I’ve discovered the key to surviving an attack of HFMD and unfortunately, it’s not morphine. It’s distraction. Or as magicians like to call it, misdirection.

So this is pretty much how Tru’s brain looks like now.

The pain in his mouth is so immense that it’s hijacking all the other signals being sent to his brain. As a result, he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t talk, he doesn’t laugh and he doesn’t want to do anything at all. When he’s not crying, he just walks around in a pain-induced stupor.

And so my mission is to hijack those pain signals before it gets to his brain. That’s where the distraction comes in. Hopefully in the process, all the pain signals gets misdirected to say, his left butt cheek.

The thing with distraction is that it’s got to be interesting enough to direct his attention away from the pain, which means that I can’t just stick him in front of the TV or make him play with the same bunch of old toys.

It’s got to be fun, fresh and sufficiently engaging so that he momentarily forgets about the pain.

The other thing with distraction is that it doesn’t last for very long. The novelty wears off and his mind inevitably wanders back to “OMG MY MOUTH IS ON FIRE I’M GOING TO SIT HERE AND SCREAM.”

Which basically makes me a state of the art entertainment centre that’s supposed to come up with new activities to keep him occupied.

By mid afternoon, I got so desperate that I sat the kids down and performed a live magic show in my living room. One of the acts was to pretend to swallow a coin. Ok, it was the only act I knew but it worked so well that the kids spent the next 20 minutes trying to shove handfuls of coins into my mouth. And nose. And ears.

Tomorrow, I’m going to eat fire.

Tru’s down with HFMD.

He woke up with a temperature yesterday and was complaining about having pain in his mouth. We thought it was a just bad throat but we found his mouth covered with ulcers in the evening and a trip to the doctors confirmed that it was definitely a case of HFMD.

In parentland, that’s cause for panicked hand-flailing and large amounts of distress. Not so much because it’s life-threatening but because it’s extremely painful and aggressively contagious. Plus there’s the 7-day quarantine that’s most certainly going to drive me a little mad.

Usually by the second day, the parent starts to display signs of insanity, like bloodshot eyes and aimless shuffling. By day 4 or 5, it will progress to full on crazy and symptoms include straggly hair, hair eating, insomnia and random outbursts.

Obviously, I did the only logical thing and turned to google for help but then I immediately regretted doing that because all the photos that came up – ewwww. I had to cover the pictures with one hand while scrolling the text with the other. Also, trust me on this, it’s not suitable bedtime reading material because you’ll dream of getting chased by legions of giant ulcers and blisters.

To be fair, the H & F part isn’t that bad because the blisters aren’t the itchy sort but the mouth full of ulcers, that’s the killer. I have one tiny ulcer and I feel positively miserable so I can only imagine how difficult it is to have 22 ulcers all at once.

Truett tried to be strong but he would stop in his tracks every few minutes, grab his mouth and cry because of the pain. He couldn’t even close his mouth so he was drooling all day and had to talk like he had a lisp. Coming from the boy who didn’t flinch while taking 5 stitches to the head, it was heartbreaking.

It was too painful to eat so I kept him on a diet of ice-cream, chocolate milk and iced water. By dinner time, he was ravenously hungry and he stared at the fish porridge with a look that can only be described as anguish.

“I want porr-age. I’m wear-ee hungee… bwahhhhhhhh, pain pain. My mowf is so painfoo.”

He would bring the spoon of porride to his lips, peer at it and start to cry. Finally, he stopped, braced himself and took a bite before quickly swallowing and bursting into tears.

I can’t believe it’s only day 1 of the quarantine.

I really don’t like to do the putting people in a box thing but let’s just say that if I absolutely had to do it with the kids, I’d put Truett in a box labelled “Not Likely to Get Stuck in Sticky Situations” while Kirsten would end up straight in the “Look, A Sticky Situation – LET’S GO THERE!” box.

I’m speaking metaphorically of course, but now that I think about it, it might not be such a bad idea to put them in a real box like this when they’re being difficult.

Relax, I’m not going to call it the Box of SHAME. I’ll christen it with a cute name like Time-Out Corner and paint pretty little pink flowers on it. I’m considerate that way.

So back to my story – there are these elevators at my block that are mental and I suspect, a little evil. The button that’s supposed to keep the door open works sporadically at best, meaning that the door shuts anytime it damn well pleases. I’ve been attacked by the crazy doors on numerous occasions and one time, the door shut right after Tru stepped in even though I was pressing the button to keep it open.

Good thing it decided to open again after a few seconds but those few seconds must have been an eternity for him because after that incident, Tru is extremely cautious when it comes to elevators.

Kirsten, on the other hand, does not care about getting lost or injured or trapped in confined spaces. She’s 10 times more likely to disappear into a drain while walking (true story – she’s like 1 of 5 people in the world who managed to graze her armpits) or run into a wall.

A couple of days ago, we were on the way back when Kirsten suddenly decided to dash into the lift. I was several steps behind and I was about to run after her when out of nowhere came a flying ninja tackle from Truett. It all happened very quickly and next thing I knew, they were both on the ground with Tru grabbing her in a stranglehold inches away from the evil elevator door.

Kirsten was obviously upset at being tackled but it was nowhere near as upset as Tru was. He was furious at me for letting her run unsupervised and upset at his sister for being so reckless. “You don’t ever do that again, you understand?”, he yelled at her.

Then he turned to me and said sternly, “Mommy you carry her now. You must take care of mei mei better and don’t let her get lost.”

Yes, sir. 

The kids are officially at an age where they enjoy each other’s company. They are now able to understand instructions, communicate effectively and recognize that having a sibling is more fun than playing alone. Which is not to say that they don’t still scream and fight over stuff, but they are able to sit together for extended periods without any bloodshed.

Naturally, this has led to many heartwarming moments where we watch them with pride, feeling like we’ve done a pretty darn good job as parents because even though we suck at a lot of things, it is clear that WE MAKE THE AWESOMEST BABIES IN THE WORLD.

Just last weekend, the kids woke up at 7.30 and instead of harassing us like they normally do, they played a horse game on the mattress for a full half hour. If you must know, the horse game is where they take turns being a horse to give the other person a ride. Kirsten was mostly a stationary worm when it was her turn to be the horse but hey, whatever works for them. Totally not judging.

This afternoon, they were clocking in some playtime before their nap and they had this complicated lego setup in the nursery. I say setup but it was basically lego blocks strewn everywhere and they were apparently building a castle. Being the supercool, involved mom that I am, I was all “Kids, are you building something? Can mommy play too?”

I expected them to respond enthusiastically with a resounding “WOW YES! YOU’RE THE BEST MOM EVER” but they just sat there and completely ignored my presence or my offer to grace their game with my lego building prowess.

So I tried again. “Mommy’s really good at building stuff, want me to make a castle for you guys?”

My son then turned to me and said, “Truett and mei mei are playing, you cannot disturb.”

“Ok fine, be that way. Mommy’s just going to stand here and observe the mayhem.”

This time, Kirsten stood up and pointed to the door. “Mommy you go outside, you are not playing, you cannot stay here.”

Great, this is what it’s come down to. There was a time not too long ago when you were bugging me to play with you and now I’m banished out of the room.

My head says this should be good because it does translate into some much-deserved quiet coffee time but I think my mommy ego just took a beating.

Right from the time the kids were born, we were certain co-sleeping wasn’t going to work for us. From a very practical perspective, there just wasn’t enough space and while the idea of sleeping with a baby seems so irresistibly sweet, the actual doing is considerably more uncomfortable.

The sweetness lasts for 3 minutes and after that, they turn into little sleep tyrants. They do windmills on the bed, monopolise every inch of space and before I know it, I’m squeezing myself into a 50cm strip of space on my bed.

Occasionally, their diaper leaks and I find myself waking up in a puddle of pee. That’s not my own. Not that I wake up in my own pee regularly (or at all) but it’s so much worse waking up in someone else’s pee. If I had to wake up in a puddle of pee, I’d choose my own any day. Just like if I ever got stung by a jellyfish, I’d much rather pee on myself than have someone else do it.

So from the beginning, we were diligent in getting them to sleep on their own beds. We did up a gorgeous nursery, bought them supercool toddler beds, gave them cold turkey and taught them to sleep on their own, feeling mighty proud of ourselves.

But…and you know there’s a but because there’s ALWAYS a but. The ‘but’ sometimes comes in the form of a dark stormy night when the kids wake up crying with nightmares. Or a persistent virus that requires through-the-night supervision. Or just a moment of weakness coupled with puppy dog eyes.

And when the ‘but’ happens, everything goes belly up very quickly.

Which explains why the nursery has been unused for several months now. The latest sleeping arrangement involves 2 mattresses laid out in our room every night and you’d think it’s for the kids to sleep but more often than not, we find ourselves on the mattresses while the kids usurp our bed.

We’ve been wanting to restart the sleep training but the though of having to sit in their room for hours through the night terrifies me. On good days, I get to crawl into bed at midnight and an hour in, I have to stumble my way into the nursery because one of them is awake and asking to sleep in our room. So let’s see, option 1 is to sit there with them till they fall asleep or option 2, cave and let them come over so we can all get some decent sleep.

Right now, we’re even contemplating turning the nursery into our secret back up sleeping room but they’re probably going to invade that too.

Seriously, how do you guys do it?

I’ve been shredding again. The last time I only managed to last 22 days before a lethal combination of fried chicken + fatigue resulted in a swift and decisive end to my exercise plans. To be fair, it was deliciously crispy chicken with golden brown skin that was fried to perfection – the kind worth getting fat for.

For several days after that, I dreamt of Jillian Michaels yelling at me to “fight for it” as she pinned me down in a stranglehold and confiscated my bucket of Popeyes. It was brutal.

The great thing was that in those 22 days, I converted at least 10kg of fats (more or less) into pure unadulterated muscle mass. And I know this because when I sucked in my stomach really hard, I could see the faint outline of pectoral muscle definition. Oh, sweet definition, how I’ve missed you. Once upon a time before I had kids, I once had stomach muscles. Now, I have one rather large mass of soft-ish tissue.

Yes laugh away, but pop 2 kids and then we’ll trade pictures of our jiggly bits.

That was probably the only reason why I even lasted 22 days in the first place – visible results. I could feel myself getting fitter just after one week of jumping jacks and bicycle crunches. By day 10, I stopped feeling like I was going to pass out from sheer exhaustion.

But discipline is a funny thing. The moment you stop, it takes you 10 times the effort to get back on track. You either progress or you start regressing.  I was down with a bout of food poisoning and after 3 days of non-exercise, all my resolve had turned into cravings for ice-cream and mee pok with extra lard. And the longer I didn’t exercise, the more difficult it got to put in that DVD again because I knew I’d be back to square one with all that huffing and puffing. Vicious cycle, really.

I just realized that it’s now the middle of August and I’ve still not achieved my resolution of completing a full 30-day shred. That leaves me 5 months to get to it.

I was doing my shred the other day and Kirsten was standing by eyeing me with interest. So I casually asked her “want to join mommy, sweetheart?” She pondered a moment and back came her reply. “I don’t need to do exercise, only mommy needs. You do your exercise very well ok.”

“Well, thanks a lot, princess. One of these days, you’ll have jiggly bits of your own.”

Guess I’m just going to start by putting on my running shoes every morning and see how far I get.

What’s your exercise regime? Need a little help here. 

Question: Anyone else ever felt as inadequate about being a mom as I do? I mean, I love kids but I’m terrible at teaching them phonics or nutrition or how to make the toilet or being responsible and all that.

Last week, I’ve been trying to get Kirsten to pee in the toilet. I psyched her up about being a big girl and wearing Hello Kitty panties instead of diapers and put her on the toilet bowl. She was all “mommy do” so ok, I figured since kids learnt through imitation, I’d do a live demo for her.

And she just stood there and laughed – nice one, baby girl.

It doesn’t really help that every other mother I know seems to have their act together. They potty-train their newborns and their kids can draw a straight line by 11 months. I’m obviously way behind because I’m 29 and still can’t draw a straight line. After that, they move on to advanced topics like feeding organic vegetables that they’ve grown by hand in their backyard and teaching their kids to perform cardiothoracic surgery.

Then I come across sites like these and I feel so. much. better.

I’ve picked out some of my favorites here. I may or may not have done these at some point.

1. Everyone thinks I’m such a great mom for teaching my daughter how to read already. It wasn’t me. It was the Leapfrog pen. I had no idea she could read.

2. Since it’s summertime, about once a week I take the kids for ice cream… for lunch.

3. I forget to brush my 1- and 2-year-olds’ teeth. I am not sure why it’s so hard for me to remember, but it’s a good thing that these teeth will fall out.

4. At the end if the day, my needs are really simple: To be able to shit in peace.

5. At the end of a long challenging day, I’m apt to call bedtime half and hour early. It’s not like they can tell time yet.

6. I used bandaids to cover my nipples when I weaned my children. See? All gone.

7. I joined a gym just for the free daycare. I drop the kids off and read magazines and blogs in the locker room.

8. Questions of the day: 1) How did the pepperoni get stuck to the ceiling? 2) Why didn’t gravity kick in & make it fall? 3) How did I not notice this? 4) When did we have pizza last?

9. I confiscated my teenager’s stash of pot, gave her a lecture, and have been smoking it ever since myself.

10. Last week, my hairdresser asked how far along I was. I’m not pregnant, but I pretended to be 4 months. I can never go back there.

11.  Mother dropping her kid for a sleepover at my house: “No food dye, no dairy, just soy milk, only organic food, and we don’t eat ANY fast food.” I let them eat all the junk they wanted. They seemed fine.

12. My kids hardy bathe in the summer. The pool totally counts.

13. When my daughter asked me what comes after a trillion, I told her “a gazillion.” Um, we are homeschoolers. Not supposed to just make shit up.

14. My baby is not spoiled, she just doesn’t like you.

15. I confess that most days, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. Everyone thinks I have it all together — good wife, good mom, successful career — but I really don’t. I’m ready to stop pretending to be perfect now.

What’s yours?

The amazing thing about parenting is that I learn more from them than they learn from me. Sure, I teach them basic stuff like how to do the poopsie in the toilet and identify different flower species. But in return, they teach me far more important lessons like how to stop and smell those flowers.

Yesterday, we spent some time on the swing set downstairs during our usual playground session. I showed her how to close her eyes and throw back her head while in motion to feel like she was flying.

She practiced a few times, then beamed and said “I’m happy, mommy.”

Momma’s happy too, sweetheart.

I’ve been trying to teach the kids to be thankful no matter what happens but these kinds of life lessons are best learnt through experience. It’s easy to teach thankfulness when life is good, when they get a gummy or a trip to the zoo but when everything seems to go horribly wrong, that’s when being thankful really counts.

Such as days like today, when Tru is just recovering from another “mommy I can’t breathe” lung infection episode. After I just spent the last two nights watching him to make sure he’s still breathing and alive. I doze off for a while and I dream he’s wheezing and I wake up to find that he is actually struggling for air which is a far worse nightmare.

Then we head off for breakfast this morning and everyone gets stricken with food poisoning so severe the husband gets admitted to the A&E at Changi Hospital. And I’m driving the kids home when Kirsten starts throwing up fountains of um, vomit for an entire minute non-stop like a bad spoof of The Exorcist. I mean, I’ve never seen anyone throw up continuously like that for that long in my life. For the next hour or so, she would vomit a handful of yellowish stuff every 5 minutes. It was unreal.

So I rushed her to the doctor and when I got back, I started feeling nauseous and pukey but I was too weak to drag the kids with me to the doctor again so I just stuck my head in the toilet bowl and tried not to pass out. It was all very exciting in a only-when-it’s-not-happening-to-me sort of way.

The husband in hospital, Tru in recovery, Kirsten in a pool of vomit and me, in the toilet. Take that, Korean melodrama.

It’s hard to be thankful on a day like today because it hits you like a freight train and knocks you out with a solid hadouken. But at the risk of sounding like a lunatic, I do got a lot of things to be thankful for.

1. I’ve got the best sick kid ever. The worst thing about having sick kids is that they’re extra whiney, which is understandable and fully warranted. But baby girl is so badass at being sick, she make it look like a walk in the park. She spent the entire day sleeping and looking so sweet and stoned all at the same time. When she’s in pain, she snuggles up on my chest and grabs my shirt real tight, then throws up on me.

2. Tru’s lung infection episode lasted 24 hours, the shortest one yet. He usually takes 3-5 days to recover but this time around, he was up and running after a day. Always a good sign.

3. We’re all on the road to recovery so the worst is over. Hopefully we all get some decent rest tonight, which is the best part about recovering from an illness – enforced rest. Some sleep always makes me feel better.

4. Not technically related but jailbreak for iPhone 4.1 is out. I’ve waited a long time for this and it is awesome.

5. I lost an entire kilo today. Mostly water, I know, but my stomach looks flatter than it has been in a long time. Silver lining, y’all.

We all have bad days. Days that make you feel like dropping everything and running for cover to a place where you didn’t have to deal with things you don’t have the fortitude to deal with. Days where you feel like screaming melodramatically “I’m just not strong enough”.

I hate bad days.

Back when I was working, bad days came in the form of having to deal with a sick kid on the very day I had an important event, one I spent weeks working my ass off on. Like come on, what are the odds my baby wakes up with a temperature on big-deal-event-day. You have the million-dollar choice of requesting for urgent leave and watching your weeks of planning (and possibly your job) go up in flames or ditching the kid and hating every single moment of your day at work, wishing it would go up in flames because WORK SUCKS and you’re a terrible mother etc etc.

Or when I get a work call at 3 in the morning with a voice at the other end telling me to get my ass out of bed and into office by 5.30am. Don’t ask.

Or when I spend every day of every week resenting the fact that I’m writing retarded press releases and reports for a bunch of folks who don’t even bother to pretend to read them, and then having to be told I can’t write to save my life.

I thought that when I left my job, that would be the last I saw of bad days.

Without having to go into the debate of whether it sucks more to be a full-time working mom or a work-from-home mom, I’d like to state for the record that bad days don’t go away even when you don’t have to put on a proper shirt and step into the office. Whether you work from home or in the office, a deadline’s a deadline and work still needs to be done. Which is kind of hard to do when your kid decides he’s having a bad day as well. And at least, when I’m at the office, I get to sit in relative quiet in my cubicle to bash out the work.

Right now, my working hours take place from 2-4pm when the kids nap and after 9pm when the kids are in bed. On a good day, that is. So when the kids don’t nap, it’s a bad day. When they don’t nap and spend that two hours whining and screaming, it’s an even worse day. When they spend that time making your existence miserable while you’re on the phone trying to get some urgent work done, it’s a bloody nightmare.

Because on top of being stressed and flustered, you get all emotional and guilt-ridden for being a bad mom who doesn’t deserve to stay home with the kids and how maybe they’re better off at childcare after all.

I told myself that the kids were supposed to come first no matter what. That I would be patient and not lose my shit. I had all these images of huggy-kissy time with smily kids in slow motion and soaring music in the background. But you know how life likes to make a mockery of your best intentions? It was like “Ok, here’s a scene right out from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not so picture perfect now, is it?”

After my fair share of bad days, I wish I could say that I’m an expert on how to roll with the punches. Except that I’m not. But what I do now is to take a deep breath, make myself a steaming cup of hot chocolate, hide in the kitchen where the kids can’t enter, close my eyes and drink. Then suck it up and wait for the day to be over. And this thing called tomorrow, it’s usually better.

With that, I leave you with my favorite Shakespearean quote of all time. “Come what come may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day.”

Touche, William.