My dad will be joining my mom in London for a trip to Amsterdam, so I was tasked with borrowing a travel guide on Amsterdam from the library. We headed to the Pasir Ris library at White Sands. At first, Alison was rather dismissive because she thought that the library wouldn’t be well-stocked with current titles. Her school library apparently is not au courant. I think I’m partly to blame for this snobbishness because before the Kindle I rarely borrowed books from the library, always preferring to own my books. Also, library books have a nasty habit of walking off and disappearing in our house, leading to a lot of frustration when it’s time to return them. Hence, fines. $12 worth of them, to be exact. That’s what I paid for returning a DVD and a bunch of books several weeks late.

After I pointed out contemporary titles like Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl and the ubiquitous Mr Midnight, Alison was more interested in browsing and soon had an armload of books to borrow. Zoe, too, ran around randomly taking books from shelves. An hour later, we’d nearly exhausted our borrowing quota. Alison began reading as soon as we got home while Zoe chose two of the six titles she borrowed for her bedtime stories. At the rate we’re going, I suspect we will be returning for more books next week and hopefully, develop a closer and more responsible relationship with the library.

Part of the haul today. A bundle of money saved by borrowing!

Singapore Bike School (bikeschool.sg) conducted a cycling skills clinic for 30 members of LoveCyclingSG. K used *Scape as a venue for the first time, and everything turned out well so there will be more clinics there in time to come.

Alison was K's able assistant, helping him write instructions on the course and taking attendance.

Zoe suddenly discovered an interest in music. Here she is with a mini accordion which I bought in Hong Kong a couple of years ago.

She also graduated (finally) to a big girl bed like Alison's. No we don't believe in matching bed linens in this house.

Finally, we bought a new old car! Our Xtrail served us faithfully for 7.5 years and nearly 200,000km. It was really showing its age in the last few months, costing us thousands of dollars in repairs. So we decided that it was time to find a new ride. We saw just one car – a 2.5 year old blue Subaru Forester 2.0X with low mileage, test drove it and put down a deposit on the same day. So far, we’ve been quite happy with it! It handles very responsively, meets our hauling needs, has a sound system that’s much better than the Xtrail’s and is comfortably utilitarian. The fuel consumption could be better but we can’t have everything, eh.

So that’s it for April. K and I had a chat about what’s coming up in the next couple of months so we could align our calendars, and it will get busier from here!

Even though she has been tinkling the ivories at home daily, Zoe refused to touch the teacher’s piano. I don’t know if it was just a simple case of shyness, the new environment or shock at the marked difference between her hands and those of the earlier student, who offered a handshake to Zoe when they were introduced. Since she wouldn’t sit at the piano, we spent the hour playing with percussion instruments like claves, maracas, shakers and rainsticks to the tunes of Old MacDonald, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and assorted bible songs. Zoe was enthusiastic enough, but both the teacher and I concluded that she is not as keen about learning the piano as she says she is. When I asked Zoe what she enjoyed the most about the session, she mentioned the claves and said she wanted to come back next week to play them again. So maybe drum lessons are more her speed.

I came away from the lesson with mixed feelings. I was happy to have found a teacher who is willing to teach Zoe, and a little sad that I had to make such an arrangement in the first place. I’m also unsure if I did the right thing by looking for a teacher with special needs experience, even though I am fully aware as a pianist myself that is difficult to play without a thumb. The teacher herself was not really convinced that Zoe needs to be taught by a “special” teacher. In fact, the only time she had to come up with an adaptive solution for Zoe during the lesson was when she was playing the finger cymbals.

Arranging this trial lesson also detracts from how K and I have been parenting Zoe all this while. We work to help her lead as normal a life as possible – so normal, in fact, that we don’t highlight her difference. We didn’t tell her kindergartens about it, and neither did we inform her art school or ballet school when she started classes there. Everyone has always just accepted Zoe as she is, and the matter of the missing thumb evaporates into insignificance once they are charmed by her sparkling personality. Zoe herself doesn’t think there is anything “abnormal” about herself – while she does ask us from time to time why her thumb hasn’t grown, it’s not something she dwells on. She certainly doesn’t let it hinder her from doing what she likes.

There is bound to come a time when Zoe will face teasing from her friends. Children can be cruel and I wonder whether it is better for us to have told Zoe that she has a disability, or that she is made a little differently but can still do everything that other children can do if she puts her mind to it, as we have been doing all this while. Which will help her cope better when she comes up against discriminatory attitudes? I don’t know. I just pray that come what may, she will be resilient enough to pull through and be stronger for it.

So it doesn’t look like Zoe will be starting piano lessons. For one, it is extremely expensive – many times more so than regular piano lessons. I don’t know how middle-income parents with more severely disabled children can effectively provide for their therapy and enrichment needs at such prices since Singapore’s government subsidies for special needs are paltry when compared to the costs, and are limited in their scope anyway. For another, I suspect that Zoe’s interest is a passing one and definitely not on the same level as her passion for art. This means that my recently tamed Saturdays can continue to be so; the rushing around from dropping K off to tuition to picking K up to art class and then ballet can be really draining!

Rather monstrous buns.

Hot cross buns are such an institution on Good Friday. I remember my parents buying bags of them after Mass in Johor Bahru. Those buns were always extra-sweet, rather dense and hard – suffice to say, I didn’t like them very much! Since I’m on a bit of a baking kick, I decided to try making hot cross buns using this recipe which received fairly good reviews. Making the dough was easy enough. It was definitely easier and quicker than making bread dough, but somehow I couldn’t shape the buns into nice round balls. Some of them were square, while others were triangular, so I’m definitely not going to win any Masterchef awards for presentation! At any rate, they’re OK taste-wise. Nice and fluffy and not too sweet. They’ll be lovely for breakfast tomorrow.

If you’re going to try the recipe, I made a few changes. I used only one packet of yeast, and for the crosses I used one part sugar to two parts flour. I didn’t bother with the sugar glaze after the buns were done, so that’s why mine don’t have the nice shiny colour like the picture in the recipe. I didn’t think the extra sweetness was necessary.

Picture taken before the dough breached the rim of the bowl.

Once I’d gotten over that, the kneading process threw me for a loop. The dough was super sticky and even though I floured my kitchen counter top and my hands, bits of dough stuck firmly to the counter and made my fingers so gloopy that I thought I’d never be able to get it off. The bread book author must have seen it coming, because the instructions on kneading advised not to be intimidated when this happened. So I got on with it, and after a lot of elbow grease and huffing and puffing, produced a dough ball that could be shaped into a loaf using a bread pan. More than two hours of kneading and let rising and baking later, I got this:

Two wholemeal loaves.

I’m not sure why, but the bread crust was pretty hard even though the loaf was fresh out of the oven. I don’t have a bread knife, so I used a butter knife to hack off a chunk to try. The recipe called for four teaspoons of salt, which I think is a bit much, so the next time I try this, I’ll put in just two teaspoons. Other than that, the bread was soft, moist and chewy considering that it was made purely of wholemeal.

Bread that was broken.

I’ll definitely be trying this again. Fun!