Third time round

Today is day 10 postpartum. Idris is a week and 3 days old. 

I read through past posts about Omar & Hamzah and it seems recapitulating the birth experience around day 10 is in order.

So let’s see.

Birth story no.3 is pretty gross but also pretty amazing.

To start with, this pregnancy has been rife with BH contractions. I got them fairly regularly and almost always when I went for a walk. This pregnancy I was also working longer than I did in previous pregnancies. (Ah, the 3 months Malaysian civil service maternity leave I took for granted.) 

Its end of semester, so I was simultaneously hoping to be able to finish classes & exams and hoping to not have to waddle around heavily pregnant anymore. I kept wondering if I might go into labor during a lecture or something. Luckily, when I started feeling more regular contractions, it was on a WFH day. They were slightly different from the BH contractions & around noon I started to time them. By 3.30pm, they were about 3-5 mins apart so I called the obgyns office and they suggested I go in because I have GBS and would need antibiotics. I told Matt & we took a short walk around the block, then Matt went and sent Pan in to daycare/overnight stay. By 4.30pm we were at the hospital and getting triaged.

However it seemed my contractions weren’t strong and I was only 3cm dilated. Instead they were alarmed by my high BP. Doc said she recommends induction 🥲 I was like can’t we just wait for labor to start? She was convinced I wasn’t near active labor yet but she wants the baby delivered because of the BP & I was 39 weeks (6 days shy of due date). She wanted to give pitocin & break my waters. I know I could’ve protested more but at the time it felt pointless.

So they moved me to labor room at 6pm to get started on pitocin. But then! Within a few minutes of taking pictures & checking out the facilities…my water broke. I had never had my water break before and I thought I had accidentally peed. It was interesting, it literally sounded like a quiet balloon bursting and a gush of water came out. Afterwards it just kept trickling which made me realize it wasn’t pee. The contractions got more intense and because my water broke they decided not to give pitocin and started me on antibiotics instead. Huzzah!

About an hour ish later the contractions felt more intense and my mucus plug came out. I think around 8pm I started feeling like I needed to poop badly so I told the midwife and she said they can check my cervix. The doctor that did it said I was 7cm dilated but apparently not ready to push yet. But man each time contractions came I really felt like pooping. So ladies and gentlemen, I actually did 🥲 I cried and asked Matt to help me wipe 🥲 Oh, the indignity.

After that I was like, screw this I  want to poop in the toilet. So the midwife unplugged me and let me go to toilet but then I was scared I might actually push out the baby even though they said I was only 7cm. sure enough I had a contraction on the toilet and the midwife stuck her hand under me and said she felt a head. so pooping on toilet was aborted and I was taken to the bed. Immediately, 6 people came in and I was ready to push. I must’ve progressed from 7cm dilation to 10cm within that last 30mins! I did a first push + a few mini pushes his head came out, second push + a few mini pushes his shoulders came out, and then third push his whole body came out and it was such a relief! 

Plop he came onto my belly and I tried to breastfeed while they clamped the cord & Matt cut it. Im pretty sure I pooped on the bed a bit too but I didn’t care anymore. Alhamdulillah! My baby was on my chest, the intense contractions were gone, I pushed out my placenta, and Matt was there kissing my forehead. The doctor said I didn’t tear and didn’t need stitches. 

And again I feel like, alhamdulillah there were a few things I did/kept up that I think helped. Walked a bunch, at least an hour long 3 times a week  occasionally even hiked even when I was 38 weeks. Drank a cup or raspberry leaf tea everyday starting week 36 (much to Matt’s displeasure but I’m glad I did!) Also did a last minute okra & budu meal when I started feeling contractions #throwbackOmar’sbirthstory. 

And during contractions I just zikir loudly and pronouncedly. It didn’t take the pain away, and boy were the contractions painful, but it helped me ride it through until the pain abated.

Overall, I’m glad for this pregnancy & my birth experience. My first & last one at advanced maternal age insyaAllah.

So, welcome, Idris Aemon McCall, aka Kirby… my youngest born, brother of Omar & Hamzah, son of Matthew. Grandson of Napi & Niti, Michael, Marjorie & Lyke. Nephew of Uncles Zaki & Hafiz, Affah & Namem, and Uncles Ben, Alex & Austin. 

May Allah bless you with good health, happiness, character, humor & kindness, and with brilliance and beauty, as He has blessed your brothers. 

Alhamdulillah for my three baby boys.

Advanced Maternal Age

If the above term sounds insulting then I'm glad that they've abandoned calling a woman pregnant at age >35 years a 'geriatric pregnancy'. I have no strong feelings about one term or the other, although after years of convincing myself that age is only a number and that turning Forty will be Fabulous, being pregnant again as I approach said age does make me realize I took for granted a lot of 'ease' of younger age when I last experienced life as a baby incubator.

To start with, one thing I always hated about being pregnant is the weight gain. The higher the starting weight the higher the end weight will be, and the more weight I need to try to lose. And while I am grateful that my weight fluctuations have been per the course for age, it does mean this time I am about 3kgs heavier before getting knocked up than I was at ages 27.5 and 30 years. Weight gain also feels a lot faster (although I wouldn't be surprised if I cheated when I was monitoring my weight years ago especially using the old analog scale, hehehe), and it is frustrating that I am not eating anymore than I was before getting pregnant. Granted I've only run twice since being pregnant, and have now completely stopped, so there's that.

At 7 months preggers this time, I've already gained 9kg, I definitely feel huge and get out of breath a lot more quickly when I go for walks and there is any incline whatsoever. Back pains, round ligament pain, other pains that shall not be named are either a new experience, came earlier or seem more persistent. This is still preferable though to the first trimester intense nausea, vomiting and fatigue, which I vaguely remember were unpleasant in the first two pregnancies, but felt debilitating for this one. It was a terrible cycle of feeling nauseous when I didn't eat, then eating a bit and feeling nauseous after I ate, and so I just slept it all off. Yes, I managed to sleep on average 12-14 hours a day, and at times even longer. Still alhamdulillah, I managed to fast all but 2 days of Ramadhan. Mostly unconscious but hey.

That said, I am fortunate that this pregnancy feels easier in many ways. For one I'm not trying to finish a PhD like I was when I was pregnant with Omar, or trying to adjust to a new job in a new city with a toddler in tow like when I was pregnant with Hamzah. There's adjustments to a new full-time job that I have to manage, but I get driven to and from work, my husband cooks me food I want to eat, does all the chores, and he gives me back rubs when I mention at all that I'm aching. So alhamdulillah.

There is also less anxiety thinking about labor given I've done it twice and survived. But then I have done it twice, and although I survived, man, I remember how painful and hard both felt. And both were by general standards 'quick & easy' deliveries. 

One thing is for sure, reading back old entries about things I did to prep for labor made me grateful that I have this blog to record key experiences that my own memory seems to have blocked out. (Just ordered my stash of red raspberry leaf tea in preparation for third trimester!) 

I only wish I recorded postpartum recovery and baby caring more. Reading from the internet, things come back to me but only vaguely and everyone experiences post partum slightly differently. I have my pati ikan haruan and my tummy binders and a confinement set on the way, but man those sleep deprived days with a newborn were a blur. I remember once upon a time sleeping only 2 hours at a time to a maximum of maybe 6 hours a day, and that time lasted well until Hamzah stopped breastfeeding around age of 2.5 years. So that is basically 5 years of my life. 

Other thoughts, this time being pregnant at an older age means people I've previously relied on during labor & post-partum are older too. Some people that I think would've loved to meet the baby have left the family and returned to God in the last five years. I already know the pangs of sadness that come every time I realize my dad never got to meet Omar and Hamzah, and they never got to meet him. I can only hope and pray that there's a chance for the people I love who are still around will stick around long enough to meet this baby. 

But if not, I have faith there will be a chance for everyone to meet and reunite again insyaAllah. 

Until then, life (and baby growing) must go on. 

Across the Spider-verse: actually beats expectations!

I really loved the first Miles Morales Spiderman movie (which for some reason I can never accurately the title of). I watched it twice at the cinema, then many more times when it was on Netflix, with the boys. Then I got Matt to watch it and felt validated when he said he was expecting a lot given how I raved and despite a high bar set he thought it was as good as I and others said it would be.

So when they announced the second one was coming, of course it was going to be THE movie to look out for in 2023. But I did temper my expectations. Sequels are a bit like that second date after an amazing first one, you have a feeling it's going to be amazing but what if the first time it was amazing because it was the first time and then the second time would've lost some of that novelty? 

We missed the first five minutes of the movie (which I keep harping on about, I realize now-- maybe because I was just irritated it happened given we were there at least half an hour earlier but for a combination of frantic buying popcorn and finding and re-finding different man/boy spread across a cinema lobby overspilling with humans), so I felt a bit overwhelmed and lost in the beginning. 

Had this creeping feeling of uncertainty, "Is this good? Is this too much? What the hell is going on?" 

But as the movie unfolded the story grew stronger, the old beloved characters became recognizable again, and there were plenty of cool sequences that were entertaining. Omar made a comment that he liked the first movie better because it had better fight sequences, and he said "There was actually only one that was really good when all the spider people were chasing Miles" And I had to agree with him, that there were at least a few memorable fight sequences (the first one where Miles saw Peter Parker get killed, the escape from Alchemax, and of course the whole stretch from when Miles finally could control his powers until the last bit where he tossed King Pin to push the button for him) in the first movie, and the sequences in the second movie bordered on 'too much too long',EXCEPT that spider people chasing Miles scene which was brilliant on multiple levels and arguably surpassed all other earlier sequences.

The funny thing is that while the Spiderman movie is an exceptional superhero action movie, the parts that I always loved in the first one was the heartfelt, father-son and identity/power-within searching moments the movie also managed to artfully inject in a way that could be dangerously contrived if not done well.

And the second one didn't disappoint. 

This time the injection came in the form of Miles's mom's talk with him about how hard it is for a parent to let go of their growing child into the world because they want so much for the child they love to be just as loved and accepted wherever they go. But that's outside of a parent's power. 

The best thing a parent could do I guess is to try and give power to the child to do their best to be loved and accepted. And if there were times when they didn't feel love or accepted by the people around them, they can still love and accept themselves because they know wherever they go, somewhere there are people who love and accept them completely as they are.

Anyhoo, can't wait for March next year! More Spiderman with the boys!

ps: The soundtrack is also just as good! Hamzah and I both have the same favorite song :D

More makeshift cooking: Solok lada!

I got invited to a baby shower potluck and the food theme was nasi kerabu. Seeing as to most of the components of nasi kerabu had been taken by the other ladies in the group, I decided I would try making solok lada.

Solok lada when done right is always a treat. It's one of those sides that really elevate a nasi kerabu, arguably the best rice dish to come from Kelantan (nasi dagang used to be up there, but as I grow older I prefer Terengganu-style nasi dagang), but then is rarely eaten with anything else.

A borrowed picture of someone else's nasi kerabu, iconic Kelantanese blue rice, with solok lada smack in front. Its so common that I never bothered to take pictures of all the amazing nasi kerabu I've eaten. Alas.

My grandma had once taught me how to make good solok lada, and the ingredients are really very simple. Just some mackerel flesh blended with shredded (fresh) coconut meat, shallots, black pepper, garlic and seasoned with salt and pepper-- stuffed into a pepper, incidentally named solok chili (I have tried to Google up a species name, but all I find is that it is a common long green pepper grown in the East Coast i.e. Pattani, Kelantan, Terengganu perhaps), then lightly doused with coconut milk and steamed until everything is soft and cooked. Mmmm so good. The solok chili has a lovely warm heat, so it contrasts nicely with the rich yet delicate blend of coconut and fish, and a good solok lada can just be eaten on its own like a very decadent snack.

Now the issue of trying to make solok lada in the US of A, is finding a suitable replacement for the elusive solok chili. The long hot peppers that I like here are too thin and too green, banana peppers are too yellow and small, so in the end I settled with a bag of green-yellow Italian peppers that were probably twice bigger than the average solok chili and vastly less hot. I had ummed and ahhed over the chili section for awhile, even after a nice fellow grocer try to weigh in on which one I should take, but it was Matt in his wisdom responding to my lament over the description of the Italian peppers as 'sweet and mild' being the biggest thing that misses the brief, "Just make the stuffing hotter then." that settled the decision. 

Then the next challenge was finding fresh coconut flesh. Ah, how Malaysians take for granted the ease of popping by the wet market and buying bags of freshly grated coconut. But in the recesses of my mind is the still vivid memory of living with my grandparents and being the one tasked with sitting on a 'little horse' with a sharp jagged mouth which we use to grate coconut flesh out of coconut halves at home. If 10 year old Kye could do it, surely 30-something Kye could too.

The kukur kelapa, or coconut grater horse. Image also taken from someone else because again, never thought to take pictures of these things before!

Luckily, we found a small pile of whole brown coconuts at the tropical section in Wegman's called 'easy crack' coconuts. It occurred to me while I have certainly grated fresh coconut flesh, I have never opened a coconut myself. It was a mini operation involving a corkscrew, (the blunt end of) a chef's knife, and a husband-- but we managed to open the coconut, and I was able to pry out the flesh from the shell (it turns out the easiest way to do this is to keep hitting the shell with the blunt end of the knife until the flesh is loosened first). Next, I peeled off the brown skin from the white flesh, chopped up the flesh into tiny pieces. Then blitzed them using a food processer until they seemed fine enough. They don't achieve the nice soft wispy texture of grated coconut, but they had to do.

So. Much. Effort.

To replace the mackerel, I used tilapia filets. This was an easy decision. I've become a huge fan of tilapia: they're cheap, they're not fiddly to cook, they have lovely texture, and I have a decent handful of fish rub recipes that work really well. So we always have tilapia on hand now. 

After blitzing and mixing everything, I seasoned with salt and sugar, and to make the stuffing a bit hotter then, I added a couple of dashes of Trinidad scorpion pepper powder courtesy of my lovely MIL (this thing is amazing, just a couple of dashes into ANYTHING and you get a good slow burn). Into the deseeded halved peppers they go, basted with coconut milk, then steamed for 35mins.

Solok lada waiting to be steamed.

I had a test taste and besides the crunchy coconut and the not-hot-at-all pepper, they tasted pretty correct. But THEN I had an inspiration, which is to give them a toasty look on the top, so I broiled the peppers for another 5 minutes. In retrospect, they look nicer but I think just leaving them steamed kept the solok lada more moist. 

And there you have it, monster-sized steamed-broiled sort of solok lada.

                                            

No one complained, and I thought the solok lada tasted decent and went well with everything else. The ladies were impressed I banged out coconut flesh from a whole coconut. Indeed, the pot luck shower featuring nasi kerabu was as much a success as any group of Malaysians in wintry Rochester could hope for. 

Got budu summore under that covered bowl next to the salted egg okay.

Rediscovering the joy of art through watercolor pens

Because I am currently a lady of leisure, I have had more time to do things for sheer pleasure. One of the things I used to do that I stopped doing after awhile is painting. I was never very good, having only ever taken a single art class in high school solely because it seemed like one of the more enjoyable ways to earn an extra A for SPM. I did learn a few lessons that stuck though, such as thinking about where the light source is coming from in a scene, and that perspective is important to give depth. And I learned how to paint trees. Lots of trees. My favorite thing was to do tree trunks. They were never very good, but I really enjoyed the process.

Fast-forward about 15 years later, and I started picking up pastels as another medium that I could lose myself in. I wasn't very good at pastels either, but they're much quicker to do. In about half an hour to an hour tops, I could bang out a complete picture of a penguin, cat, owl, skyline, whathaveyou. Pastel pictures are easy to make but really easy to ruin as well, and the dust gets everywhere. You also can't blend colors the same way you could watercolor. But I never got around to picking up watercolor because I found the process of washing up so irritating. With pastels, when you're done you just blow off the dust and put them away.

Then I found this thing called watercolor pens. I never knew such a thing existed, but apparently they have for awhile! No washing up required! 

Matt bought me a pack from Chromatek that came with a near tutorial pad so that I could learn how to use them. That turned out much more fun and satisfying than I anticipated, and was a good way to get used to watercoloring again. 

From top to bottom: The bird of paradise, pear and jellyfish painting

 that everyone and their cousin who bought a set of Chromatek watercolor pens have in their home. 

Now that I'm done with all of the beginner tutorials I decided to make my own original watercolor painting... the first in over 20 years. 

Can you guess what I painted? 😆

Going down a film review rabbit hole and a brief tribute to Roger Ebert

As I grow older, I've grown even less tolerant of a certain type of film, that is a blockbuster film by sales metrics but quite abysmal as a work of art. Really, I'm talking about the type of franchise that builds on watchers already being sucked into a particular universe, regardless how bad the script and plot is for the movie (s). 

Often I can make a pretty decent prediction from a trailer, perhaps the director's or screenplay writer's reputation (this often works fairly well with one notable exception, Nolan's Tenet which was unwatchable to me) or some knowledge about the plot (something a bit offbeat, smart, uplifting, charming, whimsical or mindbending, and no children being outrightly hurt or killed). 

Nothing beats a recommendation from a trusted source though. I still remember my brother raving about Into the Spiderverse, and thinking wow, he is the most critical person I know-- this movie must actually be good. So off we went to the cinema to watch it, and despite fairly high expectations it was still a great movie. I got Matt to watch it too recently, and he said something similar, that he had high expectations because I and many others were raving about it and he still found it as good if not better than he expected. 

That said, the ravers have to be of a particular caliber as well. Beyond my personal sphere, I've realized Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB and whathaveyou is pretty useless for me to figure out if something is worth watching. But ever since my sister mentioned that she read reviews on Ebert.com to figure out if something is worth watching, I've started doing that too. Sure enough, a lot of the stuff that gets 4 stars on Ebert.com ends up being something I enjoy, and the stuff that a lot of people say is great but gets less than 3 stars on Ebert.com I tend to find less enjoyable. So now if I am not sure whether I want to dedicate 2-3 precious hours on an unknown but intriguing film, I turn to Ebert.com and feel better guided.

But what I've found even more fun to do as of late is to look up reviews of movies I've already watched, to see whether I agreed with Roger Ebert (or any number of the writers on the website) independently.

What I realized, as I went through his list of Great Movies and picked out the ones that I loved the most (Eternal Sunshine, Lost in Translation, The Dark Knight, Departures) and ones that I liked despite the movie not being as popular, is that Roger Ebert is so great at critiquing films because he transcends critical appraisal and uses the movie instead to fully contemplate the nature of being human. In that regard, he is more of a philosopher than critic, more of a writer than a reviewer, and in full someone who seems to possess a great mind and heart. He is able to pick out the key moments in a movie and fully expound on why they are key, what they represent and how they affect him (and likely many others like yours truly). He does so in the most profound and poetic way, and it's clear when he says he's watched something not once, or twice, but often more than three times that he gives due thought to movies that have been made with due thought. In many ways he's a most generous critic, often picking out the charm and gleam even in flawed works. That said, he is unforgiving with movies that don't move beyond the superficial attempts at entertaining and for that I think he is fair.

Driven by this realization, I started reading up the wikipedia article on him and learned so much more that further cemented this overall feeling of "What a swell guy! What an ace human!" 

So here are the nuggets from Wikipedia that made me further adore Roger Ebert:

1) He has a scientific mind.

Ebert was critical of intelligent design, and stated that people who believe in either creationism or New Age beliefs such as crystal healing or astrology are not qualified to be president. Ebert also expressed disbelief in pseudoscientific or supernatural claims in general, calling them "woo-woo," though he has argued that reincarnation is possible from a "scientific, rationalist point of view.

Obviously I believe in God and that God created the world, everything beyond and within, but I don't think its unscientific to believe this. On this note, I appreciated these two other nuggets:

"I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer."

and 

"I refuse to call myself an atheist, however, because that indicates too great a certainty about the unknowable"

2) He's a mama's boy.

At age 50, Ebert married trial attorney Charlie "Chaz" Hammelsmith in 1992. He explained in his memoir, Life Itself, that he did not want to marry before his mother died, as he was afraid of displeasing her. 

A bit of an extreme but the intention seems sweet and ultimately he was happy because..

3) He's a romantic.

In a July 2012 blog entry titled "Roger loves Chaz," Ebert wrote, "She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading."

4) He's very anti-junk mail! 

During a 1996 panel at the University of Colorado Boulder's Conference on World Affairs, Ebert coined the Boulder Pledge, by which he vowed never to purchase anything offered through the result of an unsolicited email message, or to forward chain emails or mass emails to others.

I can't express how much possibly unwarranted bit of rage I feel whenever I get physical bits of junk mail in the postbox... the waste of paper, ink, mailman's effort all to get straight into the trash because I DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS. 

5) He gets it.

"I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out."

Thank you Roger Ebert, for all your words as a film critic, a philosopher and seemingly wonderful human. Rest in peace.

Sudden cravings and makeshift cooking: Salty mango sticky rice & sambal belacan without belacan

Last week after listening to Shaz describe the delicious mango sticky rice she had in Bangkok I suddenly was hit with a desire to eat white rice with tom yum, telur dadar and sambal belacan (which is more Malay-Thai than actual Thai). And for dessert, I wanted mango sticky rice of course.

I told Matt and he suggested looking up Thai restaurants. We settled on one 'King and I' that had tom yum and mango sticky rice on the menu but later I realized it wasn't run by Thais. (It's not a bad place but I just have a biased preference for Thai establishments run by Thais.) 

Luckily, the tom yum was good and hot even if it wasn't per se very Thai tom yum to me. We asked for level 4 spicy, the highest order of spicy which first shocked the waitress but then she proceeded to return to our table a few times with an array of spicy condiments 'just in case'. Sadly, they didn't have the omelet nor sambal nor the mango sticky rice.

Not to be thwarted, my kind husband offered to drive around to various Asian specialty stores to look for ingredients so that we could try and make mango sticky rice and sambal belacan. I couldn't find sambal belacan, and didn't find keffir lime leaves for the tom yum. The glutinous/sweet rice turned out to be the most expensive ingredient-- $10 for a 2lb bag!!, and the only mango available was the Kent variety which from memory was never very sweet.

I tried to follow Azie Kitchen's recipe for mango sticky rice and she had stated to make sure the santan sauce was sufficiently salty to contrast the sweetness of the mango. 

Sadly, the mango was barely sweet. 

So what we had was tart mango with sticky rice bathed in salty coconut milk. Needless to say, twas not a success. 

I managed to still salvage it for my own palate by adding generous amounts of sugar, and then used up the remaining sticky rice to make fried rice which was better received.

Today, because I realized I had a packet of Adabi tom yam paste courtesy of my thoughtful mama, I attempted to make the original thing I craved for. But this is only because I also figured out how to make sambal belacan WITHOUT the belacan. (And no, it wasn't that I just made non-belacan sambal)

Matt tried it and commented it tasted different from the previous sambals I made (i.e. sambal jantan, sambal kicap, sambal tumis), and I was like "I know right! Doesn't it taste funky?!" he agreed with the adjective. Because as anyone who knows sambal belacan, funky is the word.

So how was this achieved you ask?

Well *rubs hands*..

First I cooked off two tbs of dried chilli paste in a bit of oil, then I added a quarter of a Knorr chicken cube and a tbs of sugar. Once that was done and the kitchen had smoked up enough, I added the paste to a mix of birds eye chilli (25 to be exact), a large long hot green pepper, zest from one lime, juice from half a lime, about half a cup of thick tamarind water (basically a tablespoon of tamarind paste in warm water), and about a tbs of Lee Kum Kee salty soy sauce. I blitzed all of that, then seasoned with sugar and salt to taste. 

I tasted the result and did a little dance. And there it was, sambal belacan looking and tasting sambal WITHOUT the belacan. 

From left to right: Belacan-less sambal belacan (if you squint just so), telur dadar, tom yam, white rice & garlic bokchoy

 

Marathon baking & lofty dessert ideals

My husband has a sweet tooth, but he also has a belly for spice. 

For his birthday I decided to make a special breakfast of cranberry walnut scones (based on a master scone recipe) and pumpkin chocolate pancakes, a lunch of nasi tomato (spiced tomato rice), beef kurma and acar timun from Azie's Kitchen. For his birthday cake, I wanted to make a coffee-chocolate cake and a chocolate ganache. 

It took a couple of weeks of braining how and when I would have time to achieve all this whilst also actually spending time on his birthday with him, but here's how things unfolded:

I started on the scones while prepping dinner on the eve of his birthday, and let it sit in the fridge overnight. In the morning, I got up early to start on the chocolate cake. (Of course, at this time Pan decided to wake up too, barking his head off. I had to let him out just so he wouldn't wake the whole neighborhood up. Then he asked to go outside, and once allowed out, proceeded to bark his head off at all the squirrels for an extended period. In hindsight perhaps I should've let him in on my plans so that he wouldn't have tried so hard to foil them.)

Once I got the cake into the oven, I started on the pancake batter. Done with pancake batter, I pulled out scones from fridge and popped them into the often. Suddenly I heard dear husband wake up and about upstairs, so I quarantined him to the room to continue reading Fevre Dream and sent up a double espresso to keep him company.  In that time, I got the pancakes on the griddle and some ghost pepper honey-basted chicken sausages as well. I debated whether I wanted to add eggs but it was a short debate because a) I'm the one who likes eggs, not him and b) ain't nobody got time for that. 

It was 30 mins later, but I managed to stash my cake somewhere inconspicuous to continue cooling, and have the scones, pancakes, and coffees at the table along with his birthday card before getting him to come down for breakfast.

In his card was a clue to our first activity--a visit to the zoo! In winter! It was a small zoo, but we saw elephant and giraffe feedings, and a snow leopard and a lynx (up close!) before returning home for lunch-- which I still had to cook. To divert him, I gave him a second clue for one of his gifts which he tried to figure out as I frantically started to work in the kitchen. Once he figured that out (a massage chair pad), he was then tasked with a crossword puzzle while trying out the massage chair, which upon completion would give him another clue to his second gift. With God's infinite mercy, my usually very sharp husband actually struggled quite a bit with the crossword, and I managed to finish cooking before we had to pray and he still didn't figure out the whole thing without a couple of extra clues.

After lunch, we took a walk and caught the sunset at Cobb's Hill (this reservoir nearby our house). When we got back I barred him out of the kitchen while I completed my final baking task for the birthday-- the chocolate ganache.

Luckily the ganache turned out fine and good, but I wanted to whip the remaining ganache into a moussey cream to pipe onto the cake. Alas, I did not have a pipe! Several curses and kicks to self later, but I realized I could try to pipe with a ziplock bag. Lo and behold, my initial tries gave me poop swirl-looking little blobs! I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I think I did both. But then salvation, I proceeded to use decorative sugar stars to top them up and somehow they managed to look less poopy.

Happy birthday song and candle-blow out later-- the moment of truth! We ate the cake and he noticed my furrowed brow and frown and asked whether the cake met my "lofty dessert ideals". I said the cake is fine, but I couldn't taste the coffee which was what was slightly disappointing. Oddly though, it turned out all the coffee taste was at the end of the cake, and it was a better cake there. 

Regardless, at the end of the day I was quite relieved that I had finished my baking/cooking marathon. The scones were buttery, crumbly on the sides and soft in the middle with a good amount of cranberry and walnuts throughout. The pancakes were fluffy and pumpkin-y. The nasi tomato was good, beef kurma one of my better attempts, and the acar timun tasted right. The chocolate cake looked decent and tasted good. 

Most importantly, I think he had a nice birthday, albeit a mentally challenging one. Now I can start thinking about his birthday crossword for next year *rubs fingers gleefully*...

The coffee-chocolate cake with chocolate ganache drizzle and whipped ganache swirls aka poop blobs.

Hi again Reader Population: Zero

It's been a three year++ hiatus but what the hey, my kids are occupied Netflixing their brains out on school holidays, I've smashed out breakfast and laundry, and got some down time to sit and muse on life.

The last time I posted, it was some weird consideration about mortality, childrearing and lost love triggered by watching Toy Story 4 followed by the lyrics to Landslide. Cryptic as that was, I have to give props to Kye of 2019 for almost being prescient. 

I haven't done much in the way of illustrating personal information on this blog since college days (oh good ol' college days), but I think there are some personal reflections I can make here especially since we are approaching the end of 2022, to one of the most momentous years in my life, and certainly the most momentous in the past decade for me. 

Without giving too much away, suffice it to say my life now has taken a vastly different trajectory than the one I had anticipated or planned in 2019. I got a divorce, relocated myself and children to Melbourne for 15 months for a full-time laboratory position the midst of a pandemic, started therapy, truly did the single mothering thing and even attempted to find love on apps (!!! failed miserably), gave up on love in general, then realized I had fallen in love with an old friend with whom a rekindled friendship began from work emails, confessed how I felt to said old friend, then waited patiently for two weeks for him to figure out he felt the same way, got engaged a month later, got married 4 months later, resigned from my job and relocated to live with my husband in the US.

So indeed, there was a landslide happening in my life and perhaps in 2019 I was starting to hear some of the early rumblings. 

I somehow had a feeling even then, being fairly unhappy with many things, that there had to be more to life than just trying to survive the day, then repeat. There were always fleeting moments of excitement when a fun job came around, fleeting moments of joy when hanging out and having a karaoke and coffee session with girlfriends or sisters, and of course the sustained joy and contentment I experienced being a mother to my two favorite humans...but there was something clearly missing in my life. I had begun to think it was a problem of lack of purpose, that I didn't know what I want to do or be until I died, and that brought about a huge amount of anxiety and self-disgust. But what I didn't realize then was that the biggest thing missing was the kind of love and happy marriage I used to fantasize about as a child, that I convinced myself was just a pipe dream.

It took some major internal overhaul, equally a big renovation in the structures of the life I knew... and the hardest part that I still have to learn to cope with is no longer spending most of my time as a full-time mom since the boys don't live with me anymore, but Alhamdulillah, whatever shape that vacancy I felt in my life and in my heart is now warmly occupied by a very special man who I believe is one of God's greatest mercy to me.

This new life trajectory is obviously a work in progress for me, and we're operating on several uncertainties and contingency plans. But if the worst of the pandemic in 2020-2021 has taught me anything, is that we can plan whatever we want, what God wills will be. What else the years ahead have in store, I can't say I have felt any tremors or rumblings of things to come. For now I trust God has willed that I experience living life as a happily married woman, and for that I am sufficiently grateful. 

Landslide - Fleetwood Mac

1. 1 of 4
2. 2 of 4
   I took my love, I took it down
   Climbed a mountain and I turned around
   And I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills
   'Til the landslide brought me down

   Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
   Can the child within my heart rise above?
   Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides?
   Can I handle the seasons of my life?
   Mmm

   Well, I've been 'fraid of changin'
   'Cause I've built my life around you
   But time makes you bolder
   Even children get older
   And I'm gettin' older, too

   Well, I've been 'fraid of changin'
   'Cause I've built my life around you
   But time makes you bolder
   Even children get older
   And I'm gettin' older, too
   I'm gettin' older, too

   Ah, take my love, take it down
   Oh, climb a mountain and turn around
   And if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
   Well, the landslide will bring it down
   And if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
   Well, the landslide will bring it down
   Oh, the landslide will bring it down