Weekend at Sentosa

I'm still super-duper busy with tons of copy editing to do. But I must upload these pictures we took of Kai over the weekend cos he was full of smiles... and we managed to capture them!

We decided to bring Kai to the Underwaterworld at Sentosa for a treat. Didn't think he saw much of the exhibits as he was hungry half the time and then he got sleepy after his feed. We forgot to bring the camera with us during the outing so there were NO pix. Stayed at The Sentosa (http://www.beaufort.com.sg/) and took tons of pictures there.


We didn't bring Kai's own bathtub so we had to bath him in the hotel's tub, which means one of us have to get in with him. So that explains the second pix here.

Great expectations

It's 9.06pm and I'm still in the office doing copy editing. It's a horrible, horrible piece written by a person who can't string a single, decent sentence together. There're plenty of such writers around and I know, I'm bound to get another article that will make me very miserable again.

(Hats off to Eva Wong, the super-sub.)

Kai, I'll do whatever it takes to make sure that you write well. Never mind that you'd probably never doubleboil bird's nest for mommy (daddy will do that) and that you'd devote your life to your wife after you get married. But...

You

MUST

write

coherently.

Kai visits People's Park

Kai was the VIP of People's Park when we brought him to visit my parents on Saturday. Mom brought him all over the place and he was carried by almost every shop keeper my mom knows on the second floor -- which is a lot!

You should also see the bustle of activities when Mom passed two pieces of cloth to be sewn into blankets over to the tailor. Because the tailor was busy, the neighbors selling Christian paraphernalia got involved. One hemmed the edges, another ironed the blankets. Everyone else crowded round to see the baby.

The second picture I have of Kai in this post was taken after the milk fight I had with him on Friday morning. It involved flying milk bottles and they weren't thrown by the mother.

I've got De Quervain's tenosynovitis!

I'm a francophile with a French-sounding problem -- De Quervain's tenosynovitis!

Check out the definition and explanation given on MedicineNet.com (http://www.medicinenet.com/de_quervains_tenosynovitis/article.htm): "DeQuervain's tenosynovitis is (the) inflammation of the tendon on the side of the wrist at the base of the thumb.

"Typical causes include stresses such as lifting young children into car seats."

!!!

I've had pain in that area on both hands ever since Kai came along. I attributed it to the fact that I had to keep lifting him out of his bed, in and out of the car seat etc. It just got worse recently, with a pain in my left wrist everytime I flex it. It's a common problem among care givers, I think. Just yesterday, I met a grandmother of two six-month-old twins at the swimming pool and she complained of pain in her wrist from lifting her grand-daughters. She had her left wrist bandaged.

Terence asked me to change the way I carry Kai and take barley grass tablets. Barley grass? He swore that it cured his trigger fingers. For a doctor who never once recommended "alternative treatments" to his patients (or to his wife, at least), barley grass must be very effective since the traditional method of cortisone injection didn't help him at all.

AND, he doesn't think I'll have problems rock climbing. Hurray! But when are we ever going to find time and now that the other half of our climbing gang is in Australia, who are we going to go with. I can't belay him!

Don't blink

A lot has happened recently -- to both myself and friends around me -- which reminded me that family should always come first.

Then there was something which Terence said the other night which drove home the point. He said Kai has developed so much and so quickly as a person over the four months that we're literally seeing an evolution before our eyes. From an unresponsive, fragile little baby who's happy to be sleeping and swaddled most of the time, he's now capable of showing his likes and dislikes, of smiling and reaching out to show that he wants a hug.

Blink and we'll miss something, said Terence.

So for those of us who're in workaholic overdrive most of the time, don't blink.

What will he look like?

I was going through our picture archives and found one of Terence which I took in Luang Prabang, Laos.

Now many of you have said that Kai looks so much like Terence. I hear it so often that it's hard to imagine how emphatic you guys feel when you say it. But these two pictures really drive it home for me. Cover their hair and foreheads with your thumbs and you'll have two faces that came from the same cookie cutter!

I'll stop wondering what he'll look like when he grows up.

Funny coincident

I've been down with a cold -- running nose, cough, sore throat. Basically, the works. No mask at home; been washing hands almost everytime after I blow my nose and before handling baby. But I'm afraid he'll come down with it too. Funny thing is, the first BabyCentre e-mail alert of the week came with tips on handling babies with cold (http://www.babycentre.co.uk/baby/health/commoncold/).

Is it a sign?

The making of a swimmer

After Vivo City, we brought Kai down for a swim and this time, he was more receptive to the water. In fact, he was kicking his legs the minute he got into the pool. I found that the best position to encourage him and give him assurance that we'll there to support him is to stand in front of him and hold him under his arms. You can't really tell from the picture but he was furiously kicking his legs.

V for Vivo City

Vivo City opens for the first time to the public today and Terence decided to make it a family outing. Instructions: Dress for lots of walking indoors. But the outing turns out to be a flop. Most of the shops were not open since the official opening of Vivo City is not till Dec 2006. Hunted for the foodcourt that was suppose to be in basement two. Found it after 15 minutes -- it's still under renovation. Ended up eating yucky creamy pasta at Coffee Beans & Tea Leaf. Next time, just stick to spicy tuna.

The haze

This is how the quarry (Little Guilin) opposite our house looks like now with the haze at about 7pm. The air smells burnt. But it isn't so bad today compared to yesterday. We wanted to bring Kai out for dinner but the haze was so thick that we changed our minds. He was also getting a little sleepy, which meant lots of crying and very little actual eating for the parents.

He said Da Da!

We were just lazing in bed this morning with Kai and as usual, he was telling us about his dreams, how warm he'll like his milk to be etc. I remembered it was when we all kept quiet for a while when he said: "Da da!"

Of course Terence was thrilled. But Kai wasn't even looking at him so perhaps it was just baby babble. (By the way, he's got an imaginary uncle/friend called "Ah gu".) But we're not going to take it as such, of course.

So 6 Oct 2006 is the first time he called out for his daddy.

Fashion woes

How do you buy pants for a four-month-old baby with a close-to-one-year-old waistline? Pants for his age will be too tight; pants that fit his waist will be too long.

Ended up buying a pair of jeans for six- to nine-month-old babies from Oshkosh, and super elastic cotton pants and sweat pants for three- to six-month-old babies from Fox Baby.

Thank you Fashion God for Fox Baby. But can you do something about the abundance of cute, pink clothes for baby girls there? They've allocated close to 80% of their retail space to girls.

But if they brand their adult and kids wear as "Fox Women", "Fox Men" and "Fox Kids". Why Fox Baby?

Chubby baby

Met a lady in the lift yesterday morning who couldn't resist saying "Good morning!" to Kai. She asked if he's breastfed. When I said no, she went on to say the model answer: "But he's so CHUBBY!"

Do breastfed babies tend to be chubbier than formula-fed ones? I thought it's normally the other way round.

This is not the first time I've received comments like this. It's nice to know that people generally think he's cute--because he's a chubby baby. But I always feel funny--my baby is cute because he is overweight?

Would it be different if I had continued breastfeeding him? I think I'll always have misgivings about that.

Having said that, he's on track (in terms of the milestones for gross motor skills) despite what the doctor said about heavier babies developing slower. He can turn from supine to prop himself up on his tummy with no trouble at all--and on both sides at that!

(For the record, babies are suppose to double their birth weight by six months and triple the birth weight by one year. Kai was 2.61kg when he was born and he's now 7.9kg at four months.)