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Saturday, June 13, 2009

Shop till drop!

On 10 June (my sister and brother-in-law's 6th wedding anniversary!), we brought them out for lunch at 那家小馆, which they'd actually been to on their last visit to Beijing in August 2006 (right before our wedding in September/October). However, as they found the food good then, we decided to make it an exception and bring them on a repeat visit to the restaurant, where the children liked the talking magpie in the cage, and the adults liked the ambience, decor, and the food (though luckily they did not hold true to their threat to charge us a minimum RMB600 for the private room - it's no fault of ours they do not segregate non-smoking zones, right?!). Yes, that's how Rosabelle sinks her fingers into my flesh to grip tightly onto me these days...
One of Marianne's classic poses (very Disney Princess-like)...
The Shi family eating (including Rosabelle with her teething biscuit).
After lunch, we brought them to the wholesale area selling adult/children's clothing (动批), which they also went to the last time, and enjoyed buying meant-for-export branded wear at cheap, cheap prices (like I always say - 'I pride myself on my bargaining skills and I have an acceptable price range in my mind, but many a time, the stall-holder will quote a price even lower than what I have in mind!'). But this time round, they have renovated the place (we mainly head for 天乐市场, but ended up only Wayne went with my sis, mum and Simon, as my dad and I were left in the car with Marianne and Rosabelle who were sleeping (ended up both my mum and sis bought shoes after walking around for only awhile).

Rosabelle was actually woken up shortly after they left to shop, so I was left to entertain her (and change her diapers) for more than 30 minutes. She probably got bored after some time and kept kicking around and trying to pry the window button, maybe thinking she can open the door and indicate she wants to get out of the car.


Our next stop was the
wholesale area (官批) for kids' clothing, where my sis and mum (me included!) basically went wild with the cheap but good clothing for our children. I ended up buying a buttoned top, a singlet top, a shirt-dress, 2 pairs of socks, a skirt, a pair of bloomers-type puffy shorts, and a floral dress for the grand price of RMB247 (i.e. les than SGD55) for Rosabelle, and my sis bought well, LOADS for the kids. If the place was not closing at 7 pm, I'm sure we would have hung around more! My sis was indeed very keen to go back again to this nondescript but otherwise very, very, very worth-to-go place (she did not want to go Wangfujing nor Xidan - equivalent of Singapore's Orchard Road - for any shopping anymore after getting such good deals from this place).
We were rather tired from the spree, and so ordered dinner from a Taiwanese restaurant in our apartment area (佳味多) to the place my family's staying in and went over to eat. We let Rosabelle stay home after her dinner so that she could rest - we've been doing that (not bringing her out for dinner) these days, she's been sleeping early, around 10-plus, and getting solid 12-hour sleeps, largely due to (i) us not being around to distract her at night and make her want to play (just nanny and her), (ii) she's not sleeping much during the day due to so much excitement, catching at most a combined 1.5 hours of sleep, and (iii) she's tired-out from the on-goings in the day time.

It's a good thing as she can then sleep soundly (but she's still waking up for quite a few feeds at night, so she could very well be just wanting to suckle, though we've now successfully gotten her off the habit of suckling to sleep before her bed-time, as the nanny can just sing/pat her to sleep). Hopefully we can change her sleeping habits over this period of time!

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