My son has coined a new term, "goggling." This is a result of his inability to remember the word, "gargling." It is his new favorite pastime. "Mommy, did you hear me goggling?"
Megan's fun moment of the day came when she was looking at a book on frogs. On the breeding page, she saw one frog on top of the other and declared, "Look mommy! The mommy is giving the baby a piggy back ride!" Ok, sure.
I believe somewhere out there, someone is getting top secret information out of someone else by forcing them to step on individual pieces of legos barefooted, in the dark, so they don't know when they're coming. If they aren't, they should. It could be a very effective form of torture.
Last week at gymnastics, I overhead two Singaporean women discussing their children's schooling. One of them said, "You know, I've heard about people who teach their children at home!" to which the other replied, "Oh, so bad lah!" and they continued in that vein for a few minutes.
It seems in the last few weeks I have had numerous occasions for people to express their shock and disbelief that I homeschool my children in the form of various questions and statements such as, "You must be really brave!" (no, I'm not) or, "I don't have the patience for that" (neither do I) or "how do you do it?!" A common objection to homeschool seems to be that you're isolating your children from others and denying them socialization so that they will grow up to be academically competent yet socially inept. With my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, let me just tell you what I did this week in homeschool in an attempt to "socialize" my children and avoid such pitfalls:
Monday: I picked on them for what they were wearing
Tuesday: I stole their backpacks and played keep away with them in the middle
Wednesday: I taught them dirty jokes and swear words
Thursday: I picked them last for kickball during recess, with a strong, "Aw, not them!" comment for emphasis
Friday: I ostracized them from me with no given explanation, so that they can go home and wonder all weekend what they did to lose my friendship.
Next week I plan to make up mean nicknames for them - should be easy with that last name. And I'll probably start a rumor about them.
Obviously my point is that not all socialization is good. Don't be mistaken that my childhood was flooded with this kind of painful interaction with my peers, nor do I think that's all that happens in public school, but I have to remind us that just because you put kids together doesn't mean they'll learn what you want them to learn from each other. Who would you rather have your children socializing with - a bunch of equally immature 6 year olds with values completely different than yours, or family members who love and accept them for who they are? My kids are quite blessed to have two other homeschool families in our complex, and several other good homeschooled friends around Singapore. We get together regularly, there are weekly field trips, and even a soccer team (although Ethan didn't enjoy it - we still go play there with the younger siblings). The soccer coach, after a few weeks, commented on how much more well behaved these kids are than others. Interesting . . .
I'm not trying to put down those who put their kids in public school. But I think one important thing I'm learning in homeschool is that we can't parent on auto-pilot. We have to be conscious of the things our children are learning and being exposed to, rather than just assuming that schools, clubs, friends, etc. will take care of it for us. We have to be intentional.
I was just informed by my six year old that he needs a safe, so that he can put his Cub Scout uniform in it. And right there you see the level of fanaticism with which our son has embarked on this new venture in his life.
He had some friends in Cub Scouts last year, which sparked his interest. This is the first year he could join here in Singapore, so we decided to try it, even though neither Erik nor I was in Scouts as a kid, although I did have a summer stint as a Girl Scout day camp counselor. But that's another story.
Ethan was so excited about scouts that when all he had for a uniform was a hat, scarf, sash and socks, he took them on and off repeatedly the first. Now that he has the rest, he's preening in front of the mirror with a silly grin on his face. We attended the first pack meeting last night. Aside from the fact that half the kids were Asian, you could tell yourself you were in the States. I wondered how all the non-Americans felt about pledging allegiance to our flag. Truth be told, I have a hard time saying the pledge of allegiance these days. I remember the pride with which I said it as a child. Now I have mixed feelings about "the republic for which it stands." Don't get me wrong - I'm immensely grateful for having been born an American. I just think a little of the gleen has been rubbed off. Still, saying it with a crowd of young boys who are being trained to believe it 6,000 miles away brought a feeling of unity back to me. Ethan? He's just itching to get some of those patches and pins for his uniform.
Yesterday in home school, we were talking about Genesis. I told the kids that we were going to read about God changing Jacob's name. I asked them if they remembered how God changed Abram's name to Abraham. They did, so I said, "So do you remember what Jacob's new name was?"
Megan said, "Jacobham?"
Good guess.
For those of you who are wondering why there haven't been many pictures on my blog lately (and I know that many of you spend significant portions of your day wondering things about my blog), Erik has been a busy beaver posting them at our website. I don't know how to add to it, but there are some photos from this summer, so take a look. When I figure it out (or rather, when my husband takes the time to sit down and explain it to me) I'll put some new pictures up of my own.
It's that time of year again, when the ghosts of people past creep out of the ground, or wherever they are, and wander the earth hoping to be satiated by their living friends and relatives. Or so I'm told.
The Hungry Ghost Festival is evident in that many businesses and apartment complexes place a large rusted barrel out in front where people can worship. Hoards of little shops sell piles of paper money and effigies for burning purposes. To burn these in honor of your deceased loved ones is to "feed" their hungry ghosts so that they can rest in peace again for another year.
So it's common to see people standing near these barrels of fire, throwing in paper with pictures of money, cars, houses, anything that might allow your dead to live a more comfortable afterlife. What is interesting about seeing this is the complete disengagement with which people will perform this act. I saw a woman yesterday having a conversation with a nearby guard while she absently dropped her piles of thin paper into the fire without looking. If I have ever seen an empty ritual, this is it.
Why are Asians so superstitious? I'm curious to know the origin of this and other rituals. When I went for a haircut on the first working day after the New Year, my hairdresser told me it would have been very bad luck had I cancelled, being her first appointment of the New Year. She had already had two other people cancel that day. She felt certain there would be one more, because "these things always happen in threes." She sincerely believes that her life is directed by this ebb and flow of positive and negative luck.
As for me, I will not be purchasing any paper to burn. I don't believe in luck, or ghosts, for that matter. On this day I'm thankful that my hope is in something I believe to be much more real and life-giving.
Tomorrow Erik and I will have been married for 9 years. When you think about it, even if you know someone for a long time before you get married, you know next to nothing about them when you consider everything that you will encounter about each other. People ask, "How did you know you were supposed to marry Erik?" and I could stammer out a bunch of different reasons, all valid, but in the end I think it amounted to faith that what I knew about him was enough. In fact, when I had known Erik all of about 6 months, a friend of mine, in teasing me about how much I liked him said, "If he asked you to marry him tomorrow, you'd say yes."
"No I wouldn't!" I retorted with feigned surprise, while thinking, "Yeah, I probably would." Because bottom line was, I knew enough.
What did I know? I knew that Erik was a man of God. I knew that his main ambition in life was to serve Him with everything he has. I knew he was someone who would challenge me to go beyond myself, but do it in such an encouraging way that I would really believe I could do it. I knew that I could trust him with my life. I knew that he was wise, intelligent, strong, patient, adventurous, and fun. I didn't know those things nearly to the degree I do know, but I saw enough of them to know I wanted to be with him.
Nine years later I know a lot more. I know that he has such amazing endurance that he can run circles around me, even though I exercise daily and he never did, up until he decided to do a triathlon. I know that he garners respect from his peers for his gentle and approachable demeanor. I know that he loves goofing around with the kids until it's way past their bedtime. I know that he'll fall asleep within two minutes of his head hitting the pillow while I lay awake for another 1/2 hour. I know that he can just get close to a computer and it will stop doing whatever thing has been frustrating you for the past 15 minutes (like he just did now). And a million other big and small, great and not so great things. And I know that in another 9 years, I will have learned even more. There's a comfort in knowing so much about a person, and being known just as well in return.
What hits me sometimes is knowing that God knew all these things about Erik, and He knew how much I would need them even more than I did.
I'm watching, as surreptiously as possible, my daughter running around with a small Chinese rice measure box filled with coins. She is asking imaginary people, "Do you need a coin? Yes?" and then giving them one. She is running around the living room doing this at a more and more frantic rate as her need to also use the bathroom grows. It's amazing to me that if I were to ask her, "Do you need to go potty?" she would insist with vehemence that no, she does not!
A 30 second bathroom break is just too long to fathom taking when such joy as this is possible. Or so it seems.
My brother cyber-tagged me. Somehow it was more fun when we were kids and we played tag in person, but there it is and I must respond, so here goes:
1. One book that changed your life:
The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning
2. One book you've read more than once:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3. One book you'd want on a desert island:
This is such an unfair question, because it presumes there's some book you'll really want to read repeatedly, but if I'm stuck indefinitely on a desert island, isn't anything I read that many times going to become something I hate? In that case, I wouldn't want to choose something I currently like. I think I would choose the complete works of C.S. Lewis because I haven't read most of them.
4. One book that made you laugh:
I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson
5. One book that made you cry:
Most recently, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
6. One book you wish had been written:
My own
7. One book you wish had never been written:
Many, but none that bothers me so much I care to name it
8. One book you're currently reading:
Sacred Marriage, by Gary Thomas
9. One book you've been meaning to read:
Gift from the Sea by Ann Morrow Lindbergh
10. I'm meant at this point to tag 5 people. I tag Liz, Mandy, and whoever else might read my blog and have one of their own.
As a woman reared on good books, I jumped at the prospect of the National Library's Book Sale. Admission was free, and all English books S$2. I envisioned myself loaded with great information books to supplement our homeschool times. I even gave myself a spending limit. I needn't have bothered.
Doors opened at 9:30 on Saturday. I arrived shortly after 10 a.m. to find about 2,000 people in the queue in front of me. I seem to have been working off the erroneous assumption that out of 4,000,000 people, I was the only one with an interest in cheap books. Still deeply entrenched in the American disdain for long queues (though I have resorted to calling them "queue" instead of "line") I told myself that if I wasn't in the door by 10:30, I was ditching.
The queue moved with lightning speed actually, so I was in the door about 15 minutes later. Inside I was handed a large plastic bag and set loose on thousands of bins full of manhandled books. I worked my way down to the English kid's books and found that only about 10-20% remained. It seems the way to approach the book sale is to come early, indiscriminately grab piles of books to claim as your own, then find a spot on the open floor where you can flip through them and decide at your leisure which ones you want. I saw people with 3-4 stacks 2 feets high each of books. Fighting twinges of bitterness, I battled my way into viewing several bins until my tolerance for chaos reached the breaking point. Another queue to have someone count my books (7), and a second wait to pay for them, and I was out of there in about an hour. I saw people with what looked like hundreds of books - what time did they come? I learned that the queue began at 7:30 a.m. That's when you have to ask how truly important is the great deal?
There were just as many people waiting outside as there had been when I arrived. I wanted to scream, "It's not worth it! There's nothing left - turn back!!" Next year maybe I will try to be there early. I'll be sure to bring a good book and a partner to help me nab my own stacks.
I have no idea what my subject line means, aside from the second word being Singapore in Malay. But it must mean something good because it's part of the national anthem. It's in fact the only part of the Singapore national anthem that I can sing, the rest being also in Malay. I have it running through my head right now because yesterday was Singapore National Day. We spent it at our friends, the Wilsons house, in part because they live right next to the stadium where all the festivities were (but mostly just because we really like them).
We were able to simultaneously watch the activities on TV while seeing some of it outside, like the skydivers who flew over and landed inside. And the fireworks. I don't know where the idea of fireworks for holidays originated (probably in China, since that's where they were invented, along with everything else) but my theory for the 4th of July had always been the "rockets red blare, the bombs bursting in air" bit from the national anthem. Maybe that's why Americans do it, but I guess Singaporeans just like the way they look.
Anyway, we ended up having to stay until 10 p.m. because half of Singapore was trying to leave the stadium. That was ok with us - more time with our friends celebrating a holiday that doesn't mean much to us except a day off from work.
Erik's addition: The title means Onward Singapore! Check out photos of our evening.
We interrupt the Brenna family tour of Singapore to bring you "Ethan's emergency room adventure." Yesterday (my birthday, by the way), Ethan started complaining of stomach pain. At first, I thought it was just a ploy to get out of going to soccer practice, because it seemed fine when he was there. Afterwards though, he started complaining again and looking peaked. He refused any dinner (and it was Subway sandwiches - this kid can put away a 6" by himself!) and wanted to go to bed at 7.
At about 10 p.m., Ethan came wimpering out of his bedroom. We took his temperature, and he had a slight fever. Now, this is where my medical upbringing and Erik's collide. My dad worked in a hospital (read "great insurance") when I grew up, so we felt the freedom to treat anything with a trip to the ER. Erik's family was more along the lines of "if the towel can't hold any more blood, maybe it's time to take you in." So Erik was inclined to let Ethan go back to sleep and wait it out, while I was reaching for my keys. I won, so my mom came with me to a close children's hospital emergency room.
We had to wait about an hour to see a doctor. She determined that he was simply quite constipated, which is what we thought (though the fever threw us off, especially as it had risen by the time we got there). So our boy got to experience his first, and hopefully last, enema. It went to work within a minute. Ethan and I were in hysterics in the bathroom because he kept trying to see what was coming out and every time he bent over, the toilet automatically flushed and made him jump about 3 feet.
With a pain free boy, we tried to leave by following some people through a door to the lifts. If we had used our powers of observation, we might have noticed the "staff only" sign on the door. We got to the basement car park and were unable to exit any of the doors. We went up and down several times, looking for alternative exits or signs of life, but found neither. We finally got someone's attention through the original door we entered, and he went in search of a staff. Meanwhile, a nurse came up the elevator. "We're trapped!" we cried to her, and she laughed and let us out. So that was a good way to spend 20 minutes at midnight when we were already beat.
Today we're pushing the fiber on Ethan. He's never had this problem before, but I'll admit we haven't been eating very well since we've been out and about every day with the family. We're just thankful it was nothing serious.
Two days ago my whole family (meaning my parents, my older sister, and younger brother) all made the arduous trip to Singapore to visit us for the first time. Ethan is so excited to have his uncle here that he is bouncing off all the walls. We've set up a special blog for people to follow our adventures. Now that I think about it, we really could have just posted everything here, but this creates a good sense of solidarity and family bonding. You can read about the Brenna adventures here at the blog.
I was at a friend's house today who is a chiropractor by trade, though she isn't practicing right now due to the presence of two small people in her house. I did something screwy to my neck last week, so I asked her if she'd take a look at it. She found a little chiropractic tool and had me lie down on her son's foam interlocking alphabet squares (my chiropractor in the States doesn't have those) where she quickly fixed my problem. As she did this, I mentioned to her that, unlike her, I have no specialized skills like she does. It amazes me that she can touch my neck in various places and determine exactly what's wrong. I have a degree in communication, which means I know how to communicate well, though I don't always practice those skills. My communication abilities rarely wow anyone, to my knowledge. At any rate, they aren't skills others don't naturally possess to some degree. Mine might just be considered more fine tuned.
On the way home I thought, "No, wait, I can develop film! That's my specialized skill!" I used to work in a one hour photo studio developing pictures. I was elated by this thought until I remembered that since then, digital photos have come into being and I am not trained in developing those. Many moons ago, I even knew how to develop film and photos in a dark room, but I think I've forgotten all that by now. I also know how to pantomime, but that's a skill of mine that is generally mocked, rather than praised.
So here I am, feeling fairly unskilled, but that's ok. You don't need to comment on any skills you think I do have. This isn't a cry for validation, just an honest proclamation of myself.
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