liebesfreud

A reminder how children are such incredibly absorbent creatures.

I bring Jo to a string quartet recital a month ago. The T’ang Quartet are playing at a community centre about three bus stops away from where we are, and it is free.



The fact that it is held at the CC is the only reason why I dare to bring the four-year-old to a “concert”.



(Day didn’t want to go. I think he was afraid of being put through another Sibelius)

We went, we enjoyed it, she wriggled a bit. But she is on the whole, a far more involved audience than Day.



I forgot all about it.

Today I turn on FM 92.4 on the car radio, and Kreisler’s Liebesfreud comes on. The station’s music makes them sleepy and I wanted them to sleep.

Jo pipes up: Mummy is this the song we heard at the concert?

It takes me a while. Then I remember, the T’ang Quartet played Liebesfreud!

painted nails

HE goes and paints his nails with a Sharpie.



As I raise my eyebrows, he says: Oh it's OK I can wash it all off later.

He admires his nails, proceeds to the toilet, washes, scrubs with soap, peers at his nails, washes again, scrubs again, peers again.

Oops!

dirty feet

lu's art

From drawing beehoon she’s moved on to colouring in beehoon-like strokes.

She commands me to draw things for her – I want the little boy and the cat and the dog and the teddy bear inside the bag! – which she cheerfully fills up with colour.



She has not learnt how to hold the pencil correctly. But she is a confirmed rightie.



Which makes three right-handed kids.

world view

I am unquestioning, obedient and meek.

And until now, am perfectly happy to make the best of whatever I am given, or whatever situation I am in.

The children changed that.

For them, I am not happy to make the best of what I - or they - are given.

It's well and good to say "So be it" and "It's OK" and "Like that lor". It's OK to be cynical when it's just me. For David, Jody and Lulu?

The turning point: Day starting primary school.

He, and then the two girls, are going into The System.

I have subconsciously been paying a lot more attention to little things I never cared about before.

Surfing political websites, for one. Analysing the news. Listening carefully to and scrutinising the young people around me.

Nothing's new, of course. But it strikes deeper.

I don't like it. But I don't know what's out there.

That has never stopped me before.

But KK, perenially steady, remains steadfast on this one.

I think it'll be another case of "so be it" and, as one of my editors put it, that's what I'm staying home for anyway. So I'll be there to mitigate.

It probably won't make a whit of difference to the kids when they eventually grow up. But I want them to know I did think about it.

(Sorry if the post is obtuse. I mean it that way.)

car washing

Day and Jo have been bugging me forever to let them wash the car.

In a case of slack-mum-anal-kids, they get very bothered by the persistent patches of bird shit on the windscreen, the grubby prints on the glass etc.

Today was a nice day, so I let them bath the car.



I took pictures because it was a novelty, but I plan on never washing the car again myself (actually I have washed a car maybe once in my life) because they do a bang-up job.

Like all kids who are given responsibility, they throw their little hearts and souls into it, rubbing away at the tyre rims and door handles.



Jo the extra-finicky (but nowadays very sweet) one asks me softly: Mummy, er, we are cleaning the inside of the car tomorrow right? Mummy, can you wipe the roof please? (because she is too short)"

Water, soap and kids also go well together.

All they need is a change of clothes.

(Lu was very enthusiastic but whilst her siblings' clothes were black at the end of it all, hers was still a bright clean emerald green!)

turnip beans

Odd.

Our faithful turnip, which has spread vines all over the railing in willy-nilly fashion, has sprouted a vineful of beans.



I'm really no horticulturalist.

But what are beans doing on a turnip plant? And are they edible?



Kids didn't like the smell. Jo attempted a bite.

ear wax

* Anyone who cannot abide the sight of ear wax please close the window now. Please.

I have learnt something new.

And that is, it is not a weird thing to go around digging out wax from one’s ear. Or their children’s ears.

Contrary to all medical expertise (Flush it out! Suck it out! Do not dig it out!), many people here do keep wooden or metal toothpick-y things with tiny scoops in their drawers, to unearth all the disgusting little yellow nuggets accumulating in auditory canals.

I don't have the faintest memory of such ear-digging in my childhood.

KK does it all the time. His weapon of choice: Metal.



Then the other day, whilst he was doing his grooming ritual, I playfully peeked into one of the kid’s ears with the torch.

I won’t say who.

I dropped the torch along with my jaw.

What looked like a solid black wall of gunk was blocking the entire entrance to the ear!

I looked in the other! The wall was just as solid and just as black!

Oh my.

I beckoned to KK. He took a look, and I swear I could almost feel his desperate vibrating desire to GET IT OUT! He tensed, taut as a bow, just itching to dig in.

How can anyone hear with all that shit inside?

Kid refused to cooperate.

It took days. Some lotion from the pharmacy dripped into the ear to loosen the ear wax. Tons of cajoling and a little force to hold the head and flailing arms.

KK did his job and he did his job well. (although now I can I say I know someone who can probably do it better. Someone who used to clean the ears of six young kids all lined up in a row.)

It was the biggest piece of ear wax I, and he, have ever seen in our lives.


* That's a pea, by the way. For scale.

And that is what came out of just one ear.

labour of love

The entire blog is a huge labour of love, right.

It's been an investment of, oh, a couple of hours every week, or more, for the last six years.

It's gotten even more laborious.

Geocities, where I used to upload my photos when I first started, closed down late last year.

I didn't know. Notification emails which must have been sent to my Yahoo mail account were not seen. I never use my Yahoo mail account.

One day, the photos from my early blog days just disappeared. I assumed it was some strange Internet thing, whatever.

Then I realized, the photos were gone from the Internet. Gone forever.

Luckily I capture the blog now and then, the last time being in January 2009.

And I am now painfully uploading every single of the I-don't-know-how-many photos I used to store on Geocities, back onto the blog.

I could just leave it, without the photos, but I can't stand it. It's like an itch I need to scratch.

An easier way? There probably is. Only I don't know it.

I have done three months, up to January 2005. Slow and steady now.

I hope flickr's OK. I hope it stays around forever.

coming into her own

ONE

The other day, Lu upset Day's takeaway cupcake, turned it upside down so the top cream was smeared on the inside of the box, Day was furious.

They were all in the car.

Day (in front passenger seat): I hate Lulu!
KK (driving): How can you hate a baby?
Day: Babies are naughty!
Lu (in back seat): Baby. Is. Angry.

TWO

Lu: KEEP! QUIET! KEEP! QUIET!
Jo: Lulu is naughty.
Lu: Keep quiet or I won’t give you sweets and party pack.

I need to transcribe more of her before it passes me by. I can't believe she's already talking back.

Oh and for that matter, she can't pronounce her L's although she is practising with a whole lot of tongue-thrusting.

Phonetically, she says: My name is Yuyu. I yove you and I yike any-phants.

(My name is Lulu. I love you and I like elephants).

a clean breast

Er, nothing to do with kids again, but recommended reading. It’s dire and funny.

Theresa Tan is one of the editors who used to give me work.

At 42, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two months ago on June 25, one of her breasts was removed. Three days ago, she found a hair growing on the breast newly reconstructed from tummy fat, and rejoiced!

I did say the blog, A Clean Breast, was dire and funny.

But for all of us who are leery of cancer (just about everybody), and who are at risk (just about everybody) Threez’s blog dives straight in and she is – obviously- brutally frank.

We all need to not be scared, and just know.

She was happy for me to publicise her blog.

She writes: “I really hope someone who might be facing a diagnosis of cancer will have hope after reading this. Staying positive really is half the battle.”

a dollar for a tooth

Day found a dollar in a plastic bag under his pillow this morning in exchange for this:



The tooth started wiggling on his birthday and he’s been trying to pry it out for the last four months.

It finally dropped when he was having a sandwich at school yesterday.

Coincidentally the tooth which dropped was also his first tooth.

He is jumping for joy.



“The tooth fairy gave me a dollar!” he kept chiming.

KK the realist, half asleep in the morning when Day ran over to share the news, retorted: “Aiya it’s your mummy lah.”

Gah.

Note: I was terrified of my milk teeth dropping out. But every kid I know nowadays is so blase about it. They pluck it out themselves, walk into the school dental clinics themselves to get it extracted. I wonder why.

whew

He’s in.

Forty-five minutes of pregnant silence in the school’s AV theatre, of which half the time was spent by the administrator laboriously screening every ballot sheet on the big screen and folding it up to prove to the 50-over parents present that their offspring’s name was indeed inside the box, and then it was thankfully over for us in a shot.

Day’s was the third name to be called.

And again a short while later, as his second ballot sheet was drawn out. (Singaporeans get two chances)

"The Great Pretender" tinkled softly in the background from the AV system.

I wanted to, but I didn’t whoop.

No one else did. Only the parents of Number 42 (the last nail-biting slot) let out audible gasps.

Ten sets of parents walked out without places for their kids.

Day's all set for Primary 1.

the sisters

Some days, Day exhales in exasperation: “It’s THE SISTERS!”

The poor boy has become stand-alone. Not that he minds. He would be very happy if The Sisters stayed far-far away. The only problem is they don't.

They would give him many a white hair, if he could have white hair.

Gender has drawn the two Thirteen-Dots together (Thirteen Dots is what I call them, but you must translate into Chinese)

They’re really quite mad.

Breaking down the daily trio interactions:

Day-Lu: 5%
Day-Jo: 20%
Jo-Lu: 75%

It’s probably also because the girls spend entire afternoons together while gor-gor is at school.

It's always Jo who does, and Lu, Jo's beloved Keiji Ida, is the faithful follower.

Lately, the girls are bonding over Nurturing and Caring. They play Mummy.

They get pregnant, breastfeed the babies, wrap the babies very carefully in blankets and towels and then they put the babies to sleep.



Or they just line up all the toys for a nap.



Sometimes they grab their backpacks and go on a pretend picnic around the house, complete with caps and equipment.

They clean off wall scum with their toothbrushes and bathwater.



And another of Jo's favourites: Having a picnic under an umbrella with their children.



She tells Lu: "Look Lulu, look at the stars in the sky." It must have come from here.



Looking at them, it almost make me wish I had a sister.

singapore's 45

They are thrilled, so thrilled to belong in this country.

And why not?

From a marketing perspective, the country sells itself pretty well to the youth.

Day whispers the pledge at machine-gun speed in my ear and Jo sings Marikita. Lu falls in love with One People, One Nation, One Singapore and demands it on Youtube.

A few National Day pictures:

The school celebrates, the kids also learn the YOG cheer. (the one which goes “Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, hey” and which Lu has also fallen in love with)


* Day with Nikita and Zachary

The helicopters flying in V formation near my folk’s house where we were watching the parade on TV.



National Day morning, where three happy citizens (including a future NSman) sit safely surrounded by clean air, green space and a man-made beach enjoying a cool morning.

sorry

Dear boy

I am so sorry.

Mummy neglected to change the address on her and papa's identity card, and now you may not have a place in the primary school we chose for you because for the first time in I don't know how many years, the school is suddenly popular and kids who want to get in need to go through a ballot.

My fault. I presumed that with no ballot before, there would be no ballot now.

If I had changed the address, it would have reflected that we lived within 1km of the school. No problem.

Since I didn't, the address (your grandparent's house where we used to stay) showed that you lived outside of 2km. Problem.

I tried to change it today, but the school administrator says the Ministry says it's "in the system". And some local law decrees that all addresses have to be changed at least 28 days before registration. Too bad.

Now we depend on luck of the draw. 52 kids vying for 42 places.

I hope your entire future is not changed by your mummy's careless oversight.

Love, Mum.

cheese!

Day grabbed the camera and commanded us all to get in line.

Every time he snapped, Jo leapt off the bench and scrutinized the screen.

And every single time, the two of them giggled when they saw Lu and her scritchy-scratchy poses.

a primary start

* Day in the foreground, pondering his future

I bring Day to where he will probably spend the next six years of his life and he says: “It’s so noisy.”

Today is the Primary 1 registration for us folks who have no priority whatsoever.

Meaning Day has no siblings in the school, no parent who used to study at the school and I certainly did not volunteer my time for preferential entry.

But I am told most reassuringly that the school has never held a balloting exercise in its history.

The school is cheery, windy, orange and yellow and it makes me feel happy when I step in, which is as good a reason as any to send my kids there.

It is also the only school I had ever had in mind: Co-ed, single session, near enough home to walk and tucked in a HDB estate.

Actually my only basis for choosing the school then was that when I asked kids who went there, they all said they liked school. Which was not always the case when I asked kids from other schools.

KK does not quite care.

I said registration was today, he asked me casually: So which school is Day going to?

He, as he's always maintained, thinks every school is the same. It’s the individual which makes all the difference.