islandhippy

Olive modelling her chef's uniform made by Daddy from two plastic bags, some old drawing paper and a diaper carton.

Olive helping Daddy make (and eat) lasagne. We doubled the recipe to feed 12 instead of 6 but somehow the three of us still managed to eat half of it in one sitting. I blame Olive.

Kiasu: [Hokkien] a fear of losing, used to describe a person who is overly competitive; afraid to lose.

I may not have renounced my nationality and taken Singapore citizenship like Sri but I am displaying all the traits of a true-blue kiasu Singaporean. I’m eagerly following the results of the Primary One registration balloting, which is taking place in Singapore this month.

Primary school places are allocated according to phases laid out by the Ministry of Education. If the number of applicants for each phase exceeds the number of places available then the outcome will be determined first by the distance one lives from the school and then by balloting.

Phase 1: For kids with siblings currently at the school.

Phase 2A1: For kids with a parent who attended the school and joined the alumni.

Phase 2A2: For kids with silly parents who didn’t join the alumni and kids whose siblings studied at the school.

Phase 2B2: For kids whose parents are so kiasu that they have volunteered at the school for more than 40 hours. (This phase is for me, I'm already checking out volunteering guidelines at several schools.)

Phase 2C: For all other Singaporean and PR kids who are ineligible for the above.

Phase 3: For kids who are neither Singapore citizens nor PRs.

I have identified some potential primary schools for Olive and Leo and I’m closely watching the vacancies following the results of each phase allocation.

Of course we now have to move house as there aren’t any schools within 1 km of our flat … except for the Global Indian International School. So, we’re also looking for resale HDB flats within 1 km of our schools of choice.

As I write this post, my daughter is balancing on one leg while singing a Lady Gaga song so I can see she is obviously extremely talented. Finding a top primary school will be imperative.

And the most kisau thing about this is that my daughter is only 2 and my son is 1 month old! Olive still has 4 years to go before she starts school.

This evening I returned home from work to find an ecstatic Olive jumping up and down in the doorway shouting “Olive pee in potty, Olive pee in potty, Olive has a star. Daddy pee in Olive’s potty [runs to potty and points inside] and Daddy have star too.” Olive is such an angel, she makes life so easy for Mum and Dad. The only potty training we did was to (a) take off her diaper and (b) show her where the potty is kept. She didn’t even tell anybody she’d used it, she simply disappeared for a minute, had a quick pee then carried on playing. Obviously we need her to tell us when she has used the potty so she now looks forward to collecting coloured star-shaped stickers: one star for a number one and two stars for a number two (I suggested three for a combined effort but I can see us running short of stars pretty soon).

I was going to offer readers a photo of Olive’s poo but instead I found a visual of an even more nauseating bowel discharge:

Hello! My name is Leo 森 Tatham. (If you only see a square box then your computer doesn't speak Chinese.)

My first name, Leo, is short for ... Leo.

My middle name is 森 or "Sen" in Hanyu Pinyin. 森 means "forest" and is pronounced "sun" when spoken in English with a comic French accent à la 'Allo 'Allo! Imagine René saying "zee sun eez very 'ot".

The Chinese character 森 is delightful and, thankfully, easy to draw. It's a logical aggregate, where a character is repeated to create a new word. The character 木 means tree. Double it, 林, and you get grove. Triple it, 森, and you have a forest.

If you’ve ever tired of playing the guessing game I spy after several rounds, then you should try playing the game with my two-year-old daughter Olive. Not only are her rules very complicated, she’s also really funny. You have to guess fast otherwise Olive will pose the question and supply the answer before you know what’s happened. A typical game goes like this:

Olive: Olive wants play I spy.
Dad: OK, you go first.
Olive: I spy with my little eye, something beginning with … A. Is it a monkey? No. Is it an elephant? No. Is it doggy? Yes!
Dad: Er … well done Olive.

If you think of an object and try to make Olive guess, it’s no less challenging.

Dad: I spy with my little eye, something beginning with … [spies Tutu, Olive’s cuddly bear] ... T.
Olive: No, cannot T, must be A.
Dad: [sighs and spies a new object beginning with A] OK, something beginning with A.
Olive: Is it Tutu?
Dad: Huh?

Olive and I hit the zoo again this morning and when we returned home my two little monkeys, Olive and the squeaky one with no name, gave me a father's day present: a hotdog. This may seem an unusual gift but when daddy has been surviving on Chinese confinement food for two weeks, a crappy hotdog from Ikea tastes like manna from Heaven. Thank you Olive, thank you squeaky one.

As soon as Sandy and I got back home from the hospital, I delivered bottles of vino to all our neighbours with cards that read "Good News: Sandy and Phil have a new baby! Bad News: He's loud. We hope this wine helps you sleep!" There is no sound proofing in these old colonial buildings so our poor neighbours may not get much sleep for a few months. However, baby boy hasn't cried much at all in his first 36 hours so I might have emptied my wine fridge in vain. After visiting the neighbours I had a glass myself and promptly fell asleep.

Wow! It all happened so fast, I can't believe I'm holding my son. Olive took two days to arrive, this little guy popped out in two hours. Boy-with-no-name was born at 5.47am on 15 June 2010 and weighs 4.3 kg (9.5lb), nearly setting a hospital record. Sandy did an amazing job. Her first comment upon seeing her son: That was easy, I'll have another 10! I want to try whatever cocktail of narcotics she's on. Baby boy looks so much like his elder sister—he's adorable. Well done Sandy, I love you so much.

Sandy began experiencing contractions at midnight, thankfully just after the final whistle of the Japan–Cameroon match. We timed the contractions for an hour until we realised we were about to give birth at home. We called a cab at 1.30am and were safely checked in to the hospital by 2am. It's now 2.30am and we're in the delivery suite at KK Women's and Children's Hospital, Singapore. The contractions are 5 mins apart by my iPhone calculations, just confirmed by the nurses. Sandy's 4-5 cm dilated ... and somebody's demanding an epidural. I hope there's still time! Ah, there is, the anaesthetist is on the way. I'll stop blogging now and look after Sandy.

[Phil on the first day of the World Cup enjoying what could be his last beer out for some time]

Every day Phil asks me 'do you think you might give birth today?' He's worried about missing the football. Er, hello, I don't know when I'm gonna pop. Every night I feel like I'm going into labour. Phil tried persuading the baby to let go and drop out this morning so we can be back home in time for the next England match, but it didn't work. This baby just isn't in a hurry. (And England were so unconvincing against USA that Phil's better off not watching the next games.)

This morning I had to yank Olive off a footpath before she was mown down by a victoria crowned pigeon from New Guinea which was being chased by a lemur from Madagascar which was itself being pursued by an angry spotted whistling duck from Australia. Like a scene from the movie Jumanji, this procession of bizarre animals came hurtling down the path causing panic among pedestrians. Olive and I were, of course, in the 20,000-cubic-metre Fragile Forest aviary at Singapore Zoo so I guess we shouldn’t have been too surprised by the selection of animals but you tend to do a double-take when you have a lemur running between your legs in hot pursuit of the world’s largest pigeon, followed by a mad duck.

Even more amazing, to me at least, was my discovery that the female Malaysian stick insect, the largest stick insect on the planet, doesn’t need a male of the species to reproduce! A zookeeper kindly fished one of the insects out of its cage to show to Olive and me and she explained that if the female mates with a male Malaysian Stick Insect then she can produce male and female offspring but without a male she can still produce offspring, only that they would all be female. Olive and I visit the zoo twice a month and we love it!

'In the Footsteps of Raffles’ with Nigel Barley
Tuesday, 29 June, 7.00 - 8.30 pm
Possibility Room, Level 5, National Library Building

Want to find out more about Sir Stamford Raffles in the most humourous and insightful way? Or how to write historical fiction?

Nigel Barley is the author of twenty books, academic and popular, in genres as diverse as travel writing, fiction, biography and art history. In the Footsteps of Raffles and Rouge Raider are two of his books which have been written against the backdrop of Singapore and her history. In this session, Nigel will discuss some of the particular difficulties and satisfactions that lie behind various works, concentrating on those involving the history of Singapore and SE Asia. He will also tease out certain themes that have emerged increasingly over the years such as his motivation as a writer, his personal relationship to his subjects and the tension between randomness and structure.

Places are limited, so please register here as soon as possible.

This programme is in collaboration with the National Book Development Council of Singapore (NBDCS) and Monsoon Books Pte Ltd.

About the Author
Originally trained as an anthropologist, Nigel worked in West Africa, spending time with the Dowayo people of North Cameroon and from here, his first book which is a witty and informative account of anthropological filed work among the Dowayo people, 'The Innocent Anthropologist' was produced. He survived to move to the Ethnography Department of the British Museum and it was in this connection that he first traveled to Southeast Asia. After forays into Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and Burma, Barley settled on Indonesia as his principal research interest and has worked on both the history and contemporary culture of that area. After escaping from the museum, he is now a writer and broadcaster and divides his time between London and Indonesia.

Call me paranoid but when you return home from work to find the landlord has dug a one-meter-long open trench in front of your door you have a right to be concerned. Our landlord happens to be the Singapore government, in the form of the Singapore Land Authority (SLA). Did the SLA warn us it would be excavating an elaborate dugout system in the garden? Of course not. Olive's buggy is now trapped in no man's land between the SLA trench and our front door. What they SLA doesn't realise is that we have a secret weapon ... a two-foot-tall seasoned trench wriggler called Olive. Olive went over the top last night and left a note in the wet concrete of the SLA trench.

Finally, after two weeks, Daddy has been entrusted with the school run! Olive settled in to her half-day preschool/playgroup after about 12 days, which is fantastic. The screams from the first few days faded into whimpers then grumbles. I wouldn't say she actually looks forward to school yet, but at least she's resigned herself to her fate!

Anyway, I almost botched my first school run this morning. I had to carry Olive, her school bag, my laptop bag and a warehouse trolley so I decided to consolidate everything and put Olive and the two bags on the trolley and push it to the waiting taxi. I took a corner a little too fast, the trolley and bags turned right and the kid turned left and fell flat on her face on the path. Of course Sandy was watching from the kitchen window with eyes raised to Heaven. Luckily Olive saw the funny side of it and announced: "Daddy, Olive no more ride trolley". Wise move, kiddo.

Since Olive's school, Carpe Diem Kidz (sic), is located on the way to my office it will be easy for me to drop her off every morning (sans trolley). I have to say a huge thank you to Sandy who handled the heart-wrenching first two weeks; I wouldn't have been able to do that. Now Sandy can relax at home every morning and, er, have another baby!

UPDATE: Just to confuse Olive, I collected her from school at lunchtime today. She jumped for joy, or was it shock and fear, then whispered something to the teacher who was trying to put her shoes on. When said teacher deposited Olive in my arms, she explained that Olive had whispered to her: "I give Daddy big smile"! Sooooo cute!

OMG, Sandy had a Braxton Hicks the other night — that's a false contraction — and I was suddenly reminded that she must be giving birth soon. "Hello ... I'm 1 cm dilated, you know, the baby's due any day now! The doctor can already feel the baby's head!" Cripes. I immediately started worrying about what still needs to be done. Sandwiches. Last time Sandy gave birth I took a mountain of sandwiches to the hospital. "Screw your sandwiches, how about a name for the baby?" True. We still don't have a name for baby boy. Last time we had some great suggestions of names for the then unnamed Olive. I recall that young George Gosling came up with the best suggestions back then: zucchini (which he was eating at the time) and Cinderella.

We need some suggestions of boy's names. George, putting your thinking cap on again. Has anybody heard any great boy's names recently? We need some inspiration. So far, we have the following names on the list, but I'm not sure how taken we really are by any of these:

Nathaniel Tatham
Rowan Tatham
Charles Tatham
Barnaby Tatham
Alexander Tatham
Miles Tatham
Hugo Tatham
Rupert Tatham

With only a month to go before baby #2 is born, we need to solve the pushchair problem.

• Do we stick with our single buggy and force Olive to walk?
• Do we attach a boogie board to the back of the existing chair and let Olive stand up?
• Do we buy a twin (side-by-side) pushchair?
• Do we buy a tandem (front-and-back) pushchair?
• Should we just employ a maid like everybody else in Singapore and let her carry both kids?

Olive will be 26 months old when her brother is born so I think she'll still need to sit down in a buggy of some kind for another year or two. I quite like the idea of riding the boogie board but I can't see Olive doing it. Both the twin and tandem chairs look pretty unwieldy and are very heavy. We live in a walk-up apartment so we'll have to leave the buggy downstairs but I guess that's not really a problem as we do that anyway with the single buggy. Handling a double stroller up and down steps in shops is going to be tough, and crossing the railway line next to the house is out.

Does anybody have any experience with twin or tandem buggies? Do share your thoughts.

UPDATE: We've found what must be the cheapest tandem buggy in Singapore! A local baby store has two units of the Graco DuoGlider Stroller (Safari Sun) reduced to just S$200, which makes it the same price as it would be in the US or UK instead of being ridiculously marked up like everything else in Singapore. It is a bargain basement model but did receive an acceptable review from Which? consumer magazine in the UK. The rear seat folds all the way down and is suitable for newborns and it accepts a Graco carseat (for some odd reason, since we don't have a car, we do have a Graco carseat lying around). Olive can ride in the front of the buggy and act as bow lookout. The photo below, taken from the Graco website, has been shot at such an angle that you don't see just how long the buggy is. At one meter in length, it's not going to be easy maneuvering through tight corners. In theory it can be folded up using one hand but try that when holding the baby and watching Olive at the same time. I guess we'll only use the buggy for day trips and stick the baby in the old buggy or carry him in a Baby Bjorn the rest of the time and let Olive walk.

The day we’ve been dreading for so long finally arrived: Olive’s first day at preschool. Olive wasn’t dreading it of course, just Sandy and I. We kept asking ourselves why we were sending our tiny little baby to school when she’s only two years old. Are we the cruelest parents ever? It’s not school, we kept having to remind ourselves. It’s playgroup. It’s singing, dancing and playing masak-masak. It’s about making new friends. And it’s Olive’s best chance of learning Mandarin.

Olive was supposed to start two weeks ago but the school was closed due to a hand, foot and mouth outbreak. We meant to start Olive on the Monday but the teacher advised us to wait another couple of days as she worried that all the kids would be crying following their enforced hand, foot and mouth holiday. By Thursday we realized we couldn’t put it off any longer. Out came the school uniform and school bag.

We lingered over our breakfast trying to avoid the inevitable. Honestly, you would think Olive was leaving for boarding school half way round the world, not attending half-day school five minutes walk away. We put Olive’s uniform on and only realized at school that we’d forgotten her shorts. How embarrassing for Olive, her first day at school and her idiot parents forgot to put her shorts on so she had to flash her diaper at everybody.

Sandy decided to take Olive to school alone, which was fine by me. I wouldn’t have been able to leave her there! At 9am, when Sandy and Olive arrived at Carpe Diem Kidz (sic), there was nobody to greet them so Sandy took Olive straight to her classroom and Olive happily wandered in. Sandy waited outside the classroom but Olive soon got pretty freaked out by the noise. Half the kids in her class of seven were screaming and the two teachers were struggling to calm everybody down. Sandy decided to sit in on the class and Olive was fine with Mummy around. Only when the teacher began to read a book and Olive decided she wanted Mummy to read another book did the stress get to her and she started screaming. That was Sandy’s cue to do a runner. I think Sandy was worried Olive would continue to cling to her so she found and empty room to hide in. And cry!

Sandy changed her hiding spot at lunch time so she could watch Olive eat. According to Sandy the portions served are insanely small and the food sounds really unhealthy. I’m tempted to take some vegetables and fruit to the school and see if the cook knows what to do with them. Anyway, Olive wolfed down her food in about five minutes and asked for a second bowl. She finished that in another five minutes and asked for a third bowl. By now the school bursar was making a note to increase Olive’s school fees. I can’t believe it (actually I can) but Sandy then sneaked into the school kitchen and told the cook to serve extra large portions to Olive in the future. Honestly, my wife is mad.

The first day, or half day, was over and Olive seemed quite OK with the whole experience. Sandy and I both suffered nervous breakdowns but Olive said she enjoyed school and wanted to go back the next day. There were a few more tears on the second day — from mother and daughter — but this time Sandy left Olive at school and walked to a nearby shopping mall to cry. Lunch on day two was porridge devoid of meat and vegetables, which Olive didn’t really like so she only asked for two helpings and not three.

Although Olive is a little uncomfortable in the Chinese class because she doesn’t speak any Mandarin yet, she’s much better in the English class and has become quite attached to one of the English-speaking teachers.

I’m sure Olive is going to be fine although I’m not convinced she realizes she has another twenty odd years of school and uni ahead of her.

UPDATE MONDAY: Sandy has been banned from entering the school, LOL! The teachers wisely barred her from entering when she brought Olive for her third day of school on Monday. No parents allowed!

UPDATE TUESDAY: Olive has been banned from entering the school as the teachers suspect she's contracted hand, foot and mouth

Lest we ever forget Olive's bizarre bath time rituals, allow me to record them here for posterity.

For some reason Olive prefers cold water to lukewarm water. She likes nothing better than to be doused in cold water from a bucket. Admittedly we live in 33-degree heat so cold water is very refreshing but still. Her eyes open wide as she gasps for air and her arms freeze before she screams in hysterics. Unfortunately she likes to wash Daddy's head (no hair) in cold water too. Every time Daddy bathes Olive — most nights if he's home on time — he will have to lean over the bathtub to allow Olive to wash his head. "Daddy dirty hair. Wivvy wash hair. Daddy no like cold water, Daddy like warm water." Splash ... she pours cold water over Daddy.

From the age of about 12 to 18 months, it was only possible to get Olive out of the tub with the promise of an ear-cleaning session! She was addicted to earbuds. We were always careful not to insert the buds inside her ear canal, instead we just tickled her ears. Now, at age two, we lift Olive out of the tub, sit her on the washing machine and dry her off while she plays with Daddy's underarm deodorant. The easiest time to dry her hair with a towel, which she doesn't really enjoy, is while she's preoccupied with the deodorant, trying to pull the cap off. When the cap is off she has to give Daddy some deodorant under each arm. ("Phil doesn't seem to realise this is the only way Olive can bear being so close to him and his pongy armpits" Sandy.) Daddy then pretends to rub deodorant on Olive's armpits (she doesn't realise it's just Daddy's fingernail, not the deodorant stick).

Hats off to Jennifer of Once Upon an App for some inspired guerilla marketing! She must be searching for blog posts about iPhone and iPad apps then leaving messages about her company’s recently launched apps. Like a true pro, she takes the time to read a couple of posts on the blog to ensure her message is relevant and not binned as spam. Jennifer recently left a message on our blog introducing “Piffle’s ABC Book of Funny Animals”, a new app from her company Once Upon an App. I decided to make her 69.3 cents richer (the cost of the app less Apple’s 30% cut) and download the app to my iPhone. What the company has done is produce a song and a couple of games from of an out-of-copyright kid’s book. Piffle’s ABC Book of Funny Animals was written by Howard Eyre Altemus in the early 20th century; I’m not sure whether he was also the illustrator. You can either listen to the poem being sung while viewing the antiquated illustrations or you can opt to play one of the games. In “Choose a Letter”, you pick a letter of the alphabet which reveals an animal’s name beginning with that letter and four illustrations of animals, only one of which is the correct animal. The second game is basically the other way around: you choose an animal from a series of illustrations then have to guess the animal’s name from a list of four possibles. If you make a mistake the app very politely says “Close, try again” instead of “Wrong, fool”. And with animals such as vicunya and bruin, your kid is liable to slip up. Olive tried the app and enjoyed looking at the animal illustrations and listening to the song and she can guess some of the animal names. If this app really takes off I think I’ll republish the book and cash in on Jennifer’s success!

Download the app here.

It's official, we're now Singaporeans. No, we haven't accepted Singapore citizenship, we've taken family membership at Singapore Zoo and become official "Friends of the Zoo" card holders. Olive is overjoyed as she loves looking at all the exotic animals. After three hours exploring the zoo this morning Olive declared that her favourite animal at the zoo was a pigeon! We should have left her in the back garden at home.

At the zoo we caught part of a sea lion show where the star of the pool was a sea lion called Philip. When we got back home I asked Olive if she remembered the sea lion's name. She didn't so I told her the sea lion had the same name as Daddy. She said "Sea lion called Phil Tatham"! (Olive knows her name is Olive Tatham and Sandy's name is Mummy Tatham.)

A screenshot of Duck Duck Moose's "Wheels on the Bus" app for the iPhone.

On Saturday I attended a talk by Dr Warren Buckleitner, the editor of Children’s Technology Review, a monthly consumer reports-style publication dedicated to children’s technology products. And ... take a deep breath ... I got to play with an iPad! Dr Buckleitner's iPad. Both the iPad and Dr Buckleitner's talk were equally inspiring and I was fascinated to learn about the latest children’s technology products on the market, good and bad. Older kids (er, me) can now scuba dive with Wii using a remote in each hand to replicate swimming strokes and discover hundreds of fish. Brush your hand against a fish and you can read information about it. Thanks to augmented reality technology, hold a baseball card up to your webcam and see a three-dimensional image of the player come to life on the screen. Let the kids use an iPhone or iPad to hunt for, and learn about, colours by shooting photos of different coloured objects around the house which the app's colour wheel recognizes or rejects until they've collected all the colours in the game. Since attending the talk I've already purchased two apps for Olive to play on my iPhone and she loves them. Both are produced by Duck Duck Moose, a developer of educational apps for the iPhone and iTouch, which presumably now run on the iPad. Olive bursts into laughter when she plays "Wheels on the Bus" and she loves counting the fish on "Fish School". I haven't quite convinced Sandy we need an iPad but I'm working on it.

Olive took Sandy and I out to dinner at a local Korean restaurant to celebrate Mother's Day. Amazingly, Olive ate more rice than me ... I guess her appetite is back. She also polished off vast quantities of barbecued beef and pork, sweet potato pancakes, sweetcorn, watermelon and strawberries.

What happens when you leave the jewellery box open.

Olive held a tea party this afternoon for all her bedroom friends. Thank you Aunty Holly for the wonderful wooden cake stand.

Can you believe it?! We have Olive perfectly primed for her first day at preschool today and the school is closed due to a hand, foot and mouth outbreak! Olive has finally recovered from two bouts of cough and flu, she's eating properly again and has already put back on all the weight she lost while she was ill. She's feeding herself again and is waking at almost the right time for school. She'd visited the school plenty of times and her uniform (yes, the little dear has to wear a uniform!!) was washed and freshly ironed (perhaps not ironed).

Oh well, we can't afford her to fall sick again with baby #2 due in a month so Olive will just have to wait a week for her first day at school.

Olive and I spent a wonderful Saturday morning at the bird park. Concerned that one of the pelicans was sitting alone on land instead of joining its friends in the lake, Olive announced: "Pelican cannot swim, pelican no swimming costume." At the penguin pool, Olive was more interested in looking for sharks and, unimpressed by ostriches and emus, Olive asked if we could go and find some chickens.

Olive's getting really cheeky. While playing jigsaw puzzles on her bedroom floor earlier today, Olive got up and fetched a cushion for herself from the living room. When I asked her if she could fetch one for Daddy she replied: "This Wivvy's cushion, Daddy get self." [Sandy: "Well done Olive, Daddy already has one maid in the family."]