friends | Nyan Thomas L's Blog

Fun with Friends

Here are a few random moments shared between Nyan and various friends in January.

His friend and former MMI classmate Abi had a birthday party — at which we took hardly any photos, for some reason — so we got to see some of the old crew. Including Adriana; she and Ryan splashed in the pool together quite a bit.

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Another day, we went to the cinema to see the latest Star Wars movie, the Last Jedi:

On the walk home, we happened to bump into Kyra and Chrysa and their folks on the street. Always nice to see them.

And of course, no review of Nyan’s friends would be complete without mention of Jayden, his classmate and friend who lives in the apartment block across the pool from us. They are quite similar and have such a great time together; it’s quite lovely to see.

(Nyan also gets along well with Jonnie, Jayden’s four-year-old brother. Nyan acts almost like an older brother to him at times.)

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Posted by Chris L. on February 20, 2018 in Uncategorized

Tags: friends

Nyan the Young Scholar

15 Feb

Time for a periodic check-in to how Nyan’s doing at school. In short: just fine.

Here are some random pictures of the walk to and from school:

Walking around with various friends, mostly Jayden:

Here’s just a wee bit of his recent school work. We’ll have much more on this in the near future.

We live in the tropics – just north of the equator, in fact – which means we sometimes get tropical downpours. In January, we had a lot of them, usually at the exact time when we were heading home from school. No problem, though, with umbrellas and raincoats.

And finally, some of the funny faces our boy makes in the mirror of the elevator as we’re heading to school in the morning or coming home in the afternoon.

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Posted by Chris L. on February 15, 2018 in Uncategorized

Tags: art, friends, school

Friends and Family

11 Jan

Nyan got to spend a lot of time around loved ones in the month of December. Let’s look at some of it.

First up, goofing around with his bestie Jayden on the last day of school for the year:

Uncle Jeff came to Singapore in early December, so Nyan got to hang with him a bit, including an afternoon at the Singapore Slingers basketball game.

Nyan really loves his cousin Mia, and when we were in Iowa he got to hang out with her several times, from watching her play a soccer game to building gingerbread houses together to just goofing around the house.

Speaking of that soccer game, here’s Nyan on the sidelines, being an exhausted and jetlagged goofball. (This was about 12 hours after we first arrived in Iowa, so our bodies and brains had no idea what time or day it was. Of course, to be honest, Nyan acts like this all the time…)

He also spent one afternoon with cousin Faith. Here they are at a restaurant, hugging their goodbyes:

And earlier in the day, doing a little skit for the benefit of the adults.

That same evening, Nyan tried his hand at ping pong and foosball with Grandma, Grandpa, Uncle Mike and Aunt Sarah in the play area of the restaurant we were at:

We also attended a family get-together, with Grandma Lyon, her kids and various cousins, at Daddy’s cousin Bret’s place.

Bret’s kids showed off their considerable piano chops, which led Nyan to show off his own, not-quite-as-considerable chops:

Mostly, though, Nyan just rolled around on the floor.

Good times!

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Posted by Chris L. on January 11, 2018 in Uncategorized

Tags: family, friends

Nyan Thomas, Elf!

03 Jan

For much of the autumn, Nyan (and occasionally Jayden) would occasionally and suddenly burst into a song. “I always get, that special glow, when the snow comes falling down… I belong in Christmastown!” It was a bit random, especially in sunny, equatorial Singapore. Come to find out they were learning the song for their school Christmas play/musical. Well, finally, in early December, it was time for the play itself.

It was held at a public school auditorium just up the road, and included all seven grades from Nyan’s school, performing before an audience of parents and grandparents. Here’s Nyan’s class singing a song about having a happy jolly Christmas:

The play itself was a telling of the Will Farrell Christmas movie Elf, which none of us had seen (in fact, we started watching it over the holidays, but Nyan didn’t like it, so we stopped). We won’t bore you with videos of the songs performed by the other classes, but it was actually a fun musical with lots of good performances. There are some talented kids at Nyan’s school.

After the musical, there were some photo shoots, including group shots of Nyan’s class:

Daddy took some close-ups of our hero being silly:

Jayden was there, as was his younger brother Jonnie, who also attends Chatsworth, so we got some candid shots of the three of them goofing around.

It was a nice way to kick off the holiday season, as well as wind down the school semester.

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Posted by Chris L. on January 3, 2018 in Uncategorized

Tags: friends, school

My Little Pony with Friends

16 Dec

So there’s a movie based on the My Little Pony tv show or line of toys (or both?), and Nyan expressed some interest in going. Mommy decided it’d be fun to take along a few of his friends. The guest list blossomed until the event saw Mommy and Phwa Phwa chaperoning Nyan, Adriana, Kyra, Chrysa, Valentina and Isla to the movie theater, then to a café for lunch, then back to our place for some playtime. It was a pretty intense day, but a lot of fun too.

We weren’t able to get any pictures of the movie theater itself, but imagine a whole bunch of excitable kids and you’ll get a good sense.

Here they are post-movie, having some grub at Nyan’s fave, Batter Flappy Flaps.

And back to our place for more noise-making and general frivolity:

Eventually we all went down to the playground for more fun until it was time to go home. (The only pics we have are of Nyan and Adriana, as it happens – but all the girls were there and having fun too!)

All in all, a very pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

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Posted by Chris L. on December 16, 2017 in Uncategorized

Tags: friends

Halloween 2017

26 Nov

Nyan wanted to be a knight for Halloween this year, just like last year. In fact he used the same basic parts that Mommy did such a great job making by hand last year. She juiced it up this year with a hand-painted shield and other bits, and we got him a longsword to replace the short sword and dagger he had last year.

People at the apartment complex organized a massive party in the function room down by the pool, with snacks and games. It was crowded and fun:

There was also a ‘haunted house’ – really just a dark room with scary effects. No pictures or videos; our hero, bless his heart, was scared to death and started crying a bit. He got over it soon enough though.

Rather than doing house-by-house trick-or-treat like last year, they had volunteers standing at various places around the complex, handing out candies. Here’s Nyan and Jayden, getting ready to go:

And hanging out with a mummy. They weren’t especially scared:

Maybe Nyan’s favorite part of the whole night was eating a blue lollipop and then surveying the damage:

Happy Halloween!

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Posted by Chris L. on November 26, 2017 in Uncategorized

Tags: friends, holiday

Beach Party!

18 Nov

In late October, Tita — Jayden’s helper, who spends a fair amount of time with Nyan on playdates and walks home from school — had a birthday party down at East Coast Park, not far from our place. We headed over, along with Jayden, Jonnie and Lily.

Kids being kids, they spent a lot of time getting bucket of water to dump on the sand.

The main reason for the buckets: on the beach was the remains of a huge bonfire from earlier in the day. It was still smoldering a bit in places, so the kids were trying to put it out. Nyan someone came up with the name Ash Destroyers, which I think he meant to be related to what they were doing. Sounds pretty cool, even though it doesn’t quite make sense.

The kids also decided they would dig tunnels in the sand. Jayden wanted to dig all the way to Indonesia; Nyan was feeling a bit more ambitious and thought he’d dig all the way to Iowa, and then pop up in Grandma and Grandpa’s kitchen to surprise them. Didn’t quite make it, though.

Bonus: A week before this fun beach party, Daddy and Nyan had taken a stroll down to the beach to play for a bit.

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Posted by Chris L. on November 18, 2017 in Photos

Tags: friends, outdoors

Playdate with Adriana and Kyra and Chrysa

03 Nov

Nya got to spend a Sunday afternoon in early October with Adriana, Kyra and Kyra’s sister Chrysa. It started out at Kyra’s house, where there was much running around (perhaps as part of a game of hide and seek):

Then it was off to the National Gallery, an art museum downtown where they had some special exhibits on for kids. First they hung out on some stairs, listening to a concert:

The museum had lots of interactive activities and fun, color-splashed rooms:

And this exhibit that involved our brave heroes walking on glass across a deep chasm:

Also there was a room that doubled as a jail cell:

All in all, a fun afternoon with some of Nyan’s favorite peeps!

Bonus: later in October we spent a little time at his old school, MMI. Of course we had to pose for silly pictures.

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Posted by Chris L. on November 3, 2017 in Uncategorized

Tags: friends, Singapore

Back to MMI, Briefly

08 Oct

In mid-September, we got word that Nyan’s old school, MMI, would be taking class pictures. We thought it’d be nice to get one last picture of Nyan with all his classmates, since he spent more than half the calendar year there, so we headed over to MMI one morning before Chatsworth (his current/new school).

This being the last year at MMI for this group of kids, they put on graduation gowns for both individual and group photos. Here’s Nyan getting set for his host of individual shots:

And prepping for the group shot:

There was some time to goof around with his pals, too:

A few weeks after that, Chatsworth was closed for teacher meetings, so Nyan went back to MMI to spend the day. Had a blast too:

They were doing a unit on space and planets, and the teacher used some app on her smartphone to make it look like the kids were holding planets. Pretty cool:

And, yeah, more goofing around with, and hugging, his classmates:

Want to see how those class photos came out? Sure you do. Here you go:

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Posted by Chris L. on October 8, 2017 in Uncategorized

Tags: friends, school

Weekend Fun

04 Oct

This blog has multiple themes. One of them is that our boy leads a rich and varied life – especially on the weekends. Let’s take a look at a couple of recent weekend events.

First up: Kara’s birthday. Kara is the younger sister of Nyan’s bestie Kyle. She was turning two, so her folks threw her a party at their condo, with a lot of time in the pool, lots of great food, and of course cake and general running around.

Oh, and goofing around with selfies, along with Kyle and his mom Sara:

Another day, Nyan and Daddy went to a Lego exhibit downtown. It was a traveling show of some of the world’s greatest structures, made out of Legos.

Pretty impressive. But Nyan, frankly, was a little bored with this section of the exhibit. Probably because he knew that, around the next corner, there were large rooms full of Legos he could play with. So off we went.

Just look at all those Legos!

So Nyan built a racecar, and raced it down the sloping track. Not bad.

Finally, in the last room of the exhibit, there were still more Legos — but all of them were white, and there was but a limited selection of shapes. The idea was to challenge the kids to construct their own buildings. So construct Nyan did: