Thursday, May 13, 2010
From H1N1 to Birthday Celebration
13 May 2010:
I have a backlog of things to blog about. First, there was the H1N1 case at Dom's school. Before I launch into the details, let me explain that Dom's school is in fact a private school that consists of the primary/secondary school and the kindergarten (they have their own entrances). A few weeks ago, we received a circular informing us that the primary school was closed for 1 week due to several confirmed cases of H1N1. The parents of kindergarten children are informed because first of all, it is good to know and secondly, some kindy kids whose elder brothers or sisters are with the primary school will be sent over to join their elder siblings after school dismisses so that their parents can pick them up together. That night, as we were lying in bed having our nightly chat, Dom said, "There are 'bye-bers' in my school". "Bibles?", I said. "But you have a bible at home too.". He looked surprised and asked me where? In the cupboard, I said. He was even more confused then. After a while, I realized that he wasn't talking about the bible at all and I asked, what 'bye-bers' are you talking about? And he said "The 'bye-bers' at the big children school that makes them sick!". Haha. "Virus! 'Vai-russs'", I said.
The following week, the H1N1 'bibles' have cascaded down to one of the kindy children and the kindy was closed for 2 days.
We received the news on a Saturday when we were on our way to Ipoh to celebrate my grandmother's birthday. I was looking forward to that for a long time, but rather sad that one of my cousins (and family) couldn't join us because her grandfather just passed away. There are many things to be said during the 2 days I spent in Ipoh. Firstly, about my grandmother who is 80-over years old now. She remembered my name, remembered Saimun's name, remembered that my son's name is Dominic, remembered that I have a daughter but didn't know she was called Emily, but I don't blame her because my aunt who was only 50-over years old asked me TWICE what my son's name was! Can you guess which aunt this is? :-D I think my grandma is in good shape but can't help noticing how she seems to stoop and bend a little and gets a bit shorter every time I see her. I think she was the happiest person in the whole world that day. What can be happier than having all your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren with you, celebrating your birthday?
Can anyone count the number of candles? I missed the cake-cutting ceremony because Emily chose that time to do a poo!
Next, I'd like to introduce my family. See the photo below - they are my grandma in the middle and her two daughters on each side plus the husband (one of them is not married). My grandma has 3 daughters but one of them was not there because her FIL passed away. Then you can see her 3 sons and their wives. My grandma has 4 sons but my dad wasn't there. The rest are the grandchildren and the 3 youngest ones at the back are her great grandchildren. There are of course more grandchildren but not all of them were there. Five of them are in Australia, three in Singapore/JB, and I think the rest are all in the photo. On the far right is the maid (but she's my grandma's God-daughter, someone said).
I was told the food we ate that night was expensive but actually I didn't think they tasted that great. I'll blog more about the food with more photos in another post.
It was late by the time we finally got home and close to 1am when my head hit the pillow. It seemed like only 5 minutes ago that I fell asleep when Emily started wailing because she had done another poo. The next morning (or should I say later that morning), I had to get up at 7:30am to go to church with my aunt (which is Cattypants' mum). This brings me to the 3rd thing that I want to say about this trip. I am never good with expressing myself, especially when it comes to showing my emotions and being touchy feely. As I sat next to my aunt in church, I wanted to let her know that I remember her hospitality when I lived with her for 3 months, but I didn't, therefore I hope she's reading this now, so that I can tell her how grateful I am. It was in those 3 months that I saved enough money to put down a down payment for our first apartment (which we are renting out now). She gave me a place to live - practically my own room (as I helped myself to Cattypants' wardrobe) with my own attached bathroom. Every morning, she bought me breakfast, even on weekends so that I never had to spend a single cent on breakfast. Her maid made me a sandwich for lunch everyday, so that I never had to spend a single cent on lunch either (although I got pretty sick of eating sandwiches everyday). I also had dinner at home so that's another meal covered. Her driver would come round every morning and drive the cars out to fuel up, and if I leave my car keys with the rest of the keys, he would fill up my car too. Basically, I put all of my salary in the bank except for parking charges. Every Saturday, we would have dinner outside. On the Saturday before I was finally due to go back to KL, the least I could do was to buy them dinner, but she wouldn't even let me do that and I had to fight my way to pay the bill. That was 10 years ago. I came back to KL and bought our first house and that was the beginning of my little family now.
Back to the birthday celebration, when everyone had sobered up and had enough sleep the next day, people started to feel hungry. Although I wasn't involved in all the planning and organizing (for it took a lot of consideration with such a big group), I felt a headache just listening to the arguments. All I wanted was a quiet, spacious, crowd-less place to eat. Doesn't even matter if the food was good. As it turned out, it wasn't that bad this year. At least we didn't have to fight for parking and tables. :-)
