What do you want?

That phrase can mean so many different things depending how the tone of your voice and to whom you are saying it to, huh?

This time, though, it simply means “what do we want from the U.S.?”. When we go home we stock up. It’s always fun to talk to others who go to their homes to see what they have on their shopping list. My list is a little different each time depending on what we’re out of and what we’ve been fortunate to find since our last trip home.

My cousin is coming next week from Dallas to visit and do some traveling. She told me she’s only bringing one suitcase for herself and the other checked bag was mine. 50 whole pounds of American goodness heading our way. THANK YOU, ALICIA!!! AND TORI, for putting it all together for us. We just got back from our summer trip not too long ago so there’s not much that we really need but I’m certainly not wasting the opportunity.

We can get pretty much whatever we need and alot that we want here but if it’s something from the U.S., it’s about triple the price if not more. But believe me, we’re surviving just fine and have managed to find some things here that we’re definitely going to miss when we move back to the U.S.

So, headed our way will be these items:
Some books that I had to leave behind last trip because our luggage seriously exceeded the weight limit.
A sports watch for Anna. $30 in the U.S. and $115 SGD here. No brainer.
Fall/Halloween candies. I can find some of our favorites or a suitable replacement here but again, triple the price if not more.
Powdered coffee cream – holiday flavors
A couple big bags of pecan halves
iTunes cards
4 cans of those crunchy onions that go on top of green bean casserole
Stash Green Tea
Peach Tea mix
Fiesta brand fajita seasoning
Coffee beans (Sumatra, Ethiopia, Kenya, etc.)
Dark chocolate peanut m&m’s x 2 or 3 – this is just to satisfy a craving. Singapore has no shortage of good chocolates.
Movies – The Prestige and any others that Tori thought we might “need”
Fritos – WHY can we not find Frito’s here????? That baffles me.
Games that I ordered online and wouldn’t ship to Singapore
Mosquito Spray
Bounty Papertowels – these were for stuffing mostly. This is my favorite sweat rag. They are $6/roll here so this just saves us a few bucks.

The things that we cannot get here that we really miss when we run out are:
Some of the candies and snacks that transport us back home.
Good coffee beans are always on the top of our shopping list when we go home. We prefer Medium Roast from Land of a Thousand Hills and Guatemala Fair Trade from HEB Central Market in case you wanted to know.
iTunes cards – I know we could pay with a cc but we’d get carried away and go broke.
Gebhardts Chili Powder – Chili powder is different over here. Gebhardts might be available but we haven’t found it yet. No Gebhardts means no enchiladas. And that is a sad day indeed.

We are often asked what we’d like in a care package. That’s really sooo sweet and of course, we’ll not refuse it if you must. But it’s so darn expensive to mail anything over here and we really are surviving just fine. I do not mean to sound ungrateful, but so much more good could be done with $50-$100 that would literally help people survive one more day as opposed to sending us candy or coffee or whatever.

On the other hand, if you’re coming to Singapore and you have some spare cargo space, please refer to the list above. My motto when we travel back to Singapore from the US is “I will not waste an ounce or an inch!”. And believe me, we don’t. And sometimes we pay more for extra ounces and inches.

SHS – One Month

There’s a storm brewing outside in Singapore. I love sitting down to write when it’s raining. Rain cleanses. Rain nourishes. To me, writing does the same thing. It cleanses my thoughts, getting some of them out of my brain and feeds my soul. Sounds corny perhaps but I always feel better about life in general after I hit the “publish” button.

I’ve needed to update about our homeschooling for a while so that’s what I will do. Here are previous homeschool posts if you want to catch up.

I can. I will.

SHS Day 2

Play and Learn

It’s been one month of 6th grade and things are going pretty well. There have really only been two days when I honestly didn’t “feel like it today”. One of those was just laziness and we pushed through and the other was a true teacher sick day. I have to say, though, that it was nice to lay around that day and watch 4 movies. Anna still did some of her independent school work. She’s kind of task oriented that way and I’m grateful. She really likes to check things off of a list. Makes me proud.

PACE is going well. She is making good progress here. Sometimes it’s challenging and really hurts her brain (and mine) but alot of the time it’s a fun sort of challenge. We are both learning some things about her through this program. Areas where she tends to lose focus and ways to help her overcome that. She has already memorized all of the U.S. President’s using picture stories. This is a visual processing task so that comes pretty easy for her but it is still very impressive to me that she can rattle them off. Visual pictures to help connect objects together is a great learning tool. Many of the PACE drills use a metronome. Sometimes she uses it to keep a beat while doing the drill but sometimes its function is more of a auditory distraction. The auditory processing is what we are mainly trying to enhance for her through this program and we are seeing improvement. We laugh alot, especially when some of the drills require her to perform a specific task while I engage her in an easy conversation. Every time I bring up Dr. Pepper she messes up and every time we end up laughing. Dr. Pepper is a huge distraction I suppose.

As I said before, we’re not doing much in the realm of Science and History and Language. She does some easy grammar worksheets here and there. She is also reading and doing her memorization and copywork with Poetry. Blogging through some of these subjects is growing her computer skills and her writing ability. We brought in a DVD program for some easy American History, Drive Thru History – Foundations of Character, and we do that a couple times each week. She has written several summaries on her blog about Helen Keller and a brief research project on the Travelers Palm for Science. You can check out her blog here. Welcome to La La Land.

She barely tolerates Math. We still both love the program we use, Teaching Textbooks, though. If Math must be done, this is a good tool, for her anyway. She loves the being at the computer and she loves working independently which she can do with this for the most part. My favorite part of her Math is being downstairs and hearing her hum through her lessons. I think humming gets her through Math without making her crazy. If she were in a school setting, she would not be able to hum in Math and then it would be even less tolerable.

We’ve taken a few field trips and enjoyed our flexible schedule on a few days. We normally start our day around 9am and finish up around 1 or 2pm and this includes lunch and a swim on most days. She sometimes saves her Bible lessons for when Dad comes home and we usually share some things with him and Jakeb that she’s done in PACE. It’s always fun to show off a little.

We brought in Rosetta Stone Spanish this week. She will only have Spanish twice a week but so far she seems to like it much more than she liked Mandarin in the 4th grade. She said that Spanish is much easier because she must have ”more Mexican in me than I thought”. Funny girl. I suppose that living in Texas very near the border of Mexico for the first 10 years of her life made her part Mexican. Who knew???

We bought a new Think Fun game yesterday at a toy store in Tanglin Mall. The pieces of the game are chocolate shapes. How could we resist???

Here are a few pics from “school time” over the last month. There are some perks!

Lunchtime at Din Tai Fung.

School day at Starbucks!