precious moment 1

A childless friend once told me that reading my blog, she never wants to have kids.

Maybe it’s about time I did the Government a favour.

I have never tried documenting the saccharine-sweet planes of parenting. It’s always easier to complain, isn’t it?

So here’s a feel-good series.

We’ll call it: Precious Moments. Ahaha.

PRECIOUS MOMENT 1

We live on the third floor of a walk-up apartment.

Coming home isn’t a relaxing affair because the panting starts when we get out of the car.

Take bags out... take rubbish out (there is no bin in the compound)... take Lu’s shoes out (she always shakes her shoes off in the car)... and when we go on market runs, there are bags and bags of groceries.

Then it’s the 36-step upward trudge.

I used to have to go up and down two or three times.

Now, we have got a routine all worked out now which enables me to make just one trip.

It’s a precious one.

Straight out of the car, Day and Jo, their school bags on their back, congregate at the booth and wait.

Then I open the booth and hand them bags and things, one after another.

Day, on a good day, takes as much as he can and more. “Give me the milk, mama. Give me the cornflakes. Give me the fruits.”

Sometimes I end up with nothing, but he refuses to return the bags and he treks upstairs, heaving and panting and I think, feeling very useful.



Jo is not one for the heavy loads.

But I nearly choked the day she took one look at me struggling with an armload of things, and tossed the “wedding” bouquet of red ixora she had plucked (and which she had carefully held on to it for ages because she said she was getting married) to help me carry the stuff.

“It’s OK, mama, I don’t want to get married anymore. I’ll help you.”

kutu war

How to fight Kutu.

Raze its Living Environment.

Before.



After.



Jo is surprisingly happy and willing to go along with strong parental suggestion that she cut her hair. She stipulates the length – at her neck – but the hairdresser goes a little further.



We are also grateful to the hairdresser for consenting to cut her hair, which I of course had explained, has undergone several rounds of medication for lice.

(I think Jo looks better with long hair. But KK loves her new moppet do)

Kill off the Migrants

I make the entire family wash in pesticide shampoo, in case any of the lice from Jo jumped head.


* The pesticide has to stay on the head for 10 minutes

Lu ((who started scratching her head in school today), Day, me and KK. We all scrub our hair with the green foul-smelling shampoo which smells exactly like the pesticide my dad uses on his orchids.

It supposedly works very well. Someone I know sprayed Baygon on her head and it apparently worked.

The bottomline: Lice are insects. Insecticides should do the job.

We will continue to do the shampoo for a few more days at least.

Render the Environment Inhospitable

This, is the hardest.

This is the part about examining our living habits, our living environment, sunning out the mattresses and sheets, washing all the bed linen in hot water, changing towels regularly, not sharing too many things.

I admit: I probably am not doing too good a job. I’m not very hygienic, and I don’t even know where to sun things. There’s no space.

Isolate Ourselves

Jo and Lu are not going to school for the rest of the week, or at least until I am sure they are lice-free.


* Breakfast with me. What a fabulous tissue prata!

Everywhere we go, I am very mindful of where the girls rest their heads and I am not letting them near other kids / rest their head of sofas / car seats etc.

Funny how I take lice so much more seriously than viruses. But the thought of the parasites living in my child’s head just creeped me out, and I would never ever let another child catch a lice from mine.

kutu

Who gets lice nowadays?

Jo.

The dreaded kutu, such a vintage infestation, are currently living in my daughter’s nest of hair.

(There’s been a lot of Jo news lately, for some strange reason)

When I picked her up from school today, Teacher Nat, looking like she has something very dreadful to confess, said to me very softly: Er, Jody was scratching her head a lot and when Lao Shi tried to re-tie her hair, she found some white specks. She also caught something.

Something? Like what?

I, the pristine sheltered little kid growing up in an upper middle-class household of many caregivers, had never seen or encountered lice.

When Nat explained, my jaw dropped.

I have no idea where Jo got her lice from, but I was incredibly apologetic and I hauled Jo straight to the doctor.

Who put on his gloves, parted her hair, and declared: Oh yes, she has lice. See the eggs right there?

He opened his little panel-to-his-nurses and shouted in Mandarin: “You mei you kutu shampoo?” (Do we have anti-lice shampoo?)

“Mei you lah! Jiao ta qu pharmacy mai.” (No lah! Ask her to buy from the pharmacy)

I pay for the consultation, leave empty handed, and pick up a bottle of Malathion Lotion off-the-pharmacy-shelf.

Tonight proves another interesting night, as KK goes on another red rampage to, in his words, “kill the bastards who dare to live in my daughter’s beautiful hair”.



He is, clearly, the family groomer when it comes to things like ear wax and hair lice. I don't know what to do and even if I did, I wouldn't be very thorough.

I hold the torch as KK massages the lotion into Jo’s scalp and spends an hour – an HOUR! – flipping every strand of hair to and fro, seeking lice.

He finds four gray lice. Four. All of which had been rendered somewhat paralysed by the lotion.

He also finds plenty of eggs, which he carefully unplucks from the hair strand (the eggs claw onto the hair) and squeezes with a tiny “pop” between his thumbnails, thus killing the unborn lice.

I look at Jo and sigh: Jo, can you shave your head?

Because that really would be the answer to all her woes, wouldn’t it?

She refuses.

Now I keep her from everyone for the next few days. Or weeks.

My head feels a little itchy.

the first kiss boy

Jo’s just met the boy she gave her first kiss to nearly four years ago.

Of course, the nearly-five-year-old she is now doesn’t remember what she did or who she met when she was 1 ½.

But strangely enough, she and the boy got along mighty fine.

Jo and Fen’s boy Ethan merrily raced off to the playground on their own many times, ignoring my “we’re going home now” threats.

She pronounced, when I finally got her to leave: I love Ethan.



I wait and see how the two will take to each other again when they next meet up.

Which will probably be a long time in coming, considering how often their mums see each other.

It’s plumb impossible to co-ordinate schedules with three mega-busy newspaper folk and Xueying, in her e-mail, aptly titled our attempt to organize a meet-up as “Challenge”.

But meet we did. There are new additions all around!

Fen has another baby: Ewan. I tried to snatch him from his mum and he hates me. But photographer mum Fen was so super-quick she managed to steal what I think is a super shot in the split second before she took Ewan back.



Steph and Yen's Megan is all grown up with her two front teeth gone, and she has a baby sister Emma.

The passage of time is all too apparent when there are children alongside.

the long walk home

Should a seven-year-old be allowed to walk on the streets alone and unsupervised?

It’s a rhetorical question.

For today marks the day my son walked home alone from school.

He asked to, and I said yes.

It’s a kilometre-long trek, about 10 minutes, across a big road (with a traffic light) and several small residential streets.

Who probably inspired him (and me too) was his little Russian friend from kindergarten, now in the same primary school, who takes the public bus to and from school on his own.

I said to Nikita’s mum when I last saw her: Wow, he can take the bus by himself.

She looked at me very coolly and said: Why not? You think they cannot do it?

It seemed totally insane. But the more I thought about it, the more acceptable it became.

The comedy was in what actually happened.

True to our common flighty characters, Day and I never really confirmed that he was walking home. He mentioned it in passing yesterday, I said OK, I didn’t verify.

Today, I go to school. Miss Tan looks at me in confusion: Er, I think David said he was going to walk home.

My heartbeat suddenly races. I don’t see him in the school compound. I have visions of him being run over, of being kidnapped, of falling into a drain.

Day and I had talked about calling each other on our mobile phones. (Yes, KK gave Day a mobile phone)

Problem was, flighty me had left my freaking mobile at home.

I dash to the car, zip home and run upstairs to get my mobile.

As it turns out, flighty Day never charged his mobile and all I got was the “SingTel mobile subscriber you are calling is not in use” message (or something to that effect).

I run downstairs and walk towards school.

I see my little boy very near home, poised at a small residential crossing, staring intently at the cars coming and going.

He gives me a tired smile and shrugs off his backpack: So heavy, he says.

KK, who walks him to school everyday, asks: Does this mean he can walk to school by himself now?

hot days

It’s hot again!

It was cold a few weeks back, a cold which drove me under the blankets at night without an air-conditioner or a fan. (Although the rest of the family were still sleeping under full-blast fans. Which meant I had to be separated.)

The heat has returned with a vengeance.

The family eczemas are popping, the car air-conditioner is switched to the max, and we are eating ice cream once again.

Anything will do for the kids but because I like Udders, and because it’s on the way home from school, to Udders we go. For the rare splurge.

I rotate flavours every time, trying a sample of this, a sample of that.

The kids have firm favourites. They are terribly boring people.

Day’s fav: Ballsy mint. Which is like eating toothpaste with crispy chocolate balls, but on a hot day, this one sends a lovely little chill down the oesophagus.



Jo’s fav: Cookies and cream. Every time we go, she begs me for a second scoop. Of course I say no.



Lu’s fav: Strawberry Fields. She finishes one scoop all by herself and I can understand why because this is the only strawberry ice cream in the world I would put into my mouth.

homework

Primary 1 kids from the school across from Day’s are allegedly being piled with homework. Tons.

Primary 1 kids from the school next to Day’s are apparently being told to stay back in school once a week for English remedial lessons. What they are apparently told is: Remedial is GOOD for you. Then you become smarter than other children.

Primary 1 kids in Day’s school don’t seem to get homework.

Well, four out of five days he doesn’t have any.

At the school gate every afternoon when I pick him up from school, I hear the echo of parents, grandparents and maids in various languages asking the same thing: Boy/Girl ah, do you have homework today?

Of course I follow suit.

Day either says “nothing” or “I finished it in class.”

Instead he tells me about how his friend Said is a Malay-Indian mix, how Miss Tan’s grandfather was killed by the Japanese and how his Laoshi’s dog is called Bobo (then he always cracks up).

He spends his afternoons happily balonglong-ing along with his sisters.



Playing Beyblades with Jo, reading books, surfing the Net, trying to steal my iPod from under my nose, practising the piano, going out if I am in the mood.

Life is exactly the same.

Nice honeymoon. I hear that in this school, the homework starts raining down in Primary 3.

valentine's

gong xi, gong xi

Alexis, who heads the kindergarten Day just graduated from, asks me a few weeks ago: Eh, can your son perform a Chinese New Year song on the piano for our Chinese New Year lunch? It will be like, an alumni performance?

Sure, I say.

Then I realize what a hole I have dug for Day.

Chinese New Year songs are not easy. And I have never dutifully, Tiger Mum-like, pushed Day to excel. Happily pottering along his music journey with nice simple stuff, Chinese New Year songs are above and beyond what he could do.

Too bad. I said yes, the boy will have to do it.

I run through the usual suspects. All involve leaps all over the keyboard and the melody lines are not straight-forward at all.

I pick what I think is the most do-able. I hand-write a score for him. I task Por Por to teach Day. I simplify it along the way.



He learns it. He memorizes it. He plays it at the Hollandse Club, where the school hosts its Chinese New Year buffet lunch.



What makes me laugh is when he gets off the piano stool and coolly saunters off the stage all bo chup-like, as if he were taking a toilet break. Bow, kid, bow!

He tells he wasn’t the least bit nervous. Which is better than the last time!

mortality

Ne Ne has a heart attack.

My hale-and-hearty 60-something mother-in-law, who has eaten simply all her life and is active all day walking and cleaning house, was felled by sweat-inducing pain in her chest this morning and she was dramatically rushed to hospital in an ambulance called by the members of neighbourhood walking group she was exercising with.

We bring the kids to the hospital with us. It’s their first time in a place of sickness.

Day and Lu go, they are bored, they play with the iPhone and run around respectively, they leave without a second thought.

Jo is moved by the sight of Ne Ne in green pyjamas, drip in her hand and oxygen tube in her nose, and spontaneously reaches up from the side of the hospital bed to grasp Ne Ne’s hand. Ne Ne smiles.

But the true extent of the hospital visit is not clear until night time. When Jo is sleepless.

She steps out of bed and comes to me, repeatedly. Her scattered thoughts:

Mummy, is Ne Ne sleeping in the hospital tonight? Will she be scared?

Mummy, I am worried about Ne Ne. I love Ne Ne.

(teary-eyed) Mummy, will I be like Ne Ne when I am old? Are old people like that? I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to go to hospital and be alone.

Mummy, what happened to Ne Ne’s heart?

I try to tell her. She comes out of bed a few more times to clarify blood flow and then draw strawberries and bananas in her heart.



Finally she goes to bed at 1130pm.

more intent

Because I blogged I was on the lookout.

My, my girl is really something.

She knows how to pack her message with a whole load of emotional blackmail.

Today she comes back home with a bamboo painting.



“Mummy, can you hang my picture on the wall?”

I hem, I haw. (that happens very often with her)

I say: Well Mummy hasn’t decided which section of the wall is for your paintings so why don’t we keep it first and we’ll hang it up when Mummy decides?

Jo: Mummy, don’t you love me? I drew this painting for you because I love you so much, and if you love me you should hang it up. Please?

I don’t know how I wriggled out of that one. I think I said: "Oh I have to go and cook now!" Before running off.

intent

Jo is of a very intentional ilk.

Oh it’s been obvious, right from Tigress through to Battle days.

She is tempered these days, sugar-coated in a manner of speaking.

But that core of single-minded intent remains!

She sidled up to me over the weekend: Mummy can I go to Sam’s house to play?

Sam is her partner from school, the boy who shares her shoe and cubby hole, whose hand she holds whenever they line up.

Sam is also the boy she’s said she is going to marry. (It is reciprocated. Sam wants to marry Jo)

I hem, I haw. I don’t even know Sam’s mother.

Jo hammers away. Several times a day. Every day. Mummy, please, pretty please, can I go to Sam’s house to play? Please? PLEASE??

I finally tell her that when I bump into Sam’s mother at school, I will ask the woman.

She commands: Write in your book, mummy.

She watches over my shoulder as I diligently pencil in: Ask Sam’s mum if Jo can go over and play.

Today I pick her up from school. She berates me: Mummy you came late! Sam’s mum already came and left!

Just to show her that I am taking her very seriously indeed, I leave my number with the school and ask them to get Sam’s mum to call me.

Five minutes later, Sam’s mum calls. She is not at all surprised: Hello! Just now your daughter kept asking me if she can come and play. I said she had to ask her mummy. I guess she did, haha.

We swing over in the next 20 minutes. And here is Jo in the lift with me, all smug, as I head to a complete stranger's home.

rabbity year

Every year it feels like we backslide a little.

You know, from getting Day to toss the raw fish salad to not bothering to get any of the kids involved, from staging and taking cutesy Chinese New Year photos to neglecting it all together, from trying to explain the traditions to just: “Oh tomorrow is Chinese New Year and we are going out.”

We are just a hop away from making that overseas trip during the season.

Why? I don’t know.

I suspect it’s because I can see that Day – and maybe even Jo - can see through all that. It’s difficult to pretend to be something we’re not in front of very skeptical kids, and difficult to flog the meaning of something when we are not even firm believers.

Lu has to go where the boat goes.

Unfortunately, the meaning which I think comes through loud and clear is: CNY is time to Pig Out and Collect Money!

Random photos to sum up the CNY madness.

PINEAPPLE TARTS

Por-por learns how to make almond cookies, kueh bangkit and pineapple tarts. Day helps for five minutes then drops outs to get on the PS3. Lu can’t be bothered. Jo is the only one who has any interest in helping out. She rolls the dough.




* Yes the pastry cases are dreadfully inconsistent and yes, we made a pastry "plaster" to cover up the hole

RABBITS

The kids and I make paper rabbits to paste on the wall. Yay for rabbits! Yay for me!


* Rabbits on the wall

NEW CLOTHES

Day 1: New clothes for all the kids, chosen by the kids. Jo is bursting out of her dress. Why is KK in golf shoes? Because he played golf in the morning!



Day 2: Dots for the girls all round. New for Lu and Jo (dresses they picked themselves), I am wearing my house dress. Because it's the only dotty thing I have, see.



TRADITIONS

At the temple this year, Lulu does her first kowtow. She is perfect. She dips her head in earnest and makes sure she kowtows the correct number of times. I think she does more than 50 in total.



Jo taking a kowtow break. She is drawing.



The usual crowd congregate at our place on Day 1. The old ones play mahjong, the middle-aged adults sit around and swat mosquitoes, the kids play on the PS3. I know this will all end with my parents’ generation.



At the carrot cake auntie’s, the kids run wild. Day, Jo and Lu prefer to sit sedately in the flat munching on carrot cake and keeping quiet. Good.


* Caleb, Danielle and Angel

mummy brain

Another mummy memory episode: I lose my wallet on the eve of Chinese New Year.

I don’t even discover it until late night, when I realize I don’t have enough big notes for the next day’s red packets and want to hop down to the ATM to draw cash.

I search everywhere. I don’t find it.

I try to remember. I can’t.

I cancel the credit card, give the wallet up as lost and I borrow KK’s ATM card.

Roundabout 3am, as I am just about to fall asleep in a pool of vague dreams, a sudden stark moment of eye-opening clarify strikes me like a lightning bolt.

I see my wallet perched on the ledge of the public toilet in the hawker centre. I bolt up in bed.

I see myself putting it there because I had to use both arms to lift Jo onto the toilet seat, I remember Jo suddenly screaming because a sliver of her thigh was caught between cover and seat, I hear her whine, I remember how heavy she was as I l carried her out of the stall with both arms. I leave the wallet behind.

What a strange mind I have now, to remember so clearly and so suddenly so long after the occurrence.

There is a happy ending. I return to the toilet two days after. The toilet auntie who collects 10 cents, a wizened hag with firm milk-white hands, chides me – Why did you take so long?!? - and sends me on to the police post where she had deposited the wallet.

Seeing my wallet emerge from the white box in the police post was exhilarating.

I give the toilet auntie a red packet and go away thinking it is a good thing I live in a country of mostly honest folk where forgetfulness is sometimes forgivable.

reunion dinner change

And for reunion dinner this year, once again, we change!

We ALL move to my folks’ place!

From eating out at a restaurant to eating at my place, the in-laws all come over this year because my folks are the ones with the cutlery, the bowls, the space and the maid.

The kids - increasingly coming off as the kind of kids I can’t stand - greet their grandparents with their eyes glued to the iPhone and rush upstairs between small bites to savour the PS3.

The one and only time in the year the two sets of grandparents meet, our reunion dinner is short and sweet.



The menu is faultless, the wine is perfect and conversation is mostly started and sustained by the kids' Gong Gong.

There is still no space for the kids at the table, who end up sitting outside.



We have sharks fin soup this year, which came in a box (two whole fins) gifted to my folks. Ecologically-correct Day whines: “You know they chop off the fins and throw the shark back into the sea to die?” but we eat it anyway because in our book, wastage is worse.



Ne Ne demonstrates a remarkable propensity for alcohol – she downs whole glasses, and there is a bit of excitement when she goes missing. We find her walking along the street outside, completely sober of course.