Baby brain is ...

• driving all the way to work and then having no recollection of the journey
• turning off at the wrong exit on the motorway
• putting leftovers in the microwave to heat up and then forgetting about them until after dinner
• waking up wondering which day of the week it is
• forgetting the name of a road I have known for 20 years
• turning on the fire to start cooking without having first chopped the garlic
• bringing a banana to office but forgetting to eat it and only realising so just before going home
• getting out 4 chopsticks but only 1 soup spoon from the utensils drawer
• forgetting to defrost stuff for dinner
• keeping everything into the fridge but forgetting the mayonnaise until next morning
  

Long overdue change to driving test

When I was learning to drive, nearly a decade ago (man, don't I sound old!), I reached this conclusion: the aim of driving schools is not to teach you to drive - rather, it is to teach you to pass the driving test. And today's news article just proves my point!

No more poles when parking

With rookie drivers confessing their inability to park straight out of driving school, the Traffic Police are moving to make tests more realistic: Poles will no longer be used. This applies to those taking the Class 3 and 4 practical tests from March.

Driving instructor Heng Ngu Ang said many learners who pass the current test "cannot park outside" - some even return for lessons on how to park without the poles.

They teach you to park with poles, but in real life situation, there are no poles! And I remember when I was learning to park, the instructor told me to turn the wheel and reverse until I could visually line up the black rubber strip on the rear windscreen with the top of the pole, then turn the wheel the other way and reverse more until the left side mirror lined up with the left front pole. Or something like that.

"This only works for Honda Civic, right?" I asked, puzzled. "What should I do next time, when I am driving my dad's Mitsubishi Spacewagon? It's much bigger than the Civic. And I won't have any poles!"

"Oh, after you pass, you can take your time and practice with your own car," answered the instructor with a blithe wave of his hand.

And there was another incident which made further reinforced my opinion that some instructors really have no idea what they are talking about. There's one rule that says you have to always drive in the leftmost lane, and another that says you have to always turn right from the rightmost lane.

Well, imagine you're coming up a big three lane road, which has three lanes all turning right into another big three lane road, at a big T-junction with traffic lights. The instructor told me to filter all the way from the leftmost lane to the rightmost lane, make the right turn, and then filter all the way back to the leftmost lane (red route).

"Why can't I just turn right from the leftmost lane?" I asked (blue route). Surely this would make more sense, saving two unnecessary bouts of filtering right, then left, across three busy lanes with fast moving cars, and I'd still end up in the leftmost lane when I was done.

"If you turn from the right lane, the centripetal force will be less than if you turn from the left lane," he answered, although he didn't look very confident of his answer. With good reason too, because he was just making it up out of thin air!

But unfortunately for him, I'd just taken my Physics A level exam a few months ago, and I knew that the formula for centripetal force is mass times velocity squared divided by radius of the turning circle, so I knew that he was just trying to bluff his way out, since obviously the turning radius is smaller if you turn from the rightmost lane as opposed to the leftmost lane.

"The centripetal force is inversely proportional to the radius of the turning circle, and turning from the rightmost lane would reduce this radius, thus increasing the force, wouldn't it?" I persisted, unwilling to let him get away with an argument based on such unscientific principles.

He looked startled and rather discomfitted that I'd managed to call his bluff, then in the tone of I-am-the-teacher-don't-question-me, he snapped, "Aiyah, you just drive like this, can pass the test, next time you can drive however you want lah!"

Which led me to conclude that either there wasn't a good reason for this turn-right-from-right-lane rule, or that there was one but he didn't know it. Neither of which induced me to have a very good opinion of the driving education I was getting!

Why are there so many morbid nursery rhymes?

I'm one of those people who grew up reading and hearing lots of nursery rhymes, but when you're a child you sort of just mindlessly parrot the words without thinking about them. Have you ever realised just how many nursery rhymes contain ideas that range from mildly disturbing to horribly morbid?

• Johnny Thin trying to drown the pussy cat
• Goosey Gander throwing an old man down the stairs
• Humpty Dumpty getting smashed up beyond repair
• Jack and Jill rolling down the hill, Jack ending up with a fractured skull
  
• London Bridge falling down - imagine the scenes of carnage
  
• Tommy Tucker having to sing for his supper
• Old Mother Hubbard coming home to find her dog dead
  
• Eating pease porridge which is nine days old - yucks!
  
• Pop goes the weasel - did he explode???
• Rockabye baby - poor baby fell out of a tree!
• Blackbird pecking off the maid's nose
  
• Farmer's wife trying to cut off the tails of the three blind mice
• The murder and funeral of Cock Robin

Since most children probably don't think much about the words, perhaps it doesn't matter, but I wonder how someone could have ever thought, "Gee, I need some content for a new kiddy song, what about the anticipated destruction of London Bridge!"

Build flats over carpark?

HDB cannot build flats only ... on high floors
I've always wondered why HDB doesn't just build car parks from levels 1-4, let's say, and then start building flats from level 5 upwards. Then everyone can have a flat on a high floor (or at least, not on the despised 2nd or 3rd levels), so there will be no more low level flats for people to be "choosy" about. And an added bonus would be that there should now be ample parking space for everyone - no more letters to the ST about how people can't find a lot where they were supposed to have season parking. Even better, your lot would be just under your block, and you wouldn't have to get wet when it rains!

I want them to call me 'mother'

Twins' mother: 'We don't want them back'

The mother of recently separated conjoined Bangladeshi twins does not want custody of the daughters she gave up for adoption and wants them to have new lives in Australia.

"We don't want to get them back because we don't have the ability to take proper care of them," she told the Bangladesh newspaper Daily Shamokal.

"I want them to live in Australia and be educated in Australia and one day when they have become very respected people, I want them to call me 'mother'," she said.

Does this mean that she wants to shift the entire responsibility of raising the girls to some Australian woman, but still expects them to treat her as their mother, even though she hasn't contributed in any way to their care and upbringing?

And what if they don't grow up to be "very respected people"? What if they end up being unemployed and on the dole? In that case, would she not want to claim them as her daughters anymore?

Baby shopping - first steps

We finally took our first steps in baby shopping this weekend. Happened to be at Briscoes, and saw this baby bathtub for half price ($9.99), so we decided to just go ahead and buy it. I thought it might be a little too big, but turns out it fits just nicely onto our sink bench top, neatly solving my problem of wondering where we were going to put it.

Ang mohs like to buy changing tables with a bathtub installed under the changing mat, but I've never seen the sense of that - coz you can just put the changing mat on the cot to change the baby! And my mom used to put the baby bath on a board across the adult bathtub, but that way you have to bend over while holding the baby in the water, which is definitely no fun for your back. This way it's at a perfect height for me, with plenty of counter space to put all the baby bath stuff!


We also bought a baby potty at the same time, because it was also on half-price - $2.49. I mean, come on, $2.49! Even if the baby only can use it till about 1 year old (coz it's quite small and the plastic is kinda flimsy) it's still worth it, right?


And then we decided to get one set of baby clothes, partly for fun, and also partly because Baby City was having 25% store-wide on clothes. (Yes, I know, we are damn cheapskate people lah, everything on sale then buy.) But it's soooooo cute!


White, of course, since we haven't yet confirmed the baby's gender (guesses at the 12th week scan notwithstanding). You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find neutral coloured clothes; nearly everything in the store is either very obviously "boy" or very obviously "girl". This was one of the very few white and cute ones!

Visitors

When you live overseas, it's always nice to have visitors from home! My cousin was here for a couple of weeks, and some church friends happened to be visiting at the same time, so it was a good time of eating (what else, with so many Singaporeans) and chit chatting last Friday.


(Belated post coz I only just received the photos!)

bedtime stories

I'm not sure when exactly babies are able to hear sounds coming from outside the womb, but my father-in-law has instructed that we should read to our baby and play classical music for him to listen to. So yesterday we unearthed from the garage all those boxes of children's books that I've had in cold storage since I got married, upon orders from my mother to keep them for her grandchildren.

Unfortunately, it seems like a great majority are Enid Blyton books - Famous Five, Five Find-Outers, Malory Towers, etc - probably those which my sisters wouldn't let my mother give away when they were old enough to protest about such things. Most of which can't be read until a child is around eight years old. Well, maybe six at the very least, if he's a child prodigy or something. Some are the bigger, heavier books which contain multiple short stories with pictures, which could be read by an adult to a child of perhaps three or four years old. And a mini-kiddy-encyclopedia inherited from my cousins. None for children below the age of three, which means we can't use most of them for the next three to four years at least.

So I did what I should have done when the boxes first arrived - sorted the books into boxes according to age group, by my best guess-timation anyway, and labelled them so that we'll know when they should be opened. But I took out a few of the short story ones and put them in the bookshelf, so we can use them for our prenatal bedtime stories.

FX read to baby the tale of the Three Bears last night, just before we went to sleep. It's quite a strange feeling to go back and read the same books after about twenty years, from an adult's perspective instead of a child's. And you don't realise how much longer it takes to read aloud than in your head, or how tedious it is, until you actually try it! Especially with children's stories, which tend to be rather repetitive in places.

I'm not sure if we'll be able to keep this up, or if we'll lose interest long before the baby's born, but it's quite fun for now, for me at least, to revisit the tales of my childhood!

if you're rich and famous ...

... you get preferential treatment under the law.

Sounds impossible, doesn't it? But unfortunately, it's true. In New Zealand, if you're what they call a "high profile" person, and you commit a crime, you can apply for (and often be granted) permanent name suppression. (NZ Herald: Fame still grounds for suppression)

For example, there was this All Black who beat up his girlfriend, who was pregnant at the time. In any other case, the criminal would have been named and shamed in the national newspaper. But just because this guy was a national rugby player, nobody was allowed to reveal his identity.

Then there was this prominent entertainer who admitted forcing a teenage girl's face into his genitals, but got a permanent name suppression order because the publicity would have a detrimental effect on his career and his record and ticket sales.

The argument is that a famous person would be made to suffer "extreme hardship" if everyone knew about his criminal record. (Gee, maybe he should have thought of that before he went round breaking the law.)

Why should the career of a famous person be protected, but not that of a regular person? Shouldn't everyone, whether a bus driver, a businessman, or a pop singer, expect their career to be adversely affected when they commit a crime? Are famous people more "important" and therefore can be granted exemption from certain rules that govern the rest of the population?

Reminds me of the olden days, when there were different classes in society, and the rich would get off scot free while the poor served out their sentences in the dank misery of a medieval prison ...

the geese are getting fat

We decided that this week is the earliest we can put up our Christmas tree - must do it as early as possible to get the maximum amount of enjoyment out of it! I wanted to put it in the lounge, but there's not enough space, coz our tree is apparently much wider than I remembered. So we have it in a corner of the dining room instead. Haven't put the lights up yet - that will have to wait until we can find/buy the appropriate adapters!

I always feel that Christmas is weird in this country because it's hot and sunny instead of being cold and gray with the sun setting at 4pm. Oh, for the days in London when we could come into a cosy house, gather around the heater and sing Christmas carols!