tzlee.com/blog

Tag: Parenting

  • Life changing experience

    People tell me that parenthood is a life-changing experience. I don’t think I doubted that, but it did not exactly change my life the way I thought it would have — at least not yet.

    It is certainly tough caring for a newborn since the usual sleep/eat/poop cycle is approximately bi-hourly. I am not the type who can nap; I will wake up from a short nap feeling terrible. I cover night duties, so as a result I do not sleep until day break. If I am lucky, I get to sleep at 5 a.m.

    I end up sleeping very little each day. But just being tired is not what I would call life-changing. I have certainly been through times where I slept very little. Like going to Army/BMT, the time comes and you suck it up.

    Before the baby, most of my nights were spent working late, having dinner with friends, watching TV, busybody-ing on social media, etc. The arrival of baby meant I had to be home early and stay home for most parts of the evening. There’s only so much TV and social media I can feed on before I get bored, so I decided to spend my waking moments learning new things.

    During my army days, I spent free time reading books/online articles or creating stuff — software, music scores, etc. I learned a lot.

    So over the past month I started making a list of things I wanted to try/learn, and attempted them one by one. Baby time is great for reading or watching training videos because my hands are usually busy carrying or feeding the baby.

    Some of these action items actually required money, i.e. I had to buy/pay for stuff, and that was the biggest difference from my army days when I was broke.

    Money probably made some of those things easier/faster; but irregardless, I believe progress can still be made.

    Social time can really dilute you. I probably learned more (apart from parenting) in the last month than I have in the entire of last year.

  • The greatest gift to life

    The greatest gift to life is a new life.

    Born May 25, 2015 at 9.06am.

    printf(“Hello, world!\n”);

  • Kids CMI? Maybe Parents also CMI

    This is in response to a thread I read at MummySG. (BTW, I’m reading the forum because I found posts related to noisy neighbours.)

    Hi, have to get this off my chest. ytd was with hubby and baby at BHG Bugis. after using the nursing room to nurse daughter, we proceed to the elevator to go to the first floor to go to liang seah st to meet friends for dinner.

    As the elevator just left thus there is no one so we r standing beside the door(not blocking) with dear daughter in her stroller sleeping. then came 3 teenagers(gers in most pro 14 or 16) standing behind us. when the elevator going to reach one of them kept pushing me wanting to get in first. my hubby who saw that told them” sorry we r also going in can wait for a while(cos need to push stroller in , somemore elevator have not even reach yet.”

    in the elevator one of them say to the one who was being told”hey he scolded you ?” then she replied”aiya you knw singaporean, kiasu want to go in first.” Wa, my hubby heard that hot , cos they r the one who want to rush in first. he scolded back” dont know who kiasu, keep pushing my wife wanting to rush in front to go in. yourself not singaporean is it.” 3 of them stared at my hubby and of cos we stared them back . then comethe best pt, they got off at lvl 2 n one of them actually scolded softly but i heard “Bas****” CAN you IMAGINE THAT! if not becos im standing inside ,i will go st8 out n ask them,”who you scolding BAS****, BI***. they think i got baby i good to bully or like those ‘chi xiang mother’?sorry, too bad IM NOT as im military trained, those who dont show respect will get it from me(in workplace.)nowadays the teenager REALLY CANNOT MAKE IT

    I think there’s two sides to the problem. OK, the teens described here CMI, but why so?

    I was at the basement of Century Square Tampines one afternoon with my colleagues. We were at the AXS machine paying our bills. I went first.

    For those who aren’t familiar with that area, the AXS machine is in the lift lobby of the basement.

    There was this little boy running around and he was hammering on things and creating a ruckus which was already annoying enough. Just when I was about to key in my account number, he came around and poked at my keyboard. I was furious and held his hand and shoved him away. Not exactly very harsh, but not gentle either (because I was already annoyed).

    I was done with my payment and my colleagues went next. Same thing happened and my colleagued shoved the kid aside.

    I was really angry and I said loudly, “whose kid is this har?” No response.

    All these while there’s a couple waiting for the lift, with a pram and a sleeping baby.

    Then when the lift came, the father turned around and said, “come boy, let’s go!”

    I was like, ?!!!

    So the kid was running around, poking at others using the AXS machine and behing shoved away, they just didn’t freaking care. Even when somebody exclaimed whose kid was that, they didn’t care?

    I was very angry and told the parents straight in the face as they entered the lift that they “better learn to take care of (their) kid”, in full view of all the lift passengers but they didn’t seem like they cared.

    So really, the problem we’re seeing now is contributed by the poor upbringing of these kids. It’s a social problem and unfortunately cannot be solved unless we start looking at how we handle our kids.