more teeth

Still on teeth. Mine.

I scared the kids silly when I came home yesterday brandishing a huge bloody tooth in a little Ziploc.

It was a wisdom which had been worn down so badly - I had apparently been swallowing little pieces of it that broke off over the years - the young inexperienced chap of a dentist took forever to try and get a grip to pull it out. I think it was only the roots left which were buried in the gum and the roots were black with rot. Yes, yes.

The boy (dentist) tried every way of worming his way out of the extraction - Could it be sinus causing the pain? Could it be another tooth causing the problem? Do you think I could refer you to a dental surgeon because it looks like it has long roots? - but I was adamant.

His incredible lack of professionalism and lack of confidence made the tooth-related headache I had been having for days, and which I was desperate to get rid off, worse than ever, and I got incredibly pissed.

He started the extraction not actually pinpointing the wisdom as the cause of the problem. I did. And the only reason I insisted was because the wisdom would have to come out anyway.

If it was not the true source of the pain, then I would have to follow up and solve the mystery.

The tooth came out, I sailed home on a high.

The kids and KK were all suitably grossed out.

I, jubilant, was all ready to go out for dinner. Then the anaesthesia wore off.

Jeez!

It also seems that my extraction will forever become the de facto threat for them to brush their teeth. As in:

If you don't brush your teeth, your teeth will become like mummy's and you'll have to pull it out.

(only issue with that is that I am the most frequent and disciplined tooth-brusher in the family but I hope no one spots the inconsistency.)

cross bite

Kids, born clean and bright and beautiful, grow up and along the way, genes and age start flinging the tomatoes.

Pimples! Acne! Eczema! Weight gain! Hairy limbs! Bad breath! Myopia! Bad teeth!

Bad teeth?

Yup.

I have never seen a kid with a bad set of milk teeth. Day's were alright.

Permanent teeth are something else.

Every single one of Day’s permanent teeth is a little bit off-course. They grow, not straight up, but like weeds, each one willy-nilly following the course of an imaginary sun (not even the same sun), and they are far from aligned.

Neither are they solid white. They are, like mine, yellowish and patchy and ugly.

I wore braces for a while, chiefly to rein in a slightly horsey set of teeth.

KK never had issues apart from a Madonna-ish gap-toothed grin.

But Day. He has to deal with this: 

That little bud is his new permanent front tooth, which is not just slightly off-course, its headed for another place altogether (for the record, he told me to post the picture of his mouth so "maybe people who read your blog will have some ideas". About what, I don't know).

I think it's called a cross-bite.

Once the front milk drops, the permanent will continue growing out, but it will fall behind the lower set of teeth when he bites down.

It’s a strange one and it looks mighty weird. But it is also rather fascinating. I keep asking him to open his mouth so I can study it.

He has shown his badge of honour to his friends – “So gross!” says Michael - and calls himself a shark, “because I have a second row of teeth behind like a shark, waiting to replace the first row”.

The dentist refers us to the orthodontist because this requires a specialist.

I look at KK: The bill, the bill!

But as he says, and I agree, a smile can make or break a man.

8 and 41

Happy birthday, boys!

We keep it simple because that’s how the boys like it.

Day, now 8, pretty much likes to do things for himself. He wants to make his own decisions about what classes he should attend, which classes he should drop, where to eat and what to do.

He resents when I peer into his bag, does all his own homework and prepares for all his tests on his own, I don’t even know when they are.

He hates it when we do things he doesn’t want to and he is dragged along in the name of “family”.

He cooks his own food – mostly instant noodles, and buys his own stash from downstairs (mostly drinks and munchies)

His favourite place to be is in front of the computer on Terraria, his favourite game right now is that drawing game – Drawsome, and he is a homeboy. His favourite place to be is at home. He no longer likes going out to “see the world” which kills me (but thankfully I still have my curious girls).

He doesn’t care very much about the birthday.

At his birthday dinner, he is very put out that it eats into his Saturday night gaming time but then, since his gaming buddy (Kaofu Teng) is eating at the same table, he has nothing to say. (he typically rushes us all through our Saturday evening dinners in order to make it back home by 7pm for games)

KK, now 41, is eyeballing the second half of his life and he says strange things.

strongest

Day and Jo wrestle. It’s funny, who wins. But it’s not surprising.

For about a year ago (in February 2011) Day and Jo played tug-of-war. Again, the match was funny to watch.

She pushes him, she pulls him, the younger girl always triumphs over her big brother. I take only one video, but they play many, many times and the outcome is always the same. 

When I said I wanted her to be strong, I didn’t mean for her to be this strong!

Either that or Day is frightfully weak.

But I don’t think it’s a case of muscle power alone, because Day is capable of carrying NTUC bags of rice and what-not up the stairs for me (which Jo claims are too heavy).

It’s also a case of how much they want to win.

I understand Day. I think – Ah, heck, what’s so important about winning? – and I let it all go in a fit of laughter. I’m terribly uncompetitive.

KK understands Jo. They think – we must win at all cost. He says, she will make a great sportsman if she can (or if he can teach her to) channel that spirit in the right way.

As for Lu. She’s such a delicate puff I ban her from getting too near when her siblings are brawling. One accidental whack and her bones may break.

mummy's taken

Sometimes KK makes a grab for me.

By that I mean he sort of tackles me and hugs me so tight his legs and arms are all bound around me, so I am literally trapped.

It’s something he sometimes does just to see what the kids will do. And it’s funny.

Day, laughing at my dismay, jokingly tries to wedge himself in while shouting (in jest lah, no Oedipus here): She’s my wife! (I think he’s trying to save me)

Jo sweetly lies next to us and kisses us both: I love you papa and mama. (textbook response, girl, textbook!)

Lu is seriously affronted. She can’t stand it when KK claims ownership. She shouts, she screams (though she always ends up half-laughing - “I want mumeeee.. ee hee hee… No! Mummeeee! Hee hee!) and she tries her hardest to peel away the bars of iron.

There is genuine distress. She doesn’t stop until she’s drilled her way in between us and then, with her face smack against my chest, she wraps her arms around me as tight as she can.

drawing at the concert

Jo goes to a classical concert with me (Day: I HATE classical music) and spends the evening merrily drawing away in the dark on a notebook, copying the pictures from the very nice programme as she listens to some of the top hits from the classical oeuvre.

(Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, Mendelssohn’s Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bizet’s Carmen and Grieg’s Peer Gynt).

I see her pictures and I try not to giggle in the dark.





This one of the lady in the blue dress really made me crack up.

And I was very sorry when she saw my constipated face and whispered: But my drawing is not NICE, mummy!



Although she doesn't enjoy classical music either (none of them do), and it looks like I will be going for all these classical adventures solo as I get older and they live their own lives (KK is no fan), she is the nicest one to bring for concerts right now because she is twitch-free.

Lovely little Jo.

lemon juice

Sick.

I take a nap.

I wake up to a cup of lemon juice by the bed.

Day says: Drink it, mum.

He had squeezed one lemon, put in some sugar and water.

I tell him: It’s really nice.

He says: That’s because I made it with a lot of love.

I am ever grateful.

Lemon or lime juice is his favourite remedy for sickness.

He always does it, for himself and now for me.

From now on, lemon juice is going to mean something.

sass

It’s one thing to want to raise thinking adults by encouraging them to speak up, be comfortable in their own skins and, well, think for themselves.

It’s quite another to be confronted with a wall of sass.

I don’t like it. I don’t like rude kids.

Raising kids who are thinkers and dare to speak their minds, while remaining polite and respectful to their elders or superiors, is crazy difficult.

Me, having never been much of a thinker, much less argumentative, am not quite sure what to make of it.

Any bystander would think I was being bullied by my own kids. Generally, I don’t win arguments and I avoid them at all costs.

SASSY MOMENTS

Me: I thought you didn’t like those bags.
Jo: Haiya, so? I changed my mind. Some people do change their minds, you know.

Me: Boy, you are rather spoilt.
Day: Whatever. (silence and contrition would have been nice)

Day: Mum are you cooking dinner?
Me: No. I’m too lazy. And your papa refuses to wash the dishes on weekends. I hope you remember to always help your wife out in future.
Day: It’s OK I won’t have kids.
Me: Why not?
Day: Because I bath in really hot water and all my sperm would be dead.

balloon visors

Lu is the one to always come up with things.

With the first-born I had tried to shape him that way, but he is very much a mainstream kind of guy.

Lu gets funny ideas about everything, from her drawings to her play.

We eat rice paper rolls and she rolls herself up in a blanket pretending to be the, er, prawn in the roll.

With the last few balloons in the bag, she blows another one up the other day, decides that it’s boring making people, asks me to tie the ends together and wraps it around her head.

Ta-dah! A tinted visor!



And a hair-band!



The other two demand for their own and the girls actually wear it out one sunny day.

They attracted a lot of attention from little kids who probably wanted nothing better than to rip the balloons off their heads.

hip hop

Day really wanted to learn hip-hop dancing. So we sent him for classes.

Did we think twice? About undesirable influences? Commitment? Values?

Not really.

My only notion of hip-hop dancing is that its loud with bad lyrics and promotes an undesirable overly-liberal un-Asian culture, but that’s probably a bad stereotype.

Day wants to try a million and one things, but top of the list was hip-hop dancing. We let him, as long as it’s within cost and time constraints.

I was also incredibly curious about what he would be like, motivated.

I found a class online and sent him for it.

The fees are about half that of learning "proper" classical things like ballet and piano which means hip-hop dancers probably don’t make a very good living! (KK’s quip to Day: Piano is the best, boy.)



It’s been near two months now, I think.

Is he good?

Not really.

He is excellent at following and remembering the moves. But there is a certain cool factor which, either you have it or you don’t.

But boy, his enthusiasm is peerless.

He declares, week after week, that hip-hop dancing is his favourite class, above Chinese tuition (needless to say), swimming and piano (which por-por is still valiantly carrying on, on a very casual "by the way" basis).

He wanted to go to class with a high fever. He has a lot of fun in it.


* He used to wear his gray school shoes and hole-y shorts to class until KK put a stop to it with new pants and shoe purchases

The song they've been dancing to: Moves Like Jagger by Maroon Five. Which goes like:

Take me by the tongue
And I'll know you
Kiss me 'til you're drunk
And I'll show you

(OK, woman, cool it.)

In terms of sheer entertainment value, the class, which is fully visible through a glass wall, is a sure-win. We, the four of us, sit outside on the corridor watching for one hour every week.



The girls? I tried to put them in too, so KK and I have at least an hour for a date a week. But they both refused.

I’m curious to see where this takes us!

a poem about lu

Day makes up a little poem about Lu:

Lulu is neat
Lulu is nice
Lulu is small
Just like a rice

He's quite fond of her.

my fellow sotong

Ah, I have company.

Day leaves his swimsuit behind in the pool changing room and nobody notices until I wonder, a few days later, how come only Jo and Lu's suits are hanging on the washing line.


* The last time Day is wearing his suit.

When asked, he scratches his head and says: Ya I probably left it behind.

It's so ME.

The carelessness, the completely lack of accountability, the laissez-faire attitude, the failure to discover anything is amiss until a long time later, the whole I'm-not-sure-if-it-was-me-but-it-probably-is mentality.

He, like me, will leave clothes lying all over the floor, used tissues all over the tables and neglect to turn off the fans and lights.

He's a natural.

kiddy dreams

Lu just creeped into my room, baby bolster clutched tight against her chest, whimpering: I’m so scared, mummy. I dream I have a baby and the baby’s eye is gone.

Urgh.

What goes on in their heads at night?

When do they start dreaming? And what do they dream?

Reports are conflicting. Some say babies are born dreaming, others that they start to dream proper at about five.

On a conscious level, I had the most vivid dreams as a child, which gradually tapered off. I don’t dream at all nowadays, have not dreamt for the last few years, at least not that I am aware of.

Our trio, the girls seem to react a lot more to their dreams than the boy.

I’m not sure if Day even dreams. He has always dropped into slumber at the drop of a hat and sleeps right through for 10 hours without a twitch.

Jo mumbles, talks and twitches in her sleep.

Sometimes, when I wake her up in the morning and when she has a smile on her sleeping face, she surfaces just enough to murmur “I’m having a nice dream, mummy, I want to go back to sleep” before she dives back down.

Other times, she manages to tell me long rambling stories about her dreams. I can’t remember now, but they are fairly plot-heavy and dramatic.

Lu has started waking up terrified, just like Jo did before.

I would too if I have dreams of an eye-less child.

Sometimes she walks around, completely unaware of who is around her, babbling away incoherently. She is a lot less dramatic than Jo was, but it's no less scary.

Usually a stern rejoinder from KK – QUIET LULU! – seems to do the trick.

The next morning, she has no recollection.


* Me and my two dreamers

home alone

They are 4, 6 and almost 8 now.

These days I leave them alone at home sometimes, when I need to grab stuff from the supermarket in order to feed them.

And the one I can rely on is not the oldest one, no. He would (like me I am afraid to say) merrily open the door to all and sundry who ring the bell.

It’s Jo.

Her streak for self-preservation, so evident from getting into water to going to the dentist, runs true.

Before I leave, she asks me many, many questions: How will I know it’s you when you come back, Mummy?
Answer: Because no one is going to ring the bell but me, Jo.

Question: What if it’s a bad guy?
Answer: Then you leave the chain on, and just open the door so you can check who it is.

Question: But what if the chain breaks and the bad guy forces his way in?
Answer: Erm. That’s not going to happen, Jo.

Question (her favourite question): But what IF?
Answer: I’m going, Jo.

The moment I leave, she makes sure she closes the gate behind me (I tend to leave it swinging open), then goes about bolting and locking up every single bolt and lock on that door. She can reach it by standing on the sofa.

When I return, I ring the bell and call out “Open the door!”

Does she?

No. She drags the ladder from the kitchen to the door, climbs up and looks through the peephole to verify that it’s not some psycho who has got a sound recording of my voice in hand.

Once she sees me laughing my head off through the peephole, only then does she deign to open the door.

Hello, Jo.

mema

Souvenir photo booths these days are really fun. Or maybe I’m just really slow.

To take a commemorative photo, you don’t just stand in front of a fake backdrop anymore, or stick your face through a hole in a piece of painted plywood.

No. Your face gets super-imposed on an image onscreen, sized properly, and the photo is sent to you via e-mail.

How cool is that?

See KK?



The booth was one of the many fun stops at the neglected Maritime Experiential Museum and Aquarium (Aquarium not open yet) next to Universal Studios.



I played a gig there first. And I was fascinated by the bobbing Oriental lion head fixed to the bow of a life-sized replica of Zheng He’s vessel, with flashing red eyes and emanating smoke from its nostrils whenever the introductory movie came on.



I had to drag the kids there. I dragged KK along.

Plagued with trepidation – I didn’t know what else to expect apart from the lion head – I feared it would suck. And I, the one who always wants to try the new, would have to bear all responsibility.

But it was fab. For $20 in total ($6 for adults and $4 for kids above 4) it was great value-for-money.

How?

* It’s very, very kid-friendly with loads of corners for colouring, making Chinese junks out of paper and interactive computer terminals which actually work.



* The price includes admission to a Typhoon Theatre movie depicting a war ship wrecked in battle, complete with mist and lightning, which terrified Jo and Lu so much they left in tears.

* When we went, there were no crowds, which is crucial to me. (We went on a weekday, though, during the December school hols)


* The queue for tickets


* KK and Jo watching the introductory movie and the lion head on a field of empty beanbag seats

* It has a great shop with loads of stuff which make great presents. Like simple foam ship-building sets.


* The museum is along a sunlit walkway overlooking the shops below


* Life-size cross section of Zheng He's ship. Jo and Lu in bottom left-hand corner.

chotto mate kudasai

A funny song Day picked up from a Youtube video featuring Dick Lee on the piano.

Why were we watching Dick Lee? He sang at the gig I played for recently, I Youtubed him to see what else he's doing these days and a vid came up which Day, who was unfortunately by my side, watched ad nauseum.

He thinks Dick Lee is incredibly funny. And Hossan Leong too. Kumar came up but I quickly changed the vid.

Day taught Jo the song, who taught Lu, and suddenly, to my horror, they were all singing the Chotto Mate Kudasai song together.



The next line contained a seven-word Hokkien expletive but thankfully it was bleeped out.

lu's interview

A mono-syllabic one, this one. Here’s the reason why reporters can’t really go around interviewing four-year-olds.

And this particular four-year-old can’t quite answer Why questions.



What is your favourite food?

Cornflakes. Banana Nut Crunch and Koko Crunch.

What do you like to do?

I like to play Rainbow Jody Catty because Jody told me to.

What else?

Baby and Jae Jae. I’m the baby and Jody is the Jae Jae.

What do you like to do outside of home?

I like to cycle and swim.

What would you like to learn?

I like to learn ABCs.

Why?

Because I like.

Well what else do you want to learn?

I want to learn drawing.

Why?

Because… I don’t know!

What else?

I like ballet.

Why?

Because I like!

Piano?

No. Because I don’t want to.

Where do you like to go?

I like to go gai-gai. Kallang Leisure Park because I like to go. We go to the Little Bookshop because I have ice-cream there.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I want to be mummy. Because I want. I want one girl. Her name is Angelina.

What do you like to do with you gor-gor and jae-jae?

I like to play fetch with gor-gor. When I throw something, gor-gor will catch it.

What do you like to do with your mama?

I like to do with my mama drawing. I like to draw house, butterfly, rainbow, mummy and daddy, gor-gor, jae-jae, mei-mei, grandparents.

What do you like to do with your papa?

I like to do with my papa colouring and also cutting.

What’s your favourite colour?

Blue.

Why?

Because I like. OK bye!