snapshot

It's the holiday crazies again.

Somehow end-year is when all the music gigs and writing jobs start piling up and I am left an exhausted wreck, a spiritually absent mother apart from dreary-eyed washing of bums and fetching food and drinks.

It's the time when I try to sleep when the kids are awake (they merrily bounce around my head and jump my limbs) so that when they are asleep, I have the energy to squeeze in some work.

KK asks: Why don't you just reject the jobs and relax?

Well I don't because I am inherently fearful.

I fear not having an income, I fear dependency. I fear if I say no now, they will never call me again then what am I to do?

In any case I think it's great that I have too many jobs, to make up for the times I have none!

Today is a day of four (phone, thank God) interviews, a thousand-word profile, a clutch of Apec stories and one harried trip to the library with the kids.

Low point of the day: Finishing all interviews and the profile piece to realize that I haven't had breakfast or lunch and it's 1.30pm. Time to fetch the kids.

High point of the day: Chomping on Twisties, Mamee and chugging Winter Melon Tea (my breakfast and lunch) with the kids at mama shop behind the library.


* It's just one-off. I usually eat very well.

Now I do the Apec stuff. What time will I sleep tonight?

wrong

Three phone calls.

One, her primary-school-going daughter calls her up and tells her: “Mummy I don’t feel like going to school today.”

Two, she calls her husband: “I’m not sending the girl to school today. She has got diarrhoea and vomiting, she’s not feeling so well.”

Three, she calls her daughter: “OK you can stay home today. But I told daddy that you are sick. Remember to pretend you are sick, and say you are not feeling well if he asks you.”

I nearly choke on my toast.

Her calls are so hideously wrong I don’t even know where to start.

jo's envy

Today while going on an evening walk she sees another little girl.

Five-year-old Lerell is tall, skinny with manga-big eyes and long hair and she is wearing kitten heels.

Jo stares at Lerell. And frowns.

She turns to me and whispers: “Mummy I want my legs to be long and my arms to be long and I want to be tall. I want long long hair like the chae-chae. I want to go home and bath and then come back so she can see me.”

She repeats her message several times. She is clearly troubled.

Oh, Jo.

Will you believe me if I tell you that you are absolutely gorgeous? And will you believe me still when you are a teen?

the beginnings of violence

I started it.

One day a few weeks ago I was playing soothing ballet-type music for the girls to dance to and Day requested: “Can I have some fighting music please?”

So I socked it to him: Eye of the Tiger, which just happened to pop into my head.

That singularly inspiring movie soundtrack has led to an all-out obssession with boxing.

He’s memorized (Youtube) lines from Rocky: “We fought, we had the eye of the tiger man, the EDGE. And now you gotta get it back and the way to get it back is to go back to the beginning, know what I mean? Eye of the Tiger.”

Every day the boy kicks, punches and snarls. He asks me to please play Eye of the Tiger as he boxes his way around the living room.

Like I said it’s me.

I got so hyped up by the song - I haven’t even watched the damned show myself – I went straight to Youtube to search for it and we all spent a good half hour just watching Rocky clips.

Blood, bruises, gore, Day and Jo took it all in.

It’s made me want to watch the movie, it all looks rather inspiring.

I am, however, quite impressed at how savage he looks. He’s killing the pillow.



He’s totally ineffective but with a few pounds of muscle he could do some damage.

KK is very amused by it all and wants to get a punching bag for Day.

Jo tried boxing and she looks like she’s jogging on the spot. So do I.

In his angsty moments the boy has also taken to mock boxing his sisters with a glint of madness in his eyes.

for the album

Choon returned to Darwin yesterday.

We haven't taken a family photo in years.

Here's one for the album.


* Choon, me & Lu, Teng, mum, Jo and pa. KK was taking the photo and Day refused to be photographed.

Kids will miss Choon.

Ours was literally like a second home, he'd come waltzing in early in the morning or in the afternoon to hang around. The squeals start soon after he arrives, from all the tickling and playing catch.

Lu, who was too young last time Choon came, took to him like a fish to water.

Jo wanted him to stay over every night.



Day was relatively nonchalant but he's older and less easily enamoured.


* At Choon's Szechuan Court farewell lunch

lu talk

Observations about what comes out of her mouth:

She is stellar at the ends of words but not the fronts. Meaning she goes “YooK!” (Look with a very pronounced K) and “WeeT!”) (Sweet with a very pronounced T)

Her enunciation is blur (to Day’s Starbucks Coffee at the same age, she goes “Tar Tuck Tot Tee” or something to that effect) but her tones are what makes her understood. She sings her words the right way.

She can tell short stories. To describe a vaccination, she goes “Ah-tee, jeet! Pain pain.” (Ah-tee = Auntie.)

She's got a swear word which sounds like Bear That. Every time I or Jo or anyone gets on her nerves she hisses "Bear That".

She very naturally says "Tatoo" (for Thank You) and "Peas" (for Please).

Word count: I haven’t cared since Day! Haha!

But she’s at the stage where she cracks us all up.

Especially Day and Jo who try to teach her all sorts of bad words about genitals and such, just to delightedly watch her mangle it.

halloween

To my great surprise, Halloween has become an occasion in the average Singapore kid’s diary.

My time, it was but a concept I read about in books.

My kids, however, are being feted with Halloween goodies left right and centre.

The chocolates from the music teacher, more chocolates from Day’s music class friend (lovingly presented in a home-made orange box with a haunted house print-out stuck on it) and the School Halloween Party.

Why?

I don’t particularly know. TV?

Do I care?

Mildly. I don’t see why Halloween should be a deal at all, when it has nothing to do with our culture and especially not when it takes on a virulent form of Sugar and Scare overload.

Today, at school, the kids were scared. Not all, of course. The older ones were thrilled to bits. But cries from the younger kids intermittently permeated the morning.

Three rooms in the school were converted into Dracula’s castle, a graveyard and something else. Black garbage bags turned the rooms pitch dark, rope cobwebs, black spiders, snakes, tombs were liberally strewn all over.

Scarier were the life-size witches, ghouls, skeletons, some of which had eyes that lit up, and issued wheezy death rattles as doomsday music played in the background.

Sweets were liberally strewn all over the floor and tables as the kids ventured into the rooms to fill their baskets.

Some of them were seriously scared and cried the entire morning.

Mine?

Jo was terrified. At first.

Dressed as a ballerina fairy (she de-winged after a while), she screamed and refused to enter the rooms. Until she saw her brother emerge from one with a cup of sweets. Then she had a mission which made her forget everything.

She ventured into every single room, grabbing sweets by the handful. Searching specifically for a tube of strawberry Mentos, she didn’t even care that a ghoul (which moved its arms) was on top of her. (without the camera flash the room is actually pitch dark with only the ghoul's eyes lit up)



Later on she even let herself by carried by a ghoul (who's really Teacher Anna).



Day was terrified too. But not because of the rooms.

Dressed as Dracula (I painted the blood in the morning and draped a bedsheet for a cape. He went as a ghost last time) his usual awkwardness kicked in the moment he stepped into school and he hid his face in my tummy.

When I sternly ordered him to follow his friends, however, and once he went into the first room, he was his usual self.


With Transformer Ian, Surgeon Zachary and Devil Edric.

I suspect he thoroughly enjoyed the scares. I think all the older kids did.

Which, I think is why the teachers bother to put up the Halloween show. To let the kids enjoy themselves.

It took an incredible amount of effort. Days of planning, then putting up all the decorations the night before.

The children were also involved for weeks, making pumpkins, tissue ghosts and invitation cards for their folks.

Loving thought also went into the food. Auntie Doris churned out green worm-like bee tai mak...



... dyed the buns red (to look like internal organs? I don’t quite know!) and filled the fruit punch with jelly tadpoles. The skull cake was strewn with gummy worms and covered with bloody streaks. Principal Alexis (Morticia Addams) is cutting the cake.



For all my wet blanket comments about Halloween, I could not help but fully appreciate all the sweat and blood which went into the organization.

I found it incredible. And thankful, again, for the school’s teachers, who'd do so much just to create an entirely non-academic experience for the kids.


Jo and Sophie

love

Sometime tonight I am out with Lu for a walk.

She has just catapulted from the table and hit the floor head-first and KK is giving me the evil eye along with dire warnings of “You better not let her sleep straight away” so that’s why I am out.

She is in my sarong. She places her soft smelly head on my chest as I walk along the road, prattling on about the moon and the sky and the bus and the cars, and suddenly I feel a great rush of love, like a warm river.

Of course we all love our kids. But in the steady-state course of our daily routine lives we don’t often feel it in an ecstatic “Eh I love them!” kind of way.

In that moment I feel deliriously happy. So happy I have little people to love and nurture. So full of tenderness particularly, in that moment, for the injured one.

It is a touching walk we have, tonight. Perhaps it’s because the monsoon is pending, the air is balmy and cool and the temperature is right for sentimentality.

She feels the love, I feel the love.

She later clambers onto my back – her favourite position, I hitch her tiny buttock into the sling and carry her like a backpack. She rests her head on my back.

* The accident-prone one is fine.

yo!

She's the kid who:

Everyone (still) thinks is the wrong gender.
Will say Hi and Bye to anyone and everyone.
Will peep into a strange person's house and flirt.
Will lose herself in the crowd without a care for where her parents are.
Will merrily play with all sorts of children without reservation.
Thinks she is the same age as her siblings.
Will barrel down a slide and yell "wheeeeeeeee!"
Will try to go down a slide backwards, frontwards, on the back, on the front.
Breaks into song willy nilly.
Can't say F. ("I winished!" for finished. "Wish" for fish.)
Demands to know this and that ("WADDAT?? WADDAT?? WADDAT??")
Likes to act stupid (It's a fish, Lu. "HAH?" Fish, Lu. "HAH??" Fish. "HAHHHH??!")

She's terrifically happy with life.

drawing the trio

I love drawing my kids.

While I used to doodle flowers and women and curlicues in boredom, now I doodle my kids.

And they’re everywhere.

In my Black Book (the doodle pad), they appear a few times.

In a ludicrous comic story I told them and which I eventually drew out, to their delight.



They’re on the kitchen glass door, tumbling down a rainbow Jo drew. (only Lu sort of rubbed out parts of Jo)



Now they’re on KK’s laptop. He cut it out of a picture I drew for Jo which she coloured, and stuck it with scotch tape next to the keyboard.



They are dead easy to draw.

Day is defined by the big eyes.

Jo by the round face, wispy bits of hair framing her face which all turn inwards and chunky limbs.

Lu by the spiky standing straight-up “botak” hairs.