Welcome to the Stupid Neighbourhood

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As parents we all know the pain of putting a baby to sleep only for something that is not within our powers to wake him up again, bawling his eyes out.Unfortunately, I live in such a neighbourhood. It’s a nice location around BU, but God, the neighbours we have are seriously from a nightmare.

Neighbour 1: Shrek Mother who locks out her kid

I have a good mind to report her to the authorities. How she disciplines her youngest son, who is about 4 – 5 years old maybe is by locking him out of the house in the dark. This happens around 11 pm and sometimes midnight. I’m saying locked. And the kid will scream and bang the door, waking the whole freaking neighbourhood. At one time she locked him out of the GATE. As in on the road. She is like Shrek, as in the size and demeanour, and has a smallish husband who probably had lost his manhood decades ago. She keeps her home filthy and I believe is seriously mentally ill. I can only pity the kid growing up in such a crazy household.

Neighbour 2: Cinapek with a Ferrari.

This fat cinapek lives opposite and has a Ferrari, which he starts at around 8 am in the morning, startling the entire radius of 10 km with his car, which sounds like a WWII B2 bomber. It’s noisy and extremely annoying, yet again, startling my kid out of his skin. This Cinapek sometimes starts at about 10 pm as well, when my kid is asleep with the same result. I doubt the Ferrari is his though. In my fantasies, I have dreamt about planting a C4 under that bloody car and detonating it into a billion pieces. Without the fatty of course, since his body parts would stink up the neighbourhood.

Neighbour 3: Stupid lady with dog

I don’t know why people with terrace homes think that they deserve to have an untrained pariah as a dog. This stupid lady’s dog bark at EVERYTHING. Even when I go out to get something from my car. But the worse is when she comes back late or throw the rubbish at 10:30 pm and the dog just go ballistic barking. WTF are you barking at your own owner, you stupid dog?? And yup, you guessed right, baby wakes, parents’ has to do this over and over again.

Neighbour 4: Nincompoop Lorry Driver that comes home at midnight

I don’t have any discrimination against lorry drivers. But this jackass opposite my place owns a lorry that beeps like it’s sounding the trumpet for Armagedon everytime he reverses into his tiny house. He comes home at midnight and everytime he reverses in, it’s like a house alarm going off. He has to reverse very slowly as well, that drags the ridiculous beep, beep, beep noise to alarming length and decibels, waking up the baby. ARGH! I wished the darn lorry will crash into the stupid Ferrari with all my heart!

Fantasies like letting Shrek bite off the dog’s head, and then putting Shrek into the Ferrari, and crashing it headfirst into the beeping Lorry, before detonating it are of course fantasies. As such, we continue to suffer from these imbeciles as they continue to ruin our nights and mornings with their retarded activities. The neighbourhood has truly gone to the dogs.

Fever Time

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Jet is 7 months and to celebrate it, he has decided to have fever.

It started out pretty normal, where he was just heaty. But as the day wore on, in the afternoon, his crankiness went up the scale. I mean, how else could he conveyed that he was hot and feeling highly uncomfortable? I had to take the afternoon off and spent a few hours consoling him until our neightborhood clinic re-opened at six.

His reading was 38.1, which wasn’t in the panic level of 39 for a 7 month old, but still, as rookie parents, we didn’t want to take the risk. He was by now absolutely frustrated and kept crying. The doctor said to have him monitored at home, and if it goes higher, to give some paracetomol and ibufuren. I think that’s what she said.

Any parent know that night time with a sick kid means no sleep, and it was exactly that. We each took turns taking care of him, coaxing him to drink, and sleep. It was his first fever, so we took nothing for granted. We had a thermometer from Omron, which was good, it just took 25 seconds to get the temperature. We had another one that took 60 seconds, which just wasn’t possible for a stressed out child.

This morning, his temperature is back down to 35 – 36. Looks like we passed the test!

Progress in 2013

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So we’ve made it to 2013!

6 months ago, a screaming, reddish guy was yanked out into the world butt first, and now he’s reached proud milestones in his sixth month:

1) Sitting up – He can’t get up on his own yet, but prop him up and he sits without assistance

2) Eating Solids – and he loves eating everything he sees

3) Grabbing everything, and then proceeding to eat it

4) Learning to crawl – He does a Michael Jackson crawl where he goes backwards before screaming in frustration

5) Scream, Scream Scream – This guy can belt it. He’s going to be an opera singer when he grows up.

Looking to see what’s happening in the next six months!

Christmas Reflection

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Christmas Day, and both mom and baby are asleep, and both probably not even aware that Christmas has come, the former almost sleepwalking and the latter obviously unaware of anything except for the new sensation of food entering into his little mouth.

I spent the time watching, for what seemed to be the 10th time, Real Steel. This is quickly becoming my all time favourite. It’s mainly not so much due to the robots fighting robots. That’s not the big deal, because if I wanted robots fighting something, I’d go for the scale of like Pacific Rim.

 

I mean monsters vs robots? Man, that rocks.

Real Steel wasn’t so much of the acting as well, although Hugh Jackman ain’t bad. And of course, you’d think it’s Evangeline Lilly. I mean, seriously. Evangeline. Lilly.

Ok, Evangeline Lilly did really make it a worthwhile movie to watch again and again and again….and again, and just put in infinity times here…but the one great aspect of Real Steel was that at the heart of it, it was a Father and Son story.

And that really gets me. Hugh Jackman and that little kid, Dakota Goyo, seriously has a great chemistry. The scene when Hugh Jackman was going berserk just whacking the big robot, with his shadow robot, Atom, and doing his uppercut, and it cuts to slow motion with the amazing, amazing theme song behind. And the tear running down his son’s face. I mean, hey, that’s hollywood 101 right, but it gets me. I want my kid to grow up looking at me like that. Of course, I’ll probably not be air punching a big robot in an arena filled with thousands of people and watched by an emotional Evangeline Lilly; and I probably won’t have the biceps of Mr Wolverine….but I could be doing something else. The thing is, the way his kid looked at him: man, I want Jet to look at me like that too.

Greatest Father and Son movie ever.

Jet hits 23 weeks!

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Man, it has been a long 23 weeks.

He has entered into a routine now, and so have we, as parents. Take to grandma in the morning, feed at 9am, 1 pm, 5pm, 8pm, 3 -4 am. Each feed is around 150 – 170 ml, which is around 5 – 5 and half oz. He seems to be growing pretty well.

The milestones we passed:

1) We finally took him off the swaddle. Now he sleeps with his arms freed!

2) He found his fingers and loves to suck two at once.

3) We’ve also taken off his mittens so he can taste his fingers better!

4) He laughs a lot. I mean A LOT. I’ve seen babies on youtube laughing more than him, sure, but among his peers, he laughs. Actually, he chortles. He doesn’t go all out with his laughter, he’s like chortles, looks at you, chortles, looks at you….

5) He is a busy body. He can never look at one place for long. He keeps switching sides, looking this way and there. He’s likely a channel surfer.

6) He loves Baby Einstein videos. He gets mesmerised by it, especially the chicken puppet. He laughs, I rewind, he laughs, I rewind…again and again and again

7) He likes to grab. Especially his milk bottle. He takes it and he pours it into his mouth more than he can swallow and ends up choking. He’s a greedy fella like his father.

8) He wants to stand. He thinks sitting is for wimps. But his legs cant take it yet. So we lie him on his tummy, but he flips back to his back and grins.

9) He knows how to amuse himself in the morning for an hour plus before dad and mum groggily wakes up and finds him conversing to his Winnie the Pooh Bolster.

10) He likes Gangnam style video. He would stop crying just to watch that crazy horse dancing guy in funny pants and sunglasses do the Gangnam style.

The Injuries pile up…

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After becoming a father, my game of golf has deteriorated beyond anything that I have experienced before. Both my wrist now has swollen up due to tendon inflamation…partly because I carried my kid wrongly in the first few months, and also due to the repetitive stress disorder on the computer keyboard (which is why I am trying to lay off blogging a bit), but in my line of work, I am spending easily 4 -5 hours on the computer typing proposals, reports, emails, messages etc. Either that or on my iPhone doing the same thing. Now my hands looks like they have elephantitis.

Of course, golf is out of the question until maybe next year. Or until I fix this darn thing. The traditional massage failed, since we’re dealing with tendon here and all those massages do is to make it worse.

A friend of mine recommended ozone treatment. Which is how they pump O3, ozone into your body. My immediate reaction to that is that, “isn’t ozone like poisonous and causes cancer??” it’s one of those alternative medicine, that in 25 years from now, will either be mainstream medical advances or one of those that kill people, like when they used X-ray on your feet back in the 1920s not knowing the hazardous effect on it. Or using ammonia on the teeth to make it clean, only for you to lose all your teeth by the time you hit 30.

So I don’t know if I’m ready to be a medical monkey and jump into this ozone treatment. But looking at the injuries piling up, I might be desperate to try any remedy at the moment.

There and Back Again

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We made our first road trip with Jet over the weekend. Desaru: 820 KM to and fro.

Jet is a pretty good traveller, he slept most of the way there and back, except for a few stops to clean his shit, otherwise, it was pretty good. I even had to make the trip from Horizon Hills to Desaru, literally cutting across Peninsular Malaysia, which took me about 1 hour plus, on the new Senai-Desaru Highway. Mum had a corporate outing, so it was basically me and the kid.

It sounds like fun, but it’s actually not. Because I’m driving. And he’s crying. And he’s sitting on a back facing car seat so I can’t see what’s happening with him. It was a good thing I stopped at a petrol station before hitting the highway to check. He was spitting out a bit and gurgling and I had to spend 15 minutes at the back of my car in a god forsaken petrol station in the middle of nowhere to comfort my kid. After soothing him a little, I put him back in the car seat, and bam, lights out. From there to Desaru, he was fast asleep.

I guess as Dads, we don’t get as much confidence as mum. Face it, we got nothing. We don’t have nipples, we don’t have a nice soothing voice, and we don’t have a chance in heck to soothe our kid at times. All we can do is carry him, say a prayer and hope it works. But when it does work, it’s like we have earned a badge, you know. That says “I handled my kid alone, and drove him 100 km across the country on my own, without Mum”.