This is a sequel to Fishing in the Loo.
Remember those blue specs that Twin1 broke and used as a fishing rod? They were on the carpet of the master’s bedroom (I kinda forgot about them) and Twin2 found them yesterday.
And whaddya know? He wielded them just like he would a fishing rod and sang the same song that his twin did over the loo, except that the “fish pond,” this time, was my carpet.
“1, 2, 3, 4, 5…Once I caught a fish alive.”
With twins like these, who needs TV for entertainment? :)
After a 5-day weekend (!), it took superhuman effort to get myself to work this morning. My reluctance was partly because of my 11 a.m. meeting with 2 tough (read: unyielding!) Japanese suppliers. At least my morning was off to a good start, with all 3 kids to school and the twins to playschool without any brouhaha.
The meeting went much better than I expected, although I wished I knew Nihonggo so that I could figure out what the 2 gentlemen were murmuring to each other several times during the meeting.
Why, oh, why did I ever go for the Romance languages instead?
Well… partly because I was young, naive and an incurable romantic who thought “Romance” languages meant romantic languages, even though it actually means Romanic languages, i.e. descended from Latin. Hence, for as long as I could remember (or perhaps, ever since I first discovered romance novels), I’ve always wanted to learn Spanish and/or French one day.
But actually, it all started when I was at the Ateneo de Manila University and had to choose which foreign language to take: Nihonggo, Mandarin, German, Spanish or French. Everyone was required to learn a foreign language, irregardless of their major/concentration.
Mandarin and Nihonggo were out, as I didn’t want to deal with any new alphabets, on top of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.
I wasn’t attracted to German for some reason. It was out, as well.
That left Spanish and French.
My friend, Joey, told me he was taking up French. I asked him why French, when it’s supposed to be a heck of a language to learn, due to the pronunciation and conjugation.
“Simple,” he said, “coz French makes everything sound so cool. Mes chaussures son propres. That sounded real cool, right?”
It sounded like: Meh shos-yoor sonh prop-h. Whatever it meant, I had to agree with him. It did sound cool.
He smiled and said, “I just told you that my shoes are clean.”
I ended up taking Spanish anyway, as I was too chicken back then to tackle French pronunciation and conjugation because I knew that a lot of Spanish words are exactly the same in Tagalog and Cebuano (or very similar, with slight differences in spelling), and I thought to myself, at least I’ve got part of the vocabulary one less thing to worry about.
But I never ever forgot the clean-shoes-thing-with-Joey incident. So when senior year came and I had an extra 3 credits, I decided to use it up by taking French. And how I loved it! In fact, I loved it so much that I eventually attended French language classes at the Alliance Française Kuala Lumpur for about 2 years.
But that’s another story that will have to wait for another post. My lunch break’s almost over :(
When I woke up this morning, Twin1 was already in the toilet. He was standing in front of the toilet bowl, holding my blue spectacles (glasses) over the bowl, its left arm already broken (he broke it!), singing softly to himself “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, once I caught a fish alive…” He was pretending to be fishing!!!
I wanted to scold him but ended up laughing and just hugging him. It was just too precious! :)
[Note to self: Child-proof the toilet door so that the twins won't be able to go in by themselves.]
Tags: Children, kids, things children do, things kids do, Twins
Okay, okay, I must admit that this post is long overdue. I’ve written about the twins, a.k.a. The Human Pillows, in my 3rd post but have not formally introduced them to you.
My excuse is a good one: I wanted to post alongside a nice, recent pic of them, preferably sleeping side by side, in keeping with the Human Pillows theme. But I have not yet been able to get the shot that I wanted, and for want of the perfect shot, I kept putting off this post.
So I decided to postpone the ‘recent pic’ thing and just post one of my all-time favourite shots of them:
I took this photo using a Motorola RAZR V3i — so please try to overlook the substandard sharpness and clarity — back when they were only 7 months old and didn’t even know what a camera is. These days, they smile and pose whenever I whip out my Nikon D40 (or outright refuse to have their photo taken, if they happen to be in a bad mood), sometimes even counting “1, 2, 3″ for me. Then right after I press the shutter, they run to me to take a look at the D40’s LCD screen to check out the photo that I just snapped of them.
Twin1, on the left, who is older by 14 minutes, is a sensitive, affectionate soul. Twin2 is endearingly loud and cheeky. They almost always fight over the same thing (they easily lose interest when they have two of the same thing) and the tussle usually ends with Twin2 triumphant and Twin1 crying. Which is really quite a puzzle to me, because when they were infants, Twin1 was a self-assured baby who hardly cried and Twin2 the fussy, needy type who demanded a lot of attention. Now, it’s the other way around.
They had to wear their hospital tags for about a week after getting back home, while we tried to figure out a system of identifying who’s who. Yes, they look very much alike that even their own mother (that’s me!) gets confused sometimes.
The only fool-proof way of telling them apart is by looking at their palms. See those straight lines that run across their palms? Twin1 has this straight line on his left palm, Twin 2 on his right.
I like to think that they are mirror images of each other, identical end-products of a zygote that was split right in the middle, resulting into two separate, similar yet completely different, tiny human beings. As a matter of fact, when their first teeth erupted, Twin1’s first tooth was his right lower incisor, Twin2’s was his left lower incisor.
They just turned 2 last January and they are at this stage when they are talking non-stop, whether it’s gibberish or proper words. They continue to amaze me day by day with their expanding vocabulary and how they can now manage to put together simple sentences, sometimes in English, sometimes in Malay.
Just the other day, they were playing with MegaBloks, when Twin2 suddenly held up a purple piece and blurted out “poh-po“. I was momentarily stunned, then I encouraged him to go on. And he did. “Gheen” at a green piece, “bu” at a blue one. My husband, amazed, pointed at his t-shirt and asked them what colour it was and both of them triumphantly declared “white!”. We pointed out at their nanny’s blouse and Twin2 gleefully exclaimed “ping kaa-ler!” (pink colour).
This post can probably go on forever, if I’m to tell you every little thing that I love about my twin boys, just like any other proud parent. So I’ll cut this short for now and just post other little gems about them from time to time.
Tags: Twins
It’s Chinese New Year and, by coincidence, we had for breakfast what’s usually referred to in Malaysia as nasi goreng Cina (Chinese Fried Rice).
Malaysian fried rice comes in so many varieties, such as:
- nasi goreng kampung (village-style fried rice), which is pretty spicy and comes with cucumber slices and keropok ( fish crackers), sometimes with one or two skewers of satay (barbequed chicken or beef, served with peanut sauce)
- nasi goreng Pattaya, which looks like a huge omelette except that it’s filled with fried rice
- nasi goreng ikan masin (fried rice with salted fish), which is also usually SUPER HOT and spicy because, in addition to the salted fish and kai-lan (Chinese kale), it’s cooked also with bird’s eye cili a.k.a. cili padi in Malay or siling labuyo in Tagalog
- nasi goreng ayam (fried rice with chicken)
- nasi goreng udang (fried rice with shrimps)
- nasi goreng USA, which is fried rice with telur mata kerbau (literally “cow’s eye egg”, which is actually just an egg fried sunny side up, also known in Indonesia as telur mata sapi) and daging masak merah (beef cooked in a red sauce)
Many restaurants keep coming up with their own versions of fried rice that they can already devote a whole page of the menu to fried rice alone.
Who would have thought ordering fried rice in Malaysia can be so daunting?
Tags: fried rice, Malaysia, nasi goreng
