we didn’t know where else to go, so we ended up at the padang, where, provided with the opportunity of space and a seemingly endless horizon (and fuelled by a rainbow-sprinkled chocolate donut), aniq displayed his running prowess equivalent to a speeding F1 race car, his poor daddy lagging more than 100 metres behind.
daddy finally caught up with and wrangled him back like an escaped wild cattle bull, sweat and all
his sheer horsepower speed proved useful later when the black knights, practising their aerobatic flying displays for national day, roared above – he ran to me with all his might, fear in his eyes, his heart pounding as he climbed into the car next to me, his hand gesturing to his chest, “aniq scared!”… HILARIOUS! :D ok ok, bad mummy, but it’s just so rare to see him look so vulnerable, the gungho, no-fear boy that he is, that i doubt i’ll ever forget it. heh.
this girl on the other hand – clueless, pretty much. i have NO idea what’s going on in her cute lil bald noggin.
she sure drools a LOT though. (and no, i did not have any unfulfilled cravings when i was pregnant with her. just why i get asked this question all the time boggles me so! :p)
KIDDING! (how in heck could we make something like that out of diapers??)
damn, i should’ve eaten more of it at the party. i think the pheromones released from that one slice of chocolate cake is still lingering in my system.
anyway, *this* is our real diaper cake, for a baby shower. the second in our series of ‘Got Milk?’ theme.
featuring Hotsling
did i tell you i think i’m a milkaholic? i crave for at least two full mugs of cold HL milk everyday even though the baby’s born and i shouldn’t have anymore cravings. so i suppose auni’s having HL-infused milk (and also honey red tea with pearl, my other pregnancy vice which looks like it’s here to stay). as it says on the HL carton, “Made with Fresh Milk”. which i can’t really figure out, coz if milk isn’t made with fresh milk, what IS it made of? stale milk?
which i stink of, most of the time. stale milk, that is. it smells like… cheese. which is what cheese is made of anyway, right?
and speaking of milk, i finally did it.
i aimed, i squeezed, i conquered. (and i laughed – at myself for looking so silly, and at the clueless baby who ended up with milk sprayed all over her face, trying to lick herself.) now let’s see if baby’s teary eye will be less watery.
ps: and it’s decided! land of many cows, here we come… altogether now, “mooo!” :)
my mum just told me she’s definitely going to perth in august to visit our relative.
which means, she won’t be around to:
a) cook for us
b) entertain aniq in the day
c) ‘guard’ our often-wandering helper
d) call me everyday to update on things i sometimes half-listen to (goings-on in the family, shopping escapades with her also-retired friends, aniq’s latest mischiefs, etc.)
that’s two weeks of no mum. *whine* how am i going to survive??
sooo, i would like you to help me.
no, not cook for me. or babysit aniq in the day. or keep watch over our helper. or call me everyday to gossip (actually, i don’t mind this so much, just make sure it’s juicy and scandalous).
can you help me sway, cajole, coax, persuade, wheedle, plead, beg my BELOVED husband izad (who loves to stay home, grr) to bring ALL of us with her?
and by all of us, i mean me, aniq & auni. no, no, not you.
the rule is to look serious, like mark wahlberg. while holding a, erm, weapon in one hand. very macho.
ok, so those aren’t calvin kleins. (on aniq, that is. on marky mark, they’re the real mccoy, all right. not that i’d know, though. too much distraction to see actual label on those tighty-whities… ouh.)
it was on a whim that i picked out a pair of bright bots’ training pants and shoved it to his daddy. not to try on, but to ask for his opinion. we wanted a bright red one (!!), coz we planned to tell him they’re part of Superman’s costume. but they didn’t have red in his size, which we guessed was M (though now we know they’re a little tighty-err…bluey, so we’ll get a size L for the next few ones).
he got all excited when we told him we bought him Superman underwear, and he ripped open the plastic bag, just like Superman would if told he’s got a new pair of undies.
“unnerwear!!”
he’d had a brief (pardon the pun) experience wearing dadam’s smaller underwear some time back, which was short-lived as he’d forgotten he was wearing it while playing, and headed to the toilet a micro-second too late. pee had seeped onto the rug in his room.
these bright bots ones are brilliant and i don’t know whyyyy i never thought of getting them earlier, like super-duh. they look and feel like briefs, but have a waterproof thingy in between the layers of cloth on the crotch. like a waterproof bib for the willy ha ha.
anyway, his eyes immediately lit up at the thought of becoming superman, and he said,
“aniq nak encing!”
because, of course, superman must potty first before becoming superman, as stated in the Golden Handbook of Becoming Superman. he promptly proceeded to the toilet to take off his pants, place his potty seat on the toilet bowl, and climbed over it to do the wee-wee.
“bye bye encing!”
that’s him bidding farewell to the liquid deposit as i flushed.
he grabbed his new “unnerwear” and put it on, the way i taught him to – sit down, one leg in, then the other leg, stand up, pull up “unnerwear”, cover beberd (“wait beberd fly!”), and cover “ontot”.
i wonder why little willies are called birdies. must be coined by a coy mother in the olden days to ensure their boys covered up their bits and not let it, err, stray. plus, it’s cuter than calling it “wormie” and less menacing than “snakey”. i think.
aaanyway (why do i always get distracted?), he spotted daddy wearing the SAME coloured underwear (oops, is that too much info?).
“daddy unnerwear same! daddy superman?”. afterwhich he started leaping around the house like superman’s apprentice.
and right on time, the tv played one of those superheroes cartoons and we ALL got excited pointing out how ALL of them wore “unnerwear”! yes, wonderwoman is just like mummy! look at mummy’s “unnerwear”! (admittedly, i was wearing pink, but whaddahell, right?)
“mimmy can fly?”
erm. maybe if i changed into a corset. and eat steroids. otherwise, i’ll probably look more like this:
yes, with the pizza. which incidentally we had for dinner while watching cartoons last night. (i really want to talk about Tom & Jerry, the dynamics of.)
speaking of wonderwoman, doncha think her logo says W&F??
the invisible wonderwoman. with not so wonderboobs. she needs a wonderbra.
oh, and we made a mistake of unleashing those superundies at night coz after his second pee in the toilet, it was time for bed, and he super-refused to wear anything other than his new “unnerwear”.
so he ended up wearing that AND his pull-up diaper over it. (i’m SO not ready to wake him up in the middle of the night to remind him to pee! :p)
wonder how superman does his pee-pee with his unnerwear outside his tights… (i can imagine izad coming up with some theory about how there’s probably a side slit, like boxers. hmm, which brings us to the question, how big IS superman?… ok, what did i say about always getting distracted??)
ps: message to norsita – i got your email, so sorry i’m taking so long to reply! will do so soon. :)
ok, so we were up till late, as usual, finishing up our W&F work for the day, some time last week. it was about 2am and rin’s dad was fetching her from my place.
she went downstairs and waited by the main road.
she started to feel goosebumps when out of nowhere, a large figure loomed across the road, a young man with menacing eyes. he looked right at her with those eyes, and started walking briskly towards her, as if he was going to pounce on her…
she looked around for her dad, who arrived just in time on his bike, and quickly left the scene. but not before she took one last look behind her – there was no one at all.
of course, it could just be a normal guy trying to scare her. but she insisted it wasn’t, he disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared.
when izad heard about the incident, he immediately thought of a fatal accident that occured in october last year, right around that same bend near our place.
a young man had died while delivering food from a certain fast food chain.
so we googled for the newspaper article, but didn’t find any photos, just a picture of the accident site. (which izad had passed by on that fateful day, on his way home from work. he saw the man bleeding on the ground.)
we knew the date, so rin’s mum did some digging and of all the malay newspapers she still had, that particular day’s edition turned up.
and whaddaya know, there was a picture of the man in the accident.
and… it was him, the same face she saw.
rin’s dad later admitted he saw the figure too, but didn’t mention to her until he heard it from her sister.
so, what do you think??
i have to say, it kinda fascinated me, morbid as it may sound. very ghost whisperer.
to think i almost sent her home that night, which i’ve done before (i wanted to escape with the car for while, go to the petrol kiosk nearby for a late night snack, etc.)
but, erm, don’t expect me to walk (or drive) down that road at 2am in the morning anymore, eh. :S
there are things to blog about, but by the time i have the time, it’s night time, and the thing i want to blog about, well, it’s not something i’d like to write about at night.
it’s rather… incredible-tale-ish in nature. erm.
meanwhile, don’t forget to watch chef s.o.s tonight. at least we’re not in there to embarrass ourselves. or look ten pounds fatter. face OR butt.
we had to come up with something to represent the chinese AND malay culture, so we went nuts for a bit, as we tend to do with our more ‘challenging’ dpcakes, ha ha. (read on in our Flickr.)
and well hey, i finally got to put something i’d always wanted to on a dpcake…
minyak telon, lol!
i’ve never tried yu yee oil, but izad said his brothers use it for stomach discomforts (still!). and the sinseh man i spoke to swears by it too, heh. i suppose it’s the chinese equivalent of minyak telon (which, i must repeat, smells oh-so-good, in a baby sorta way).
speaking of something i’d always wanted to put on a dpcake…
Babylegs legwarmers! i love ‘em so. i might just be crazy enough to collect all the colours of the rainbow. just.
both little ones are presently in their respective rooms, fast asleep.
the littler one is on her own for the first time tonight.
somehow, i didn’t mind so much having her bunk in our room a little longer than we did with her brother when he was a baby (we ‘banished’ him at eight weeks old). i guess it’s because she’s never bothered us at night since she came home, so her presence in our room, happily bundled up in the moses basket next to me, hardly registers anyway. she’s been nothing but a pleasant bedfellow.
but off to her own room, she must. simply because, fair is fair.
speaking of rooms, the boy, in all his two-and-a-half-year-old glory, is going through what i think (hope!) is a universal phase of normal children his age:
1) the “ada hantu!” phase
we’re not sure if this is one of his delaying tactics at bedtime (the other being “i want to read a book!”), or if it’s a result of an over-active imagination. well, we definitely prefer either as the explanation, because, erm, i would really rather not think otherwise! =O
so, how DO we deal with these phantom sightings?
so far, i’ve done the most obvious thing any parent, or what a politician charged with adultery, would do – deny, deny, deny.
“no lah! where got? nonsense!! now go to sleep.”
then i tried the ‘tell it to go away’ tactic.
“just tell hantu, ‘go away! go away!’ ok?? now go to sleep.”
then i tried getting to the root of the evil, so to speak.
“how does it look like? muka dia macam mana?”
and his answer would be his face scrunched up with his hands, scarily similar to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, or more scarily, like Macauley Culkin in the Home Alone posters.
“apa ajer! now go to sleep.”
i’ve now resorted to leaving his desk lamp on while he falls asleep, and things are looking brighter, so to speak. not so much for the daddy, who will also do an Edvard Munch’s The Scream impression when he sees the next electricity bill.
we figure it could be due to a clutter at a particularly dark corner that made him see shadowy figures lurking. i’ll get around to removing some bits of toys to reduce the appearance of lurky shadows there. soon.
heck, i used to be frigging scared of the dark when i was small too. and it was exacerbated when i was separated from my brother, who’d gotten too old to share a room with his silly kid sister. once, when i was five, i had a nightmare involving the purple Count from Sesame Street springing up on me in the dark, and i could never till now think of that purple Count without a slight shiver running down my spine. (that’s also probably why i ended up hating math and anything to do with counting… ok, i’m stretching the psycho mumbo jumbo too far – i just have a really lazy left brain, is all.)
but of course, i got out of it (the scared-of-dark part, not the hate-math bit, which is still there), and am perfectly comfortable being in the dark (in more ways than one). it helped that i got married and finally had someone for company in the same room as me at night, ha ha.
another phase he’s going through, is:
2) the “i dowan to eat!” phase
now let me disclaim that he is, in essence, a true-blue anak wak jawa, in that he’d actually choose rice over pasta or even bread, for his meals. he can even be content with eating white rice on its own (his other eating oddity includes stalks of broccoli by itself).
but lately, feeding him is like negotiating with a terrorist. bribes, in the form of jellies and vitamin C (his choice of candy, or rather, OUR choice of ‘safe’ candy for him, ha ha) are brandished, like carrots dangled in front of a mule.
so it was one of those bedtime chats (another of his delaying tactics, no doubt) that i began my spiel on why he has to eat rice.
i’m sure you’ve ALL heard it before, the old tale that has been passed from generation to generation, the one that sows guilt in many a small children into polishing the food off their plates.
the How Rice Cries When You Don’t Eat It tale.
as a perfectly rational teenager, i used to scoff at how illogical it was that tiny lifeless grains of rice could be personified as weeping, grieving beings, and i would feel betrayed that old people would spin such stories to fool impressionable little children into believing such things.
but, oh my god, there it was, out of the blue, i didn’t even know why i did it, or how i even remembered it, but the words just flowed out of me, spewing forth like a full-fledged diarrhoea, the age-old tale of How Rice Cries When You Don’t Eat It.
*in most dramatic voice* “you know ahh, mummy buy rice, but aniq don’t want to eat the rice, so mummy has to throw the rice away. the rice is soooo saaaad *insert sad voice* – ‘i’m soooo saaaad, why aniq won’t eat me??’ then the rice CRY! ah ahh!”
i never got how or why our parents spun that particular web of apparent deceit, but in that instance, the lights switched on and i – a Parent – just… got it. it made perfect sense – appealing to children’s basic sense of empathy. brilliant.
and so i went on to tag emotions to every item he’s rejected according to his whims – his bed (“i’m sooo saaad, why aniq won’t sleep on me??”), his milk (“i’m sooo saaaad, why aniq won’t drink me??”), his toy (“i’m sooo saaad, why aniq throw me??”), etc.
it got him thinking for a bit, then he started grinning, not too sure what to make of this newfound realisation that objects around him actually react to him. but he started to slowly reach for his bottle of milk, and downed it accordingly.
and now when you ask him what happens to the rice if he doesn’t eat it, he’ll tell you – “rice cry!”
maybe it’s maybelline
i could come up with a few other phases, equally exhausting and exasperating, but journalling them all down would prove exhausting and exasperating by itself.
it’s been nine weeks since i gave birth (funny, it feels like much, much longer than that), and i was telling the Spouse the other day a cold, hard (and heartless) truth:
i sure don’t miss being pregnant.
i think it was around this time, after giving birth to aniq, that i’d gotten the “i miss being pregnant” pangs. but strangely enough, this time, i don’t.
maybe i’ve lost the maternal mojo, maybe the last one overstayed its welcome. but the thought of going through all that ten months of whatever that goes along with being pregnant, does not appeal to me very much any more. :S
and since it’s been nine weeks, i guess i really should make that appointment to see the doc to get my plumbing sorted, aye? get it, erm, plugged or something.
coz i say, these two will keep me pret-ty busy dealing with their multitudes of phases for the next, ohh…. twenty-odd years or so.
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