Family Time

Well, it is significant that my blog hit a hiatus on 27 Jun - the reason is both my girls were back, one on the 27th and the other on the 29th. Then began 2 weeks of activities with R trying to squeeze as much as she could into the 2 weeks she had here before going back to Melbourne.

We went for a family holiday to Port Dickson and KL the first week and as expected R had a packed social calendar the next week, trying to meet up with as many friends as she could. It was a nice relaxing time but I don't think I will go back to PD again. It really was a dead town! I had booked us into The Legend Water Chalets and all I can say is - it was an Experience! First we had a really hard time finding the place because their signage was so bad. In fact we even began to doubt whether the hotel still existed and I actually called the travel agent in Singapore to ask!

The room was another Experience for us... You opened the door and walked into the bath area! Yup, that's right! It was some kind of an open concept bath area which meant that when someone was bathing the rest of us had to stay on the bed or on the balcony :) It was weird. I thought perhaps we had been given a honeymoon room by mistake but J pointed out to me that the chalet slept 4, so.....???!!! The first thing we did was to call the reception and ask for another room which had a closed bathroom :) Turned out there was one available but only on the next day so we had an awkward one day in that room before transporting all our things to the room next door the next day!

It was a nice design concept, it had a glass pane on the floor so you could see the sea at your feet but beyond that the hotel was nothing to shout about.

There was no beach and the only entertainment was a Scrabble board we hired, the pool and the children's playground where we spent most of the time. Hahaha...

Our next stop was Mines Resort near KL which was better in terms of entertainment options, had nice rooms too but was really far from KL city. We got lost a couple of times this trip, but generally had a good time.

Back in Singapore R had a packed social calendar and a trail of meetings with friends that stretched till the departure lounge at Terminal 3. I actually sent J to hover around R and her friends to make sure she came back and did not miss her flight :) Didn't make me a popular mum I'm afraid. Didn't do much good for J's image either.

Well, it was really good to have both J & R at home. The last time we had all been together was in Nov last year during my birthday. Now with R away these times will be harder to arrange. Soon J will be going back too. Sigh.

One thing I am glad about is that we went to have a family photo taken at a studio. I'm really happy we managed to do that. If I get digital copies I will post them on my blog :)

A New Kind of Holiday

I went to Ho Chi Minh City with 2 of my office colleagues at the end of May. We left by an early morning Jetstar flight on Thurs 29th and came back on Sunday. It was fun. A new experience for me - travelling with friends instead of family. Ever since the children were born, we have always had family holidays, not counting the couple of times when D and I drove up to KL to attend a wedding or something. So this trip seemed like a milestone marking a new state of independence for me :)

It was especially unique for me not having to plan anything! I did the online booking of the tickets but Chit and Dot did the rest. Like a true civil servant Chit looked for hotels and presented us with 3 quotes to choose :) We stayed at Metropole Hotel on someone's recommendation. It was a nice enough hotel - they even surprised Chit with a birthday song, card and a voucher for coffee, and the staff was really nice - but it was not near the shopping areas and we had to take a cab to get to eating places and to the shopping belt. And boy did the girls shop! Me - I had very few things I really wanted to buy and was content to walk around with them. Dot had planned the itinerary (see, I really had nothing to do) and we went on 2 day trips out of Ho Chi Minh City. The day trip I enjoyed was the trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels and the Holy See of the Cao Dai sect. I'm writing up a separate blog on my trip to Ho Chi Minh so details and photos will be there soon!

I'm glad I went. It was nice to hang out with friends from the office. And we came back still speaking to each other! Hahaha. I wish my whole BOWALA gang could have gone. That would have been really something but this was a good start. I felt as if another phase of my life was starting - when I didn't have to keep thinking of others but travel as equals, each doing what they liked. I especially liked how cool it was that the other 2 went off shopping on Sunday while I went off to the spa. I liked that - because usually I have had to think about what the others would do while I was at the spa :) So yeah, it was nice.

Would I do it again? Yes. Maybe not go back to Ho Chi Minh, but I would like to travel somewhere else with friends. God willing, Dot and I are planning to go to the Holy Land end 2009, to make use of our leave before we go back to the schools. But I'm hoping I don't have to wait as long as that.

My Young Adults Group

I really like having my CYAN group over. We celebrated Michelle's birthday, ate far too much pizza, ice cream and cake, talked about interesting stuff - what happens when you get filled by the Holy Spirit? - and ate some more when the late comers arrived. VERY bad for my diet!!! :)

Family Stuff

This year seems to be extended family time. After Maya and Mala, another niece of mine, Veena, is in town with her daughter Vishaka. They have come from India to visit for 2 weeks. Veena felt her daughter did not know the relatives on her maternal side and decided to put that right :)

On thing that struck me was the ease with which my grand-niece Vishaka (11) talked to me. This was the case with Ananya (10) and Avinash (5) from New Zealand as well. It was the first time they had met me yet all three got over their initial shyness quickly and chatted about their lives. There was none of the monosyllabic answers I get from the children I meet here. This was the case with 2 delightful girls aged 7 and 9 from Auckland whom I met in church last week as well. It's got me thinking (again!) as to whether we really had got something wrong in our education of the young. It's not just that I was their grand-aunt - the grand-niece and nephew I have here don't even greet me though they have seen me since they were born. So why is there this reticence, this inability to have a conversation among the local children I meet? Hmmm....

On another note, I spent 5 days in Melbourne two weeks ago. D and I took a budget flight on 6th May and returned on the 11th. Very short trip but the price was too good to resist - we got 2 return tickets for $1040 - and I wanted to see how R had settled in. It was a very pleasant trip. The weather behaved and remained a manageable 18 degrees, I had a chance to see Neen, spent time with my other grand nephew and niece and celebrated Mother's Day with my niece (in-law)Ling Kuei.

I saw a sight to behold - my darling daughter who HATED supermarket shopping here and moaned every time we had to do the weekly shopping, actually buying groceries herself. Hahahaha :) So this pic deserves special mention...

But my best memory was the morning of Mothers' Day itself. We stayed in a little hotel beside R's hostel the night before our departure so that we could have some family time and as it would save an early morning commute to the airport. Rubhi disappeared early in the morning saying she had to pass something to her friend. Then she came back while we were having breakfast with a plate of scrambled eggs! Since the hotel only served continental breakfast she decided to make scrambled eggs (my favourite breakfast) for me for Mothers' Day. So she had asked the hotel staff for permission, then gone back to her hostel kitchen and scrambled the eggs and brought it over with a card. It was a really sweet sweet gesture. And I love the way my children still hand-make cards for me.

Now I'm looking forward to the end of June when both my girls will be back for holidays. We are planning a road trip to Malaysia - now that D has achieved his long dream of owning a car (what is it with men and cars??) - going to Port Dickson then KL. I kind of suspect that if we didn't take this trip, I won't see my daughters. Their list of things to do and people to see is long and the parents are number 2675 or something close :)

The Singapore Flyer

My niece, Mala, is visiting from Auckland, New Zealand, with her two children – Ananya and Avinash. Though the children have visited before, now they are both older and not so shy of me.

We celebrated Ananya’s 10th birthday last Monday and as a treat we (together with my sister Vasantha who was visiting from India and her husband) went for a ride on the Singapore Flyer last Tuesday.

It was an interesting experience and I think we chose the best flight time – 7.00pm – as it was daylight as we went up and it had darkened by the time we began the descent so we got to experience both the day skyline and the night one.

It would have been a really pleasant evening except that the ride was spoilt for me by a group of Indian tourists who were in the same capsule as us. One man in the group spent not even 10 minutes looking at the sights. He was focussed solely on taking photographs and kept marshalling his brood of 5 adults and 3 children into different vantage points. He wasn’t interested in the view and oblivious to the fact that that was why the rest of us were on that observation wheel! He directed his photo shoot in a loud voice, kept getting in people’s way and was just such a pain. To top it off he was an indulgent father and the children were allowed to run around the capsule shouting and then twice his daughter had a screaming tantrum. I just wished I could shake that man. He had just no idea that the capsule was a confined space and while his children running around and his family posing at different places would have been fine if we were at the Botanic Gardens, this was a capsule in the sky, for goodness sake! Aargh!

What Empty Nest???

To all those who ask me how I am coping without both my daughters I have to answer – very well, actually. Lest my darling daughters get upset, I have to clarify that I do miss you both dearly and I do miss Maya and Ro as well, but I am not in a deep funk about it. Yes, the ‘empty nest’ feels strange at times (and a big realisation that hit me was how much of the silences between my husband and me had been filled up by my children’s voices) and yes, I am looking forward to when my girls are home for the holidays, but I don’t spend my weekends twiddling my thumbs and crying. I attribute it to 3 reasons –being prepared, technology and God.

I think one reason really is that I had by chance hit on a useful strategy in parenting – I read ahead of the stages my children were in, instead of reading about the stages my children were in. This was by accident really, because I read so much while I was pregnant about the first trimester, second trimester etc that I got bored and started reading ahead. So by the time Jennani was born I was reading about toddler-hood and then early childhood etc. So by chance I had hit upon a way that kept me prepared for what was to come and when the challenges happened I wasn’t caught by surprise and I had time to mentally prepare myself for colic, temper tantrums, reading needs, adolescent needs etc.

So I saw this empty nest coming quite some time ago – round about the time the girls were in their teens and didn't come home straight after school :) Being emotionally and psychologically prepared for this season of parenting has helped me a great deal because I managed to do the one most painful thing about motherhood, letting go, a little bit more easily than I would have otherwise I think. So I started getting involved in other activities like exercise, serving with the youth in church, renewing friendships and most important of all, learning to enjoy the solitude of my own company.

Then there is the whole wonderful world of technology. I am in danger of becoming an addict, I think. And yes, I think the label that Praveen gave me (techno cavewoman) still lurks in the background somewhere but increasingly I'm exploring new stuff online that keeps me occupied for hours - even distracting me from this blog some days :) Then I have taken to watching movies by myself - a wonderful, liberating experience. I get to watch movies that I want to, without considering whether my husband would like it or whether it was suitable for my children (though now this is no longer a consideration as they are both above 18). So 2 Saturdays ago I watched 'Grace is Gone' and last Saturday I watched 'The Bucket List'. Both great movies that made me cry and very glad that I watched them as well. Then of course there is Skype! LAst week Jen, Rubhi and I managed a 3-party video conferencing thanks to a free website that Rubhi found and that was great! Yeah so between Blogspot, Gmail, Facebook, Skype and Web 2.0, I must say my evenings and weekends are full.... :)

Above all, what gives me the greatest peace is the time I spend with God. I am a born worrier and have always found something to worry about. But the choice to send Rubhi to Melbourne is undergirded by a strong sense of peace despite others' questions as to whether she is too young and whether I could afford it because I have a sure sense that this is God's plan for her and that He would provide. As I look back I can say with certainty that in each season of my life, God's guiding hand has been there even when I did not recognise it. And in this season, I feel drawn to spend more time studying the Bible and to spend time with the young people in the cell group I mentor. In fact, far from having lots of time and not knowing what to do, I still find there isn't enough time as there is so much to learn and so little time to do it in. Of course by divine design my home isn't technically empty as I have Johnson staying with me now and I must say that it is a unique experience having a young man staying with us.

So, yes, here I am on Saturday night, blogging. Just came back from a 3 hour workshop at church (hmmm... that too must have been part of God's plan - to have got us this flat which is a stone's throw from church because He knew I would need to get to it without driving :), watched 'Om Shanti Om' on tv and all is well on the western front! Yes!

My Digital Shadow

So, I learnt a new term today - "digital shadow". Like our "carbon footprint" this is a new term coined to describe the traces we leave in cyberspace. Apparently we leave enough data on cyberspace from all our activities on the Internet for others to collect a great deal of information about us - like what we like to wear, what brands we favour, where we would like to go for a holiday and of course in perverse cases, what our sexual oreintations are :) Every website we have ever visited, every online transaction made, every email sent, every blog updated and commented on, every item googled gives away information about ourselves that can range from the innocuous (so you know I like chocolate, so what?) to the potentially scary (you know the names of my children, where they are and what they are doing) to the damaging (my credit card number is somewhere in cyberspace?)

When I first read the article, I admit I was rather perturbed and it made me pause to think about my online activities. In light of my recent narcissistic activities involving googling myself, I realised with a start that I had willingly put out a great deal of information about myself and my family. So technology has made it possible for me to contact long lost relatives, friends and students, but it has also made it possible for strangers to know me. This is especially true in Facebook where your friends' friends whom you have never met could possibly know about you depending on the kind of privacy levels set on your page and your friend's.

So what does one do then? Retreat into an Amish village and erase all signs of my existence? That's a depressing option. I'm still thinking about it. But meanwhile, for those of you haven't discovered Facebook yet, here is the link to my 50th Birthday party photos on my Facebook...

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=36127&l=a1222&id=607050798

Since I am already casting a digital shadow now, might as well make it a HUGE one while I am still at it :)

Alone

I spent yesterday evening alone. And I enjoyed it. I had relished the prospect of a quiet evening and had looked forward to it really as I was travelling home on the bus. I liked the quietness of the house, the stillness. I made dinner for myself, read the newspapers, uploaded photos on Facebook, read a little and felt sorry when my husband came back.

Was that unusual, I wonder, liking this solitude and being quiet? Would I like it if this was the situation every day? Or did I like it only because I had had a lot of social interaction during the day?

I Googled Me!

I was browsing round my old entries today and chanced upon a comment left on one of my entries by my friend Mini who had randomly googled my name to see if I had “made my presence felt on www” and found my blog! I was both pleasantly surprised (to see that she had found my blog and to discover she too had a blog) and intrigued that I could be found by being googled!

So, I went and googled myself (when did that name of a search engine become a verb, I wonder) and lo and behold, there were all these comments left on my blog up there at the top of the google search list! So then I suddenly understood what Jennani meant when she said she didn’t want her blog to be discovered and read and why she subsequently first locked and then abandoned her blog altogether (sad, sad, sad).

I was at first startled to see my name listed as a google entry. I mean, I am so used to googling for authors, sources and readings that it didn’t strike me that a non-descript individual could be googled. But yes, I do have a presence on the world wide web… Woo hoo! Then I was amused – that the drivel I write and the trivia I blog about is floating around somewhere in cyber space to be retrieved by my anonymous readers. Of course I had always known that what I blog about would not remain private which is why I have a journal and a blog – uncensored and censored versions of my thought life! But somehow, seeing the entries pop up in response to a google search seems to give my words an importance and significance I had not considered. There was also the interesting side to it - I discovered that my dear Angel had enjoyed herself at my 50th birthday party and blogged about it – in a a secret blog I had not known about…. Aha! Caught you! :)

Well, all in, it was an interesting experience. And then I was quite intrigued and went on to google various combinations of my name… hahaha… talk about narcissicism. And I have since discovered a new destination that I now desperately want to go to one day… A beachfront hangout called Vara’s!!! It’s on Cook Islands and it looks really idyllic and I think if I ever have enough money to just have a get-away-from-it-all holiday, I will go just there! Imagine staying on a beach in a place named after me! How cool is that! You must go and take a look at it – and if by my 60th birthday I have not gone to holiday at Vara's, you must all pool money to send me there, ok!!! :)

Self Reflection

My church has recently started a thrust towards encouraging discipleship among its members. This vision has struck at answering chord within my heart as I have been longing for a discipling relationship with someone who could guide me spiritually.

From my pre-believing days right through the past 17 years it has been Wai Yin who has been my guide-post in all matters spiritual (and otherwise) but much as I would wish to, we have not been able to see each other on a regular basis. So it has been that we meet up when there is a crisis (always mine of course).

Since last month, I have been meeting one of my church elders, Laura, once a fortnight. This started as a follow up to the cell leaders training that I attended last year. I guess it is a way for the church to make sure they are not letting loose a wolf among the sheep :) Yeah so we have been meeting for a couple of hours on Sat afternoons and it has been quite cathartic for me :) I haven't been able to be as open as I am with Wai Yin but of course there is a lot of history there that I'm sure can't be repeated. Nevertheless, I have since realised how important it is to have a spiritual guide, someone who has walked the path ahead of you, who has been matured by her struggle and who can in turn help you cope with your own.

As part of this plan to get the congregation into discipling relationships, the leadership also distributed a table of sorts for us to gauge where the members of our cell were in their walk with God - new Christians, growing or mature. Looking at this table, it occurred to me that it really isn't easy to say. I suppose by the fact that I am training to be a Asst Cell Leader, one would say I have been classified as a 'mature' Christian - ready to help others walk with God. But in reality, I would say I was still 'growing'.

Just 1 incident this past week has made me very aware of how I fall short. Last week, the usual round of annual promotions came round and I subsequently sent an email message congratulating those on the list whom I usually talked to. But I omitted one name. Because I just could not bring myself to say to this person that I was happy for her promotion. So I thought I must be honest to myself, and not be a hypocrite, saying something that I did not mean.

But immediately after, 2 colleagues came up to me to say they had noticed that I had not included this person's name in the email. Al 3 of us had had bad times with this person and the 2 who came to speak to me were not condemning me but commiserating with me because they saw in my email, a reflection of their own feelings for her.

And in that moment, I stood condemned. I saw at once how I had failed God. I had in my human-ness, passed up a chance to forgive her, to see her through Christ's eyes, to treat her differently than as the world would have treated her. I had been petty and I had not had the grace to rejoice with her and God saw that. And in sending those 2 colleagues to me, He showed me where I had failed - because it was not a case of "being human" as one of my colleagues said. It was a case of passing up the chance to have made a better choice.