Z

(This entry is not suitable for those who are easily offended by graphic images.)

Today, I went to a hypermart in JB.

Some preschool books were sold there and I decided to get some Malay books for Huda. Almost all her books are in English and if I'm serious about ensuring that she has a good command of her mother tongue, I better get some Malay books for her.

I randomly selected 2 books from the RM1.00 pile. At this juncture, I can hear everyone telling me that quality books do not come with a RM1 price tag. Yes, yes. Point noted with thanks. :p

This is one of the books I bought.


When I reached home, I flipped through the book and I saw:

Sleep & Talk

1. Huda and Sleep

I don't understand why it's so difficult for Huda to sleep. She resists it like it's her worst enemy. It's now 10.45pm and when I last checked, she's still not asleep yet. She went to bed today at about 9.30pm (a bit late; normally, it's 8.30pm). We did the usual winding down activity - drink milk, pee, brush her teeth, say her prayers. I generally don't read books before bedtime because she will have a million questions after that. Not a good idea when sleep is supposed to happen. Admittedly Sundays, today being one, are always extremely fun for her because she sees her gajillion cousins and play, play, quarrel, cry, play, play and play some more. So, she's still a bit high when she goes to bed.

But this problem is not a uniquely Sunday problem. It's almost a nightly occurrence. As I nurse Farah to sleep (bad habit, I know) and they share a bedroom, I will be with them when they both go to bed. And Huda will still be awake when I'm done nursing Farah. I'll leave the room and her eyes will still be wide open..

Sigh. What am I to do with this girl? It is not healthy for kids to sleep so late.


2. But, of course, there are endearing moments. While all of us lie down on the mattresses (the bed is merely a showpiece; H refuses to sleep on it, preferring instead to sleep with F on the mattress on the floor), Huda will kiss each of us on the cheek. Cute. And if I had not talked to her about her day in school, she will ask me to ask her about it.

3. Her Day

I like reading Dr James Dobson's Focus on the Family articles in Today newspaper. The advice given is highly practicable and relevant. The fact that he is from a religious organisation helps too because we share the same conservative values.

One of the things which I read some time ago is about how to engage your children in a conversation. Some may think that asking a child 'How was your day?' is enough and shows some kind of concern but that is not quite right. If you want to engage your child, you shouldn't ask him 'What did you learn in school today?' either. Unless your child is a genius and enjoys lessons and pays 200% attention when the teacher is teaching and laps up every single word that the teacher says. Congratulations to you if you have such a child.

But if you don't have such a child, you should ask specific questions such as: 'What did you play during recess?', 'What did you eat?', 'Who did you play with?'. Basically, specific questions about the fun part of school.

When the child is in a chatty mode, you can include the more academically-inclined questions such as, 'What did Teacher F talk about in class today?'/'Did Cikgu ask you to colour anything?'/'What questions did Cikgu ask you today?'/'Did you ask your teacher any questions?'.

So far Huda enjoys talking about her school day and she looks forward to the conversations that we have. I hope and pray that this goes on for the rest of our lives. Keeping the channels of communication open is extremely important in building a good parent-child relationship.

(Edit #1)
Time check: 11.15pm. Still not asleep. I know because when I stood at the doorway, she immediately pulled her hand from Farah. She has this habit of holding Farah's hands once I leave the room.

(Edit #2)
Time check: 12.50am. I went to bed around 11.30pm. 12.15am, Farah started crying. I went to the girls' room and Huda made one of those sudden movements which very obviously showed that she was not asleep. I stared at her and she continued to pretend to sleep. But occasionally, she opened her eyes a little bit just to check if I was still there.

I am pulling my hair in despair. Why why why? Insomnia is not hereditary, is it? And even if it is, it doesn't affect kids this young, does it? I don't think it's the Sunday high that's keeping her awake.

For me, on nights when I cannot fall asleep, I know very clearly why I can't. Most of the time, it's because I wasn't cerebrally challenged in the day for days on ends and the part of my brain that wasn't used much starts getting overactive when the rest of the body starts to wind down. Well, that's how I try to explain my sleeplessness. If that were true, I am going to try to exhaust her mentally each night by making her do sums, read more pages in the Iqra' book, learn spelling, recite and memorise verses from the Quran, do more sight words recognition... I hope this will work. I'll give it a go for a few nights and hopefully, she'll sleep earlier. Big sigh.

Remote Control Needs Reprogramming

One of the perks of having children is that they can function as your remote control.

For example, if you want someone to put your slippers in the kitchen, you can just get your children to do it. Why move when your children seem to have boundless energy and can move from the living room to the kitchen and back to the living room faster than you can get off the couch?

Lately, our dear Farah seems to have developed the ability to do whatever I want her to do. When I found a ladle which belongs to the kitchen among her toys, I asked her to put it back in the drawer in the kitchen. And that ladle went dutifully to the kitchen, into the said drawer. Amazing, right? So, I've been making use, erm, no, I mean, I've been training Farah to tidy up by directing her to put various things back to where they belong.

This afternoon, her pillow was in the living room. I asked her to put it on her bed, in her room. I didn't check.

Some time later, I went to the kitchen.

This is what I saw:


(For those who cannot appreciate blurry images taken by a phone, that's a pillow in a kitchen sink.)

Ikan Masak Kicap

Description:
This is for my poor sister who's living in some place in Kuala Lumpur. Plenty of good food there but sometimes I think the student budget she's on and a longing for home make her crave for some simple home-made recipe.

And so, this is a very simple Ikan Masak Kicap (Fish in Sweet Soya Sauce) recipe which will definitely work.

The fish can be replaced with eggs or chicken. You can also use beef but the cooking method for beef is slightly different.

Ingredients:
Fish - about 3-4 slices. Marinate this with turmeric powder and salt. Fry them. Set aside.
(Nowadays, I like kerisi. I have no idea what that is called in English. The only reason why I can recognise more fish nowadays is due to my mother; it is only now that I find out her marketing schedule and shadow her when she goes marketing.)

Pound together using mortar and pestle:
2 cloves garlic
Ginger - same amount as garlic
2 bird's eye chilli (cili padi)

1 large onion - sliced

100ml kicap manis (sweet soya sauce; NOT light or dark soya sauce and not the Indonesian type of kicap manis either because that's much too thick and sweet for this recipe. I love Habhal's brand of kicap manis.)
100ml water
1/2 tablespoon vinegar

1 red/green chili, sliced

Oil (use the oil from frying the fish)

Note: There is some agar-ation involved here. This is (fortunately for me) one of TheHusband's favourite dishes so I cook this frequently enough to not have to refer to a recipe to make this. You might want to give it a taste after Step 3 below and give it either more kicap manis or vinegar according to your taste. I assure you, it's quite difficult to screw up this dish.

Directions:
1. Heat oil in a wok.

2. Add pounded ingredients. Then add the onions.

3. Once the onions have become translucent, add the kicap manis, water and vinegar.

4. Add sliced chilli after the mixture has started to boil.

5. Add fish. Turn off the heat.

Voila! Another simple but very delicious dish ready!

An Insect Story

If you have a facebook account and you log on to it regularly enough, you will know that I have ants and cockroach issues.

Ants

I wonder if ants will die when sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.

I searched the good old internet for answers but couldn't find any! This is almost shocking because the internet should have answers for everything, yes? While I found questions posed by a number of people on this, the answers are mere suppositions.

I'm inclined to believe that they can be sucked up whole all the way into the dustbag. Insects are after all, extremely hardy and cockroaches can survive even the worst nuclear explosions (or so I thought I read somewhere). I feel like doing a research on this when I next change my vacuum cleaner's dustbag. But, the thought of having to rip apart a dustbag that costs $3.25 stopped me. Besides, I'm not sure if SPCA/PETA/Acres etc will approve of what I'm doing.

Cockroaches

There was that one day when I lost my sanity and caught a tiny little cockroach cavorting among my kitchen things with my bare hands. Now, that is a story which I'll tell my grandchildren over and over again because that's as close to a heroic act that I'll ever get to do. But, no, the story doesn't stop there. As I held it over the kitchen sink and was weighing my options as to how to end its life ~ I ruled out crushing it to death because my hands will smell of cockroach juice for at least 326 days ~ it bit me. Bit. The little thing bit me.

Of course I didn't know that it just bit me. My first thought was, I've been stung by a cockroach! But, I remember sketching out rough pictures of cockroaches for science lessons and it has feelers on the top of its hands and six legs. To the best of my limited scientific knowledge, it does not have a stinging device. So after using a piece of kitchen towel to crush it to death and washing my hands repeatedly with antiseptic soap, I trawled the net while frantically calling TheHusband to tell him what happened.

In that frantic state, I misread some of the stuff online. I thought I read that a species of cockroach stings its victim with its eggs and the victim would give birth to little cockroaches. TheHusband immediately said, "Chop off your hands now." A few minutes later, I realised that the creature that does that is another type of something-cockroach-larvae and it uses cockroaches as its victims.

After that, I went through some serious cleaning of the drawers in the kitchen. I cleaned out each drawer, pulled them all the way out, cleaned the insides of the cabinet walls, wiped them with antiseptic solution, bought Combat bait for roaches and now, I'm monitoring the drawers for cockroach droppings. It involves more emptying and cleaning of drawers but it has to be done.

Itsy Bitsy Spider

1. I now am beginning to appreciate having documented (not THAT religiously, but well, whatever little I captured here) Huda's major milestones here. At this age, she's beginning to ask what she was like when she was Farah's age, the things she said and did. With what little I have written down, it managed to jog my memory about what she was like.

2. Farah is now one feisty little girl. If Huda disturbs her or takes something that she was holding on to or refuses to give her something that she wants, she will fight back. She bites, pinches and scratches. Poor Huda has some battle scars to show for it. When Farah is scolded, she'll look at me with big round eyes and then start rolling all over the floor crying. (And I'll just leave her there)

3. Farah is always horsing around. When I read the papers in the morning, I will sit on the floor and spread the papers on it. I'll sit cross-legged on the floor, bend forward a little bit and start reading. Up to about 2 weeks ago, whenever I lay the papers on the floor, Farah will lie down on top of the papers. What I did to counter this problem was to lay out two sections at the same time so when she lay down on one section, I'd just turn around and read the other section. Now, she has found something more enjoyable to do. When I'm seated in my newspaper-reading position, she'll climb up my back as high as possible, then slide down. Then climb up again, and slide down. And up again and down again. Sometimes, she even has the audacity to ask me to stand up and walk all over the house with her on my back.

4. Farah has suddenly started talking a bit more. Pretty basic stuff (but not limited to):
"Nak zuzu" (Want milk, but instead of susu, she says zuzu) when she wants milk.
"Biyak!" she'll shout out when she passes motion and at the same time, she'll clutch her diapers.
"Nak loll ler" when she wants the stroller.

And, strangely too, she has a special name for my youngest brother. He is otherwise known as Pak Usu to all his nieces and nephews. Huda used to call him Tutu which later evolved into Tutumat. Farah calls him Bubu. I don't know what is it with these girls that they can't just be like all their cousins and call him what everyone else calls him.

5. Farah's also beginning to develop an obsession with cats. She will pull out all the books from the bookshelf and flip through them in search of pictures of cats. She managed to find quite a few cat pictures this way and I am always stuffing books back into the bookshelf.

6. Farah is now on partial formula. She drinks milk from a bottle once or twice at night. It's really ridiculous how she's still waking up at night. Now I know she's not waking up because of hunger. Before she sleeps, I give her about 5-6 ounces of formula milk. Then I nurse her to sleep. You would think that that should be enough to last her through the night. But noooooo. She''ll wake up around 11pm/12midnight. If I refuse to wake up, TheHusband will wake up and feed her another 4-5 ounces of formula milk. Around 3-4am, she'll wake up another time. And I'll nurse her because it's just madness to feed her another round of formula milk. Around 7-8am, she'll wake up, all bright and cheerful because she has a very full tummy and her diaper, if it hasn't already leaked (which is almost always the case), will be at the point of bursting.

7. A bit more about Huda's fasting attempt - It's not quite justifiable anymore to use the word 'attempt' because she has shown that she can fast for a full day for many days in a row. Generally, she has no problems fasting when she goes to school.

At her school, before food is served, all the children who are fasting are brought to another room. However, she doesn't like that because she ends up with the bigger boys and girls from K1 and K2. Most of her classmates are not fasting and even if they do, they break their fast by lunchtime. So, I asked the teacher if it was possible for her to stay with her class while her friends were eating and that's been the arrangement for her. According to her teacher, she seems completely unperturbed that her friends are eating and she's not. She plays with blocks and puzzles while waiting for them to finish eating. I'm super proud of that because it shows that she can resist temptations in school.

However, as I want to make fasting enjoyable for her and not something that she die-die must do, if she can't wake up in the morning for her pre-dawn meal (which was what happened yesterday), I'll tweak her fasting schedule. She'll eat her breakfast and lunch. Then, she'll start fasting from around noon to the time we break our fast. It seems like today, Sunday, will be the same. She slept really late today (past midnight) because we (irresponsible) parents that we are, brought the kids to Geylang Serai at 9pm. :p  I doubt that she'll be able to wake up at 5am to eat. So, modified fasting schedule it'll be.

8. This year's Hari Raya will not see me rushing all over Geylang in search of a baju kurung. Whew! Unfortunately, I'll have to pay another visit to Geylang because the seamstress to whom I sent my baju kurung closes shop at 5pm daily. I didn't manage to collect my baju kurung from her just now. Grrrr. I really do not enjoy having to make another trip there.

9. More on Geylang - I am so impressed by how clean the Geylang Serai hawker centre is!

10. Is anyone watching BBC Life (on Okto, Wednesdays, 10pm)? It's an amazing documentary! And I absolutely adore David Attenborough's narration. I am in awe of nature and the creatures that live in it. I learnt about the capuchin monkeys and how they use tools (!!!!!) to help them crack a nut. And the grebes - something like a duck but a very very distant relative, if they are even related at all - are such amazing birds. Their courting ritual (and they mate for life, mind you) will make you weep with joy. Then there's the six-plumed bird of paradise - where do I even begin talking about the wonder that it is.

Octopus - we've come to know Paul the psychic one. But do you know that a mother octopus makes the biggest sacrifice of all mothers? Once the mother octopus lays her eggs, she hides under some rocks and she takes care of the eggs, never leaving her den, not even for food. She caresses her eggs from time to time and when the eggs start to hatch (is that what you call it 'cos it seems like eggs hatching is such a bird-like description?), she'll blow the little octopus out of the den and then she dies. So sad, right?

So if you've missed BBC Life all this while, now is a good time to start watching. I think there are only 2 episodes left. Episode 9 next week is about plants. I'm not sure how exciting an episode about plants can be. I hope it won't disappoint anyone who's watching it for the first time.

So there. Another snapshot of our lives. :D

Cream of Mushroom Soup

Description:
This is another easy recipe. If you believe in making your own chicken stock (and I do because I don't like not knowing what really goes into those little cubes of stock), then that will be the most laborious of all tasks in this recipe.

Ingredients:
500g fresh button mushrooms, sliced (I also remove the stalk/stem of the mushrooms)
2 tsp olive oil
1/2 tbsp butter
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 cup chicken stock (that's 250ml)
4 stalks fresh coriander leaves, chopped
1/2 cup cream
1/2 cup water

Directions:
1. Marinate mushrooms with olive oil for about 10 minutes.
2. Melt butter and saute garlic.
3. Add mushrooms and saute for about 5 minutes. Remove from heat.
4. Combine mushrooms above and chicken stock and puree for about 5 minutes.
(This calls for a blender. What I do is, I just leave the mushrooms in the pot, add the chicken stock to it, then use a hand blender to puree everything. It's much neater that way and less messy. And, whatever blender you use, make sure it's not one that you use for chillies and other hot stuff. I have 2 blenders - one traditional blender for chillies/onions etc and one hand blender for making kids' food and ang-moh recipes like this.)
5. Pour everything back into the pot (if you were using a traditional blender. Otherwise just turn the heat on again.)
6. Add water and cream. Bring mixture to a boil for about 10 minutes. You migh need to add some salt if you were using

Szechuan Black Pepper Prawns

Description:
Hahaa! I managed to start a recipe tab. I didn't realise it's so simple!

Now, it may seem inconceivable that I, the soooo-not-a-cook-SAHM, am starting a recipe section. But, well, SAHMs, even temporary ones, must justify their staying at home with occasional visits to the kitchen. And while I am nowhere near moderately-good, I can (with the help of good cookbooks and my mother and the grace of God) come up with something edible for the family. When I'm successful in the kitchen, I'd like to share the recipes with whoever who's interested. Beginning cooks might find this useful because I only share recipes that work here.

If you are a beginner, you might want to take note that in cookbook (and in here), when they say 1 tablespoon, they mean 15ml. Definitely not the spoon you use to eat your rice. And a cup is 250ml. So, if I say a cup of oil is needed to prepare that sambal tumis, I'm not kidding. You need an outrageous amount of oil to make your sambal tumis palatable.

This is one heck of a simple recipe. The most difficult part of this recipe is preparing the prawns. Sheng Siong is now my favourite place to get prawns. They have prawns which are very much alive moving merrily in tanks. And when I bring them home, they are still wriggling in the plastic bag. :p

(If you have little kids at home who don't eat spicy food, you might want to marinate a few of the prawns with salt and black pepper, poke a satay stick through each prawn so that it remains straight, then pop them in the toaster oven for a couple of minutes til they are cooked.)

Ingredients:
500g prawns

1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tbsp butter

A:
1 large onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, sliced finely
10g dried chillies, soaked in warm water until they are ready to be used

B:
1 red capsicum, cubed
1 green capsicum, cubed

C:
1 tbsp black pepper sauce
1 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tsp dark soya sauce
1 tbsp marmalade jam*

(I don't have marmalade jam and I don't fancy buying a bottle of it just for this purpose. So I use the only jam I have - strawberry jam. It still works. But if I had wanted the tanginess of the marmalade jam, I suppose I could have squeezed some lime juice into the sauce.)

Directions:
1. Prepare prawns by removing the shells and deveining them but leave the heads and tails intact.
2. Heat olive oil. Add butter.
3. Add Group A for 2 minutes.
4. Add Group B for 3 minutes on high heat.
5. Add C and prawns for about 10 minutes or until prawns are cooked, taking care not to overcook the prawns because overcooked prawns are sooooo not nice.

Ta-dah! Ready to eat!

Ramadan

1. This is Huda's first real attempt at fasting.

On Days 1, 2 and 3, she went to school. Day 1 saw her refraining from food the entire day. But she took one sip of water from her water bottle in school. Still we were extremely proud of her. 6pm, she saw Farah eating and asked for some rice. So, I distracted her with some TV. Ah, yes. It's somewhat justifiable to break the no-TV-rule at 6pm in the month of Ramadan.

She broke her fast the moment I put her rice in front of her, about 30 seconds before Maghrib. :p

On Day 2, I sent her to school without her water bottle. When I picked her up, she was so thirsty. So I gave her a glass of water when we reached home of which she only took a sip.

She was about to throw a tantrum over something but I told her that people who are fasting must refrain from getting angry. She smiled and behaved again.

She ate at Maghrib. This time, I only put her plate of rice in front of her at exactly Maghrib so Day 1's incident won't be repeated.

Day 3, she woke up for sahur as always. It's not so difficut to rouse her at 5am in the morning. The trick is to gently wake her up and promise her her favourite food for now - eggs. :D But at school, she had some porridge for lunch and Milo and biscuits during her teabreak. It's okay, I suppose. She needs an occasional break from fasting. After all, for now, we are just training her. It's not compulsory for her to fast at all.

Day 4, Saturday. It's the weekend. She doesn't go to school on Saturdays and we're afraid that not being meaningfully occupied will make her think of food. But we were in for a big surprise. She was such a trooper! She spent the morning playing with Farah and by 3pm, she took an afternoon nap all the way til 5.30pm. Then, it was time to go to her paternal grandma's house. And by the time we made our way there, it was time to break our fast. That was such an amazing day. She didn't whine one bit!

Day 5. Today. Sunday. We're going to her maternal grandparents' home where she'll meet all her cousins. We'll be there by early afternoon and knowing how they play, I fear that she will over-exert herself and will start asking for water especially when she sees the younger cousins taking huge gulps of water from their bottles. Well, we'll see. I hope she'll be as strong today as she was yesterday. And even if she can't make it, we'll still be proud of her accomplishments so far. :D

2. Well, this next it has nothing to do with the fasting month. But since I'm spending some time writing here, I might as well include a little tidbit about Farah. Farah pronounces the words 'dog' and 'horse' in the funniest way! Both words are said with a very pronounced 'ou' sound ('ou' as in bow and arrow) and her lips would be in a full pout as she says it. Priceless!

Gotta go now. My computer time is up. :p

Bountiless

I recently renewed my acquaintance with S and Z, a married couple. 

They have been trying for a kid for some seven years without success.

Through the wife, I learnt that they have tried all sorts of procedures but the result is always negative. The most recent negative result they got was just two weeks ago.

I cannot even begin to imagine the pain they go through.

When I bumped into them a few days ago, the kids were with me. Although we were all jokey and smiley, I knew that there's suffering under those smiles. The pain and longing in the eyes of the wife were just too clear when she looked at Huda and Farah.

I can't do anything about their situation. I can't help them.  All I can do is pray that their wish will be granted. But if it's not meant to be, then I pray that they'll both be happy together and that they'll be granted the wisdom to accept that it will just be the both of them forever. Amin.

Woody

1. Starhub is showing all channels for free during this long weekend and while channel surfing, I found myself stuck on the Woody Woodpecker show on Cartoon Network. It is so very very different from the Woody Woodpecker I used to catch when I was younger. I don't like the new one. I'm just leaving the cartoon on now so that I can catch the woodpecker pecking at a tree at the end of the show. I hope they still have that at least.

(Eventually I couldn't bear watching this show and changed the channel. How can there be aliens in Woody Woodpecker?!)

2. Two years ago or so, we decided to start hunting for a place much much nearer my mother's. We told ourselves that it is to make it convenient for us when we have to drop the kids off at my mom's when I go back to work. But, honestly, we are just itching for a bigger space and this time, with better ideas on how to do up the flat. A 5-room flat will do just fine. As very ngeow people, we want only specific units in specific blocks. We want an excellent view from all windows and we want it to be on a high floor. And of course, being so particular about everything, we have yet to find our unit.

When we started our search, my sister was not at all interested in moving out of her seaview home. But now, renovations in her new flat is almost complete and she's moving in by next week.

A few weeks after she made an offer for the flat, the 5-room flat next to hers was up for sale. The block is near my mother's house but it wasn't one of our shortlisted blocks. The view from the back is that of other people's kitchens. The view from the front is not that bad. But the owners were asking for an unreasonable amount for the cash-over-valuation component. I refused to budge from the amount which we have agreed upon from the very beginning. And so the flat slipped from our fingers.

Now, it seems like the person who made the offer is having some problems fulfilling his end of the bargain and the flat might be available again.

Well, I'm pretty fatalistic about things sometimes. I believe that if it's meant to be, it's meant to be. So if that flat is meant to be ours, it will be ours with us offering what I think is a reasonable amount of cov. We'll see.

3. I think Wuthering Heights is a terribly depressing story.

And now, on to the kids.

4. HELP! Farah is starting on her Terrible Twos six months too early! She's now very much into wailing and rolling all over the floor whenever something displeases Her Royal Highness. Sometimes I don't even know what Her Royal Highness wants. I'm beginning to think that Her Royal Highness is just doing this rolling-on-the-floor-wailing to expend her energy.

I'm sure someone must have snapped my picture and sent it to STOMP this morning. We were outside NTUC supermarket and my beloved Farah was wailing at the top of her lungs. Obviously I'm not entering the supermarket where her wailings will be amplified so I waited outside while TheHusband made a quick dash through the supermarket.

I can just imagine what the contributor will write on STOMP - Young* (possibly unwed) mother let her baby cry and cry and did absolutely nothing to stop the crying baby.

On a side note, I think I should send her to a gymnastics class where she can roll around as much as she wants. Or perhaps, a popiah-making class.

(*Clarification: I'm not trying to hao lian about my youthful looks. Up close, the fine lines under my eyes and my old aged wrinkly hands will reveal my true age. But from a distance, the sum total of my features make me look younger.)

May June July '10

Cold Storage Kids' Run 2010

Some of the things we did in the presence of the camera in the last three months. And there were also many things done without the camera present.