Food Navels

Whenever we make pancakes, the girls often ask for teeny-teeny ones. These are the result of batter drops frying on the griddle. The girls call them baby pancakes. This morning, I gathered the cooked batter drops and served one on each regular sized pancake to the girls.


"Look!" said Jenna. "The pancakes have bellybuttons!"

"Bupbillas," I corrected her.

Slightly More Serious Verse

Last one!

I don't remember whom I wrote this for - could very well be for myself. I also don't remember why (i.e. during which exact "difficult period in my life") I wrote it.

Jesus poem
Jan 1 2004

In all the toil that lies ahead


May Jesus be your rest


And for your striving, peace instead


Your weariness arrest.



In all the friendships you hold dear


May Jesus be your love


His mercy and His presence near


His company your trove.



In all decisions you would make


May Jesus be your guide


And all your anxious thoughts forsake


His counsel to confide.



In all your service - noble, weak -


May Jesus be your joy


In His anointing, humble, meek


True calling His employ.



In all you treasure, known and hid


And long for, great and small


Know in your haste, its coming bid,


That Jesus is your all. 


Limericks

Two limericks about stress. The first is about my work in a government agency which shall not be named. I learned a lot in that job, but it was sadly a poor fit for me, in terms of work values and interests.

A woman at work in despair -


So bored did degenerate there


Years later they found


Her hair reached the ground


And she, petrified in her chair.

The second is about my then-regular occurrences of canker sores (we called them "ulcers" in Singapore). Now I know they were probably caused by using toothpaste that was too strong, but then we attributed them to being "heaty" and stressed and blamed the weather and our jobs. Bonjela was the brand of a popular ointment for canker sores.

A girl with an ulcer from hell


Slathered on Bonjela gel


By Day Six she found


Her tongue on the ground -


Which mocked her from wherein it fell.

Rhymes

While digging through my computer archives tonight, I found a folder labeled "Scribblings". Inside were things I'd written some years back, and that I'd forgotten all about. I must have penned them during "difficult periods" of my life, but they don't count as poetry, since... well, you can see for yourself. I clearly didn't take them seriously, and it was fun to read them again tonight and remember the situations that led me to write them.

I wrote this first piece in response to my bout of prenatal carpal-tunnel syndrome in 2004/2005. I was pregnant with Emily at the time, and for the first few hours after waking each morning, I could not use my right arm at all. It was by no means life-threatening (except, perhaps, while driving to work), but it was frustrating and uncomfortable and thus counted as a "difficult period in my life". I am perplexed at why I chose to define "limb" as "hand" in this instance, but, hey, it's daft enough as is without a critical analysis.

O Useless Limb by Lier



O useless limb that dangleth from


The arm on my right side


What purpose dost thou serve except


To wakest me at night?



O useless limb that cannot hold


A fork or knife or spoon


Could thou my retribution be


For glutt'ny - none too soon!



O useless limb that cramps whene'er


I try to hook a bra -


Or bathe, or groom - alas,


Was I too vain thus far?



O useless limb that tingles when


I type or write or bind*-


It must be that I've worked too hard


And should mayhap resign?
(please, please, please)



O useless limb that cannot steer


My car - could this be sign


That I've been lazy- I should walk!


Should run! Should trek! Should climb?



Alas, the purpose of this trial


Has suddenly come plain -


I'm gluttonous and indolent,


Distracted, and I'm vain!


* I don't know what I needed to "bind" - I am guessing possibly reports - it was one of the menial tasks in my job, along with sharpening pencils, smiling, serving tea to VIPs and holding elevator doors open for members of parliament.

Told you it was daft!

I wish I still had some of the even earlier verses I'd written - but they were on 3.5" diskettes which became all mouldy and defunct in Singapore's lovely humidity. One of my favourite rhymes was called Manny The Manhole Cover. It was about a disgruntled manhole cover, tired of being walked all over by humanity, who rolled away to seek out greener pastures, leaving a trail of destruction and mayhem in its wake. A good friend who was then working in an editorial company, suggested that, I someday write children's books. I was in my twenties, had no children, and thus no inkling of what children's books were really like. I wrote Manny because I thought it was what I would've liked to read as a child myself. Now that I actually have children, I wish I still had it - I'm sure Emily, Jenna and Kate would've found it very suitable reading. And no, it was never published.

For more daft (and illustrated) verse, see this silly one I wrote on the craft blog. The "difficult period in my life" in that case, was having our house invaded by Hello Kitties.

We Left The House

Kate has graduated from Potty Training School. She completed her second chart this week and earned her trip to the Children's Museum. Yesterday we spent the afternoon at the Museum. We forgot to bring an umbrella stroller with us and happily found that we no longer need it. Everyone walked and even after being on our feet for 4 hours, everyone could still walk along the skyways back to the car without collapsing. All of a sudden, I am a mom of children, not babies/infants/toddlers. Surreal. My brain, however, is still that of a mom of babies/infants/toddlers - I donated almost all the cash in my wallet to some worthy cause at the museum, forgetting that I needed it to pay the exorbitant parking fee. The parking attendant, being very Minnesotan and therefore incredibly nice, let me off with a courteous, "stay warm!" Unbelievable.

Yesterday's temperature, incidentally, hovered miserably between - 20 and -17 C*. I am grateful to all the people who are extra nice to everyone else to help us all get through the winter.

Today I left the house again (brave/stupid) - had to buy pork chops. I made a slight detour (different store from the pork chops) to buy two sweaters as an incentive to stay alive till Spring. I also brought home pho (lovely) and chicken curry (why do we even bother) to feed the family.

* Celsius = for the benefit of Singaporean family reading this.

Translated to Fahrenheit = -5 and 0, respectively.

Masak-Masak*

The girls painted a tiny ceramic teaset yesterday. It came in a kit, and it was messy, but well worth the cleanup. Kate played with it for a very long time, all by herself.




* Masak-masak (Malay)- cooking pretend play.

Kateism

Katie, worriedly, "I accidentally ate a piece of paper!"

Then, working something around in her mouth for a while, "It's in my teeth!"

Did you notice? She said "I", not "My".

Graduation!

Braised Peanuts

Emily is sick this week. One of our favorite sick foods is plain rice porridge* with braised peanuts. We usually buy these peanuts in jars from the faraway oriental supermarket, but I haven't been very good recently at replenishing our stock. So I found a recipe online and cooked a small batch yesterday. It needed only minor alterations to achieve the taste I was looking for. I'll still buy them in little jars for emergencies when I next go shopping, but it is nice to have a workable recipe to turn to when I am clever enough to plan ahead.

Here is the final recipe:

Ingredients:

• About 350 g raw peanuts with skin
• A stick of cinnamon
• 2 cloves of garlic, whole, washed and with skin left on.
• 1 star anise (I used seeds because I didn't have the stars)
• 2 Tbsp light soy sauce
• 2 tsp dark soy sauce
• 2 Tbsp oyster sauce
• 1.5 - 2 tsp salt
• 0.5 tsp Chinese 5-spice
• 4 cups water
• 60 g rock sugar

Method:

1. Wash and drain peanuts.
2. Put garlic and star anise in spice bag.
3. Throw everything except the sugar into a pot and bring to a boil.
4. Add in the rock sugar and dissolve.
5. Pour everything into a crock pot (pressure cooker is best and fastest, but I don't have one) and cook for about 8 hours, till peanuts are tender.
6. Season to taste. I added about a quarter teaspoon of chicken stock granules, since we were going to eat them with plain rice porridge, but the sauce was very tasty even without.
7. Serve drained, or with a little sauce.
8. Save the rest of the sauce for braising the next batch. I plan to freeze mine.

* Dave continues to be very intrigued by this concept of plain rice porridge (Teochew porridge) - particularly with how we drop condiments and small bits of accompanying accent foods into it, which we then constitute into individual mouthfuls. There are hundreds of other dishes we eat with this porridge, but the ones that our family favor are radish-and-garlic omelette (chai-po ng), spicy pork with minced dried shrimp (hiam bak), salted egg (kiam ng), szechaun vegetables with pork strips, chillied fish with lime and chai sim with oyster sauce and sesame oil (yau choy).

Hanging Out With Jenna

Whenever I can, I try to get Jenna all to myself. She is delightful to be with - generous, sweet, solemn, serious and very, very, very funny. When Emily is in school, she shares me with Kate. So it is hard to find time to be together, just the two of us. Last Saturday, Dave drove Emily to a birthday party and took Kate along with them. Jenna and I did a gleeful little dance together in the living room, said conspiratorially to each other, "Just Mum and Jenna!" and baked cupcakes.

It was a serious affair - Jenna did all the egg-cracking and pouring and stirring. And Jenna lined the cupcake tray with paper liners. And Jenna poured the batter into the little wells. And when they were cool, Jenna piped squiggly rainbows all over the tops. This last part was even more serious - Jenna had a little book of cupcake stickers for Christmas, and she'd been thumbing lovingly through it, pointing out all the designs she wanted to copy on real cupcakes someday soon. So we made these cupcakes as close to those pictures as we could. They were quite delicious, unlike the other bizarre rainbow cupcakes we made long ago, which were completely inedible.

Yesterday, Emily stayed home sick and Dave watched her and Kate while I drove Jenna to school. Jenna whispered, "Can you stay for a while in school with me, Mom, since Kate isn't here?" Parents are free to do this, but it doesn't happen often because everyone is so busy, and so many parents also have younger children with them.

So of course I did. We sat and played with blue playdoh and made giant bagels. We played with the mushy sand in the sandbox. She sat on my lap at circle time and talked about the weather. I got to watch her belt out Days Of The Weeks, Mararena Months and all the routine songs of the day. Then I had to go, because there was one tiny child and her bigger, sick sister, waiting.

When I picked Jenna up later, I asked her how her day went. She said, "I thought of you while you were away."

So did I, Jenna. Thank you for hanging out with me.

Kateism

Kate, with horror, after rapidly emptying her cup of milk this morning, "Mum! My accidentally drank all my milk at once!"

All giggle. Then I ask, "Do you want more milk then, Kate?"

"Yes." says Kate.

Why We Measure Temperature Here in Fahrenheit

Because look at what we get to look forward to next week:

In Fahrenheit, at least some of those numbers are above zero.

This has been a cold, snowy winter so far. Winters in Minnesota are always cold and snowy, but this one is especially so. We had the most snow in December in years, and this weekend we are playing host to a Siberian air front. And we heard that 49 of the 50 states here have snow now. Strange weather.

Actually, I don't mind the cold so much. We don't spend a lot of time outdoors so we do avoid the worst of the wind and the blizzards. And when one's body starts acclimatizing from October, one doesn't feel quite so frozen-numb by January. What is hard for me in the winter is the light. I miss the sun. I miss the brightness and the dayness and the awakeness and the colourfulness of it. Winter evenings are protracted - they start after lunch and go lingeringly downhill from there. I'd rather have a freezing day that's sunny than a warmer one that's grey. Still, I'm glad I don't live in Washington - at least here we get some sunny days with brilliant blue skies that almost make me forget the windchill.

So we do what we can to stay jolly. Here follows a sampling of some things that have made our recent winter days more exciting.

Today we made fancy sandwiches with some cutters we bought at Christmas. Whenever I consider the frivolity of such purchases, I tell myself that there are only so few years in which our girls will find these thrilling, so it's now or never.


I bought Emily a stack of craft felt in a rainbow of colours, so she spent some time making herself a mini felt board this afternoon.

Yesterday was our turn to be a guest reader in Emily's classroom, so Jenna, Kate and I dropped in to read this book:

It's one of our favourites, and it turned out that Emily's classmates liked it too. Jenna and Kate were very excited to be allowed to visit Emily's class. And I love being in a classroom of any kind, of course. When we were leaving, Jenna whispered to me, "How many more days before I get to be in (kindergarten)?" Next month, we get to come back, dressed in Chinese outfits (ha!) and tell Emily's classmates all about Chinese New Year.

Later, James (Dave's brother) came to have dinner with us, which was lovely.

Kate is close to graduation from potty training! We went shopping today for underwear (she chose princesses) and she felt very big ditching her pullups for the first time today. She is 3 months shy of her 3rd birthday, and suddenly we don't have any more babies in our house.

And that's the update from our end. I still have Christmas photos to post, and a very late Christmas letter to write by way of summarizing our past year, but I feel slothlike. Must be the cold.

Promise

My friend Gretchen made this for me when we first found out that we were expecting Kate. I was excited and overwhelmed at the thought of being a mother of three. One of our neighbors, who has three kids and also the one who later babysat Emily and Jenna while Dave and I were in the hospital welcoming Kate, said, "three is when you are officially outnumbered - it's one more than the number of arms you have, and one more than the number of parents." How true- the early days were a juggling act of transitions and new patterns. It was challenging to hold both Kate and Jenna in my arms - literally and figuratively - and to leave an armpit or two of space for Emily.

This little framed verse sat on the bedside table in Kate's room (the nursery) until she moved into Jenna's room a fortnight ago. (Emily has moved into Kate's room). It has been good company for me through the sleepless nights, the nursing, the manic unearthly-hour screaming, the questioning of my own competence as a caregiver and gatekeeper of my faith. Kate is no longer a baby, and many of the initial needs that prompted Gretchen's gift have been met. But life ever steamrolls forward, so this precious promise now sits on the ledge beside my sewing machine, where it continues to remind me that God goes ahead of us in our bumbling experiments as parents, and that He is infinitely tender with not just the skippetty lambs, but also the wretched ewe that dares call herself their mother.

Quantum Physics

I love books. Not as much as I love cardboard, maybe, but it's close. We have bookcases full of odd books. Half of them belong to Dave, and half of them belong to me. One of the many nice things about marriage is merging our literary pasts in one physical space. Our combined collection of Science/Electronics/Physics/Scientific Journals/Psychotherapy textbooks lives in the bookcase in our bedroom. No reason; just no space elsewhere. The basement bookcase contains the print relics from our respective childhoods - not much overlap because we grew up in different cultures, reading quite different authors. Many, many books from my own childhood were thrown away for lack of space to store them in mum's and dad's Singapore apartment. But I saved some, for which I am glad, because I can re-read them now to the kids, or when I'm feeling like I want to be a kid again.

Someone said that books are windows to new worlds - how true, especially when they are never-before-read books. But an old, old book from one's childhood is like a little door to a time rich in memories. I often re-visit old books from my childhood because they remind me of when I could sit and read with nary a care in the world. Also because they don't require much concentration - therefore perfect for being interrupted by small people every 5 minutes or so needing help to dress a doll, or find a marker cap, or use the bathroom.

While looking for such an old comfort book yesterday to enhance a mid-afternoon snack, I found this instead:

I first read it when I was teaching Physics in Singapore. Quite a wonderful combination - Physics and fiction. I gave away my first copy - probably to a student, if I remember right. Later I bought this second copy to keep, along with this:

Not as good as Alice in Quantumland, though, which was quite excellent. I like Quantum Physics a lot, even though I personally don't think I have what it takes to cleverly dissect it on the deep level it deserves. "But it can explain the possibility of miracles!" was my evangelistic pitch to friends who wrinkled their noses at its very name. It seems a foreign world to me now, Physics. How easily I've forgotten so much of it. Did I really spend hours in dark labs making holograms and taking readings? Did I really teach it to other people? Did I really attend conferences and seminars and courses with brilliant older educators (mostly men) in unmatching clothes (them) and weird hair (me) and not fall into a coma? Wait - I was in a coma. Did I really (grumblingly) wake up at 6 am on a regular basis to go to a job for almost 10 years? Was there really a time when I didn't have children? A funny door to walk through. Very funny.

I left it on the shelf, though, and picked something not quite so cerebral. I don't think I can enjoy Alice in Quantumland now the way I did way back when my brain was actually awake. But I like to think I'll re-read it someday soon.

And I might just put this on my wishlist in the distant future:

All images from amazon.com

Sometimes I Don't Kill My Plants

Dave bought me this orchid plant for Mother's Day last year. Orchids remind me of Singapore, but I'd always thought they were fragile, high-maintenance plants so I never dared buy any. This one needs 3 ice cubes every week. When I first got it, I thought, "I can do 3 ice cubes every week." I'd also always thought people who talked to their plants were bonkers, but - surprise - I talk to my orchid plant. And yes, I feel bonkers. But here's the thing: it bloomed beautifully for a month or two, and then went into hibernation. I thought it had died, but nothing actually withered, so I kept feeding it 3 ice cubes every Saturday (I had gotten into the habit and it was hard to stop). This winter it put out these purple stalks and grew buds. This is the first plant I've had that I haven't killed. Now that the shock has worn off, I am ecstatic.

3 Below

The weather was a balmy 40+ degrees (5 C) when we took this picture last week. It was so tropical that we spent the whole afternoon outside sledding in our backyard and playing in (some of us also ate) snow. Our neighbours were out on their backyard ice-skating rink in short-sleeved Tshirts.

Not today, though. This morning, the van thermometer registered 3 below (minus 20 C) when we were driving Jenna to school. Good thing there was no wind chill. We are looking forward to a high of 10 today (minus 12 C). People often talk about The Lull After Christmas. Many causes: the sudden inactivity after all the celebration, the paralysis of one's body from gaining 25 pounds in one weekend, the prices of things in stores re-skyrocketing after the sales. In Minnesota, it's probably the suspension of feeling in one's brain because it has frozen - cryonics to tide one over till the end of the manual snow-shoveling season. A new manifestation of mercy, no?

A Year of Art

Happy New Year!

This week, I finally sat down to clear out our Art Basket. This is the basket that sits under our coffee table, into which all the kids' artwork goes. The idea is that when it's full, it gets cleared, and the artwork sorted so that some get displayed in the playroom, some get filed away in appropriate folders, and some get thrown away. It is always hard to throw away any of the artwork, even the ones that don't look like anything, because they are little time capsules of what the kids were able to do at those points in time. Also, they tell stories of what captured the kids' imaginations when they drew/painted/doodled those pieces - flowers, octopuses, buildings, mermaids and princesses,

outer space,

nativity scenes,

teapots,

rainbows,

cookies,

faces.

My favourites are the faces -

they all start out with the big eyes and big mouths

and then, over time develop expressions,

emotions,

details,

colour.

Fascinating, faces.

And then there are the stories -

this one is titled Santa Is Great And Late

and reads from the bottom up:

Holly loves Christmas - not about presents; about Jesus's birth.

Holly only wants one present but she won't tell.

Holly leaves a note and this is what it says: Dear Santa,

I've been wondering: do you stay alive all year?

That night, Santa came and brought the gift Holly wanted,

and a letter back. This is what it said,

- she didn't finish the story, so we will never know what Santa said to Holly. Sorry for the cliffhanger.

And there are the 3-D interactive art projects -

This is Manger With Baby Jesus That Can Be Hugged By Mary:

This was our old art wall in the playroom:

It had artwork going back to 2008 when Emily was in her first year at preschool. Most of the pieces are hers, with a few by Jenna and even fewer by Kate.

We refreshed the art walls (we need more than one now!) this week with pieces from all three girls:



There is a lot more colour -primarily because Jenna really knows how to use colour.


Speaking of time capsules, I suddenly remembered this Christmas, the two books I'd drawn for Emily and Jenna when their respective younger sisters were born.











And that's where they end - with just four Christmas stockings. We're clearly ready for Part III - the one with Kate in it, even though she isn't going to be welcoming a new sibling. Equity is a small part of the motivation, but mostly it's to capture the hilarious dynamics between the three sisters while everything is still fresh. Sort of what this blog tries to do, but in drawings.

And now that even Kate is allowed to participate in the messiest of art projects -

what will 2011 bring? Obviously not sanity for Mother. Stay tuned.