“Miss Kinnian teeches me how to spel better. She says look at a werd and close your eyes and say it over and over again until you remember. I have lots of truble with ‘through’ that you say THREW and ‘enough’ and ‘tough’ that you dont say ENEW and TEW. You got to say ENUFF and TUFF. Thats how I use to rite it before I started to get smart. Im mixed up but Miss Kinnian says dont worry spelling is not suppose to make sence.”

- extracted from ‘Flowers for Algernon’, Daniel Keyes

#currentread #ootdmatchesbookcover #FREAK

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the boy was down with one of those 24-hr stomach flus on tuesday, at around 1 in the morning. it was to be his first MC from school.

at 6am he cried out, “but today i got spelling!”

yeah, that was my first thought too, ha ha.

*********

he did his spelling yesterday, all ten words in one go. and got them all correct. (feough. phew.)

next week’s spelling’s going to be tuffer tougher.

*********

a bit on ‘Flowers for Algernon’: it is a story of Charlie, a 32-yr-old with a low IQ, who undergoes an experimental brain surgery to artificially increase his intelligence. the result is a rapid rise to great intellectual heights. like a modern-day creation of Frankenstein’s, he begins to question his existence, and what makes up humanity since it soon becomes clear that intelligence alone does not fulfil the criteria.

a subset of the story is the far-reaching repercussions of childhood traumas on one’s psyche. one of the memories Charlie gains from his new-found clarity of mind is of constantly being pushed – and punished – by his mother when he was young, to accomplish tasks other kids his age had already mastered, to no avail, and even to detrimental effect. all the doctors told her to give up hope that he would ever become smart. she eventually sent him away to a facility for the mentally-challenged, for the sake of giving her younger daughter of normal intelligence – aptly named Norma – a normal childhood. for Charlie, these memories and events have remained fuzzy all his life, but when they finally emerge from his subconscious, there is pain, anger, grief and disillusionment in place of blissful ignorance.

the part where Charlie’s mother tried to teach him to read, and him trying so hard to please her yet only succeeding to make her even angrier, made me so, so sad.

i ended the book last night feeling wretched.

#greatread

*********

i gave the boy extra kisses in the morning. i know i’m sometimes hard on him.

they test my patience, each in different ways. but i am just grateful they are normal, average children.

*********

but seriously, i swear i don’t know what to do about my spelling-nazi-ness!

(brain surgery, anyone…?)

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was it not just yesterday that we reached that exciting milestone that is peeing in a potty?

no no, i’m not complaining, not at all. in fact, please, keep growing. i’d even petition for you to skip the whole dreaded business of teenagehood and go straight on to mature adulthood if i could. but i suppose that’s why milestones are necessary in the first place, to prepare them for that full bloom ahead…

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and so, here he is, one of the 38,600 children this week to reach that exciting milestone that is P1.

as you can probably tell, he was VERY psyched to start his P1 life. being in a new environment and making new friends and having access to ‘big children’ – these things have always thrilled him. (what’s that? studying? meh, that’s just a distraction…)

at the school, we were quite impressed that there were hardly any display of first-day jitters or anxiety or nervousness or clinginess or tearfulness normally associated with first-days (i’m talking about the children AND parents here). we reckon that’s the upside of having already been to pre-school. another thing we observed, they were such a well-behaved, orderly bunch. (for now.) and oh-so-cute. (for now.)

the first thing he asked after he alighted from his school bus and met me by the canteen was: “can i buy something?” i think to him, primary school is a kind of ‘freedom’ – getting to hold on to his own money, having the autonomy to choose and decide for himself what to buy without mummy perpetually nagging or ordering him at his side. (instead, he had a P5 buddy to do that, ha ha. nahhh, he was very nice and all big-brotherly. we didn’t have to worry at all.)

“don’t worry,” assured one of the teachers to a bunch of parents peering from behind the barricade surrounding the canteen during recess time, all their eyes searching the blue sea of little uniforms for a glimpse of their kid.

“i’m not worried; i’m just CURIOUS,” i muttered, chuckling at how preposterous we parents must seem, waving at our kids like mad visitors at a zoo.

some, like me, got promptly IGNORED.

LOL.

oh well.

+++++

as soon as i got home, i smothered the girl with kisses and inhaled her heady sweet-sour scent all over her body. “i’ve got one more,” i rejoiced. maybe it’s a last child/only daughter thing, but i got sentimental imagining her first day of primary school in the future, in her oversized uniform and oversized school bag, coz obviously, she too will be as tiny as i was back then.

(like this tiny:)

yes, i’m afraid with the girl, i’d prefer the growing up to go juuuustt a teeny little bit slower. (although her streak of independence, while totally charming now, is quite a force to be reckoned with…!)

when i was briefing him after school on the timetable i drew up for this week, he actually negotiated/bargained with me to reduce his 4.00-5.30 slot by half an hour, and thereby increasing the 5.30-6.30pm slot by half an hour.

first day of school already so clever ah?

ok lah, since it’s your first week, i give you chance…

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new bag packed with list of books, new shoes and socks set by the door, new uniform hanging on the door knob, allowance of two dollars (in small change) tucked in new money pouch.

the boy has to be in the school hall by 7.15am, and we have to be up by 5.30am because his school bus is scheduled to be at our block by – ugh – 6.10am.

i don’t know how i ever made it through school. what a horrible feeling. it’s like preparing to be sent to the gallows.

BUT THAT’S JUST ME.

the boy, well he is /quote/ SO very excited /unquote/.

we’re still undecided whether to send him to a student care centre nearby after school, or just keep him at home with a routine timetable (although this option runs the risk of driving his grandma up the wall in the afternoons).

guess we’ll have to work it out over the next few days..

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with the boy starting P1 in the morning session come 3rd january, there is no choice but to start getting him used to sleeping early. well, at least earlier than usual anyway.

i’ve been way too lenient in allowing them the habit of a late bedtime. by the time we’re done with their nightly routines, they’d still be rolling around in bed till ohhh i don’t know…. 11-ish? that’s VERY BAD, ok. especially for their… brain development and what-not. i don’t know how and why their tiny bodies have such a ridiculous reserve of energy, EVERY DAY.

i guess, partly why i allow for the late bedtime is because of my working-mother guilt, for having only a few hours with them after i come home in the evenings. partly, i myself have the bad habit of sleeping late. my nocturnal habits are even harder to break as i age.

anyway, it’s been working okay so far, after the initial resistance and excuses and protests. and i now find myself with more time in my hands at night to do things.

like, blog about this:

i’ve watched one episode of charlie & lola some time back, and while it certainly is quite charming with their BBC accents (which i try my level best to imitate when reading their books aloud ha ha), i’ve resisted the kids’ pleas to add the printed series to our collection thus far because: 1) i can find any number of charlie & lola books at the library (and probably have borrowed the entire collection); 2) i didn’t want to encourage them to watch even more tv, even if it’s BBC-endorsed (i know, twisted logic); 3) i’m a bit iffy on lola’s excessive use of superlatives (although i know children have the same tendency to exaggerate like so, but still); 4) it took me a few books before realising charlie is actually a boy (ok this has little to do with my point).

but then, there are undoubtedly good bits in their stories, and the kids really extremely especially like them so very truly much (;p) and would often remember certain episodes or words or phrases in the books, so i relented and got them (and ok fine, myself) this, in a pop-up version. also since it goes with our theme for this week.

plus, have i mentioned how much i appreciate good paper engineering?

(omg it’s 1.40am, gah! brain development fail, hana!)

i’m not sure what brought about this line of conversation. we were walking around vivocity, me holding his hand tightly so he wouldn’t run off into the crowd. it’d been quite a day:

i’d brought them to the office in the morning. (they’ve been asking to come to work with me again ever since.)

i’d brought them on board a docked ship in the afternoon.

i’d bought them books from the floating book fair. (but no, NOT any more of those princess ones she’s holding, please!) then, more books from the lovely Page One bookstore. (which now I hear is GOING TO CLOSE DOWN WTH?!)

i’d brought them to watch the latest ‘Alvin & The Chipmunks’ movie, even though their high-pitched singing GRATED ON MY NERVES OMG.

i’d brought them to the playground and a dinner of disgusting fried fast food.

i guess, i like hanging out with them too.

(until the end of the day when THEY grate on my nerves and i’ve had enough of scolding them. )

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i’m not sure if that conversation earlier had anything to do with me telling him the story of ‘Room’ (by emma.donoghue). his interest was piqued when he read the title on the cover and asked me what it was about. so i’d been telling him the story in bits and pieces as i progressed through the pages. i’d finally reached the conclusion of the book the night before, and he was in rapt attention as i told it to him in the car on the way to the office that day.

i could see how compelling the storyline would be to him: it’s written in the voice of a 5-year-old boy, who has never been outside of the room (or rather, the windowless garden shed) where he was born. his mother was abducted 7 years ago, and had been kept captive in the 11ft-by-11ft room by her kidnapper ever since. she was repeatedly raped, impregnated, then gave birth to the boy and raised him all by herself as best as she could under the dire circumstances. she never allowed her captor to touch, or even look at the boy, all his life.

you might think that being locked in a room your entire life, never knowing the outside world (or even believing or understanding that there is one), would be a truly horrific thing. but to the boy, the room was his world, and it was enough, because he had his mother. like a protective womb, the room for him was safe and secure, even as he lies in the wardrobe at night while the kidnapper makes his mother’s bed creak. she was everything to him – his playmate, his teacher, his friend, his nurturer (he’s still breastfed at 5, and there’s a brief touching part near the end when they’re out in the world and he bids goodbye to his mother’s breasts, a symbolic ‘weaning’ off his dependency on her). she invents games to keep him active, tells him stories, teaches him to read, uses recycled materials for crafts, establishes a routine and good habits.

i imagined living in a closed room with an active, curious child, with limited resources to keep him engaged all day, every day – i would DEFINITELY go mad in less than a week.

but then i read this – the real case of elisabeth.fritzl, locked and abused in the basement of her house by her own father FOR 24 YEARS, and gave birth to 7 children in that span of time. the eldest child was 19 by the time they were released. it’s a miracle she did not go mad.

the human will to survive is an amazing thing.

for the boy, perhaps the story of Room drove home the point to be thankful for his life, his possessions, his freedom, and opportunities.

and hopefully, for his mummy, who tries to provide him all those things, and more.

===================================

i am my mother’s only one,
it’s enough

only love is all maroon
gluey feathers on a flume
sky is womb, and she’s the moon

- bon iver, ‘flume’

he’d been here one other time with his K2 class, when the school had generously responded to his child care centre’s appeal for a visit some weeks back. each kid brought along $2 worth of change to experience making transactions at the school canteen (they were learning about money), and had students to ‘buddy’ them during the visit. i thought it was a nice gesture by the school management to welcome the K2 children and provide them with such a learning opportunity. i was told later, a teacher had asked for a show of hands as to who was coming to the school next year – only aniq had his hand up.

i suppose i should feel a little maternal stirring of emotions, i mean, this is an important milestone after all, the firstborn entering primary school, but… well, i look at him at the school hall, amongst the sea of tiny expectant faces, all confident, ready and raring to go, not the slightest bit perturbed by the new people or environment or things he has to adapt to, grinning and waving at us from afar, and… i don’t feel too concerned.

he’ll be just fine.

(of course, i shouldn’t speak too soon: first day of school, *i* might be the one in tears – for having to wake up SO EARLY and have him reach school by 7.15am!!)

well, ok, it’s not bad, really. just… so INCONVENIENT.

the girl was discovered with ulcers in the mouth by the teacher, and the doctor confirmed it, but it’s VERY mild, no fever or loss of appetite or decreased energy AT ALL, only the occasional “oww, painnn” when at the peak of it, two angry red spots sprouted on each side of her tongue and she’d just eaten something slightly spicy/salty. (but then again, it could have just been a dramatic act for the sake of being dramatic.) a few tiny red spots appeared on the sole of her feet a day or two later, but that’s about it. she refuses the Bonjela (i don’t blame her, can’t they make Bonjela taste like strawberry or grape or something?) and there’s no medication to make it go away any faster.

the boy, on account of being a sibling, and therefore highly susceptible to infection, was also not allowed to go to school. tried to prevent them from sharing food, exchanging kisses, wrestling and other sibling acts of endearment that involve physical contact, but of course, this is impossible.

it’s Day 6, and the doctor has extended the girl’s MC for another 4 days, till end of the week before issuing a letter to say she can go back to school, which means the boy, who has a graduation concert next week to prepare for (!) btw, will have to stay imprisoned at home too. with new tiny red spots on his hands.

“my friend in school also got H-F-Family, you know,” the girl will tell you.

ok, enjoy your H-F-Family holiday…

so, i finally got around to asking my mum how it was during her time when she had to register us for primary school. as it turned out, there *was* a priority and balloting system back then too. and here i was, thinking i was from a dinosaur era where such things didn’t exist, where it was all a simple process of enrolling within a certain distance from where you lived.

mum was teaching at an all-boys’ school when my brother turned primary one, and teachers had priority to register their children in the school where they taught. she transferred to another school nearby soon after, so when it was my turn to register for primary one, i had sibling priority for the all-girls’ school next door, which was affiliated to the all-boys’ one… so yeah, that’s the story. no regrets – loved the school, the teachers, the yellow pinafore, heck even the brown bloomers we had for P.E… (nostalgia is a funny thing, heh.)

(hmm actually, come to think of it, i don’t know why she didn’t just enrol me at the all-girls’ school where she was teaching then, that would’ve saved me SO much time/effort/headache now, seeing how (a) that school has since turned co-ed, (b) shifted to tampines from its original ceylon rd location, and (c) is highly-sought after by parents in this vicinity… ah well, i guess it wasn’t meant to be…)

she also mentioned briefly about the ‘graduate mother scheme’, where priority was given then to children whose mothers were degree holders. thankfully, this was abolished soon after it was implemented, because frankly, i found it a little appalling. i mean, seriously, first you get all mothers to stop at two kids, and when the higher-educated mothers were having fewer babies than lower-educated ones, you worry about the ‘lopsided procreation pattern’. then you use paper qualification as a measure of ‘intelligence genes’, and entice them to beget ‘intelligent’ citizens by giving them first choice of primary schools? maaan, that just reeks of…. well, you know, the ‘E’ word. (the opposite effect imagined in mike judge’s ‘Idiocracy’ – see movie intro.)

in any case, many non-graduate mothers did eventually churn out graduate children after all, so.. phooey.

aaanyway, back to the present time, where the primary school registration system continues to boggle the minds of many. i’d mentioned about doing parent volunteering in the hopes of stepping around the dreaded phase 2C, where it’s a free-for-all and luck plays a big part, like striking 4D or toto. i was having none of that, no siree bob.

and, i am ashamed to admit this.. we ended up each doing PV in two different schools. “WHAT in kiasu gods’ name?! are you MAD? that’s a total of 80 hours of your life!” yes, we’d narrowed down to two choices and we couldn’t decide, so we strategised – in a ‘let’s poke around both and see what each one offers’ kinda way. it was like dating two prospective partners at the same time, or an episode of “The Bachelor” without the rose-giving ceremony…

so within the year, i’d gone on learning journeys to various places (i think i learned more than i ever did during my accumulated years of excursions), did some library inventory (so thaaaat’s what school kids are reading these days, i discovered), talked to teachers, parents, students… while the husband did traffic duties, some e-learning session, talked to teachers, parents, students (and apparently, even canteen aunties)… we observed the culture, the environment, the programmes… and only on the last few days before the anticipated phase 2B did we eventually decide, after a lot of consideration.

one of the factors for choosing school Y over X was the overwhelming registration in the earlier phases for the latter school. it was obvious from the numbers that a balloting would have to take place, and that involved a risk since we live outside the 1-2km proximity. school X has a long history, and with many of its alumni from our generation having children of the same age seeking tradition, many slots were understandably filled up in the earlier phases.

i also presented our dilemma to a number of people whose opinions i value, and they were surprisingly unanimous in their advice. even aniq himself voiced his preference. and since school Y had the foresight to take in a comparatively smaller number of parent volunteers, our slots were confirmed, which meant no stressful balloting.

so there, voila – our firstborn officially has a place in primary school. we did what we could to secure a place for him, and … i hope it’s the right place for him to bloom. (or i’ll freakin’ stuff him in my old brown P.E. bloomers.)

and that ends our ‘exciting’ kancheong-first-time-parent milestone of registering a child for primary one. phew.

(now starting to think about our second round of decision-making, a few years down the road. do i want to see auni in a yellow pinafore being all demure like this? HELL YEAH I WOULD. i’ve always wanted to pass down this yellow-pinafored ‘tradition’ if i ever had a daughter. but hey, there’s still time to make me change my mind… :p)

(oh my goodness, almost 30 years later and i still have the same haircut?! LOL.)

i think i’d vaguely heard of its existence (it was a recent viral sensation), and yes, the title would definitely resonate with MANY parents out there with little children who have up their sleeves, many creative ways and cunning tactics to delay going to sleep.

here’s samuel l. jackson narrating the book – which looks and feels deceptively the kind of beautifully-written and illustrated bedtime story you’d pick up in (vain) hope of putting your kid to sleep – and he sure made it sound so f***ing brilliant.

LOL.

any chance we’ll find this in our local bookstores? get me a copy!

the story is simply about 3 little owls who wake up to find their mother gone, presumably to hunt for food. and so they await her return, a wait which feels long and precarious, punctuated with moments of doubt and optimism, fear and courage, loneliness and solidarity…

their speech, thought processes and reactions indicate their varying ages and personalities, reflecting a typical family with young siblings, something you and your kids will surely be able to relate to. the elder owls think aloud pragmatically (owls think a lot, after all), but the youngest owl, being the youngest and needing the most comfort, simply cries out (over a few pages): “i want my mummy!” the sad expression in the youngest baby owl’s eyes is enough to make you quake and go “i’ll never leave my kids alone again, ever!”

the illustrations are beautiful and poignant, a big plus point for me. you can feel how scary and foreboding the forest would be in the eyes of the young, perhaps a reflection of the real world outside, without the comfort and security of the one you trust and depend on the most….

of course, in the end, the mother comes home to her babies in a joyful reunion, even chiding slightly at them, “What’s all the fuss? You knew I’d come back.” the elder two proclaim that they knew she would, and the youngest owl? he simply says “I love my Mummy!” and if you’re a parent, you’d know that feeling, of having your kids literally fly at you with their arms around your legs the moment you come through the door, proclaiming all kinds of feeling, lol.

it’s not a schmaltzy story (if there’s one thing i hate is schmaltz, believe me!), but just very touching without overstating it, especially for a mother going through, well, separation anxiety. (hey, it happens to mothers too, and not just children you know.)

we’ve all passed this separation phase quite a while back, thankfully. when they see me all dressed up with my ‘up shoes’ (ie. high heels), they know mummy has to go to work, and a kiss, hug and cheery ‘bye bye mummy’ later, i’m out of the door, with nary a fuss or flutter of feathers.

i remember a friend posting on FB (i said i’d steal it, and i’m doing it now): “A good mother: It’s not about always being there, but it’s teaching your kids to survive when you are not there.” which i think is the heart of this universal story.

post-note: found the video animation, cute!

“God, this is such a one-child household.”

I looked darkly at her, disliking her implication that I only kept my kitchen clean because I had just the one child. Troublesome undercurrents flowed between us at all times, and indeed between myself and all other mothers.

I judged Lisa and any other mother who came within my range. The next-door neighbours put their kids to bed too early; the people down the street put their kids to bed too late. The friend who lived near Green Lake was overly fussy about organic baby food; the friend on Queen Anne Hill was not fussy enough. Friend A dressed her baby in designer clothes, which was ridiculous. Friend B let her kids go around looking like slobs. I felt there must be a happy medium to parenting, and I felt that I was the very barometer of that happy medium. Anything that someone else did that I did not do was, to me, excessive and probably crazy. My strongly held opinions about parenting were like an elaborate carapace for my insecurities.

Bruce called it “the loathing of the half degree”. You despised or looked down on or envied those who were most like you. The moms who were like me, just a tiny bit different: I hated them! They infuriated me.

Bruce seemed to take my motherhood travails quite lightly. In fact, Bruce was not getting with the program as I might have wished. He did not always buy organic milk. He had vetoed cloth diapers. And there would be no sharing of the bed with the baby on his watch. These were political, moral, and ethical stances for me. For him, they were inconveniences.

Ideology, in my experience, had always been unmoored from real life. The activist or political movements of my youth were to me somewhat abstract: support for the guerillas of Nicaragua; shanty-towns built on the college lawn that were meant to urge the administration to divest their holdings in apartheid-era South Africa. However worthy these issues might have been, I didn’t have the political imagination (or the compassion) to connect them to my own movements. They affected not at all what I ate, where I slept, what I did all day. This is what I learned: Politics are for talking about. Politics might affect people who live halfway across the planet, but they will never, ever affect you.

Until you have a child. Then, all of a sudden, ideas are tightly zippered to action. The personal becomes unrelentingly political, whether you like it or not. It starts with pregnancy: Do you hit the KFC or do you eat bulgur? It moves on to birth: Do you believe in natural childbirth, or are you flipping open your cell phone right this minute to schedule a C-section? Home birth or hospital? Breast-feed or bottle-feed? Continue working or stay home? Let the baby “cry it out” or sleep with it in your bed? Stroller or sling? TV or no TV?

Regular life seldom presents us with dichotomies, especially dichotomies that are so fraught with philosophical underpinnings. These choices could be overwhelming. A huge number or the parents I knew were mostly reliant on a single approach that solved all these problems and answered all these questions: attachment parenting.

Attachment parenting – the general name given to the kind of parenting that involved co-sleeping and breast-feeding on demand and toting your baby around on your person – had the mothers and fathers of North Seattle in its grip.

Attachment parenting was like a constant reminder that the other mothers were better. No matter how consumed I was, other mothers were more consumed with their babies. Although I didn’t practice attachment parenting, it had a powerful hold on me; the idea of it hovered around my parenting like a cloud.

Even its name was a taunt. It implied that the rest of us didn’t care if our kids became attached to us or not. And so I hated the attachment mothers and suspected that they were judging me.

After our pee+wash feet+brush teeth regime, i invited them into my bed with their choice of books. Note that my bed is considered a treat to them because I’m always shooing them off it, so I give them the terms of condition: that they must kiss me and go straight to bed as soon as I finish the books, which they understood and agreed to.

I’m amazed it worked. Read, got my kisses, said goodnight, watched them march out of my room, everything’s quiet and am now snuggled under my duvet, feeling gleeful coz I managed to trick them into going to bed on their own accord, without having moved an inch from mine heh heh. (Then kick myself for not having thought of this earlier.)

now if only everything had a solution as simple as this….