• We travelled to KL, Malaysia as a family, and had a wonderful weekend together!
• I travelled to Vietnam on my own to meet up with Trisha, Saigon is a cool city, a lot more interesting then singapore!
• Robbie and I spent a couple months at home this summer!  Visiting family in Canada, Utah, and California.
• Robert joined a softball team...wrecked his ankle in the first game, was out for 5 weeks, but then got back into it, and is loving it.
• Robbie turned 3, his Grammy came to visit, and now our spare room is no longer called Anna-May's room, it's called Grammy's room.
• Robert and I spent a long weekend in Bangkok for our 1st anniversary!
• Robbie can dog paddle in the deep-end without drowning, we need to keep practicing, I'd like him to do butterfly next time we are at the lake.
• And here we are - February 2008, one month to go, and we will have lived here for 1 year as a family of 3!!  I forgot to mention, we are about to become a family of 4 - I am due with a little girl in March 2008.  It's been a great pregnancy and we can't wait for Robbie to become a big brother!  It's also been a scary pregnancy, because ultrasounds have shown that she only has 3 heart chambers where there should be 4, but luckily the doctors here say that they should be able to fix that with open heart surgery in a few months time.  I wish I could tell you what we will name her, but we still can't decide, and we've only got 5 weeks until she gets here.
• We've hired a live-in-helper who starts at the end of the month, so daily life should be a piece of cake, no more cleaning, cooking, or laundry (like I have ever really worked hard at those things!)
• Robbie starts school next month, 3 days a week - they start them young here in Singapore!
• Grammy will be back when the baby is born, and my Dad will be coming too, they are trying to decide if they want to spend a long weekend in Phuket Thailand, or Bali Indonesia!  LOL, it sounds so "life of riley" but really, they are such close destinations, it's like living in Vancouver, and choosing a weekend in Victoria, or in Kelowna!

And now I will upload some photos, sorry it's such a hodge podge collection, I finally found my camera cable, so I will be able to upload a lot more, ASAP.

Check out Facebook.com for more of the latest and greatest photos of our lives in Singapore!!

OXO Shannon

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Where's Robbie - training to Scuba

 
Video: Where's Robbie - training to Scuba

Look out Sea World

  
Video: Look out Sea World

My mother had 2 unbreakable rules for me growing up - never go on a Carni-ride, and never go on a motorcycle.Luckily, this is a permanent amusement ride...and yes, Robbie will have the same rules!
 
Video: where's robbie? flying

 Like Father - like son
 
Video: where's robbie? rockin out with dad

this is at the amusement park in Downtown East, Singapore
Video: where's robbie, driving already

For our first weekend trip away we decided to bring Anna-May and Robbie to Phuket Thailand.  It was one of those, hey, I can find us some cheap flights and a great deal on a hotel next weekend, yeah? yeah, lets do it!  And away we went.  And we were not disapointed, by Saturday night Robert felt as if he had died and gone to Heaven.
 
One of the first sites we saw was on our taxi ride home, we were travelling through busy streets with cars, motorbikes and people everywhere.  And beside us on a moped laiden down with shopping bags, was a father and mother, with their 3 year old daughter standing between them, no helmets, no worries!

After a fantastic thai dinner for super cheap (everything is cheap compared to Singapore, especially Thailand!), Robert and I headed down to Patong Beach.  We asked the taxi driver to take us to an area of Patong Beach tthat was fun, and had lots of different bars and restaurants to cruise.  So he brought us to Soi Bangla, the craizest street in Patong.  There were lots of ladymen dressed up in costumes, there were people selling souveniers, cigarettes, flower necklaces, bubblegum (I did buy some of  that) - you name it, and they were all calling out to us. Not to mention, lots of men shoving menus of "fancy shows" into your faces.  But we just kept walking, trying to figure out which of the 100 bars we wanted to enter.  So of course, we choose one with a great view of the street, and ROCK music.  Did I say we? LOL, Robert was very happy with the music, and I enjoyed the people watching. Especially the drama between the local girls and the foriegn guys.

Friday!  Our first full day in Phuket was pretty quiet, Anna May and Robbie walked to the beach, and had breakfast together, allowing us an awersome sleep in.  And then we spent the majority of the day in the pool, which had a fun waterslide.  The general warning was, go down the slide first, before you go with Robbie :-)  It was one of those slides that starts out calm, and then whips you around at the bottom.  At nap time Robert laid down in the bed, and i laid down on the couch, both trying to convince Robbie that everyone should sleep, he wanted to play with trains instead!!  Then as I was lating on the couch, I thought that it moved slightly, I was a bit confused, but thought maybe it was from laying down after being out in the hot sun.  Then it happened again, and Robert says "Earthquake?". He was right, there was a 5.9 in Northern Sumatra Indonesia.  But that was all we felt.  Scary thing though, at the time Anna-May was floating in the Ocean, and never noticed a thing.

You have to know that when vacationing in Phuket in the back of my mind is the Tsunami of Dec. 04.  Even though the Tsunami escape route led to our hotel, guests and locals stayed in the mountains behind our hotel for 3 days.  So, for me that meant that at every location I would mentally plan an escape route.  At one point Robbie was playing in the dirt near the pool with another little boy about 8 rooms down from ours, and I sat on a deck chair lounging with a drink and taking pictures of them.  Planning that if there was any danger, I would drop everything, run and pick up Robbie, and go straight up the nearest flight of stairs to the 4th floor.  From that location I would not be able to warn Robert and Anna-May who were back at the suite getting ready for dinner, I can't run that fast, and that was hard to think about.  (Yes, I know I have my mothers overactive immagination, and poor Robbie will get a GPS cell phone when he grows up so that I can track his evert movement!).   The few people that we spoke to about the tsunami had very scary stories to tell, and the overwhelming response was that they were lucky to be alive.

That night the whole family went into Patong for dinner, where we had another amazing thai meal, in a fantastic beach front restaurant for dirt cheap.  There were beautiful cats rooming the restaurant rubbing up against us for scraps. And Robbie slept through the whole meal, so it was peaceful!!!  Except for the every 3 minutes when a truck would pass by blasting the latest promotions for thai boxing or the "best bar in Phuket".  3 trucks that past by caught Roberts attention...ROCK CITY...LIVE BANDS EVERY NIGHT.  So, we knew what we were doing after dinner! We put Anna-May and Robbie in a cab, and headed down the beach in search of the Rock Bar.  There were 4 amazing bands that played, and we stayed until the very last one left the stage.  At one point Robert turned to me, and said "Can it get any better then this?", my response was "Yeah, if the next band played country music" :-) LOL

On Saturday Robert had to meet up with the tailor who was making him 2 "pimp suits" and a business suit, and so Robbie, Anna-May and i went off looking for an adventure.  We took a 45 min cab trip up into the hills to an elephant farm, to go for an elephant ride!!  Before the elephant show we had an interesting experience of a monkey show.  Where we got to get up close and very personal with a couple different monkeys who were trained to climb trees to get coconuts, ride bikes, go swiming, and shake hands.  Some parents would be fearful of letting their child be so close to the wild monkeys, but it was one of those days where anything goes!  And as you can see from the pictures Robbie got to be up close and personal with both the monkeys and the elephants.  For our elephant ride, we had a very young friendly driver, whom Robbie took to right away.  During the ride, Robbie asked me to get his hat out of the bag for him, and he put it on and started imitating the elephant driver, making the same noises and kicking his feet.  Then he said, he wanted to sit on the elephants head!  Until this point, I had pretty much been holding on to the elephant and robbie for dear life, but I decided to give in just a little, and let him sit on the edge of the seat, so that he could put his bare feet on the elephant.  Then at the top of the hill, the driver got off and let Anna-May sit on the elephants head for a picture.  WELL, Robbie would have none of that, and wrangled from my grasp to climb down with Anna-May, and got his wish of driving the elephant.  The actual driver was walking in front of the elephant taking our picture for us, as we made our way down the hill.  I may look calm in the photos, but I was freaked out!!!!  After, the driver got back on, he told Anna-may in broken English, that if the people he worked for found out about the photos, he would be in big trouble!!!  No doubt, a 2 year old was stearing the elephant down the bloody hill!!!!