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About two years ago, before Max was born, we were at a friend’s baby’s first birthday. It was a wonderful poolside party with lots of kids. My wife remarked that almost every kid we met that day had a party trick. One little girl could dance like Mr. Bean. She was absolutely adorable.

Max knows almost no party tricks, but my wife did manage to teach him to clap when he’s happy. We had also taught him to wave earlier, but he rarely does it now that he’s learnt to clap.

Then, about a month ago, he started head-butting furniture wherever he went. That was a very painful week for us. It was like he was trying to teach himself some sort of Shaolin Iron Head Kungfu. I seriously considered getting him a helmet, or at least have him wear a hat throughout the day.

Luckily, as his motor skills developed, he stopped hitting furniture so much, and we could see what he was trying to do. It’s not easy to describe, but he does this forwards and backwards thing with his head and he goes “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.” You can see him doing it on this video. We thought it looked like headbanging, so that’s what we called it.

Last weekend, we were at a full moon party and Max was the only toddler there, so naturally he was showing off his crawling and walking (with support) prowess to everyone. Then the thought came to my mind that he had a new party trick. So I said “Max, headbanging, Max. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.” As always, he obliged.

One friend said, “That’s not headbanging. What have you been teaching him?” and gave me a dirty look. I wasn’t sure what he meant until later he was telling his wife “Max was going like this,” and started thrusting his hips suggestively. I thought he was having us on, but the next time we got the little guy to do the headbanging, I realized how he had to move his hips back and forth to keep his big head in balance, and what the whole movement would look like to some.]]> http://www.bigbigplanet.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080704-175814
My wife came up with this list to help me figure it out. It's a bit too much work for me, but I thought it might be useful to other readers.

EBM - Expressed breast milk
TBF - Total breast feeding

AF - Aunty Flo (Menstruation)
CD - Cycle Date
DC - Day Cycle
DPO - Day past Ovulation
EDD - Estimated Due Date
TTC - Trying To Conceive
O - Ovulation, ovulating
BBT - Body Basal Temperature
OPK - Ovulation P Kit
MS - Morning sickness
BD - Baby Dance (Make Love)
PCOS - Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome
MC - Miscarriage
2WW - Two week wait (before testing, not always 2 weeks)
BFN - Big Fat Negative (pregnancy test)
BFP - Big Fat Positive (pregnancy test)
EWCM - (we're not sure yet, so will update later)



Post up if you find we've missed out anything. I'm quite sure there's many more.]]> http://www.bigbigplanet.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080703-223137

Don’t ask me if the baby has said his first word yet. The truth is - I don’t know. He might have. As you can imagine, we’ve been looking forward to the event with great excitement but it’s really not turning out as clear-cut as we had imagined. In our naivette, we always pictured he’d be babbling nonsense one day and then he’d say something crisp and clear and we’d all clap and rejoice and that would be the end of that.

Before the baby was born, a friend was telling us how her three-year-old girl was greeting everyone “Good morning” and “Good night” in Mandarin. It was difficult to believe but when we became parents, I think one of the first sounds our boy made (I don’t remember when, but he couldn’t have been more than six months old) was something like “Aaaaooowww” and we were jumping up and down with joy because the proud-parent babelfish in our ears translated that as “Hello”.

Months went by and, despite great efforts to recreate the conditions of that day, we didn’t manage to get another hello out of the baby, so that has been dismissed as a fluke. Since then, the baby has been making many new sounds and once in awhile, we get all excited because some of these sound like words in one language or another.

Here are a few suspects that spring to mind.

“Papapapapapa.” At first we thought he was calling Papa. Then we realized we never taught him to call me papa. As far as we can tell, it’s just gibberish.

“Weh weh weh weh weh.” Again, another of his first sounds. Doesn’t sound like anything but I thought I’d mention it since he said it very often at one point.

“Oooo. Oooo.” If I remember correctly, he says this when he’s pointing at things. This was still during his repeated-syllable stage but he’s gotten more sophisticated since.

“Ah jeh.” A few times he said this in response to me asking him “Okay?” I’m still not sure if he was responding to me, repeating my words or mocking me. We’re monitoring this one closely.

“Dahd Dih.” My wife is convinced he’s calling me daddy. I won’t say I’m 100% convinced, but I figured there’s no harm in me responding positively to it every time.

“Mahm Mah.” I tried to convince my wife he’s calling for her but she quickly realised he only says this when he’s upset. We now agree this is his way of saying “Help!” or “I’m not happy!”

“Caterpillar.” Okay, not really. I think it was something like “dadumeewa” or “ameneena”, or… you get the idea - correct number of syllables, vowels more or less right but consonants all over the place. We were all on the way home in the car and I was telling my wife I’d read him his favourite book (“The very hungry caterpillar” by Eric Carle but we just call it the caterpillar book) that night, and that’s when he said it. My wife kept going “Caterpillar! Max, caterpillar. Max, say Cat-ter-pil-lar” and surely enough, he said it again.

Since then, that word is mentioned a few dozen times each day in our house but not once by the baby. However, if you understand how new parents behave and appreciate the intricacies involved in forming four syllables with a little toothless mouth, you would not be surprised that my wife has made it official that caterpillar is our baby’s first word. Just don’t argue with her.]]> http://www.bigbigplanet.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080625-030649
My wife woke me up to scratch her foot. After about ten minutes of scratching, I decided to cure the cause of the symptom, so I thought I’d wipe her foot with a towel. I wet one corner of a bath towel. While I was rubbing her foot with it, she kept complaining about how I was doing it wrong and shouldn’t be cleaning her whole foot and only cleaning the itch. Then she moved on to how I was giving her a fungal infection by wetting her foot, so I moved on to dry her foot with the dry part of the towel but she insisted that the towel was wet so we had a big row about whether or not the towel was wet. I know, it was so stupid but that’s what we were fighting about. It’s wet. It’s dry. It’s wet. It’s dry. It feels wet. Come on! It’s dry.

I was screaming. She was using her victimised-Mickey Mouse voice. It wasn’t pretty. She wouldn’t let me dry her foot any further so I could tell her mind was set on being the victim and growing a whole new fungal community on her foot over the next few days to prove her point. Nothing I could do about that. Meanwhile, my screaming had woken up the baby. She fed him from the breast to put him back to sleep. I was afraid he wasn’t getting enough milk, but I can never mention that because she takes it as an insult to her womanhood, a challenge to her abilities as a mother, an affront to the long lineage of breastfeeding women in her family, and a slap-in-the-face to women in general. I just quietly made the baby some milk to feed him with. He’s been rejecting the milk bottle and formula milk recently and at the best of times would only drink it as he’s drifting off to sleep. I warmed the milk up and as I approached to feed him, my wife screamed.

“Don’t wake him up. What’s wrong with you? You’ve done enough damage already.”

In summary, I can't win.

Wasn’t going to actually post this, but then I thought what the heck, it's a good snapshot of my life at the moment. I'll look back and laugh at this, I think.]]> http://www.bigbigplanet.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080611-145110
Sorry for the lack of updates again. I’ve kind of lost track of where this blog was going. Like many blogs, this started out as a place to organise and file away complaints and maybe rationalise and justify the crummier feelings I have. Well, I’ve not run out of complaints just yet, but I did start caring about what people thought.

We just came back from a holiday in NZ, and it was wonderful and beautiful of course. But now I really feel very tired and it’s true what they say – you really do need a good rest after a vacation. I had this whole blog sort of written in my head about that, but it stayed in my head because I decided nobody likes the guy who whines about his vacation.

I thought about leaving out the vacation bit and just focusing about how tired I am but then it seemed hypocritical to expand that kind of effort on the topic, not to mention unmotivated and self-victimising.

I also had something about how we were turning into consumer automatons and how our material possessions were enslaving us. Not very original, I admit, but it really was something I felt passionate about. Then I thought about it a bit further and I could see how, to some folks, it might seem like we were bragging about what we had, or worse, just whining for no good reason.

I thought about writing down some of the dumb things that I’ve been saying or my wife has been saying but then I decided that was more reality than either of us could handle at this point.

Then, I was going to write about how my wife was considering spending more time with the baby and what this meant for us, but then I thought about how somebody from her workplace might read that and interpret it. So that entry went straight to the recycle bin.

I also had a few not very politically-correct things to say about parenthood but then I thought about how people would react and you know I’m really not feeling ready to tackle that ideological behemoth just yet.

So thanks for reading this, but I’ve really got nothing to say at the moment. Sorry. I’ll come up with something soon, hopefully. I’ll either find something to say that is meaningful to everyone or I’ll cut back on the caring and just lash out. I’m not sure which of the two will happen first, but I have a hunch.
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I’ve thought about it and the only situation that warrants the use an analogy to bring home a point is when one has run out of examples and facts. Analogies feed on emotions rather than logic. If you can come up with one quick enough, you will appear spontaneous, funny and clever and win the audience even if your logic is faulty. Often, a person is led to belief that their point has been “proven” by their clever use of analogies – which is another way of saying analogies make idiots think they’re smarter than they really are.

I cannot argue with the entertainment value of analogies, but apart from that, I don’t see them carrying all that much weight – not unless they are very closely related to and carry useful meaning to the topic at hand. But then again, if they were that accurate, I’m not sure if they can still be called analogies.

They are still very much in vogue now, but in a few years time, they will be passé – first in humour and then slowly, in general use. If you don’t believe me, find your favourite comedian now and catch them using an analogy now, and record them. Come back in a couple years and listen to it and see if you don’t say, “Wow. I used to find that funny?”

Trust me, they’re on their way out. You read it here first.
]]> http://www.bigbigplanet.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080310-111909 MalaysiaKini.com and its mirror sites. The traditional media (all the TV stations and many of the newspaper web sites) were several hours behind in their reporting. Utusan was also giving very up-to-date reports that day.

Malaysia Kini made their web site free for one week to give the public a source of independent news so that they could make more informed choices at the election. Today is the last day it is free. Give it a read. If you like it, subscribe to it. Don't be left out of the loop like this poor guy.

My wife is already subscribed, so I can read over her shoulder.]]> http://www.bigbigplanet.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080310-005805
My wife and I stayed up late reading about all the BN's shock defeats across the country on MalaysiaKini.com. I want to say it was a pleasant surprise to finally receive the news at 2.42 am that the BN had finally lost its 2/3 majority but the wait was actually really nerve-racking. Now my faith in the EC and in parliamentary democracy is somewhat restored.

We've had a day to let everything sink in. Everybody I see and meet are still talking about how shocked they are at the way the BN lost. The truth is they still won by a comfortable (simple) majority. Forget about the historical context for a moment and just see the present for what it is. Then you'll realise that the BN is still our ruling coalition - only, with an opposition presence, which is no big deal in a real democracy.

The fact that we have been trusting our ruling party with a big enough majority for them to change the constitution willy nilly for 51 years is actually then the extraodinary part.]]> http://www.bigbigplanet.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080217-182033
All you'll need is a small Philips head screw driver.


The motor compartment is held together from the bottom by three small screws. Remove these.


You can see the motor here but the picture doesn't show the two screws in front of the motor, holding the fan blades/light circuit compartment together. Carefully take the motor out to gain access to these screws and remove them. Be very gentle with the wires as the solder joints are very fragile.


This is what it looks like inside. Two button batteries power the light circuits. One springy thing acts as a switch. When the fan turns, centrifugal forces push the spring outwards to make contact and close the circuit, turning on the lights. These batteries won't last forever, so if you don't want to take the fan apart, you could always wait for them to run out. But since we've already got the fan in pieces, let's move on to the next step.


Grab the whole circuit board and wiggle it loose. The whole thing should come out easily. You can cover the holes where the LEDs poked through with some masking tape if you don't want them to collect dust.


Put everything back together and you're done. Your AA batteries might even last a bit longer now that there is less mass for the motor to turn.]]> http://www.bigbigplanet.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080217-000522

This thing is called an Exer-saucer. Talked my wife out of buying it. It's a pair of pants that keep the baby upright, kind of like a walker, but instead of walking, the baby just learns to spin around and play with the toys around him.


Talked her out of this one too. It's a diaper bag that doubles up as a seat cushion. It seemed only marginally useful, didn't seem to fasten securely to the chair we tested and cost more than a good high chair.


These aren't books, they are your "Infact Development System". How do you keep a straight face saying that to a customer?

The rest of the pictures are quite self-explanatory...






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