I’ve just dropped Steev off at his college prom at a six-star hotel, no less! Yes, isn’t it grand how kids, who haven’t even started making their own money, are dressed to the nines, dining and dancing the night away at an event that cost their parents a freakin’ 100+ bucks per head!?!

At around this time last year, Steev’s secondary (high) school prom was also at a hotel and it cost us another small bomb! Money doesn’t grow on trees, ya know and I wish the schools and colleges would impress that on our very materialistic generation of kids instead of leading the way.

Steev is hardly the party animal and he doesn’t really care if he goes or not. He just gets a big kick out of playing photographer. As for me, I get a big kick out of seeing my son looking all grown up in his father’s tie and dress shoes !

Tonight he let me kiss him on the cheek when we stepped out of the elevator at the hotel ballroom. I was pleasantly surprised when he bent over and offered his cheek. Normally I’d just squeeze his arm so as not to embarrass him in front of his friends.

But hey, tonight’s kiss was nice, it gave me a warm feeling. There’s my son, bigger and taller than me now but still my baby .

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Well, that’s it, my baby is finally done with primary school! We collected her upsr results from school yesterday and I just came back from her school’s prize-giving a short while ago.

Eighty-nine students from her school took the exam and she’s one of the 17 who got straight A’s. We’re so proud of her. You should’ve seen her big old grin when her brother and sister congratulated her, such a baby, goo-chi, goo-chi.

Skye only took one tuition class but she’s very disciplined and does her work without me having to sit on her all the day. I just cook all the good food and make sure she’s well-fed .

We’ll be going out to celebrate (more food, gah!!) and she gets to choose where she wants to eat. My kids don’t get any monetary reward for their achievements. Instead they have to make do with intrinsic rewards.

Our policy, they work for those A’s because they want to do well, for themselves, for their own future, not because they’re going to get paid for them.

So no selling those A’s to us, we ain’t buying. No X amount of money multiplied by the number of A’s they score. Well, maybe just a teeny-weeny gift to make them happy although Daddy tends to get carried away sometimes .

This school term has barely ended, and already tuition teachers are asking me to confirm my kids’ spots in next year’s classes. Yes, they do start early and they’re making a kiasu (scaredy cat) out of me! Seriously !

Unlike many parents, I say blek to tutors with proven A track records because some use the wicked stepmother approach which I’m so against.

A’s are nice and a great bragging point for parents but not when they’re forced out of the poor kid!

Personally I prefer tutors who create an active interest in the subject and take the trouble to explain things through simply and clearly. I’d be crazy to pay someone to kill my child’s interest in learning, won’t I?

My kids have done okay so far with minimal tuition. One or two classes, that’s all. Like I always say, no point cramming their growing years with tuition and more stress after school. If they can manage or if I can help them, there’s no need for tuition. I find kids try harder on their own and when they’re not just wait to be spoonfed.

Our rationale for tuition is based on how the subjects are taught at school, and how confident the kids are about doing well. I use their grades and their feedback to assess their tuition needs.

Come to think of it, I hardly had any tuition in my time and I turned out okay. See? But I know some of you will jump on me and say, yeah but things were different then, it’s so much more competitive now.

True, but at least we got childhood memories to share with our kids and their kids from our rocking chairs. I wonder what our over-scheduled kids these days will remember of their childhoods? Childhood? What childhood?

I don’t blame Steev. Every morning, he catches the college bus to school. It’s a pretty long ride and a pretty long day at college as well.

And the food around the vicinity of college sucks, according to him. It’s expensive and untasty.

Yes, you can definitely tell that he can be really moody sometimes and pours out all his little grievances to me on the way.

Well, he’s at the end of his matriculation program and pretty soon, he’ll have to decide what course he wants to take next year and at what college.

If you ask him, he would surely prefer to sign up for a university online where he can take a course comfortably without even leaving the house and continue to enjoy mom’s cooking as well.

Apparently online universities like Capella are highly popular because they’re fully accredited with lots of courses to choose from. Hmm, maybe I’ll get Steev to take a look at that.

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We had a quiet, kinda low-key week because Raine was busy with her pmr exam. I don’t know how she does it but she wasn’t the least bit flustered or nervous as she flipped through the pages of her book lazily with one hand.

How can you study when you’ve got an MP3 perpetually plugged into your ears? How can you remember anything with that music blasting right into your brain?

I can, is her smug reply, and I don’t blast the music the way kor-kor (older brother) does, Mom. Wokay, I’ll just hands off for now and see how you do in the exams.

Like I said, I’m usually the nervous one during exam time. But I’ve gotten less so with practice. So yeah, we had a low-key week with boring, low-key meals and quiet, humdrum days.

The nights were far from quiet though. Just before bedtime every night this whole week, Raine and Skye ‘force-fed’ me Simple Plan videos and songs till I’m now hopelessly in love with Pierre .

So hip moms, this is now my latest favoritest song, courtesy of my two girls. Love you, Pierre *muaks*

Um, just between you and me, I can’t believe this is all happening during exam week .

I don’t take kindly to people saying that moms who stay at home have nothing better to do than paint their nails or go shopping all day.

To all the friends, ex-colleagues, even family members who think, and sometimes even say it out loud to my face, yes, you guys piss me off.

But I’m too tired to pick a fight today. Instead, I’m going to list out what I did yesterday to give you a taste of what a typical Friday for a mom of 3 teens is like.

Warning: Do not try this at home. This is extremely hazardous to your mental and physical health and may mess up your simple mind.

5:00AM - Alarm clock goes off. My mistake, I clicked the wrong alarm setting on my PDA phone. Try to get back to sleep. Couldn’t. My mind just keeps going through my schedule for the day.

6:00AM - The usual breakfast rush. DH drops off the kids, then comes back to pick up his luggage for a business trip.

7:40AM - Work out at gym for 1.5 hours.

9:15AM - Home to change out of my gym shorts and pick up some stuff to go to the bank. Banks are what I consider hostile zones, gotta cover up. I don’t want the men at the bank to drop dead from heart failure seeing me in my gym shorts.

10:05AM - Wait in line at the bank, only to realize I’m at the wrong branch. OMG, what a waste of time!!

10:40AM - Second in line at the right bank but just how long does it take to withdraw a few measly dollars and update a savings book?

11:15AM - Do some quick shopping at Tesco while waiting to pick up Skye. Tummy growling like crazy since I didn’t have time for my second breakfast after gym.

11:45AM - Wait at Skye’s school, munching muruku to keep from fainting from hunger .

12:10PM - Set Skye to make her own ham sandwiches while I have a quick shower. Been stinky since gym .

12:30PM - Rush out to pick up Raine from school.

12:50PM - Finally get to have my two ham sandwiches and a cup of tea. Then go online to quickly check my emails and read a bit of news.

2:30PM - Rush to pick up Steev from college and then head straight for DH’s office downtown to pick up something. Luckily I packed two curry puffs and a bottle of iced water for Steev because he has irregular lunch times depending on class breaks. Reach home at 4:00PM.

5:00PM - Send Raine to tuition in the pouring rain. By the time I drop her off, it’s storming so badly I decide to wait outside her tutor’s house instead of driving all the way home.

I spend the time crunching almonds in the car and making phone calls home to get Steev and Skye to turn off the modem and to look in the fridge for something to eat if they’re hungry.

8:00PM - Finally we’re home after one whole hour in the massive traffic jams everywhere. I needed to go to the bathroom badly and had been holding my poor bladder till I was going to burst!

I have not prepared dinner. Earlier I’d promised the kids we’d go out for a quick burger for dinner. But by the time I get home, I swear nothing was going to make me go out again. So we end up eating sandwiches again since it was too late to cook!

This has been a long post just as it had been a long day yesterday. But I still say this beats working in some cushy office getting paid to do practically nothing all day except drink coffee, socialize and surf the net in air-conditioned comfort!

Steev does practically all of his college assignments online. Oftentimes, group projects are also done online though I don’t understand how it is possible to have a ‘real’ discussion without meeting up face-to-face. But I’d best keep those doubts to myself lest I be labelled a dinosaur .

After each person in the project team is done, they’ll pass along their portion of the paper to someone to compile. Steev doesn’t like being that person. It’s not that he hates doing the work, his biggest concern is whether his friends’ files are infected.

Apparently there’s a high incidence of viruses being passed backwards and forwards between students working on common files and documents.

I wonder if the college has any data protection solutions since they’re likely to be hit since the students access the college computers so often. I’m pretty sure their IT department would’ve taken care of that. Still Steev is very careful with what he loads into his laptop.

Woo-hoo, Skye is done with her upsr exam. This means my baby is done with primary school. This also officially makes her a teenager going to secondary (high) school next year. Not that she hasn’t already been acting like a teenager under the influence of her older brother and sister .

With the exams over, I can at least go back to cooking some of our favorite fried foods like butterfly wontons and spring rolls. We’ve been avoiding those because of the heatiness.

Instead I’ve been preparing stuff like leen chee tong sui, or lotus seed soup with gingko nuts. Gingko is supposedly brain food but most kids balk at it. Mine won’t eat it unless I threaten them .

So now that the exams are over for Skye, she wants to celebrate her newfound freedom from books. Why do I get the feeling more food is on the agenda ??

Whoa, this must be the quietest weekend in a long while. True, my kids are the quiet type, even when they were little, they never run around the shopping mall or jump on the furniture or scream and fight with each other.

Still, this is a very quiet weekend even by our standards. All my three kids are in exam mode which means everyone is supposed to be doing their own revision with minimum social interaction. I check in on them periodically but for the most part, they’re on their own.

Kids these days are very different from us in our time. I used to get more panicky as the exam date drew near. But these kids, they’re counting down the days, they just can’t wait for the exams to come and be over and done with.

But just between you and me, I’m the most nervous one of all. My two older ones tell me I’m such a worrier and that it’s all going to be a breeze. Yeah, if I can honestly believe that because when I was preparing for my exams during my time, I was nervous as heck!

I overheard Raine talking to her friend on the phone. These days, it’s a big deal when 15-year-olds don’t see each other online on MSN, so they either call or SMS to find out what’s happening.

Funny, I’m never online and no one bothers calling me! I reckon that immediately qualifies me as someone who belongs to the Dinosaur Age ??

At any rate, I could only hear Raine’s side of the conversation. But it sounded like her friend was seriously concerned about why Raine hasn’t been online.

Is your computer conked? Raine said no. Are you grounded? Raine said no. After a few more ‘no’s to her friend’s guesses, Raine finally told her she’s only allowed limited time online.

Actually I’ve imposed a no-surf curfew on my two girls as the government exams are approaching. They have to get my approval and even then, only if there’s an emergency online, bwahaha.

I may sound harsh but I’m not. I’m actually pretty easy-going as far as pushing them to study. I’d love for them to score A’s, of course, but I don’t believe offering money as a reward is the way to go. And my kids know that.

They know they must work hard because they want to succeed, not because of the money I’m offering to pay them. So far, it’s worked out really well.