I wonder what can make a mother so angry that she could bring herself to hurt her own child. I was at one of the quiet corner of the shopping mall today and saw one young mother scolding and hitting her daughter. I don’t know what made the mother so mad. She dragged the wailing girl, spanked her, pulled her bag, and then pushed her, slapped her face, continually thrusting her hands at the girl’s head and hurling verbal abuses at her all the time.

The girl was obviously traumatised, her crying further agonised the mother. The mother must have lost control, I don’t think she even realised her daughter was crying so pathetically and she was hurting her. I wanted to walk away, but couldn’t bring myself to do so. I was worried that my intervention might worsen the situation and make her angrier. But luckily, I managed to calme her down a little and stopped hitting the child, though she was still shoving forceful pushes at the kid and continued demeaning the child with unkind words. The child was probably stunned to see another adult trying to pacify the mother and stopped crying too.

I hoped the mother won’t “deal” with the child again after I left. Besides the daughter (around 4yr old), she was carrying another toddler on her hip. All while, this younger child looked on with a very confused and terrified look on the face. I hope this is an isolated episode and doesn’t leave any harrowing memory that is going to scar them for life.

My heart was still pounding hard when I left them. I was as badly traumatised by the mother. It was very distressing seeing young innocent children victimised by angry parents who lose their cool. Disciplinary actions from some parents can get so harsh that they become abusive. Under no circumstances should we vent our anger or took out our frustrations on the kids no matter how mischievous or irritating they are, got to constantly remind myself just in case I snapped too.

We finally visited the zoo today. It is really near our place, just 10min ride away. James, my sister and my brother all promised to get me their corporate zoo pass. I think by the time I lay my hands on the pass, Yauyau would have gotten married. Didn’t want to wait anymore, pay money will do. Well, I didn’t know the entrance fee to the zoo is $14 per adult. Luckily I didn’t bring along a whole big group of grandparents and helpers.

We didn’t bring along our stroller this time. We thought we could let the child walk or carry her. After walking not more then 100m from the entrance, we turned back decidedly and forked out more money for the tram ride. Letting her walk would take forever, carrying her would tired us. Next time, I would remember to bring along our faithful stroller.

I was quite surprised to see the kid touching the donkey and goat at the Children’s World Animal Land. I always thought she is wary of strange things and doesn’t like to be near them. An encouraging change.

I wasn’t in the best mood to look at the animals. Because I have been there many times, the weather was too warm and humid, the kid was annoyingly heavy and I was too busy trying to take photos. Maybe I would pay more attention to them on my next visit.

My favourite? Not the animals, but the Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream at the entrance. Simply drove away all the heaty and exhuasting sensation.

I mentioned Cheerios in my last post. The power of advertising introduces this finger food to me and conditions me into believing that it is the perfect snack for children.

I have been looking for it for months. I always try searching for it in the baby food section, without any success. There are only formula, baby cereal, jar food, rusk and babybites, no sight of the much wanted O shaped food. I even went to the more high class supermarkets where more expats frequent in search of it (I had the idea that all ang moh kids grew up eating Cheerios, too much advert I guess). Still no sight of it.

It was like discovering a gold mine when I saw Bee Gek from our playgroup brought out these little golden ring like snack. It is available in our little island, and can be found at Cold Storage! The next day, I headed down to Cold Storage at Guthrie House (a lot of ang mohs shop there, sure have), and I found the treasure among the many different kinds of breakfast cereal. It was never found at the baby food section.

Taste a bit like pop corn without butter and honey. The kid loves it (to be fair, she loves almost every food we offered). I enjoy eating it too and my father enjoys offering “biscuit” to the kid without having me screaming at him.

I bought a set for Dory as Ryan’s birthday present. These stay-put suction bowls from Munchkin look so interesting and useful that I decided to get one set for Yauyau too.

The bowls come in a set of three, which was why it took me more then a month to finally come to a decision to buy them yesterday. Three suction bowls! Why would I ever need so many of them!? But having returned to my old impulsive shopping self on that instance, I adhered to the “buy first, justify later” principle and brought the three colourful bowls home happily.

And I must tell you, it is a good buy. I have it tested today, the suction rubber kept the bowl firmly stuck to the table at the coffee shop. Not only that, it kept Yauyau firmly glued to her chair as well. With the bowl full of Cheerios stuck to the table, she actually spent at least ten quiet minutes eating her snacks while sitting on those red plastic chair. For once, Indar and I didn’t have to take turns to finish our food and carry her in our arms. What a great helper I have found!

Playgroup session at the pool today. The babies and older children have lots of fun. We had a new mommy with 15mth Dansel (I hope I got the name right), he is such a cute boy. Joshua is a natural born aqua baby, he was kicking and paddling all the way like a pro though he never had any formal lesson. Aoife was always wandering away in search of new adventures. The big brother Cian swam, dived, dunked, and jumped everywhere, thoroughly enjoying himself.

Yauyau was very happy riding her F2 super racer airplane float. I think she felt a bigger sense of security riding on the float then with me holding her.

The trial period for Yauyau’s new routine is over and she has adapted to it quite well. It was mainly adopted to solve the problem of the kid not sleeping till 11pm, which deprived me of all the precious time to get some work done. Earlier on, I have concluded that she still has a large reserve of energy which she must burn before bedtime. She must have slept too much in the morning and afternoon nap and did not have enough activities to work her out. My solution is simple, to make her really tired by 9pm, and knock her out by 10pm.

I decided to cut down one nap. I only wake her up at around 8.30am, and then bring her downstairs to roam about for an hour after her breakfast. No more morning nap. She would be real tired by mid afternoon and nap without much fuss. By 9pm, she would usually be tired again.

Nursing her to sleep doesn’t work so well nowadays. I realised that the success rate is higher when I pretend to sleep with her. Seeing me quiet and motionless, she seems to calm down and relaxes herself on the bed too, instead of tossing and turning about. If I can get her to lie still, she will fall asleep after a while. The problem with this is, I am not good at pretending and really falls asleep with her. A night wasted!

She followed what we demostrated to her and figured out that if she covered her nose with tissue paper and blew air out from her nose strongly and delibrately, she would be able to wipe away some slimy yucky stuff from her runny nose.

Must be a lot of fun for her, because her runny nose has cleared, but she is still hunting down tissue papers.

It has been at least 10years since I last visited the Chinese Garden.

I have never been to the top of the pagoda and we briefly mentioned that we would climb to the top floor during our detour. But we never reminded each other about the climb, especially when there was a 10kg baby to carry.

There was a grandma with two kids fully prepared with a huge loaf of bread to feed the (very big) fishes in the pond. Yauyau was offered two pieces of bread to join in the fun as well. She finally managed to throw the last few pieces of bread into the pond correctly instead of dropping them straight onto the floor.

There were these very colourfully painted “terra cotta” soldiers on display. So brightly painted that the kid couldn’t take her eyes off them.

These fake were actually plastic or fibre glass, one of the poor soldiers even lost half his arm. Well, I still think they look awful and ugleeeeeeee.

And finally, one last picture with the landmark bridge to conclude the day. It is always difficult to take photos of children; they always looked at the wrong direction!

There was this strange sense of déjà vu visiting the Chinese Garden. That was a place my parents always brought us to when we were kids, and now I am bringing my own baby there. While the Botanical Garden is full of activities and children running wild during a weekend evening, Chinese Garden is really quiet. Except for some joggers who looked local, all other visitors seemed to be a foreigner. Is the Chinese Garden really that unpopular to families here or is it just too out of the way in the western part of our island?

Today is the day the kid gotten her first choke of her life. It was a rubbery plastic thing, just small enough for her to stuff into her mouth. There was a basket full of little toys for the kids to play during playgroup time this morning, and I knew I couldn’t trust her not to put anything into her mouth. I was watching her all the time, and during that half a minute time when I lost her as she wondered away to another room, she got hold of something and pop it into her mouth.

Before I had the chance to experience the “scared to death” feeling or had the time to rush forward to try digging into her mouth, she already started crying and gagged. Out came the plastic thing, followed by some sticky slimy stuff. It was a forceful explusion. I was amazed when I saw the plastic item shooting out of her mouth like a missile.

At that moment, I thought near choking wasn’t really that scary after all, our body seems to be armed with an eject button to clear any obstructive foreign bodies effectively. Of course, that was only because the kid was lucky that the object didn’t get stuck at her throat. I wouldn’t want to trigger that eject button a second time.

She is finally sleeping through the night! I have been having uninterrupted sleep for three consecutive nights …. with a condition, she sleeps on the big bed with me.

Children just want to be near the parents for that added sense of security. I am sure she still stir and wakes up at night, but knowing that I am just right besides her; she would shut her eyes and continues her sleep. No more sitting up or standing up in the cot crying for me to transfer her to the big bed.

The next thing to do is to dismantle the cot and get a mattress by the bed. My only worry is she might get too used to sleeping with parents and wouldn’t want to or is afraid to sleep on her own in future. I know too well about this problem, because I was plagued by this fear for many many years. How did I overcome this fear? Marry a husband who travels frequently, thus force to sleep alone, after a few nights, it doesn’t seem so frightening any more. I am sure it will work on the kid as well, the only problem is, I am not unsure when it is the right age to start.