Had Good Friday All Planned

Morning:
Tuition

Afternoon:
Tuition

Evening – night:
Meet up with one of besties
Visit cyn and the kids

Fortunately said bestie was understanding about the last minute change. I figured that I needed to save my weekend nights for marking atrocious compositions and hence decided to drop by on Friday instead.

When I arrived, I could hear Charlene screaming from the room,

“OH godma Jolene is here to save me!”

Haha… The kids must have been “shooting” her with their “guns” and “injecting” her with their “syringes” again.

While I took over from Charlene who had been entertaining the kids the whole day, she went on to help cyn with the household chores. Now that Aunty Sonia is gone, cyn has to juggle with so much chores. She has to assume the role of a mother, father, cook, domestic helper, daughter, accountant… the list is endless.

My er jie bought play doh beach theme for the kids and so we started playing with dough along with their own play doh.

It was hours of play doh fun.

After opening all the tubs for them, charmaine started pinching off bits of dough and mixing the colours. When I saw the green mixing with the yellow, I felt so sorry for the fresh new dough. The next moment, Jase started mixing colours too.

WAH! Heartache ah!

Cyn, char and I are those who cannot bear to see different colours of play doh being mixed together. However, the kids had no qualms about mixing their dough. We looked at the mixed play doh and felt our hearts ache.

I taught them how to roll in circles to get spheres, rolling forward and backward to get a long dough, cutting different shapes etc.

Jase looked at the packaging on the container and asked if I knew how to make a lobster. While making, he kept asking me what colour lobsters are when alive and when cooked, how many legs does a lobster have (which I seriously dunno…10?) etc.

In the meantime, Charmaine was mixing more colours, rolling and cutting the dough. Every now and then, she would cut some bits for us, telling us that they were pizzas and cakes.

When I was about to add some finishing touches to my lobster, Jase fished out a lobster cutter mould and went, “Eh? Got lobster here.”

I looked at the mould and felt so stupid to realise that the mould is provided in the set only when my lobster was almost completed.



It was time for Charmaine to take her medicine but she was unwilling. Cyn mummy spent some time coaxing her but to no avail. Charmaine turned a deaf ear to all our coaxing too.



We left her alone and continued with whatever we were doing.

After some time, Charmaine picked up the syringe and we were all so happy to see her attempting to feed herself. Luckily Charlene’s fingers were fast enough to capture this.



So cute! Still can dance summore. When I showed my family members the video on my camera, they all laughed at the part when she was dancing.

Jase wanted a little attention too so he held his mixed colour car up. Other than that little bit of attention crave, Jase was a real angel that day. =) He even let mei mei use her feet to touch his face w/o scolding her. Haha… should I say that’s nice or bo chup of him?

Next, we started making starfish from the starfish cutter mould. We didn’t have enough pure colours left and so I told them we had to use the old doh. Earlier on when they asked me open the yellow cap container from their old play doh set, expecting to find yellow dough inside, we were greeted with an ugly dirty green colour. They could actually say “EEEEE” when they saw that.

“Now you see why we cannot mix so many colours? Mix already will become this ugly colour.”

When I realised that we didn’t have any pure green play doh anymore, I started a little trick to stop the kids from mixing colours. I told them we had to save the dough. I began trying to save whatver uncontaminated colours, peeled them and put them into different lumps.

It was a tedious process. Each time, I managed to peel a pure colour away from the mixture, I would stick it onto that colour lump and exclaim, “Saved!”

Soon, the kids were imitating… only that their lumps were still quite a mixture of colours.

DIAO!

越帮越忙!

It was time to make ice cream from the ice cream moulds. Jase wanted 2 ice cream. Charmaine as well. Charmaine requested for an ice cream for mummy too. Such a lovely gal. Hence, Godma Jolene became a busy busy ice cream maker.

When the ice creams were done, Jase started rolling dough and putting eyes, nose and mouth for his ice cream. Charmaine followed suit but she wasn’t sure about how to roll them proportionate to the ice cream so I helped her with it.

Charmaine got a little angry at one point of time but I wasn’t exactly sure why. I think it was because Jase took her ice cream saying that he requested for them first. She gave an angry face and said, “I don’t want to play already.” Then she went into the room where cyn and char were.

After she got over her anger, charmaine like a slinky snake, slid onto my lap and asked for her ice cream. Haha… She was still bitter about her loss. When she got her ice cream, she was happy again as evident from the photos below.



[All photos that day were taken by Charlene]

Soon the sky turned dark and everyone was tired from playing doh. At that time, I had a slight headache and was actually relieved that we stopped.

I personally hate clearing up play doh. Hate it when the play dough gets stuck in those “press machines”. I’ve to use toothpick to pick out all the bits last time when I was young and anal. Now that I’m older, I’m even more anal.

Jase was such a little helper. He filled a plastic pail with water and tried to help. However, he did not know what to do with the pail of water.

When he saw me picking up all the small pieces of dough from the floor and the table, he did the same and threw them into the pail of water. It wasn’t an effective way of clearing play doh at all but I allowed him to help coz of his good intentions.

Jase got yellow and pink paint onto my shorts!

It happened when I sat down on their self painted wooden chair to clean the table without knowing that he had put the pail on the chair before that, leaving a circle of water stain which got into my shorts.

越帮越忙 again!

This boy ah… must surely find something to help. He started finding for all those stuff which “touched the play doh” and asked me if he could wash them.

Anything that would keep him busy, I said yes.

He took some of the play doh equipment to wash at the basin all by himself. I must say he did a really clean job for most of them. I dried the equipment and he also offered to dry them.

The most disgusting part came the press machine. It was full of old doh from the previous time. Goodness knows how long they’ve been stuck there. Jase tried to wash it clean but they were quite stubborn and too difficult for a young child to wash. I brought the whole damn thing to the table and started picking the doh with toothpicks.

Charlene came over and asked, “Must be so clean ah?”

To which I answered, “No la, but I just cannot stand it.”

By then, my head was throbbing. Hence, when Charlene offered to take over the nit-picking, I gladly let her. We started chatting about stuff. It is pretty hard for us to chat and catch up unless we are alone.

At the end of it all, we managed to catch up PLUS the press machine was super duper clean!

We spent some time in the air-conditioned room after the kids had showered. Jase asked if we could go home at 1 o’clock and we said no. He bargained for 12 midnight. The kids are always so active and refuse to sleep whenever there are visitors. They did not even have their afternoon nap that day and they were still so energetic close to midnight.

I wasn’t quite myself as my headache was getting worse with wave of nausea every now and then. Cyn told the kids not to disturb me and said that it’s ok if I wanna go home. I din wanna go home yet coz I dunno when would be the next time I can make it down again.

I was already dying from the headache but charchar wanna take a pic of me so must pose.


I thought that I would probably have to fill my tummy to feel better. Decided to drink milo with Charmaine as she wanted to drink milo before that. We went out to the kitchen to make our milo coz Charmaine told me she knows how to make milo herself. After cyn mummy opened the tin, Charmaine carefully scooped the milo without spilling. She also helped me to scoop too and since my cup was bigger, she added more milo in proportion. What a clever girl!

Like a traditional auntie, I sat at the kitchen table and ate “sau tau piah” (those traditional Khong Guan, Jacobs or Julie square crackers) dipped into my milo. Cyn said she has been teaching Charmaine to eat in this manner too as the biscuit would be soft and this way of eating would be beneficial whenever she has ulcers after chemo.

When Charmaine saw me eating like that, she climbed onto my lap, pulled her cup of milo in front of her and dipped her sau tau piah into her milo.

“Nice or not?”

“Nice.”

The next moment, Charmaine gave me her unfinished sau tau piah and said, “I don’t want already.”

IF I’m reading her correctly, that means it’s not nice.

I managed to catch up with Cynthia for a brief moment before Charlene came out of the room to announce that the kids were in sleeping position. This was good news. Cyn had to go in to tuck them into bed.

By midnight, Char and I let ourselves outta the house with she feeling bushed and me feeling nauseous.

I went home, looked at the unfinished food on the table and immediately turned to the sink to puke. My throat hurt big time while retching but I felt a lot better after that. Little did I know that the throat problem would erupt into something major in a few hours’ time.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

On Sunday

To those who sms-ed me,

I’m really very touched by all who sms-ed me asking me how I am, telling me to take care, encouraging me to hand in there…

You know who you are. ;)

Even people whom I thought wouldn’t care told me to take care.

It’s always very heartwarming to receive sweet sms-es.

A particular sms got me laughing at the end:

“ Read ur blog. Charmaine is real strong to maintain her cheerfulness amidst her chemo. Wana encourage u also for being her n her family’s strength n joy. U need to rest n recharge nw. Hope u get better soon. Well, at least the bees din die for nothing. Tk care huh.”

Talking about bees… My dad went to buy the throat and voice medicine from another medical hall. This time he openly told me that there was just one bee inside.

I have since gotten 90% of my voice back and the swelling has gone down by a lot. I’m able to eat like nobody’s business w/o having to endure the pain from swallowing.

The wonders of Western and Eastern healing!

However, my throat hurts like crazy whenever I sneeze or cough.

I’ll be able to take on my classes tomorrow, I mean later today.

Just now during my 2 sessions of tuition with constant speaking one to one, I was still wondering how I was going to teach my pai kia class later. Well, I just hope I don’t strain my vocal chords while teaching pai kia class later.