In-laws & out-laws » Hip to be Mom

all set for the Tiger

Posted by clairity Comments Off

Feb 062010

Okay, so Chinese New Year is just around the corner and it coincides with Valentine’s Day this year. This time every year, we’d be trying to catch every lion dance performance in town. But not this year! Seems my teens have finally outgrown the obsessive lion chasing though we’ll still be picking a few spectacular ones to watch.

As usual, we won’t be traveling out of town like most folks. We prefer to avoid the rush and just visit some friends and relatives here in town. Now if we were going on vacation in Orlando, that would be a different story.

I’ll be cooking a simple reunion dinner at home on New Year’s Eve. Customarily daughters having been married out of the family are not welcome to have the reunion dinner with their side of the family because it’s believed that it’ll impoverish the family. Hahaha, I call it poppycock and fiddlesticks!!

They could, of course, ignore the superstition but my Dad celebrates it with his ‘new’ family and I’m technically an ‘orphan’ who never gets invited so… That leaves Hip2bDad’s side of the family where we’re customarily supposed to be having the reunion dinner with. But since his Dad also celebrates with his ‘new’ family, us ‘orphans’ decided to heck with all this nonsense and just have our own reunion .

On the first day of Chinese New Year, we observe a vegetarian diet. On the second day, I’ll be cooking the first meal of the year. As usual, we’ll be avoiding Chinese restaurants like the plague for the 14 days of CNY, away from the crowd and having to pay through our noses.

And that’s about it. Got a whole stash of festive cookies, mandarin oranges, drinks and flowers for the altar. Not much left to do except finalize my two menus. We don’t traditionally decorate the house with festive symbols, plants or lanterns. The kids have some new clothes which we bought over the Christmas holidays. Hip2bDad and I don’t bother with new clothes. No trips to the salon for any of us either, yay!

And we’re set for a whole week off school, that’s all we care about . Call us boring, call us weird but we’ve always done our own thang much to the horror of our extended families. We’re not your typical family. So the way we celebrate Chinese New Year shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone !!

over tea and red envelopes

Posted by clairity Comments Off

Dec 272009

I skipped my cousin’s wedding dinner last night. I was at the lunch reception though when he brought his bride home for the tea ceremony. Needless to say, all of our relatives were there (except for the ones who decided to boycott the event for reasons best known to themselves ).

If you ask me, the holiday season is the worst time to be meeting up with hordes of family and relatives if you don’t want to stress yourself out. But if I hadn’t gone, I swear I would never hear the end of it either. So!

At the tea ceremony, the newly-weds offer tea to the elders as a form of respect and for the elders to acknowledge the new family member. Well, I was hoping we (that’s me and Hip2bDad) wouldn’t be called up to receive the tea because I really wasn’t in the mood for this. I was there purely out of obligation, that’s all. But you guessed it, we got called up!

It’s customary to give the newly-weds an angpow (red envelope) each as a gift for their tea offering. My kids later told me one of the bridesmaids had been assigned to note down the name of each giver on the red envelope. That, I presume, was to open the envelopes later and see how much money each contained. They apparently did the same thing at dinner last night where it’s customary to give another red envelope as the dinner gift. Only Steev and Hip2bDad went as we were issued only 2 invites. I stayed home with the girls.

Weeks before we even got the invites, I offered to help my uncle and aunt with the wedding arrangements. I even offered to help cook for the lunch reception but was told they’d be hiring caterers. Anyhow, I’m still puzzled as to why my kids were excluded from the wedding dinner. Surely it can’t be because someone figured our gift wouldn’t be big enough to cover the cost of the posh dinner at the JW Marriott for our family of 5. After all, this is the uncle who recently helped his son (the groom) buy a million-dollar home.

It’s interesting though that when I got married, this uncle and his siblings came with their 11 kids to our wedding dinner. Of course, our hotel was nowhere as posh as the new downtown Marriott! And the gifts my dear uncles and aunts collectively gave us? Five items of re-gifted and outdated electrical appliances they had received at their weddings ten years before!

lazy day randomness

Posted by clairity 2 Responses »

Dec 222009

Back from our beach vacation and minus the usual taxi runs, these are lo-oong lazy days we’re enjoying. Waking up late. Simple lunches at home.

Me: Go to sleep, it’s very late!

Kids: Still early, Mom, we’re cultivating eyebags!

Well, I set my alarm clock last night, and Raine and I finally dragged ourselves up early enough to hit the gym which we missed for an entire week while we were away. Great to get those lazy bones moving again!

Steev, my 18-year-old who’s working part-time on a software project, came home after a half day’s work saying the office was practically deserted. Everyone’s on leave this time of year. So no work got done. Instead he snuck out for morning tea with a family friend who was in the area to meet up with some business plan writers.

I’ve pretty much decided I won’t be attending my cousin’s wedding dinner reception at the JW Marriott. We’ve been allocated only 2 seats and told point-blank my 3 teens are not invited. Now I’m not being picky, I just think it’s bad manners on their part.

Nyek, that’s my randomness for today. By the way, please go check out our holiday photos of buffet breakfast at the Hard Rock Hotel, Penang and lunch at Strada.

buffet breakfast at Hard Rock Hotel

a pleasant Sunday afternoon nonetheless

Posted by clairity 2 Responses »

Aug 232009

family reunion We had another family gathering over lunch at another cousin’s place, the one who used to help us source for life insurance quotes. SIL and hubby are back from their brief domestic holiday and will be flying home to Australia tomorrow.

Lunch was homecooked, seems to be a new trend with the in-laws these days. Well, at least, the food was much more palatable than the lunch at the other cousin’s two weeks ago. This time, my kids managed to polish off a full lunch in spite of what we’d eaten before we left -�noodles and nachos with guacamole.

Before we go to any meal invitation, I always make sure I feed the kids first. While we always make it a point to respect other people’s time by arriving early/on time, it’s not a common practice here where guests rarely ever arrive on time and there’s no telling what time dinner will be served.

Also if the kids are fed, they’re less likely to make a dash for the food. Nothing’s more embarrassing than seeing my kids make a rush for the food as if they’re so deprived they’ve never seen good food before! I teach the kids to stand back and let others rush ahead if it’s a buffet-style dinner. We’re not in a hurry as we’ve already eaten.

But if it’s a sit-down Chinese meal, I encourage them to quickly take a little bit of what they want before everyone else “washes” their chopsticks in the communal dishes, and not go back for seconds no matter how good the food tastes. If they really love the food there, I will take them back another time and we can have a leisurely meal on our own, sans the saliva cocktail.

Oops, looks like I’ve digressed. Lunch today was curried jumbo prawns, fried noodles, deep-fried chicken, cauliflower mix-fry and rojak (fruit salad). Later we had walnut cake over a pot of Chinese tea. I might even say the afternoon with the in-laws was pleasant though watching reruns of the same wedding video 5 times proved a little too much .

bonding in the boonies

Posted by clairity Comments Off

Aug 082009

reunion We drove out to the boonies today. SIL is in town with her hubby and staying with some cousins. It’s a half hour drive which turned into a frustrating 1.5 hours of wrong turns, u-turns, endless phone calls and needless waiting, no thanks to the wonderful directions provided by the cousin.

When all else failed, she decided to drive out and meet us so she could lead us to her house. The strange thing was when she got to where we said we were at, she sat in her car and waited instead of calling us, and we were sitting in our car just across the street waiting for her to call, which she never did. Brilliant!!

We finally arrived at the house way past 1pm and were quickly hustled to lunch by the outlaws. The thing I love about these little family reunions is that me and the kids get to sit there completely mesmerized in a crossfire of alien conversation, nodding like clockwork puppets with a stilted smile pasted on our faces. Have you ever tried it? It’s so liberating .

Today though, none of us was prepared for what we saw on the dining table! There was bamboo shoots fried with bamboo shoots, chives fried with squid, and sea slugs (ew!!) fried with green peppers. OMG, except for the squid and green peppers, these are foods I’ve never cooked before, so my kids were naturally speechless. Where’s the spaghetti and pizza, I’m sure they were silently screaming inside!!

Oh, of course, there was chicken cooked in wine which reminds me too much of confinement food, yuck! and which the kids wouldn’t touch either. Luckily there was a plate of steamed fish, which though overcooked and buried under tons of thick ginger strips, was the only thing that looked vaguely familiar.

All in all, our day with the outlaws went extremely well and we drove home in silence, each recuperating from the afternoon of intense family bonding . We couldn’t have been more relieved when the scenery on the highway became familiar and we knew we were back in civilization once more. Home sweet home, whew!!

and we’re off… into the Year of the Ox

Posted by clairity 2 Responses »

Jan 262009

Last night, our reunion dinner didn’t quite turn out as I’d planned. We had two older relatives along whom we invited to have dinner with us at the last minute. So all plans to go Western went straight out the window.

Plus the fact that Skye’s fever had just subsided the day before leaving her cough and cold behind. Her appetite was still weak and I don’t want her eating anything too heavy.

So Chinese it was… and we were prepared to drive around in circles since we didn’t have prior reservations. Lucky day, we managed to get a table at the third restaurant we tried. The food was super (see our reunion dinner on my food blog) and we didn’t get ripped off.

Around midnight last night, I got the girls to help me fill my ang pows (red envelopes filled with cash). Raine did all the hard work this time, ang pow packets and cash strewn all over the bedroom floor, while Skye cuddled her pillows in bed and cheered her sister on.

angpows

This morning, dh rushed off to golf while we rushed off to the temple. The first day of Chinese New Year is vegetarian day for us with two simple meals of lor hon chai (a vegetarian mixed vegetable one-dish meal) and vegetarian ham.

vegetarian lunch

I turned down the invitation to meet up with the clan today. I don’t want to stress myself out the first day of the new year. I just want to have a quiet day with my family.