lu, snails and cats

LU KILLS A SNAIL

One day on the way to school, Lu and I saw five snails on a driveway.

They were exquisite slimy things, each one with two perfect sluggish prongs. Two big and three small.

I bent down. “See Lu, it’s papa, mama, David, Jody and Lulu.”

Lu bent down. Quick as a flash she stomped on a snail. Wetness trailed.

I was so aghast I could not speak.

She looked the snail. She looked at me. “Mummy is it spoilt?”

(Snail-lover Ondine would cringe!)

LU PATS A CAT



Lu got to molest her first cat, a black yellow-eyed snarler which gave her a scratch in return.

At first Lu gave chase, feline ran.

I picked Lu up and slowly approached the cat. It worked. It lay still. Lu patted it and looked at me, cheeks puffed up in a very self-satisfactory smirk.



The cat scratched. Lu drew back.

We vamoosed.

toy 4: trains

It has to be the trains.

After I packed, the kids saw the box and my flawless packing made it seem brand-new, so it all went out again. (on that point, here's a tip: Re-packing toys renews interest.)

I’m too lazy to take another photo.

But in this case, the trains are money well-spent.

toy 3: cooking set

The pink and white Japanese wooden cooking set is so exquisite it’s not just the kids who want to play. Even I do.

That said, cooking sets, or anything to do with cooking, always seem to be winners. Not just for the girls. Every boy I know is equally fascinated with cooking sets.

Little velcro-ed Swiss rolls that can be cut up, mini aprons that can be worn, ice cream cones with magnetized pastel-coloured scoops of ice cream (so they all stick together).

My three love serving food to me.



They put on their aprons (one for each), ask me for my order, prepare a beautiful dish. I pretend-eat, smack my lips, they pretend wash-up.



Lu has recently gotten into the hang of cutting up the velcro fruits and veg.

I particularly like it when the girls strip and put on their aprons (because it’s hot). The back view is priceless.

toy 2: tent

This was a gift from our friend in Sydney, Kelly, when she came back to Singapore 1 1/2 years ago.

It’s a simple tent.

It’s an imaginarium.

The kids like to crawl in and stay in the hot space (anyone who has been in a kiddy tent which is not in an air-conditioned place will know) for a long time.

They like to pile pillows into the tent and lie down. “We are having a picnic” they say.

Jo and Lu like to sit in there giggling.

Day likes to retreat in there with his beloved books. Once he chucked the tent into a room and locked the door so he can enjoy privacy, in his tent, in his locked room, far and away from his mad sisters.

Sometimes they bring in their cooking stuff and pretend it’s a restaurant with customer and cooks.

Stuff like that.

Holes are appearing all over. But as long as it stands it'll do.

toy 1: lego

Toys: What works what doesn’t?

First-born Day played with toys the most. He had no one else to play with. And since I had nothing else to do, I played with him a lot.

Jo played with toys together with her beloved gor-gor. But it was always the interaction she loved more than the toys.

Lu does not play with toys. She unscrews my lightbulbs every morning.

The trio don’t play with toys very much nowadays.

But there have been much-loved well-used favourites which are winners with all three.

And by winners I mean these are the toys I would unveil just before I start cooking because it brings me peace.

(I am also referring to toys which can be found in stores. Because really, the ultimate toys are mattresses / coffee tables / cushions / boxes / water.)

So if anyone is thinking of buying toys for kids, this series of four are tried-and-tested favs (the rest of their toys are transient). By my three anyway.

LEGO



There isn’t one kid I know who doesn’t like Lego.

It’s expensive but it lasts.

Our Lego is three decades old. Vintage.

It’s the Lego that me and Choon and Teng played with when we were kids.

Small heads and legs which come off, wigs of long and short hair for the people, tiny pea-sized steering wheels.



Day and Jo don't make very complicated profound structures.

They are forever making houses with people doing things, going to the playground, driving in cars. Lu is not ready for the small bits, but she likes to stack up the bigger blocks.

girl in thailand

Again, nothing kid related.

I don’t have an excuse. But the world, after all, is sometimes more important than our offspring

(and I did promise dearest Arli a blurb. Hahahahahaha!!!)

My friend (not Arli) was in bloodied Thailand, where she has been for several years now.

A few days ago she wrote – and took pictures – of the empty supermarkets. How shelves had been cleaned out.

“What else do people buy in a crisis? Toilet paper and sanitary napkins were apparently top picks.”

Her apartment was just three short streets away from one of the deadliest flash points between troops and protesters.

Yesterday she came back to Singapore after the Thais started burning tyres in a street near her apartment.

“Stay or leave – it was a very difficult decision. I’d never liked running away from anything. But the thought of being totally sealed in by an angry mob was equally choking.”

“It was only when I came back to Singapore that I realised how living on the edge of violence had taken its strange toll on me. When there was thunder last night, I woke up with a start thinking it was an explosion. Or when the helicopters flew past in the morning, I felt the familiar fear grip my heart that the troops were coming.”

She is going back to Thailand at some point. Because her hamsters need her.

Here’s my take: Such lovely compelling writing, isn’t it! Such an exciting life!

For more, head over to the eatshopplaylove, a writing experiment featuring an all-female cast of dang-good Singaporean writers who offer their spin on the world (outside of Singapore) through their eyes.

Crazy Arli in Jakarta helps to run the blog and she's one of the contributors. She’s Shakeleg on the blog. Her motto is: “My eyes are bigger than yours. My teeth, too. I win.”

electric car

The thing about my folks living in a landed house is that there’s good trash to be found.

People sell their houses for a windfall, downsize to a smaller home, and find they don’t have space in their new abodes.

So they throw out perfectly good things which - if we like and if there’s space for it - we are quick to pick up.

The best trash we ever got was two years ago when the neighbours across the road moved out and were going to dispose of their furniture. Dad scurried over and got a good working fridge, several pieces of beautiful heavy wooden cabinets and some storage cabinets.

I am also on the prowl for kid stuff.

A few weeks ago, a perfectly good almost brand-new plastic swing popped up next to the trash bin at number 34. That piece, the domestic helper from number 35 quickly booked. She said she was going to dismantle it and send it over to the Philippines.

A week ago, an electric car came our way.

One of those buggy things which you pay something like $3 to ride at makeshift counters.



The owners were moving out.

The car, while not brand new and is frankly very slow, was working perfectly. Including the musical tooting horns and the forward/reverse gears.

The kids were chuffed. But driving around my folk’s garden was a bit like driving around a very small carpark.

So I lugged their car into my car and brought them to a void deck. Best place in the world for aimless kiddy driving.

bubble fairy

She's slightly slimmer. Slightly.

family photo

Teng graduates.

My baby brother is done with school days.

Here he is, the 13-year-old in the red dragon tee, when I graduated.



That little boy is soon going to to join a military organization and do top-secret research. It suits him.

Mum insists that he attends his university convocation.

He dead refuses. His stubborn lament: "Such a waste of time! None of my friends are going!"

Anyway, mum drags him and the rest of us, before Choon returned to Darwin, to a photo studio where all the uni grads in the family can put on their gowns and sit down for a very expensive family portrait.

KK protests: What??

He’s never worn a convocation gown in his life. This will be yet another experience he’s had to endure from being married to me.

Choon protests: What?? Can’t we just take a photo ourselves with Kheng in a hard hat, sis with a notepad and me with a banana? (representing engineer, journalist and dietitian respectively)

Mum glares.

We obediently go. The kids too (ah!).

The 20-minute session passes without incident, apart from KK mumbling “I’m suffering”. The kids are obedient to a fault, not wriggly and they don’t make a sound.

The photo lady comments: Wah your children are so guai!

Then we get 10 photos. We have to pick one to blow up into a gargantuan canvas.

What are the chances of three little kids all smiling beautifully at the same time in a posed, still setting in front of a stern-faced photographer?

Me and mum don’t even look at the adults. They all look the same in every photo anyway. We choose the final based on the kids.



Lu, legs crossed in my lap and wearing the double hand-me-down (from Aussie girl to Jo to Lu) was disapproving and suspicious throughout. Not one of her smiling. Too bad.

Day, in the school tux he last wore 2 ½ years ago (he wanted to wear it, it wasn't my idea. It still fits!), was trying valiantly but could not muster up a convincing smile. Sneer is more like it. Or in this one, like he smelt something very bad.



Jo, ah! She smiled beautifully throughout. To my great surprise, it was not her usual leer. But gentle, gu-niang smiles which made it appear as if she was happy to be there.

She is such an adult. She already knows how to do a nice fake smile.

mortality

In middle age, time begins to shrink.

Days, months and years seem shorter.

The rebellion of youth gives way, exhausted, to the certainly of genes, and little by little one begins the long limp home.

I didn’t write the three lines above. Gay actor Rupert Everett did, in his autobiography.

I am mostly unmoved by what I see and hear and read, but at this point in our lives, those three lines resonate.

In our minds, the days, months and years take on a plodding sameness, life has settled, and it’s always the same two exclamations: “Oh is it (insert festival) again?” and “Oh my, the kids have grown!”

Next to me is KK, who brutally, sadistically, unflinchingly revels in driving home the point that we are ageing.

He has just been told that the state of his eyes are at the top of the downward slide to “lao hua yan”, whereby he cannot see near and he cannot see far.

“I’m half way there, half way there,” he mourns.

I am four years his junior. I have noticed an increasing sensitivity (potato chips and I get a sore throat, caffeine and I’m up all night, detergent brings on the eczema) and an overall decline in mental speed.

And truly, it’s amazing how fast the kids have grown. KK always reminds me: As they grow we decline.

exam's over

KK walked out of his examination hall at the SMU this evening at 5pm, lugging three heavy bags bulging with textbooks, face downcast.

“I think I may have to try again next year,” he said.

Then he brightened: “But when I see the kids, I forget all of that.”


* Just out of the exam hall

Good thing, then, that me and the kids were there to form the Finish-Exam party.

For a man who is so un-diligent and so un-academic and who flunked all his uni papers, KK seems to have done hell of a lot of studying in the last 15 years.

The Masters was over.

Now it’s the Professional Engineering certification.

A badge of honour bestowed only on a select few in Singapore - particularly in the wake of the Nicoll Highway collapse when the Government made it really hard for anyone to get that certificate - this is KK’s second attempt.

Exams are offered only once a year. It costs $450. He took a week off work to study.

He said it felt like the result would be exactly the same this year: Fail.

But even if that were to be the result, we went and ate up a post-exam storm anyway.

Esmirada (and its incredible garlic bread) at the slightly musty CHIJmes was our dinner venue of choice.



What stood out was Lu peeing in her pants (her shitty diaper had been removed earlier and I did not bring a spare), peeling it off, throwing off her shirt and shaking her naked booty on the Esmirada couch to the thumping music under a spotlight.

I unfortunately did not snap a picture.

I was too busy scurrying around Raffles City in my slippers, with a pee stain on my tee, desperately searching for a diaper (no diapers in Raffles City).

emails

All the kids have gmail accounts.

On a crazy whim in January, I just decided to get it for them.

Well it’s free!

The accounts are clearly not active.

I only use it to email them when I feel a sudden rush of lurve. Or when they do something incredible.

I figure it’d be nice – especially for the girls – when they are older and they see all these messages of lurve from mum back from when they were little.

Hopefully if they see it when they are older and rebellious, they’d feel guilty.

Anyhow.

Day has accessed all his emails and he’s recently taken to checking his gmail account every day.

He realizes that this way, he can “talk” to people he can’t see, like Kaofu Choon in faraway Darwin, for free.

And he gets a kick, like he’s writing letters to penpals.

Today he left his gmail window open and kept popping back to check if he had email. Just like the rest of us no-life adults.

He manages to type his own emails.

An email exchange between me and him went like this (and it was quite ridiculous because he goes to the computer, types his line, then I take my turn, sign out for him, sign in myself and type my line...):

Day: hello mummy i love you can you buy beast quest on christmas
Mum: Hello David! Of course I can buy Beast Quest for you. I don't have to wait until Christmas, can buy for you when we go to the bookshop! I am always happy to buy books for you.
Day: ok at least i bring some money so you wont waste so much money
Mum: But you should also save some money. Don't worry, mummy has more money than you. And I like you to read books.

He has also been e-mailing Choon about our upcoming trip to Darwin.

mother's day

Mother’s Day, the kids’ school hosts an Indian vegetarian cooking class.

I mean, all mums cook right?

Sarcasm aside, it was a blast.

True to fine form, the school teachers go all out to roll out the red carpet for us mums.



They draw an incredible chalk mandala on the porch, paint mandala-inspired artworks to plaster on the walls and floor, play Indian music on the CD player, burn a stick of incense.

Every single one of them dress up to the nines.


* Natalie and Alexis


* Shikin and Erzy

Best part? No kids allowed, just like that other R(A) Mother's Day party in 2008. Alexis made that quite clear to me.

I liked that a lot. Which mother (of young kids) wants to work on a day she is meant to enjoy herself?

The one boy who turned up – Joel – was wrongly convinced that kids were invited. He asked me, pleadingly: “Where’s David?” He ended up hiding behind the wall, terrified of the wall of mums.



The scary wall of mums:



As to the food, well. I have never enjoyed Indian food as much as I did that night.

Ami – whose son used to study at the school – cooks incredibly light Indian vegetarian food. I dove into her samosas and puffed rice salad (bhel puri) like there was no tomorrow.

None of it was cloying or heavy. It was all crisp, fresh and light.

We dined with wine to Indian music and tealights in Day’s classroom.

With the little basket of Indian spices we were all given, I'm going to give this Indian cooking thing a shot. Really. First I need to get the sev...

on a hot day

I bring the girls to Macs for a vanilla cone.

They both insist on an add-on of french fries with curry sauce.



Lu lops up huge dollops of curry sauce with her fry and licks up the sauce – without eating the fry. It's a fry spoon.



Jo dips her fries into the ice cream – I told her to try that because some people apparently enjoy it though not I – and she loves the mix.



The weather is killing.

It’s forcing me to seek refuge in places of air-conditioned comfort which I normally shun.

It’s also making me wonder about how hot it would be for my grandchildren – if I have any. What a world.

bye, thomas

It was with real sadness that I packed up his Thomas train track set.

It’s been languishing for months.

Thomas’ time was up. Somewhere around the time he was 5 ½, Day was done with the blue train.

The boy’s had a good five-year run with it.

And with this particular mega track from Choon, two years, the love shared with fellow friends like Matt and Benz who similarly adored Thomas.


* All in one big knee-high box

It’s incredible and surprising, how moved I was when I carefully removed all the batteries and stowed away the trains into the box.

There’s Thomas, which he brought to Sydney and which accompanied him on many a cold night. There’s Gordon, his favourite for a time. There’s the original train station and train, which KK had so lovingly introduced to him as a wee 1 ½ year old.

Mostly I see Day lying on the ground with his face positioned right next to his trains so he feels like he’s right there with them, carefully lining up as many trucks as possible and letting them go.

He would do this for hours at a time, the first thing he did when he came back from school.

And there were the stories he would make up and share: Gordon has had an accident! All the cargo is gone! Murdoch is coming to the rescue!

The trains still feel a little grimy but I am loath to wipe them.

neat

Jo is neat to the max. Just like her brother.

I was prepared, even looking forward to, a little messiness in the family. But no.

She loves writing. And she makes sure her lines are straight and as beautiful as can be.

As for Day he's now into this sort of lettering. He gets a kick out of it.

stepping out

All of a sudden I realize she's all grown up.

Well and truly past the baby stage.

She flirts, pouts, hold conversations, throw tantrums and scolds me when I laugh at her. (particularly when I sing "Lulu ball, Lulu ball, Lulu on the wall..." to the tune of Jingle Bells and she says "NOT LULU! JODY!")

choc bananas

Their uncle Down Under makes a short trip back home and this time, he makes chocolate-and-nut-smothered-bananas with the kids.

The story: Day stays over at my folk’s place one night, the next morning he rolls over and describes a recipe to Choon which sounds like chocolate-and-nut smothered bananas. (ie. You take a banana and cut it into small pieces, then you take a satay stick...)



Choon assembles all the ingredients, melts a bar of chocolate in a bowl sitting in a pan of hot water, rolls the banana in it and then sprinkles nuts all over.



Good?

Not quite.

Choon bought bitter chocolate and the bananas are not quite sweet enough. Not a hit with the kids.

But Day was pleased as punch to see his dream come true. (Jo was just pleased as punch. She tells me "I want to be a chef". That's her first real ambition!)



This time, Choon’s trip back, he plays a lot less with Day. The boy is always at the computer or reading.

Jo is still a ball of fleshy fun.



While Lu, I think this time she is old enough to become a Choon fan.



She takes to him (like the other two) instantly and constantly asks for him: Where is Kaofu Choon? I want Kaofu Choon.

As they grow, the dynamics change. I’m sure Choon will miss the baby stage when even Lu is all grown up.

Which is why I keep telling him to have some of his own. So when Lu is grown I can have fun with HIS kids.