Jonathan's taking a Stay-cation.

It's hard to believe that it is more than halfway though the year; it was time for Jonathan to use up some Annual Leave. The 2 sets of National Holidays with only 4 workdays sandwiched between them (Hari Raja Haji and National Day) were a good reason too.

Hari Raja Haji is the Muslim Festival of Sacrifice which commemorates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice everything to God. Normally we would have tried to find a way to join in the festivities with the kids by visiting an area of town like Kampong Glam on Arab Street, but we stayed away from any potential crowds due to COVID-19 this year. I'm not sure there were any of the usual public festivities around town, as Singapore was encouraging families to celebrate in small groups at home. I did notice a number of very nicely dressed Muslim women about in more traditional clothing, who I'm assuming were celebrating with lunch out with friends.

Of course, we can't leave the country as Singapore's borders are still essentially closed. Hotels are open in Singapore again though and there are some great hotel deals out there.

But we're staying home for our Stay-cation. Seeing as our condo complex feels like a resort, someone makes us dinner every night and takes care of the house cleaning, and we'd probably have to share a room with our kids, home sounded like a better deal.

We do want to fit in a bit of Singapore sightseeing though. On Monday we figured the crowds from the holiday weekend would be over, so we would visit the Zoo. The five of us spent quite a while debating the merits of each of the 4 zoos in Singapore before we settling upon the River Safari. It has a combination of large aquariums and other land animals that live along the rivers of the world. Personally, I just wanted to see their Pandas again.  

Unfortunately, I had forgotten about reduced hours everywhere due to COVID. The River Safari was sadly not open. You have to make advance reservations for all attractions right now, so we wouldn't have actually showed up to the gate, but we were all a little sad that we couldn't visit.

Onto Plan B - We made our reservation and headed out to the S.E.A Aquarium instead. The Aquarium is close to us, just a short bus ride over to Sentosa. Everyone was very well behaved and we all loved it. It was our first trip to the Aquarium since before the Circuit Breaker (4 months or likely more) . Thankfully they've extended our Annual passes until December which was nice to hear.

It's a good thing we headed to the Aquarium instead of one of the Zoos, because we were beat when we got home just 2.5 hours later. None of us are used to being out in public as a group or walking for so long just yet. We should probably work our way up to the Zoo, which is easily a 4 or 5 hour adventure.

It's also important to have a million spare masks. I had 2 extra kids masks in my purse and I used both of them on MsI in that short time. The cloth mask she wore out of the house kept falling down off her nose. I eventually took it away and tried to give her a disposable one. I snapped the strings on one of those before I even got it on her face. MsI is our least picky mask wearer, so she was totally fine with all of mask messing around. I never did get MsE into a mask. She wore her face shield the whole time and no one side-eyed her. Face shields are allowed for children under 12, but masks as obviously safer.

The Aquarium was quiet. It is maxed at 25% of it's former capacity, but there were way less people than that today. It was easy to keep the required 3 feet from other parties - I think we were 6 feet or more most of the time - and we always found a viewing square right at the aquarium wall. Actually staying within our square was a little harder. I kept repeating, "find a new square, if you can't stay in ours." The Shark Tube was the busiest part; Normally the Shark Tube is shoulder to shoulder it's whole length.

The girls completed their Aquarium Membership Children's challenge about Sharks and their Relatives today. The girls had to complete a number of sketches today as well as answer some targeted questions. One of their tasks was to sketch a shark's tail. They found a square to stand in and then were very serious about their sketches. It took MsE a while, because she kept losing track of her shark. They move pretty fast.

I was surprised to find that MsE was very into observational sketching this trip. I thought she wasn't ready to start to Nature Journaling yet, because she wouldn't do any sketching before this. But she changed my mind today.

I'll start both the big girls on Nature Journaling as part of our Science curriculum this upcoming school year. It's really more about making observations, recording them, and asking ourselves questions about what we see, than it is about sketching. I totally recommend this book, if you are want to start Nature Journaling.

Jonathan's also planning to do freshwater planted fish tanks with the girls. These tanks use live plants and animals like shrimp to kept the water clear and minimize algae. We lucked out and spotted a Scuba diver cleaning the Aquarium tanks today. I asked, MsE if she was going to get in her tank to clean it? But, she said "No, I'm too big."

Jonathan was there too. However, I only snapped the one picture of him in shadow form.