…the two of you eventually met. Its the same, for things that you USED TO LOVE doing; you’ll never know how much you’ve MISSED doing them, till you did it again.

Remember my post about Sundays Not being the same again? Because my eldest niece’s swimming lessons had been changed, hence we have not been meeting up like we used to in my PIL’s place on every Sundays.

CH has slimmed down alot as her dark skin tone explains the reason for her smaller frame now.

As usual she brought lots of self-created games with her. Some were fun, others just doesn’t make much sense, while the rest needed to be improvised.

Today IS a special day. Its a day when ALL Chinese (would) celebrate: Dong-Zhi. Below is an extract from Wikipedia:

…..Traditionally, the Dongzhi Festival is also a time for the family to get together. One activity that occurs during these get togethers is the making and eating of Tangyuan (??) or balls of glutinuous rice, which symbolize reunion. Tangyuan are made of glutinuous rice flour and sometimes brightly coloured. Each family member receives at least one large Tang Yuan in addition to several small ones. The flour balls may be plain or stuffed. They are cooked in a sweet soup or savoury broth with both the ball and the soup/broth served in one bowl…….

tangyuanThis was the Tangyuan my MIL made. Sad to say, out of the 14 of us in the family, only my 2nd SIL, her daughter-CH and I love to eat it. 3 of us love to eat those with peanut-fillings. As for me, if given a choice between with or without fillings, I prefer WITHOUT.

Finally after months, I get to see CH there on Sunday, even though there were these 3+hours she had to go for her swimming lessons, but that period zoomed passed easily while teaching ZY Primary 2 maths.

Hey, did you think it was my idea? NO way! On such occasions, I would love to play Play PLAY, why would I ‘torture’ a 7 year old kid doing maths sums on Dong Zhi!? My FIL needed to know if she could do it. For ZY, as most of my regular followers know, she doesn’t really have someone to ‘teach’ her any subjects except Mandarin… *sigh* that would be another story in itself….

So the kids got their Christmas presents today! Allan was feeling creative the other day and chose to draw their faces instead of writing names on the wrapper.

Presents for CH from Allan (left) and I (right) :

ch

In case you are wondering what was mine? It’s a foldable Storage Box (3rd pic).

cha

chm

chme

Presents for ZY from Allan and I :

zy zya zym

Presents for MY from Allan and I :

my mya weidongme

Presents for WD from Allan and I : (please don’t ask me why he didn’t draw WD, cos’ I don’t know…)

weidonga weidongme

In return, these were the presents Keatkeat (left) and Binbin (right) received:

keatsp binsp

jengaOther than my realization of how much I missed CH and all her self-created games, I missed playing JENGA!!! A game I used to play in my much younger years. This was one of CH’s presents. I was jumping when CH wanted to play it that very moment!

Its a Wonderful Family Gathering today! I hope you had a great day too! *cheers*