putting the kids to bed is not only a relief and a very enjoyable time of day for me, but an opportunity to see my offspring’s personalities in action. not so much their sleeping positions, but what it takes to get them to sleep shows in what direction the kids are heading.

young sebastian still dotes on Special Blanket. although Special Blanket did not come on holidays with us and does not leave the house, when based in hong kong, sebastian requires Special Blanket to get to sleep. or believes he does. many smart parents out there have two of whatever it is their child is addicted to. i do not have two Special Blankets, but i do have a cousin to Special Blanket, the same blanket except one side does not have a white background with tiny puppy dogs frolicking across it. it can be used in a pinch, but he won’t cuddle it. he will accept it on his bed, but he won’t rub the tag between his fingers and hold it beneath his nose like he does the original, the vintage Special Blanket.

jasper is attached to nothing. he has a blanket, but it isnt necessary. i have never once been called into the bedroom by jasper because he is unable to sleep unless something is returned to him. toys, they’re okay. jasper is still drawn to the bottom of his bed, nearer his sisters. he usually sleeps in that position, head at the bottom of the bed, and still occasionally falls out of bed. but no "sleep props" for him. he is a totally independent dude, dependant on the company of others.

SURPRISE carys does not, cannot, will not sleep without BEBE. BEBE is the equivalent of Special Blanket for her. however, there have been occasions recently where we have disciplined her by removing BEBE. while that may seem a road that will just lead straight to a therapist’s office, what were we to do and b: i love therapy!! at night she was handing BEBE to sela and jasper and they were playing a merry little game of pass the BEBE that would only stop when BEBE was dropped or they started dropping off to sleep. mc caught them in action and said, "you don’t want BEBE, i will take her away." and he did. and she cried and got all snotty. and after three removals and sleepless nights for carys (BEBE seemed to enjoy the break away though)…she stopped carelessly passing BEBE around.

sela is a true bedtime packrat. her beloved is spongebob square pants (although like BEBE and Special Blanket, SBSP does not come on holidays with us), but our social miss also requires the pillow made for her by peach, a blanket (actually a face flannel but who are we to argue with her perspective?) give to her by sandi, and BEBE’s sister, courtesy of dale. and of course, if one of her friends lent her something, it has to come to bed as well, and possibly a doll or some other toy. she mothers them all and covers BEBE’s sister carefully with the sandi blanket. i once assumed that having SBSP would be enough for her and left off a few of the integral players. MISTAKE. she yowled and protested, "MY BLANKET! MY BABY!" loudly until i handed them over to her, whereapon she smiled, said, "thank you" and snuggled down, thumb in mouth heading off to sleep sure in the knowledge that her kingdom was in order.

carys the fairest

something really divine happened the other day. i was chatting with a friend of mine about life, God and dreams and she asked to see a picture of my kids. my friend is french, and very well put together in the hair, accessories, shoes and clothes department. i have always thought of her as being very attractive. and her eyes, hot-cha-cha!!

she was looking at pictures of the kids, when she did a quick intake of her breath and quietly said,

oh goodness.

i looked at her and said, "what’s up?"

and she responded, "that daughter there, which one is she? carys? she looks identical to how i used to as a child. identical."

i stepped back and looked at my friend’s face. carys’ skin is lighter and her eyes are paler, but yes, there is a resemblance. i have always known that little lulu looks like my dad, but no one wants to imagine their daughter looking like their dad. unless he is like clay aiken or liza minelli’s ex, david gest, and quite feminine to begin with.

but looking at my friend, i saw what carys might look like in coming years as a woman resembling my father. i was so overwhelmed. i have wondered, with the pressing of the machines and the prematurity what her face might look like…but if she continues to resemble my friend, (and my dad just in a more feminine way), she will be beautiful.

x x x x

the little beauty is ill right now. she vomitted at ppa. all over her new shirt and she cried with the shame of it all. she came home early for hugs and cuddles and just wanted to be held and comforted. it is nothing terrible, a temperature and she smells funny (even after baths), but she is pretty miserable. poor little kitten. most of the time if she isn’t being cuddled (and it is tough to type with a child in your lap even if they are being very very still), she is standing bewildered in the middle of a room, holding BEBE to her and wailing in misery. she just vomitted up her tylenol, i have re-medicated her and hope that stays down. little sweetheart.

until last month, as long as sebastian wasn’t around, i could do pretty much anything i liked at home and know that unless i told magnificent about it, he wouldn’t find out.

and even if sebastian was around, a well timed distraction (movie, sweetie…depending on how much time i needed), could get me confidentiality.

however, those verbal triplets are getting me and others in trouble.

i guess it is my own fault for encouraging them to talk. but really, if they don’t stop making my life difficult and embarrassing me, i will stop reading to them. they have no problem repeating things i would rather they didnt. they bust me. i need to face it (and change my activities accordingly) – i am no longer the sole gatekeeper of information. there are four security leaks in holland’s dam, and i only have one finger to plug up leaks, if you will.

jasper isn’t really a fink, but he is a repeater. so something that might slide by if said once, jasper has to repeat until it sinks into mc’s psyche.

ie: friday.

i had a weakness and consumed a not unsubstantial bag of nibs. let’s blame it on pms. magnificent got home and wondered why i wasn’t overly enthusiastic about going out for dinner. i hemmed and hawed, actually tried distracting him a la sebastian. but then good old jasper trundled along and mentioned, "mummy ate sweeties, daddy." and when mc didn’t respond, he turned up the volume and repeated his statement until magchar looked at me and said, "what did you eat?"

and then i had to tell him.

carys is a finder and revealer of secrets, definitely the first and occasionally the second. in years to come, she will store the sights she discovers up, waiting to trade them in for favours. but for now, she is fast to repeat what her siblings say, or to share with her siblings what she has seen. seb doesn’t so much listen to her, she takes too long to speak, but the others certainly do.

the other day carys came across me filing some shoes away for Christmas. girlie shoes. and i explained they were for a long time for now, to be quiet…and my little girlie-whirlie got up, raced down the hallway calling for sela. shared the news with her and the next thing i know, sela is up to me, arms pumping and shoulders hunched (the way she runs) and interrogating me, "pitty shoes? carwis said pitty shoes?"

sela herself is loud, and no good in the secrets department. life has so much variety and she is just bursting to tell you all about it because it is so exciting and interesting. we were singing the goodnight song tonight and after singing to grandparents, aunts, dora, swiper, boots, diego, sally,  adam, ashley, ellen, baby ella, baby zahlia, tallinn, abby, daddy, chahlie and assorted others, we got to tallulah. suddenly sela held up the songest and declared, "tallulah got time out."

i looked at de, and he confirmed that in the playground tallulah had been given a time out.  sela nodded and kept singing.

she’s like the ticker tape at the bottom of cnn, continually updating you.

i have to say, i look back to the olden days when i could do whatever and not worry about being finked out by three little people with fondness. you would think they would show some gratitude and not bust the one who helped them learn and speak. but then again, dora, the wiggles, bob the builder, and leapfrog tad probably get more credit than i do.

on another topic entirely, jasper is having a tough time doing his poos in the toilet.  we’re encouraging him, but it is frustrating. sunday, he informed his daddy that he needed to do a wee and a poo, so ,c put the blonde beast of burden on the toilet. thespian grunts followed.

where is your poopers, jasper? inquired mcharles, the most loving and patient man i know.

in the toilet, daddy, responded the impish jude, throwing in a few grunts for good measure, so we could get an idea of what a task he was enduring.

charles checked and realised that jasper was not telling the truth.

jasper! he said, quite firmly for him. where is your poopers?

and jasper looked at his dad and said, "it’s in my bum".

well, at least some things can still be hidden.  which around here is a rarity.

next year i won’t care

one of the best lines from rick warren’s THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE can be paraphrased as such:

90 per cent of what you are worrying about now, will be unimportant this time next year.

the first time i read that i said to myself,

"hmmm, what was i worrying about last year? probably only big things."

but you know, if i think back to what i was worrying about in october 2005, i really cant remember specifics. i am sure the generals were there: good health, sebastian’s hearing tests, and ??

i certainly wasn’t worrying if there would be freshly made custard filled chocolate frosted krispy kreme donuts, which is now a dominant concern in my life every time i take the #22 bus into central.

monday, i will go in to the hospital for a three hour surgery, a three day hospital stay, and a new caesarean, all in the name of removing irritating, ambitious fibroid. yet have i given that much thought? not alot. what have i been thinking about? schooling for my children, sebastian’s party, financing for various endeavors and a relationship. if we are meant to stay in hong kong, and if not…where to go? and there are other things, i forget what they are though.

the book also reminds you that it is a waste of energy to worry about things that you haven’t a hope of changing.

next year, will i remember that i was worrying about the triplets all failing their hearing tests and if they all require grommets how we will tell their earplugs apart? (that was it, i knew i had forgotten something.) does worrying about the hearing fall under the 10 per cent of stuff that it is legit to be concerned about?

i still think the chances are good i will be concerned about the custard krispy kremes. the heart wants what it wants.

whether we’re stuffing krispy kreme’s into our faces or not taking the oprah and health department recommended 10,000 steps a day – we take our bodies forgranted. drinking, breathing, walking, moving your fingers…they are all wonderfully complex actions.

when i see my children at gymnastics, i am always reminded of their nicu days, and how far they have run, jumped and climbed from those early predictions. hearing issues and mild cp be ding dong double damned, my children are living normal lives. we are so blessed by God and we are so grateful.

not all children are so lucky. i received an email the other day from a fellow blogger, joe schmidt. his cousins son has OI, also known as brittle bone disease, which affects 20,000 americans. Osteogenesis Imperfecta…"

…literally means "bone that is imperfectly made from the beginning of life." OI is a genetic disorder of type 1 collagen– the protein "scaffolding" of bone and other connective tissues. People with OI have a faulty gene that instructs their bodies to make either too little type 1 collagen or a poor quality type 1 collagen. The result is that bones break easily.

today he is blogging about OI and his goal is to raise money and awareness for the OI foundation. drop by his blog. you are not obligated to donate any money, and learning about this disease is extremely enlightening. read. learn.

http://www.joeschmidt.com/blogathon

http://www.oif.org/blogathon

thank you for taking the time to make a difference joe, good luck.

friday is myday x 3

without a doubt friday is the triplets favourite day of the week. we start talking about fridays on monday.

what makes fridays so divine? playschool in the morning. oh how important they feel, being able to announce to their uniform clad older friends "i go school". if you are jasper you say, "thcool" but you know what he is saying, mainly because he repeats himself five or six times until you say, "yes, jasper, you do go to school". and then he nods, satisfied. "yeth".

so playschool. exercises, snack at a tiny table, cantonese stories, counting, playing…oh the excitement. the playschool is perfect for the triplets in that they aren’t the focus of attention at the school. their great friends charlie and tallinn are there, and charlie and tallinn live in our building and are blonde and caucasian as well. there are two chinese kids in the class, and they have no idea of triplets, they just know there is a blonde infusion into their classroom, which amuses them to no end.

so, playschool. very grownup, very entertaining.

but after playschool, and after lunch, and after naptime is

gymnastics.

saying the world gymnastics sends the triplets into the throes of excitement. the word is pronounced anywhere from ‘nastics! to gynsticnastic! always always with an exclamation mark at the end. gymnasics, the BEES KNEES. the final word. the perfect way to end their work week.

gymnastics. i love going, it makes me so happy to see my kids so enchanted.

sela has a bit of hero worship for sally, the patient and kind teacher. every time sela accomplishes a new task, she looks up, "sally! i did it!" and sally pops her head up and says, "yes pet! im watching!" sela has great upper body strength and can pull herself up and over the box horse and other apparatus very well. she also jumped two levels by herself and landed once on her feet! the other from her feet to her well padded caboose. (SALLY! i wear knickers! was from last week’s conversation).

carys, with those long legs, is great at scaling and climbing. she liked having sally nearby today when she kangaroo jumped ten spots and then climbed a ladder. she’s good at the "balance beam" as well, more adventurous than jasper, the same confidence as sela. (that’s saying something). carys is also learning to turn somersaults, which she enjoys. its interesting though, at home they flip somersaults on the couch faster than you can say DON"T!, but at gymnastics, our little lulu is not as willing to do it.

i mention jasper last because of the three, he enjoys ‘nastics the least. however, he enjoys it more than he enjoys any other physical activity, which makes gymnastics therefore, his favourite sport. today he really liked balancing the beanbag on his head and walking, mainly because it wasn’t too physically taxing, i think. sally gave him the opportunity to be the "mouse" in the warmup game of cats and mice…she tucked a "tail" into his shorts and said, "jasper is the mouse, the rest of you are cats, come on, grab his tail!"

he frisked about the gym giggling. enjoying having the other kids chase him. but after a few circuits, he slowed down, pulled the tail out of his pants, and handed it to his instructor, with a smile, "here, thally."

they love gymnastics.

it’s not like they were your ex-boyfriends…

is there an unwritten rule about inviting friends you met through friends over for dinner? IF you invite friends you met through friends for dinner and don’t invite the friends that introduced you in the first place … do the "catalyst couple" have a right to be angry?

i think the answer is i’m not sure.

one girlfriend holds a six year grudge because two people she introduced at one of her theme parties went on to become v. good buddies. "and they met because of me!" she cries whenever she hears that the two of them went on a holiday together or to the theatre.

obviously i ask for a reason. magnificent and i met a great couple through another friend of mine. we basically spent the entire party talking together. later on in the day, charles said what i had been thinking, "i would really like to see them again, we should have them for dinner."

the unsaid was hanging there. swaying like that giant spider we passed along bowen road yesterday.

"just the four of us?" i said, hopefully.

"yes".

"but how, charles? their last name is quite common."

"i remember where he works. i know people in that company, and i bet all you have to do is write his name with a dot between first and last name, then at then the company and i bet that’s his email."

"ooooh i lurrrve it when you are clever," (sound of smooch or two)

i suspect this friend would be upset if she knew we were planning on spending an evening with these people. i have no plans on telling her, because it falls under the category of NOYB.

but does she have a right to be upset? sometimes when i am flying across the ocean i miss big news stories. it is possible i missed ETIQUETTE’s millenium proclamation that you can’t invite friends you met through others unless the catalysts are invited as well.

why do i care.

wah! so careless!

how could i? after threatening to throw rocks at boulder if she even hinted at the outcome of tar10ep2 (she watches it 10 hours before i do), i cavalierly gave off information in the blogosphere! thank you writers for the careful reminders that south africa has not started tar10. i will be very careful. and if i can’t be careful, i will CAREFULLY warn you with a plain heading like TAR10 SPOILER.

having said that, ep2 was very impressive. i am NOT giving anything away (because they show this in the previews), but one team member fell off a horse but their foot stayed in the stirrup. and this person did not mention it again (or if they did, editing was working in their favour.) that impressed me, because i bet that HURT.

enough AR. more anal retentive.

how anal retentive am i, you ask? well, today i went through the closets and pulled out all the summer clothes the girls wore this past summer that i figure they will outgrow by next summer. how is THAT for closet cleaning with vengenance? i can’t believe how much they have grown in the past few months. and slimmed down.

yesterday i spent three hours approx in the duchess of kent rehab hospital with the triplets completing hearing tests. despite my anal retentive ways and the findings (jasper has conductive hearing loss in both ears and glue ear in both ears, carys has glue ear in one ear), i am giving myself two days of bliss before jumping into the world of going to general gp’s to get specialist referrals and googling conductive hearing loss. i just don’t feel strong enough right now to do the google and take all that information in. too much else going on.

moving away from ar to moral

with all the talk about did or didn’t marcia cross use donor egg…and the chances that a high percentage of celebs who conceive after the age of 40 (joan lunden, jane seymour, geena davis all became mums in their 40’s but refused to comment on whether the eggs were theirs or donor..) used donor eggs…don’t you think that in two decades, one of the highest selling items in the back of magazines is going to be a home dna kit? can’t you see the ads?

IS YOUR MUM OLD? DID SHE HAVE YOU WHEN SHE WAS OVER 40? CHANCES ARE, SHE MIGHT NOT BE YOUR REAL MUM. FOR $15.99 YOU CAN FIND OUT FOR SURE, WITH OUR HOME DNA KIT. ALL THE ANSWERS YOU NEED.

i can see why people might not want to tell their children and their relatives that their children are not theirs genetically. but given the high numbers of donor egg/sperm children being born, this joking ad will some day be a reality breaking some suspicious kid’s heart.

did you think

a few things you thought i might not have noticed

1) that the amazing race 10 started? (TAR10). tres naughty of me not to have commented but my heart has been a little bit crushed this last week and weekend. but let’s start simply by saying:

a) i am tired of "model" teams. wouldn’t one suffice?

b) sarah, a contestant who has a prosthetic leg, told people ahead of her in the taxi queue that she needed to take their taxi because of a medical emergency. in fact, she just wanted to get to the pitstop faster. was this wrong? my friends and i are divided in this camp. some people say

NO – she has been handed a tough course in life, let her take advantage of her disability where she can. the race is tough enough for her.

YES -it was a lie.

i fall into the second camp. also, this girl is an ironman athlete. she has achieved incredible things despite of her physical disability. lying about it just cheapens her accomplishments somehow.

c) i predict the top four finishers will be:

team model/rehab

team chobros

team ironman (aforementioned sarah and greg)

and this team that reminds me of team kelly and ron

tonight is episode two and i am trembling to watch.

2) item two

yesterday i had just finished eating cold indian food and suddenly i threw my volunteer science experiment away. am i digressing back into grade eight you inquire? possibly. it was more like i came home from summer vacation and found that even though i had THOUGHT i had secured the top of the cannister i keep the flour in VERY TIGHTLY, some renegade weevil had weasled its way in there. looking at the patterns it made in the flour, wondering why the tunnels didn’t collapse, watching the clear pupae (Where are the internal organs?) turn into sullen teens and then full fledged tunnel digging adults, waching the colony multiply, seeing the corpses of the adam and eve of the flour cannister and their offspring slowly pile up and the uncaring great grandkids stumble uncaringly over them fascinated me.

for the past two weeks i have kept the cannister right beside the water dispenser so the little critters can get maximum sunshine and so i can watch them frequently. when they were in the cupboard i wasn’t getting enough viewing time. it was my own little truman show. but suddenly last night i thought of them bursting out of the cannister and that combined with the cold curry made me shrug my shoulders and pitch the whole thing. charles wanted me to make a souffle of the flour, but i didn’t let him. i took a picture and will post it soon, it was the coolest thing. unfortunately, i was the only one that thought so. sebastian didn’t care about them the way i thought he might have.

3) the other day we were walking on bowen road. i was having a sad day and then i saw something that didn’t make me feel better but sure did a lot to make me smile, i saw a MASSIVE spider. really huge. i lifted up sebastian so he could get a better look at the arachnoid, and seb was totally impressed, if a little wary. i am usually not skittish about spiders, but even i, when raising my hand so we could get a good scale on the picture we took, was a little apprehensive. his web was so thick and stringy.

if we ask charles nicely he might post the pix soon.

4) am i the only person who doesn’t think tom cruise is crazy for not prostituting his child to the media? let me amend that statement. i think jumping couch tom is a few sandwiches short of a picnic but not because of the hiding the child from the paparazzi. i would have probably done the same thing. knowing the trash media, who would want to read that their child was ugly, or, as they’re doing now, resembles and ex-boyfriend? tom cruise def. gets my sympathy on this one.

whew, feel much better.

only six hours until tar10ep2.

ps – if any of you internet spies know which one of my kids drew on our monitor with a pen, please let me know. Oh, and Charles posted more video on his blog.

Bouncy, Bouncy Baby – Part 1

Oh dear, Charles has discovered You Tube. Well hopefully this will be a good thing for everyone… I think there will be some very funny videos coming your way soon. Please go to his blog to find out more.