February 23, 2012
by renayung
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Happy Birthday to a Five Year-Old

To my beautiful, inspirational, weirdo daughter who turns 5 this year. Birthday presents of toys and other disposable gifts don’t always cut it, in my opinion. So I’m giving you the gfit of your mother’s words which I hope you will treasure and appreciate (maybe not for your 5th birthday, but hopefully later in life at least).

To my wonderful daughter who turns 5 today,
There are so many things I want to say.
You’ll always be my angel with reddy-brown curls
But you’re so grown-up now, my sweet baby girl.

You love trips to the aquarium to see the fishes,
You cover our table with plastic food and dishes.
You laugh at your ‘catepillars’ (which are inside-out socks),
Your pockets are always filled with sea-shells and rocks.

Your stunning artwork never ceases to amaze me,
You’ve drawn 8-legged spiders since you were three.
I like your sketched robots and snails the best
And your princesses with their over-sized breasts.

You will play for hours blowing bubbles in the air,
Your super-power is your Shirley Temple hair.
You stage elaborate parties with tea-pots and cups,
You want to be a unicorn when you grow up.

You are friends to all animals including all bugs
(You don’t even hesitate to touch worms and slugs).
After each bath you enjoy wet “Huggy Time”,
At dinner time you suck on lemons and limes.

Your cheeks I will kiss, your belly I will rub,
I laugh when you ask, “Want to see bubbles in the tub?”
You’re totally awesome at finishing a meal,
Your stuffed kitties wear Band-Aids ‘cuz “They need to heal!”

Your moves can be spastic like a Great Dane,
Your dancing reminds me of “Seinfeld’s” Elaine.
You fill our house up with beautiful noise,
But honestly I am tired of picking up your toys.

You sleep amidst mountains of pillows and dolls,
You would pick beaches and nature over going to malls.
You’re always pretty good about going to bed,
I melt when you discreetly kiss Tai on his head.

You climb and you run and you scoot and you walk,
You have the sweetest sing-song voice when you talk.
You cover your ears saying things are ‘too loud!’,
You put your pants on backwards but you’re always so proud.

You laugh after you fart (‘cuz each one is funny),
You’re obsessed with the imaginary Holly the Bunny.
We fight over the TV and the iPad too,
You announce to the household each time you go poo.

We will argue and quibble and yell and fight,
But we’re always best friends before the end of the night.
And when I come home from a long day at the rat-race,
All my troubles melt away when I see your sweet face.

You greet me with presents wrapped in cloths and bows,
Is it a book? Or a toy? Anything goes.
I am tired after work and just want to rest,
But I am revived when you whisper “I love you the best”.

I tuck you into bed and slowly shut the door,
Then the house falls quiet (except for your occasional snore).
Tomorrow you’ll be fresh-faced and ready to play,
And I wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

Happy Birthday, Sloaney-Baloney! I love this thiiiiiiiiiis much ….

–Mommy

February 22, 2012
by renayung
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Who’s Going to Win, You or the Bus?

It seems I’ve been ranting about public transit more than normal these days? Maybe my life is pretty dull lately. Or perhaps it’s because people really can be stupid and it’s so tempting to write about it. Yes, that must be it.

Every day I find myself at a bus loop. There are multiple buses coming and going and as a result there are many passengers running around trying to make their connections and also catch the skytrain. It’s controlled chaos on most days. There are a couple of marked crosswalks and there are big signs that say ‘Watch for buses.’ Well, duh. Unless you’re seeing-impaired, how could you not notice the large, tubular people transporters that race in and about the roundabout? (hence the term bus loop, Captain Obvious).

But of course, what do I witness every day? I see people either in a rush (yes, you are SO important and your time is SO much more precious than anyone else’s) or they are just totally oblivious. They will run or saunter out into the crosswalks right into the path of a large bus, and said bus often has to slam on its brakes to avoid hitting a whole swack of walking meat tubes. Often they don’t even look up to check or acknowledge this big bus that keeps slowly inching closer and closer to them as it tries to get on its way to pick up more passengers. And so many times the bus finally has an opening and it starts to enter the crosswalk but then there is a brand new batch of psychotic, inconsiderate commuters who dart out in front of the moving vehicle and the bus has to slam on its brakes AGAIN.

What do I do? I wait patiently at the crosswalk until it’s clear, even though I could cross with the droves of ignorant sheep and be protected by the presence of the crowd. No, I’m cautious and aware of how my actions affect other people. I don’t want to contribute to the bus drivers’ frustrations. And I’m intelligent enough to know that if it boiled down to it, the bus would win. Yes it would, Captain Obvious.

February 21, 2012
by renayung
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I Side with the Snarky, Old Ladies of Transit This Time

I witness so many examples of people behaving badly on transit that I could probably dedicate an entire blog to that. Well, the other day I witnessed a doozy and more importantly I witnessed the other commuters openly verbally bash the offender. It was awesome.

I was on the skytrain and it was about half-full. I was on the long, bench seats in an older-model train car and an older man (about mid-60s?) who was neither homeless or crazy stood up and then turned around and planted one of his size-10 shoes on the seat that he had just vacated and tied his shoelace. Then he proceeded to do the same for his other shoe. When he was done he put his foot down and walked towards the door, leaving behind 2 sandy, dusty foot prints on the newly-vacated vinyl seat.

The older lady beside me (also in her mid-60s I’d say) loudly scoffed when he tied the first dirty shoe with it on the seat. I had my headphones on so I didn’t clearly hear her, but then she said something like “Some people! How rude! No manners, so oblvious!” (you get the idea). Then the other elderly women who were seated around us nodded in agreement and the proceeded to trash-talk this guy while he stood just a couple of meters away. He had his hands in his pockets and was staring at the door, and I wasn’t sure if he was ignoring them or if he was so oblivious that he had not idea how his behaviour had just offended the rest of the train car.

Regardless I have to agree with the ladies on this one. Seriously, buddy. You have no class and you’re a loser. Just because you’re finished with the seat, you have absolutely no regard for the next person who wants to have a seat on transit during rush hour but has to contend with your dirty foot prints that might rub off on their asses. Give your head a shake. You’re an idiot.

February 20, 2012
by renayung
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On Turning Five

My daughter turns 5 years old later this week. But we decided to celebrate it on the Sunday beforehand since myself and the hubby are both off work on the weekends. So, what did the 5 year milestone involve, you might ask? You probably have images of screaming children, games, sugary treats, gift bags, balloons, etc. But it was hardly any of that. No, my daughter did not want a birthday party.

“Hmmm, that seems a bit odd,” I can imagine you thinking right now. It was very odd for me at first, I’ll tell you. “What child does NOT want a birthday party?” I asked myself over and over again. Even though my daughter seemed very comfortable in her decision, it did not sit well with me. I went through a whole process of acceptance. Initially her decision lead me to worry even more about her social development. She has always been an independent child from the time she was a baby. She is very good at entertaining herself, often finding activities to amuse her for hours on end. I am the envy of many of my friends who are parents because of this. Yes, I am grateful that I don’t have to constantly keep her busy, but at the same time I find it odd that she rarely requests play-dates or vocalizes that she wants friends to come over. At the park she’d rather climb a tree by herself or engage her little brother. Only occasionally has she approached other children to play with her.

And I am the opposite. I am a social person and often am proactive in reaching out to friends and organizing events. So to see my own offspring mostly reject this social behaviour is a bit unsettling to me. But then who am I to project my personality and social habits on to my own child?

So we took Sloane to the aquarium, just like she requested. We left Tai at home and she got to spend her special day with Mommy and Daddy. She brought along her camera to take pictures of all the fishes, creatures and other animals. We patiently waited outside each fish tank and pool while she snapped photos with her Fisher-Price camera. I watched her as she studied each display, the light shining down on her Kewpie-doll face, her camera poised and ready in her pudgy-Starfish hands. She was so happy and also so concentrated in her activities (so typical her). But even Robin and I exchanged confused glances when we offered to buy her something from the gift shop and her response was, “Uhm, no thanks. I’ll just take a picture instead!” And *click* she took some pictures of the toys.

After the aquarium we went to White Spot and she got a Pirate Pack meal. Robin and I were able to have an uninterrupted meal (for the most part) while our daughter quietly devoured her 2 burger sliders, all the french fries (dipped in ketchup), chocolate ice cream and a chocolate coin. Again, so typical her.

I watched her, focused on the meal and content in her thoughts. So well-adjusted, I thought to myself. It just re-iterated that I think she’s awesome and she’s her own person, and I have to respect that. I hugged her beside me and told her that I love her. She smiled back, with ketchup and chocolate smeared all around her mouth. I hope she never changes. May she be 5 years old forever, and only want to hang out with her parents for her birthday outing. I wish.

February 17, 2012
by renayung
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What’s Your PAR? (and I’m not talking about your golf game)

Around my household and at my workplace, there is often talk about life after the apocalypse, what we’ll do when the zombies attack, etc. And I just read the “Hunger Games” trilogy (which highlights people’s various skills needed to survive in a post-apocalyptic world). Robin also always reminds me that he’ll be good to have around when the world turns to shit and we’re all fighting our neighbours for survival. He’s got a point there. He’s strong, athletic, good with his hands (i.e. he can build things), he is mechanically-inclined (e.g. he can quickly figure out tools and I’m sure he’d be equally competent at mastering any kind of firearm or weapon), has lots of common sense, etc. You get the idea.

So, all this got me thinking about myself and then the general public. There should be a measure for this kind of situation. I call it a PAR – your Post-Apocalyptic Rating. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’d score very high. I’m quite unlike Katniss Everdeen (or any of the other “Hunger Games” Tributes, for that matter). I’m not comfortable with any kind of weapon (e.g. I can’t imagine being comfortable with a bow and arrow). I’m not particularly stealthy or athletic. I have no idea what plants and roots are edible if I was hiding out in the forest. And don’t even get me started on my knot-tying abilities or camouflaging skills. And I’ve never built a snare or trap in my life.

I guess I’ll just have to hope and pray that I will be near Robin when the zombies attack, or the machines rise up, or whatever. But I did pose the question recently to my co-workers about what 1 household item would you want to have to battle it out with the zombies. I said a shovel. Then I Googled it and according to some zombie-experts, I made a smart choice (see this link: http://emergency-preparedness-stores-review.toptenreviews.com/10-household-items-that-could-save-your-life-in-a-zombie-apocalypse.html)

There may be hope for me yet. Although on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the highest), I think my PAR would be a 4. In the meantime I think I’ll start sleeping with my shovel under my bed.

February 6, 2012
by renayung
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The Latest Trend: The Baby Diet

I had a brainstorm the other day for yet another trendy, get-rich scheme. I should publish a new diet book and I will base it on my 18-month-old’s eating habits. It would read something like this:

Day 1:

Breakfast: handful of Cheerios. Bonus exercise – practice emptying the bowl out on the carpet, bend down and pick up food pieces and place them back in the bowl, then repeat.
Snack: multi-grain Goldfish crackers. The snack that smiles back. Feel good about eating some smiling friends.
Lunch: piece of multi-grain toast cut into quarters and dipped into organic blueberry yogurt. Make a note to smear 3/4 of the yogurt on your face and wall.
Dinner: 15 fistfuls of homemade macaroni and cheese (you are justfied to have a large meal for dinner since your previous 2 meals were kind of light).

Day 2:

Breakfast: a dozen grapes cut in half, and half a banana cut length-wise.
Lunch: veggie dog on a bun with a touch of relish and ketchup. Make sure to smash half of it into the table and leave it there.
Snack: bowl full of dried fruit pieces. Pick out the raisins and leave them under the TV. Jump up and down excitedly as your mother discovers them hours later.
Dinner: potatoes and chicken and cucumber cut up into teeny-tiny pieces. Chew the chicken bits, get all the flavour out, then spit it out again. Eat ALL the cucumber and pick at the potatoes but then scream until you are excused from the dinner table and go run laps around the living room furniture.
Snack: a bottle of warm 2% milk. Extra relaxation hint: enjoy drinking this while lying down in a warm bath. Heaven in a bottle.

*All meals to be enjoyed with room temperature filtered water. Sip very slowly through a very narrow straw.

You get the idea. I think if more people followed this diet regime they would be like my son: happy, healthy, muscular but not fat, and in the 90th percentile for growth….. Wait, that last point might not sit well with some people. If that’s the case, then just eliminate the snacks.

February 1, 2012
by renayung
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Winter Matinee

I was talking to my friend James today and he mentioned how the upcoming weekend sounded like a good time to go see a matinee. He went on to describe that feeling he loves when he goes to the movies for an afternoon showing and then it is crisp and dark out when he emerges from the theatre. He really didn’t have to say much. I totally knew what he was talking about.

Ah, the winter matinee. How I have missed you.

January 24, 2012
by renayung
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The Future is Now

Welcome to 2012. The last time I started a blog it was perhaps 2004 or 2005. I was using FrontPage for the first time. I struggled through that and stuck with it for several years. Over time my website was starting to look dated but I didn’t really make efforts to update its look because I was no longer the single-person with endless free time (one has no idea how much time one has until 2 children enter the picture and become time-Hoovers). Then unfortunately my domain name renewal lapsed and some squatters took away my domain identity. Curses, you URL pirates!

So after a few months of absence from the blog-world, I have a shiny, new domain name and have decided to use WordPress to manage my new site. It is indeed a brave, new world for me. So in between working full-time and raising 2 little monsters (sorry, I meant to say wonderful children), I am slowly learning WordPress. My plans are to migrate old content over but I’m having issues doing basic things like changing the header image so you shouldn’t hold your breath if you’re looking for any previous postings.

I’ll be honest. I feel like a techno-dinosaur. And not the swift, quick, efficient Velociraptor variety. More like the slow-moving, dim-witted Brachiosaurus variety (or in my day, we called that type of dinosaur a Brontosaurus). Seriously. I feel feeble with technology lately, and I’m not just talking about updating my website.

When I got my first Smartphone I made sure it had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard because I did not feel comfortable with those ridiculously tiny, sensitive touchpad keyboards. I don’t know how those teens can type so quickly on their iPhones. I would be all swollen thumbs and atrocious spelling errors. We also recently got a new cable-PVR system at home and the interface is so different from our previous system. It took me awhile to get comfortable with it and familiar with the new navigation screens that for the first few months I felt like smashing our LCD TV with the club-like remote. But now I’m able to locate my cooking shows, HBO series and “30 Rock” so all is right in the world. For now.

Oh, and my household recently got an iPad. It’s the first Apple product I have ever owned. And as a lifetime PC user, I have to admit that it is different enough to trip me up once in awhile (“How do I copy and paste?” I could be hear yelling lately to no one in particular from my living room). I am just so happy that I am still more adept at using my tablet than my 5-year old. But I know my days of being more technically-superior than her are seriously numbered.

So this brings me to my main point of today’s entry. I am still somewhat techno-savvy. I can learn any new household technology that is thrown at me, assuming I’m given a reasonable amount of time to experiment with it. And I believe I am of that final generation that appreciates technology and doesn’t just take it for granted. I saw it all unfold in front of my eyes. Using music as an example, I grew up listening to LPs then graduated to taping songs off the radio. Then came CDs and I have many fond memories shopping for music at A&B, Sam the Record Man, HMV, and Virgin Megastore. And now of course I can get any song, any album from the comfort of my home (with my handy iPad). But I appreciate the fact that it wasn’t always this way and I couldn’t always just get whatever music I wanted. My children, on the other hand, will grow up expecting to have any music at their fingertips and the MP3 files (or streamed radio stations) will be disposable for them, whereas I treasured those precious tapes, CDs and LPs and treated them with care because they costed money and were breakable.

I still embrace technology and value it. But at what point (if any) will I just fall behind with the times and refuse to learn about new gadgets? When if ever will I be like my elderly mother who needs me to set up her new phone and answering machine and walk her through the basic functions (“Just teach me how to retrieve a message, I don’t need to know how to personalize ringtones for everyone!”)?

I think the answer is never. I think I’ll just be comfortable enough that I’ll always be willing to adapt new technologies. And I’m happy with that. However, if there comes a day when we all drill holes in our heads and plug connectors straight into our grey matter, well then – you’ll just have to see what I have to say then.

December 15, 2011
by renayung
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Hogging the Remote Leads to Consumerism

As like most small children, my baby-boy loves to grab the remote and press buttons. It muddles up the TV occasionally but nothing we can’t fix e.g. we might need to go back to the channel we were watching.

But the other day, the baby-Daddy yelled from the other room that we can’t let Tai have the remote anymore. “He was one step away from ordering ‘Thor’ on Pay-Per-View!”

Yikes! Giving a toddler a remote control is no longer a harmless gesture. You might end up owing tons of money in unwanted movies (especially if he learns how to order in High-Def)….

December 6, 2011
by renayung
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Channeling Trinity

There is a scene from the movie “The Matrix” that cracked me up at the time and totally stuck with me. It’s the scene where Trinity needs to know how to fly a helicopter and so she requests that the information gets uploaded directly to her brain.

There is a flash of data on the screen at the base ship then you see Trinity’s eyes momentarily flutter (to portray the massive amounts of details flooding into her grey matter) and then she opens her eyes and confidently states, “Okay, let’s go” (or something to that effect). And off she goes behind the joystick of the helicopter, the massive knowledge transfer complete, seamless and a success (not to mention almost instantaneous). So awesome.

Well, the reason I’m mentioning this scene is because I’ve kind of witnessed it at home. No, my children are not exactly flying helicopters after a 3-second learning lesson. But I have noticed that I will show both children something briefly (either consciously or inadvertently) and then moments or days or weeks or months later, I see the ‘learned’ behaviour display itself. Examples include Tai seeing me engage the shower knob in the bathtub (and then he tried to do it himself next time he was in the bath), Sloane watching me draw certain pictures (days later she’ll try to duplicate them), and a much-younger Sloane hearing us swear when we thought she was too young to understand language (months later she dropped the f-bomb in context much to our horror).

Ah, if only adults could learn and retain information as early as the little ones.

The World According to Rena

My World, My Words