Double Happiness

[warning: long, boring, no photo post]

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 :/

Here it happened, how we get from this:

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

Hi there! it’s been a while since the last update.

My parents were with us for 2.5 weeks for their holidays. Yvonne and I took a few days off to spend time with them, and be there with the whole family. Their stay has been great, if not very tiring for there has been many activities, daily! Indeed we visited the swimming pool (several times), Marina Barrage (several times), the zoo, Changi Point Coastal walk, Botanical garden for outdoor concerts, Jacob Ballas’ children garden, Bugis, Our downstairs playground (MANY times), etc… Below are some shots from these activities.

It’s getting more and more tiring to look after the kids, Tristan in particular. Because he seems to have endless energy and has started to just like running as far and fast as he can. In some instances, he will simply run loops around the playground, which is fine. In other cases however, he might charge straight ahead, wherever ahead may be, and that means we must chase after him to prevent him for getting into an accident. The chase is exhausting, as my Dad can testify! :p

This had not been helped by the fact that this month has been VERY hot in Singapore. Just yesterday we hit 37 deg Celsius, with 32 IN the house. We (well I, mostly and Celestine too) are literally dripping sweat drops just sitting around, doing nothing. Sadly we were not doing nothing, refer to the chasing above :/ .

On top of all these activities, we had planned several food pit stops for my parents (hey, of course, this is Singapore after all), including a Curry Fish Head (that even my mom has loved), pratas, Breakfast at Yakun (for runny eggs, kaya toast and local kopi), and a local Chinese restaurant.

Furthermore, we have celebrated a little early the kids’ second birthday. The whole family was there, and we managed to take a nice pic of everyone. The kids had many new toys and soft toys. I am very much for low tech toys (non mechanical, non electrical toys). So this year, they had several wood-based toys. Yvonne is fond of saying they are actually for me (which, I must admit, is a little bit true :p).

Finally, below are the customary portrait pics of Tristan and Celestine so we can all agree that they still are the cutest babies in the whole wide world!! Yes, that’s true! Who says I am blinded by fatherly love? That is only an obvious, perfectly objective, unquestionable truth I’m reporting…

Ha, lastly, having my parents around, meant that there are more photographers around. Inevitably, I ended up on some photos, like this one below.

Till next time! Hopefully the next update won’t take as long as this one.

PS: pending grammar review by Yvonne, please ignore the English mistakes :p.

I’m secretely hoping for a software engineer, like his papa; but I think Tristan’s skills are already way broader than mine, and he’ll have more choices, including the circus

Tristan funny man

Here is a few quick of pics as usual. I was trying my longer lens (55-200), which means I could take pics being further away from them. That made for more candid shots because they were not always aware of me; but it was tougher too though, because shaking was emphasized, obviously, and many pics ended blur. This is not even considered a big zoom, it just goes to show what a lousy photographer I am . Well, it means there’s room to improve

I used to be obsessed about taking as many pics as I could of the babies’ faces, just so we immortalize their cute cuddly little baby expressions. Now I realize it’s equally important to capture what they are DOING and how they are fascinated by the little things. In some of the shots below you can see the babies playing at an exercise ground for old people. There is a stepper with platforms, and the platforms have tiny holes (for water drain presumably). The babies were contented shoving tiny branches into the holes, realizing the branches actually drop below the platforms, picking them up again, and doing the process all over again . This is actually a GREAT change because it means that, instead of me running after them all over the playground, I could for once sit there and observe what they were doing, now THAT is a lot more relaxing

Rock Star?

or Bank-Robber?

Here are some pics of the kids playing with water. You’ll see more pics of Tristan because Celestine is a bit scared of water-rushing, noisy fountains.

Our outing at the swimming pool allowed us to confirm that humans INSTINCTIVELY hold their breath under water, they don’t have to learn it. We discovered this when both Tristan and Celestine lost their balance in the pool and went under water entirely. They did not panic, they did not gulp water, they did not cough, and they did not cry. Mostly they were surprised.

That being said, they were unable to stand up again by themselves while under water, so they still HAD to be rescued. Luckily for them, Yvonne and I were paying attention while sipping our cocktails…

Interesting uh? Next scientific experiment: “Do babies react well to electric shocks?”

As you may, or may not, know, we have 3 cats: Storm, Yuki, and XiaoBao. The three of them are all very adorable, but have very different personalities.

XiaoBao is a natural born coward, he spends most of his time hiding somewhere, coming out only for his basic needs (eat, pee, poop). And even then, he will hold on if he senses that any unknown presence is in the house. He’s only really comfortable with Yvonne or me around.

Yuki is the pretty one, she craves affection and does not have an ounce of shyness in her. In fact, she will tolerate a lot of abuse just for the chance of getting a good caress.

Storm is the snobbish one, she likes Yvonne and me and only tolerates the rest of the world. She’s not shy but she just doesn’t care about people. And although Storm likes us for sure, and follows us around, it’s all on her own terms: she likes some distance between her and us, about 1.5m. She comes closer once in a while to get a caress but don’t you try to force her to come closer or force her to stay there.

XiaoBao and Yuki, by their nature, are very peaceful, they have never, and probably will never, scratch or bite. XiaoBao, in uncomfortable situations, only aims to escape. Yuki, might move a bit but will stay around in the hope of getting something back. Storm on the other hand might hiss, scratch or even bite.

This has not been a problem for us because we’ve learned early on to give Storm the space she needed. It’s a problem now though because the babies do not understand that. Storm will not try to harm them. But when Tristan sees her and runs after her, if he manages to corner her, there’s danger for him.

Yesterday, that just happened. Storm was hidden under a cabinet and Tristan spotted her. As he went towards her she panicked and scratched. Apparently cats aim for the eyes. She aimed well. Below is a picture of the result:

It could have been a lot worse...

This is not acceptable and we are very worried. We love our cats but we cannot let them get to the babies’ eyes. We’ve considered declawing, but I cannot bear to do that to Storm, declawing is horrible: it’s basically an amputation of part, or whole, of the last bone of the cat toes. We’ve considered giving her away, but I cannot bear to do that to myself. Storm was our first cat, and we got her when she was only about a month old. She was literally our first baby.

I found an alternate solution called soft paws, which are basically glued-on rubber paddings for cat claws, preventing them to scratch furnitures (and people in the same stride). We’ve ordered a pack yesterday and we hope that it will work out. If not, we’ll have to seriously reconsider the dreaded first and second options again. I don’t want to think about it just yet…

Today (22 Sept 2008), Celestine and Tristan both muttered their first 4-syllable sentences and they were:
“bon-jour pa-pa”
“al-lo mum-my”
“al-lo ko-ko”

Until yesterday, they could only go as far as 3 syllables, mainly for food items:
“ba-na-na”
“po-ta-to”
“pa-pa-ya” (which Tristan insisted until very recently was “Pa-ya-ya”)

It’s also interesting to see how their communication improves as they realize language can get them what they want. The most striking example so far is the word “UP”. We have a rather tall bed which the kids cannot climb on their own; we do however carry them on it in the morning so they can play with the quilt. Nowadays, if we are slow to take them up, they would come to the side of the bed and firmly say “UP”, to which we must comply and take them up. “UP” is also used:
1) when they want to get out of their playpen
2) when they want to be taken out of their feeding chairs

The unstoppable human urge to communicate is well on the way, we look forward to all the conversations to come.

What’s great about having twins is that they learn from each other. This means they progress faster than singleton because they benefit from each other’s experiments and experience. The problem is, they learn everything from each other, both the good and the bad. Case in point for the bad, the finger in the nose. We don’t know who started it, we just know they thought it was funny to do it at the same time

(click to see large view)