Season of change

Year 2009 - year of change.
We've finally got ourselves a landed house :) At last I don't have to climb up the stairs when the lift breaks down for the umpteenth time, and I don't have to go 2-3 rounds to carry the luggage when we travel . The best thing is my poor dogs will not have to be 'fugitives' anymore and will alas be able to roam freely in the garden. Yes, we're gonna have a garden too..yippee. Well a small garden but nevertheless still a garden. Of course I'll also miss the swimming pool which Zaydeen is beginning to enjoy. But it'll be a good change definitely as the current apartment has started to feel too crampy with the growing kid and additional maid. Purchasing the house was easy (not so much on the wallet though), but now comes the biggest headache of renovating it. Because of budget constraint, there are a lot of 'wish to have' that simply has to remain just that - wishes only. And to add to my headache, hubby insisted on getting a Feng Shui master to check out the house and ended up we need to do some not so conventional modification to the house which also cost another bomb. Anyway that's a story for another day.

As for little Zaydeen, she's going to nursery next week!!! She's so excited about it and keep mentioning she wants to go to school though I don't really think she knows what school actually is. I'm just as excited as her actually coz I think she will really love playing with the other kids and learning new thing. But yet I'm also fearful if she'll be alright by herself with strangers. Worried if she'll be taken good care of. Will the other kids bully her. Worried if the caretaker will beat her since she's really naughty at times. Don't even know why I'm so worried since she did go to daycare since she was 2 months. But somehow feel different now. Well, shall just have to pray for God to watch over her.

This is also year of promotion for me. Nothing much to shout about since it's a promotion without a raise! Just means added responsibility and added input required. When I was young I used to be ambitious and had a dream of being some powerful career lady. BUT marriage and motherhood has mellowed me a lot, and honestly nowadays all I really want is a boring mundane 9-5 job with no stress and no challenge and that allows me to go home early to the family.

Next hubby got a new job and his office is just 2 blocks behind my office! Haha talk about close proximity. And now both our office is gonna be really near our new house. Perfect! No more 1 hour jam on the LDP to get home. No more having to pay the exorbitant tols. By the way, why the heck do we need to pay to get caught in a jam? Anyway, hubby's new job means an increase in our family income. Yahoo....one tiny little step towards my dreams of retiring early....YA RIGHT!

And the final change, Sis is getting married! Sis is going to be 40 next year, and we really thought she was gonna be an old maid the rest of her life :-p It wasn't because she lacked choices, but she just didn't have much fate to remain with the guys. So thank God she finally found her perfect man and we don't have to worry about her anymore..hahaha.

So let's hope that the rest of the year will bring more good changes :)

I want to be a stone

I'm back!! Been such a busy busy mummy, and Zaydeen's already 13 months now. Below are some pics of her birthday celebration at her daycare centre with her other little friends.



And this link shows what she does at her daycare - typically being a hiao por :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl1hVGN8zvI

Ok back to adult things. You may be wondering what in the world my blog title means. Well that's actually the conclusion I got from after some religious discussion with some of my colleagues. Being in Malaysia, we are multi-cultural and multi-religion and we supposingly respect each other's religion. Supposingly I said because I guess most religions do think of themselves as the superior religion. Anyway one of my colleague is a guru on Buddhism/Taoism Malaysian style, and I was just commenting that the religion is kind of frightening because there seems to be so many different 'Gods' belonging to that religion. Compared to that, Christianity is just about one God and one destination - heaven. Well it's the same isn't it, argues my colleague MC. Buddhism also has one God .... seems all the different Gods are actually the same God but with different personalities and colors and looks. Some sort like human I guess - we're all just human but we look white and black and yellow. But anyway, MC said Buddhism also has one destination which is Nirvana which is when one has achieved perfection and doesn't need to return to this world to suffer anymore. So for him, Nirvana is like heaven except that one doesn't just go to Heaven when they die, they need to be reborn into different things such as an ant, a dog, a human, an angel (??) until they achieved perfection in life.

So what is the purpose of Nirvana? For Christians we believe that in Heaven everything is perfect and there is love all around and that is all eternal. That is why we wish to go to heaven coz hell is a bloody burning hole. (My personal opinion!!) But Nirvana according to MC is feel-less. You will cease to have any attachment, any feelings and just totally unemotional. If I understood him correctly. SO my question to him was, does tht mean perfection is being a piece of stone? Is that what they want to reach? As a stone one feels nothing, hurt nothing, kills nothing and love nothings. Not so bad actually if you think about it coz then you'll definitely not be suffering at all. Interesting point. But... I think I'll stick to my heaven.

Yes I respect all religions, but I am not ashame to say that my religion is superior to all religions. O please don't send me any bombs or death threats - this is just a personal opinion. I'm sure we are allowed that, aren't we? And for those who don't know, my husband is a Buddhist and he gets to have his prayer table in our house. My dad used to be a buddhist too and my mum followed him. Even though she had loved the Christian teachings very much, but she followed my dad faithfully. Her teory was that she didn't want them to be separated in death. Awwww. I think it's the same for me. So dear husband, I'm waiting for you to become a Christian.. :-p

ACT 19:11 - God did extraordinary miracles through Paul for me.

Btw, my mum did become a Christian finally after the passing of my dad.

As time flies

With a blink of an eye, and it's already been more than a month since my last entry. In that blink of a month we have celebrated mudpie's birthday - well belated coz we were too busy enjoying ourselves in Jerajak. This is a picture of him with his birthday hat and of him enjoying his birthday cake :D


From the tiny little puppy that could fit into my palm, he's now 2 years old and a definately much more matured boy. It's amazing how a different spesies of animal could actually also learn to be attached to a human and he's really grown to be like a son to me. I'm hoping one day he'll be able to play around with Zaydeen and love her just as much as he loves me :)

Zaydeen too been growing up fast in this space of 1 month. From crawling on her tummy she's now able to sit by herself, crawl on all four and now pulling herself up and standing in the cot. O she's definitely growing up fast, which means I am also growing older fast too.

Today I was wondering aloud with my husband about what this world has become and is this really a world where we want our little angel to grow up in. Recently there's been a few cases of little girls kidnapped and some brutally murdered, and it has come to the point that it is even unsafe for little girls to be just standing outside their house! I find that really saddening because our homes have now become like a prison. Would Zaydeen not have the opportunities which I had as a little girl to enjoy her childhood? Would she not have the chance to cycle to the park with her friends? Would she not be able to just hop over to her friend house for a play session without mummy tagging along? My goodness, she won't even be able to enjoy looking for little 'longkang' fish in the little drain outside the house gate. Our children's childhood would now have to revolve around computers and television.

I remembered when I was in primary school, I was usually home alone after school and my friends lived along the same road as me. We would just go to each other's house and our parents did not have to fear we'll be captured by some pervert. There were days we even went to the big drain at the end of the road to sit by the bridge looking for rubbish or fish in the muddy water. In fact, I even walked to school by myself and it took me 15 minutes to get to school but my folks never had to fear that some sicko would try to sexually assault me. Sure occasionally there were those problematic 'flasher' but compared to the perverts of today, those 'flasher' now seems to be pretty harmless.

Much as I hate to become those overly anxious parent, but I think I have no choice in today's world but to ensure such heinous crime doesn't happen to my little angel. What option would I have besides being by her side every minute possible? I could only imagine the pain and suffering the parents of those missing girls go through. I however cannot imagine what kind of human could be so cold hearted to harm a being so young and innoccent. Could it be they are really without soul and compassion? How frightening if that was true.....

Food Holiday

Hmm...been a while since I last blog. Somehow working + baby <> spare time for blogging. Anyway, finally got myself some days off and decided to go for a short holiday with the family. Since I was still apprehensive about getting Zaydeen on a plane, so we decided on somewhere nearby and accessible by car. So off we went to Penang full of anticipation about the glorious food and the sun, sand and sea.

This is Zaydeen all excited about her 1st trip out of KL.

1st stop was a famous seafood town called Bukit Tambun. The restaurant we visited was called Prawn Village which was highly recommended by some blogger, but alas the food was nothing spectacular. We had bamboo chilli prawns, baked crab, bean paste 'juk tan', fried mantis prawn and steamed mantis prawn. Only the steams mantis prawn in egg white and 'juk tan' tasted satisfying while the rest got only a 3 out of 10.

Zaydeen got tired of looking and smelling the food and not getting to have a sample of it.

After lunch, we continued our journey onto Penang Island and Jerejak Island. Everyone and anyone who heard that I was going to stay in Jerejak Island had exclaims "WHY?!!" For those who don't know, Jerejak used to be a prison island of Malaysia and even further back in history it was also a quarantine area for leprosy patients. So I guess that explains why everyone thinks I am a bit cuckoo to have chosen that as my holiday destination. Well..all I can say is...it's a VERY relaxing island (as in there is nothing much to do or eat there) and there's no ghost there!!!! Well at least I was lucky enough not to have met one :S

We got a king-size bed which as you can see Zaydeen absolutely loved it!!!

The rest of the holiday was spent rather stressfully trying to taste all the good food of Penang. And being the peak holiday season, most of the roads were pretty choked with traffic. It didn't help either that me and Aaron were not familiar with Penang road, so I think about 60% of the time was spent trying to understand the map and figuring at exactly which point of the island we were at. In the end we didn't managed to eat all the food that we had wanted to, but I think we kind of lost the mood after trying a few so-called famous ones and went away highly dissapointed with the taste. I think personally my most dissapointed food was the famed Balik Pulau designer durian. Admittedly this is not the durian season but somehow we came across a stall that still had durians growing in their orchard. The durians cost a bomb and it won't have been so bad if it tasted great, but all it tasted like was like bad watery normal durian.

This is Rosy....whiched turned out to be not so rosy afterall.. :(

Luckily Balik Pulau was saved by a great stall selling yummy Assam Laksa served with fresh Nutmeg juice. Ummm..that tasted nice.

Another great sampler from Penang was the Lorong Selamat Char Kuey Teow. Most everyone had advised us not to go to this stall as the stall owner was said to be arrogant and the queue extremely long. Luckily we ignored those advices and gave it a try. The wait was indeed long, and the price was pretty exhorbitant for a plate of fried noodles. Ours cost MYR7.50 per plate for special order of extra prawns. But the prawns were huge and fresh, so we didn't grumble too much. And actually, now it's no longer a stall, but a shop. Guess the owner got rich and decided to set up a shop instead, and in fact she's no longer doing the frying but instead sitting back and just collecting the money ;) And nope she's not some grumpy old lady anymore either but was even friendly enough to pull up a baby chair for Zaydeen when she saw how tired we were carrying her. So guess this taught us to always give someone a chance no matter what others may say about him/her.

And finally the not so great food we had at Gurney Drive. Tasted worse than the ones in KL. Need I explain more?

Merry Christmas and Happy Year 2008 everyone!!!!

My Happy Family

What makes a happy family? And does a happy family really exist in this world. Is there really a family that is always all smiles and happy days, with no arguments and no dissatisfaction? Are the parents always loving and understanding, while the kids obedient and cheerful? If there really exist such a family, then I don't know to congrat them or to laugh at them because one has to have a really simple (nice way of saying pea size brain) mind.



Before you start thinking that maybe this looney girl is having some family crisis, let me assure you that everything is fine at home. I would call my family the normal family. The mummy and daddy slogs through all day at work making the measley amount of money just so the kid can have a good life and just maybe there might be some extra left for mummy & daddy to have a nice getaway. The kid thinks only of herself and what she needs and wants. Give me my milk, give me some attention, clean my bum bum...etc..etc. The dogs on the other hand thinks they are also kids and yelping for attention and to be cleaned. Mummy nags and daddy goes deaf momentarily. If this is not normal then what is normal?



Am I happy? Well definitely not when I am nagging. And why do I nag? Because things are not done my way I guess. Which is interesting - why do men not nag? How do they control their irritation when things are not done their way? And why do I bother to nag everyday when my husband does not seem to be remembering what I am nagging? Actually, I don't know myself...maybe it has just becomes a hobby. I used to wonder why my mother likes to nag so much, but now that I am a mother myself, I think I understand. It's because we are so darn tired trying to make our family a happy family!!!



So back to the question - am I happy despite all my nagging? Umm...I would call it a different type of happiness than before. Happiness now only happens when my daughter is happy and my husband is happy. When I hear them laughing and chuckling then that is happiness. The dogs looking happy would be an added bonus too :)

Does money make me happy? I don't think money makes me happy, but it sure makes me nag less...hahaha... O ya, just an update from my previous post. My fatty boom boom is now all fine. She was recently operated for stones in bladder, and turned out she had about nearly 10 small little stones! In fact it was lucky we discovered the problem before her bladder exploded. Thank God.


That's my happy little Zaydeen :)