i love you, you love me, i love children, don’t you see? ;)

we had another project this morning, for another non-profit organisation. (no, not izadnhana.org, though we are also a non-profit organisation, so please donate out of goodwill thank you ha ha.)

a few kids were involved, and there were plans to take a group shot of them, but of course that was like asking hana to cook up a 10-course dinner in one night. (ie. theoretically do-able, but in practice ABSOLUTELY impossible.)

they were each supposed to take up an ‘occupation’, along with the right props. you know, scientist, doctor, chef, artist, construction worker (??)…

this fella was meant to don up as an army soldier. so sexy hor, sleeveless camo vest some more. in battle, sure kena attack. (by mosquitoes, that is.)

some may be aware of my distaste for violence and violent role-play in the form of toy guns and knives and swords and what-have-yous (*dagger eyes at haz&sham*). even when we happen to be watching something with gunfires or wrestling, i’d block his view and distract him, though he’d attempt to push me aside to partake in the exciting scenes. (damn you, nacho libre! you made him go around the house wrestling with mr lion!)

so anyway, he didn’t know what to do with the gun and hand grenade that went along with the soldier outfit. of course, he IS only fourteen-and-a-half months, never having watched ‘apocalypse now’ and with no knowledge of having to serve the nation in seventeen years to come. so he basically refused to have anything to do with the boring green helmet or the boring green binoculars, or the gun and hand grenade, and kept running away from his designated spot in front of the camera. ha ha! nak lari dari NS kot? tak boleh, nanti masok jail tau…

tapi duduk sebelah babe baik pulak. ha ha!

her name’s aniqah, by the way. how cool is that?

a few of the other kids didn’t have the right ‘job fit’ either, so the props got changed around.

and what did he finally take to, you ask?…

… i can’t tell you! i almost had heart palpitations from all the prompting and clapping and singing to get him to ‘perform’, and even the rest of the mommies in da house rallied round to do the same. quite a hilarious sight we were, grown adults getting excited to the tune of barney’s ‘i love you, you love me’.

(i know i know, the sheer irony of it all – army vs barney, barney wins.)

i think the campaign will be rolled out some time in march. not sure how the thing will turn out, coz the kids were pretty pooped out after three hours, some were crying, and some simply refused to cooperate.

ahh well, what’s not to love about them kids…

inTekpendence day

i wanted to ‘password-ize’ this entry coz of the erm, what some may feel is the rather ‘unsavoury’ business of boobs. (i can picture the guys’ eyes turn round as saucers, but don’t worry, they will be duly disappointed if they read on.)

but it’s pretty groundbreaking news.

what i want to talk about is something close to my heart (literally)… yes, you know where i’m getting at – tekmilk and aniq’s tek-pendency.

and what i want to announce is:

we have officially, successfully, and surprisingly, painlessly, weaned off each other, tek-wise.

!!

let me recap my journey of tek-hood.

the lil fella gulped down one full year of BM aka tekmilk (of which he’d staged a strike against the bottle for a few weeks in his fourth month before begrudgingly succumbing to the inevitable silicone teat and sterile bottle when i went back to work in the fifth month).

one full year of lugging around my borrowed pumps (and a perpetual love-hate relationship with them).

one full year of nursing bras (and sweaty breastpads, till i stopped buying them and ended up with the occassional wet tshirt – no, no, it’s definitely not the stuff of fantasies, boys, it’s very – i repeat – VERY unglamourous and tak stim langsung).

one full year of revolving my life around his feeds (and not leaving him behind on dates and outings for more than half a day if i can help it).

as soon as we reached that first-year mark, i knew it was time to let go. so the day after he turned one, i’d begun him on his FM journey, the last he’d tasted it being at the hospital when he was born.

then the thirteenth month came along, and again, he staged a similar coup – refusing the bottle with the ‘offending’ FM. (dah satu bulan minum baru tau lain ke? haha!) it’d gone along fine at first. i’d cut down my pumping sessions, so that he still had half BM and half FM per day, and direct feeds in the mornings and evenings when i was around. it’d also become a force of habit for him to automatically turn to the teks as soon as we stepped into the coltmobil aka BFmachine. ho ho! a sticky situation we have here, i thought…

then a friend advised me to mix the BM with FM, gradually lowering the amount of BM and increasing the FM till he gets used to it again, and that actually worked when i was not home. on weekends, i began bringing him out with a bottle of FM and a steely resolution, as well as a bag of distraction tactics, eg. gave him biscuits to make him thirsty, showed him the scenery, whatever it took to make him forget.

my mum and i reckon that this happened to be the period that he fell ill (fever/cough/runny nose) and his body was probably instructing him to get more tekmilk to boost his immune system. well, that’s what we THINK anyway. plus, his gums were swollen at the time, and his appetite to eat had gone down too.

but he got better, and every weekend thereafter, i increased the FM, and limited direct feeds to morning and evening. i stopped pumping altogether early this month, as i slowly let my supply dwindle, from 200ml… till the last i pumped, a mere 80ml.

i have to say that my body did take some time to adjust. there’s a case of what O told me was the ‘blip’ (no, i’m not censoring anything, that’s what it’s called, apparently, but i can’t seem to google anything on it). it caused lumpy blocked ducts and i had no choice but to make him (and by him, i mean aniq) solve the problem for me.

you always hear that bedtime feeds are the hardest to drop, and i really thought so too. but he continued to surprise me by accepting a bottle of FM before bed (distraction tactic: tv!), and proceeded to do his other nightly routines of reading some books and rolling around in his cot till he falls asleep by himself. i always thought he couldn’t sleep without the teks, but i was wrong! just like the time i was proven wrong when he slept through the night all by himself in his own room at 8 weeks.

i think, perhaps, he has this… intrinsic independent streak that has made him a relatively ‘easy’ baby, in a sense. we’re blessed, i’ve no doubt about it. of course, with his strong desire to be independent, comes other not-so-easy problems! like… immediately running off the OPPOSITE direction whenever we put him down (and not even looking back to find us). wanting to do things by himself although he’s not physically capable of doing them yet (think sofa stunts and messy meals). and you know, with a gungho little person like this, the possibility of him getting into all kinds of trouble and accidents is MASSIVE. :S

anyway, i never really set myself a target as to when to wean him off totally, and if i felt that he really needed comforting, he’ll still get them. coz that’s what they’re only good for now, comfort. (that refrain, “everybody need a bosom for a pillow”, suddenly comes to mind, heh.)

so, that day we went to the parade, was also the first time he went without the teks throughout the day. he didn’t ask, i didn’t offer. and for those of you who know us well, would know that this is big news coming from the TekBoy himself!

and the coltmobile is now a safer place because he’s stopped clambering out of his carseat to get to my boobs. of course, distraction tactics are still at play – a small box of cornflakes at his side to munch on, a frisbee to bang on, a straw to chew on, a mini magna doodle to, err, doodle on, a ball to throw around. however, mum was clearly disgusted by the state of the backseat of coltmobile when she rode on it yesterday, and promptly nagged and picked up stray cornflakes crumbs and other tiny swallowable objects i’d dropped while wrestling the lil fella. (mothers! we can never do anything to please them, can we?)

he now drinks up his FM with relish and anything goes. gain IQ, dugro, enfagrow… bedal ajer lah!

so there. my glorious BF days are, hmm, i guess… over.

i don’t feel hungry anymore.

disgusting tummy flabs have made threatening comebacks.

my boobs have shrunk back to it’s dismal borderline B. (Boohoo!)

but thank you. you’ve been of good service for almost 15 months. i’ll miss the times we had.

till the next round….

the parade

while many would shudder at the thought of massive crowds, i’ve never really minded them, so braving orchard on saturday to watch The Parade was not such a big deal.

it was the first time i’d even been to one of these things, having always shunned the live tv version each year. i’d always associated it with chingchong-fied cheesiness, creepy big-headed figures, and.. it’s just not very cool, is it? :p

so what triggered me to do what i’d never bothered with before, then?

well, the thought of being stuck at home with an (over?) active child over the weekend is a big factor! (plus, when you’re a parent, uncoolness sometimes gets thrown out of the window.)

staying home drives me up the wall, and i’ve clearly transferred my kaki-jalan bug to the little one. just mention the word ‘nak jalan’ and he’d toddle, in nothing but his diapers, to the door, sit down, attempt to put on his shoes/sandals, and make a big fuss.

and you know just how tiny singapore is, there’s hardly anywhere exciting to go to. i’m always cracking my head thinking up of things to do to jam-pack our weekends and holidays. and with his love for all things visually and aurally stimulating, the parade would be perfect entertainment for him.

i didn’t know we had to pay to get seated (i didn’t know you could even have seats, i always thought people just stood around, but singapore being the ever orderly country, you gotta have barricades and proper seating arrangements huh), and thankfully, a friend offered a pair of free tickets.

so, apa lagi!

the parade

“when I was a young boy,
my father took me into the city
to see a marching band…“

tipah tertipu

daddy said he felt like ‘cooking’ roast chicken for dinner the other day.

mummy was like, okay!

when she saw the spread, she asked, “sejak bila you sempat roast the chicken?” coz it was a weekday evening and they’d both just come home from work.

nampak sah daddy bedek. i saw paper bags with pictures of chicken on it on the kitchen stove. but he said he did heat it up and fried the wedges and poured thousand island dressing on the salad which came from a plastic box.

later, i tried to bedek daddy to get some ice-cream. i smothered him with my most charming wet kisses on his cheeks, and pointed at the ice-cream bowl while babbling disarmingly at him to show my keen interest.

alas, daddy’s just to clever for me too. he merely ignored me like a robot till the bowl was cleaned out.

one day, daddy, i will get my revenge.

mark my words!

(blog)rollin’ rollin’ rollin’…

back up, back up!

trailblazing

I did a little photography project using my dslr camera last week. Maybe some of you had seen the pictures in my Flickr site. Anyway, I got the idea from an article in the February issue of “Practical Photography” which I highly recommend especially for photo enthusiast like me    I’m rather amazed by the result. It’s rather easy to do and the outcome is quite interesting.

What you need is a tripod, a dslr camera and a vehicle (for my case, babycolt). That’s it. You need to set the camera to Aperture-Priority mode and set it to f/11 so that you can have plenty depth of field, which means the camera won’t focus the things close in front of you but focus on a wider range. By setting the camera to AP mode, it will decide on the exposure time needed, to match the selected aperture. Also, set the ISO to 100.

Next, you need to focus the camera on the windscreen. Then you fix the camera on the tripod. Strap the tripod securely using the seat belt on the passenger seat. Ideally you should use a remote control trigger for the camera so that you can concentrate on the driving. For my case, I used the 12 seconds timer. I would ready myself and press the shutter button and drive off, and in 12 seconds the camera would be snapping away.

Frankly, the wifey who was also with me during the shoot wasn’t too happy with me driving around, so I only managed to take shots at the neighbouring estate and also on the streets leading Changi Village, where we had our dinner (must give excuse to go out, mah!)

Maybe tomorrow I will experiment in the CTE tunnel and also the expressway. Hopefully the result would be good.

“let’s go to the paaaark…”

ok, so this isn’t as romantic as that john legend song, you know, the one about kissing underneath the stars and not caring about going too far in public, etc. (seriously, where got time to be romantic nowadays?? ceh.)

…

so, every place we go to now has to fulfil a certain criteria.

the first question we’ll invariably ask is: “is it family-friendly?”

whenever we go to restaurants and other eateries, the first thing we look for are high chairs for The Royal Highness. if they do not furnish us with one, we’d scoff at them with a “huh! so un-family-friendly!” rant and turn away with our noses in the air. (hey, if simpang bedok/hawa restaurant/et al have them, you air-conditioned food courts should jolly well have them too.)

shopping malls are judged by whether they have nursing or diaper-changing rooms. if they make us go through an entire maze of escalators and fire escape routes without finding even a broom closet with a handwritten cardboard sign that says “Baby Room”, we’d throw our hands up in the air in exasperation and nevermore swipe our visa/master/nets cards there again.

anyway, back to the park.

it can’t get any more family-friendly than this.

(well, in the day-time, anyway. come night-time, i’m sure other kinds of ‘family-making activities’ take place… *cue that john legend song*)

wide open space, green grass, blue sky, balls, bicycles, and best of all… horseys and ponies! wahhh… (yes, i AM very jakun like that. lol)

you know, i don’t think i did or went out much as a child. my parents aren’t exactly the outdoors sort, and i didn’t have anyone to run around with. (which probably explains my aversion to P.E and ECAs that required any outdoor activities.) i don’t even remember what toys i had, except girly ones like strawberry shortcake or barbie. i tried asking mum at what age i did what, but she didn’t exactly have a blog or a digital camera or anything back then. :p

so, yeah, i really don’t remember much about my childhood. all those stories other people have about climbing trees, catching spiders, playing chapteh, sound like cliched fairytales to me.

nevermind playgrounds, i was terrified of sliding down the pole, and disgusted by the sand which smelled of cat’s pee.

cycling? can’t!

throw me a ball? i’ll duck!

and you know that game you used to play during recess, where you jump over a string of rubber bands (see, i can’t even remember what it’s called), forgeddit! i was hopeless, and it didn’t help that i was the size of a hobbit child.

my gross motor skills, as you can tell, are almost zero.

but looking at the little boy, i’m amazed. i’m not sure, though, if i should be too smug at the rate they’re developing. i heard something about kids who start walking at an early age being more stubborn or headstrong or belligerent or… something when they’re older. i don’t know. (in any case, i think any stubborn streak should come from me, his motor-challenged mother.)

nevermind. let me be amazed now (“you mean one-year-olds can do THAT??”) and worry later.

i just hope one day he’ll look back and remember the fabulous times he had as a child.

and i’ll look back and remember the fabulous times i had with him.

the waterboy

more water and vitamin D for the little one.

this little waterboy of ours.

…

seeing this picture conjures the image of how his head must’ve looked like to the doctor, the nurses and the daddy when he first made his crowning appearance out of me. a big, wet, round head. how that ever came out of me is still an unfathomable mystery.

as i was uploading my ‘unnamed’ blog archives, i came across how he’d loved being bathed and splashing around in the tub right from the beginning when he was merely a few days old.

and not to mention how he made all those incredible ‘waves’ while he was still floating about in my waterbag.

so yeah, back to the present day. we’d planned this sentosa trip waaaay back, but never thought how exceedingly crowded it’d be on a public holiday. yikes.

in any case, the water bambinos had a whale of a time getting wet in the waters. (while we adults, well, were not too thrilled with the wet weather.)

big splash, little splash

the weather was perfect for a little splash.

and it was a perfect day for a little meet-up with some hunks and babes.

dan sementara mereka-mereka sibuk ber-gong xi fa cai, kami pula berkongsi gambar di multiply…

hope you guys make damn good use of the nice long PH.

cupid’s chokehold

and sometimes, when neither oly nor lumix is around, they resort to mummy’s k800i.

not exactly up to their, ahem, standards, but whadaheck. i gotta have SOME pictures to accompany my blog entry, right?!

so, anyway, i didn’t manage to find myself a valentine’s day date after all. which is weird, coz i could’ve sworn i had some ‘proposals’. hmm, has mum been screening my BlackBerry, you think…?

what a waste though, coz i had a pretty good reservation for two that day, with some great food that i’m sure my date would’ve enjoyed. i mean, i’m sure you can tell how great the food was from here! it would’ve been SO ‘lady and the tramp’… you know, that cartoon where the two dogs eat from a bowl of spaghetti, then they slurp on the same strand, then they accidentally kiss right smack in the middle… so romantic one!

errrr, you know what… i take it back. i don’t think my date would’ve enjoyed the food if she saw the way i ate. :S

i mean, i’m a gentleman and all, but i still got to work on my fine motor skills, you know? i’m on top of it, i really am. (if only mum would just let me have a go with that nice big fork…)

meanwhile, in the spirit of the recent valentine’s day, let me sing for you a song that i’ve been hearing on radio and mtv lately.

“Take a look at my girlfriend
She’s the only one I got
Not much of a girlfriend
I never seem to get a lot

It’s been some time since we last spoke
This is gonna sound like a bad joke
But momma I fell in love again
It’s safe to say I have a new girlfriend

And I know it sounds so old
But cupid got me in a chokehold
And I’m afraid I might give in
Towels on the mat my white flag is wavin’

I mean she even cooks me pancakes
And Alka Seltzer when my tummy aches
If that ain’t love then I don’t know what love is

We even got a secret handshake
And she loves the music that my band makes
I know I’m young but if I had to choose her or the sun
I’d be one nocturnal son of a gun…”

- gym class heroes feat. patrick stump from fall out boy.

one nocturnal son of a gun! ha ha!
that is soo funny, i think i just peed in my diapees.

ok. gotta find me some wet wipes. darn spaghetti stains.

bye.