Today marks an important day in our own milestone with Darius, as it’s the first time we are bringing him out of the neighbourhood. So far, we have only brought him out for the First Lunar Month Celebration (see Part 1 and Part 2) and a visit to my parents-in-law over the weekend, but all these outings were in the comfort of a home and within our Woodlands neighbourhood.

We were undecided if we were to go ahead with the outing to Toa Payoh’s Kiddy Palace branch, as we were worried that we might not be able to handle Darius’ temperment and crankiness, making an embarassment to ourselves and spoiling the mood altogether.

Still, we decided to take the risk and venture to unchartered lands.

On our way there, Darius started to feel hungry. Fortunately we were still in the neighbourhood then so I could park the car to prepare his feed. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if he started crying due to hunger in the middle of SLE!

Upon reaching the HDB Hub, we drove down to the underground carpark, and despite being a Monday afternoon, the carpark was basically almost full and it took us 15 minutes before I could find a lone empty lot in Basement 3.

We then took out the stroller given to us by Cat’s younger sister, and were glad that Darius was sleeping soundly, which made our tasks of transferring him onto the stroller much easier.

We then proceeded to the ground floor and approached the lift by the POSB, and were surprised at the huge crowd. I didn’t expect so many people to be shopping/walking around on a weekday afternoon.

We reached the lift and nobody was there. After a while, two middle-aged women came by, looked at Darius, and then looked at us, whispering between themselves. I could vaguely hear them scrutinizing our action of bringing such a young baby out. We simply ignored them, as we were aware of the risks and that’s why we had chosen to bring Darius out on a supposedly less crowded weekday to minimize contact with strangers.

And when the lift doors opened, the two women were the first two to rush into the lift, despite us with a stroller (we didn’t fold the stroller as they was nobody waiting at the lift when we arrived) and more importantly, with us being there at the lift well before them.

Another mother with two kids then tried to squeeze past us (who were standing behind us) but I firmly voiced ‘Excuse me’ and proceeded to push the stroller into the lift, using my body to prevent them from squeezing through.

Upon entering the lift, the mother then started to say to her children, “Ah boy ah, must remember to always give way to people hor.” What hypocrisy!

As our Prime Minister Lee had hinted, it’s still a long long way for Singapore to become a gracious society.

Putting the incident aside, we reached the 3rd storey and was delighted at the scale of the Kiddy Palace; the entire floor was basically under its ownership, with different ‘shops’ dedicated to different needs, such as maternity, infants, toddlers and children clothes.

We browsed through the infants section, but didn’t really come across anything essential at the moment, though some of the items we might need in the future caught our attention, such as a fence which we could use to barricage the Pooh playmat (see Pooh Bear Bumper Playmat) when Darius is older.

We then proceeded to the children clothes section, where more things caught our eyes.

In the end, we bought a set of long-sleeved top and long pants for Darius. Some other clothes also came into consideration but we wouldn’t want to waste money on unnecessary items.

And so, that ended our short but smooth expedition, and thankfully Darius was sleeping soundly in his stroller and not being his cranky mood. He woke up briefly several times but as long as we continued to push him around and expose him with new things to look at, he seemed satisfied and secured, thus falling back to sleep easily.

With this new milestone, we will be more confident to bring Darius out for other expeditions soon.

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