Can the water bottle shoo people away?

The big one put a water bottle on the table to chope it. The littlest one takes it away. I told him to put it back, with the comment that other people will sit on the table ( since it has been un-chope-d) without the bottle. He takes it back. Comes back with this wide-eyed-i'm-so-incredulous look and a question for me. "Can the bottle shoo people away? When people come, it says SHOO?" I look at him, and try not to react. He goes back to the table, and tells the bottle in his usual loud voice. "Hello? I'm here. Can you say Shoo?" Comes back to me with a smug. "See? the bottle cannot shoo people away!" I'm thinking... he's just four and a bit and talks like a gangster already. Thankfully by then, his four siew mai and one char siew pau is paid for. He can start eating at the table of the incompetent bottle that cannot shoo people away, and shut up.

A new beginning...

There is so much to say yet so little comes out. A huge part of the reticence comes from knowing too well it could all go to naught. Only one fine Saturday morning, rainbows speared through the heart, lighting up all that is not, leaving nothing that needs to be said.

Wealth

If you woke up this morning
with more health than illness,
you are more blessed than the
million who won't survive the week.

If you have never experienced
the danger of battle,
the loneliness of imprisonment,
the agony of torture or
the pangs of starvation,
you are ahead of 20 million people
around the world.

If you have food in your refrigerator,
clothes on your back, a roof over
your head and a place to sleep,
you are richer than 75% of this world.

If you have money in the bank,
in your wallet, and spare change
in a dish someplace, you are among
the top 8% of the world's wealthy.

If you can read this message,
you are more blessed than over
two billion people in the world
that cannot read anything at all.
You are so blessed in ways
you may never even know.

...Author Unknown

Instant noodles

He woke me up to tell me he was hungry. 
He asked if he could cook noodles by himself... I nodded and went back to sleep.
He asked if it should be half a bowl of water for half a pack of noodles.... I mumbled "en"... and dozed off.
He asked if he could add an egg.... "ok"... zzzzz
He asked if he could add powder directly to his noodles because it wasn't spicy..."orh"... zzz

When I finally crawled out of bed, he was done eating. He's managed to cook and feed himself! House wasn't burnt down... although there was seasoning powder on the kitchen floor, around the stove, on the coffee table, some noodles on the sofa and ... dirty dishes lying around.

Pringles

He put 2 short cans of sour cream and onion Pringles into the cart.

I told him to put one back. He ignored me. I repeated... he went, "Har?"... repeated a second time. He went, "Har?"

Frustrated with his loss of hearing, I said, "Put both back!" He took one look at me, measured my resolve, and scooted off with the cart before his Vitagen gets threatened as well.

Came back grinning, with one can.

I looked at the can and then at him, and asked, "So the can grew up?" 

He laughs....

I pay.

Nothing much ...

... been alone for a month. Me having all the time to myself and me exhausting all my writing energy on flyers, brochures, emails and reports.

It's kind of nice though, to hear that the big one was asked by my son's teacher whether he (my son) has English tuition, because the boy's English is ok she says. I better not read in-between the lines else I'd go off on a spiel about the education system back home. The big one told her, "No. Mother teach."Also nice to know that his maths and Chinese are ok too.

The boy though, has decided that he prefers school here in Shanghai ( not a problem now but would be an issue when we move back to Singapore). Other than seaweed, chips (same store) and drinks from the vending machine, he's not attempted to buy anything else from the canteen. He's bought a Chinese chess set, a Singapore flag, some stickers for his cousins and not sure if he did buy it eventually, but definitely something he did consider buying - a mechanical multi-colored pencil, from the bookshop.

His Summer Holiday
- lots of meals with the family
- 3-day beach holiday in Mersing, Malaysia
- had a blast at a gathering with his kindergarten school friends
- went to Universal Studios ( pong-tang school one Friday) with his dad.
- survived 8 violin lessons with his 'old' violin teacher
- spent one evening at the new Pasir Ris public swimming pool
- went cycling at East Coast Beach a couple of times
- went to school for 6 weeks
- fell ill for a week
- had his jabs
- went to the dentist
- had a wonderful birthday party at downtown east explorer (organized and paid for by my dear girlfriends)
- didn't finish his summer holiday school work

He's flying back here tomorrow.
Another year begins

Our phone call

Told him I bought a monopoly card game but have not tried it yet because I have nobody to play with.
> He tells me I should open it and start reading the instructions so that we can play it when he gets here.
Told him I also bought a 2X2 rubik cube and that I tried to very hard solve it but couldn't. Explained that these cubes normally come in 3X3... he knows what it is but couldn't understand what I meant by 2X2.

Told him we'd give him a budget to buy his own birthday present at the toy shop.
> What's a budget? He asks.
Well, it's an amount of money.
> Twenty dollars?
I think it's going to be a bit more than that... if it's not enough, you can use your savings to top up. Or if it's too much, you can save it for another day.
> Orh.

Then we talked about the Toys R 'Us in Shanghai vs. the one in Singapore. Told him to shop in Singapore because the price is cheaper.
> It's because one Singapore dollar is 5 Renminbi, that's why it's more expensive.
No, when you do the conversion, it is still cheaper.
> What is a conversion? He asks.
...I explained with a couple of examples...
> Orh. Then proceeds to tell me he wants a control car... the one that is being sold in Shanghai - the one that comes with the steering wheel.

He tells me when he is coming back to Shanghai and that I should buy some dumplings from the market the day before he arrives so that we can cook them when he gets here.

I told him I cleaned up our apartment.
> He made me promise to drive his 'drifting car' on the floor to test (the cleanliness)....saying I should be able to make the remote control car crash to the wall if the floor is smooth.

I told him about the green worm I found curled up on the handle of our electric kettle.
> He asked if the worm got electrified.
Told him no, electric kettle is for boiling water. Won't electrify the worm. Told him I threw the worm away
> Asks why I never take some newspaper, put the worm on it - a newspaper big enough so that it will not crawl on my fingers - and bring it downstairs to the bushes.
Told him I didn't think about it... because I'm a girl and I don't like worms.
> He laughs, tell me he is not afraid of creepy crawlies and asks what I would do if he had a creepy crawlie.
I told him he would have to live alone.
> He tells me he doesn't like spider webs but he is ok with spiders. He doesn't like them because of the insects on the web. Tells me that spiders live in between rocks and that the web is only for catching their breakfast, lunch and dinner.
(I didn't know that!)
> Tells me again I should have brought the worm downstairs...
What if I threw it out of the window?
> Then it will smash onto the ground!!!
Oh.

Typhoon

City issues typhoon alert as menace of Muifa looms by -- THIS year's first typhoon alert was issued this morning as Muifa was moving closer to Shanghai, packing winds of up to 162 kilometers per hour and threatening havoc in the next two days, weathermen said.

>>> I should stock up some food and water?

August

Flew back to Shanghai last week. Alone.
They come back here at the end of August.

Meanwhile, I hear the cicadas for the first time. From whence they come I don't know but they are making a huge din day in and day out, from morning to night. I imagine they are simply sizzling in the summer heat on wu-tong treetops and complaining as loudly as they can but no, apparently, it's a love song.

I have been reading and finished 
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Wallpaper Magazine August Issue
I am fifteen and I do not want to die by Christine Arnothy
... and about to start on
A very short history of the world by Geoffrey Blainey

I've also watched a couple of movies, caught a cold and recovered sans medication, went for a session of yoga, visited Tanzifang at Taikang Lu and started clearing out 11 months of living excesses from the apartment.

Another 4 weeks.

3 words make a sentence

Asked his P1 teacher. "How is he?"
Answer: He is coping. Period.

Day 5 in the Singapore school

He's getting richer by the day!
I give him $2 daily.
He spent a total of 80cents the whole of last week.

2 years 1 months and 10 days

Just realized I've completed almost 11 months of my 3-year assignment. I can almost 'see' what's going to happen this time next year. How far can one plan? How far should one plan? I haven't yet planned us coming back to Singapore for sure.

Day 3

Day 2 ended with him saying that he is upset with everyone in his class. He said they would not listen to the teachers instructions and all that happened on day 2 was non-stop scolding by the teacher. He decided he had enough, hated it and that he did not want to continue going to school here in Singapore anymore. He continued to be upset the whole evening, protested when I told him to get into his uniform this morning and sulked along the journey to school.

Told him the story of the boy who went to school for 3 days and quit.
On the first day, the boy was taught how to write the Chinese character for the number One: 一
On the second day, he was taught how to write Two: 二
On the third day, he was taught Three: 三
And so the boy thought, that's simple isn't it and decided not to waste his time going to school anymore.
He never found out that the number Four is written like this: 四
Worse. Whenever he had to write 'One Hundred', he had to use a comb instead of a pen.

This made our boy laugh... but he still carried his bag reluctantly and deliberately dragged his feet through the school gates.

Day 3 ended with him showing us a thumb which was neither up nor down.

It was "ok", he said.

Rare Art

The next 2 weeks

One more week of school, then exams and then we are going home!
Except our home has been rented out...

He's finishing his first year in primary school in 2 weeks! WOW!!

He's not losing so much stationery nowadays, although occasionally he will do stupid things like sharpen his pencils both ends, break them in twos or saw them up with his ruler.

He had a few problems with his class bully earlier on in the year. Had food picked off the floor dumped into his soup, scratched his cheeks, hands, kicked, tripped etc. But last I hear, he says things are alright now, the bully doesn't bother him anymore.

So when yesterday he came back with a scratch on his cheek, I asked him how he got it. Refused to tell at first. I left it as that. But later, he did open up and told me he had a scuffle with his best friend's brother on the school bus. An older kid. Kid's brother took his 'shark' (he's into origami nowadays - it was a paper shark) so he grabbed that fellow's with his hands / fingernails but stressed that he didn't scratch him because there weren't any marks on the fellow's arm. Fellow retaliated by grabbing his face. Scuffle was broken up by bus auntie.

He's learnt how to add, subtract, count money, tell the time, recognize right angles and do 1-10 multiplications. Chinese speech and writing has improved dramatically and he's started reading chapter books by himself - Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

He's taller too. It became apparent after winter. His pants - the ones he had before the cold season, have all shrunk against those skinny legs of his.

He swims. Picked up front crawl, can swim 8 laps or so in that style without too much effort, and do a total of 16-20 laps during his hour-long lesson. He's also now learning backstroke.

Music education on the other hand, is a disaster. He punches the piano like he does the computer. Randomly and forever searching for the right keys.  He also dropped out of the school choir and joined the paper-folding / origami class instead. Finally, he is still struggling to hold the violin properly and plays it like an executor with severe finger spasms.

He lost 2 baby tooth and has a couple more loose.

I see only fleeting glimpses of the baby nowadays and so when he ran back for a voluntary second hug and kiss before going to school this morning, something he never does nowadays, I was reminded. He's not yet seven but will be soon, all grown up.

Attention span of a chicken.

I have no idea what a chicken's attention span is but I don't think there's a chicken in this world which would forget to swallow the corn that it has in its mouth. I do know however, of a boy who would write a chinese character halfway, start talking and forget that he has not yet finished writing it.

Children's Day

It's Children's Day today in China.

His school held a Charity Bazaar ( flea market + food fair).

A couple of days ago, he asked me how much I would give him... I said RMB20. He asked for more. RMB35 was the number we eventually agreed on.

On Monday, he brought a note home from school. Each food coupon was RMB5 and could be pre-purchased. So I gave him RMB20 for 4 tickets.

This morning, we argued over how much money he could bring to school. I thought I'd give him RMB15 ( 35 - 20 = 15!) but he said it was not enough and wanted RMB100. "That's 50 Da Niang veggie buns!", I exclaimed. Finally, we agreed to settle for RMB50.

Putting RMB20 in his right pocket and RMB30 in his left pocket, I told him that he could spend the RMB30 and urged him to save the RMB 20. As an incentive, if he brought back the RMB20, I'd double it - money he could spend next time.

He asked me to go to his school. I did.

Oh what fun! I observe the boy examining a bow & arrow game set at his class booth. Then he put it down and went away. Came back later with a small Optimus Prime (RMB1) and Mitsubishi toy truck (RMB1), spiderman stickers and some origami paper. I left him to himself and got myself 3 food coupons and exchanged them for chocolate ice-cream, corn on the cob and prawn crackers. He found me and asked if he could buy the bow & arrow set which was priced at RMB40. ( I think he asked only because he knew we had a spend 30 save 20 deal ) I told him to go bargain the price down  but he said, "No" and ran off. Came back with a box of Japanese rice maki, a really delicious looking cupcake covered with white icing and a pack of cookies ( 3 coupons gone). He asked again if he could buy the bow & arrow set. I relented. He happily rushed off and came back balancing the loot on his head. Told him to go spend his last food coupon before the fair ended. He flew off and came back with our 2nd pack of prawn crackers. *Yum.

(Addendum: he bought incredibles stickers, not spiderman stickers, a spiderman marker that has a roller stamp on the top end, a bottle of water, gummy sweets in the shape of a pizza, look-alike/taste-alike Yakult!?!)

We ate and I laughed so hard at the kids' conversations. One boy started jeering a girl who had applied glittery eyeshadow on herself - she had bought it and was delighted that it was 'real'!!! Another one regretted her purchase and placed it on her classmate's desk, who wasn't very impressed with the 'gift' and wanted to throw it away. One kid was given too much - he said he had RMB130 in one wallet and yet more money in his 2nd wallet. He had already filled 3 bags with stuff and became visibly very exasperated and exhausted with still having money left over after his nth trip.

My boy told me he had fun. I would think so.

Happy Children's Day!

He broke it.

It was on the floor and he fell on it.
The neck broke.
He broke the violin.
He broke a Paganini violin.
He broke a violin from the 19th century.

I told him to remember that his mother did not kill him when he broke the violin.

Project

No frills. I would have painted it, added details and made a mess of the house in the process. Him? He stuck to his plan. So long as the stuff stuck together, it was project completed. I even had to persuade him to add some feathers to the top of the robot's head. To him, anything outside of planned was out of scope. Had to bite my own fingers and lips to stop 'helping'.

We met on a boat named Pegasus...

It's our 10th Wedding Anniversary today.