Hohum, another day...

Baby was extremely cranky last night : ( - woke up every hour, crying. I lost it at one point - had to wake hubby up to take over, in case I did anything terrible... seriously, could have thrown him out window, I was that frustrated...

Fortunately all the books say parents will occasionally feel that way about their babies - otherwise I would be wracked by guilt : P . Made peace with baby this morning... he was in a really good mood, strangely enuff.

Partly, frustration compounded by Sunday evening family gathering... There's always one or two relatives who home in on new mums and start hounding them with questions - how much does baby sleep? How does he go to sleep? Can he be left on his own? What's he eating? etc etc. I'd resolved to follow Dr Sears - not really resolved... more like, its the path of least resistance - anyhoo, Dr Sears basically says - feed when baby wants to eat, carry him to sleep, respond to him, its imposs to spoil a baby in the first year ... so then, my relatives start saying, oh, well my daughter can do x,y,z... I NEVER carry her to sleep.. you must TRAIN him bluh bluh bluh...

It's stupid of me, but their words DO bug me... the thing is, they really mean well, and their kids ARE well brought up (relatively : ) ) - so I start to wonder if maybe I'm being to lax with him. After all, disciplining him is really for his good - who wants to hang out with a spoilt baby?

Someone commented how, now I'm not working, I must lead a stress-free life. Well, free of one kind of stress. Bringing up kids brings its own pressures, and maybe more perplexing, because, unlike work, where you can more or less tell whether what you do is right or wrong, its much harder with kids - results don't show for years, and there's less room to repair mistakes. There's no established "right way" to bring up baby.

It made me so grateful that I have God in my life. I can trust HIm to give me the wisdom I need, and I have the peace of mind kinowing that He is also looking out for my baby. : )

There's a scratch on our new car! I found it yesterday when I was giving the car its weekly wash (btw, for some reason, everytime I wash the car, it rains almost immediately after. What's up with that?) : ( . Husband said it wasn't him, and I'm 99.9% sure it wasn't me either - surely I would remember... the time I scratched our previous car is very firmly etched in my memory. Hubby thinks some wu liao passerby did it... dunno. Anyway, it's quite low on the body, so not very noticeable.

Was playing with James last night, when it occurred to me that I'd be quite happy for him to stay frozen at this age. I think that's a good sign - not that it's a healthy sentiment :) - but, it was the first time since his birth I've felt that way. All along, I've been hoping he'd grow up faster - so he'd be more fun, less fragile, less frustrated, etc. Got nearly teary eyed thinking about him soon mastering art of crawling & walking... it's so brief, this baby stage - only one year! I guess I never thought about it before - all the babies I've known seem to stay babies so long. Then, whoosh, suddenly they are six years old and in school.

Sold our New York bought PC yesterday to a kalang guni man called Simon. He gave me $50!! : P Mega-depreciation, but not as bad as car. Anyway, can't remember how much we paid for it, so have nothing to contrast $50 to. Oh, hey, what am I saying? Did we not buy it out of our careful managing of his overseas allowance at the time? Hahaha!!! FReee!!!

Talking about SImon, since stopping work, feel like I'm beginning to discover this wierd underbelly of life- sorry, wrong phrase - wierd parallel universe that co-exists in same space and time as me but from which I was totally vacuum sealed away from. The world of housewives, household service providers, people who drive and shop when the sun is still in the sky... From my initial encounters, I'd say this world is inhabited by much nicer people. Finally, when I read reports from foreign tourists saying that SIngaporeans are warm and friendly, I can actually nod my head in agreement. It's a very happy affirmation. Everyone at work seems to be miserable, or, if not exactly unhappy, than too busy to be friendly. Or maybe just the places I used to work at : )

So now that the pc has been sold, I have our nice big NY bought IKEA table for my use... yay! Have spread out all my scrapbooking paraphenalia and finally dug into putting photos in albums... am working on 2004 Israel trip, although everything from honeymoon (2001!!!) onwards is unarchived. I know we have digital albums and all that, but physical albums still seem very necessary. This must be my mother's influence. When we were younger, she used to put all our holiday snaps in albums along with relevant clip outs from brochures, postcards, maps, etc. Every new location had its own header to seperate it from the rest.

I was going to start using this blog to document wacko Singaporeans, but I don't get out very much, so nothing new to report this week. Simon was only moderately eccentric. Maybe I'll do retrospectives - like our overzealous security guard. Hubby tells me the saying is, "on the wrong ball". He took five months of us driving into the estate on a daily basis to realise that we were residents. Before that, without fail, EVERY time, he would wave us over officiously, tote out his little clipboard and demand to know the purpose of our visit. EVERY time, we would patiently explain that no, actually, we live here, pls refer to little sticky plastic thing on our windscreen. EVERY time, he would go, Oh... yes, yes... Two days ago, I saw him stop an ambulance from leaving our compound - an ambulance which had just taken on board a patient, and had flashy waily redlight thing happening on its roof. I hope for the sake of every resident living in our estate, that if every any of us needs an ambulance, that guy is not on duty. He means well though. I think he's a little bit shy of us after the five months mistaken identity fiasco - hubby and I always cracked up after he left us, which must have made him a little nervous. Can imagine his internal commentary... Is my fly undone? Is there something stuck in my teeth? DId the toilet roll get caught in the back of my pants?!! Nowadays, his smile is always a little uncertain : P.

Am so sleepy! This is my first coffee-free day - well, the first coffee-free day of the latest in a series of coffee-emancipation attempts. I think my longest was a few months, in the early days of pregnancy. James has been getting crankier lately, and everyone has been accusing my coffee-a-day habit. I think they're wrong, so I'm going to deprive myself for a week, prove that this will have no impact on his crankiness, then resume my love affair with nescafe : ) .

Yup, nescafe. Very uncool, perhaps - maybe less uncool than it would have been ten years ago? - but I like my instant coffee! I used a cafetiere all through university because it was the done thing - on hindsight, I regret it. I suffered three years of yukky tasting coffee, cafetiere washings, finger piercings from the metal filter mesh bit - when a teaspoon of Goldblend would have done as well. No, better.

Only B&B's make really great cafetiere coffee. For some reason, it never turns out right for me. Probably the mouldy storage tin. Or maybe the too liberal dosing of dish washing liquid and indifferent final rinses (for fear of finger piercings, see above). Anyway, I'm putting that all behind me for a week.

No wonder I feel so flat this morning.

So, I quit my job, after all, and am now a stay-at-home mum. Only, I have a cushy life as we have a live-in helper.. Sometimes when I'm doing me-stuff (like now), I wonder if it would have been better for me to have continued. But I know that if I was still working, I'd feel like I'd been a surrogate mummy for our helper. I get guilty for any "me-time", like I should be in a 24/7 play/stimulation frenzy for the sake of James. Never mind, we'll muddle through this somehow.

One other minus point is how my new status reinforces my hermit tendencies, which are wierdly strong. Or maybe not so wierd, in reaction to growing up in crowded Singapore? But most Singaporeans are nice, sociable creatures. It's been having an impact on my conversational abilities (note, I don't say skills!) when I get my weekly airing at church on Sundays, or the occasional extended family gathering. "Oh, really?" is the cleverest thing I say all night, sometimes. Uh-oh. Not that I mind for myself, but James is going to be one warped kid when he gets to school.

Oh, time to be milked...

Whoosh! How long since the last post?! Time is zipping by... James is four and a half months already, and finally, getting more interactive. Hurray. At last, the silly high voices and monkey faces bear fruit! Sometimes felt like I was mugging for a statue, the way he used to stare back at me with zero reaction.

On our weekend getaway - husband and I have taken to abandoning baby on Saturdays as we go galivanting - we thought it would be fun to check out some showflats. Why are showflats so appealing? I dunno - but I find deep satisfaction floating about a model home, checking out the fixtures and feature walls. Since husband has also recently taken Singapore into his portfolio, we can also use the excuse of market research for work. Sigh - justifying like that brings back fond memories of our time in New York, when he was covering retail. We took our frequent shoppoing jaunts - Bloomingdales, Century 21, Woodbury etc - all in the name of industry.

We decided to check out some new launches at Duchess Ave, which is where, in a development that I will not name, we encountered the property agent from hell. Her name was Jane.

We were halfway to Duchess when husband announced that he really needed to pee. (Note: Why are men like this? Fifteen minutes earlier, when we were at lunch, with good, clean bathrooms screaming to be used, he felt not even the littlest twinge, hint, of bladder pressure. In fact, up to 14 min 59 sec later, he felt absolutely nothing. But in a heartbeat, he was doubled over and if he could have driven with his legs crossed, he would have.) The first thing he did, after hurriedly parking the car and running into the showflat, was to ask if he could use the gents. One of many black suited ladies peeled herself away from her pack and latched on to our side immediately.

Jane, for it was she, adopted stentorian tones and immense concern, as for six year child, "Toilet ah? Urgent is it? You got stomache ache, is it, stomache ache?!" This blasted through the living room, over the miniature models and three or four "visiting families. "Okay, I bring you go toilet. Or you want to see flat first? See first, okay? Hah -? No ah? Oh, yah, yah, urgent!"

Fine, maybe she was a little excited, when faced with showflat A&E situation - my husband was desperate enough to pee into the model toilets, which may not always be a good idea. However, after going, and reappearing in the showflat, where a whole new set of people were, she had to again announce, "Yah, we just came from the TOILET. He was urgent. Stomache ache."

Hello?! My husband felt utterly maligned - what stomache ache? He only needed to pee. Jane was totally clueless to the fact that embarrassing your clients can potentiallly damage a sale. "Why? Why? I show you four room layout okay?" Not that we were buying, but we would have humoured her more if not. Man. To top it off, she refused to show us the nicely done up designer decored flat - even though we asked to see it twice. Instead, she trawled us across mud and gravel to a three room unit that was being built up around our heads as we toured. "This -" she declared, waving a hand over six bewildered workers laying out the parquet floor, "is bedroom number one."

I had to content myself with peering wistfully up at the windows of the done-up unit and imagine the finishings in there. Curses, foiled again! We ended up hunting down another launch, to restore our faith in property agents (from minus kadzillion to neutral) and to appease my craving for feature walls and themed "art".

Themed "art" - every model flat has some modern paint streaked canvases in tones that perfectly accent the cushion covers and floor rugs. I'm glad for the artists who produce these things, because its much needed money - but I can't help thinking they must be laughing themselves silly everytime they deliver one of these oeuvres to the developers. I dunno, or do they really take the commission very seriously? But so far every piece I've ever seen has been pretty soulless. Elephants could paint better than that.

Okay, time to go...