untitled #26

my kid now:
- hums song's tune (biasanya "bintang kejora") and other self-invented tunes when he's alone playing, or sitting on the carseat while 'enjoying' the scenery... haha kocak liatnya.

- is really improving his ability to be my and adit's "teacher." i read #obsat's twits about @iburobin who is a midwife and introduces this whole 'new' concept about gentle birth, aware parenting, and the likes. the twit goes like this: @HanitaNitnut: Ibu Robin..how can u manage 8 children amazingly, while I'm overwhelmed with only 2? | "simple dear, just remember that they are our teachers." i read this with an awe.... now i can understand (and truthfully, do my best to comprehend) bumy's "challenging" attitude. he is teaching us to be patient. he is teaching us to be terrific parents. he is teaching us about unconditional love.

at times i think those parenting experts surely don't call this phase "challenging two" for no reason. bumy would throw tantrums for little matters, yell at us when he dislikes something, pull my hair and then giggles when i tell him it's wrong (with a galak facial expression). i try my best to keep in mind: he is testing to know our reaction, and he is learning to communicate his needs. i'm certainly not perfect in being such a zen mom, but i do try and try and try . :D

- sometimes kisses me out of the blue, and boy, that makes me jump out with joy :D one night, i teased him with "cium mama dulu dong sebelum bobok," and he immediately kissed my cheek with a loud "muwahh." i thought that was it, but it turns out he was to shower me with kisses. he kissed my face for like nine times and it was "muwah! muwah! muwah!" hereby i tag it as one of those golden moments as a mom, heheh.

- voluntarily sits in his carseat everytime he's in the car. i'm glad i could make adit cooperates on this.

- is still being breastfed *seka peluh* there are nights when i still have to wake up up to 5 times because he demands to be breasfed.

- starts to call bigger kids "teman" instead of "kakak." and now he calls babies with "dedek."

- demands to be read aloud when he finds a book. he would give me the book, sit on my lap, and would not set me free until i finished reading the whole book. this is good, right? considering he's being stuffed with non-stop tv in my mother's house during weekdays.

*a working mother's melancholy on a monday morning*

untitled #20

i look at my boss who just spent her night sleeping at the office for the nth time. i can't help not to wonder when was the last time she sees her children.... it disturbs me to know that i'm dealing with a workaholic on daily basis. and she's a woman. randomly i browsed some info regarding workaholism on the internet, and i found this:

"...He says that the spouses and children of workaholics grow feeling isolated and lonely, because of the vacant relationships caused by their workaholic parents. Children of workaholics, he says, continue to carry those feelings in to their adulthood." from here.

all of a sudden i feel regret and guilt for having brought my work home and ignore bumy when i was busily trying to get my tasks done. God, please give me strength to have balance with these roles You bestow upon me....

our children will be next

"...Only 600 miles to the south, there's a vast city. And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment; instead, he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery, and he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But somehow he didn't know where to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it.
So now his children are sentenced to 10-15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment. For instance, if it's Monday and 7:30 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 8:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 15 minutes. And then you have to look busy again.
And so your day is chopped into pieces, and in each segment of time you adapt to a new set circumstances. No wonder some people go off the rails a bit...

But in the Kalahari, it's always Tuesday, or Thursday if you like, or Sunday. No clocks or calendars tell you to do this or that."

From The Gods Must Be Crazy (1981) :D