hfmd

Two weeks ago a lady from the Health Promotion Board sent me an email. She wanted me to use my blog to “raise awareness” of HFMD (Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease)

Apart from feeling rather chuffed – this IS the first time anyone has ever treated the blog as anything of importance, I did not blog. “Not unless my kid has HFMD,” I chortled.

It’s come back to bite me.

HFMD has struck our household for the first time ever and what do you know? It picks on the little one.

Poor, dear Lu.

Having had no experience with HFMD, I though the tiny blisters on her feet were chicken pox. Which made me panic. Not because of Lu. But because of me, because I’ve never had the pox and catching it from my daughter at the age of 35 is no joke.

So when the doctor pronounced HFMD it was a bit of a relief.



She had spots on her feet, a few on her hand, two in her mouth.

She did not eat for two days, would only drink cold milk, was occasionally limp, had a mild two-day fever and was a little clingy.



But she was a trooper.

The doctor made that pronouncement in the clinic when she observed that by all appearances, Lu was perfectly normal.

I feel the same. What an incredibly easy smiley patient.

Both photos below taken when she was sick.





As of now, two days later, Lu is good as new, chomping on french fries in a frenzy.

Day and Jo do not have it. Yet. I don't know if they will, HFMD is notoriously contagious and there is only so much one mother can do to separate three children in a small apartment.

But HFMD is serious business.

I had to fill in a form so the clinic could send it on to the Government to add another new case to their HFMD statistics.

Courtesy of the press release that nice HPB lady sent me: "(HFMD) is a worrying topic as 721 cases of HFMD were reported last week (1st week of July), crossing the epidemic level of 679."

Lu had it easy. I've had friends whose kids mouths (the insides) and throats erupt in a field of ulcers plus high fevers.

And while Day and Jo were to have gone on a school excursion to the Singapore Flyer today, the principal - rightly so - said better not because of the risk to the other children, even though they looked OK.

I had told the school that Lu had HFMD.

To end off, something again from the HPB: "After reading your blog (!!!) I believe that you will be able to raise awareness of the disease by informing other parents who have young children, warning and informing them about the next seasonal outbreak of HFMD that will take place during October and November this year."

So, er, be careful ya.

why

Why is it that it is always me who finds fault when KK breaks some rule with the kids, but it’s never the other way round?

Why is it that I have become the bad guy while he has become the good guy?

Why have I become like my dad?

Why is it I cannot accept that all my son and daughter want to do - if they could do anything they wanted for an entire day - is to play computer games and watch TV respectively?

Why is it I cannot accept that for all my efforts in so many years to try to get them to live life outside a box, they want to be confined in it?

Have they reached the stage where everything that mum does is uncool?

Why is it that the Singaporean culture of TV, games and sleeping late (for kids) is so pervasive and so damned hard to fight against?

What else is in store for me re: Singaporean culture? Tuition, stress, competition? Is that all coming and is it so relentlessly pervasive that I will have to succumb, like it or not?

Should I attend a parenting course?

rhianna's party

Jo was her wet-blanket-best at Rhianna’s birthday do.

She was mostly in the background.


* Rhianna and Maeri in the foreground

Once again, I am flummoxed. Why is it that my kids are so – to use my father’s word – unsporting? (It's a word he used on me relentlessly when I was a child)

Perhaps it is genetic.

I hated parties. I hated party games with a passion. I wanted to hide in a corner for the first 16 years of my life.

I let Jo hide in her corner.

Her friends swam and played in the pool. She hit the water for 10 minutes then clambered out after floating around solo.


* Georgia, Maeri and Vasil

Her friends played pass the parcel. She deigned to sit down but refused to touch the parcel. “I doowant, mummy!” she whispered.

Her friends hit the pinata. She stood far away, begging to be spared from the pinata queue.

Her friends merrily threw water bombs at the human target. She stood far away, distressed. “I dooon’t like, mummy!”

These friends, by the way, were not strangers. They were all friends from school, including Maeri, whom she did not play with at all.

Her papa asked her what she did at the party.

“I ate! I ate popcorn and cheezels and the fish biscuits and marshmallows, then I ate the gummy sweets, then I shared sausages and potato with mummy, then I ate cake.”

She plopped herself right next to the food table in the air-conditioned function room, the sole person indoors, just eating and eating and eating, as her friends (and even I who was taking photos) frolicked outdoors.



What a lot of effort which went into the party though! She should have enjoyed it!


* Rhianna and her folks

joel's cereal run

This man is a freaking genius right.

Joel is an artist and designer who spends every other day with his sewing machine and tool box, churning out the simplest most amazing toys for his kids and (the best part) posting it all for free online for uninspired idiots like us to pounce on.

I always only used to read for pleasure.

I can't sew, I can't quite draw and I don't even have a printer to print out the free downloads he puts up.

Then one day I saw his Cereal Box Marble Run.

Who doesn't have cereal boxes, scissors and tape at home, right? I stored the idea in my head, ready to whip it out when everything fell into place.

Today I made it. In 10 quick minutes with some very rough cutting and pasting of our Meiji biscuit box.

Then I yelled: "MARBLES? Girls, WHERE ARE THE MARBLES?!"

No marbles. We used grapes.



Oh, what a lovely contraption!

It was such a slipshod job, but it held together beautifully and all the grapes rolled merrily along.

They ended with a big grape pileup because they couldn't eat anymore.



* Anyone who wants to make it do follow Joel's instructions. It's the thought he puts into little things like making a little ledge - so the marbles don't roll off - which makes it so brilliant.

ting xie

Nothing much fazes me.

But my eyebrows involuntarily shot to my hairline when I saw Day’s Chinese spelling list.

(Yes it has to be Chinese)



I mean. Come on.

The boy has not officially started school and I, who have undergone12 years of Chinese education, cannot read some of the words in his spelling list . (Admittedly I am crap but still.)

I would have let him sink or swim. I saw it as the teacher trying to give the kids some exposure, and while I might have spent some time going through the words, I thought it was more important to get him to speak and like the language.

However, KK rose to the challenge.

In true problem-fixing man style, he strode into Popular and purchased a Besta electronic dictionary. The sort with a stylus which allows you to trace the correct order of strokes, and which very helpfully vocalizes words you write in in case you don’t know how to read it.

“It’s more for us lah,” he intoned, when I protested the $400 transaction. “So we know how to read and write the words.”

He sat down with the boy and what do you know? Despite the expression below which seems to state the contrary, Day loves his ting xie sessions, which happen every night, after his bath.



Their tools: The Besta and a timer.



KK essentially goes through every word on the Besta, getting Day to follow the screen and write out the strokes correctly, gives him five or 10 minutes to revise on his own, when the bell rings, he starts the ting xie.

If he gets a wrong word, KK gives him another five minutes to revise, gives it to him again.



Reward: Plants vs Zombies (one level).

KK is a magnificent coach.

I am not given to hyberbole, but even in the days when he trained the varsity softball team and various other hostel sports teams, he was patient, clear and firm. The sort of coach who does not force or terrify you, but challenges you in a good way.

Day has scored full marks for his ting xie ever since. KK, seeing his son for the first time as a student, states: “He is very easy to teach.”


* Day's ting xie

Can the boy speak Chinese smoothly in a conversation? Does he love the language per se? Can he understand a Chinese programme? I doubt it.

But hey, one small step at a time.

lu toilet trained

With very little fuss and muss, Lu’s gone on the bowl.

Excepting sleeping and going-out time, she pees and poos in the toilet bowl at home.


* Jo hustled herself into the shot

How did we do it?

I don’t think we did anything much, really.

From that time, I occasionally popped the question and she would always say no. I’d say fine.

Then some weeks ago, she started peeling off her diaper whenever she did one pee. Just one. Because she felt it was already dirty. That meant more than five diaper changes a day.

That got me, the sheer waste. Plus it meant she had learnt that pee is not supposed to stay in touch with her skin.

So I left her diaper off. I told her: Now you’re not wearing a diaper. You must tell mummy when you want to pee or poo so I can bring you to the toilet bowl.

She did. We all clapped very loudly, of course.

Now it’s really no effort.

It’s breath-taking, how easy her toilet-training is, compared to (and I know I shouldn’t compare but it’s too remarkable for words) Jo, and even Day, both of whom, on hindsight we might have pushed too early.

Maybe it's because she wants to do whatever they do.

Dearest Lu does not hold her pee or her poo, calmly tells me when she wants to go, gives enough advance notice so we can walk in a dignified manner to the toilet bowl where she sits for a moment before the pee piddles in nicely.

She is remarkably controlled and very happy (to my delight) to sit on the bowl, which to be frank she can fall into quite easily.

At home I have taken to chucking a stool at the foot of the toilet bowl so she can climb up and do her own business without bothering me.

Of course, there are accidents when she pees on the floor. And she seems to prefer to opportunistically poo when she is wearing a diaper, in dark and quiet corners where she does not like to be disturbed. (“Go away!” she yells when I look at her and whisper: “You ung-ung ah!”)

But I think she’s done very well on her own.

I was quite prepared to put her in a diaper until she was in kindergarten.

She now takes a great deal of pride in wearing panties which unfortunately mostly hang loosely off her very small butt.

chinese recital

More of Jo's Chinese, only this time it's in shi1 ge1 lang3 song4 style.



Text of the second poem, from her school book.



She loves showing off her Chinese.

"Chinese" referring to her learning the entire thing by memory. Does she know the meanings? Can she speak Chinese conversationally? The answer to both is no.

She tells us: "Can I sing my Chinese for you?"

To her, it's a song which she thoroughly enjoys singing.

knife cut

* Excuse my wrinkled eczema-ed fingers

Should a four-year-old be allowed to use a knife?

Jo sliced her finger. She was helping me to cut up the carrots. It hurt, she whined a little.

The sting was mitigated when Day waltzed over, took a look and declared: "Haiya, that's nothing Jo!

I cut my finger three times already, you know!" He carefully recounts (I hardly remember any of the incidents):

#1: With a pen-knife a long time ago.

#2 & #3: When he was helping me to cut vegetables. In one instance he mistook the blade for the back edge and instead of slicing into the potato, the blade sliced upward into his finger. There was rather a lot of blood which he welcomed because he could plaster it.

I get them to help me with the cooking prep for very pragmatic reasons:

#1: Extra help. Things get done faster. (they are quite good)
#2: If they are occupied in the kitchen, they cannot fight outside.

Once I gave Day the chopper and he backed off. "Er, mum, can I have the small knife?"

Is it an accident waiting to happen?

I'm not sure.

But I know my kids pretty well and while I would not put a knife in Lu's hand, Day and Jo are quite adept.

classical concert

Day attends his first classical concert tonight.



Now, classical concerts are iffy.

Not only with kids, but adults.

It is an acquired taste.

My mother, who looks after the Singapore National Youth Orchestra and who listens to them play day in day out, still nods off during the many concerts she gets free tickets for.

And I, when my parents dragged me to SSO concerts as a young girl, would find comfort in finishing a whole tube of Mentos ensconced in the Old Vic’s red velvet seats. I got to know the white Roman pillars quite well because I found its architecture far more interesting than the music. Often I was lulled into slumber.

What changed? I think when I started being an orchestra player myself.

Day’s por-por invited him to tonight’s concert, A Symphonic Journey by (of course) the Singapore National Youth Orchestra at the Esplanade Concert Hall. Tickets were free.



He was OK with the quickie The Wasps Overture, by Ralph Vaughan Williams. “So fast!” he exclaimed in delight when everyone started clapping.

The Concerto for Piccolo and Orchestra by Lowell Liebermann – a 49-year-old composer who is still alive, which is generally bad news for anyone wanting to hear nice harmonious orchestral music – was when he started fidgeting and said he needed desperately to pee.

We sneaked out to the toilet after the Andante comodo, and saw the Adagio and Presto on the flat screen outside, which made me think seriously about attending free concerts at the Esplanade by just sitting outside the concert hall watching the TV.

He probably enjoyed himself most during the reception during which he stuffed his face with rice paper rolls, otak and mango with rice pudding. (the perks of being related to por-por)



By Sibelius, heavy Sibelius, he was huddled in one corner playing Snakes on my mobile phone, yawning away for dear life.

To his credit, he didn’t reach for the phone during the first two of the Symphony No. 2 in D Major’s four movements, which runs to 50 minutes in total.

He certainly fared better than the man next to us who was already snoring away.

I was enthralled by how talented young people in Singapore are nowadays, and how HUGE the orchestra was. Nearly 40 violinists!

There are so many young musicians in Singapore! Fighting for a place in the orchestra! Way more than during my time!

I love the Sibelius, had played it before a long, long time ago, but I don’t think our effort was anywhere as good as what the SNYO presented tonight.

Kudos to their guest conductor Darrell Ang, one of the most exciting Singapore-born conductors to emerge from the 30-something generation, along with Joshua Tan Kang Ming.

I doubt if Day would want to go to another concert.

Then again, the night’s programme was not child-friendly. Even my dad, a regular concert-goer for decades, thought it was too heavy.

I mean, Sibelius!

plants vs zombies

Plants vs Zombies.

A game which my brother Teng so thoughtfully slipped into my desktop computer when he assembled it for me, and which has Day (and papa and gugu) hooked.

It's Day's first game obsession.

He goes on for hours and hours, first thing in the morning when he wakes up and entire afternoons if he is free.

He's such a sweetie. He tries so hard to introduce me to the game and get me to play it.

But at this stage of my life, I would rather decorate a wall than play a computer game. He tells me very excitedly that he has acquired a Puff-shroom or a Fume-shroom or a Sun-shroom and I smile politely.

I did try the game once. The zombies ate my brains and Day was very tickled.

Good thing KK is just as nuts. He fancies the Michael Jackson zombie. It's good papa-son bonding.

Is it just a phase?

Could be. He's however now trying out Mardek, again thanks to Teng.

I can honestly say, that the origins and evolution of Day's game influences - 100 per cent - are from Teng.

music end

And so it’s fizzled to an end.

Two years of weekly music class, it all ended with a whimper on June 25.

A class of eight whittled down to five, two of whom did not turn up for the last class.

They did not even have the graduation concert, which I thought was par for the course.

I think it’s because of the five, two could still only manage playing with one hand.

The top student was the only girl in the class, quiet sweet little Nicole, who would whisper out the correct answers to all the mystery chords and notes the teacher was playing, and whom the four boys were lost without.



Each time their heads collectively swivelled towards Nicole to catch the soft answers falling from her lips before they loudly parroted her with all their false bravado, I had to stifle a laugh.

Day could play with two hands.

But at this point I would frankly say he has little talent and even less passion.

Perfect pitch? Nil.

Relative pitch? On and off.

What he’s able to do now, is based on general smarts, not musical smarts.

There is a difference between a bright kid – not musically inclined – playing the piano, and one who is musically inclined.

In Day’s class, for instance, there is a boy who plays terribly. His fingers are weak. But he has perfect pitch. If I were a teacher I would rather teach that boy.

The ear, I would say, is far more important than the finger. It’s far easier to train the latter than the former.

I don’t think Day has a musical ear, although he is far and away the best singer in class.

He’s not tone deaf for sure. But he’s not super-talented. Most importantly – and this is the crucial bit – he’s not interested.

He started losing interest in earnest, when he discovered computer games.

I think he’s tried hard, for the sake of class, and I am very proud of what he has managed to do despite the lack of interest. It’s painful to do anything if there is no interest.

I promised him, once the class ends, I’m not going to get on his back about music practice anymore.

I have seen too many times how forcing a kid to do music kills his interest forever.

I suppose, in some ways, the cessation of music class ends a journey which started way back when he so marvellously picked out Twinkle Twinkle Little Star as a 2 ½ year old.

They may show initial talent, initial interest, but in the end their life takes a different turn.

Who knows? He might suddenly be keen once more.

His por por will continue to teach him, informally.

As for the girls. I have been asking Jo if she wants to go for the same class gor-gor went for, since she’s of age.

Not that she’s picked out anything on the piano, but she sure can sing.

Just like the ballet class, however, she steadfastly refuses. So be it.

On that note, Day's slightly shaky but serviceable swan song.

maeri & the boys

This is Jo with one of her best girl friends, a Japanese girl she calls Maeri Chan.



Here they are again.



What I really wanted to say is that, it appears to me that, contrary to the photo, in class, some of Jo's best friends are boys.

A random question "who do you play with" elicits an answer filled with boy's names.

"I play with Jia En, Ming Jun, Sam. Sam is very naughty. He always says Ali Baba Chicken Man. Ahahaha! Or Ali Baba Chicken Woman.

We always play house. I am the mummy, Jia En is the papa, Ming Jun is the boy and Sam is the cousin."

I ask: What about Georgia? Or Maeri? Or Sophie?

There is a long pause.

"They are the other cousins."

Sounds to me like she is the leading female in the set-up.

What had me in stitches the other day, was when I brought her to school late and I knocked on the door, and the door was opened.

Two boys, Jia En and Ming Jun, came rushing to the door. "Mummy!" they chorused.

Jo, in a black mood, demanded that I escort her into class. I did not want to.

The boys responded immediately. "Come Jody we'll take for you."

They relieved her of bag and bottle, tugged on her shirt to drag her into class.

I liked seeing my daughter twirling two boys around her finger.

Then again, maybe she's one of the boys. It's more likely.

I told KK: Maybe I should be like our neighbour, who is intent on imparting the very important skill of learning how to snare a rich man in life (she did so herself), and is deliberately putting the girl in a branded pre-school (and will continue putting her in international schools) so she meets the right sorts.

Then again how can I impart a skill which I never learnt?

KK is not amused.

$

I flipped the page, I saw this headline, I actually sighed involuntarily.



Going by the writer’s estimates, we are far short.

We've always been short, are still short and I think we'll still be short in 10 years time.

I'm also quite sure we're not alone.

The standfirst reads: Bringing a child up to tertiary education level can cost new parents between $190k and $700k.

On the side, Day recently announced: I want to be a neurosurgeon.

Of course we are not taking him seriously, and it is really rather cute of him to move from train driver to neurosurgeon.

But his simple utterance struck a chilling note and reminded me yet again of the possibility that these three may need A. Lot. Of. Money. From. Us. Next. Time.

Friends tell me: Don't worry. Let them take a bank loan, give tuition or work to earn money, and then pay back the loan themselves.

Still. Won't a medical education (should any of them want it) require the mother of all bank loans?

And in some way, I consider a parent's job to cover the child until he or she steps into the working world. It's what mine and KK's parents did for us.

It would break my heart to have my kids not be able to go into a profession they love, and have to settle for something less for the rest of their lives, just because we could not afford it.