Raine and I had a really great brainstorming session last night. Like me, both my girls love to write. I’m glad some of their teachers notice this. Yesterday Raine was asked to submit an article to the school magazine. All afternoon while in the car, she and I were tossing ideas at each other.

Should I write about Twilight, Mom? Everyone’s so crazy about it at school but I think it’s way overrated . Or should I do a book review? How about fashion trends? I sure have a lot to say about, oh, never mind, forget I said that *giggle*.

Come dinner time, she’d finally decided she was going to write about Twilight and we discussed the angle. She showed me the piece later and asked me to proofread it.

Going through a piece together is always a great time for us to bond and discuss the finer points of writing.

I see great potential in my children’s writing. They write very well and I love cheering them on. I was never a cheerleader at school but I swear I’m getting pretty good at it now . Raine was so excited about her piece last night I could almost sense the feverish tingling from across the room. Rah!

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Woot, glad the long weekend is here… finally! Aren’t four-day weeks just the greatest ? On top of that, I’ve had Steev home with me and we’ve been drinking ourselves silly. Yep, he’s just rediscovered his love for green tea while the rest of us, except for Raine, discovered we heart Cameronian tea.

The weather’s been so frickin’ hot even after those pretentious spats of rain which doesn’t even help at all. In the afternoons, we hide in the bedroom with both the air-conditioning and fan going full blast, and sip cooling drinks to ward off the heatiness.

The girls are having some crazy homework to finish this week. One day, Raine’s homework was to copy 5 pages off her book into an exercise book ! Absolute rubbish, I say! What’s the point? What’s she learning from this? Luckily Steev, the kind older brother, volunteered to do her homework blind copying for her while she was busy with the other homework. I normally don’t allow this but in this case I’m justified to say okay.

The past few days, I’ve been a lame duck nursing a pulled muscle on my right side from carrying a bag of rice from my car into my kitchen. The pain twitched on all day and I could only drive short distances. At night, it got so intense I could barely sleep ! Anyhow, I’m better today and I’m just so glad the weekend is here. I can’t wait to get out of the house !

Raine is all worked up about the frog dissection that’s coming up soon. Yesterday she was horrified to see some frogs hopping about in glass jars in the science lab, oblivious to the fact that they’re going to be history soon.

Raine says there’s no way she’s going to play a part in cutting up the poor frogs. It’s just too cruel. In Buddhism, one of the 8 Precepts is to live and let live and to refrain from destroying living creatures. That got drummed into all my kids’ heads from day one.

Some of the kids told the teacher, look, you can’t do this, there’s some poor tadpoles in a pond somewhere waiting for their mommy or daddy to come home! OMG, that sounds so freakin’ sad! (I wonder what frog life insurance rates are like these days, just kiddin’).

Amongst themselves, the girls are planning to ‘accidentally’ let the frogs escape by leaving the jar covers open. I’m not going to bet they’ll be able to pull that off but Raine will certainly be saying a prayer for the frogs when she sees them today. To think I thought compassion is dead to our modern-day kids. Apparently not. It’s definitely there and I’m just so happy to hear it.

It’s Wednesday, middle of the week, two days of school lunches left to cook. Not that I mind. I love cooking for my kids. But I’m just a little off this week so I can’t wait to hang up my apron, quite honestly.

Well, let’s see, what we have so far…

Monday, we had ham toasties, so yummy because we haven’t had them in a while.

Tuesday, that’s yesterday, we had Bratwurst sausages with potato salad. We had them once or twice at a German restaurant which has now closed down. I bought these Bratwursts from my regular deli and they’re great !

Today, we’re having spiral pasta bake. Tomorrow, I’ll probably save myself some trouble and just go grab one of those 5.95 burgers at McD since Steev’ll be home, he doesn’t have classes Thursdays.

And Friday, I haven’t figured it out yet. Probably baked potatoes since I’ve got the bacon and the sour cream and the chives. So yeah!

Looking at the stuff we eat, I’m sure there’s more than a few of my older relatives shaking their heads already. I love it when they give me disapproving looks !

So what do you think? Is this the stuff you’d feed your kids?

Right, now that I’m done with frying 6 eggs, 4 sausages and 12 slices of bacon, heating up a can of Heinz baked beans and making 2 cups of coffee and endless slices of toasts, I guess that means our Sunday breakfast is officially over…

… and I can get down to writing a long overdue post. No excuses, just that someone had part of the internet connection turned off the past 5 days for reasons best known to themselves, so it was virtually impossible to get much done online.

So I dallied at the gym, slipped in a couple of afternoon naps here and there (a rare luxury in the life of an Executive Chauffeur, I tell ya !) and while waiting to pick up my girls at school one day, I saw the familiar face of a mom that I haven’t seen in 7 years. Seeing her again brought back a flood of memories!

Her only child, C went to the same kindy as Skye, and was one of the few kids who, along with Skye, got slapped by the Chinese teacher for going out of line and not being in synch during their dance practice.

When I found out the truth from Skye, I immediately u-turned back to the kindy to confront the teacher who blatantly denied she had slapped the kids. She said the kids were probably just playing and had slapped each other! Yeah, right, what a polished liar!

The next day, I got a call from C’s mother that after the Chinese teacher found out that C had told her mother about the slapping incident, she (the teacher) had twisted C’s ear till it bled. C’s mother sounded alarmed and asked me what she should do.

I couldn’t believe my ears. Honestly! What do you mean what should you do? Go to the kindy now and confront the teacher!! She asked me if I could help confront the teacher for her. I was like, what ??

She’s a very meek woman, quite the opposite of me maybe that’s why I sorta lost my patience with her. She had no guts to even defend her own daughter. Frankly I would’ve helped but I’d just been in there that morning telling the principal off and threatening to pull Skye out of school, which I did!

I couldn’t believe this woman would just sit there and let someone abuse her daughter. Even if she was too afraid to bark at the teacher, at least she should ask why her daughter’s ear was bleeding! Um, it’s okay, she said, she will wait for her hubby to get home! I was like, hell, what are you so afraid of??

I lost respect for her as a mother right there and then. She told me the decision to send her child to Chinese school was not hers, but her in-laws! Maybe I’m so used to making the decisions and calling the shots with regards to my kids it just pisses me off that she can’t even make up her own mind.

Earlier she also told me it was good that her daughter was getting the hang of ‘being beaten’ before she enters Chinese primary school where the beating supposedly gets worse. Can you believe this woman ?!

C now goes to the same secondary school as Skye. I look at C’s mother from where I’m sitting in my car across the road from school. She looks the same. I hope C’s not counting on her mom to defend her any time soon!

I’d say it was. Skye needed a uniform for her Choral Speaking competition… last minute ! I had to rush around trying to loan a uniform from someone, anyone. Thankfully I found a dad with a daughter in F5 who is Skye’s size (tall and thin). I’m baking chicken pies today as a thank-you gift to him for being so kind.

On Wednesday, Skye and her class rode a school bus to another school for the competition. They didn’t win but my baby had quite an adventure when she couldn’t find a seat and was left stumbling for a while as the bus pulled out.

Friday was Sports Day at the girls’ school. Raine spent the morning in the hot sun making fake Starbucks ice-blended coffee for sale. Anyone from Starbucks wants to hire her, she’s already well-trained, very polite and has the sweetest smile !

Saturday, Skye was invited back to her primary school’s prize-giving for her upsr results last year. We all went to cheer for her. The rest of the day was spent at Midvalley. I dropped Steev off to meet his friends and decided to wait for him instead of making 4 trips back and forth to pick him up later.

While waiting, I decided to have my lunch in s-l-o-w motion (since I had so much time to kill), then do my grocery shopping in s-l-o-w motion at Carrefour. Okay, so one minute I’m racing around like a cheetah in heat and the next I’m whiling away my afternoon at the mall like a lazy lioness !

Later I took a walk, in s-l-o-w motion, down the bridge leading to The Gardens. Picked up some avocadoes at Cold Storage! Oh, I also bought Steev’s favorite muruku from the little store at the entrance to the bridge. We arrived home in the evening with my groceries melting in the back of my car !

Sunday, I was off to Tesco bright and early for another round of grocery shopping. Shopping in slow motion on Saturday was hard. I think even my brain went into low gear and I missed a few items I need for this week!

It was raining heavily this morning as the kids were leaving for school. Steev, our macho-macho guy, usually doesn’t care for the hassle of umbrellas if the rain is light.

So happens the only umbrella Hip2bDad had in his car today was a pink one. Steev looked at it in disgust but what choice did he have but to use it to get to class? His classmates cracked up when they saw him.

Steev’s response: “Only real men carry pink umbrellas!!”

The Sunday before school starts is always a rather humdrum day spent at home. I’m nagging the kids to tie up the loose ends of whatever homework or projects are due. It’s worse than making them hunt down a health insurance lead they’re so bent on enjoying their “last few hours of complete freedom from the drudgery of school” (in their own words!).

I did my groceries yesterday. Today, I’m mentally working on next week’s meal menu. As usual, there’s this doom and gloom about having to go to school so I’ll have to think up some nice recess food to cheer them up.

Earlier on, I took them to Carl’s Jr at One Utama and to the bookstore one more time for last-minute stationery. Instead of a burger, I ran across to Sun Moulin and bought myself these ten pastry petits .

See, so pretty, ya? And so yummy. I had a seaweed floss bun, tuna puff, chicken puff, raisin roll, cocoa roll, pineapple roll, 2 blueberry and 2 peach danishes, all in one sitting. Burp ! Now I’m officially in love with the cocoa roll (the darkest piece in the photo), it’s heaven!

But you know me and my super-metabolism. By the time I got home an hour later, I was hungry again and had a bowl of homemade meehoon (rice noodle) in abalone soup. Yep, I’m quite the pig !