Just......saying........

Email, SMS, Whatsapp, Skype messages. They do save time and facilitate our communications.

But sometimes, having a good face-to-face chat is still best.

Words and tone do get misconstrued in a non-verbal, purely written environment.

Just saying.

Spree

Just did a self-spree on Qoo10 again. To feed my terrarium hobby....
Another $52 gone haha. ;) This time round it was to stock up on vessels (bought 5 of them) and figurines (erm...almost uncountable lol).

I've been keeping track and I've spent $220 so far in the last 4 months for my terrarium and gardening pursuits, including today's purchase.

After today's purchase, I suddenly realised....I'm running out of space for my terrariums..
Gave 1 away. 2 are on my office desk and 1 open air succulent terrarium is still at home as I'm closely monitoring how it's faring (since it's my first time doing something like that). I also have a mini terrium of 2 growing marimo balls...this one is sitting unceremoniously in my kitchen. No choice, I don't have any other ledge/space/platform to put it at where the kids can't reach!

With 5 new vessels on the way....I need to figure out where to put them when I'm done doing them up...

Planning to make 1 to be put at my parents' place. I think they lack greenery in their house haha.

May I find time to do up these little garden jars!

Pray Tell

Sometimes I do wonder how I manage to tahan a working day when all I had the night before was roughly 6 or 7 hours of intermittent sleep, which was interrupted a good 5 times in between by one or both the kids.

Yep, happened last night again.

Each interruption took anywhere between 10 to 30mins to revolve. So actually on the whole I think I only slept 4 hours yesterday?

Pray tell, this desperate Mama is wondering how to get her kids to sleep properly...................:(

MC on 23 Aug

Was on MC yesterday. Had a bad tummy with cramps and diarrhoea and some nausea.
Accompanied K to watch a movie in the morning.  (Yes, I know, I was supposed to be resting...sigh)

Went home thereafter, had lunch and started packing the goodie bags for the girls' birthday celebrations in school in the coming 1-1.5mths...

Feels nice to do mundane and mechanical stuff. No need that much brain power.

Stuff for Nadya's classmates

Stuff for both Nadya's and Alyssa's classmates.... 

Stuff for Alyssa's classmates.....

Hokkien baby

I'm happy that Nadya is taking an interest in Hokkien...:)

She has been repeating "ey sai" and "buay sai" on and off for the last week or so haha. It means "can" and "cannot" in Hokkien.

She also knows "bang sai", "pi sai" and "chau"...erm..."to shit", "nose wax" and "smelly" respectively. Interestingly, most of these hokkien words that she knows all end with "sai"....lol...

Here's to more Hokkien in the future! While my kids should be strong in English and proficient in Mandarin, I do hope that they will be able to speak Hokkien and Malay like me too.

I am not an expert in Hokkien and can only hold simple conversations using it but I think dialects rock! And we should not let them die off....

I didn't know!

On a lighter note, I never realised that some of the National Day/patriotic/community songs are actually composed wayyyyy back in the 1960s! gosh...

Singapura, Sunny Island - 1962
Munnaeru Vaalibaa - 1966
Singapore Town - 1967
5 Stars Arising  -1969

Being songs that I grew up with, I always thought the songs were composed and written during my era i.e. the 80s.....I just realised how wrong I am!

In fact, when Singapura Sunny Island was first released, my mum was only 12 years old!
Wow, that really puts things into prespective haha.

累了

There are days when all I want to do is to lay down and sleep. Or veg out and let my mind do mindless stuff.

Today is one of those days. And these days are increasing in numbers....

My body is in office now. But my mind is floating around somewhere. I am tired. Quite tired. I cannot concentrate. My eyes are dry and itchy today. My neck is aching, as always.

The constant interruptions each night is wearing my patience thin, and wearing me out somewhat...I wake once when Nadya wants to go to the toilet and Alyssa has recently started waking at least 4 times during the night.

I don't know what to do except to trudge on mindlessly.....
Jiayou Michelle. Jiayou.

Last night

Slept 2 hours.
And then kept awake by an extremely cranky Alyssa for another 2 hours.
And then slept for a final 2.5hours.

That makes it 4.5hours of sleep in total.

All because of a damn plaster and the rashes it caused Alyssa, and her stubborn refusal to remove it, and her shrieking when I finally yanked it off her at 3am in the morning, and her subsequent meltdown, and her kicking, and .....you get the drift....

Panda eyes are totally in their element today. Dark and obvious.

I took essence of chicken this morning just so I could have more energy for work today....

Praying for a good night's sleep tonight.
Fingers crossed big time. Toes too.

Ti-gong boh pi....

FML Moment

The other day, I had an ulcer in my mouth. Near my front right incisor.
It started out small and grew larger over the course of 2-3 days. :(

And during that period of time, I woke one morning to find I had a pimple on my face. Near the spot where the ulcer was, just that the pimple was on the outside of the face and the ulcer was inside.

But both were at the same spot or almost at the same spot.

It was a FML moment lol. That area felt so sore for those 2 days....

Full Fool!

We were having breakfast on Sunday morning.

Nadya: Dada, you fool!
Me: ????!!!!!!

I was shocked that she knew this phrase. And then I realised later....
Oh...my bad. She actually meant "Dada, you full?" as in....Are you full from the food yet?

LOL....

..........

Why do I allow myself to always end up doing things that is against my better judgement as a mother? 

Frustrating. 

I don’t seem to learn or am I too much of a doormat? 

Time check: 1am. Just showered after Alyssa puked on me. Why did she puke? Because we force-fed her some medication that was supposed to help her with stomach pain. She’d been complaining of tummyache since before she slept and had woken up at least 2-3 times since 915pm. 

I’m sorry sayang...for having done that to you. I’m really sorry. 

Let Go, Let's Go

I recently attended a training on Becoming the CEO of Your Work and Life.

One of the running themes in the course was "letting go".

Let go of your emotional baggage.
Let go of things past.
Let go of unhappy incidents.
Let go of toxic relationships.
Let go of bad emotions.

And the list goes on.

For they cannot be undone.
And keeping them in your heart or mind will just gnaw away at you little by little.

Let go and the journey forward will be lighter and brighter.

I do have some things that I need to let go of.
I should learn to let go and when I learn how to do that better....I can then shout Let's Go!

Music

Meditation music accompanied me at work today. I have a particular 6-hour long Mv that I listen to from Youtube and it's by YellowBrickCinema.

Also making it on the list today are Tanya Chua, Wang Lee Hom, Beyond, Wang Feng and popular OSTs like Xia Hu's 那些年 and Hebe Tien's 小幸运....

Giving Kpop a rest today and going back to my Chinese stuff...afterall, I spent a good 15 years "chasing" Chinese pop...:)

Chronology

24 July 2011. 
K and I were having dinner at The Cliff in Sentosa. He popped the question. It was partly a surprise and partly not. Call it a woman's 6th sense. You just know when the atmosphere's a little different from usual. I said yes.

8 October 2011. 
Our ROM at True Blue Cuisine! I think we pulled it off nicely in just 2 months. From signing up a wedding studio and package, to finding a venue for our ROM, to engaging the Justice of Peace and attending a Love Language and counselling session with him, to doing our ROM dress fitting and bouquet....I was very happy that Granny was present at the ROM and that she was able to indulge in her favourite Peranakan dishes.

22 July 2012. 
Our Chinese wedding! Weeks and months of  preps. Budgeting, photoshoots, trial make-up sessions, dress fitting sessions, entourage planning, schedule planning, table and invitation planning, etc...K with his band of brothers...me with my band of sisters (and my good male buddy being a sister wannabe haha)...our families and friends and colleagues. Dinner was at the Four Seasons!


How time flies. It's been 7 years after our ROM and 6 years after our Chinese wedding. And in that span of time we went from a unit of 2 to a family of 4. It's also been 9.5 years since we first got together.

Thank you sayang, for being there with me and for me over the years. Of course it's not been entirely smooth-sailing and there are the usual ups and downs....but I'm just glad that it's you I'm journeying with. Like what we told each other a long time ago....我们手牵手一起走....:) To many more years ahead!

That feeling

That you want to do more.
That you can do more.
That you should do more.

To contribute and help others.
To give back to society.
To grow and develop yourself.

Dream

I had an awesome dream last night. Well, sort of. It was equal parts exciting and sinister.
It ended prematurely though...to my dismay. All because Alyssa woke me up. Bah.

I dreamt that for some reason or another, Baekhyun (of EXO) started woo-ing me. Oh imagine the euphoria I had in the dream! Mega Kpop star woo-ing the insignificant me leh! I was over the moon!

For the sinister portion....because Baekhyun and I ended up being together, one of his crazed fans went apeshit on me and started stalking me and trying to harm me.

She was chasing me in slow-mo through an abandoned carpark which strangely still had cars parked in some lots, though they were all old, broken or rusted.

Therein lies the commonality of alot of my dreams...I'm always on the run or trying to escape a place. "That place" is usually a school though from time to time it changes to something else. In this case, it was an abandoned carpark. And invariably, all these places that appear in my dreams where I'm running away or trying to escape, would have complicated architectural structures. Lots of staircases, lift landings, lifts, mezzanines, pillars, blind corners, etc. Maybe my sub-consciousness is trying to be a horror movie producer.

Sinister stuff aside...Baekhyun! One of the cuties from EXO. Erm...he is rather young though. I'd be deemed a cradle snatcher if I were really with him lol. He's a good 12 years younger than me and has a great voice. Wonder how he ended up in my dream though. I've not been listening to their songs recently and he's not my main bias too.

We were on a sweet outing to someplace nice and romantic...I'm not sure how we communicated though. He was speaking to me in Korean but somehow I understood and could converse with him as well...We were going off to another place...

And then "Mama!! Mama!!"

Alyssa just had to.

Oh well.

Bah. Who will it be tonight? D.O.? Chanyeol? Lay? RM?

p/s: To my darling K, I still love you much ok...:)

Of Starts and Stops

My walking journey (which I hope to lead up to a jogging routine) hasn't been very smooth at all since the start of the year....

There would be a few sessions where I would do ok and I could have the time and chance to go for walks. And then I'd either fall ill or one of the girls would fall ill and my routine would get haywire.

So it's been a start, stop, start, stop jerky effort since the start of the year. And once you stop, your stamina (or whatever meagre amount left of it) goes back to zilch again and you need effort to get your engine and motivation going again...

Hope it all works out well in the end....
Fingers crossed.

Need. To. Get. It. Going.

DEFTT

Desperate, Exasperated, Frustrated, Tired and....Tired....

Felt like crying last night but I had no tears...

Alyssa woke every hour from 1130pm till 530am. Each time she woke, she had to be placated by me carrying her. By the time I settled her down to sleep again, or gave her her medication, it would be anywhere between 10-30mins gone. And around 45mins to an hour later she'd wake again.

It's been like this since Saturday. Her best stretch was maybe a 2-hour stretch on one of the nights.

That's worse then a newborn's schedule.

Back to work today after 2 days of medical leave. Zombiefied.
Discovered I was running a slight temperature while on the way to work.
Popped panadol and am trying to get some things done. May head home thereafter to work from home. See how it goes.....

In the meantime, Alyssa...please get well soon and quickly...
Nadya, please get well soon too....

Michelle, jiayou....

rough week so far

Nadya vomitted once last Friday night but had no fever. PD said she had stomach flu. She then started having fever on Monday night and peaked at 39C on Tuesday evening.

Alyssa started having fever on Sat afternoon and vomitted twice in the evening. Her fever went quite high and peaked at 39.3C. It only broke the 38C mark on Tuesday afternoon. She is extremely cranky but I’m glad the fever is on a downtrend. 

As for myself, I vomitted 4-5 times on Monday night. LS-ed 3-4 times as well. The retching and expelling left me giddy, breathless, queasy and weak. I crashed for an hour from 10-11pm and felt much better thereafter though still queasy. Managed to still look after both girls that night. On 2 days’ MC for Tues and Wed.

Every night since Sat night has been rough. That makes it 4 nights already. Both girls take turns waking up, either due to tummy aches or wanting to drink milk (because they didn’t eat anything during the day), or wanting to pee or be carried, or because of a heavily stuffed nose, or due to a dream, or.....just because. On average, I wake every hour each night. Feeling quite tired zapped out by now. Though I’m thankful I managed to nap for 3.5hrs yesterday afternoon. (We’d left both girls with the inlaws.) 

Also...the car is at the workshop and seems like a lot needs to be done.

K’s aunt was warded yesterday due to a mild stroke. 

And my office laptop refused to boot up since last night so I can’t clear some of the work that I’d been intending to. 

Breathe in, breathe out. 

Sigh...

Of Fights and Squabbles and Tears and Tantrums and....Sisters

The 2 girls have been gong at each other for the past 2-3 nights before bedtime. I'd finish reading a book and leave the room to make their bedtime milk. It'll be approximately 2-3minutes later when I'd hear a cry or a shriek or a shout. 

Usually Nadya would come sobbing out of the room and telling/complaining to me about what Alyssa had done. And, usually it'll be that Alyssa took a swipe at her head or pinched her arm or scratched her somewhere. Sometimes the scratches really do draw blood. 

Sometimes though, after probing, being the honest girl that she is, Nadya would admit that she was the one who started the fracas. Alyssa, whether guilty or not, whether she's the one who started it or not, would always be quietly sitting or standing in the room, sulking and glaring at Nadya, while Nadya tells me the story of what happened. 

I'd make the girls sit down and apologise to each other for taking swipes at one other. And then I'd have to talk to the one who started the whole thing. And then if there was someone who didn't want to apologise, I'd have to spend more time and effort to wait it out or explain more, depending on the situation. (Last night, Alyssa refused to apologise and fussed/cried/sulked for more than 15mins before finally saying sorry to Nadya quite loudly.)

And then finally I'd go on a spiel about how they are sisters, how they should take care of and love each other, etc. They then hug each other, giggle and make up.

Only to have to repeat the whole thing again the following night. And sometimes Alyssa hits Nadya less than 10mins after they hug and make up. 

SIGH.

Let's see what happens tonight.