Mindspace

Pictures from Phuket

Finally got them off the camera and online.

The True Meaning of Christmas

Every month, i pore over Nally's curriculum report sent by the school curious to know what she's learning. This month, i realize that the school's going full steam with educating the child about Christmas.
Yew Chung is a Christian school but not overtly so, so  i am grateful they are stressing the "giving" part of Christmas, but i know they are not going to be telling the Christmas story. As i look through their book list on Santa and Rudolph, i realize i have a small window of getting the "story right" with my kid before she gets swept up with the whole American ideal of Christmas.
It's funny because my sister and i always dreamed of a white Christmas as kids. In blistering Singaporean heat, we spent our younger years trying to recreate the Christmases we read about in our books redesigning the tree every year, Christmas pudding and holly decorations. My sister especially was especially sentimental. My mother did a wonderful job of creating the mood at home. My favorite memory is watching her sing cantatas on a man-made Christmas tree and being a praying shepherd after the service.
Now that we are in America. i suddenly feel an aversion to gifts and Santa and reindeers. The kids are so insulated right now. i have a clean slate.
Aidan has no idea who Santa is. We stood in line for an hour waiting for a horse-ridden sleigh ride because he really wanted to ride the "ma" ( horse ). Nally sat across from Santa and he asked what she wanted for Christmas and i said " Actually, she doesn't know that we get presents for Christmas yet and i'm trying to keep it that way. "
It's like the delicate, precarious task of protecting the kids from sugar and Disney : ) It's only a matter of time.
But this year, as we talk about our favorite Christmas traditions at Preschool Family -- we realized that even as adults, we didn't remember the presents as much as the family traditions unique to each home.
Everything from an orange at the bottom of a stocking, to Hannukah candles to pasta on Christmas morning. Never have i been so aware of the preciousness of rituals.
So this year, while my children still don't know that we get presents at Christmas, our family traditions are:

• A tree their height, where they spent the month making ornaments and decorating it themselves. ( this year, we'll light it on the day papa comes )
• An advent calendar ( from which they had their first taste of chocolate and they are ecstatic ) where we count the days down to Christmas
• The Christmas story read every night till the big day.
• Visiting Bethlehem AD ( a live re-enactment of the Bethlehem scene complete with angels and camels )
• Face-painting the homeless children at church and at the local soup kitchen
• Happy Birthday Jesus party -- where we have a birthday party for baby Jesus complete with cake and presents.
• A Gingerbread house
• Menlo Park Presbyterian Christmas service

November Home-schooling Pictures

Highlights of November Home-schooling
- Phonic CDs in the car
- Finished chapter 7 and 8 of Headsprout reading program
- A new science and math site called Peep and the Big Wide world
- Wedgets
- started getting addicted to Diego!Diego and tree frogs.
- audio books at nap-time
- counting out "is there enough? " for everyone
- measuring things with string and ribbon
- cutting intricate snowflakes
- cookie decorating
- making spatial houses out of marshmallow and toothpicks
- starting Singapore Math 1A
- starting to trace her name in Chinese
- Moon sand
- mapping out our house directionally
- illustrating a chinese poem
-carbon dioxide filled people
-carbon dioxide rising raisins

SAHM

If anyone told me when i had children i would be a stay-at-home mom, i would have extended the already long 7 years i waited before i had my daughter. i was one of those women who liked the idea of children, the symbolic concept of children, the motif of procreation and fertility and the hope of the future but not actual babies.
i loved reading book after book of developmental psychology my mother had on child-rearing. i devoured them in real time as she was using them to raise me. Those were my first lessons on detachment, honing down the out-of-body art of leaving an adolescent crisis while being a teenager, and thinking " i see what you are doing .... you're using Chapter 9 out of Dr. Dobson's The Strong Willed Child ".
i figured i would do the same with parenting; that if things got too much, i would go to the "happy place" in my head and get some perspective.
But i couldn't. Not if you were a stay-at-home mom. You can't really leave. There is no "happy place" to go. There isn't even a place to go to take a day off or get a vacation ( yes they come too on vacation ). i remembered in the early months or even now, daydreaming of this large empty house ( with no furniture or i would start cleaning ) with a single, down-filled pillow in the middle of the room and just laying my head down and sleeping.
i overheard one of my coworkers say when he had a new baby " i really needed a vacation so i came back to work." i wrote my manager at 3 in the morning and said the infant made every flakey engineer i worked with look good.
No, a stay-at-home mom never leaves. There is nowhere to go. There isn't a job that refer to with your spouse with that special important voice " Honey, i need you to do ..... because i need to work". There isn't the stress of a project that makes you feel like you in community with all the other working employees in the world so you can exchange tired glances when you walk across the parking lot to your car.
Mothers never look bad in front of each other. They put make up on for play-dates. They actually dress up when they take their kids out. i think the biggest thing i missed when i stayed home is the community of mothers who were honest enough to really talk about how bad things were somedays. People at work did. We whined together. It made the day go by.
But with moms, it was almost like we were hanging onto such a precarious strand of sanity that if we admitted to another person how hard it was that it would be the last straw on the camel's back to make us snap.
i remember pulling by the side of the road in tears, chiding myself for not being able to "do this". i was intelligent, well-read, well-degreed, relatively competent, apparently well-resumed, why in the heck can't i "do this? " It took a kind soul, a former co-worker at Oracle to take me into her house, give me a cup of tea and gently suggest the unspeakable idea of getting help. Getting as much help as i needed to get through this. This woman whom i had pitted myself against in my "younger days" in bureaucratic office politics was offering me permission for help. i still thank her everyday for it.
So why do i do it? Why don't i, as my husband nonchalantly suggests to me during bad days "just go back to work? " Because i've hated many of the jobs i've worked at and never quit. Because i have sold my time, sleep, energy and mental health for the highest bidder of fortune 500 companies. Because i had endured crazy out-of their mind bosses and still showed up for work day after day getting medals and awards for " maturity beyond my years ". Because the Singaporean in me has trained me to believe me that jobs are not for loving. They are for surviving. That's why you get paid as much as you do.
i'm home because finally for the first time i've got a job that matters. And if i had sold my soul, sleep and sanity for cold hard cash, how much more shouldn't i sell the same soul to 2 human beings who loved me before i'd even proven that to them that i was qualified to be mommy. Because i finally found a CEO who thinks i am irreplaceable, that won't lay me off and is irrefutably invested in my ideas; Because at the end of the day i am as or more exhausted as when i worked for Sun but never once then did i say "i'd wake up and do it this all over again! ".
Trust me, i've tried to go back. i even got full-time help ( which practically costs a house in the US ), i got the household ready, i had the kids sleeping through the night at 10 weeks so that i could have my energy up to put in those hours.
But as i stood in front of 60 hour work weeks, bosses and team members people who wanted all of me and i realized, to my horror, that a lot more has changed on me than that 4-inch scar on my stomach. i am not the sharp-edged, cut-throat negotiator i used to be.
For the first time in my life, i have to value my time. i have to REALLY like my job. Because every hour i am there, i am not with my children. i am not in their life.
For a while i was really angry at the children for putting me in this bind. i was outraged that my husband got to pick up and continue working like nothing has changed while i was "scarred" with this new space they took up in my brain. i was different. Motherhood had changed me.
It's taken me this long to thank them. These little creators whom i one time viewed as my captors day after day; whose lifestyles, sleep schedule, conversation pattern interrupt my stream of thought and life a million times a day. Somedays i still can't believe the selfish audacity of toddlers and preschoolers.
Yet i've learnt to appreciate and thank them for taking me out of the rat-race of work and forcing me to value myself in a way i could never do all by myself. They make me value my wholeness, my sleep, my mental health and my recovery because now their well-being is at stake.
"What makes you happy mommy, what makes you smile ? " my 4 year old has been asking me lately. i shift self-consciously " you know sweetie, mommy doesn't really smile ... smiling is not one of my daily goals " i say racking my brain for a pat answer embarrassed that a child has once again put their finger on something 10 years of therapy failed to do. They are the wisest teachers -- the children.
And that's why i stay home.

Tania Choi is a SAHM who trades her industry skills only for school fees, academic favors, non-profits starts ups and causes she feels passionately about. While she still struggles with being a cost center, she is infinitely happier.

( Submission to the Straits Times Singapore on the Topic of Stay-At-Home-Moms )

5 Year Stanford Reunion

i went to a Stanford reunion yesterday. Usually, i approach this kind of function with the enthusiasm of driving to San Francisco.
But the founder of my program Decker Walker is retiring and i thought i owed it to him for putting together this interdisciplinary program that caught my eye so many years ago.
Enoch said to leave the kids with the babysitter and i said "Why they are all i have to show for these years ". It turned out the 14 year old had a sleep-over so with 2 kids dressed to the nine, we went.
It was eye opening. All of 6 people showed up for my class. i think we were brooding bittersweet memories. i know that i had that twang in my throat that wished my best friend Vincent was there ( he died in the World Trade Center ) 
2001 was a hard year, we were the second year of guinea pigs for the program. i know i was sorely disappointed at what i presumed to come to learn.
But more than that, i saw 5 other peers exactly where i've left them. Some in the same jobs that they started with from graduation, much senior i am sure. But mostly the same. They hadn't gotten married, moved on, moved away or had kids. Nothing.
As i watch my children run around gleefully playing with wood chips in front of Wallenberg hall, i felt like whole lifetimes had passed. i had been so many different people. i've had so many vocations. i had found and lost and found myself so many times -- with writing and recovery and parenting and marriage.
For the first time in 5 years, i really felt i had so much to show for it.

Her Brother's Keeper

This lady in my writing group recounted the most adorable story about her 2 year old standing up for her 7 year old in the face of an over-defensive mom. " Be nice! " she said, her feet apart, she patted her brother on his 3- times-taller head and went on her way.
Today i got to witness it when a little girl hit Aidan on his head with a baseball bat, and my usually,empathy-deprived little Thinker,hugged her brother to her defensively and said "Don't hit my brother!".
I guess turning empathy into a job ( " if you don't defend your little brother nobody else will ! " )worked after all.
So much for outcome-oriented parenting.

My child the Thinker

It's official -- i have a Thinker. i am thumbing through "Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles: Winning for a Lifetime" (Mary Sheedy Kurcinka)
today and she had a really good list that i thought pegged Nally down to a T  -- no pun intended.( i didn't think you could do Myers Briggs that young )
If your child is a thinker she probably

• is an excellent critical thinker who is able to quickly analyze the facts.
• find it easier to explain what happened than how she feels about it.
• needs to know "why" things are done and loves a good debate
• values justice and is alarmed when something is unfair
• hates to feel incompetent and becomes upset if you review her mistakes with her or suggest other strategies.
• does not want to talk about her feelings when she is upset.
• highly values truth and may get into trouble for being too blunt.

It's not surprising i understand her, because i am a thinker. The one that resonates with both of us is our discomfort with feeling incompetent and our need for things to be fair.
The little girl still hates to be "taught" anything --everything from demonstrating how to write her alphabets to strokes in the pool. We never knew she could draw or write, or remember her numbers or lower-cases until she showed us one day -- a drawing perfectly rendered or her sounds totally mastered. It was like a gift to be let in to her knowledge.
It'll be tricky for her to learn in school.
By the same token, it's hard for Enoch to understand the importance of seeming "fair" and consistent with her and of working out the entire universal rules in your head before introducing them, of anticipating every pitfall, every loophole, every way she could turn it against you. Every interaction with you is recorded for posterity and retrieved 3 months later.
Once successfully instituted however, the rule runs itself. She is the first to implement it on herself, on you and on the whole family.

Strategies for Cooperation

Little girl's been testing her limits lately. i am toggling between being this indifferent impatient mother who keeps rolling her eyes and being someone that is trying her darnest to be there for her emotionally. i do notice when i shut her out and refuse to listen to her, she escalates.

Strategies for cooperation with Nally

• One-time request/instruction. Making a request more than once trains your child to wait for you to escalate to comply.
• Present reason for instruction if requested. Do not offer a reason otherwise.
• One-time reminder of consequences for non-compliance in a low-tone, non-emotional voice ( courtesy of Supernanny ) No time-outs without warning.
• Introduce logical consequence in a calm non-emotional manner

Things that don't work with Nally

• Nagging. Badgering almost always ensures her ignoring you.
• "Because i say so". This thinker needs face to obey.
• Any whiff of a power struggle or escalation on your part ( i always trip on this one )
• Letting her get away with no consequences ( sets the precedence for enabling )

Papa memories in the evenings

Tonight i miss my father as i help myself to a bowl of green bean soup. Something about his presence in the evenings was calming.
Even the sound of enoch reading to Nally doesn't do it.
The frogs are eating moths, and i am reminded of him going around the house vacuuming the moths in the larder the way Enoch did today. Except then, they weren't starved enough to eat them then. He would have gotten a big kick out of seeing them with their mouths stuffed full.
Today we ate at Pasta, the last time we did we did with him. Traveling with the kids was so easy with him somehow. i'd forget how much work it was to have two kids out.
All of the aloneness came back today as i managed them at the restaurant.
Precious memories.

High Maintenance Frogs

Our baby frogs are eating us out of our home.
Enoch declared them undernourished which activated just enough maternal guilt in me to spend all the "me time" i had this week (when my child was in camp ) looking for flightless fruit flies.
Apparently they are all sold out. Apparently they are $5 for a one time use, which i told my husband amounts to a $5 can of dog food when we had our yorkshire terrier ( granted the dog's got brand new $12K knees ).
But this is getting ludicrous. Especially since i just spent $18 for flies and crickets and our weekly grocery budget at Safeway for 4 ( not 20 little frogs ) is $30.
But apparently we've starved them enough so they have gotten enough gumption to eat these micro-crickets ( at 8 cents a piece ) twice their size. Apparently they seem to have terrible reflexes and display much difficulty catching these disabled fruit flies who can't fly.
They can't seem to multi-task either, ie. swim and catch the flies that fall into the water. It's one or the other.
So Enoch's going around with our bug vacuum catching the flour moths that inhabit our pantry. Apparently if you lower them into the water, get them water logged and then transfer them by hand onto the rocks, the frogs will eat them.
How can anything be more work than the kids?