Super Dino

1. The title is Super Dino because Huda's book is beside the laptop and 'Super Dino' is part of its title. This entry has nothing to do with the jurassic era but I am not one who can come up with relevant titles so I get completely irrelevant ones.

2. Farah is now almost 16 months old and she has begun to hate eating. Her weight is sliding off the charts and she is exactly on the 3rd percentile now. She's dangerously close to falling off the charts but she no longer wants to eat now!! BOOOOHOOOOOHOOOOOOO! As with Huda, I've been cooking all sorts of potions and concoctions (I have at least 4 baby cookbooks) but nothing's working. The one thing that worked recently was nasi lemak. Just plain nasi lemak.

3. She went to the doctor's for a check-up recently and was sent for a whole lot of blood tests. One for thalassaemia, iron count, liver and kidney functions and something else. They had to take 5ml of blood from her vein and she was screaming violently while the blood was drawn from her. Results of the tests would be available at the next appointment but as for now, she's a confirmed anaemic case. Being anaemic, I want to feed her beef at least twice a week but - as expected - she rejected it even before the spoon touches her mouth. And if I manage to push the food inside her mouth, she'll spray everything out. My neighbour told me to make a drink for her using a teaspoon of wolfberries (qi zi), 2 red dates and some dried longans to help with the anaemia. I'm trying that as soon as I get the wolfberries.

4. Farah is also walking. Hooray! She started doing so from around her 15th month. Now, I no longer have to cringe in pain when I see black-ish spots around her knees. When she was actively crawling, I dressed her in long pants so that her knees are protected against rough surfaces. But, despite mopping the house daily, she has a way of showing me that my mopping is no good because by the end of each day, where the pants cover her knees, it will be grey. It got to the point where I decided that maybe I should make her wear mittens and she can do the mopping for me.

5. It's now 12.56am and I can't sleep because of my overactive brains. While I was lying in bed and waiting for sleep to take me, my brains were busy translating sentences from English to Malay. I then realised that my Malay is really not up to scratch. It is good enough to communicate with a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old but beyond that, I need to do some serious work. So, since I couldn't sleep, I decided to get up and write here.

6. We were supposed to go to Bangkok from 9-14 June. But who wants to go Bangkok when Central World (the place with the ultra ultra nice and clean toilets - I bet Farah's knees won't even turn a shade darker had she crawled in the toilet) is gone? Well, it's not just about Central World, of course.
So where are we going instead? Kuala Lumpur. We were there last December (when we had to change our destination from Langkawi) and again in February (that was planned a loong time ago). I won't say I'm sick of the place but because I've been there much too often in recent times, it has somewhat lost the charm it used to have over me.

7. Huda. One day, we went out for dinner. She was so stuffed, she couldn't have one more bite. On the way back, she saw some junk food (I think it was Kinder Bueno) and wanted us to buy it for her. Me, being the junk food police ("only one junk food a day") refused to buy it for her and soon she started whining about how hungry she was. All the way home, in the bus, on the way back from the bus stop to our home, the whining went on and on. Of course from excessive hunger, it escalated to extreme exhaustion. By the time we reached our door, she said she needed to pee. Run to the toilet and take off your pants in there, we instructed. But by this time, our little drama queen was beyond exhausted and was in danger of fainting from her parents-induced hunger, she started crawling, dragging her poor almost-lifeless body to the toilet.

8. My parents were expecting guests, one of whom is a Mr Green who used to teach  TheHusband when he was in secondary school. So we were at my parents'. The first few guests came and as I was putting Farah to sleep (and falling asleep myself), I wasn't part of the welcome party. Huda came into the room and I asked her if Mr Green was there. TheHusband came in at the same time and he said that Mr Green wasn't there yet. Huda immediately rebutted, "Dah! Dia dah datang. Dia yang pakai baju green dengan tudung green." (Yes. The person's here. The person is wearing a green blouse and a green tudung.)
(Dia = third-person pronoun for both males and females, no distinction between genders;
Tudung = a headscarf worn by Muslim women)

Huda is my Malay-speaking daughter who has no idea that 'Mr' is a salutation for men or that people can actually have colours as names.

9. I'm not sleepy but it's 1.24am and I must force myself to sleep because my kids have no respect for public holidays. Then again, they respect public holidays so much that they will wake up at 6am to greet the arrival of one.

So, goodbye for now. Til the next time when I try to translate English to Urdu or something.