Our weekend

On Monday morning, we often get asked about what we did over the weekend. A simple question, but a little embarrassing to answer since we hardly ever do anything more than grocery shopping. With little Hannah's arrival, we have more excuse to simply vegetate at home. After all, long outings pose a logistic difficulty and unlike certain countries, we do not have baby-friendly cinemas here!

Ah, but the last weekend saw us in an unusual flurry of activity.

Firstly, Hannah's Gong Gong and Po Po had gone home to Port Dickson, so we were left with a baby who had to be constantly carried and entertained. How the two old folks keep up with her, I don't know.

Next, our apartment had marked the weekend as a time for "gotong-royong" - Malay for a joint clean-up exercise by the community, that is, the residents of the apartment complex.

However, we weren't quite going to empty out store rooms or dig up weeds. Instead, we were going to paint the stairwells of the entire complex! All in the name of saving a few thousand Ringgits and, erm, spending some quality time together?

There were a few snags though - not everyone from the the various units volunteered, although you can be sure that Chris did his fair share of work.

Most who DID volunteer were unequalled in their enthusiasm, but unfortunately had just as much experience as Chris (none). The first stairwell took a whole day to paint, and cleaning up took almost as long as the painting (much to the chagrin of our caretaker)!

And of course, you have SOME residents who just look cute and well, LOOK.

Thankfully, the second day progressed much quicker - we doubled our results and created half the mess. By early Sunday evening, we had to dump our brushes early and prepare for our next engagement...

a Hindu wedding

Hindu weddings are often lavish affairs with hundreds if not thousands of guests. This was held in a community hall of sorts with an elaborate set-up on stage. The bride and groom were seated on ornate chairs (much like a throne) where they spent a good part of the first couple of hours performing prayers with a Hindu priest and musicians in attendance.


At the end of the ceremony, guests formed a steady procession, going up the stage to personally congratulate the new bride and groom. Otherwise, how would they ever know who came for the wedding? I reckon all they saw were a sea of faces in bright garments.



There they are, in all their wedding finery.

I suppose the groom can't help being bored. After all, half the guests were like us - his wife's friends who he had never met in his life. The other half were mostly his guests, including distant relatives he had never met in his life either! After going through a lengthy prayer ceremony, shaking a few hundred hands and desperately wanting dinner, he must have wished the camera man would quickly get on with it.

Well, congratulations Nesa & Ganesh!

Mum Mum?

"Next to structuring feeds and sleeptime, weaning is the most emotive subject in parenting"

Can't remember who said that, but that comment stuck and I wholeheartedly agree. Hannah is approaching 6 months and the time has come to expose her palate to a whole new delicious world. Just when we have finally sorted out her sleeping and feeding patterns, it's time to complicate things all over again.

For those unfamiliar with our local lingo, "mum mum" means "food" in baby language, and needs to be spoken with a sing-song intonation. I assume it's a mutated Chinese dialect, but even Malays and Indians understand it, so who knows how it originated.

Recalling our initial difficulty coming to a compromise with Hannah's "routine", we anticipate a similar struggle establishing her on solids. Hannah's carers (Gong Gong and Po Po) not only come from a different generation, but also a differing cultural background. While feeding babies rice porridge is unheard of in Daddy's home country, it is the norm here. Similarly, our suggestions to offer her mashed avocado (supposedly one of the best first foods for babies) was greeted with "What's that?", which then became "but it's not tasty", accompanied by suspicious looks.

Big names like the American Association of Paediatrics and the La Leche League mean nothing to them, so quoting them as our source of reference (among others) was useless. It was only after a phonecall to a fellow grandparent that they became more receptive to our weaning programme. Thankfully, this particular grandmother is rather updated and does all that we plan to do - puree & freeze fruits and vegetables, grind up organic oats and brown rice, and yes, serve avocados.

So, in the coming months, we will be embarking on this journey together, all of us none the wiser. No doubt, once Hannah has been established on solids, Po Po will have the satisfaction of cooking up rice porridge with ikan bilis and hin choy, and whatever else we were fed as babies.

After all that fussing, Hannah probably wouldn't even care less what we offer her - she has taken after the Wylie and Teoh boys, all of whom never had a problem with their food!

Ah, the joys of having a cross-cultural baby -- whose culture do we follow?

Identity Crisis

"You're so lucky!"

The oft repeated response whenever someone at work asks me about Hannah's childcare arrangements. Indeed I am fortunate to have such wonderful family support, knowing that Hannah is always being looked after by people who love her, almost unconditionally!

Oh, of course, this is the little monster we are talking about (happily chomping the unsuspecting Mr. Rabbit)...

Having compared notes with my colleagues, here are some of the common childcare arrangements of our local working mommies:

1. Send the baby to a local babysitter
2. Send the baby to grandparents / relatives staying nearby
3. Send the baby, with a hired maid, to grandparents / relatives staying nearby
4. Live with grandparents
5. Send the baby to grandparents for the week, only collecting her back at the weekends!

The first three options involve early mornings and late evenings, given the state of traffic jams in this city, ferrying the little baby to and fro her carer's house each day. The 4th option is what we have naturally settled into, since our new apartment is not ready for occupation. To many, this seems the most favourable arrangement. However, having the extended family all under the roof of a crowded apartment is not without its drawbacks.

Surprisingly, not a few resort to option five. A significant number will travel home to the East Coast (erm... at least 6-8 hours away?) for their confinement / maternity leave, leaving the husband alone in the city to continue working. Afterwards, many leave their babies behind with the extended family, choosing to come back to KL to work, only visiting their babies occasionally! This continues till the baby is a little older - until he can be placed in the hands of a trusted babysitter.

Well, we have to remember that maternity leave is a mere two months, and there are no creche services in most places of work. So, I suppose leaving the baby behind is safer than taking a risk with an unknown babysitter. After all, we are familiar with stories of child abuse and neglect under the care of hired maids and supposedly trusted babysitters.

So, having considered all options, I should be happy I have the best of all worlds, but am I?

Many years ago, I remember attending a seminar on "Balancing work and family" as a medical student. The speaker was a Consultant Pathologist who had deliberately taken twice as long to complete her training, just so that she could spend time with her children. Obviously, at that time I could not have possibly understood the difficulties of juggling so many roles. The only take-home message I remember is this: you will have to compromise.

That translates to: you will not be the best mommy you strive to be, or be as aggressive as you wish to be in your career aspirations. Spending more time in one area will inevitably result in compromise in the other.

What roles are we talking about? Well, I am first a Christian, a wife, a mother, a doctor, a daughter, a student ... or have I already got it wrong?

It's a little like those chemistry equations with funny arrows pointing both ways - eventually everything settles and the components involved reach an equilibirum. I guess I just haven't found that equilibrium yet.

The truth is, I wish I could be more of a mommy.

It is so difficult to reconcile the fact that my baby spends more waking hours with her carers than with me. Who is her parent?

Parenting choices such as using the dummy(or not), structuring feeding and sleeping times, having supervised tummy time etc., are all out of my reach, simply because I am not there. Trying to force the little baby into "my" routine at the weekends seems cruel, since she already has another routine. Hannah now wakes up irregularly at night, searching for her dummy, simply because she can't do without it now. Trying to break the habit during the weekend seems pointless, since she gets her way during the week!

The utter heartbreak would be if Hannah says "Po Po" as her first words instead of "Ma Ma". I'll blog about it if that happens, and all the working Mommies can then try to console me.

Experts say that babies instinctively know who their mothers are. But I really wouldn't blame Hannah if she gets a little confused. Everybody wants to have a piece of her (remember the market lady?), and Mommy just can't seem to get enough of her!

Working Mommies out there, any words of advice for this anguished Mommy?

Getting back online

Wow, it's been a while. Who would have thought an earthquake off the coast of Taiwan could have so disrupted our blogging? Actually, we don't have much to say, so we will let the picture speak instead. I have chosen this particular photo as my new desktop background - it's bound to raise a smile every time I turn my computer on! I hope it brightens your day too.