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When I’m not doing these things, I’m agonising over my work outfits because I’ve lost 6kg and almost every item of clothing I own is now too loose. Which is great for shopping but not so great for my wallet. I haven’t been able to run in the last two weeks, though, because I contrived to injure first my left calf, and now my left knee. Doctors have ordered me not to run, which means that all my good work in preparation for the upcoming 10km at the Stanchart Marathon has gone to the dogs.

The bright side is that I have finally, after six months, been confirmed as a full-time employee of the organisation. This is the first time in my working life that the confirmation period has been anything longer than three months, so you can imagine what a wait it was. Plus the paperwork took awhile, because HR forgot, but it’s all done now.

The even brighter side of life is that we are all packing up and heading north to Kuala Lumpur this Thursday, to attend my cousin’s wedding. KL is not really all that exciting a place to holiday in, but I’ll take what I can get! Technically, none of us at work is supposed to take leave until after the black hole is gone, but weddings are good excuses. So off we go on a road trip.

The girls are going to be flowergirls at the wedding, and my mom bought them their foofy dresses when she was in Hong Kong earlier this week. I’m so thankful she found them there because the same dresses here in Singapore would cost four times what they cost in Hong Kong. The girls are thrilled to bits, can you tell?

These dresses were only S$30 each!

K and I always visit the topic of whether it’s better for women to have their babies earlier or later. I belong to the former category of mothers – married at 21, first baby at 23, second baby four years later, and in between all that I changed jobs quite a few times because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my career, such as it were. I also took breaks totalling two years because of the babies. Now that both Alison and Zoe are quite big and independent, I’ve entered into the next phase of my life, which stretches 30-odd years ahead of me. This is where I work and work and work and try to get somewhere, not because I really want to but because doing so provides some sort of guarantee that our retirement years will not be fraught with financial worries.

My friends are only just now getting married and having babies. They’ve had years to do whatever they like and enjoy the finer things in life without worrying about milk money. Now they have to give it all up for colic, poopy diapers and teething. I’ve done all that in my twenties, but I haven’t travelled anywhere much, haven’t had time to do the things I want to do like take knitting lessons, dive more, go backpacking, learn a foreign language for longer than 2 months. No, I’ll get to do all that in, maybe, six to 10 years’ time.

You gotta wonder which is the better option. And why does all this remind me of “I’ve Never Been to Me?“

The other day, Alison left a bowl of fried rice laden with Chinese sausage slices to go and get a drink, and returned to find that every last slice of sausage had disappeared from her dinner. She was hopping mad of course. The culprit, however, very smartly claimed that she was “just sharing because Mommy said we have to share”. Another time, this self-same culprit shook her little fist at my mother-in-law, who had to swallow her chuckles and put on a stern face while she enforced a time-out.

These things while naughty are funny, yes, and cute, yes, but it’s the fighting that really gets my goat. No mother wants to return from a day’s work to see her kids going at it tooth and nail but increasingly, that’s what I’m being treated to. Alison and Zoe are each at different stages of development, but the shared characteristic is that neither wants to back down in a fight. Which translates to neverending spats. Which makes me want to scream, pull my hair out, pull THEIR hair out. Anything to make it stop. I really hope that this passes soon. Is it any wonder that we’ve only just returned from Tokyo and already I’m dreaming about our next holiday?

This one will be all about writing…

1. I actually express myself better in writing than verbally. I can get all tongue-tied in an argument, but give me some time to write a good, long letter and I’ll rebut everything you say point for point and more. I also suffer from malapropism and tend to trip over my words. My friend June says that’s a mark of intelligence because my brain is working so fast my mouth can’t keep up, but I wouldn’t know about that.

2. Writing was never an ambition. I wanted to be, at various points, a hotelier, a zoologist and a professional pianist.

3. I turned down a plum job at Ogilvy & Mather because it paid a pittance. It made the late Shane Weaver, who offered the job to me, very very very angry. I believe an apt phrase for his reaction is “apoplectic with rage”. I think I would have been a better writer if I had taken the job, though.

4. I write best when the deadline is about to pass, or when it’s very late at night.

5. Believe it or not, my first paid writing job was a makeup review for the now-defunct missKat.com. A supreme irony, given that I’m pretty bad at applying makeup and seldom wear any!

6. I think I might have scraped through school with third-class honours instead of a second lower if not for the supposed brilliance of my honours thesis. My coursework was pure rubbish because I was too busy dating K. Ha!

7. I have started and abandoned three novels. Actually, they can’t even be considered novels. More like unfinished short stories.

8. I took a comedy scriptwriting course at MediaCorp several years ago in which our assignment was to write a full length script for Phua Chu Kang. I didn’t finish mine because I simply don’t know how to be slapstick. One of my classmates was Imran Johri, who went on to do pretty well as a writer for MediaCorp before moving on to other writerly jobs.