we went for a walk today. all of us.

and none of us went to church.

i had a really tough time justifying this behaviour. if we were sick enough not to be at church then we should be home, right?

well, according to the best pediatrician in hong kong and possibly the world, dr thondup, when the babies are sporting snotty snuffly noses as they are now, their immune systems are compromised and they are vulnerable to all sorts of other germs. so keep them away from people. so no church.

but the fresh air, excellent. approved. applauded. best thing for them.

so into the fresh air we ventured.

we went to bowen road, a 20 minute drive from our flat. the crew were pretty listless.

jasper and sela had only had half-hearted naps, and had spent the remainder of their designated naptime rolling and laughing on our bed with sebastian, magnificent charles and myself. i had broken my iron rule of insisting they stay in their room and hopefully fall back to sleep by rationalising that carys, who is the sickest of the three and is off her food, really needed to sleep and not to be woken up by dolby sound crying. (i try to stay away from NEVER/ALWAYS and leave room for provisios/addendums/PMS dictated judgements. saving face is very big in asia. and in this household.)

sebastian had his bike. one thing about kids bikes today, they don’t have the erstwhile "wheelbrakes" located when you pedal backwards. ohhh no, today, brakes are located on the handlebar, and more often than not, too far away from the handlebar to be conveniently accessed. sebastian uses his feet as brakes. i seem to remember that i used to do that as well, even though i was wearing sandals at the time. can you say scabby toes?

hong kong unfortunately has yet to decide what side of the sidewalk to walk on. in most parts of the world, you walk on the right, despite what side the cars drive on. but in hong kong, there seems to be the same number of people that walk on the right hand side of the road as the left. it was a navigational nightmare for poor sebastian. he actually had a head on collusion that was entirely his fault.

i carried sela in the baby bjorn (much to her delight). why did sela get the special position? jasper is too heavy to carry for 45 minutes, and i was hoping that carys would sleep on the road a little (she did). the other two were in the maclaren.

the babies did not attract as much attention as they usually do. this was deliberately planned. we brought lita with us, so while charles and sebastian cycled and walked ahead, lita and i brought up the rear with the babies. two women and three babies made the majority of passersby assume we were carting "just" twins and a singleton. so there were a few "God bless you’s", a few "oh look" and a few age, weight and gender comments, but none of the massive congestion, touching, and questions "do triplets run in your family?" that we usually get. we just kept walking and smiling. the less interest in the babies, the fewer germs transferred to them. and that’s what we were hoping for: no close encounters of the third kind.