King Of The Throne

Hellooo! I am back in the blogging world after a 2 month hiatus! Many things have happened in these 2 months, including the Chinese New Year frenzy and a deeply personal situation that I may one day feel brave enough with the outside world. Till then, I will stick with the story that light-bulbed in my head today.

 

Hear ye, hear ye! The Rascal is officially potty-trained after some false starts and much utilisation of our otherwise leisurely mop (yep, this tells you pretty much about the state of cleanliness of my house. All 121sqm of it..). To be fair, we had attempted to get him to be King of the Potty long before he started childcare in Nov 2012. This included preparation of a traditional plastic potty circa our grandparents' time, loads of briefs a la toddler style and bankrupting NTUC of its entire stock of floor detergent.

 

Armed with grim determination to never have to change a stinky/soggy diaper again, YSY and I morphed into walking alarm radios which went off every 15 minutes to the dulcet tune of 'Boy, do you want to pee? Must tell mama/papa if you want to do so k?' Repeat process a gazillion times and you get 2 extremely thirsty adults plus a toddler thinking: 'Man, can someone turn off the Repeat mode on these 2 bozos? They are making me look uncool in front of the girls.' While we had a certain degree of success in getting the Rascal to pee in the potty, it was getting kinda tiring to have to repeat the Pee Mantra over and over and over and over and over (you get the picture) again without any initiative from the Subject to inform us that he wants to pee.

 

Despite what the experts say, the crash course on learning to pee in 2 days with intensive training did NOT happen. Nor did it happen in the next 3 weekends which was the only time we can give him 100% of our time to learn potty-training. I even ventured to buy him a musical potty which sings and makes flushing sounds when peed / pooed on correctly (parallel imported no less, for all the good that it did), in the waning hope that he will be incentivised by the new 'toy' enough to be successfully potty trained. No such luck, though he got himself a new singing toy complete with toilet paper.

 

After that, we decided to shelve the potty training for a while as he did not seem mentally ready for it despite all the physical signs of readiness. Fast forward to January 2013. In a rare chance for me to chat with the Rascal's cc teachers (rare cos YSY is usually the one who fetches him to and fro from school), I remarked to Teacher J that he is actually physically ready to be potty trained but did not seem to want to do so. Could the cc see if they can help in this aspect? Little did we know that this little discussion helped push the Rascal to his next major milestone of being potty trained (finally!) when one day, YSY came home and told me that the cc proclaim him toilet trained (the Rascal that is, not YSY. I sincerely hope that he has been potty trained 20 plus years ago. If he hasn't, it will explain those wet patches in front of the toilet bowl...)

 

There's an old saying: ' Man propose but Heaven dispose'. I find this pretty true in the Rascal's potty training saga.

 

1. We set out to train him but he wasn't mentally ready at the time. 
2. We 'invested' in a pricey, fun potty to get him interested but as of today, the only thing in use is the detachable potty cover which can be used on other adult-sized toilets as well.
3. Even the said potty cover above is being gradually ostracised by our post potty-training purchase: toddler ladder (to facilitate their climbing onto the throne) which comes with its own attached potty cover.

We are happy to say that the Rascal is happy to go about daily in his 'big-boy' briefs instead of 'small baby' diapers and eliminate in the 'big adult' toilet bowl without much fuss or accident. The fact that we do not have to risk being fumed by his adult-smelling poo when cleaning up doesn't hurt too bad too! =)

 

 

Pregnancy Memories

In true Huixuan style, I did not realise that I was pregnant until I was nearly out of my first tri-mester of pregnancy.

 

In my defence, I did a pregnancy test in what must been my second month but as the results were negative (either that, or the urine fumes must have really blinded my eyes), I didn't think much of the missed periods as I was undergoing a very stressful time in work and wrote the missed periods off as stress-induced. Neither did I realise that those massive heaving of saliva after my morning cuppas and falling asleep anywhere at the drop of a hat (note: I am usually pretty picky about where I sleep and have been known to survive a 13-hour flight to Europe without sleep) were anything pregnancy-related.

 

Wrapped up in blissful ignorance, I jetted off on a company trip to Taiwan and frolicked about in hot springs (well, the pathetic excuse of a cubicle which passes off as a hot spring room anyway), inhaled sulphuric fumes of the hot spring spas and feasted on BBQ sotong, fat juicy oysters and pigs' blood in Taipei. The only difference was that I could only collapse onto the hotel bed in exhaustion every night after a full day's activity while my colleagues went on to drink and basically turned late nights into more rounds of shopping, body massages and more shopping.

 

The shoe finally dropped when I went to the doctor after my Taiwan trip for a bout of flu. Innocuously, I asked her about the strange bouts of saliva-spitting in the mornings that happen always after my cuppa as I was concerned if it was a gastric problem. She asked me if I wanted to do a pregnancy test and not thinking much about it, I took it with earth-flipping results. My mouth literally fell open and I could only look at her in bewilderment when she told me: 'You're pregnant!' To my credit, I mustered enough coherence to utter: " Are you joking??" and proceeded home in a daze.

 

I broke the news to my partner in crime Mr Y and the look of pure happiness on his face told me what I needed to know - no other words were necessary. For folks who know Mr Y personally, they will all tell you that under usual circumstances, his expression is usually expressionless (yeah, I get the irony of those words too) and one can hardly tell what he is thinking or not thinking at any given point in time. If I had a camera to capture his expression when I broke the news, it will be an expression of pure delight and if Instagram was invented then, there will also be a warm soft glow to it. So there was that.

 

At our first visit to the gynae, we caught an ultra-sound scan of this beautiful little being who was fully formed and appeared to be sucking his hand with the gusto of SMRT trains breaking down on Singaporeans at peak hours. There was no doubt about it: we have been blessed with a wondrous little life and he is for keeps =)

 

 

A Mother's Pride

I was actually contemplating if I could sit my butt down tonight to come up with the 3rd instalment of my blog when there is a chick-lit screaming my name. However, I decided to man up and start the words flowing so as to not disappoint all 3 of my faithful readers.

 

In my previous blog, I had written about how T had captured the hearts of the surgery staff (well, better to have captured their hearts than pissing off people wielding surgery knives so near your delicate bits eh?). Anyway, tonight's blog shall be dedicated to a mother's prideful joy of her son who seems to be able to extract a 'Oh, he is so cute!', 'Oh he is such a sweet boy!' etc from both passerbys and people who know us personally. This was the actual article I intended to write previously but was further bolstered by one-off incidents recently.

 

Incident One:

I chatted with T's nanny's daughter online, who was currently studying overseas, on Facebook last night. This was nothing unusual as by the time I tuck T into bed and managed to get some free time of my own, it would have been close to 11pm and this coincides with the time that she is usually online. Anyhow, she asked me if she could make T her godson. Which made sense to me cos they are both Tigers and when Ms JJ was still in S'pore, she was the only one who could make T obey instructions without him making a single peep. I wasn't sure if she was being serious in making the offer but if she is, BRING ON THE GOLD! (Ed's note: gold refering to the requisite gold ornament given to a godchild by a godparent)

 

Incident Two:

I was on my way to work this morning when I bumped into a neighbour whose grand-daughter went to the same childcare centre as T. As usual, we stopped to chat a while but this time round, I couldn't much get a word in cos she started gushing about how friendly T is even around strangers and has manners enough to wave byebye when the Husband herds him towards the car to go to school. Not quite sure why the gushing but it did brighten up my day just to hear such praises from a neighbour. The fact that I could only catch half of what she was saying in rapid-fire dialect was besides the point!

 

Since he was a baby entering into toddlerhood,  I never had much major issues with T except during the Terrible Twos and there was nothing much that couldn't be resolved with brandishing a cane in front of him (don't worry; no toddler was injured in the course of this production).

 

All mothers are naturally proud of their children and I am especially proud to have T as my son cos he is such a sweet-natured boy who is always ready to laugh. More importantly, I am thankful each day that he is growing up healthily each day into a wonderful boy who spreads smiles and laughter to all around him. I love you, T!

A Brush with Jaundice

Jaundice

 

A couple of weeks after T came home from the hospital, we noticed that he has taken on a yellow-ish pallor and his first visit to the PD confirmed our fears: Jaundice.

 

Having just cleared the doors of Mount A, we trooped back again to have him admitted for a date with the UV lamp. It tore at my heart to see his little diaper-clad form baking in a strange blue light but we prayed hard that this will clear his jaundice which hovered around the higher index range. After 3 days, he was discharged but still had to be checked weekly for monitoring purposes. So every Monday, the Husband will drop me and the Confinement Lady off at HG Polyclinic for a weekly blood test and doctor consultation.

 

Throughout this whole episode, I kep thinking: Did I do something wrong that had brought on the jaundice? Was it those onion rings I ate last night? (Wait, that would have made him green with the fart smells, not yellow.) After doing some research work, I read that kiddies are more likely to get jaundice if:

 

• were pre-mature (T was induced at 37 weeks due to low amnotic fluids)
• boys (duh!)
• some other criteria that had been gobbled up by Mummy Brain Syndrome (doh!)

Happily, his condition cleared up when he was about 1.5 months old and I now know the floor-plan of HG Polyclinic for when I ever decide to burglarise the place for its stash of Ibufen and Panadol.

 

 

Winding up for the night now. Thanks to the 3 readers who supported my 1st blog (and one of them warranted a post on her own FB about this) and good night!

 

 

 

 

 

A New Beginning

Inspired by a close friend who had her own mummy blog, I decided to take the plunge and dip my aquaphobic toes into the literary world of blogs. Just to see if i can form a coherent sentence (or two) after a hard day's work that normal humans can understand and not wanna pick up their iPhones / Samsungs to call the IMH hotline...More importantly, I dedicate this blog to my little guy T, who made me fall off the 'No! No kids!' bandwagon (my oldest friends can attest to this, with just a little too much enthusiam perhaps) and gave me a good kick in the butt to see that having your own little warm body to hug when the mood strucks isn't all that bad after all.

 

T did not decide on his own to grace Mount A with his presence at 37 weeks (the minimum non-premature period) - rather, the dipping levels of amniotic fluid helped decided when he should come out and smell the flowers, as opposed to swimming in his private pool and wrecking havoc on a bladder-like organ which crimped his butterfly stroke. Right.

 

And so we were told by Mr Gynae to report to the hospital waaaaaaay early in the morning where the birth had to be induced. I will spare my dear readers the gory details but having said that, I probably will not look at poking sticks and laxatives the same way again. The only resounding fact I remembered from the birth was confusing my birth pangs with wanting to poo. In fact, I remember telling Mr Gynae: ' Hey doc, buckle up cos I think the shit is literally about to hit the fan!'

 

So from hanging out at Compass Point the night before and having my last decent meal before the birth with my sis Sharon, I found in my arms this  infant who was covered in dried up amniotic fluid and yelling fit to raise the dead. However, I was too zonked out on epidural side-effects to cover my ears. All in all, it was a pretty smooth delivery for us. Phew!

 

That's all for tonight folks. Do drop by again soon after you have done the dishes, coaxed your little ones to sleep or the tens of thousands of things that needs to attended to. Good night!