CATS (Bento #53 - hubby's & 54 - girl's)

We attended the musical 'CATS' last evening with KY & JG. Timing was very tight as we both had to wait for the kids to come home from school before rushing out the door. KY lives like 45mins away from the Esplanade and she's really lucky to have arrived before the doors of the theatre closed. For me, we are lucky we live less than 10mins away. However, I prepared bentos for princess, hubby and myself which we needed to consume before the start of the show. We made it in good time!

However, I spent at least 2hrs on the bentos and seriously can't imagine myself doing this on a daily basis. But, I am really happy that I fulfilled what I started out to do. And am proud that the CATS logo turned out pretty well on hubby's bento. In his bento, I have placed the rice at the bottom after seasoning it with sukiyaki beef furikake (picture down at the bottom), which is super yummy, if I had put more of it in. Was afraid that it'd turn out too salty, but for future ref, will be generous with it because it really is super delicious! :P I have also placed some blanched broccoli & a piece of luncheon meat at the base.

In this layer of his bento (using the hamburger bento, which is a perfect portion for him), there are strawberries, dragonfruit & a salad I made with potatoes, corn kernels, cut-up sausages & Japanese cucumber and seasoned with mayo, garlic powder & black pepper.

For the girl, I made two little kitties to depict the characters in the musical. For the fishball cat, I cut two tiny triangular ears out from the luncheon meat & secured them with vermicelli strands. I didn't have time to beautify it further as it was time to get ready to pick her up from the bus, a quick shower & change then rush out the door. Love the metal Cinnamoroll bento.

Her dessert bento held dragonfruit & blueberry marshmallows.

The bento below is for myself. I had onigiri & a salad just like hubby's, However, I only ate the onigiri & the salad is still sitting in the fridge. I think I was too tired after the preparation of the bentos that I wasn't hungry by dinnertime.

I made some extras, for JG & for my mum, which they ate during interval.

This below is the very yummy sukiyaki beef furikake.

We did have a good evening & princess enjoyed the musical, because it is after all, about cats, which she loves. However, it was too long for her and by 10.20pm, she was complaining that she was sleepy and bugging to go home. She got a t-shirt from the merchandise shop and couldn't wait to put it on. She even wore it to sleep. ;) Thanks AG & KY for the tickets. :D

Church funfair & Scrooge Play

Every year at this time of the year, we look forward to the funfair at mum's church. It's so full of fun with lots of games and activities, as well as needless to say, plenty of food. The highlight of this funfair for princess is the ritual of getting her face painted and doing some manicure and pedicure. Unfortunately, we were a little down on our luck this year. We arrived late... just after 12pm and most of the food had been sold out, plus there was no nailart stall this year. What a letdown. Princess was so looking forward to getting her nails painted. Thank God I distracted her with other things so she wasn't too disappointed by it.

Mum usually buys lots of coupons and we'll spend them all on buying food home - brownies, dim sum, cakes, etc. Sometimes I even buy food for dinner so I don't have to cook for that evening. However, I only managed to get some nonya kueh and just had a little lunch of fried carrot cake, with otah and siew mai. The siew mai were selling 1 for $1!!! The carrot or radish cake looked a little plain and not completely appetizing but was surprisingly quite tasty. The otah was nice. I believe they were homemade, including the kueh kueh.

After a quick lunch, it was off to get our face painted. We usually do a full face butterfly. This lady is very talented and she's there every year. There's always a queue and as she's usually a one-man show, you have to wait quite a bit as it takes some time to paint an entire face. For today, we only wanted one cheek painted as we were off to watch the play 'Scrooge' afterwards and didn't want to scare anybody off with a fully painted face. Haha. So we asked the dear auntie to paint us a little rainbow, complete with silver and gold glitter.

Next we were off to the bouncy castle for a 20-minute workout.

We couldn't last 20 minutes in there and came out after 15. Then we bounced off to the 'golf course'.

We caught someone being dunked into the water. What a thrill!

Now, we practise our chopsticks skills. We managed 3 little marbles. That's not too bad. And we could pick some little sweets as our prize. Of course they were gobbled up in an instant.

At the end of it, mum was rewarded with a prize from the lucky draw. We had to leave the funfair to make our way to the play and mum received a call from a friend whom she had left her lucky draw tickets with. She had won the 8th prize! Whoopee!!! And I am the lucky recipient of the little photo printer, not that I need one. Haha. Thanks so much mummy.

We were very early for the play and decided to take a walk around Robertson Walk to check out the area. Mum had read about this chocolate specialty place called Laurent. As you enter the place, you get a feeling of unfriendliness with a sign posted on the door that says 'No pictures please' (as you will disturb the other patrons in small prints on the menu or somewhere I saw it). Mum wanted to check it out and try the chocolate desserts on offer. Princess picked the chocolate apricot cake. I don't know what the actual name was as I did not go to the counter to have a look. I ordered the Iced Chocolate while mum had a coffee and princess had the cake. The iced chocolate was very rich, but nothing to shout about. The cake was a little on the disappointing side, a bit dry.

The rebel in me decided to snap a photo with my mobile. Picture's not great but it's not about the quality of the photo. It's about defiance. :P

Following our little 'tea', we strolled over to the Singapore Repertory Theatre at the DBS Arts Centre. Here we met up with K and the boys for the play 'Scrooge'. I enjoyed it and so did princess. It was a lovely production, and an interactive play which involved the participation of the audience. Princess' school had arranged to take the kids there in Dec but I was invited by K earlier and we had already planned to go from a couple of months' back. It would have been nice for princess to go with the class, but oh well, maybe next time. I love that there are plays for little children and SRT specializes in these. It exposes them to theatre productions and that's lovely. I enjoy watching musicals and plays and hopefully little one will enjoy it too. So far it looks promising. :) We hope to catch 'The Emperor's New Clothes' in March 08. Have been asked to go for the Swan Lake production in December but am still considering it as ballet is so not my kind of thing. We'll decide soon.

So all in all, it was a fulfilling activity-filled Sunday and next weekend as well, we have 2 birthday parties to attend! God help me.