Raine’s classmate is working at McDonald’s. If it were any other guy, I’d have said so what? But this is the young man who is sorta Raine’s unofficial ‘brother’ at school as he shares the same last name as us.

He likes to ‘bully’ Raine and the other girls at school, splashing water on them, snatching their food, pulling their hair, stuff like that. And he’s also the one who says I’m one hot mama.

Naturally I was curious. This cheeky 15-year-old, I have to see!! So when Raine suggested we go to McDonald’s to ’stalk’ him and give him a hard time with our order, I happily played along. Hey, I’m a sporting mom .

Turned out he was the guy making the french fries, not the guy at the counter so things didn’t go as we planned. Still we had lunch and spied on him from our corner table.

His seriously over-salted fries aside, he didn’t look like a bully to me at all. Maybe his behavior has to do with his parents being divorced. He lives with his dad and sister, and is pretty much left to his own devices. I can’t imagine how his dad could let him cycle on a major highway to/from school every day.

Not having a mom also means no homecooked food, I guess. Maybe that’s why he likes to pinch the girls’ food. There I go playing shrink again ! The more I looked at him, the more I felt a soft spot for him. Coming from a broken home myself, I can see myself in him.

Anyhow, he finished his shift shortly afterwards and the girls suggested we follow him as he set off at a deadly speed on his bicycle. We spotted him at the traffic lights way ahead of us.

Since I had to turn off to pick up Steev from college, Raine wound down the window and shouted to him while I leaned on the horn. Whee, that was fun! Poor guy probably didn’t have a clue who he was waving back at. We laughed all the way to Steev’s college. That was such fun!!

Today I made two big pans of pasta bake. Yeah, when you have 3 teens, you think B-I-G! Figure we’d bring French Fry Guy a slice over to McDonald’s. But Raine was too shy to give it to him as there was another guy from school working there.

If you liked this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed for more hip parenting posts. Oh and do leave me a comment, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Last weekend’s grocery shopping was so stressful. I really didn’t know what to buy, or rather, what is safe to buy that isn’t tainted with melamine, and which reports to believe. Dang!

So I wandered around like a Food Inspector checking the labels of fresh produce with a fine-toothed comb. Have to be kiasu (chicken, afraid to lose out) when it’s the blind leading the blind, what to do ?

After walking round and round, these are what I got - celery from California, russet potatoes from the US, carrots and baby carrots from Australia, sweet corn and a bag of fresh salad from Cameron Highlands.

I’ve asked my neighbor to stop buying veggies for me from the wet market until further notice. Probably the veggie seller will say their stuff is not from China, either knowingly or unknowingly.

Most times, they’ve also repackaged their stuff into smaller bags so there’s no way to even check the labels. Headache !

You know how when we run into friends we haven’t seen in a while, they always look at our kids and marvel at how much they’ve grown. It’s strange how we never seem to notice how our own kids have grown but it takes someone else to see it.

This morning, as I watched Steev get ready to attend a launch, I was suddenly struck by what a handsome young man he’s grown into. Okay, maybe I’m a little biased here but… wasn’t he that little baby in my arms just yesterday?

Today my 17-year-old is wearing a long-sleeved dark-colored shirt and pants with his spiky hair all gel’d up and looking for all the world like a grown man, and I had to swallow hard and blink back a few tears (of joy).

Steev runs his own business. Today’s the first time he’s been invited to a product launch by a multinational at a five-star hotel. And they said he could bring along a staff member.

That really cracked me and his Dad up! Staff? Since one of us would have to chauffeur our CEO downtown, Dad decided to tag along as his ’staff’! The things we do for our kids!! I guess in many ways, we’re growing up with them.

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 ??

Let me look into my crystal ball. Ah yes, I can see some school holidays coming up… very, very soon. And I can definitely see me doing less driving and cooking and staying home more.

Skye will be preparing for her P6 exams and Raine her F3 exams. They’re all done with the school’s additional classes for the exams, thank goodness. So I don’t have to bring food to them after school any more. That sure is a relief.

Their tuition classes are still on during the school holidays but it’s minimal. Raine goes to tuition for 2 subjects and Skye only 1 subject. I don’t believe in too much tuition. If I can help them or they can handle the subjects on their own, that’s good enough.

The countdown to the exams are on. There’s a flip chart at school reminding the kids how many days to the exams. But the kids these days aren’t like us. They hardly worry about their exams. They’ve been having trial exam after trial exam so they’re already very well prepared (I hope! *bites nails*).

In fact, they can’t wait for the exams to start so they can get it over with sooner. Ya, neither can Mom so she can stop worrying .

My kids want these

But we’ve got these

I really don’t have the time or the inclination for pets. Puppies are cute but they’re a lot of work, and a mom with 3 kids and a ‘taxi’ to run don’t need two more ‘kids’. Honest .

The two beagles in the photo above belong to a friend and were from the same brood. The male puppy went missing more than a month ago and has never been found. His sister is very lonely and has since put on weight. Worry can do that to you .

The fishes are leftovers from Skye’s school project. Skye’s Dad decided the fish deserve a better home than that small square plastic box Mom got them. So he got them a ‘castle’ with piped-in fresh water and an underwater forest to play in. Mom’s just thankful fishes don’t have legs!

Like I say, sometimes you need a weekend to recover from a weekend. Well, this is exactly how I feel right now. But of course, this also means we had one blast of a weekend.

You know how we sometimes try to plan a truly family sort of weekend without someone getting uptight about impending school exams or having to sacrifice being somewhere else. Well, this weekend fell together just like a jigsaw puzzle.

First stop was the food court at Suria. This is one of the few food courts we actually like liked because it’s clean and the food is was pretty good. Well, it’s still clean but the standard of the food has dropped tremendously. Yes, even my camera lost its appetite, so no photos.

The nasi lemak lady was hostile and purposely chose the smallest pieces of chicken and omelette for us. The chicken was probably raised in a gym because it tasted like chewy muscles. DH had mushed up chee cheong fun (flat rice noodles) in curry. Raine had the beef ball noodle soup that had no taste of beef at all while Steev’s pizza was expensive but so small he finished it in a couple of mouthfuls. In fact, I never even saw his pizza. He was done by the time I came back with the nasi lemak.

Next stop, the PC Fair so the girls could buy their headphones. You know what a ridiculous sardine can of a place that is. You can’t see anything except for people’s heads and a few scantily-clad la-la girls shoving brochures in your face. Whoever thought of this grossly ineffective marketing gimmick is completely missing the point. The guys are more interested in getting their hands on the cheapest piece of computer equipment than that poor anorexic girl in the knee-high boots, brother!

After 2 hours in that stuffy place with hardly any air-con, I had developed a throbbing headache so Skye and I called it quits and headed for Suria to find a cool place to sit down.

We grabbed a cup of Kaffeefrosten and 3 bagels at Vienna Bagels. I took some photos of it with my new PDA phone but later discovered I’d had the video function turned on the whole time. Duh! So I have nothing to show for our little bagel escapade either. It sure wasn’t my day for photos.

Raine called home to ask me to pick her up from school as she wasn’t feeling well. When I got there, she was waiting at the school office with a few of her classmates.

As I swept past them into the principal’s office, I greeted them with a simple ‘hi guys’. It’s my standard greeting when I pick up my kids or their friends. And my kids greet me back with ‘heya, sexy mama!’ or ‘wassup, mom’ so I guess we’re even *rofl*.

Anyways while I was in there signing the release form, the girls told Raine, “Your mom is so cool. She says ‘hi guys’. If it were my mom, …” *rolls eyes and shrugs*

Hey, hear that? It’s hip being labeled ‘cool’ by a bunch of 15-year-old’s, okay!! Raine was so proud of me, bwahaha and that’s cool.

I stopped for gas yesterday. A full tank now costs me almost rm120 and it sometimes lasts me less than a week. Mom’s taxi is becoming very costly.

Even with Steev taking the college bus one-way, I still have to pick him up at the end of class every day and his college is like 20km away.

Sometimes I wonder if we should switch him to an online university degree program instead. If nothing else, it will definitely save us a bundle on transportation alone. So I foresee online degrees will gain popularity simply because of this.

But I wouldn’t want Steev to forgo the social aspect of going to college which he won’t get to enjoy if he does his degree online at this stage.

This blog post is based on information provided by Blogitive. For more information, please visit Blogitive.com.

Well, next month is already here and today is Steev’s first morning taking the college bus. Whew, no more carpooling and worrying day after day about him being a car driven by reckless noobs who give no thought to their road safety.

His friend charges the same amount per month as the college bus. We found out that although he says it’s for gas money, Steev is the only one he collects from.

He doesn’t charge his other ‘good’ friends and as far as we know, his parents are still forking out the gas money. This can only mean he’s pocketing the exorbitant sum without his parents’ knowledge. What a crooked kid!

At any rate, enough is enough! I’d rather be paying for peace of mind here. It costs me the same price anyhow. The college bus looks good. It’s air-conditioned. It’s convenient and there’s lots of other kids taking it. So I’m happy .