The secret to better behaved boys

Something has happened to my kids.

Today T2 picked up the Peter and Jane book 3b and read it through aloud. Then he worked his way through book 4b. Voluntarily. At 9 pm, he was practising his piano. Voluntarily. No threats were issued on my part, nor as far as I am aware, has any other authority vested with the right to issue threats and enforce sanctions. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, London Bridge and finger exercises. This is the self same kid whom I have had to threaten two weeks ago with television ban if he did not practise his piano, to which he asked with a twinkle in his eye: for how long? For one day? One week? One month? The rest of his life? And skittered off to watch tv.

Don’t believe everything they tell you about effective parenting in those self-help books. They haven’t dealt with my pair of imps before. To illustrate this point, the first time we made good on a threat for timeout, which according to the said books must be executed decisively, we ended up in the hospital with a bleeding and possibly broken nose. Now, most parents may be unaware of this, but it is quite possible that when enforcing a three minute timeout, the child may decide for some inexplicable reason to get off the sofa and proceed to apply his head forcefully and repeatedly on the floor so that after you get over the shock there is a handy amount of blood gushing off his nose and when mixed with a good dose of tears and snot is apt to look very alarming. It is also not entirely foreseeable that more drama would take place at the hospital because unlike a primate on which tranquilizer may be prescribed to still the subject, it is not so for a three year old hominin, and therefore the assistance of parent, radiologist and several attendants are called for to hold the said bleeding, thrashing, howling child still for the x-ray. Now, I do not say that we do not believe in discipline, but this turn of events naturally worked out uncommonly well for the kids, for a parent can only take so much trauma within a lifetime.

Hubs and I come home at 11 pm after our dinner, and we find T1 in the study doing his English homework, writing out his sixth stanza of a poem on Greek mythology. Something about Hades and Zeus and Hermes and Kronos and Atlas and Enyo destroying Castor and Pollux. I know, Castor and Pollux? And Enyo? Thankfully Wikipedia is at hand as panacea for my ignorance, so I quickly look them up so as to exhibit some semblance of intelligence.

What is going on, and why are my sons behaving like model kids? Since the beginning of time we have had gargantuan struggles with T1 regarding his homework. Epic battles were fought and buckets, no, ocean-load of tears were shed over homework. It was the single largest cause of vexation between us, mother and son. In fact, so as to preserve some household harmony and realizing that the battle of homework is diminishing our relationship, the first ever email I wrote to T1’s teacher at the beginning of school last year was a plea to not assign T1 any homework at all. Years of law school and legal practice finally came down to pleading my son’s case to the authorities against homework. Because, as I put eloquently to his teacher, the kids are in school for the better part of the day, and we need to allow them time to unwind and to do other equally important things, like football, tv, and play. Am I not by this the personification of absolutely the coolest mom ever? Truth be told, I was absolutely depleted of energy and ideas when it came to getting T1 to do his homework, in whatever form, shape or size.

And yet here he is, writing out six rhyming stanzas quietly at his table. No skedaddling, moaning about headaches, stomachache, finger ache, earache or the impending doom from our planet being sucked into a black hole. He looks up and asks if I’d like him to read the poem to me. I kept interrupting him about the capital letters and his word spacing but he keeps going. Old type A personality habits die hard. Must fix that.

Hubs comes into the room and whispers incredulously, “This is too good to be true!”
To which I rejoined, “What’s going on?!” We were astounded. There must be some karmic explanation for this but we must not look gift horses in the mouth.

I did harbour a remote suspicion that some alien species may have descended upon us and switched our kids as part of some scientific experiment of cosmic import, but I am presently too pleased to investigate any further. Alien kids who do homework, practise piano, read willingly and voluntarily?

I could get used to this.

Sigh. Perhaps tomorrow I shall investigate, to uhm maybe get my kids back. Tonight, I’m keeping those alien kids and thanking my lucky stars.

Okay, so what’s the real secret?

Hubs thinks it’s the fish oil we’ve been giving the kids the past month. I think it’s the recent trip to Melbourne where they observed how hard their cousins work for scholarships to stay ahead of the curve. Or perhaps they are just growing up. Or just plain getting tired of driving me up the walls. I think we’ve been observing slight improvements over time. Still, it is too early to tell. But for this one night at least, I have been given a glimpse of a world in perfect equilibrium, assisted by maybe…fish oil!?!

Mommies night out

No drugs of any kind.
No firearms or weapons of any kind.
No bodyguards are permitted.

You might think that these are the entry rules to the PEOC or the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, but they are not. These are the entry rules to a restaurant in KL. Fancy, eh?

I got an invitation for a night out from a mommy friend and she reminded me (again) that this place we are going to has a strict dress code policy just in case I am minded to turn up as I normally do in my comfy t-shirt, cargo pants and Hush Puppies. I did manage to find a dress that would fit me for this occasion and I must agree that black is a most wonderful colour indeed because you can be squeezing into a dress like a bak chang, which in Hokkien lingo means a tightly wrapped glutinous rice dumpling, but black makes it look painless, unless of course if you have to lift up your hands above your head but thankfully in a place that did not permit firearms or weapons there is no danger of that happening.

I arrived fashionably late after discharging mommy duty ferrying the kids to classes, and having to brave the storm and wade through some flood waters. Upon arrival, I was directed by five different staff at different points to the lift that took me to the fifty seventh floor of the tallest building in the city and as soon as I exit, there were three more staff at hand to usher me to our table. I could see that this place is going to cost some because before I even got to the menu there were already eight headcounts on the payroll. In fact when I finally took a peek at the menu I can see that the prices would likely induce a myocardial infarction on most honest hardworking middle class folks not otherwise on corporate entertainment expense account.

Having said that, from what I observe, the newspapers and everyone at large must be wrong about the economy because notwithstanding everyone moaning about the price of chickens and eggs, there are a lot of folks with pockets full of dough because this place is chock-full of diners sipping wine and eating fine food, and a place that has eight pairs of legs padding about in tailored suits providing ushering services is not cheap by any means.

So as not to look entirely like a cheapskate though I would normally not care to deny this fact, I skipped the appetizer and chose the baby lobster pasta, which costs almost as much as an arm and two legs. Okay, maybe I exaggerate. But it is the most expensive thing I’ve eaten this year. As soon as the food is presented before me I am relieved to see a brimming plate but the server quickly whisks off the lobster shell which is apparently empty and leaves what looks like half a dozen strands of pasta on my plate so I quickly load up on the free bread and butter to obviate the need for more sustenance from our neighborhood mamak stall, especially after already busting my entertainment budget for the entire year. The food is alright, though a little steep, but you pay for the view and the service. My mommy-cohort was feeling cold somewhat and a waiter appears out of nowhere, whips out a shawl and drapes it around her like a trained valet, though I wonder how long they were observing her before the shawl draping protocol kicked in. I think it might have been less creepy if he had actually asked if she would like to have a shawl…

Baby lobster pasta sans lobster shell

View of KL from 57th floor, KLCC
The initial agreement with Hubs was to get home around nine-ish, but mommies when let loose for a night without husbands and kids and pets and other distractions have so much to talk about that we did not finish until way past eleven. We talked about childbirth and choice of painkillers, we talked about kindergartens. We talked about tuition and various enrichment classes. We talked about the great teachers and the mean ones, and the school. We talked about the other classmates, and our kids’ challenges. We talked about our childhood. We talked about the food we cook or mean to cook and snacks. We talked about boarding school and university and discipline. We talked about crime and security. We talked about our kids, their personalities, the games they play and the tv shows they watch. We talked about their dreams.

As you can see mommies have a lot to talk about.

We talked about nothing that really mattered and everything that does. I was really apprehensive at first, going on a night out with mommies I’ve only known hardly a year. I would normally rather spend my time with my kids and Hubs. But as it turned out, it was very therapeutic. I highly recommend it, though not necessarily at a fancy place where you have to install your bodyguards in a waiting room and check in your guns, if any.

Mommies face a lot of challenges. We seem to spend a lot of time doing things that suck up all our time which seem all too trivial to mention. But it matters because someone has to make sure the home machinery is well oiled and running. Picking up the kids, having food on the table, books in their bags, homework done, snacks in their boxes, water in their bottles, writing and art implements in their cases, money in their pockets, plaster for the cuts, doctors and medicine for their sniffles and fever, the right amount of chicken, meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables in the fridge, toilet paper and soap in the bathroom, toothbrushes, toothpastes, dental appointments, batteries for every electronic item in the house and knowledge of where any given toy, book or thing is located at any given time. All too insignificant but yet necessary. And then we gotta make sure they turn out alright as fine upstanding citizens who hopefully won’t abandon their parents in squalid old folks homes. As someone once said, no one knows what we do until we stop doing them. Of course I’m not discounting the role of daddies. But Hubs doesn’t need to talk about all that because he watches Formula 1 and plays squash for therapy. And when the going gets tough, he can always skip off to work and by the time he gets home, all the stars and planets would have been moved and realigned and once again spinning in their rightful places and orbits.

Mommies need solidarity. We need conversation. We need to unload so that we don’t implode.

Coffee, anyone?

A pet is not for the pot

When I was a little girl of about six or seven years, we had a white Silkie, a chicken with a lovely plumage of fluffy white feathers and dark skin. He was the closest thing we had to a dog. I have always wanted a dog and had once smuggled our neighbour’s mongrel into our house and kept him for a couple of hours under the bed, because two hours is just about the maximum time we can keep a dog and ourselves under a bed quietly without him howling blue murder or without my co-conspirator, my brother B1 hollering the same.

My Dad would never have allowed a pet dog. Or at least I assumed he wouldn’t but we were too terrified of him to ask. In those days, you don’t ask Dad for anything. If he is minded to give, he would. And since he was more liberally minded to give whips and lashes, we generally gave Dad a wide berth especially during report card day.

Ah Leong was the name of my pet chicken. Because my Mom said he was a Leong Koay, which I take now to be the Hokkien equivalent of the Silkie chicken. Come to think of it, I never knew if Ah Leong was male or female. Back then, I wasn’t terribly imaginative when it came to naming pets. Years later when I finally had my first pet dog, she was named Brownie because she was brown. Actually I wanted to call her Blackie, but the brains of the family, my sister S2 said I can’t call a brown dog black and I had to defer to her ample wisdom, she being older and smarter and all.

I helped my Dad cut the chicken wires and nail together a makeshift chicken coop which we kept Ah Leong in, in our tiny kitchen in Klang. My ever loving Mom’s pragmatic plan for raising Ah Leong was to kill two birds with one stone or in this case to kill one bird with two stones so to speak, to allow me an ephemeral pet and to ready him for the pot; for one day when I got home from school, the fluff of fair feathers was ostensibly absent and the aroma of Chinese herbal soup – a concoction of the usual dong quay, dong sum, goji berry, bak ji and hong dao was conspicuously present and simmering merrily in a 5 quart pot.

I never did partake in the nourishing goodness of the white Silkie despite its superior curative properties of being able to allevitate all sorts of chronic conditions from treating asthma and heart disease, curing infertility, banishing headaches to strengthening the immune system. Eating a pet just wasn’t my thing.

These days, you can’t go around giving a pet to your kid and then sticking it in a pot.

For one, that kid will probably need life long therapy, and at the going rate of psychologists these days it’s cheaper to separate the chick you want to eat from the chick you want to feed.

Secondly, you’ll have the local chapter of PETA or the SPCA picketing outside your house squawking murder most foul.

Thirdly, you might get slapped with a RM200 fine for animal abuse. And that’s the price of seven good sized grass-fed pastured organic chickens.

How the times have changed.

image credit : benjamint444

Po chai pills and love

When we were young, the tiny Po Chai pills were the magic cure for almost everything. Especially tummy aches, indigestion and nausea which about makes up almost 90 percent of all childhood ailments. Just tell Mom you have tummy discomfort and she’ll instantly whip out the Po Chai pills which you down in one go with a glass of water. On the other hand, catch a cold and my Mom wouldn’t even do anything about it. Because a cold is what any child would catch in those days. You’re pretty much on your own nursing your runny nose. All Mom would do is remind us to blow out the snot into the washbasin and not into our shirtsleeves. It just wasn’t one of those things she would fret over.

po chai pills image credit – ax3battery

These days, the kids would get sick of sniffles, and at its first signs, you’d want to stamp it out before it starts trickling down the windpipe and start taking life as a nasty cough and into full blown bronchitis. The ubiquitous anti-histermines have taken over. There is no parent who doesn’t have a personal stash of anti-histermines. Each time at any sign of a sniffle, T2 would announce that he needs his Zyrtec. If he tells me he’s got a tummy ache, I’d just tell him to go poop. It wouldn’t be one of those things I’d fret over. But if he’s got a runny nose, out comes the anti-histermines, dettol, tissue, wet wipes, and all sorts of preventive measures to stop the sinister spread of snot.

I learnt many things from my Mom, who will turn sixty nine in a few days. I remember her unwavering faith in the power of the the Po Chai pills. I remember the times we were sick and she would be awake in the night and in the wee hours of the morning to give us our dose of medicine or to rub of Vicks on our tummies. And though I don’t share her faith on the miracle of Po Chai, and I worry more about sniffles than tummy aches but each time I pour a dose of paracetamol or anti-histermine I remember learning that the power to heal comes first from love. I learn a lot about love from my Mom.

Here is to the lady who didn’t have to be a dragon or a tiger mom or an imperious dame to bring up kids she could be proud of. Her children’s successes rise from her humility, sacrifices, encouragement and love, and never at the price of her children’s pain or happiness.

Now, that is food for thought for me and for all the tiger moms out there.

Evolution, Adam and Chocolate Banoffee

Some kids like museums. T1 doesn’t. We went to the Natural History Museum in London last year. It’s such a fantastic place, and admission is free which appeals instantly to my frugal Chinese genes. According to T1, you get to see bones and more bones, and all sort of bones. And lots of dead animals. What’s there to be excited about? All he wanted to do was to play ping pong on the park outside the museum. On a windy autumn day. It’s one of those tussles we have, my idea of a holiday adventure is usually tied to some form of knowledge acquisition, especially when it involves free admissions. T1’s idea of fun and adventure is waiting for other kids to finish chasing ping pong balls in the wind so that he can do the same. We sat on the grass for an hour munching the sandwiches I prepared and the Chocolate Banoffee dessert which we got from Waitrose whilst waiting for his turn at the table.

I dragged the boys into the museum after two rounds of ping pong. We went up to the first floor, where I tried to get T1 interested in the evolution of man. A marble statue of Darwin sat imposingly by the staircase as if to oversee the origin of the species. There was the homo floresiensis, the “hobbits” that lived more than 17,000 years ago, the Neanderthals, the homo erectus and all sorts of homo whatchamightcallits with such close resemblance to the modern man that suggest the irrefutability of evolution. T1 was unimpressed.

“Just because a bunch of people in a museum tell us we evolve from apes, doesn’t mean they are right.” How he could dispute the carefully curated chain of evidence before us is beyond me.

“Besides if we evolved from apes, how come there are still apes around, and they didn’t evolve?”
I wasn’t sure if I knew enough of evolution to explain its complexities to him. Normally, I would have just consulted my trusted advisor, Mr Google, except that I wasn’t ready to pay Maxis’ phenomenal roaming charges so Mr G was unavailable for comment. T1 was just not convinced and goes on to seal his argument,

“Mima, you said God created Adam, the first man. If we are descendants of Adam how could we have evolved from apes?”

It is safe to say that if I ever homeschool T1 I’m quite sure I’d be the first mother to pull all her hair out by the end of the first week.

We hustled through the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods and more old bones in record time to get back to the ping pong table. I don’t remember much else of our tour of the museum, except that 1) you don’t want to argue with an eight year old about evolution and creationism when he has his heart set on ping pong, and 2) the Chocolate Banoffee dessert from Gü, with dulce de leche, banana puree and mascarpone cheesecake topped with chocolate ganache, was an absolute delight.

The rest, as they say, is just history.

The new leadership

Not satisfied with the current state of uncertainty regarding the pecking order of the executive leadership at home, I asked T2 whether he told Daddy that he didn’t need my permission to play the iPhone. He opened his eyes wide and said as a matter-of-factly,

“If it is Daddy’s iPhone, I should ask his permission. If it’s your iPhone I should ask your permission. And the PSP is mine so I don’t need anyone’s permission.”

Obviously this guy here is not well versed with the current political affairs of our national household, because everyone who desires a long, peaceful and cake-enriched life knows it’s the mommy who rules the roost. T2, bless his tender age, is still under this naive impression that the normal rules of the game apply.

“So you don’t think I’m the boss, do you?” I thought we’d better clarify this point once and for all, and disabuse his young unlearned mind of any ambiguity over such matter. It’s important that we establish a clear chain of command, because you can’t run a household if you don’t got respect, you know?

“Nope. Daddy’s the boss.”

“Because he’s bigger than you and he’s got more strength.” He flexes his arms to show off some imaginary muscles.

“And Daddy is older than you.” He may have a point there.

“And,” he delivers the stinker, “Daddy makes more money than you.”

Ouch. I didn’t see that one coming.

This kid’s unshakeable. I’m just going to slink off to my Mommy corner and lick my wounds.

Lessons from Kidzania

I took T1 to Kidzania twice last year. The first time, all he wanted to do was to go through Secret Agent training not once or twice, but five times. Because it was fun, and T1 is all about just having fun. He first went through the Nippon Paint House painting, because he didn’t know any better, and I think it was because his friends went. But after getting the hang of the idea that he gets to choose what jobs and activities he can go for, he abandoned his friends and struck out on his own. Luckily there’s no limit as to how many times one can participate in a job. Surprisingly, the swashbuckling life of Bond is not terribly popular with Malaysian Kidzanians, so the queue was much shorter. You can tell a lot about the personality of the child by the choice of his career.

The second time we went to Kidzania was just T1 and me, because I wanted us to spend some mummy-T1 time together. Armed with 27 Kidzos from previous visit, we paid a total of RM90 (RM55 for T1 and RM35 for me) to get into the land where kids rule. I whipped out the map, and proceeded to outline the flow in which to systematically attack the myriad activities. In order to get the most bang for your Kidzos-buck, you will have to contend from time to time with not just superkiasu mommies and daddies, but superkiasu kids as well. There’s quite a bit of elbowing to get into queues and some surreptitious queue jumping when you’re not looking. All the popular jobs like Air Asia pilot training/flight simulation, Dentist, Lawyer, Doctor etc had very long queues. We’re talking half hour to one hour waiting time, that’s equivalent to 16 Kidzania years, assuming the average life expectancy of 80 years because each admission entitles you to only 5 hours. To be honest, unless you have some serious attention deficit hyperactivity related disorder, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to spend more than 5 hours trying out all sorts of jobs from news reporting to window washing, but then, that’s just me. T1 is never one to waste his time on activities he didn’t like. So it was Secret Agent training again, three times over. And just to humor me, because I was wailing about the cost of the admission, T1 queued up for the flight simulation, where I had the opportunity to dispense alpha mom glares to a couple of queue usurpers. So, yea, it’s a lot like real life.

By 1 pm, after popcorn and cotton candy, T1 was ready to call it quits. I couldn’t get him interested in CSI training, making computers, curing people, fixing toothaches, or any job at all. There are 99 job options and activities, and we did all of two! Three if you count shoving around traffic cones. Honestly, I question my ability to execute as a tiger mom. How does one do it – just identify a handful of activities one deems worth doing, force him to do it and threaten to give his PSP away to the Salvation Army otherwise? Knowing T1, he’d just shrug at the point of threat and whine, whinge and wail at the point of implementation until I am quite sure I will have to spend the rest of my life paying for therapy. For me.

As we were walking towards the car park, T1 said,

“Mima, I think you should be doing this kind of business.”

“What? You think it’s so easy? It’s very expensive to set up something like this.” I scoffed the idea and went on to explain the huge capital involved, and something called the cost of debts and gave many reasons why it couldn’t be done.

T1 was not deterred.

“But if it’s a good money making business, won’t people want to give you the money for it so that they can make more money?” You gotta love the naïveté of this kid. Even the great Kidzania founder ex-financier (read: someone with HUGE credibility) Mr Lopez had trouble raising the funds for it.

“Okay, assuming you can raise the capital, there’s all the fixed costs that you gotta pay every month, if no one comes, you’re looking at bankruptcy, pal!” T1 asked what were the biggest costs. I thought for a bit.

“Uhm…Salaries. Rental. Cost of maintenance. Electricity and utility bills. And the initial investment..I think.” I couldn’t think of any other major item. Maybe royalty? I wouldn’t know, seeing that setting up a theme park wasn’t exactly on my list of things I wanted to accomplish in my lifetime.

“How much?”

I did a quick assessment, and googled it. Don’t you love these smartphones and googling on the go? It’s so….modern.

“Well, assuming they took about 70,000 square feet of space, they may pay maybe around RM2-4 per square feet.” Too much? Too little? I couldn’t tell.

“That’s RM210,000 if they pay RM3, because they take the good spaces and the not so good ones too. Don’t they get a discount for renting the whole building?” said T1. Perhaps he should negotiate my lease agreement next time. What next?

“Salaries, of say, (quick Google) about 300 staff.” We estimated at an average of RM2000 per staff. T1 baulked at the staggering cost of RM600k for salaries. I said nobody works for free you know, everyone’s got bills to pay. What next?

“Maintenance. Maybe about 10% per year? That’s like 10% of startup cost (Google again) of RM30,000,000.”

“How much is 10% of that?”

Haha you gotta love this kid. He hasn’t learnt percentages, and he’s talking millions.

“RM3million a year. So, each month is about RM250,000.”

“What! It costs so much to fix things?”

“Ya, what do you think, that the maintenance guys are gonna work for free? And that’s assuming you don’t have to pay for any new equipment to replace old ones that costs lots of money. It’s called wear and tear and depreciation, sweetheart. Did you see some of the exhibits were already broken? And they’ve been open hardly a year!” (I did put in an additional nag on the cost of breakages and lack of care for his toys whilst we were on the same subject. But I digress.)

T1 thought for a minute.

“But Mima,” he said slowly but thoughtfully, “most of the jobs are branded. You know like the pilot training is AirAsia, the bank is CIMB, the driving shop is Honda, the computer factory is Dell, chicken shop is Ayamas. Won’t these companies have to pay Kidzania lots of money to put their brands there?”

Hmmm. I hadn’t thought about corporate sponsorship, but that seemed like a big possibility. More googling, and apparently corporations do provide sponsorship, in fact sometimes up to 75%. I was secretly impressed. Maybe 50% here? So, actual money to come up with could be RM15 million instead of RM30 million. That would make the cost of debt of about RM125,000 assuming a simple rate of 10%.

“What else?”

“I dunno, maybe miscellaneous bills like utilities and marketing? Say about RM100,000 a month.”

T1 calculated mentally, “So that’s like RM210,000 for rental plus RM600,000 salary plus RM250,000 maintenance plus RM125,000 interest plus RM100,000 bills. Total costs every month is RM1,285,000.” T1 loves to add big numbers up in his head. I double checked with my iPhone calculator app.

“So, Mima, just now there’s a teacher who said that today there was about 1,200 visitors. So how much is each person?”

Sigh, I wasn’t expecting to get into a complicated discussion about this. I explained that you can’t expect everyone to pay the same admission price, because the parents pay a lower rate and the school excursions pay a lower rate too, though non-residents pay more. How much, T1 pressed. I wish he would apply as much tenacity in his homework and schoolwork. I looked up Kidzania’s website. RM55* per child, RM35 for adults and RM40 on average per person for school excursions. I didn’t want to get into the ratio of how many students or child to adult, so I gave him a ballpark figure of 80% kids to 20% adults. (*Admission price has since been revised to RM60)

“That works out to be RM1,530,000 a month or 30 days if they have 1,000 visitors a day. That’s assuming, Mima, that they don’t make money from other stuff like selling popcorn and cotton candy and stuff.” He remembered the popcorn and cotton candy! Alternative revenue stream from F&B. The Devil’s in the details, they say.

“Mima, they make RM245,000 a month! That’s RM2,940,000 a year!”

I tried to explain that our calculations were too simplistic, but I couldn’t think of any other impediment to making this theoretical profit.

We didn’t set out that day to learn the lessons T1 learnt by the end of his trip. Cost of capital, cost of debt, fixed and variable costs, maintenance, marketing, branding, depreciation, revenue stream, profit. He was just fascinated by the idea of having a business where you make money from having fun.

And I learnt three important lessons from T1.

Firstly, education happens in different ways to different kids and different kids learn things differently. Unlike me and most other kids at Kidzania who were clamouring for the experience of actually doing the jobs, T1 was processing in his mind what a great racket this was. I could have forced T1 to go through the jobs that I thought were worth his while to get more bang for my buck, but I knew he would be none the wiser for the experience, and it would have just marred the pleasant time we had. We educate when we plant the seeds of possibilities, and not just the probabilities.

Secondly, we adults are always busy shoehorning our kids into being something that we determine to be useful or desirable. T1 was unfazed by the amount of cost and effort it would take to build a park like this, and would have kept going at it with me barking at his heels that it couldn’t be done because I just couldn’t see myself doing it or fathom its possibilities. Kids aren’t born with any particular preconceptions of their abilities or limitations, we erode them over time with what we call a dose of reality.

Thirdly, I’m definitely in the wrong business. Anyone has about RM15 million to spare?

Vive la education!

photo credit – Kidzania

Tiger moms are from mars

T2 woke up at 7 a.m. sharp on Saturday and told me that I had to help him with his Eye Level Math homework. Wow. This one’s completely different from T1 who would take about a ride to the heck and back before he would even pick up a pencil. At 8 a.m. sharp, T2 brought in 3 worksheets, 16 pages each and settled down on the bedroom floor and did his work.

After a few pages, he ran into trouble because he couldn’t read the instructions, so he hopped on the bed, prised open my eyelids and shoved the workbook under my nose.

“Mummy, I need your help. What they say here?”
Bleary eyed, I read: “Count the number of objects and write the number of objects. Circle groups of 10 objects.”

He hopped off the bed and continued. Then he bobbed up again, this time he was in the sort of trouble that’s going to take me more than 4 seconds to solve.

“Circle the biggest number. Count the number of objects and write the number of objects”. Except this time, the objects aren’t arranged neatly in rows. They are scattered.

I guess there is a reason why I could never ever homeschool the kids. I don’t have the patience. T2 counted several times. Then he counted again. Each time he’d miss one or several objects out or he’d double count them. Why in the world would they scatter the objects and confuse the kids like that at this age?!

It’s 8 o’clock in the morning, for crying out loud!

I got up, and sat beside him.
“Look you have to start counting from the corner and work your way towards the other side.”
T2 counted and missed out the scrambled ones in the middle.
“Okay, look, you gotta mark the ones you’ve counted so you won’t double count them and you can see which ones you haven’t counted.”
T2 counted again, and this time he made a small slash over the objects he counted. He lost count after seven and recounted, and got confused whether the marked objects were already counted or not.

So I told him to write out the numbers instead for the ones he’d already counted. Then he missed counting the ones at the top right corner. By then, I was all worked up and well and truly awake.

“For heaven’s sake, T2, use your eyes! You’ve left out the ones at the top right corner. Count again!” T2 counted, and recounted, and after me close to decimating my zen completely and him almost losing his nerves over counting 16 pairs of glasses, he finally got all of them numbered and accounted for. He went through all the three worksheets, doing exceedingly well except in the ones involving counting tiny scattered objects. Seriously, the pictures were purposely designed to hide the objects rather than to display them. At his age his eyeball tracking capability is still being developed. He deserves a medal for doing all 3 worksheets in one go, yet, listening to me you’d think it was unacceptable for him not to count them all correctly at first try. Because he had done everything else with so much ease, not getting the counting down pat is just not trying hard enough. Such is the unfortunate hymn of the tiger mom.

Later, we were at the mall coming out of the DVD shop when T2 grabbed my hand and asked

“Mummy, are you clever?”
“What do you think, T2?”
He looked up at me and nodded with his dimpled smile.
“How about you, T2. Are you clever?”
“Almost” This answer surprised me.
“I can do critical thinking, I’m good at that. Teacher showed me the AB, AB, AB and I can identify them all in the right sequence. I’m good with patterns.”

Poor baby. He’s *almost* clever because he couldn’t count all the tiny scattered objects all by himself. And my impatience didn’t help either. He’s four, and he’s telling me about critical thinking and identifying things in sequence. That ain’t bad at all.

You know what the crazy tiger mom routine does to kids? Sure, some kids may get better and improve, some even achieve great success. But you’re always going to risk hurting the self-esteem of the sensitive ones. I’m gonna hightail myself out of Mars and move back to Venus. Self-esteem and self-worth are fragile treasures in every child that parents, especially tiger moms take for granted. You don’t realize it until they are gone.

It ain’t worth it. And I don’t care what Amy Chua says.

Who’s the boss?

T1 was nattering in the car that he and his friends were talking about who’s the boss in their respective households. Don’t you love finding out what the boys talk about in school at this age?

Based on his observation he had come to the conclusion that I was the top dog in our household hierarchy although in most of his friends’ homes, the daddies are usually the boss. I asked him why he thought so.

“Because every time I ask Dila if I could have something or do something, he told me I have to ask you” T1 have always called Hubs Dila instead of Daddy. We don’t know why, and he has always insisted on calling me Mima despite being corrected many times since he was a baby.

Well, to be honest, you don’t see me going around splurging big bucks on Chanel handbags and Manolos on the sub credit card. If I was really the Big Kahuna, I wouldn’t even worry about Hubs propelling through the roof when he sees the bill. Did Gru ever have to consult the minion about spending money to steal the moon? Nope, I didn’t think so.

“Well, that’s because Dila wants to create a perception that Mima is the boss so that he doesn’t have to deal with having to say No to you and the tantrums that comes from it.” Yes, I’m on to Hubs’ nefarious scheme of casting me as the bad cop. You see, the smart men always let the wife think that she’s the boss, but the even smarter Machiavelli wife knows to let the man think that she believes she’s the boss. See how complex the household politics can get?

T2, never one to be left out, started screeching about his toy car and that the wheels were loose and that I fix it pronto, right there and then. I explained that the wheels are meant to be loose so that the cars can move but he went on shrieking about the wheels coming down and I told him to please be quiet I can’t fix it while I’m driving. When that little tyke wants something he wants it now.

“Eeeeeeahk, I won’t be quiet! And you’re not the boss anymore!” Now, I’ve dealt with a lot of insolence from both the boys before, but even this is a first for me.

“Oh yea? Who’s the boss then?”
“Me! I’m the new boss” He reached for T1’s tennis racquet and started thrashing it about.

“Well, if you don’t stop screeching I’m gonna show you who’s boss”
“No! If YOU don’t stop screeching I’M going to show YOU who’s boss!” Even though T1 went through the annoying phase of repeating everything we say, only T2 took it so far as to repeat our threats back to us. T1 knew instinctively when to stop, but T2 is always pushing the envelope. How do you deal with such insolence?!

Later that night, T2 was screeching that I should pour him a glass of water. His fingers were not yet strong enough to push open the bottle stopper.

“So, who’s the boss now?” I asked him, pressing the point whilst opening the bottle and pouring him some water.
“You” came the reply.
“Do you know what a boss is?” I asked out of curiosity.
“Ya…It’s someone who gets other people to do things when there are things to be done.”

Wait a minute.

That little Machiavellian. And I thought I’d won the war.

Postscript:

T2: “Daddy, can I play with your iPhone?”
Hubs: “What does Mummy say about it?”
T2: “For your information, it’s your phone. Why do you need her permission?”

I think I’m going to have to nip insubordination in the bud.

Happy parenting! *Sigh*

Listening skills

I picked the boys up from their tennis class and made our way to Amcorp mall to get some chewing gum and books at BookExcess. As usual they are both gabbing at 90 miles a minute and both wanted to be heard at the same time. What’s a mother to do when this happens?

I’ve developed split hearing, another supermom capability, as opposed to selective hearing, which is the chronic condition suffered by the kids and occasionally Hubs. Selective hearing is when you say “Go take a bath” and nothing happens, but when you say “Anyone for ice cream” and a mini stampede makes its way to the freezer.

Split hearing on the other hand, is sort of an evolution of one of those useful survival skills you pick up from hearing all that corporate double speak and having to filter out the manure (useful) from the cowplop (useless). It is a technique where you consciously listen out for snatches of key words in all that chatter and subconsciously you process the keywords in context to the chatterer. For example, if T1 is talking about his class activity, and if you hear the word “sun”, you could make an educated guess that he’s talking about science class, so you test your assumption at intervals by making intelligent non-specific guesses or seek clarification “like the star?”. Cast the net wide so that you won’t be found out that you’re not paying 110% attention, because he could also be talking about the “sun” in context of a poem or the Greek mythology or Mandarin class, all of which are possible.

I reckon every mom knows you must participate in any natter to show interest and involvement, especially when you have super sensitive attention seeking kids like mine. You could interject occasionally with a generic “really?” or “that’s good” etc and if you’re too far out you can have him repeat so that you can quickly recalibrate, like “sorry I didn’t hear the last bit”. Split hearing requires dual core processing, verbal output however due to obvious limitations is only executed alternately with the other chatterer.

It takes a bit of practice and as with everything else, practice makes perfect. Soon you’ll be able to watch tv, perform microsurgery, listen to two yammering kids and cook lunch at the same time.

No problemo.

Happy Friday, and brace for the weekend!