What is the point…

… of bringing the children to mass? Or putting them on an airplane for a holiday?

The two things seem different, but really aren’t. Not to me anyway. I got a few dirty looks today as I struggled with S and N at mass today. D had something on and couldn’t come, and while my mom-in-law was with me, the two decided that my lap was the only thing they wanted to sit on. They fidgeted, they talked none too softly, they almost fought several times, and they spent a good chunk of the hour attempting to edge each other off my lap. I was attempting to engage them in the mass, but fat lot of good that did – N’s too young to care and S too concerned about her brother getting the upper hand.

There is a crying room at the back of the church hall for people with babes-in-arms. I could’ve chosen to sit in there, away from the congregation proper, and have my children bother no one but other parents with equally fidgety children. But I didn’t. Because I think my children are old enough to learn how to sit through mass in a reasonably quiet manner. This is what I object to while sitting in the crying room. It’s meant for babies who cry. Not older children who can be told to sit down and listen. N may be a little young, but he has managed several times to sit through mass without being too embarassing and he is old enough to start learning. S is definitely old enough to know what should be done during this hour. This is why I appear to be “inconsiderate” in having my children sit with everyone else.

I am apologetic when they make noise or fidget too much, but really, this is something they must learn – to sit through an hour-long mass in relative silence. Yes, I don’t get to hear much of the mass because I have to keep an eye on them and get them to behave and yes, it is embarassing, but we can’t be sitting in the crying room till they are ten. I bring my children to church for us as a family and for God, not simply to annoy the people around me. I do get mad with the dirty looks, although I am patient with it – prior to having kids, I was one to throw dirty looks too. Parents around me are generally sympathetic, but today,  I got really annoyed when this couple in front of me turned round and told N to shush. They obviously have no children and I felt like telling them off. But I stopped – I used to be like that too. I reckon they think I should be sitting in the crying room. I then decided that they’ll figure it all out like I did – when they have children of their own.

I take a similar stand with taking children onto an airplane. Young children, especially babies, are very unpredictable to travel with. Much worse than the holiday itself is the trip there and back. Planes are notoriously difficult for babies and toddlers and even more so for parents. And yet, D and I have dragged our children on flights many many times now. The single biggest reason for doing so, in S’s case, was because we simply didn’t live at home. She needed to get onto a seven-and-a-half-hour flight just to come back to Singapore. She needed to travel with us while we globetrotted for D’s job. There simply wasn’t any other option. 

Since moving closer to home and then later to home itself, however, it’s largely been a choice of wanting to go on holiday. Once you’re past that mental hurdle of dragging a baby onto the plane, there’s nothing that really phases you about travelling with children. D and I share the belief that we are a family, and hence, we do things as a family, including holidays. So we are sorry, in theory, about the noise we make when we’re on the plane, about the screaming, the kicking, the whining, the continual need to go to the loo and to walk up and down the aisles, to peep at others while they sleep and to fidget and whine continuously while waiting for take-off.

But we aren’t going to stop it – our holidays are for the family, and not just for adults. We have made the choice to not put our lives on hold while waiting for our children to grow up. And we have made the choice to have our children as part of our lives in as many aspects as we can, instead of leaving them with others when they inconvenience us.

These are all very personal decisions and I accept that everyone has their own take on them. I don’t dispute others in their choices – I just hope others can be tolerant enough to not dispute ours.

The Miseducation of Sarah Palin

Once again, I must emphasize I care little about American politics, but once again, I saw read something today which I have to say something about.

Sarah Palin is getting her crash course in international diplomacy, meeting heads of states and other key foreign diplomats, and foreign policy makers, current and former, this week. You could say all you want about a potential leader of a powerful nation (remember McCain’s odds of croaking in the next four years) who has never really stepped off American soil and can claim to know Russia just because she sees it from her home (I’m not sure how far this is really true she said it). But when the new Pakistani president can only remark about how “gorgeous” she is in person and how he’d really like to hug her rather than just shake her hand, we do wonder exactly how seriously world leaders are taking this woman.

I should be so totally for working mothers and female empowerment, but somehow Sarah Palin just doesn’t get good press and inspire confidence in her abilities. Whatever Hillary is, she is definitely way more qualified to be standing on the world political stage versus Sarah Palin. But thanks to a large number of Americans – many who voted Bush in twice and will probably vote Palin in too, it will be the hockey mom who gets to be out there.

Useless F1 factoid of the evening

In the event of a crash and emergency evacuation, the driver is to leave everything behind, save the steering wheel. That, he gets to take along.

Because he actually needs to remove it to get out of the car.

Bet you didn’t know that. And now, you do.

Have a happy F1-mad weekend.

What makes me lose sleep

1. A strange bed. I may have had two nights away from the children, but goodness knows I got no rest. I can’t seem to adapt to new places quickly enough to enjoy a good night’s rest on the get go. It usually takes a couple of nights to break in the new sleep environment.

2. Paperwork. When I have stacks upon stacks of unopened mail and unattended paperwork, it will wake me up at 3am in the morning. I will just stare at the ceiling and sometimes even go over to the desk and fiddle about with some paper before attempting to go back to sleep. Don’t ask me why I let it get that way – it’s just such a drag to have to sit at the desk and attack a new pile of mail each day. And trust me – I get a lot of mail.

3. The sight of my thighs in the mirror. Yes, I may be heavily pregnant and onto my third child, but somehow that still does not justify how I have descended into the “thunder thighs” category. I was walking around the room in my swimsuit yesterday and it depressed me greatly to see my reflection in the mirror.

4. My children. Whether it’s S coming in to announce her need to go to the loo at 2am or N yelling for me at 4am in the morning, someone usually gets me up at least once at night. And if neither do, I find myself sitting up in bed at about 5am wondering if everything’s okay. And yes, I will go and peep to see if everyone’s breathing before going back to sleep. Yes, I am sad.

It’s a good thing I can function on little sleep. I get little of it and am about to get even less with the new baby. Such joy to look forward to.

Escape

It may have only been two days, but don’t underestimate the significance. We have never left the children behind before – it was a definitely a huge step, for me and for D.

Sure, that’s only 48 hours and yes, we didn’t even board a plane or ferry, but it was still a huge deal to not have a little person (or two) calling or screaming or crying for me every few minutes.

We’ve decided we should do this more often, although probably not soon since we are expecting a new arrival to the brood fairly soon. And as long as the grandparents are on board with the idea. Definitely something to look forward to.

Rare moment

D: Can I have my papers back?

D takes the Asian Wall Street Journal and The Business Times to work every morning. I typically don’t even touch those papers, but this morning, in a rare turn of events, I actually got my paws on them first and was reading them in the kitchen when he came downstairs.

When something of this magnitude and with such far reaching effects hits the news, it’s very hard not to be concerned.

Morbid

I normally care little about business news. I used to read it for work, but since retiring (if you could call it that), I usually just leaf through world news and spend most of my time reading gossip and other useless information. Since the weekend, though, I’ve been following developments on Wall Street with the same morbid fascination I had with 911 and other disasters. Yup, that’s what I’d call this – a unbridled disaster. Some say the shake up is good and that in the long run, the industry will clean up and live to see another era of prosperity. Between now and then, however, we could be looking at more failures, more pain, more joblessness, a long recession and overall doom and gloom before things start to turn around again. 

I just wish the soothsayers could tell us when that turnaround will be.

A perfect storm

On this day, two giants have fallen and one teeters at the brink. I may be out of the business, but still, reading how Lehman Brothers has filed for brankruptcy and is to be liquidated, and how Merrill Lynch has agreed to be sold to Bank of America, and how AIG is borrowing US$40 billion from the Federal Reserve to remain solvent, I can only shake my head in disbelief. This is huge. Even Alan Greenspan says so himself. A “once-in-a-century” financial crisis, he calls it. And it’s clear the contagion isn’t over yet.

We don’t know how much further this crisis will deepen and how badly the rest of the world will be affected. One thing is for sure – no one is safe.

American politics

I don’t really care about American politics much, but I did come across some comments Matt Damon made about Sarah Palin and I have to admit, the man has a point. There is a real actuarial probability of McCain not living through the next four years and we could be looking at what he called “a really bad Disney movie” – a small-town hockey mom becoming President of the United States.

Now that’s a scary thought.

A long day

N gave us all a bit of a scare yesterday. We had our inaugural visit to the A&E at KK Hospital. Definitely not an experience I want to repeat. Mind you, KK Hospital’s Children’s A&E is run very well and everything moved along like clockwork. Still, being there means that something has gone desperately wrong and we have no clue how to fix it.

It was over lunch that N spat out his mouthful of food. We were out at a Chinese restaurant. He gagged a bit and I rolled my eyeballs. Fake coughing. He does it often enough. So does S, especially when the food in question is not of their liking. Then he started crying and grabbing at his throat. And complaints of pain, on and on. I tried placating him, offering water, but he refused. He had been chewing rice and fish, so we thought perhaps a swallowed fishbone. He briefly tried plain rice and then spat it out. Now N LURVES white rice. He always gobbles it up. That’s when I got worried. He wasn’t even trying to swallow his favourite food. And then the drooling started, as well as the step up in the wailing.

Then we all kicked into panic gear. Swallowed fishbone was one thing. We were more worried, however, about an anaphylactic reaction. D was suspicious about the tofu, but I had given the go-ahead for N to eat it. It was labelled home-made and didn’t look like typical egg tofu. We later found out, through calls back to the restaurant and some investigation, that egg was used as a coagulent for the tofu. N has never had an anaphylactic reaction, but this is something that perpetually sits at the back of our minds. We cannot assume he never will have one.

I spent the car ride trying to soothe him, but it’s pretty hard to do that when he’s strapped to his car seat, wailing and scratching. He wasn’t swelling though, nor were his lips turning blue, so that gave me some comfort. Still, we couldn’t assume nothing life threatening was going on. He still was drooling and he still kept clutching at his throat.

The arrival at A&E ended his tears. It must’ve been the bright colours, or the big jar of sweets at the registration counter. Curiously enough, the drooling also ended there. The doctor saw him fairly soon after we arrived and confirmed no swelling. Huge sigh of relief. So now was the question of a likely fishbone. Superficial inspection, including a headlight on a curious headpiece worn by the doctor, showed no bone. An x-ray later confirmed this. So we were sent within an hour of showing up.

But that was not to be the end of our day. N later complained of a stomache, which history has shown, usually suggests an allergic reaction in his case. Good thing was that I expected it (after getting confirmation from the restaurant about the egg in the tofu), and good thing was that I knew what to do. All because I had seen THIS type of reaction before. We had a few upheavals before bedtime (severe itching, continued stomach cramps, diahorrea, loss of appetite), but we knew he’d be okay.

Today, he’s all back and full of beans. He’ll tell you how his throat was painful and how he had a tummy ache, but he’s all smiles when you check with him if his throat is okay or if he still has a bad tummy.

“Is your throat still painful?”

“Mmmmmmm….. no.”

“Is your stomach still painful?”

“Mmmmmmm…. no.”

“So you’re okay today?”

“Yah.”