Yearly Archives

2009

The Marshmallow Experiment

September 18, 2009

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

Check out this brilliant video on the battle between instant and delayed gratification. It’s modeled after a test done by Walter Mischel at Stanford University in the 1960s. The test followed the subjects all the way to adulthood and it was discovered that the kids who were able to wait became smarter, more successful and get this, less likely to take drugs.

My theory is that girls are naturally predisposed to delayed gratification, and they’ve got loads more self-control, which explains why they’re generally smarter than boys.

I’m pretty sure Kirsten will pass with flying colors and she’ll be chilling like ice-cream filling the whole time, unbothered by the marshmallow. But Tru, I’m not so sure. He’ll be touching it, smelling it, licking it and grabbing his head in torment if he manages to wait it out. Given the startling results, I will conduct this test on him myself everyday until he learns to wait. And I will bind his hands with tape if I have to.

by Daphne

kids inc

Girls just wanna have fun

September 16, 2009

I’m starting to realize that having a girl is entirely different from having a boy. Now that Kirsten can do a lot more than ingest milk and scream, it’s becoming quite apparent that I’ve got a girly girl on my hands. Not just any girly girl, but the kind that speaks softly, bats her eyelids and preens when she walks. I’ve gotta say, I am actually terrified surprised.

I had my money on the fact that she’d be the spunky sort but no, looks like that’s not going to happen. For starters, she doesn’t like to be spoken to loudly or harshly, which will instantly cause her mouth to turn into a pout. And we all know what that leads to. We’ve been so used to shouting at Tru from across the hall or singing at the top of our lungs that it’s so disconcerting to have to keep real quiet and talk gently to Kirsten.

Feeding her is also an art form. All the elements have to be just right in order for her to enjoy her milk. I used to just prop Tru on a pillow and hold his bottle with one hand while still surfing the net or reading. But with baby girl, I’ve got to cradle her close, look into her eyes and whisper sweet nothings before she will take in a full feed. If I so much as look away or get distracted, she’ll start to fuss and refuse to drink. So much so that Superdad has acknowledged defeat because he is too restless to do nothing but look into her eyes for 30 minutes.

Then the playing. My boy is an adrenaline junkie. Any form of playing that requires throwing, swinging, hanging him upside down or drowning is a sure hit. He’ll giggle himself into fits and make you repeat it a million times. I tried swinging Kirsten once and she broke out into the loudest shriek of her life. True story. I almost thought I sent her into a cardiac arrest. And even after I spent the next hour holding her and whispering sweet nothings, she still sulked and pouted, as if to say “DON’T YOU DARE SWING ME LIKE THAT AGAIN, MAMA.” I got the idea.

To be honest, I have no idea how to handle a girly girl because I’ve never been one. My favorite color is blue (the husband claims it’s yellow), I love soccer and cars (the faster the better), I outplay boys at basketball (yes, even the husband) and dolls *really* freak me out. When I got Barbies as presents as a kid, I used to beat them on the head with various objects and trade them for remote control cars with my brother (the going rate was 3 limited edition Barbies and a full set of accessories for a Lamborghini Murcielago). My sister was the one who loved the clothes and high heels and ballet.

Although having a girl has its perks. She’s content to just lie in my arms and gurgle when I talk to her for hours. She’s got none of that restlessness or mischief and she’s got a smile that turns you into mush. Tru never smiles. He grins or giggles, and either way, he’s up to no good, so it’s a refreshing change to have baby girl sit on my lap without squirming.

It’s a good thing I’ve still got some time before she’s into the whole Barbie/Bratz thing. Or the day she starts to make me pick out sand from between her toes.

by Daphne

Sort of Movie Reviews

Up Up and Away!

September 15, 2009

disney-pixar-up-poster

I finally went to watch UP over the weekend to celebrate the husband’s birthday. We’ve been trying to catch it on the big screen since it opened but with the arrival of Kirsten, watching movies is a luxury we could scarcely afford.

We used to put Tru at my mom’s place and pop out for a show but it’s just too cruel to leave her alone with 2 kids. We also contemplated bringing Kirsten along for the show but it’s the kind of thing that gets you crucified by your neighbors so that was the end of that. So with a little help from my mom and a friend, we settled the kids and headed downtown for our first movie in months.

You probably already know the movie rocks big time, so I’m not going to rave about it here. *IT IS ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS AND EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH IT. MULTIPLE TIMES.* Ok, I got that out of my system.

Instead, here are 5 lessons I learnt from Pixar’s latest masterpiece.

1. It’s cute to be fat… Only if you’re under the age of 10.

up_russell_600

I had my doubts about placing the weight of an entire movie on the shoulders of an old man and a fat boy, but hey, that’s why I’m not raking in millions from a movie I just produced. I fell in love with Russell, the fat boy Junior Wilderness Explorer from Tribe 54 the moment he stood on Carl’s front porch with his super backpack and pudgy cheeks.

He obviously overdid the chocolate thing, but when you’re 8, nobody’s going to judge you. Heck, you can probably also get away with eating that much chocolate if you’re a 13-foot multicolored bird . What they’re not showing you is what happens to him after he grows up into an obese teenager and eating that much chocolate is no longer cute.

2. When you start to have a gazillion talking dogs, you’re bound to lose your marbles a little.

Case in point: Charles Muntz . Ok, so nobody believed he found the bones of an imaginary creature and he got banished to Paradise Falls, which is clearly NOT paradise at all. But he was still pretty much sane. It’s only when he started breeding dogs like hamsters and making them talk, he turned into a psychotic bird stalker. He’s got them cooking his meals and making him coffee, which is when he started losing his sanity. I bet if he kept fish instead, he wouldn’t have fallen off a moving aircraft.

See, its not that I have a bone to pick with him, but..

3. Guys in black suits and shades are EVIL.

Never trust a guy wearing a suit. They’re always out to run down your mailbox or steal your money or destroy your house. Even when they don’t physically do it themselves, they’re probably still to blame for whatever bad things that happen to you. The next time you stub a toe or break a fingernail, look for the nearest suit and punch him in the gut because he’s likely to deserve it. Only the bad guys wear suits. With shades. Duh.

Case in point

4. Girly girls are so yesterday.

i'm a woman, hear me roar!

You don’t have to be into make-up and nail polish to snag the guy. Girls that hold hands and dance around the campfire are so last season. Spunky girls are all the rage now, so feel free to knock out a few teeth, snip off those locks and ditch the miniskirts. In fact, if you really like a guy, go ahead a terrorize him into submission. That’s the key to a marriage that lasts a lifetime.

5. If you need to do some major business in the jungle, dig a hole BEFORE you go and not after.

Nuff said.

by Daphne

motherhood

Somebody tell me again why I’m breastfeeding

September 14, 2009

The good news is that Kirsten has started sleeping through the night. Since she turned 6 weeks, she’s been sleeping from 12 midnight to 6 in the morning, which gives me six whole hours of uninterrupted sleep. Now at 9 weeks, she’s been stretching that to 10 hours every night.

Naturally, I’ve been taking advantage of this new development to catch as much sleep as I can, except that my breasts seem hell bent on destroying me. I figured that if I ignored them, they would stop bothering me and eventually adjust to the new feeding hours so for a few nights, I express my last round of milk at 1o and crawl into bed by 11.30. This would last till 7 in the morning when Kirsten starts stirring. Initially, I started leaking milk all over my top, which I was prepared to handle in exchange for more sleep, but a after 2-3 days of leaking, they decided to develop blocked ducts instead and believe me, it is a pain in the ass breast.

I know it sounds like a very mild condition, like a blocked nose or something, but no, it is nothing like it at all. You can’t just blow it out and go along your merry way. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s worse than hemorrhoids combined with herpes at the same time. The pain is pretty much indescribable, like someone stuffed rocks into my breast and started beating it. Repeatedly.

A few nights ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a sharp pain in my left breast. I waited for it to pass, but it got so unbearable that I had to get up to check it. I tried expressing, but putting the pump to it was sheer torture. The entire breast had become rock hard, inflamed and filled with tiny lumps. Worst thing is, nothing came out. I’ve been averaging 120ml per session, but after 45 minutes, I was still at 20ml. The next morning, I came down with a flu and a fever. A quick check on google and apparently, these are all symptoms of blocked ducts. And check this out, if left untreated, it could develop into mastitis, which is NOT GOOD. You don’t want to mess with a name like mastitis.

Despite the pain, I’ve been back to a 3-hour expressing schedule, even through the night. And I have to battle a flu at the same time. Just like that, there goes my dreams of sleeping through the night. Now I can only look on with envy as my 9-week-old sleeps like a baby for 10 straight hours, while I’m banished to breast purgatory.

I never thought breastfeeding would be this hard. After going through all that initial teething problems, I though I had paid my dues but it just keeps getting worse. I only hope all that “Breast is best” propaganda is true, then at least it would all be worth it. If not, I’m seriously going to set fire to the person who came up with it.

by Daphne

love bites

Love bites in Reality

September 11, 2009

The first time I celebrated his birthday was on Sept 11, 2001. Technically, it was a day before his birthday. We were preparing for a paper on cultural icons in the 21st Century (thanks Madonna!) and also just received news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre. We had only met a couple of weeks earlier and our entire interaction consisted of a handful of text messages and several conversations over Madonna’s biceps. But I remembered thinking, if the world was coming to an end, I wouldn’t mind spending my last moments sitting beside him.

But the world didn’t come to an end, so at the stroke of midnight, I sent him a text message which read “Happy birthday, have a great time.” That was it. No romantic declarations or fireworks. Then I proceeded to destroy his party by ruining the surprise and I think at the end of it, he thought I was a big dork. Or totally hot. Maybe both. A big hot dork. Ok, that’s just wrong.

8 years later and it seems like everything has changed. The wedding, the kids, the house, the bills, the boring routine of a couple who’s been together like forever. Well, everything except the way I feel whenever I’m with him. The way he makes me laugh. The way he looks at me across a crowded room like I’m the only person he sees. The way he leans over and kisses me in the morning. The way he holds me by the waist when we walk, just because. And most of all, the way he does all the little things like crawl out of bed to feed the baby so I can sleep for another hour.

Some days I wake up and I still can’t believe that I actually managed to marry the man of my dreams. To be fair, I’ve got pretty weird dreams, like the time I dreamt that I was shot in the leg while trying to escape from a bunch of assassins by rappelling down a building without the rope. And after that my knight in shining armor showed up and whisked me off into the sunset, bleeding calf and all. You should know by now that I’m not your typical fairy tale kinda girl, but that’s just how I roll.

They say that a relationship is defined by the moments and the memories (I kinda just made that up, feel free to use it). And we’ve got some pretty kick ass ones. I actually came up with 75, but here are my top 10.

10. The time I crashed my dad’s Mercedes into the back of a pickup truck and the entire bonnet was shortened by half. All I could do was sit by the side of the road and cry. The whole time he just held my hand and told me everything was going to be ok.

9. The time he had to run 15 minutes to my hostel room at 4 am in the morning to catch a lizard because I couldn’t possibly sleep with that monstrosity waiting to attack me.

8. The time he bought my brat of a sister a fugly snowman soft toy for her 12th birthday after she’d called him a “monkey face and a thousand other bad names I will not mention here”.

7. The time he first held my hand while his was sweating so bad it kept slipping off and he had to keep rubbing it on his pants to dry it. True story.

6. The time he wrote me a cheesy poem and claimed he found it off the Internet because I’m the kinda girl who likes poetry and moonlight serenades.

5. The time he spent his last dollar planning a surprise on the Christmas of 2001 and had to take a 3 hour walk home because he couldn’t afford a cab.

4. All the times he would say he’s sorry first even though it’s totally my fault.

3. The time he covered a room with rose petals and wrote me a not-that-cheesy poem and went down on one knee and asked me to marry him.

2. The time he held me close and cried for days when my daddy went to heaven.

1. When he turned to me after we got married and said “I think all my dreams have come true”.

Happy Birthday, baby.

by Daphne

Disney Magic, love bites

California Dreaming: Los Angeles (Part 2 – Finale)

September 10, 2009

Leg 5: The happiest place in the world

: The castle

I have to devote a whole post to Disneyland because it is hands down the single happiest place in the world. It’s an insane amount of happy thoughts packed into 85 acres. There’s fairy dust in the air that makes all your troubles disappear and turns kids into tiny little balls of sunshine (even the bratty ones). It’s impossible to feel depressed in Disneyland. Even the Grinch would have turned into Tinkerbell if he had the sense to go there. Only in Disneyland, you could be a kid and no one would judge you.

I originally wanted to get a 5-day pass but the husband threatened to leave me there alone so we compromised and decided to go for 3 days instead. It was 3 days of non-stop action. I dragged his ass out of bed at 5.30 every morning just so that we could be at the gates by 6.30 when the doors opened. And I refused to leave till they chased us out at close to midnight. I’m like a hardcore Disneyland fanatic.

If there’s one bad thing about the place, it’s the crowds, which is legendary. The average waiting time for popular rides like Space Mountain and Indiana Jones was about 2 hours, so you either had to forego the experience or spend up to 12 hours just waiting in line. But not us, because before we left, I spent hours developing a genius of a masterpiece – Daphne’s Disneyland Touring Plan. I had the day divided into 15 minute segments and it required massive amounts of discipline and a lot of running. The folks who walk in Disneyland are the queuers and the smart ones, well, they have to sprint from one end of the park to the other. But the result was that we never spent more than 15 minutes in the queue. Ever.

Seriously, if you’re planning to head down, just drop me a mail and I’ll send it to you. You will be eternally grateful to me, and you can also come clean my house from time to time after that.

: I kept these 2 Disney dollars from my trip in 1998

: Our stash of fastpasses

Besides checking out the rides, I was also on a mission to collect autographs and photos of all the characters I could find, which is way harder than it sounds. First, there are tons of crazy kids thronging them all the time, and they don’t have a fixed schedule of appearance. So they can just pop up anytime and then suddenly disappear. Since I was way smarter than all the pesky kids, I bribed the staff to give me their schedules for the day so I could beat them all to it. Actually I had to grovel and offer some special services for it, but hey, whatever it takes baby.

: Eeyore

: Pooh

: Pluto

: Chip or Dale (I could never tell)

: Goofy

: Minnie

: Mr Incredible & Frozone

: Sully

But I think it’s karma. After spending 3 days shoving babies out of the way to collect autographs, I actually lost the autograph book, which was far more upsetting for me than when I lost my wedding band in Tahoe. (see, I didn’t even bother to mention it in the Tahoe post, but I did. I lost it up on Adventure Peak) At least I still got the pictures to show for it.

So that’s it. All 3 weeks of our honeymoon. The best 3 weeks of my life. When it was time to drive back to LAX, I was turned to the husband all Arnie style and said “I’ll be back”.

by Daphne

kids inc

Boy Genius discovers Ipod at age 1

September 9, 2009

The day has finally arrived. Tru has discovered the ipod. Like DISCOVERED the ipod. I was preparing his lunch in the kitchen and after a while, it got unusually quiet, which is far more worrying than him raising a ruckus. At least I know what mischief he’s up to.

So naturally I shout out from the kitchen, “Tru, I hope you’re not up to no good.” *Silence* Not a good sign, so I drop everything in a flash and leap over my safety gate into the living room. And lo and behold, there he is, with the earphones stuffed into his ears, head bobbing geekily to the beat. (he clearly didn’t learn that from me)

He casually glances up at me and what do you know, starts SHOUTING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS. And I’m like “Young man, don’t you raise your voice at me.” But he clearly couldn’t hear me with the music blaring into his eardrums so he shouts some more. On retrospect, I should have yanked those earphones out, but it was too cute so we had a shouting match for a while before he decided to SING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS, and right about that time, I decided that there was no use fighting it. This is going to be my life for the next 18 years. Me shouting and him with earphones on blasting some angsty music pretending not to hear me.

ipod

by Daphne

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