1. I push life updates through my facebook account these days and so I have neglected the site for a while
2. my provider auto-disables blogs which are not updated to prevent security exploit on old versions

So well, this has been rectified now, wordpress is upgraded to 2.9.1, whose admin panel looks fantastic btw, inclusive a shiny new auto-upgrade tool, which should make my life a lot easier (not that it was hard to upgrade wordpress before anyway).

On life, well… Our 2 terrors just started school this week. Not a single tear shed! They are great kids! Although Tristan is having some problem with discipline and following the class when they do boring things: stay seated for 10mn for morning assembly, walk in pair, etc. The teacher’s gonna have a hard time for sure, because he is pretty strong, and she is quite petite.

Some other stuff I posted to facebook recently: kids love cartoons, but they don’t understand Road Runner at 2.5 years old . Yvonne reads books in English, I show them cartoons in French, hopefully that’ll be ok to make them multilingual.

The kids are definitely real French because they have started to say stuff like “pouf”, “hop”, “toc” when they do various things. We French love to say the sound of what we do

I blew my savings to buy a new camera and a couple of lenses, so hopefully I will have some nice pics soon. Pics may be posted on facebook, flickr or here. *sigh*, media management is a new age problem .

Till later!
Tim

Saturday is a special day: daddy cooks diner, we all eat the same thing together, and we all sleep in the same room. On regular nights, the kids have their own baby meal before us, and while Celestine sleeps with us, Tristan sleeps with BlutPaw in the other room.

So Saturday nights are fun… Except when erm, we realize the mash potatoes dad wants to cook are a bit expired, but still look good, so we give them a try… and then we all get food poisonning.

It all started ok: no sign or bad taste whatsoever during the diner itself, Tristan in particular ate A LOT. This boy looooves his mash potatoes. We took the babies to bed, they fell asleep, Yvonne was tired and stayed with them, I went back to work on the computer a bit. Around 11h30pm, Yvonne calls me urgently, Tristan had vomited all over: mattress, pillows, blanket, stuffed animals, everything. We take him out, Yvonne cleans him, I take the first pass at rinsing the vomit out of everything. He singled handledly soiled 3 pillows, inclusing Yvonnes because she was lying next to him at that moment.

We attribute the episode at Tristan eating too much, too fast. We get another clean mattress for him, he falls asleep again, fast. Yvonne stays in the room, I continue my stuff, we look forward to a peacedul night from then on.

Another 45mn later, Yvonne calls me again. Tristan had vomited again. Not so much, since he pretty much emptied himself the previous time, but enough to soil one more blanket.

We start to suspect the potatoes, but are not sure yet because, well, everyone else is fine.

I switch off the computer and join Yvonne in the room. Over the next 2 hours. Tristan wakes up several times to vomit. The terrible kind of vomit: stomach spasms with nothing coming out because there’s nothing to vomit. Just spitting saliva and feeling miserable. At least we are prepared: we have a pale in the room, that he uses cleanly. Yvonne tells me she’s starting to not feel good as well. Perhaps it’s just the smell of Tristan’s vomitus… We wish… At around 4am Yvonne rushes out of the room to vomit.

Luckily at that time, Tristan is stable. Yvonne rushing out wakes BlutPaw up. We carry Tristan to her room so she can take care of him in case he wakes up again (which luckily he doesn’t). Yvonne vomits another 2 rounds over the next 1.5 hours.

We manage to all wake up around 9am. I’m fine. Yvonne is down though, she will stay in bed and rest pretty much the rest of the day, enjoying an occasional dash to the toilet to attend to some diarrhea. Tristan and Celestine seem fine and drink their morning milk. Celestine has no energy though, and just lies on the couch all morning, we know something is up :/ .

Time for lunch, Tristan and Celestine refuse to eat their porridge. They accept some oat meal. Nap time comes, they both fall asleep in less than 10mn. Cool.

I go down to the market because I want to make a vegetable soup to cleanse everyone’s system. Being back , I start preparing.

1.5 hour into the nap (naps are usually 2.5 to 3 hours), Celestine vomits her morning milk and the oat meal all over, that’s another bedsheet soiled, plus her pyjama. I was preparing the soup at the time, so Yvonne is the one to attend to her first. We set up a sleeping station in the living room, where Celestine sleeps on the coach, and Yvonne next to her on the floor. They’ll both sleep another 1.5 hours.

Meanwhile diarrhea kinda hits me. I gotta go. Nice timing for Tristan to wake up. Blut Paw attends to him. In 10mn, he vomits all of his oat meal. One more bed sheet soiled. Beside that, he surprisingly seems in great spirit and shape.

When Celestine wakes up, she’s also in great form. Her energy is back and I spend time with her and Tristan. They want to draw, play, and even go outside.

Diner comes, they want nothing at all. they have a bit of my great soup but they’re not fans (these little ingrates!). The tiredness+sickness is hitting them. They cry for this, and cry for that, shout, and drive us crazy. Yvonne, being sick, is not in the mood to entertain their every demand either.

We manage to get them to sleep. Yvonne crashes with Celestine and sleeps right away too.

And, here I am, typing my report of the day. I’m pretty exhausted myself, and I’m starting to feel my stomach churning too. Oh boy, I sure hope I don’t vomit this night.

Worse thing: I have not managed to take a shower the whole day yet. I’ll do that after this post. What made it hard is that food poisoning gives you the cold chill, so Yvonne and Celestine’s condition prohibited the use of aircon, and even fans! And that doesn’t do well with me … In other words… I stink!

Ok, that’s it. Oh and by the way, we are definitely blaming the potatoes. I threw the rest of the box away. Don’t mess with expired stuff, it’s not worth it!

[edit Mon 3:15pm]
The nightmarish weekend wasn’t over for me after the post I did yesterday night. I did take my shower and went to bed at about midnight, only to realize that the moment I’d lie down, my intestines would go: “Hey bro, time to go, hurry hurry hurry”. Great. That happened about every 15mn, and that little routine lasted about an hour. I realized I couldn’t just go back to the room each time and risk waking Yvonne and Celestine up. So I set up a sleeping station in the living room. The routine continued up to 2am until at last, it stabilized. By the way, FatBoys are great to sleep on!

At 3am, Tristan had woken BlutPaw because he was hungry (not surprising). He ran into the leaving room where he kinda tripped over me, causing me to have a surprise startle, which in turn scared him so bad (realize it was very dark), that he started to cry, and cry, and cry. I comforted him as I could, BlutPaw made the milk and that was it.

At that point, since my intestines were leaving me alone, I decided it was ok to get back to the room. It’s around 3:15am now. Then at 4am, Celestine woke up and called us both because she could not find her pacifier. She wouldn’t go back to sleep without it. I wake up, take the lamp, look around, under the bed, spot it against the wall, we have to displace the bed to reach it. It’s 4:15am now. back to sleep.

Then at 6am, my intestines go: “Wakie wakie bro, time to go again”. Joy. The routine starts again until around 7:30am, then it stopped again. At 8:15am Yvonne wakes up, she has to get ready for work. She’s feeling MUCH better, which is great. For me, well, I’m kinda stuck in bed, barely able to move at all. The intestines bother me another 2 or 3 times in the morning but overall, they leave me alone, and all I can do is sleep. Working, was out of the question.

I woke up around 2:30pm, take another shower. And there you go, now I’m done writing the post update. It’s 3:30pm. I hope I can get some work done today :/

to that:

Other than that, everything’s cool over here. There is more and more talk going on, and we’ve seen the beginning of lies too, *sigh*. They’ve started to blame each other on stuff when they do wrong themselves. It’s not always easy to deal with it.

One funny thing they’ve also started to do is rat on each other. For example, I may be working in the study, when suddenly, I hear banging on the door, it may be Celestine (Or Tristan, just change the name): “Papa! Papa! Come! Koko pipi on the floor!”. It’s cute… for now

Wishing you all a wonderful new year 2009, filled with love, happiness and good health!

The operations were a success. You read correct: operationS, with an ‘S’, because it was one operation per eye, with 2 weeks delay in between each. That was to assess the healing process of the first eye and proceed with more confidence on the second eye.

Yvonne now no longer needs neither glasses nor contact lenses. Her vision is not absolutely perfect though, there is some minor residual degree left but this could be due to some swelling and we need to wait between 1 and 3 months for both eyes to stabilize before we can make a final assessment.

Regardless she is now free of glasses and contact lenses and it means that when she opens her eyes at night, she can see ME, as opposed to that big pink blurb. Since I am infinitely more sexy than a big pink blurb, I must say I have some expectations as to what might happen next (hehehe).

Er, *cough*, so anyway, we decided to post some pics of the stuff she had to do to take care of her eyes after her surgeries. For one thing: she had to wear eye shields at night to prevent accidental rubbing during sleep. It means she looked like this:

For second thing, she had to ensure that no water whatsoever would come in contact with the eyes during showers. That meant earing special, sealed, water-proof shields for shower too, and she looked like this:

So that’s it, freedom at last, hopefully till her old age!

Storm was not happy when we fitted the pads, but since then she has tolerated them without a fuss, looks like this solution might really be a winner for us.

The package contained 40 pads, supposedly for 2 full applications (4 legs x 5). In our case, since we are only worried about the front claws, we should have enough for 4 applications, which is great.

Here are some pics of our beautified Storm

In case you haven’t checked the soft claws’ website, this solution causes NO HARM to the cats whatsoever, muuuuuuuch better than declawing.

Blut Paw comes from Myanmar, where the average university graduate earns S$50-60 a month. As a domestic help in Singapore, she earns S$300 from us, though she first needs to pay off her hefty agency loan of S$1,700. So for the first 6 months, she practically has no salary. After that however, the earnings she gets will probably all go into her savings (since lodging, food and basic necessities are all bore by us) and by the time her contract expires in 2 years’ time, she will bring home a tidy sum of money for her family. I think this is every domstic help’s desire – to work hard for a couple of years and when they finally go home, they can provide for their family, perhaps buy a motorbike or build a house.

So far she’s been with us for 2 days. Her English is quite quite terrible and communication is very painful. When I want to explain something to her, it works better if I ask her to sit down and I write down what I want to say. Just now I spent a good 15 minutes trying to ask her whether she prefers to eat together with us or to eat by herself. Tim and I could sense from the 3 meals we had together that she felt quite awkward at the dining table. When she finally replied that she prefers for Tim and I to eat first before her, I was so surprised that I drew illustrations a second time just to ensure it’s not a miscommunication. Indeed she prefers for us to eat first. Perhaps with us at the same table, she feels restricted, not daring to eat her portion and not daring not to finish the food? Well, since this is her preference, we shall abide by it.

Another disappointing thing is that she doesn’t really know how to cook. At least not Chinese dishes anyway. Hopefully this will improve with time. Unfortunately I don’t cook either so it’s not going to be possible for me to teach her. Tim’s better at this then I am. I think we will teach her to make Tim’s meat spaghetti one day. Mum’s coming over on Wed to teach her a couple of dishes. I’m thinking of raw rice fish porridge, steamed egg with pork and sweet and sour prawns. I salivate just thinking about my mum’s home cooked food =)

The good news is Tim and I both feel that she’s quite fast at learning thing and can take initiative. So far that part is good. She does take a long time to get things done, compared to our usual weekly helper Sylvia, but we don’t mind it for now since there is not much chores to be done anyway. When the babies arrive, she will probably have to really speed up. We plan to ask Sylvia to come over one last time and show Blut Paw the ropes, because neither Tim nor I am up to Sylvia’s efficiency. I don’t even know how she cleans the floor but it is always sparkling clean after she’s done her round.

We were moaning the loss of our privacy in the last few days before her arrival. Afterall, what is home but a place you can strut around naked and have a burping competition when you please? Well, so far our uniform around the house has gotten more civilised, and unsavory noises are kept to a minimum. But in other aspects, it hasn’t been as bad as we thought. I guess that’s mainly because Blut Paw spends more time in the kitchen and her room, leaving us in our private worlds in the living room, study and bedroom. Anyway, once the babies are here, I think we will better appreciate Blut Paw’s presence and the price to pay for privacy would really not matter then.

As the Chinese saying goes, “Every new journey starts with the first step“. The lead-up to parenthood starts one step at a time… first the domestic help arrives, and we lost some of our privacy, our couplehood. Then the babies will arrive, and we will completely lose all notions of romantism… And hopefully gain a new perspective on life.

“There are however disadvantages with the spouse in the OT because of possible increase risk of infection, distraction of the surgeon’s and nurses’ attention and occasional interference of the processes by an anxious spouse during the delivery process. The outcome may be compromised as a result. For those reasons, we usually advise against spouse accompaniment because we want to ensure optimal outcome for the mother and baby.

But as long as you understand the limitations and possible sub-optimal outcome of the delivery process, and that Tim should cooperate and comply strictly with my advice at all times, I will consent Tim to be with you during the surgery. If we can have an agreement on this, having Tim by your side would certainly be great. Please understand that should Tim be asked to leave the theatre at any time during the surgery, it is usually for a good reason, and it would be best for the interest of the mother and baby that he does so.“

With that settled, we will probably sign up for the Premiere Package B1. B1 means 4 patients to a room, with the babies’ charges such as nursery charges, medication and vaccination pegged to B1 rates. At first we were considering splurging on A1 package (where we have the whole room to ourselves, Tim can stay overnight with me and babies can room in) but decided that there is a risk that the babies may need some special care or extra medication (touch wood!!) and we had better play it safe. Even if all goes smoothly, A1 is still more expensive than B1 by at least $1,500 which is not payable by MediSave. I guess we can do other things with the money… Like contribute that to our buy-a-car fund…

After the check-up, we went around to check for details on KKH’s delivery packages. Instead of going to a private hospital, perhaps we can opt for the Premiere Package which Dr Tham mentioned a few months back that would allow Tim to be present during the c-section operation. A check at the counter at The Private Suite revealed that once we sign up for the Premiere Package, it is NOT AUTOMATIC that fathers will be allowed in the operating theatre. What it does is that it allows the chosen obstetrician the right to grant permission for fathers to be present. Given that Dr Tham does not seem convinced for the need of the father to be present, we decided to play it safe and pop him an email to confirm whether he would grant Tim the permission. Only if he says yes would we sign up for the Premiere Package. We are now waiting for his reply…

Meanwhile there are still a few things to be done between now and when babies arrive – 1) pack my ‘hospital bag” to bring with me to KKH on day of delivery; 2) set up the nursery to ensure space for babies’ clothes and maid’s clothes; 3) test how the sterilizer and breastpump work; 4) purchase of the last few items we have missed out (eg: baby bath tub). I intend to take it slow and try to do one thing at a time, maybe one task a day.