. 

JD loves the bag and was all excited to show it off to his friends and teachers at kindy the next day!  And he has been totally captivated by all the Monster Warriors characters, the giant spiders, giant earthworm, and all the giant “monsters” in the little booklet that came with the parcel.

I blogged about Chloe wanting to be like the big brother.  She likes to wear the his clothes, look into his bag, and just be like her big brother.  Here she was again, insisted on wearing her brother’s size 4 t-shirt, but with her own “off the shoulder” style.  And she loved the shirt so much that she has worn it for 4 nights in a row as her pyjamas and I have to wrestle with her each morning to get her out of that ”off the shoulder” dress, haiz!

JD’s drawing has improved greatly just in the recent weeks.  He is starting to draw spiders, bugs, treasure maps, and lately Spongebob!

But here’s his latest drawing of a giant spider which I was really surprised with.  Everyday, he would get a stack of paper from my desk, standing on the stool to get the box of colour pencils from the shelf, then sitting at the craft desk, quietly, drawing pictures of the above mentioned…

And that’s on top of looking around for insects, snails, centipedes, spiders, ants in the garden each day before putting them into the stack of recycled containers and feeding them with strawberries, lettuce leaves…

Finally after months of going backward and forward on prices, we agreed on a contractor to handle the whole kitchen renovation. 

Tips for kitchen renovation:  It helps a lot to have one contractor whom design, demolish, install the new kitchen and organised for the electrician, plumber, tiler to do the full job.  Let them do the project management.  It saves you a lot of time in chasing more quotes.  And the best deal is you get the service at a trade cost, so it’s cost saving!  They plan the whole process, and I get a daily calendar of what happen and just be around to open the door when the contractors arrive!

This was one of the fun parts.  Because I get to play around with the different colours, colours for the bench-top, the wall, the splash-back, the kick-board, the cabinet door, the door handles and etc.  And when we have a good designer like the one we have, she pretty much helped to pick out a few key colours that could easily blend in with the rest of the house and taking into consideration the amount of natural light we get in our kitchen.  She is straight to the point and I get told off if it was something ugly I have chosen :)  Honestly, I really like her approach towards kitchen reno!

So the colours were picked, but I also need the man to have a look at it.  He kept saying to me “Whatever u think is right!”, but that bothers me because I don’t want to get it wrong.  And we use the kitchen everyday, so it needs to feel comfortable and it has to be a joint decision.  You know, choosing a kitchen should be a family affair!  So finally, I managed to drag him with me to the designer’s place one Saturday morning and encouraged forced him to sit down and have a good look at the whole layout.

It was good, because the man decided to go for a granite bench-top rather than the laminate bench-top because I was trying not to go above budget.  Once again, if he said so, I wouldn’t say no.  It costs a bit more, but it looks really good.

And we had the 2 kids with us…with JD happily sitting in a corner, admiring all the different colours granite top sample, running back and forth to check if I like the colours he had chosen, playing with the water cooler, drinking gallons of water from it  because it was icy cold…crazy kid I have!

And Chloe just crawled around (she wasn’t walking then), hiding herself in the cabinets….

Tips in choosing colours:  If you have a kitchen with lots of natural light, be careful to avoid an all white kitchen because it can look too washed out.  Have a creamy colour tone to it, but blend it in with some glass cabinet door to break it out a bit, and you can afford to choose a bold colour splash-back for some nice contrast.  Sometimes a bit of bold contrast is good, it makes a statement, it brightens up the whole kitchen.  When doing so, think about the rest of the living area in the house and more often that not, you can pick out a colour to match with, like the colour of the wall in the living room, the couch, the floorboard or etc. 

Remember, the kitchen is a very important part of the house and very often, when visitors arrive, we usually crowd around the kitchen first, to make that cup of tea, getting that cool drink from the fridge and in my case, where my sisters (when they visit) will sit in the kitchen for hours with their laptops working, chatting, surfing….