Rockin' & Rollin'

we're on a roll

Last Friday, little Jesse turned 3 months old.

The three-month marker is an important milestone in a baby's life. During this time, he is expected to roll over unassisted. Even the Chinese have a little saying for this: "Saam Phook Lok Chor" which is literally, Three Roll Six Sit. That means, in three months a baby rolls over and in six, he sits up. The Chinese have a saying for everything!

So there he is, 3-months old and right on the dot like a good little boy, Jesse rolled over on his own for the first time. All this while, he's been trying but he'd gotten stuck halfway. We usually just give him a nudge to help him on his way. But on Friday, he did it on his own

Mae and I had just come home from work and we laid him down in the middle of the bed. He was wailing his head off since he doesn't quite like lying on his back. He was kicking and screaming and threshing about when suddenly, *plop* - he landed on his belly. Then he stopped crying. And like the silly people that we were, we began cheering and clapping.

Poor kid was dumbfounded. Hahhah! Like Dr. Evil says, "Why must I be surrounded by i-di-ots?"

Just a little roll and what a big deal that turned out to be. It's such a refreshing experience being parents. Everything is a big deal. :)

A Day in Hell

Yesterday, I was practically in hell. Actually, I was in Singapore. Heh! But that's not what I meant. I promise.

I had set my alarm clock to ring at 5am so that I could catch my 8 o'clock flight. But my little Jesse alarm went off at 4am. I got up to help Mae feed him and decided that it was best I didn't go back to sleep.

My return flight was at 5.25pm. By 3pm, my colleague Pinky and I waltzed out of the client's office. We got to the airport and decided to try and catch an earlier flight. As fate would have it, there was a 5.00pm flight on SQ. Great! Or so we thought.

By 5:30pm, we were still in the plane and the damn thing hadn't budged. "Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that we are experiencing some technical difficulty." They ushered out of the plane and told us to proceed to Gate 51 which, incidentally, was like a thousand miles away.

At Gate 51, we had to go through the metal detectors yet again. This time I didn't make it through. "Beeep!" the machine went. "Stretch out your arms, sir," the sullen security instructed as he ran a handheld detector all over me. The damn thing was beeping like a roadrunner on heat. "Remove your shoes." I did.

So there I was, arms outstretched and barefooted and looking every bit the terrorist. My long unkempt hair, dirty-coloured skin and my obsession with black clothing didn't help me one bit."That must be the bastard who planted a bomb in our plane earlier!" There was whispering all around. "Burn him! Burn him!" Heh! And all this while the bloody metal detector kept beeping! *sigh*

"I need to check your belt!" Geez! Was there no end to my misery? What next? Cavity search? Calibrate your instruments for goodness sake!

By the time we took off, it was already 7pm. Hell.

100 Days

One fine night... erm... out of the blue (heh!), Mae tells me, "You know what your mom said before I gave birth?" She had that evil gleam in her eyes. I knew at once that nothing good would come out of this conversation. But as a loving and wonderful husband, I humour my wife. "Okay, what did mom say?"

"She dragged me to a corner and told me that we can't have sex for a hundred days after birth. Hehheheh!"

It was her "Hehheheh!" that grated at my bones. Mae was never all that tactful.

"What? WHY??!?!?" I protested. "Confinement is supposed to be for 100 days," Mae explained how our stupid ancestors had decreed it so.

"I can't believe mom said that to you!" Mae was enjoying this. "She said men cannot control themselves." Then she added her annoying "Hehhehheh!" again!

What's a man to do? Take matters in his own... erm... hand? Hehheh! Sure, I laugh now but in truth, I'm crying inside.

One Flu Over The Cuckoos' Nest

Poor Jesse is having the sniffles. He started coughing a little over the last couple of days and yesterday, his nose was all runny.

Mae goes into a frenzy, "You gotta send him to a doctor!" It wasn't that I refused to. Just that it was 2am and I thought it best to see how Baby was doing in the morning before we made our decision. But there's no talking to Mae when she gets this way. "Okay, okay, I'll take him when the clinic opens," I relented.

We finally manage to see Doc only at noon. Her appointment was all filled in the morning. "He's coming down with a flu," Doc said. "It's probably a virus." Doc prescribed a syrup medication for cough and cold and another one, in case he got a fever. And she gave us a little syringe to administer the medicine.

Last night, we decided to give Baby his medication. However, we caught him at a bad time and he was kicking up quite the fuss. He was crying so much that Mae's heart was breaking right there and then. And I wasn't helping. I had that dead serious face that sort of told Mae, "You asked for this." It's fun toying with guilt.

Anyway, I slowly drew the medicine into the syringe. For effect, just before I pumped its content into Jesse mouth I held the syringe up to my eyes, furrowed my brows, took a deep breath as I examined the drug. I was looking every bit like those CIA torture specialists that we've been watching in our DVD collection of 24. Heh! Nothing like a little TV to fuel the imagination.

Then Mae broke. "NO, NO!!! I don't want this!" She held Baby close to her and pulled him away from me. She must have been close to tears. I went a little too far. I can be a real asswipe. "It's okay, it's okay," I comforted her. "It's not so bad," I assured Mae. By then, I was back to my 'good spouse' mode. "Here, have a taste," I said as dripped a little droplet on the tip of my forefinger. She tasted it and at once determined that it wasn't gonna hurt Baby or make him uncomfortable.

Curious, I took a lick too. Maple syrup!!! Man, they should've had this when I was a kid. Back then, Grandma use to ground up a Panadol, mixed it with a little water and forced it down our throats. Getting sick was hell. Not anymore, apparently. Now we've got maple-syrup-flavoured drugs.

Finger Lickin' Good

Okay, this is one of the weirdest discoveries yet on my journey into parenthood.

Occasionally, Baby sleeps on our bed between Mae and I. While I have always assured Mae that I will never roll over and turn little Jesse into a pancake or catch him in the eye with my stray elbow, at the back of my mind the worry is always there. And so I take all necessary precautions. I sleep lower down the bed. Baby is all the way up there and my eye is at the level of his thigh. I figured in the event that I actually turn over, at the very most my head will just nick his legs. No harm done! :)

One night, the kid somehow managed to make his way towards me. And as you can imagine, he ends up sticking his crotch into my face. And thereupon came an amazing revelation.

His pee-soaked diapers smelt like Kentucky Fried Chicken. I kid you not.

"Honey, Baby's crotch smells like KFC," I tell Mae. "Oh my God, it actually smells good enough to eat!" Serious. Really.

Mae thinks I'm on to my nonsense. "No way! You're just hungry," she dismisses me. And so I pulled her over, for her to see things my way, if you will.

"Damn, you're right. He does smell like KFC!"

And there you have it. Confirmation that baby pee smell like fried chicken. And no, don't anybody try to egg me on to a taste test. Won't happen.

The Ring

suffe-ring?

There. It is done. I couple of weeks back, Mae dragged my ass down to KLCC to get her long awaited Tiffany.

RM 500-ish. I forget the actual price. Some things you just don't want to remember. Five hundred bucks and it isn't even gold. *sheesh* But it was the nicest ring there. The others were just normal. Didn't matter that Paloma Picasso designed them, they still looked like the el-cheapo knock-offs you get in Chinatown. But still, 500 bucks?! *sigh* I don't think I'll ever understand a woman.

It rained that day. From the very moment we got into our car to leave, it poured cats and dogs. It was like an omen. Or maybe that just God saying, "James, you're a lousy pushover pussy-whipped pumpernickel!" Whatever that means.

By the way, if you want a nicer shot of the same ring, head on over to Najah's. With a better camera, perhaps I could have taken a better shot. But who can afford a better camera now? Heh!

Cockroach Flavoured

the backstroke was Siu Keong's favourite event

This here is Baby's water bottle. And right there on the surface of Baby's water is a baby cockroach.

If any of you out there are wondering, yes we're Chinese and we feed our baby water. Apparently, only the Chinese do this. Hehheh. We're hung up about our water. Our grandmothers force-fed our mothers water, and our mothers did the same to us. "Water is good for baby - it'll help him poop!" And so, here we are today continuing this silliness tradition.

Anyway, Baby Jesse hates water. It taste like crap - at least that's what's written on his face whenever we feed him water. In fact, we can hardly get him to take more than 3 ounces on a good day. But not when we spice it up with a little cockroach. Add one tiny little cockroach in your baby's drink and he'll lap it up like a good puppy. Yumm-yumm! Dee-licious!

Okay, I'm kidding. I don't know how the damn insect got in. By the time I found him, Baby had downed a whopping 5 ounces of water. He probably went, "Hmm, water tastes good today. I think I'll have some more."

That was a month ago. I didn't dare blog it in case Mae found out I accidentally fed Baby cockroach. She tends to freak out at these things. Mae is as sanitised as they get. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing like bugs in our food to help us grow better. Back when I was a kid, I ate ants, flies, worms and probably even a gecko or two. And look at me today - tall, dark and handsome. Hah! Okay, I'm just dark but like my dad says, one out of three ain't bad!

Anyway, Jesse's growing up well. Two months old and tough as nails. Just like daddy. So what about cockroaches? Feh! We eat cockroaches for breakfast!

As long as they're not the flying kind. :)

Smile Therapy

no teeth, just personality

Baby Jesse is 2 months and 9 days old. And this is what BabyCenter.com has to say:

"All the diapering, feeding, kissing, and cuddling you've been doing for the last two months will be rewarded now with a real beaming baby smile — and when you see it, you'll know the meaning of pure joy! Her past smiles were probably involuntary or the result of passing gas. These are the true "I'm happy" signs."

Even on my shittiest day (like this long, loooong day), I always have something to look forward to when I get home. Beats any therapy.

A baby is a great thing to have. Everyone should have one at home. :)

Next up: How to Make a Baby in 12 Easy Steps!

Working Class Baby

Just a few months before Baby Jesse came along, we contemplated on how we would manage this new little addition to the family. Would we send him to a babysitter when we went to work? Or would we hire a live-in maid?

It was a pretty tough decision. Would we leave our firstborn to evil babysitter-slavedrivers who operated sweatshops producing cheap Nike knock-offs on child labour? Or would we fare better with psychotic serial killer live-in maid who would murder the family in their sleep and take off with the baby? Ah... decisions, decision!

Finally, Mae decided that she would want to be there at every stage of Baby's development. And since she worked for herself at a job that didn't require her to leave the office, we came to our solution.

So, for two weeks now, Jesse's been going to work with Mommy as her new assistant. We've got a crib (now christened crib-icle) set up at Mae's office along with a small cabinet of his stuff. And everyday he'd put in his daily 8 hours. And although he sleeps on the job a lot, Mommy will never fire him.

On one hand, it's kinda tragic that he's gotta go to work at such an early age. Yet on the other, Mae gets to be with him 24/7! As for me, I get to walk across the street to Mae office and have lunch with my family. And that's as ideal as we can make it. :)