Alright now.

It’s Daphne’s birthday today.

Those of you that know me personally you know how I feel about being overtly mushy, particularly in front of people we know. I’m not one to blow kisses at her from a distance or call her sweety-pie names like muffin, cupcake, chee-cheong-fun and other saccharine sweet delicacies. We have this agreement that started from our NTU days that we won’t make the people around us feel uncomfortable, simply for practical reasons – we didn’t want to be ostracized and left without group partners for all our assignments. Just imagine doing a project in a group of four and two of them spend half their time cavorting with one another. Urgh.

I digress.

Remember the great Boyzone song - Love me for a Reason?

Don’t love me for fun girl

Let me be the one girl

Love me for a reason

Let the reason be love

It’s a nice idea but let the reason for love be…love? Nah, it doesn’t make sense even after a sixpack of beer.

There’re always reasons why you are drawn to a person, and I love Daf because of real reasons. Here are five of them. I’m not sure if this post qualifies as too much information but there, you’ve been warned.

1. She’s smoking hot.

I’m not sure what you can use to describe that except one word – NOSEBLEED.

2. She’s darn smart.

You know, I’m no half-wit myself (heh-heh).  So when I say she’s smart, believe me, she’s smart.

We had this competition in church called the Word Power which was basically a competition where you memorise bible verses – SIXTY of them, including punctuations, commas, full stops, the whole works – and recite them without reference. Daf, her sister and I formed a team and we topped the first two preliminary rounds before choking in the finals on a rather careless mistake.

The point here is that anyone who can memorise Habakkuk 3:17-19 practically backwards is no mean intellectual slob for sure. I’m not proselytizing but you might want to check that verse out.

3. She has a radio voice.

You’ve read her blog for sure, but did you know that Daphne was one half of NTU’s internet-radio DJ team called the Mad-Crappers? She actually hosted a public event at Scape Park, IMPROMPTU as well. Got the crowd worked up and all. Which was really impressive. Unfortunately I’m sorry I can’t find any old audio clips of her program. But she has one sexy voice I tell ya.

4. She’s sporty and fiercely competitive.

I know, I know. She doesn’t seem like the sort. But Daf was actually captain of her Anglican High School basketball team during her secondary school days and they were apparently really good.

I once played a pickup game with her against two ah bengs and me being a soccer guy I inevitably misplaced a pass to her.She came up to me real close, right in my face, gave me the most fearsome glare I have ever received in my life and said quietly,

“Are you serious about the game?”

I nodded furiously.

“Then make sure you don’t make another pass like that.”

I was left shivering in my pants and I didn’t misplace another pass for the game, nor for the rest of my life for that matter.  There, I confess it, I’m henpecked like that. We crushed the two ah-bengs and I didn’t make a single basket – true story. When you find someone like that, you just gotta marry her.

5. She loves me right back.

This is where it gets a little cheesy and emo here.

Having been together for almost ten years, we’ve been through some crazy, amazing times. Always crazy and mostly amazing. Even times when we were so broke all we had was a plate of char kway teow (plain) which we bought for 80cents and shared it while having a good laugh about our sorry plight.

But whether it was watching Serendipity for the 12864th time…

kissing in the rain at East Coast Park…

sharing a warm cup of toffee nut latte at Starbucks on a chilly nite…

trying to act young and hip at another Jason Mraz concert…

saying yes to me when I was a mere student with nary a single cent in the world…

Every moment is and will always be close to my heart.  You are the most beautiful and awesome person ever and five is really just a micro-milli-mini-fraction of the reasons why I love you. And thanks for loving me right back.

Ten years seems like an awfully long time but I know it’s just the beginning for us.

Happy birthday, love.

I haven’t done this in a long time. Blogging in my room. Or doing anything in my room that does not involve tiptoeing and breath-holding.

Since baby girl was born, I’ve been banished to the living room to do everything except sleep. And also making the sexytime in absolute silence. Which is like having melted ice-cream – no fun at all.

Kirsten just made the move to Tru’s room today and at this moment, they’re both sound asleep next to each other. There was a bit of adjustment at bedtime because Tru kept talking to her and trying to climb into her cot and all that commotion was a little too much to take so Kirsten started screaming, which led to Tru screaming at her to be quiet. You know the drill.

It took a while to settle them both down but it’s a small price for getting my room back. I can blast the air-conditioning until icicles start to form without worrying that baby girl will die of hypothermia. I can shower in my bathroom again and read a book in bed. It doesn’t take a lot to make me happy and reading in bed is one of them (which is why I’m practically blind but again, small price to pay). Days like these, it feels like we’re back to being newlyweds without the kids. Except that I miss them a lot and I keep sneaking into their room just to hear the faint rhythm of baby breathing.

Speaking of newlyweds, we just attended our first wedding at The Fullerton Hotel. Besides our wedding, that is, because it doesn’t count as attending if you’re the one getting married. Three years and two kids in, we were walking down the same steps to the ballroom where we had our wedding. Complete deja vu. I remember looking at Kelvin all dapper in his tux and thinking that life would finally be perfect. We’d have our perfect kids and perfect holidays and perfect jobs.

If I had known then that this was how my life would be three years down, I might have turned and ran for the hills. Or at least made him go for a vasectomy. Or performed it myself.

Going through that much in the last three years, it’s easy to forget the way you felt when you held hands and said your vows. It’s easy to lose the fuzzy feeling in your stomach when babies are screaming at you all the time. I have a theory that screaming makes you forget practically anything. It’s like repressed memory, except less scientific.

But it was nice to remember. And honestly, even on retrospect, I think I might have done it all over again. Ask me again in five years when I have another two kids.

1. Making the first move

2. Talking through the night because there is just that much to say

3. Holding out for a yes even when it seems like a no

4. Cycling in the rain

5. Kissing in the rain because who really just cycles in the rain

6. Passing soppy love notes in class even though it is that juvenile and embarrassing

7. Sharing the papers in the morning

8. Making them smile

9. Delivering nasi lemak at 2am

10. Sharing the last cup of bubble tea

11. Freshly folded laundry

12. Thinking the same thing at the same time more times than is normal

13. Saying the same thing at the same time more times than is normal

14. Boom-chica-wow-wow

15. Excessively long bubble baths

16. Forgiving even when it hurts

17. Taking out the trash because it’s gross

18. Round-the-clock pest control

19. Saying sorry first all the time

20. Midnight feeds, and I’m not talking about a smackerel of honey for your tummy

21. Bedtime stories that involve a cat, dog, raccoon, hedgehog, hamster and a 4-year-old girl

22. A kickass shoulder massage

23. Cooking dinner together, and then ordering McD’s

24. Walks by the beach even when you get attacked by killer ants

25. Meaning it when you say forever

Happy anniversary, baby!

The first time I celebrated his birthday was on Sept 11, 2001. Technically, it was a day before his birthday. We were preparing for a paper on cultural icons in the 21st Century (thanks Madonna!) and also just received news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre. We had only met a couple of weeks earlier and our entire interaction consisted of a handful of text messages and several conversations over Madonna’s biceps. But I remembered thinking, if the world was coming to an end, I wouldn’t mind spending my last moments sitting beside him.

But the world didn’t come to an end, so at the stroke of midnight, I sent him a text message which read “Happy birthday, have a great time.” That was it. No romantic declarations or fireworks. Then I proceeded to destroy his party by ruining the surprise and I think at the end of it, he thought I was a big dork. Or totally hot. Maybe both. A big hot dork. Ok, that’s just wrong.

8 years later and it seems like everything has changed. The wedding, the kids, the house, the bills, the boring routine of a couple who’s been together like forever. Well, everything except the way I feel whenever I’m with him. The way he makes me laugh. The way he looks at me across a crowded room like I’m the only person he sees. The way he leans over and kisses me in the morning. The way he holds me by the waist when we walk, just because. And most of all, the way he does all the little things like crawl out of bed to feed the baby so I can sleep for another hour.

Some days I wake up and I still can’t believe that I actually managed to marry the man of my dreams. To be fair, I’ve got pretty weird dreams, like the time I dreamt that I was shot in the leg while trying to escape from a bunch of assassins by rappelling down a building without the rope. And after that my knight in shining armor showed up and whisked me off into the sunset, bleeding calf and all. You should know by now that I’m not your typical fairy tale kinda girl, but that’s just how I roll.

They say that a relationship is defined by the moments and the memories (I kinda just made that up, feel free to use it). And we’ve got some pretty kick ass ones. I actually came up with 75, but here are my top 10.

10. The time I crashed my dad’s Mercedes into the back of a pickup truck and the entire bonnet was shortened by half. All I could do was sit by the side of the road and cry. The whole time he just held my hand and told me everything was going to be ok.

9. The time he had to run 15 minutes to my hostel room at 4 am in the morning to catch a lizard because I couldn’t possibly sleep with that monstrosity waiting to attack me.

8. The time he bought my brat of a sister a fugly snowman soft toy for her 12th birthday after she’d called him a “monkey face and a thousand other bad names I will not mention here”.

7. The time he first held my hand while his was sweating so bad it kept slipping off and he had to keep rubbing it on his pants to dry it. True story.

6. The time he wrote me a cheesy poem and claimed he found it off the Internet because I’m the kinda girl who likes poetry and moonlight serenades.

5. The time he spent his last dollar planning a surprise on the Christmas of 2001 and had to take a 3 hour walk home because he couldn’t afford a cab.

4. All the times he would say he’s sorry first even though it’s totally my fault.

3. The time he covered a room with rose petals and wrote me a not-that-cheesy poem and went down on one knee and asked me to marry him.

2. The time he held me close and cried for days when my daddy went to heaven.

1. When he turned to me after we got married and said “I think all my dreams have come true”.

Happy Birthday, baby.

Leg 5: The happiest place in the world

I have to devote a whole post to Disneyland because it is hands down the single happiest place in the world. It’s an insane amount of happy thoughts packed into 85 acres. There’s fairy dust in the air that makes all your troubles disappear and turns kids into tiny little balls of sunshine (even the bratty ones). It’s impossible to feel depressed in Disneyland. Even the Grinch would have turned into Tinkerbell if he had the sense to go there. Only in Disneyland, you could be a kid and no one would judge you.

I originally wanted to get a 5-day pass but the husband threatened to leave me there alone so we compromised and decided to go for 3 days instead. It was 3 days of non-stop action. I dragged his ass out of bed at 5.30 every morning just so that we could be at the gates by 6.30 when the doors opened. And I refused to leave till they chased us out at close to midnight. I’m like a hardcore Disneyland fanatic.

If there’s one bad thing about the place, it’s the crowds, which is legendary. The average waiting time for popular rides like Space Mountain and Indiana Jones was about 2 hours, so you either had to forego the experience or spend up to 12 hours just waiting in line. But not us, because before we left, I spent hours developing a genius of a masterpiece – Daphne’s Disneyland Touring Plan. I had the day divided into 15 minute segments and it required massive amounts of discipline and a lot of running. The folks who walk in Disneyland are the queuers and the smart ones, well, they have to sprint from one end of the park to the other. But the result was that we never spent more than 15 minutes in the queue. Ever.

Seriously, if you’re planning to head down, just drop me a mail and I’ll send it to you. You will be eternally grateful to me, and you can also come clean my house from time to time after that.

Besides checking out the rides, I was also on a mission to collect autographs and photos of all the characters I could find, which is way harder than it sounds. First, there are tons of crazy kids thronging them all the time, and they don’t have a fixed schedule of appearance. So they can just pop up anytime and then suddenly disappear. Since I was way smarter than all the pesky kids, I bribed the staff to give me their schedules for the day so I could beat them all to it. Actually I had to grovel and offer some special services for it, but hey, whatever it takes baby.

But I think it’s karma. After spending 3 days shoving babies out of the way to collect autographs, I actually lost the autograph book, which was far more upsetting for me than when I lost my wedding band in Tahoe. (see, I didn’t even bother to mention it in the Tahoe post, but I did. I lost it up on Adventure Peak) At least I still got the pictures to show for it.

So that’s it. All 3 weeks of our honeymoon. The best 3 weeks of my life. When it was time to drive back to LAX, I was turned to the husband all Arnie style and said “I’ll be back”.