Fun Places and Activities Archives - Page 6 of 16

FIVE SQUARE – new family-friendly dining place

How often do you find a dining place that caters activities to everyone in the family?

FIVE SQUARE did just that! Not only did we have sumptuous mid-range price food, we had fun after that as well, all in the same place. So, you can eat slowly while other members of the family can move on to activities, and I am talking about electric car rides, playground, bouncy castle, pool table, art and craft and beer for the hub.

FIVE Square, the new flagship outlet of the FIVE Bar Group, had recently took over the old home-grown restaurant Hans in Great Eastern Centre. The concept of FIVE Square is rather unique with 4 different dining / chill out places within the same 13,000 square feet space. Add in a few play areas and the Artisan market (think of Uni / Poly days bazaar) within the same “food court” at The Bazaar, you have a family friendly dining area to go.

Let me take you through the play areas and the 4 interesting corners on FIVE Square.

PLAY AREA – For the toddler and younger children

The play area for the younger kiddos is sufficient to keep my toddler occupied for 2 hours that we were there. Best of all, they are all free, including the electric car rides!

ARTISAN MARKET – For the crafty kids and adults

The Artisan Market is only available on Saturdays and has up to 30 stalls selling hand-made accessories, arts & crafts, fashion apparels, decor, home-ware items and more. Missy 10 and I were so engrossed in all the cutie stuff and beautifully hand-made crafts that we spent more than an hour at one stall called Scottiecraft, learning from the freelance self-taught artisan who was selfless in teaching us how to make these beautiful spoon flowers, cupcakes and more!

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Simple baking with the kids – New York Cheesecake

I have found a great recipe for New York Cheesecake on allrecipes.com!

The texture is creamy and the kids totally love it! The reviews on this recipe actually rated it as THE BEST NEW YORK CHEESECAKE. I am not an expert in judging cheesecakes but seems like it is indeed very popular. I have baked 2 times so far with the same recipe. The second time was baked for Master 3’s 3rd birthday and we decorated and drew a car for him!

Previously, I had made many No-baked cheesecakes as I did not have an oven back then. No-baked cheesecakes taste yummy too, but I find the cheese taste in no-baked version much heavier than baked ones. You can find out more on my Yogurt cheesecake recipe here, which is also a favourite with my children.

Recipe for Baked New York Cheesecake (modified by me, if you want the original recipe, please click here)

Ingredients Continue reading “Simple baking with the kids – New York Cheesecake”

Checklist for a simple birthday party

I have been so busy lately that even though I knew Master 3’s 3rd birthday was round the corner, I just simply had no time to plan for it! And guess what? This busy mummy only started to plan for the birthday party 3 days before the big day! It has kind of become a norm to me even though I do not like it last minute. Sometimes, I feel guilty that I have not been as conscientious as most other mummies who plan much in advance and take care of every aspect of the party many months before. Well, I am glad I did manage to put up a decent simple party in a short time anyway. No one would know that I had only planned 3 days before.

The following checklist is a mental checklist that I have mastered over the years with 3 kids. Ok, I am sure everyone has about the same list and I am going to share what I did for games, venue, ideas and resources.

Here it goes rolling:

3 days before madness

1. Guest List and invites

First the hub and I decided on a day, not that we have much choice anyway. Usually, we host birthday celebrations on Saturday nights. Then we decided on who to invite. This is easy as the list is usually our immediate families which totalled up to about 13 adults + 10 children. Lucky for us, all our guests were able to make it on the short notice, yet, again. I promise I would not do that again if I can help it, i.e. invitation at the last hour.

2. Party Venue

We hold parties mostly in our small house. However, after Master 8’s lovely and cosy birthday celebration with his classmates in our favourite yogurt cafe “Frozen – a thousand blessings“, I decided on the same venue since it is new to our guests. A second time lucky for us, the date we had chosen was still available to book. We love this place as the kids love the Frozen yogurt, not to mention that the venue is basically FREE with $120 for a 2 hour slot which included $120 worth of yogurt for our guests! The place is cosy for an Continue reading “Checklist for a simple birthday party”

DIY Daiso wooden blocks fun

It has been a while since I last bring out the painting set and do some art and craft with the kids.

I remembered Mum in the making blog on Daiso small wooden blocks and decided to do something similar too.

I bought 3 sets of 12 blocks size 30x30x30mm ($2ea x 3), 2 triangular blocks ($2 x 2) and a wooden case to keep the blocks ($2).

I would highly recommend to use a sand paper to smoothen the edges and surfaces to protect little fingers before starting the below activity.

We took out our paint set, poster colours and acrylic paint to Continue reading “DIY Daiso wooden blocks fun”

Jubilee celebration – Art Science Museum

As Singapore celebrates her 50th birthday which we called our Jubilee Celebration, we had a rare long weekend of 4 days “staycation” in Singapore! Apart from Chinese New Year which we once in some years may have a 4 days straight holidays where we spend visiting relatives and friends, this is perhaps almost once in 50 years where we had 4 days straight holidays to enjoy Singapore like tourists in our home country. Best part is many attractions are free or at heavily discounted rates. So, like typical Singaporeans, we thronged to free attractions together with fellow citizens to celebrate as one Singapore! Happy Birthday Singapore!

We did not really flock to each and every free attraction. In fact, we only wanted to go to the Art Science Museum or Gardens by the Bay flower domes. Perhaps Singaporeans had been well-trained to queue some months back to pay respects to Mr Lee Kuan Yew during the lying in state period, we batted no eyelids upon queuing for several hours up to 10 hours for free cable car rides! On our way to the Art Science Museum, I did do a quick check on facebook status on the queue time at the museum and saw 4-5 hours wait! I was so determined to bring the kids to see “The Deep” where the exhibition is on the ocean life deep down to the ocean bed, I was undeterred about the long waiting time.

Luckily for us, we queued for only 1 hour and finally saw the entrance.

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