January 27th, 2012 | Personal | No comments
My family celebrated our dad’s birthday tonight. My sisters, most of whom came home since last week for CNY holidays, decided to stay the entire week until my dad’s birthday today. They are leaving tomorrow morning. We rarely get the opportunity to stay in one roof for long periods of time. It has been a wonderful week long holiday.
It’s alway sad when happy times pass by so fast. I really dread going back to the same old boring every day routine. It will sink in when I wake up at 7am Monday preparing Clarisse for school. I’m already looking forward to school break in March.
January 13th, 2012 | Personal | No comments
Our iPad suffered it’s worst drop impact this evening. We were dining out and Edward as usual plays with the iPad. He decides to pull the iPad from the table to his high chair. It slipped and fell onto the floor. The iPad hit the sharp edge of the table’s leg and was dented near the speakers. The impact made such a huge bang all the diners in the restaurant turned towards us. The protective case didn’t stand a chance against a 3-foot drop straight onto a metal edge. Our iPad has been dropped a couple of times before this, but never this bad. I hope it didn’t cause any severe internal damage.
January 11th, 2012 | Personal | No comments
We’re down to less than 2 weeks to Chinese New Year. I’m starting to really feel the rush to spring clean our home. We were consumed with running errands at the start of the month. Popping in and out of the lawyer’s office to sort out house buying issues. I’m glad we are done with all the necessary documents last week. Things have been really hectic around here. The kids, as always, are a handful and takes up an obscene amount of our time every day. I’ve arranged with the maid agency to send a helper on Sunday. I have tons of stuff to wash and clean. I do regret leaving things to the last minute. It all seems so rushed now I’m starting to feel a bit depressed.
January 11th, 2012 | Personal | No comments
Clarisse made me very angry again this morning with her slow eating habit. Even with the cartoons paused and eventually switching off the TV altogether, she still takes her own sweet time to sip and chew her breakfast. The time was already 8.10am, school starts at 8.15am. Although we live 5 minutes drive away from her school, the traffic can be quite busy during the morning rush. I lost it when she kept her food in her mouth for more than 5 minutes, barely chewing. I threw away her bowl of cereal, bread and eggs. She wailed but I didn’t give a damn about it. Put her socks and shoes on and daddy sent her to school right away. It’s one of those mornings where I could get a good night’s sleep. I was so darn tired and the last thing I want is to be annoyed by her bad habits.
December 30th, 2011 | Personal | No comments
I’m sitting here trying to download again all the games Clarisse and Edward play. We meddled with the idea of updating to iOS 5.0.1 was screwed up bad. Ended up losing all apps and games. I thought iTunes had backed up everything including all the apps in the iPad. I guess I’ve sure set up synching properly.
The iPad was using iOS 4.3.2 before this. It worked fine except iBooks when reading PDFs. The kids play games whereas I just read PDFs with it. PDFs are loading excruciatingly slow in iBooks. It takes seconds to load a page. It wasn’t like this months ago. Not even close to as bad as it is now. So I decided to upgrade to iOS 5.0.1 and hope iBooks will be back to normal when reading PDFs with it. Well guess what! It seems to have worked. My PDFs are loading a lot faster now. But maybe it’ll get slower and slower in a few months time. Till then, I’m happy iBooks is normal again. Eventhough I lost all my kids’ apps.
December 28th, 2011 | Personal | No comments
The doctor prescribed the usual medicine for them. A bottle of cough and phelgm medicine. A bottle of runny nose medicine. Fever syrup and suppositories. Their lungs sounds alright, for now. And that was two days ago.
Edward seems to have recovered. A few bouts of coughing but quite mild compared to Clarisse who has a much severe cough. Edward’s temperature was fine for more than 24 hours.
Clarisse on the other hand seems to be getting worst. Her cough is getting from bad to worst. And her fever still goes up and down. I’ll be taking her to the doctor again in an hour’s time. I’m quite eager to have the doctor check out her lungs now. Hope she hears nothing serious.
Nothing worries me more than a bad cough and spiking fevers. Clarisse is very prone to this. Those are the symptoms that led to pneumonia more than 6 months ago where she was admitted for more than a week. Thinking about it scares me.
December 27th, 2011 | Personal | No comments
It is now 2.40am and I have to wait until 3am to feed Clarisse her fever syrup. I can feel her forehead is warm and my guess is her temperature is probably around 38c.
Edward’s temperature spiked an hour ago. The thermometer blew past 38.5c. I couldn’t take his exact temperature because he was crying and pushed my hands away before the beep. We gave him a suppository, some water and immediately his temperature came down. 30 minutes later he woke up having poo-ed in his diaper. I washed him and now he’s wide awake on his bed.
December 27th, 2011 | Personal | No comments
We have decided to buy my uncle’s house which I’m currently staying. We’ve been renting it for slightly more than two years. Last month, my uncle decided to list his property for sale and asked if we would like to buy it. It didn’t take long for us to say yes.
My parents live just a few houses away. They often help us out with the kids when we have to go out and run errands.
House prices around this neighbourhood is quite reasonable too. The location is good. We’re usually no more than 10 – 15 minutes away from major areas of the city.
Now that we’re buying the house, I can start fixing it up. We’re starting with the windows. They are more than 30 years old and most, if not all of them are broken or stuck. We will remove the sliding door and grill panel in the front portion of the house and replace it with some windows. Lastly the kitchen and toilets. These are a few areas we are sure to fix.
Next up are the furnitures. We have ordered a new set of PU sofa, a table and to replace the old rustic furniture set in the living room. We avoided fabric because the kids always make a sticky mess and cleaning up a PU sofa is easier. I’ve ordered a wardrobe and a set of drawers for my room.
December 26th, 2011 | Personal | No comments
The kids are down with fever again. Yesterday morning, Edward who have been having a bad cough developed a slight temperature. Clarisse was fine the whole day. But around 1am last night their temperatures spiked up to over 38.5c. We gave Edward a suppository and later a dose of fever med. Clarisse suprised us when her temperature suddenly spiked after midnight. She woke up to pee at around 11.30pm and I felt her forehead, she was fine.
We will be taking the kids to the doctor today. Both are coughing, have lots of phelgm and now, feverish. I am dreading to step into the clinic today because I’m expecting tons of patients after the Xmas holidays.
December 20th, 2011 | Personal | No comments
My husband has Dyshidrosis. It is an eczema related condition of the skin, usually affecting the palm and fingers. He realised he had this condition for many years but it got worst in the last 2 years. Probably because he started to help out more in household chores, getting his hands in contact with water and detergent a lot more.
The symptoms of Dyshidrosis starts with tiny itchy blisters on his palms and fingers. When scratched the blisters break and release a serum usually under the skin. Within a day or two, the area starts to dry and crust. And this is when the pain starts because the dry skin cracks.
And lately, in the last 2 months, his condition got quite bad. Nearly half his right palm suffered from constant blistering which in turn caused many painful cracks in the thick dry crusted skin area. Itchy blisters pop up before the skin has time to heal. Further aggravating the condition.
His grandma suggested he dip his palms into vinegar+rice liquid every night before he sleeps. Today is the fourth day he tried this remedy and we are seeing good results. The itching has stopped and this is the most important thing. Without the itchy blisters, the dry cracked skin will have time to heal. We’ll see how his grandma’s remedy of using vinegar+rice liquid works out in the long run.
