Breaking in the new house

We moved. Finally. And no, I haven't delivered yet. I've got 3 weeks left and at the rate I've been trying to reorganize this house, I won't be surprised if I go in next week.

Thank God for international packers. They take everything out and remove all flattened boxes and packaging before they leave. Bad news is that they shove everything everywhere. So it's been like hunt-and-seek since the move. Can't find 90% of our things at first go, nor on the second either. The anal-retentive streak in me is also adamant that I do some reorganizing, no matter how little, each day. So it's an uphill task, but damn if I sit by and let it fester. So no, I haven't been relaxing much, but instead am on my feet more than I should be.

I guess it'll be slow blogging from here on, if at all. I get too exhausted and I haven't even swung by most of the blogs I typically visit. Too much to catch up on to read.

Today, had a bit of a reality jolt from my doctor. Time to actually start thinking about this baby instead of everything else. Poor baby – hasn't gotten much of my attention since last November. Perhaps these last weeks should be his.

Random musings on a warm evening….

My mom-in-law is treasuring every last second she can get with her grand-daughter. She will be heading home this weekend after the long stay with us. We are truly blessed to be (a) back in Hong Kong which is only three and a half hours from Singapore; (b) healthy parents who don't mind a change of scenery once a while for the sake of grandchildren. My dad comes next to help me around our new place for a short while and then he returns to pass the baton to my mom. She comes for the long haul to basically help with the new one and Sara, feed me copious amounts of confinement food and feed us as a family with home cooking. She'll also train our new helper who, God-willing, will show up before I pop.

It's moments like these that make me want to go home. To where our families are. Family is such a blessing. I wish Sara could have her aunts, uncles and cousins all around her on weekends, rather than squatting out here with such a fluid group of friends. The foreign community is really always changing – people come and go all the time and very often, with so little notice too. We've been quite lucky in this particular move – we have friends here and so many who have recently started families. All the same, changes happen all the time and just as you're getting comfortable, someone is bound to up and go again.

I recently had a conversation with a girlfriend who delivered a little while ago. She is still on maternity leave, but wants to return to work. Unlike unambitious and lazy me, she actually enjoys her job and loves the challenge of her work. I think it's great, but she is now having severe anxiety over the childcare arrangements. She, like me, has no extended family here and has no one she can trust to leave her child with. She was initially prepared to leave her daughter with a domestic helper, but as her maternity leave draws to an end, she is becoming unsure of her choice. It is tough to be a woman sometimes. If she returns to work, some would say she should stay home since she can well afford to. If she chooses to stay at home, others would say she has taken a step back for womankind – everyone's juggling career and family these days. There doesn't seem to be a "right" choice for her to make.

I suppose I have been lucky in this aspect. Danny has afforded me the luxury to make the choice I have – to stay home to care for our family – and I have no ambitions about having a high flying career. Some of my old colleagues who I met recently since returning to Hong Kong said they were surprised – they thought I was more of a go-getter than that. Maybe I did project that impression while I was working, but we all know that to move up the corporate ladder (i.e. get paid), you have to show some amount of ambition. The truth, as Danny too has always known, is that I'm much happier in our current situation, making small but significant differences to our family life, rather than having it out with the big corporate pow-wows. Sure, the money would've been nice, but at the expense of missing out on your children's big moments? Not for me, if we could afford it.

I used to feel a little bad about having made the decision I did about quitting upon Sara's arrival. Everyone kept saying what it pity it was. These days, however, I feel no remorse whatsoever. I don't even vaguely feel intimidated by women who choose to pursue high flying careers. I say kudos to them and I admire them for their drive, but I don't feel any less as a person. I think taking a step back and finding your own significance in other things outside a career takes confidence. Of course, I am assuming here money isn't an issue, which isn't always the case. Staying home isn't for everyone and looking after children is certainly not something every woman can tolerate. In fact, I remember reading an interview with Felicity Huffmann (Desparate Housewives, Transamerica) and how she was criticized for not saying motherhood was so wonderful and perfect. It isn't for many women and just as women like me shouldn't be forced into a mould that says we should juggle career and family, women like her and my friend shouldn't be forced into a mould that says motherhood is the single most fulfilling thing you can do in your lifetime.

Anyway, I suppose I don't have much of a conclusion here to make, other than to air some of the recent thoughts that have occupied my head. I have been thinking of things I'd like to do once our lives stabilize again after the arrival of the new baby, but figure I have plenty of time to figure it out. My life is mostly about our family, but I still want that slice for myself. Guess I'll chew on that on the many hours of breastfeeding ahead.

Macau

No, I haven't delivered yet. And no, we haven't moved yet. Nothing's happened yet. YET. Can you beat that? The good news is that we finally move. In a matter of days. Yay. The lack of blogging is mostly because I've been dog-tired, largely due to poor sleep at night. I don't recall struggling this much with the first pregnancy, but hey, everyone does say each pregnancy is different.

We went to Macau over the weekend, mostly just to take my mom-in-law out of Central in Hong Kong for a change of scenery. She'd never been and we haven't been back in three years. Now, it's not to say that Macau is worth going back to, but for a quick escape, it's not too bad. It's a little like stepping back in time because it is less developed than Hong Kong, except this time around, it seems that someone hit the fastforward button while we were away. Suddenly there are more bridges connecting Macau and its outlying islands. Suddenly, instead of two outlying islands, the land between has been reclaimed and now it's just one big island. Suddenly, there's a Fisherman's Wharf. Nothing like the one in San Francisco, but designed to be a tourist trap just the same. Suddenly, we've got a building boom everywhere. Construction going on everywhere. New casinos, condominiums, office buildings, all popping up everywhere.

We didn't do the casino rounds, not with me and Sara, of course. We just strolled through historic Macau, which hasn't changed from the last time we were there. Had a bit of Macanese food (which I don't really like, but hey, that's what people do there). Had a bit of a horrifying experience after indulging in my favourite Macanese dessert – double-skin boiled milk. Think of it like sweet yoghurt. The little joint we ate at served other food too, but this was their specialty. Being heavily pregnant and having a compressed bladder the size of a teaspoon, I of course had to visit their unsanitary loo. That, my friends, wasn't the horrifying part. What was horrifying was the walk through the kitchen to get to the loo. The food preparation was astonishingly unhygenic. Or more like, un-astonishingly unhygenic. Better yet, while I waited for the person before me to get out of the loo, a kitchen hand was chopping raw liver on the big wet chopping board on the floor just outside the loo. She later choppped some melon there too and some of the melon fell off the board onto the wet floor. I couldn't help but stare in mortification. After using the loo, on my walk out, I noticed another lady scooping milk from a huge tin which sat next to burning hob that had something deep frying in the pan. The milk was being used to make a fruit milkshake, judging from the blender she was scooping the milk into. My eyes almost rolled – not only was the milk not kept in refridgerated conditions, it was sitting next to a hot frying pan?? After that, we were a little more judicious about choosing where we would eat.

Danny and his mom had a great time in the evening inspecting the little bit of Las Vegas that had recently opened up in Macau. The Sands is now the most popular casino and after their trip there, Danny explained it's little wonder all the other casinos from Vegas are trying to get their feet in too. For starters, there were thousands – THOUSANDS – of people milling about. The casino was crawling with people and most of them Chinese. In fact, 99.9% Chinese, from Danny's estimation. It sure looks like there are a lot of rich Chinese out there ready to gamble. Danny and his mom didn't gamble themselves, but instead had a field day watching and inspecting the crowd at the different tables. It appears the games played there are very local, not the stuff you'd see in Vegas itself. All the same, it looks like The Sands is making good money in Macau and given the many constructions sites, it seems that many other foreign casinos are hoping to cash in too.

It was nice to get out for the weekend, but now it's time for us to battle down the hatches and countdown to the new arrival. First we get the moving out of the way and then we wait.