My Day Off

Today, Robby homeschooled Atticus & Thelo and give me the day off.  What to do on my own?  There are lots of places for kids to visit, but for a solitary grown up?  The mall!  There are so many malls in Singapore, & I haven't found much anything else to do for fun.  Downtown is over an hour away by public transit, so I opted to stick close to home & forgo a museum visit.

I went to JEM & Westgate, two malls in Jurong East that are connected to yet another mall called IMM.  Not only that, but they're also connected to a hospital (I walked into it by accident when I wandered through an overpass).  There's not much to share about shopping, except that it was pretty cool to wander from mall to mall without setting foot on the ground.  They were interconnected by overhead walkways with a subway station connected to Westgate.  Some indoor spaces were covered from above but still outdoors, so it odd to see & hear it pouring outside just beyond the railing. 

Anyway, the most interesting thing that I saw was the Baby Spa. I walked by a few aquarium-looking tanks lined up along the window, and when I looked down at one, I saw a baby's head peering up at me with an inflatable life preserver around his neck.  Yup, Baby Spa.  Infants get their own personal pool to flail in.

This is a one-month-old infant.

The employees at Baby Spa explained that because fetuses float so long in the uterus, the infants feel very comfortable in water.  Plus, they get a lot of exercise in the limbs.  

My 16-year-old niece, who, frankly, knows a lot more about the world than I do, said that this kind of baby spa is a "worldwide phenomenon," popular also in some European countries.  Although it's a bit discomforting to see a baby held up in the water by a floatation device around his neck, he seemed to be happy kicking his arms & legs around.

Sidenote: 

When I got home, I discovered that Robby had taught the kids geometry!  They noticed patterns as they were filling out a times table, and this led Robby to teach them about the area of a square, rectangle, triangle, & circle.  He really enjoyed spending the day with them, & we both discovered that we need to teach them mini-lessons because they don't get enough fulfillment through practice & Kahn Academy.  Don't ask me why it has taken us two weeks to figure it out, but I'm glad we did.  Thank goodness Robby led school today because I'm the kind of person to stick to one strategy, hell or high water.