Author: charlestess

i got two emails and some comments on a forum where i post asking me:

how do you save $1300us

being anal retentive, i had this figured out by noon the day following the event, and would have had the sums earlier if the hotel had not been so swanky and used cloth napkins. if there had been paper, i would have been jotting down numbers as soon as magnificent charles said "guess what i just did?"

i won’t bore you with the spreadsheet, but i figure in the five months until my birthday, we can absorb that $1300 by making some cutbacks.

here’s what i have done so far:

$75      passed up opportunity to buy pre-ny champagne. i won’t drink sparkling white, i just won’t have champagne. i don’t drink alcohol anyway, why should i make an exception for nye when all we ever get is a half full bottle?

$50     no taxi’s this week. i am very conscientous about time, i just at times am so double booked i take taxi’s. not this work week, bebe.

$20     no buying vanity fair for five months

$20     no ordering pizza for dinner last night 

$20     cancelled pedicure for next week. had nails painted last week, that is fine.

$50     sold pilates training classes passes to friend. i am not going to get to the classes, why don’t i accept that and just sell the passes. so i did.

$20     selling car seat (have not done yet, but we will)

$75     i am not going to shenzhen tomorrow. transport alone would be close to $20, lunch another $7, and oh i would buy an estimated $50 worth of stuff. all unnecessary.

so there is $300. true, not everything (car seat) i have accomplished and is cash in the pocket, but i reckon by march 17, with more frugal living, we will be on even keel again. and if we’re not, gee, how awful. how terrible.

so not only am i the closet and house de-clutter queen, but i am also able to help you analyse your budget/lifestyle and see where cutbacks can be made. if you want. this week i am going to terri’s to help her toss out some things. terri is very agreeable and not a clingy possession person, she just wants an opinion to bounce off, so good times will be had. i will take the #40 bus to her flat.

sebastian’s sixth birthday party was yesterday. charles was/is ill, but still managed to make a very great superman cake, which sebastian had requested and loved.

we held the party on middle island at the boat club, which meant that the kids could take a ferry ride. some of the kids liked it, some didn’t. they liked playing zombies and the treasure hunt. all in all, it was a good party and the Lord heard my prayers and the weather was fantastic.

grandad doug is here and of course the kids are short on sleep and are being appalling with their manners/whinging/irritatingness. it didn’t hit me until four days into his visit when he was lecturing one of them (not inappropriately, and if you remember, i like it when someone correctly disciplines my kids) on something, that he might be saying to himself, "wow these are terrible kids, so bad mannered, whingy, repulsive, etc"

it was just a passing thought, because i know how tired/sick the kids are right now and really, i know that they are pretty well behaved. and if sebastian didn’t eat the salad on his plate, well, that just is the way things are some days. pick your battles is key for me, and i could have either asked tired sebastian to eat his salad and been miserable making him, OR i could have let it slide. i chose option two. i wanted to have a nice chat with doug.

coughing& feverish charles didn’t come out with us today, he stayed at home while doug and i took the kids to church and then out to lunch & a play. the kids were overtired; after church sebastian even said that he wanted to go home, but charles is going to shanghai tomorrow and needed to sleep undisturbed so i didn’t let the varmits head home. but when we eventually got home with the whingy crew, we learned that charles hadn’t slept the entire time as i had expressly instructed him to do!

husbands!

love overflowing like rice grains inbetween my fingers

possibly it was the frock, or the twinkling toenails, but mr magnificent and i had a very good time last night at the International Care Ministry banquet.

ICM is a fantastic charity that works in the philippines improving quality of life through creating homes, providing medical care (daily and funds for emergency), education and food. i am hoping to take sebastian on an ICM mission trip soon where he could help build something.

the event was held at the jw marriott ballroom and it was fantastically decked out. the live and silent auction prices were displayed in the hallways and there was a buzz of excitement. who would auction the smartest and win the skiing in telluride, colorado prize? the trips to bali, capetown (i WISH!), washington, south of france, the antartica cruise, fiji & australia, peru? who would be playing the british open courses and who would be staying and playing at wimbledon and have courtside seats at the french open?

magnificent bought me a prize. it was one of the prizes where as many people could bid as they like and there were an endless supply of prizes, and love.

ICM’s feeding program provides destitute families with rice as a supplemental food source. as a gift to me, magnificent paid over $1,300us and joined one of these neighbourhood feeding programmes. this gift will fund the feeding programme for one community, providing weekly gifts of four kilograms of rice for six months to 25 families. can you imagine that? it is estimated that this gift is providing essential nutrition to approximately 125 malnourished people.

i will even receive a birthday card signed by some of the recipients to say thank you.

this is a great gift, a meaningful gift and charles knew how much it meant to me to receive it.  do we have $1,300 to be casually flinging around? no, but we have food in our pantry and the knowledge that some families don’t, and knowing we had the chance to change their life, was enough to change our lifestyles for a few months.

how do you get over a bad start?

this morning i was having a great natter with charmaine. it was blissful because we haven’t caught up in ages. i was in my room trying to organise things, but not having much success. today is a hugely busy day, compounded by the fact that sebastian is sick. poor poppet has a headache and a cough and those blurred watery eyes.

charmaine and i were having a great moan about life in general and the unlikelihood of me flying across canada this summer due to exorbitant costs/four children, when all of a sudden there was a frantic knock at the door. i thought it might be tara or katie, who are flying to new york today and might be in need of some airline reading material. but no, it was a lovely helper, who said,

"i just got a call from marianne, charles called her and he is trying to call you you need to get off the phone."

now, charles is flying back from india, doug is flying in from canada, that’s a lot of air flying and a lot that can potentially be wrong. frantic i bid charmaine adieu, and dial charles.

"yes hello what is it what’s wrong" i say, forgetting to be relieved that he answers the phone which proves he is alive.

and i am annoyed, yes annoyed when he says, "nothing is wrong. calm down."

he accuses me of being ticked (i am), i accuse him of being ticked and am happy to have the ammunition of how he ended a sentence to prove that he is cross. but you said this!  i cry, unwilling and unwisely.

how can a conversation improve from there? after miscommunication like that we are doomed to spending the rest of the conversation unhappy, and the majority of it was silent.

did i want to burn up the airwaves with silence? absolutely not. did he? no, he’s a better person than i am. but we managed quite nicely.

and we have a chi chi lala ball to attend tonight. i have a frock and toenails the name colour. i need something warm to wear with it, because i don’t plan on giving still-magnificent the cold shoulder, but you never know.

i’m kidding.

8 random reasons to be pleased:

the title says it all:

8) charles’ dad doug arrives on thurs and details of his visit are falling together nicely. he’s going to shanghai with charles for some father son time and plans to do some independent sightseeing when not reading, cuddling and being grandad to four excited kids.

7) i contacted the enlighten for epilepsy group in hong kong today and offered to volunteer. this isn’t exactly the best season in my life to volunteer, but i want to be more involved in this group for the obvious reasons. they asked if i could help this sunday. if i can, i will. i want to spend time with doug while he’s here and my schedule is packed enough as is without taking more on. but, we will see. i’m not sure why i made the call to enlighten today.

6)i am organising the book table for the kennedy night market (dec 7) and it is falling together nicely. i think i have thought of most of the issues that need to be covered in my friday morning meeting. can you imagine….two classrooms filled with second hand books. and i get to organise them (as well as carry them up two flights of stairs, find 40 plus volunteers and a few other choice tasks). but just to be around so many books and organise them, well that is my passion.

5) i bought the girls new nightgowns today. i was going to save them until Christmas but i didn’t have the heart. when they saw the nighies they began jumping up and down, arms high in the air. and then they pulled off their school clothes and pulled on their nighties. and then the twirling began. they grabbed each other’s hands and started turning faster and faster like they were doing a reel.

4) we are successfully de-cluttering our home. when changing styles of their home, painting a wall a new colour, do you ever throw away paintings, or what do you do with excess art? we have art in storage in vancouver that we received from our wedding, and then we have art we chose and bought years ago that we will never put on our walls. we have art that we first had on our walls when that was all we could afford and is now faded but still sentimentally loved. we have expensive impulse buys that we regret but still have.

3) i have heard quite a bit from lita and she is happy. her employers are really kind and going out of their way to accommodate her. my heart is so much lighter every time i hear from her. she’s cheering for the wrong team on the amazing race, but no one is perfect.

2) i have found my dad a Christmas present which he will like very much. as frugal blake is a blog reader (it’s free!) i will not go into details until 25 december 2007, but let’s just say for now that i think he will be very pleased.

1) last night sela woke me up squealing loudly, "wee! wee, wee wee wee!" i ran into her room (which is also carys’, jasper’s and sebastian’s room) and found her holding her crotch and sitting upright in bed.

"do you need to do a wee?" i asked her

"yes", she confusedly confirmed

"fantastic job, sela" i congratulated her and led her to the toilet. the knickers were dry, the bed linen was dry.

waking up to do the wee is a monumental step. the bladder overruling the urge to sleep is huge. i still have dreams that i am sitting on the toilet doing a wee and i wake up only to find that i am still cosy in bed with a bursting bladder.

yesterday jasper nearly was very badly hurt.

we were walking towards park n’ shop (me to shop and the kids to go the park) and jasper broke from my grasp and trotted a few feet ahead of me. i let him go. gary was holding sela’s hand, i had cary’s sweet little paw, and jasper was at the front.

behind us there was the #28 bus.  buses in hong kong do go notoriously fast but it was my child that darted out into the middle of the street. i saw him turn at the crosswalk and said, "stop, jasper" but he didn’t. he took a step out into the street and then another.

i let go of carys’ hand and lunged at jasper. someone screamed. it wasn’t me. i watched this observer scream. gary also pulled at jasper and because he went around (i tried to pull jasper over the waist high bars) he got to him. and then i felt like vomitting. did he really come close to dying? why were all these people watching us? a mum i know passed by and put her hand on my shoulder. i appreciated that.

jasper. i swalled the lump of vomit and tears in my throat and looked at him. tried to give a lecture but he burst into tears. i crossed the street with gary and delivered the kids to the playground. it was AWFUL. those are the only words for it, folks.

i went about my shopping, and was nervy and cross. i wanted to poke my fingers in a mango and feel the flesh under my fingernails. you would think, i would be delicate and gentle with the precious mangp but i was just so angry. what if he had been hit.

i was so upset i even forgot to be shocked at the appallingly high grocery bill.

i came home and told charles (who is in india today) what had happened. he made me feel better.

i told someone else what had happened and she said, "well, you aren’t a bad mum."

i had never thought of that. me, a bad mum?"

and, she continued, it’s not because you have so many kids. you have good control of the kids.

if you saw a child get hit by a car and saw that the mum had lots of kids, would you think "oh, she couldn’t control them?"

new thought and possibly, once i get over my anger at jasper surviving his early preemie days only to die for not listening to me and being an idiot, a nice new paranoid thought to creep me into the bell jar.

jump over to charles’ blog to witness sebastian’s karate lesson!

sebastian + viola sitting in a tree

monday morning when library mum popped her head into the doorway of sebastian’s class for a little bit of observation before rounding up the kids and heading off to the library i observed that things were a little bit askew at sebastian’s table.

both he and rufus were chatting to girls.

how nice, i thought. that’s good. rufus and sebastian remain very good friends and i like the friendship. they get along quite well. i helped another table use their parachute words of the day "and" and "but" and then it was time to distribute library pockets (library books are kept inside) and head up to the library.

i noticed that sebastian stood in line and walked to the library with this girl, a very sweet girl i know as viola. how nice, i thought, that’s good. during the library session, sebastian and rufus hung out together and looked at beano comics with a few other boys. i helped sebastian select a chapter book which i am reading to him at home, the littlest dragon.

then it was time for circle time reading. as the kids gathered round me (this takes a long time), i noticed that rufus was jockeying to sit next to sebastian and a girl was jockeying to sit next to rufus. sebastian was already sitting down next to viola. how odd, i thought, and instead of sweeping my arms in hen like movements to get the kids next to me, i neglected the class and observed my child.

i saw viola and sebastian hold their library pockets up to their faces, drop them down to their noses, and then past their mouths MAKE KISSING GESTURES AND THEN LIFT THEIR LIBRARY POCKETS UP TO THEIR FACES AGAIN. it was like a national geographic special on whooping cranes in the marshes except it was my child in the library! they giggled and then when they saw me observing them, blushed and looked at each other.

i didn’t know the best way to handle this. be stern and say "If you’re finished!" ignore them? croon an air supply song? congratulate viola on her obvious good taste?

i chose to ignore.

rufus’ girl has a tougher time ahead of her. good luck jerrie.

sebastian walked down the stairs with rufus.

but !!!!

i asked him at home, infront of mr scott, about a few of the girls in his class. scott was there so sebastian was unusually expansive, and i think i got scott to ask the first question which helped. and so i asked sebastian about a few of the girls and then i said, "i think viola is a really nice girl" and then he clasped his hands and turned them inside out and said, "yes, she is, she is my favourite." to which, i asked the innocent question, and not an entirely far fetched one seeing that i had observed both she and my son making a smooch face…"is viola a kissy girl"?

and sebastian got almost affronted. "oh no!" he said seriously. "not viola".

i think this little friendship has a lifespan of two more weeks, and then we will see what will happen. maybe jerrie will have cracked rufus by then which automatically will extend the romance as jerrie and viola are friends. the laws of romance.

"can it be that life was so simple then"

whether barbra is singing about life pre-yentl or the life of a child, i’m not certain, but honestly, they really are experts at simplification.

the other day, i was giving explicit colours to the girls new stripy sweaters, much to their rapture. the light green was "mint" the red was "cerise", the blue was "azure". the girls were repeating the words and then promptly forgetting them, so their fingers were travelling up and down their arms with the repeated question, "mummy, what colour is this?" it was a great way to spend time in a taxi.

finally, expecting that young jasper might be feeling out of sorts, i looked over at him and he said expectantly, pointing to a sticker he had received in sunday school, "mummy, what’s this?" and i said,

"that’s gold, jasper!"

and he replied with faint derision "no mummy, that’s a star".

we’ve had a friend staying wtih us for the past couple of days, scott is a favourite guest because he comes and goes easily, is happy to read lots of books, never compares the kids to other kids, is indpendent, he comes and goes, is happy to listen to one sentence kids stoires that take 10 minute to complete and never interrupts and has the kids screaming with laughter with his own tales. i hear them outside his room at 7am, they’re scuttling around, and then one of them will remember he is in the playroom and the one child who has a memory will say, "oh! shh! mr scott!" and the rest of them will quiet down, and as a group i will hear them taking three silent steps away from the playroom door and then the noise level raises again.

i laugh at my kids.

the weather here, for those who are interested, is chilly in the mornings but generally quite nice, high teens, in the afternoon, even early 20’s. but thse early morning…crikey!!! cold kids hands touching me, their little feet walking over mine because they refuse to wear slippers…come on!

the aftermath

the party went very well, thank you very much. only 35 kids had pre-registered for the party, but over 60 showed up. we had ordered 13 pizzas, and other parents had brought noodles (i had brought some nut free cookies and some crackers and cheese for the parents!) and there was not a crumb left. one of the mothers was complaining! she had not done a thing all night, and yet there she was complaining that there wasn’t enough food. here is a sample of the conversation:

"where’s the pizza?"

"it’s all gone, the kids finished it up in a spectacular fashion."

"so there’s nothing for me to eat?"

me, in a meaningful tone "well, we did ask parents to contribute a dish so there would be more food, however not every parent did".

"well, what am i to eat?"

"i know, i have been here setting up and i haven’t eaten anything either. but still, it’s the kids night, right? and they got something to eat, so that’s what counts."

scissors are great for pizza, because they allow you to use the pizza box and make plates out of the cardboard. i brought an apron and kept my scissors at the ready.

my kids (jasper in regular shoes) excelled at the rubber chicken toss, the ring throw, and spent the majority of their time in the bouncy castle. prudently, we shut down the bouncy castle post pizza, because the last thing we wanted was someone vomitting up their meal.

it was a good event.

it was not so good driving home. the sugar had kicked in and the kids were alternately giggling and screaming and crying. not sure why they were crying, possibly every time one of their balloons escaped their grasp. i had a little bet with myself to see whose balloon would pop first and when. i lost whose, but won, as someone’s balloon (sela’s) popped while we were driving home. she asked marianne to blow it up again. not even my stellar sewing skills could fix that balloon!

inside the house there were more tears and sorrow. wiping the facepaint off the girls faces was cause for tears, as the sugar high came crashing down.

one quick book, and everyone was in bed.

this morning, the post apocolyptic behaviour continued. they were all appalling, and continue to be so. i feel very sorry for their teachers today. they will have naps. and i might too.