foodie lu

When it comes to food, Lu is Jo’s close rival.

I’m cracking my head now trying to recall Jo at the age of one, to conclude who was the more fervent food worshipper.

I think Jo is a little more "li-hai".

But Lu has also become a bottomless non-discerning food pit.

She, too, lives to eat.

Apart from eggs which she can’t even stand the smell of – the pong hits her when the spoon is about an inch away from her lips, she wrinkles her nose, shakes her head and sticks out her tongue – she eats everything.

Typically after a full big bowl of brown rice porridge, she polishes off an entire apple, then eats sizeable portions of my noodle / macaroni and then sizeable portions of the maid’s meal and our fruits.

She doesn’t stop.

Mummy may be her favourite person, but she swerves and makes a beeline for anyone who is carrying food, muttering “mum-mum” and vigorously nodding her head and waggling her eyebrows (she still seems to think she has to raise her eyebrows in order to raise her head).

The unofficial feeder, surprisingly, is Jo, who loves sharing little morsels with her baby sister. Oh and probably because she monopolizes the food sources.



Lu is a huge fan of French fries, bubble tea, biscuits and everything unhealthy.

And she has the hilarious tendency to make her feelings known. If she likes it, she nods straightaway like a very satisfied customer.

The only difference is she is nowhere near as fat as Jo was.

But it’s nice, to have two gluttonous girls (versus fussy bird peckers) in the family. The boy is out of the ring. Maybe he just can't be bothered.

mad shopping

I lost my mind this afternoon.

Between 430pm (when Lu woke up) and 6pm, I decided that I could lug all three kids with me to Takashimaya in a taxi, buy a set of book shelves for the house, let the kids play around the shopping centre, walk to the MRT at Wisma Atria (at peak hour) and take a train to Marina Bay to meet KK by 6pm.

I ended up meeting him at 615pm.

All four of us were parched – I did not bring any water or any snacks. I literally walked out of the house into the hot sun with nothing but kids, wallet and mobile.

In the taxi – from East Coast to Takashimaya the driver went by the ECP-KPE-PIE-CTE – I started doubting the wisdom of my action when Jo starting wriggling and whining.

Through the Orchard Road crush, Day hung on to the right pocket of my jeans and Jo to the left. I would have liked to hold Jo’s hand only I had to carry Lu with both arms.

Jo had a look on her face like those army recruits do after a very long road march, particularly at the last long stretch coming out of the Marina Bay MRT to the faraway main road. (amazingly not one but TWO people gave up their seats for me and the kids!)

She, exhausted, hungry and thirsty, had given up on whining. She was just trooping along.

Lu was thoroughly pissed off because I cut short her explorations everywhere. We were in a big rush. She was also starving.

My arm muscles were screaming – no pram no sarong (like I said I lost my mind) - and KK looked like the finish line of a marathon.

It’s just Takashimaya to the Orchard MRT, and then Marina Bay MRT to the road. I swear it felt like 42km. And it was a mad dash.

Amazingly, both kids did it. I am very proud of them. And Day, with a smile on his face throughout. Maybe because he got to use his farecard.

art again

JO

She's sick of circles and loops. Now she's onto squares.



I must say she draws remarkably straight lines and remarkably square squares.

She has also become very anal with her drawing. She is precise in her colouring, whimpering when a tiny bit goes over the lines. In this flower, for instance. She is very upset that there are bits of purple marring her flower's lovely beige face on the left side.

She still switches between left and right hand, but is now showing a preference for the right.



DAY

He's drawing with acrylic paints on canvas in school with Teacher May's help. This is our family portrait!



And his favourite trains.



Everything he draws looks terrific, though I think the rest of his classmates' drawings look fantastic too. Medium (canvas/paint versus paper/colour pencils) plus instruction makes a big difference.

That said, he is a neat freak and is very careful with his painting, more so than his classmates.

I've got two ultra-neat CANNOT colour-outside-the-line kids on my hands. I wonder why.

david the dentist

My dentist is David.

Today David met David and the boy had his tooth filled. It's his first filling.



The dentist was incredibly accommodating, turning the whole visit into a space-age exploration of robotic arms, remote-controlled chairs and rotating toothbrushes.

As a result Day was incredibly co-operative.

Barring a short crying spell and insisting on sandwiching papa between himself and the chair...



... once KK slipped out, he was all quiet and wide-eyed on his own.

Holding a little blue mirror, he opened his eyes wide as the dentist carried out some tooth engineering and conducted a show-and-tell on the side.



Day was hooked the moment he was invited to press the right buttons on the robotic arm to move the chair.

Before Dr David put anything in Day’s mouth – like the rotating toothbrush - he tested it on Day’s finger so he would know what it felt like.

Dr David also explained every part of the process: “I’m cleaning out all the germs and dirt from the hole in your tooth now. Can you see? Now I’m mixing the cement so I can plug it into the hole, so no more germs can get in. It’s pink cement!”

It’s one of Day’s molars which has got a tiny groove and which looks like a grayish streak. It wasn’t causing him any pain, and Dr David says he actually need not do anything because it’s just a teeny tiny hole, but as the tooth will last until he is 10 or so, it may be wiser to fill it now.

Post-fill, Day tongued his new pink tooth and pronounced with a frown: I don’t like it!

What I care more about is that he likes the dentist.

A very big part of that, I think, is knowing and getting engaged in what is being done to his tooth and I think Dr David did a stellar job.

By the way, Day visited Dr David once when he was three to clean off some stains, and the boy was equally co-operative.

Jo is three now. She opened her mouth beautifully in the car by way of practice on our way there.



But unlike her brother, her self-preservation instincts just do not allow her to sit on a chair lying down and let a man poke around her wide-open mouth with scary-looking instruments.

She does not trust what I say – “Jo the dentist is so good at giving you clean and strong and white and bright teeth!” – she does not trust her papa and she certainly does not trust Dr David.

While Day was happily peering at himself in the mirror, she buried her face in KK’s neck, intoning “I doo-want, I doo-want.”

I now rue the day if she ever has a cavity and I have to bring her to the dentist for a procedure.

All the best PR and marketing in the world will not make her go willingly into that chair.

I, for one, always went into that chair with cold hands and fluttering heart, until childbirth. Dental treatment pales in comparison to childbirth.

sex talk

Me, Jo and Day are squashed into a toilet cubicle of one of the busiest shopping malls in Singapore: Jurong Point.

He goes, she goes, I go. I stand up and then I hear the very loud shriek: Mummy, blood!

The girl with the even louder set of pipes takes a peek and in what seems like a yell in the suddenly silent toilet chamber, yells: Blood!

I bite my lip and hold my finger to my lips.

In their highly excitable state, they ignore me. And they keep yelling.

I say, very firmly: I'll tell you later OK?

Then I charge out of the toilet with the two kids trailing behind, trying very hard to ignore what I imagine are pointed stares.

Over lunch, in a quiet corner of the restaurant, I launch into the Birds and the Bees Talk.


* The food's not the point. It's Day all-agog I was trying to snap.

How apt. The whole world seems to be on Comprehensive Sexuality Education, what a great place to start, with the three-year-old and the five-year-old.

No need to go into what I said, though it was rather an exciting story.

But here's what they said:

Jo: My eggs! My eggs are dropping! It's going to break!

Day: The sperm is made in my tentacles? Tentacles is it? Tentacles?

Jo: Testicles bicycles. It rhymes! It rhymes!

And this, is Jo's expression when she learns that one day when she's all grown up there will be blood in her urine because she's a girl with unused eggs to shed.



Jo: But I doo-want blood! I doo-want!

hello, friend

An old friend returned today after a two-year absence.

Unexpected and not very welcome, the old pipes gave an almighty heave and reluctantly squeaked into action.

So unfamiliar was I with the feeling that all I had were sinister thoughts: Do I need an oncologist?

What was unfelt before, when I was young and hale and hearty, I felt. Every millimeter of that three-inch journey, every day of the last two weeks.

Now I know better.

That’s what’s been bugging me and putting me in a foul mood.

But hopefully, my friend is here for good, at least for the next 20 years.

It would be a disaster of epic proportion if it decided to take another leave of absence.

snapshot

The nose is runny, the throat is scratchy, the eyes are watery.

I have just dispensed cursory kisses to the kids and left them with their father.

These days, I have little patience for the kids.

I do not take photos of them, I do not have a stream of potential blog posts planned, and that’s saying a lot.

Nights I head straight to the computer.

I work like a demon.

I may take the car and drive down to the apartment to take some shots.

I am KK’s foreman. He never goes for site visits. I go and then I report.

The bulging brain drawer I talked about before has broken under strain.

I forget to turn off the fans, forget where I put my wallet, forget everything.

My mind is just too full.

A million and one thoughts swirl through my head at all times.

At times my hands shake because I am too hyped up on my thoughts.

Life is cyclical. I am in a trough.

my dancing baby

My absolute favouritest thing to do with Lu is carry her and dance. Since the day she was born I’ve been jiggling her – exactly the same way - to a cutesy 10-second rhythmic ditty which even the older two know by heart.

She’s so damn cute when I hoist her up by the armpits and jiggle her up down left right the neighbours are tickled pink and they always make it point to ask me to “make Lulu dance”.

Of late, she has gotten sick of this, but has started her own (typical baby) choreography: Bopping her head (it's Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours" in the clip and the disjointed voice at the end is Jo)...



and waving her arms madly.



If not, I put on our Ruth Ling CD (pop album by a friend) and swing around with her. She knows that as her theme too, the moment the trumpets come on at the beginning of Track 1 she starts bouncing.

It’s very different music exposure from Day and Jo. With those two, I would pop them on my lap and sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars or Eency Weency Spider while doing all the finger actions, that sort of thing.

I hardly do that with Lu.

Why the difference? I don’t quite know. I just don’t sing TO her, I dance WITH her. Maybe she seems to enjoy dancing so much more, it just brings us both great joy.

ack

Aiyoh. The girl is a confirmed nose-dripper of the slimiest sort.

Following the latest virus (all three get the exact same germ of course), and some other viruses here and there, here are my new conclusions:

* Day is really the strongest. Are boys truly hardier than girls?

* Jo's lungs react the most. She always coughs her guts out and I always hear wheezing. Her coughs are wet, wet, wet. The nose, however, is quite clear.

* Lu's sinuses, on the other hand, work overtime. Her coughs are mere hiccups but the nose! Such glorius never-ending streams of gold!

solar system

Day’s current obsession, along with the MRT system, is the Solar System.

He reads obsessively about the planets, watches all sorts of DVDs about space and comets and meteors and the sun and the moon, his favourite website is this crazy one which bores me to tears.

He is right now at the stage of feeding his grey cells, collecting all sorts of useless information about anything, didn’t we all go through that phase?

He loves regurgitating it all, very carefully scripting out all that he's read.



In a variation, he draws little thermometers on the left and right of every planet he draws to show how hot or cold it is. How odd.



He’s meticulous about it. Rattles off the order of the planets from the sun (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars etc), tells me “There are only eight planets because Pluto isn’t really a planet, it’s a dwarf planet”, and thinks it’s awfully important that apart from Pluto other dwarf planets include Ceres and Eris.

But ah, he doesn’t ask WHY these are dwarf planets and not planets (not that I know but I'd Google it).

And not once has he looked UP into the night sky to look at the stars or search for Venus. He doesn’t even look at the moon.

Which makes me realize that it’s all abstract knowledge, really. A very Singaporean way of accepting everything that he’s told without actually asking why or looking for the evidence.

I’m not sure if I’m going too far here.

On that note, I’ve always been thinking about what, learning-wise, would really be of value to the kids.

And really, next to process, content is quite useless.

As in, anyone can Google anything nowadays and become an expert or a freelance writer.

But it’s skills that matter: Reading, Internet skills, navigation, cooking, listening, social skills.

Come to think of it, a lot of what he'll learn come Primary 1 is very content-centric.

Which might mean Day might fit well into the local school system?

Probably not a good thing in the overall scheme of things but if he stays afloat happily memorizing and he's happy about it, then fine.

mother's day

This is the enduring image I have this Mother’s Day: Jo, standing forlornly in the first row of the school “choir”, lower lip trembling as she searches vainly for mummy, stoically trying to hold back her tears as the rest of her classmates serenade the 50 or so mummies present with “Shi Shang Zhi You Ma Ma Hao”.

Once she reaches up to rub her chubby cheek and when she removes her hand I see that her cheek is wet.

The rest of the kids are either belting it out in song or screaming for mummy or just standing there, but what moves me is that my little doll is standing there quietly, sadly trying to search for me.

It sounds silly, but I am astonished at how much she needs and loves me.

Suddenly I am transported back to Primary 1 when I started sobbing in class when I imagined myself at my mother’s funeral. Jo must have been feeling exactly what I felt then, this overwhelming consuming need for Mother.

It’s humbling, how we love our mothers, and I am humbled at how much these three love me.

How fortunate we all are, mothers and mothers-to-be. There is so much to be thankful for.

workers are home

So the other day I drop by our new home with Day and Jo in tow.

Amidst the rubble the kids are greeted by a pair of young, too-cool-for-school Bangladeshi workers, merrily smoking away on home-made fags with towels wrapped around their heads pirate-like.



The workers, predictably, zoom in on Jo (predictably because strangers seem to have a decided preference for Jo over Day and they always try to chat her up) and say “Hello!”

Day, who pronounces “Cool!” when he pops his head in not because it's nice but because the whole scene is utter chaos...



... pulls me aside and asks: “How come Indian men are so good at building houses?”

See, apart from our new place, there are a few constructions going around where we live now and Indian men are regularly sleeping under the trees, lining our pavement for their afternoon naps like scores of dried fish, being ferried in and out on a pick-up to do the building work.

I am flummoxed when he asks me. I’m not sure an answer about cheap labour is what he’s looking for.

So I give him an equally unsatisfactory answer off-the-cuff: “They built lots of houses before so they’re good.”

Lame!

lu up a tree

And Lu at the beach where she is initially suspicious of, and then reconciles, with sand.



She's a trooper.

flash

Lu: My God.



* The thoroughly photo-shopped subject of her scrutiny, who was really butt-naked under the photoshopped cloud, shall not be named.

independent walker

Once Lu found her legs, she changed.

She is literally on her own!



Walking has given her the confidence to go off and do things on her own, in a manner of speaking.

All day long she toddles around on her own, disappearing for long periods of time into odd corners or outside the house and even when I am walking towards her, she actually unbelievably walks PAST me with a little chuckle and a wave.

Now that has NEVER happened with Day and Jo.

At that age, they would NEVER have let me walk past them without a full-on body assault.

Lu breezes past, leaving me a little put-out but very happy to be able to go and do my thing.

Yes, she was supremely clingy before, for a month or two, the I-want-to-stick-to-mummy-all-day phase. But it seems to have blown over.

On that note, she’s got shoes!

Her first pair of shoes, also from the same folks who sent Dee her first pair of shoes in Sydney, Jason and family.

It’s an (originally) baby-pink pair which is scuffed beyond recognition. Right now it's sort of gray.



Having never worn a pair of shoes in her life, she was dead resistant at first. But once I got them on and put her on her feet, she kept wanting me to put them on for her. (She’s quite malleable, like Day.)

Goes straight to the shoe pile and picks out her baby-pinks.

I’ve also tried on Day’s first pair of shoes, now four years old, for her. She doesn’t like it so much.