35!

I'm 35 today! Thank you all for your well wishes :) Yes unlike most ladies, I am not shy to reveal my age :p Comon, it's just a number!

The day started off with us trying to introduce organic baby cereal to Dylan who is a few days shy of his 6th month. He wasn't too pleased and here are some photos of his reaction to the new experience.


Then it was off to the PS Cafe at Palais for brunch with the usual suspects. We make it a point to celebrate each other's birthdays each year and today was my turn. The food was pretty good but the waiter wasn't. He stopped me from taking any pictures of what we ordered :s Thank you Corinne, Yvonne & Nic, Terence and my family for celebrating this day with me :)

(Click image to view larger. All collages created by the wonderful free software Picasa 3. It ROCKS! Go get it! :D)

A week of surprises!

Surprise #1
My friend Raquel who's working in Dubai is back for a short holiday and she popped in the studio on Thursday for a visit. I decided to bring her out for lunch and invited the girls as well but they declined saying they will go for their lunch later. As we were coming back from lunch going up the stairs, I noticed the door was left ajar and the aircon was spilling out. I quickened my pace and walk through the door about to tell whoever it was off for leaving the door open and I was met with the girls and Rose (our cleaning lady) singing Happy Birthday to me with cake in hand :p Man was I surprised and I didn't even suspect anything. They even got Raquel in cahoots with them to stall for time. So sweet of you all, thanks girls! It's a great surprise :D And what a yummy cake it was too.

Surprise #2
It's the second Christmas Walk In yesterday and as the first one only had 3 families walked in, we thought it will be another relaxed day. I was about 5mins away from the studio when Hitomi rang me and said there were 5 people there already! The crowd didn't stop till about 3plus. All together, 31 families came for the walk in! A big thank you to all of you who came and made our second Christmas Walk In an unexpected success :)

Special thanks to my staff Charlene who shot all of you except the last one. She didn't even get a chance to sit down all day and also did not have her lunch. Same to Hitomi our intern who did well to coordinate all of you and organise the photo selection process. Thanks girls, much appreciated!

Surprise #3
I was shooting the first family this morning when a delivery guy walked in with a very cute looking flora arrangement. I thought it must be for the company upstairs and that they have made a mistake but the flowers were FOR ME! :p I quickly looked at the card and they were from that not-one-romantic-bone-in-his-body husband of mine! :D I was totally SURPRISED and ELATED to receive my FIRST (wedding bouquet don't count la) flowers from him in all our years together. CANNOT BELIEVE! Thanks baby! The card addressed to "Mummy" read: "Happy Birthday!! We love you lots lots!!! -Your 3 rascals, Dyl, Kay & Daddy". Awww, so sweet right? Love you all lots lots too! :)

my kooky bouquet, too cute! and the fat thing next to it too who kept trying to pluck out the daisies :p btw it's made of real flowers!


daddy and kay were not around to take this photo with us but their thoughts are!

Finding Miss Gostelow

Throughout my life as a student, there have been many teachers, lecturers, trainers and tutors but only a few stand out and are fondly etched in my memory and top of the list is Miss Gostelow, my primary school teacher. I never forget her even years on when I was in secondary school and in the MRT train, I saw her with her husband and as I was hesitating to go up to her, she saw me and instantly spoke in my direction,"Meiling right?!" I could only smile sheepishly after that :p That was the last time I saw her.

My little cousin who's like 20 years my junior happened to study at my alma mater Raffles Girls' Primary School and I asked her, during a Chinese New Year visit many years back, if Miss Gostelow was still teaching there, she scratched her head. Then I remembered that Miss Gostelow married a Mr Tan so I asked my cousin about a Mrs Maria Tan and she said yes yes still there! I made a mental note to search for her email address and drop her a hello but never did.

Then this week a Bloom client Nicole mentioned to me that she was also from RGPS and we started to talk about the teachers we remembered and of course Miss Gostelow was brought up :) So I did a google on her name and after a few different configurations with her maiden name and married name, I found a mention of her in the search results, she was one of the National Day Award recipients in 2002! Through that link, I learned that she's now teaching in Methodist Girls' Primary School. I quickly hopped on over to the school's website and started searching for her in the staff section but couldn't find her under TEACHERS. Disappointed, I tried a search of her name within the site and finally found her to be the teacher in charge of the Library there! Her email is also listed and I am going to write her an email this weekend :)

I am 99% sure she will remember me - Xu Meiling the clumsy "oopsy daisy" girl :p Will update here with a comment. This is so exciting for me, it's like finding a long lost pal. Speaking of which, I am also looking for my best friend in primary school, Irene Ng Wai San whom I lost touch after she moved out of her Ghim Moh flat. Can't find her on Facebook or Google. This will have to be another blog post. Miss Gostelow, I am writing to you soon!

Little Santarinas

More Christmas shots, little girls this time.

Deceptively Delicious

There's no phrase that make you sound more like your parents than when you hear "Eat your vegetables!" being uttered from your lips :p Obviously directed at your own children. I have all but totally given up on Kayden's meals till I happened to watch an episode of Oprah where this book Deceptively Delicious by my favourite comedian's wife, Jessica Seinfeld, was featured. It uses the simple tactic of hiding the goodness of veggies into foods kids love in the form of purees. She cleverly mixes the right vegtables with the right type of food so that even the most discerning little eaters will not be suspicious.

Some winning recipes include:

Macaroni and Cheese with Butternut Squash or Cauliflower


Chocolate Cake with Beetroot


For the sweet toothed, there's even Brownies with Carrots and Spinach! Really cool!

After the show, I rushed to Borders to get it but they said it's out of stock...obviously! I'm sure all the other mothers who like me have struggled to get their kids to eat right have rushed out to get the book before me! It must have been a rerun I was watching :p Finally I got my hands on the book last week but have yet to try out the recipes. Will do so this week and post some of the winning recipes with reports of how they went with my white-rice-green-noodles-bread-eating-toddler :p

I think Jessica sums it up best in her book introduction:
"All we want is to make simple, fast, nutritious meals that our kids will actually eat. But after just one experience of watching a child throw our best efforts onto the floor, or refuse to eat, we just want to give up. Who has that kind of time - and food - to waste?"

*NODS*

It's Summer time!

Back in September, Ashley and I shot an outdoor session with a little girl named Summer. This is actually Summer's second shoot with The Studio Loft.

We met Summer's parents during the Motherhood Fair in 2007. Her dad was totally in love with the canvas we displayed at our booth of Candida's son St John jumping from a chair. It was a seamless collage of a few jumping positions SJ did in the studio when he was 2 years old. He signed up for a studio session with us just to try and get the same shots done. It was unsuccessful :p Summer refused to jump.

One year on, her parents decided to go for an outdoor session. Here are some shots from the session and some spreads from her coffeetable album.

Trying out a new effect which is dominant throughout the album:


This is the album cover:










After the shoot, we adjourned to the studio to try the jumping shots again and hurray! She got it this time :) Here's the final jumping collage which was printed into a 1 meter long canvas.

Rudolf has a friend

Yesterday was the first of our 3 dates for the Christmas Walk In special. Our favourite shot from the day was little Isaac with our reindeer Rudolf :)

Princess Marla

Princess Marla is all of 13 days old today. Her parents brought her in for a newborn shoot and I got to try her out on THE chair :) She looks better in it than my chubbster Dylan kekeke

Tough to be charitable

Last week I posted details of our Christmas promo and the very next day I thought why not increase the price from $25 to $28 and contribute the $3 to charity? So I contacted the Children's Cancer Foundation to make some enquiries on how I should go about doing this. I was referred to 3 persons before I was able to speak to someone about making a contribution. A nice lady Yenni spoke to me and she said if I put it like that, it will be considered as fund raising and a permit and auditing will be required amounting to about $500! So she suggested:

1. The Loft just mention that the studio will be supporting CCF for this Christmas and hoping to raise some funds (or fix an amount) for CCF and encourage the customers participation by donating a voluntary amount to make this event successful.

2. Sponsorship in kind, the studio can give free photo shoots for their beneficiaries say for 3 or 5 of them? They will select those born in December or else those from low income family, etc.

I decided to go with her second suggestion and I revised the promo flyer to include their logo and mentioned that the studio will be donating a part of the proceeds from the promo to the charity in the form of 3 x Little Big Shots packages. Then I emailed them for approval but received a call from Yenni's colleague to say that the first suggestion by Yenni actually requires a permit, that we are not allowed to mention "a part of the proceeds will go to blah blah blah" and also cannot mention "do your bit for charity" as this will again be insinuating that it's a fund raising activity thus requiring the permit and auditing :s Also he said I cannot use their logo... Sigh, so much red tape just to donate to charity, it makes me wonder why they make it so difficult for people to give them money. Then he explained that it was because of the NKF saga...

Anyway, he said if I can just donate to them without mentioning it in the promo flyer that will be good and will not require permit or auditing. So my bit for charity this Christmas will be a donation of 3 x Little Big Shots packages to 3 children from the CCF :) I can't wait to meet them all soon!

The Intern and The Chair

Yesterday The Studio Loft welcomed it's first intern! She is Hitomi from NAFA. Into her final year majoring in photography, Hitomi likes to shoot still life and is inspired by the works of Takashi Yasumura and Rebecca Sittler. She explains that they photograph objects in places where they are not usually found, eg. some marshmellows tumbling down a pillow on a bed. Interesting :)

During lunch time, we went to my friend Corinne's office which is a street away to collect this victorian looking chair she's loaning me for use as a studio prop. Wanted to take some shots of Dylan wearing just a bow tie sitting on the chair but my mother-in-law kept nagging that he's still not well and so here are the shots of him sitting on the chair in his pajamas :p

Christmas came early

Christmas came early for me this year, Dylan my cutie pie was my present in June :D Another early Christmas present is Kayden's social skills improvement :) Both these "gifts" are priceless and I treasure both my boys dearly. *MUAK!*

Earlier I posted some photos we took of Dylan for our Christmas Walk In promotion. On Saturday after his outing with Gong Gong, Kayden dropped by the studio and we managed to get some shots of him as well. Too bad we couldn't get a nice shot of both brothers together, it was a total nightmare trying to do so!

Anyway here are some of the pictures, you can view the full set on my Facebook.

I may be slightly biased, but isn't this the cutest Santa ever! :p


What do you mean there's nothing in them?


Doesn't he look like a mischievous elf here?


Can I have this one mummy?


My first Christmas tree!


Do I look like Santa?!?


RAAAH!

Christmas Walk In

Ho ho ho everyone! We are having a Christmas special as you may have already heard. Here are the details of the promotion, click on the picture to see bigger. Do spread the word :) I'll post the photos which we took for this promo in another post.