Happy 4th of July (Quarantine Weekend)

It felt a bit complicated to celebrate Independence Day in the midst of both a pandemic and racial injustice happening in the US. And if we lived in the US, I’m not sure I would have participated. But since we live in Singapore, we try to ‘do up’ the American holidays, to give a sense of what is means to be American. And interestingly, focusing on the good parts of the American ideals was heartening; thinking about being the mother of democracy, welcoming all people, and people can have any dream and work hard to achieve it. Unfortunately that’s not really the case for all people, which is not fighting for the fairness the US was built on. But it felt good to be reminded of what we Americans are fighting for, and what we expect have to expect from each other.

I made this cute banner, that’s actually quite easier than it looks! Instead of wrapping the paper around a toilet paper, like she suggests, I just used card stock, painted them, and stapled them into tubes. The whole thing took about an hour– not too bad. (And I did most of it while chatting on the phone to my bestie.)

Our Saturday started with the kids outside, while Mama worked out and showers and Papa worked on a special lunch. The kids came back from the store with thier nanny and brought back watermelon for snack.

Shortly after they started work on thier afternoon snack of popsicles. I wanted to do the striped ones (like in the banner) and we didn’t want it to be too sugary. We blended strawberries for the bottom layer, coconut for the white layer and lemonade died blue for the top, freezing in between layers. We let them freeze over nap and took them out to eat by the pool.

In between freezing layers, we did a craft of q-tip firework art. I still have cut q-tips from the Under the Sea weekend’s sea aeonomes, so I pulled out some black cardstock and paint and we were good to go.

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