Singapore - first two days

At the start of this year I raised an idea with Ri, let's leave the country for Christmas,  we've never left the country for Christmas before! His Nan's birthday was just before Christmas, so we would usually stay in Brisbane, especially after the kids were born. Nan, sadly, passed away at the tender age of 100 last year (we've missed her a lot this year). So before everything went so wrong for us this year, before our new home flooded, before we needed to live in an airbnb for 3 months, before my RA/liver went out of control, before two contracts on our house failed. I booked a two week holiday to Singapore and Hong Kong. AND I AM SO GLAD THAT I DID.

photo from booking.com

We left on the 13th and arrived on the 14th of December. Our flight left at 11:35pm and I honestly ended up wishing that the flight had been longer. By the time we had our first meal and switched off the lights that only left 4 hours to sleep before they switched the morning meal lights on.
We arrived in Singapore drunk from sleep deprivation - I'd slept for about half during an iron man movie, and Ri had had a blanket over his head for about 2 hours. We arrived at our hotel - W hotel Sentosa Cove, at around 6am, check in wasn't until 3pm, but they were sure they'd get us early check in. They offered us coffee and we followed the offer into their breakfast area, which had access to the pool. So after breakfast we went into the pool area... about fifteen minutes later (because our togs were somewhere between the door to the hotel and the room and there was no guarantee that if Ri left the pool area to try and find said togs, that he'd be able to get back in again without a swipe card) we just got into the pool in the clothes that we'd been wearing on the plane. It was an effective way to wake up. In interesting move in a dress.
We were able to get our hands on our key at around 10:30am, so we headed up to get our room sorted and then decided to stay awake by going for a walk around Sentosa Cove, we found a place called big fat mama's - we ate here at least three times. We spent the afternoon zombiefied by the pool. We ended up ordering room service and curled up in bed by 7pm.

On our first full day in Singapore we ventured to resort world to visit the aquarium, which was very impressive. I liked how they had education stations pushing the 3 r's, reduce, reuse, recycle plastics. The kids found some fish stamps and put one of their fists, Immi held out her fist to Arch saying "fish bump!"

When asked Immi reports her favourite animal was the jelly fish and Arch says the lobster. We had lunch at Slappy Cakes, which we'd been to before on Maui.
After lunch we made our way to the rainbow candy store. After the kids went mental in the candy store, which is where we bought their stuffed merlion that they named Reece's pieces, we decided it was time to leave Sentosa. We hoped on the monorail to vivocity and then tried our hand at the MRT, after staring at the map for a minute I confidently said to Ri "we need to get on the circle line" Ri asked "in which direction" I replied "we're at the end of the end" Ri: "wait... what?" (Singapore we need to discuss the definition of 'Circle'.) We managed to get on the wrong circle train, so we decided to abandon ship at the botanical gardens (just in time for the rains). We waited out the rain at the gardens,received some great advice on where to grab dinner from a guy who worked at the gardens. After the rains we checked out the children's garden then went straight back to the MRT to try again. Our destination was satay club lau pa sat. We managed to get on and off the right trains, but crossing a main road in Singapore city - you need to either go over the road, under the road or walk a mile to a crossing. The food at Lau Pa Sat was soooo good. We were a bit conservative in our selections when we we on our own...