Everyone Has A Story To Tell

I’ve taken to people-watching lately, not for the sake of merely watching, but out of genuine deep curiousity. I look at people and wonder what kind of lives they lead, what secrets they keep, what dreams they harbour.

I look at young children and envy their innocence but, at the same time, I deeply worry about their future, what with the disturbing trends in recent years — drug abuse, increasing divorce rates, teenage pregnancies at a younger age, paedophiles, violent crimes.

I look at people in their teens and their twenties and how I long to tell them — you are only young once, make the most of your youth! I look at them and wish that, when I was their age, I knew then what I know now.

I look at middle-aged people and wonder if they even realise that they’ve used up half their lives already, that there’s very little time left, but it’s never too late to change, to clean the slate and start over, to start something new.

I look at old people and I feel startled with the realisation that they were once adolescents who made the same mistakes as everyone else, they were once young people who fell in love and got hurt, they were once middle-aged people who either made a difference or simply let their lives pass them by. I long to ask them what their lives were like, what they’d do if they can live their lives all over again, how they feel now that they are at death’s doorstep.

I know that everyone has a story to tell and I believe that, given the opportunity, they would gladly share it. I suppose this is the main reason why blogs are so popular. People have stories. They want to be heard. They want to voice out their thoughts and fears and dreams, if only someone would listen.

But while some people find release and closure by making public confessions (such as in Oprah), I believe far more people would opt to do so anonymously, as the cloak of anonymity gives them more freedom in expressing their heart’s deepest darkest secrets and desires.

Take the case of PostSecret, where people send in their secrets written on homemade postcards. Some of the confessions are funny, many heart-wrenching, others shocking. There’s a postcard of a newly wed couple, their faces covered with stickers, with the handwritten note “We were not mean because we didn’t like you. He is our daddy, we know how violent he is… We were trying to save you.”

OneSentence, on the other hand, features “true stories, told in one sentence”. The most popular story from the last 30 days reads “Seven months after she ruined my life, her name is still in all of my passwords.” The most popular of all time is “I held my father’s hand as he died in that hospital room and realized I’d never held his hand before that moment.”

Then there is Six-Word Memoirs, where people are asked to sum up their lives in just six words, no more, no less. A book called “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure” has already been published in February 2008, featuring more than 1,000 of these mini autobiographies. The site is now inviting submissions to be considered for their next six-word memoir book.

• funny (”Our lips meet. Ugh. Bad breath.“)
• pathetic (”I will never be good enough“)
• poignant (”never got over my first love“)
• bittersweet (”he left, now I can breathe“)
• heart-breaking (”That avalanche killed me too, Son“)
• defiant (”Cancer is not a death sentence!”)
• smartaleck (”Hillary, why did you marry Bill?“)
• just plain bored (”At a meeting. I’m so bored“)
• to outright scary (”Abused psycho kid; Serial killer secrets“)

What about you? What’s YOUR life story?

Tags: One Sentence, PostSecret, six-word memoirs, SMITH Magazine

This is OnlyGirl, my one and only daughter. I have previously mentioned her in my post about traveling with kids and also in my mini-travelogue about Port Dickson. I seem have developed this bad habit of talking about people whom I haven’t properly introduced yet :P

OnlyGirl is very spunky, artistic, independent, outspoken, loves to sing, easily makes friends with anyone and everyone, has an excellent memory (so I always watch what I say around her because she’ll question me afterwards if I say anything inconsistent or contradictory) and has a very pronounced American accent which, to this day, we have no idea how or where she got it from.

As a toddler, she spoke English long before she learned to speak Bahasa Malaysia (literally: Malaysian language, or BM for short), to the consternation of our Indonesian maid, who didn’t know any English at all at that time. She eventually learned a few words from OnlyGirl, the first of which were ‘banana‘ and ‘go away!‘. OnlyGirl always told her to go away whenever I was around. My children would pick me over anyone else anytime ;)

All my children were bilingual from the start. DH and I always spoke to them in English; they picked up BM from everyone else. Hence, I consider English to be their first language, despite their being Malaysians, and this gives us quite a headache every time they need to do their BM homework because *I* always have to translate most of the instructions and questions for them. And my BM’s not that good either. I mean, I can pass off as a local when it comes to day-to-day conversations, but BM grammar and essay writing are totally out of my league, despite having 2 Malay-English dictionaries to assist me. So I end up calling up friends who are good in BM because even DH himself speaks better English than BM :P

But I’m digressing from the main topic for this post. As I said, OnlyGirl has many outstanding qualities as a person. But if I were to choose just one single word to describe my daughter, it would have to be DETERMINED. She’s the type who doesn’t give up, once she has set her mind to do something. She is bold and fearless. She could very well be a spokesperson for Nike, as the famous tagline ‘Just Do It’ is a very apt description of her attitude towards life.

For instance, when we went snorkeling recently in Phuket, off the beach in Bangtao, the lifejacket that she had on was too big and too uncomfortable for her, so she decided to take it off and just use a kickboard. Mind you, we started from a depth that was deep enough for the boat not to scrape the coral reef. And she’s only 8 years old!

The two of us swam away from the boat and went farther and farther, as the view underwater got better and better. We saw at least two puffer fish, a live coral that looked like a throbbing brain, a school of long, thin, silver fish and an assortment of colourful tropical fish. Sorry, I don’t have any pics of those things, as I don’t have the budget for an underwater housing for my D40 right now.

This was our snorkel site. From this photo, you can see how far OnlyGirl and I swam from the boat and back. We swam very close to the rocks on the left, way past the round orange buoy. The boatmen didn’t dare bring the boat any closer, as they feared that they might damage the corals if they did.

After some time, OnlyGirl told me, “Mama, I think we should get back to the boat now. We’re a bit too far.” Mind you, she didn’t say “I’m tired” or “I can’t swim any more”.

So we swam back to the boat. And it turned out to be quite hard, as the current was getting stronger and stronger. I was fighting back panic, as it was very tough swimming against the current, even for me. We were not that far from the boat (everyone could see us and we could see everyone), but I was seriously worried for my little girl because I had a life jacket on but my 8-year old daughter only had her kickboard. I knew I had to be calm and level-headed so that she, herself, would not panic.

Did she complain? Not at all. She just stopped several times to spit out sea water from her snorkel and asked me a couple of times to help clear her mask.

When we finally made it back to the boat, she excitedly told DH about all the things that she saw — something which she was very proud of, because only the two of us made it that far — and only casually mentioned in passing how hard it was for her to swim back to the boat.

I am so proud of my little girl. And I like to think she got her determination from me ;)

Tags: Children, Phuket, snorkel

There’s a story behind every unforgettable pic. And for these pics, the story is short and sweet: we were at the beach on our first day in Phuket, the children were playing with sand, Lola and I were enjoying the water, and the sun was starting its descent into the horizon. I realised that I had only minutes to spare before that huge crimson ball would completely disappear, so I quickly ran back into our hotel room — dripping clothes, sandy feet and all — and grabbed my Nikon D40. I remember saying to myself – ‘the hardwood floor can be cleaned up later but the sun waits for no one‘. Then I ran to the small bridge connecting our hotel to the beach and took 6 shots of the setting sun.

Three of those shots were so badly blurred (from my shaking hand and my pounding heart!) that I deleted them immediately from my camera. One was a bit blurred but should still come out okay for a 4R print. But the other two shots — absolutely magnificent additions to my collection of sunset pics — are simply too beautiful not to share!

Focal Length 62mm, F/5.3
1/1600 sec, ISO-400
Aperture Priority
08/03/2008 19:48

Focal Length 135mm, F/5.6
1/2000 sec, ISO-400
Aperture Priority
08/03/2008 19:49

Kamala Beach is said to be one of the best places to savour the sunset in Phuket. To that, I totally agree and these photos are proof of that!

Tags: D40, Kamala Beach, Nikon, Nikon D40, Photography, Phuket, sunset, Thailand, Travel

The days of the Malaysian 1 sen coins are numbered.

Effective 1st April, 2008, all over-the-counter payments in Malaysia shall be rounded off to the nearest 5 sen. This only applies to the total amount of the bill, not to the individual items.

According to the official website of Bank Negara Malaysia (National Bank of Malaysia) “the total amount of a bill which ends in 1, 2, 6 and 7 sen will be rounded down while the total bill which ends in 3, 4, 8 and 9 sen will be rounded up to the nearest multiple of 5 sen.” Hence, if your total bill is RM99.92, you must pay RM99.90 but if it’s RM99.93, you have to pay RM99.95.

Apparently, this is based on a method called Swedish rounding, a term that came into popular use in New Zealand in 1990 when their 1 and 2 cent coins were removed from circulation. Wikipedia says that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand adopted the same practice as Sweden when 1 and 2 öre coins were removed from circulation in 1972.

But there is a difference between Malaysian rounding and Swedish rounding. Whereas Swedish rounding only involved cash transactions, Malaysian rounding is applicable to both cash and non-cash payments made over-the-counter. Only on-line transactions are exempt.

This is a public service announcement from www.sleeplessinkl.com ;)

Postscript: I wrote this post in early February but never posted it because I intended to take a photo of the Malaysian 1 sen coin. But I never got around to doing it, so this post languished under ‘Drafts’ for more than a month.

Tags: Bank Negara, Bank Negara Malaysia, Malaysia, rounding, Swedish rounding

The packing alone is daunting. I always try to minimize the amount of luggage that we have to take along but, at the same time, I learned the hard way from past trips that it’s safer to bring some extras rather than run out of, say, diapers or baby formula in a country where packages are labeled in a totally different script such as Thai or Chinese or Arabic.

Here’s my packing list:-

• Swimming clothes
• Goggles
• Kickboards for the bigger kids (1 each)
• Arm bands for the twins
• Sunblock
• Day clothes (1 per day + 2 extra per big kid)
• Night clothes (1 per night + 2 extra each for the twins)
• Underwear (2 per day per child)
• Spare towels
• Diapers (4 for daytime + 2 for nighttime x 4 days x 2 toddlers + 10 pcs extra, just in case)
• Band-Aids
• Medicated oil (for tummy aches & insect bites)
• Baby oil (can be used as moisturiser, also for hair)
• Head-to-toe wash
• Slippers
• Toys (to play with at the airport, in the plane, in the van en route to/from the hotel)
• Pencils and paper (to entertain them when the toys get boring)
• Pokemon trading cards (kept them out of my hair during the entire flight)
• Travel Monopoly kid’s edition
• Assorted crackers & tidbits (because kids get ravenous after playing in the beach/pool)
• Instant noodles (for middle-of-the-night-tummy-growlies)
• 1 pack of Koko Krunch
• 1 carton fresh milk
• Milk bottles
• Milk powder
• Bottle brush
• Liquid detergent (for washing the bottles)
• Charcoal tablets (crush and dissolve in water, for the bigger kids) and/or oral rehydration salts (as diarrhea can strike anytime!)
• Passports

Don’t you feel exhausted just by reading this?? And these are just the stuff that I had to pack for the kids! ;)

It’s a good thing that the bigger kids could pick out their own clothes already. So all I needed to do was to make sure they made suitable choices and then pick out clothes for the twins.

It’s a good thing, as well, that the kids have outgrown their asthma, so I no longer have to bring any nasal sprays or aspirators. For some reason, all five of them went through an asthmatic phase when they were babies. The twins were hospitalized at least once when they were about 8 months old. RoundBoy had to be rushed to the clinic in the middle of the night almost every month for like 6 months in a row. He also had an asthma attack when we went to Fraser’s Hill when he was about 3 years old.

Most of all, it’s a HUGE relief that the twins don’t have any stuffy-wuffs or blankies that might get misplaced before, during or after the trip. Several parenting sites recommend getting kids attached to a toy or blanket, so they’ll have something familiar to hold on to when they have to be left in a daycare centre or have to go on a trip. I did try introducing all sorts of soft toys and pillows to the twins but they never got attached to anything, unlike MyEldest who had his yellow horsie, OnlyGirl who had her pillow or RoundBoy who had Tiger. So that was one thing less to worry about.

Sanity-preserving tips when traveling with children:

Sanity-preserving tip #1: A few days before the trip, prepare a checklist of the things that you need to bring. Review the list a few times to make sure you didn’t miss anything and tick each item as you put it in the bag.

Sanity-preserving tip #2: Pack the food and ‘entertainment’ items (toys, books, colour pencils, etc.) in a small bag, preferably one that’s waterproof, and separate from the diaper bag, if you have a lot of kids like me. Once you reach your destination, make a quick trip to the local grocery store to top up the contents of the food bag – buy some drinks in small tetra packs as well as a few bottles of mineral water, buy a few packs of yogurt and keep them in your hotel room’s mini-fridge, buy a few sweets. I don’t usually buy sweets for my children but I make sure I buy a few rolls of Mentos (the tutti-frutti type) for the twins when on the road because Mentos can avert chaos.

Sanity-preserving tip #3: Prepare the clothes in sets – shirt, matching pants/skirt & underwear – so whenever the kids need a change of clothes, you just grab one set and not have to rummage inside the bag for the rest of the clothes.

Sanity-preserving tip #4: Bring basic medication for yourself and the kids – charcoal tablets or oral rehydration salts for diarrhea, some paracetamol, some oil or ointment for painful tummies or insect bites, medicines for your family’s specific condition(s), such as asthma. But keep in mind the latest airline regulations on the 100ml limit on liquids.

Sanity-preserving tip #5: Stuffy-wuffs and blankies can soothe children especially in a strange hotel room, but it can also mean major tantrums and last-minute frantic searches if a stuffy-wuff or blankie goes missing. So if you have to introduce your child to a teddy bear, for instance, try to keep an identical teddy bear as a spare. You can always give it away later on.

Tags: Children, kids, Parenting, tips, Travel, traveling with children, traveling with kids