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kids in motion

kids in motion, kids inc

Kite flying and happy Sundays

April 19, 2010

Anybody else feels like this year is slipping by way too fast? They say it’s a sign of age, when your days roll into weeks and weeks into months and before you even have time to catch your breath, you’re singing Auld Lang Syne yet again.

For us, weekends are the craziest. Every weekend, we cram in all our errands and family dinners and church services and house cleaning and by Sunday night, we’re more exhausted than we were before Saturday came. Yesterday, we decided to leave the dishes unwashed, the clothes unlaundered, the house in a massive mess and brought the kids to Marina Barrage for a much needed break with a couple of old friends.

Some catch up and kite flying was in order.

The kids got bored with the kites after five minutes so we had to abort mission to bring them for some water play. Can’t blame them though, because I got bored with the kites in half that time.

Also, for my soccer roundup, we scored a magnificent goal in the final 20 seconds against Man City, which only goes to prove that all the money in the world can’t buy class. In fact, all you get is a bunch of whiny, spoilt brats who are more concerned about their summer holidays than playing soccer. The even better news is that Chelsea lost to Spurs so the gap is back to 1 point. 3 games left and Chelsea’s self-destruct button has already been activated. COME ON!

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kids in motion

First there was UP. Then there was UPSET.

March 17, 2010

Kirsten: It’s not working. Why is it not working?

Me: What’s not working, pumpkin?

Kirsten: Bring me more balloons. BRING ME ALL THE BALLOONS!

Me: That’s all the balloons we’ve got.

Kirsten: NOOOOOOOOOO! That fat boy made it look so easy. I’m not watching that stupid balloon show ever again.

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growing up, kids in motion

Give me back my baby smell

February 23, 2010

I'm a big girl now

Maybe it’s because Kirsten is a girl. And my youngest (for now). And I’ve done this before so I’m not uptight about having my baby be way ahead of the pack in terms of milestone development. But I find myself babying Kirsten far more than I’ve babied Tru.

She doesn’t like tummy time and she can barely support her own weight for more than a second before her knees give way and crumble to the ground. So mostly she just rolls around on the bed or sits on my chest. Every time I think that she’s teething, it’s a false alarm and till this day, she’s still gummy and toothless.

Which is so different from Tru. Who sprouted teeth at 4 months. And started cruising at 8 months.

In a way, I’m less bothered about having them reach their milestones just because baby centre says they’re supposed to start crawling at 7 months. Or start to walk at 11 months. They’ll get there soon enough and I really do like not having to chase after 2 extremely mobile babies. Also, on the bright side, Kirsten’s lack of mobility means that she hasn’t had a single injury yet. No hard knocks or falling off the bed or massive bleeding. In my house, that’s a miracle.

Anyway, my point is that in the past week, she’s suddenly grown up. It’s like she just decided to stop being a baby. One day she’s helpless and immobile and then all of a sudden, she’s like “I’ve had enough! My life can’t go on like this.” She’s now sitting and crawling and playing with toys and making her presence felt.

I’m not complaining though. It’s just that this growing up business sneaks up on you like a ninja. 7 months in, I almost forget what it’s like when she was a newborn.

This morning, I picked her up and kissed her like I do every morning. Then I took a deep whiff and realized that the baby smell, the lovely smell that makes me go all mushy inside, it’s totally gone. I stood there sniffing her all over like a bloodhound like maybe a faint trace of it was stuck in her armpits but nada.

And the worst part? I can’t even really remember what it smells like anymore.

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kids in motion, side effects of motherhood

We were on a BREAK!

February 22, 2010

I hate the end of breaks almost as much as I love having them in the first place. It’s a conundrum. I hate it so much that I almost wish it didn’t exist in the first place. Except that I don’t because not having breaks at all means that life is just one huge, never-ending suckfest.

I spend most of my days counting down to the next long break and we try to plan one every quarter, at least.

Ever since the year started, I’ve been looking forward to the this first break. Coinciding with the Lunar New Year, Kelvin took a nice, long week off for some family time.

That’s 9 whole days of having daddy at home. 9 days of sleeping in, going for brunches, hanging out and spending time away from this pain in the ass called work.

This past week, we did all sorts of crazy stuff with the kids all day. Like smoking a pipe, polishing shoes and trading stuff at the playground. You know, stuff children don’t really get to do on a normal school day.

hang on, while I chew on my pipe and think

are these shoes for real?

So we were at Mackers for breakfast and Tru got 2 balloons from the nice lady behind the counter. After a while, he got bored with them so he went over to the playground and traded them for 2 spiderman figurines. Somehow, he managed to con the other kid into thinking that it was a fair trade. I mean, I seriously don’t teach him this stuff so I have no idea where he learns it from. Eventually we made him give it back, but we secretly gave each other high fives because you got to admit, that’s some kind of awesome.

Then at night, we put the kids to bed and watched movies at home and held hands and snuggled up in bed just like we used to do. We watched soccer and stayed up late talking about our kids and our dreams. In short, it was a week of complete incredibleness.

But as quickly as it came, it’s suddenly all over and the feeling of going back to the mill, that’s exquisite misery. It almost makes me wish that I didn’t have so much fun because it wouldn’t suck to bad to have to say goodbye. As I counted down the final hours of our little break, I had the most severe bout of Monday Blues so I sat down looking all miserable as I expressed my milk.

And my husband, who totally deserves an award for this, set about packing and cleaning the entire house, because he says “I know it makes you feel a lot better tomorrow when the house is clean“. That’s when my panties melted because there’s nothing sexier than a man who knows how to get down and dirty with Mr Muscle.

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kids in motion, stuff best described as not safe for parents

The reason I’ve not been posting is because I’ve been trying to find the antidote for Frankenstein

February 17, 2010

The lunar new year does not agree with small kids. All that visiting and gorging on snacks is turning out to be my worst nightmare. It’s a lethal combination that makes me want to stab myself repeatedly with an ice pick. In the eye.

Because you know, when you visit people, it’s not nice to refuse their love letters, which they rolled lovingly by hand for 16 hours. Or their pineapple tarts. Or the almond cookies that their great-grandmother honed to perfection in ancient China. Or the truckload of snacks all stashed neatly into little glass jars on the dining table.

So you politely take one of each and discreetly hide some in your pocket. The rest, you give to your kids to stop them from going on a rampage from restlessness.

My son has also discovered that when he flashes his megawatt smile, he gets all the candy he wants. So he goes around collecting junk food like a squirrel when I’m not looking. And it’s becoming apparent that he’s far more enterprising than I thought.

Although it translates into two things.

The death of naps and a badass sugar high.

He’s been skipping his naps the past couple of days and I’d be fine with that if he can actually handle it. But no. He goes from Alvin the chipmunk to Chucky to Frankenstein to the Flash multiple times a day. One moment he’d be twitching and bouncing on the spot, then his eyes glaze over and he shuffles around like a zombie and then it all rounds off with the mother of all hissy fits.

Then finally, he falls asleep for 15 minutes and spends the rest of the day looking like this.

my best frankenstein face... on weed

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kids in motion

I’m bringing you down to Chinatown

February 14, 2010

Deep down inside, I’m really kind of cheena. Really deep down inside. You have to dig real hard but underneath all those layers of self-professed UN-chineseness, I can’t get away from the fact that my chinese roots are deeper than I thought.

my litle chinese kids

Ok, so writing Chinese characters are the bane of my existence, and my spoken Mandarin is possibly worse than Jackie Chan’s. My Chinese teacher used to get a kick out of making me read passages aloud because it’s monumentally embarrassing for me.  Those kungfu Chinese words all look the same to me and I mostly make up words as I go along.

That’s until I traded my friend 2 essays to write down exactly how it sounds like in English at the bottom. Right back at you, liu lao shi.

But that’s not really the point. The one true test of a person’s degree of chineseness only comes around once a year during the Lunar New Year. It’s the BIGGEST affair for every Chinese person, even if you’re living in the hills of Afghanistan. It’s the time of the year where you get away with wearing pigtails and silk costumes. You put on ching-chong-chang music, grab two oranges and go around collecting ang pows.

pigtails and silk costumes

Just like Halloween, except all the costumes look the same and instead of candy, you get real money. Seriously, it doesn’t get any better. Until you’re married and have to start giving corpulent brats dollar bills just because they shoved 2 oranges in your face. That kind of sucks.

And much as you hate to, you have to resist the temptation of giving them monopoly money because you know that the moment they grab it, they’re going to run to the toilet to check it and you’ll be busted.

Right, so the music. For those in the know, it’s called dong-dong-dong-chiang. Because that’s exactly what it sound like. Basically, that’s the whole song. For like 15,000 times. It sounds like the kind of song cool people love to hate.

But here’s the thing. It’s my ultimate guilty pleasure. I’ll never admit to this but since I can be honest on the Internet, I think it’s time to come out of the closet. It’s a big moment for me so maybe we should all observe a moment of silence.

There.

I actually know ALL the lyrics to most of the new year songs and when no one is looking, I sing them with gusto. It’s strangely liberating. There’s all that deafening clanging so you can sing aloud like one big karaoke party.

It all started when I was 13. I went to a Chinese school (shocking, I know) and every year, we do a massive singalong party where we get to ditch the uniforms and rock out to Chinese New Year songs. Being all angsty, I pretended to mumble through the entire set list looking downright sullen but deep down inside, I was rockin it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.

the last emperor

Tomorrow it’s the Lunar New Year yet again. I get to dress up my kids real cute and bring them around to as child labor. It’s going to be so fun.

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how i pretend to be a cool mum, kids in motion

All in a day’s work – revised edition

February 2, 2010

Ever since Tru started school, my life has been so much easier. On the downside, I spend 3 hours apart from him every day, but that’s time I get to spend with Kirsten alone, which I’m really enjoying. It’s our special girly time.

i love having momma all to myself

Now that Tru has gotten past the initial separation anxiety, he’s gone on to charm the socks off his playgroup friends and teachers. A little bird tells me that he’s got two very cute 8-year-old girls fussing over him and it’s becoming apparent that the teachers absolutely adore him.

This new schedule is working out brilliantly for all of us. And by all of us I mean me. It’s a walk in the park compared to my life 5 months ago.

7.15 – Express milk and sip my morning coffee. The husband feeds and changes the kids and then gets himself ready for work.

8.15 – Drop the husband off at work, then drop Tru off to school.

9.00 – Have a leisurely breakfast at someplace nice and feed Kirsten baby food. Some days I even get to read the papers or fiddle with my iPhone for a while.

10.30 – Baby girl takes her nap as we take a walk at the beach/mall/library.

12.00 – Pick up Tru from school and head home for lunch. The madness begins when we get home and I scramble to cook, feed Tru, bathe both kids, feed Kirsten and get them ready for their nap.

2.00 – Both kids take a nap while I express milk and take a breather.

4.30 – Snack time (for Kirsten, it’s milk time), followed by play time. They’re starting to play with each other and it’s really fun watching them interact. Kirsten laughs at everything her brother does and he will do all sorts of crazy stuff to make her laugh. It’s too cute.

6.00 – Pick the husband up from work and head out for dinner.

8.00 – Kirsten takes her last feed and both kids go to bed.

Effectively, that’s when I get to kick back, take a nice shower and spend some time with the husband. I almost cannot remember how bad it was just a few months back. I think my mind has blocked it out completely. But it’s true that life gets better as the kids get bigger. I can’t wait till next year when baby girl goes to playgroup as well and I’ll have 3 hours all to myself. Oh, that will be so awesome.

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