The Household COO

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During our very brief visit to Shanghai, the hubby and I discovered one very important point of note - don’t bother eating at the airport unless you are starving.  Yes.  It is THAT bad.  Not only that, it is very expensive for food that is terrible.

We woke up early on Sunday morning and got our bags packed.  After taking a quick look at the buffet spread at the hotel, we decided to delay gratifying our stomachs and check out the food selection at the airport.  I swear my mind had been conjuring up images of Shanghai dumplings and various other delectable Dim Sum dishes.

In our haste to get to the airport, we forgot that we were too early to check-in.  Taking a walk to the back of the airport revealed little.  We assumed the restaurants must have been located near the departure lounges.  Returning to the check-in queue, we waited and waited and waited and waited.  The staff refused to open the counters to let us check-in, instead they went about their social chit-chatting and pointedly ignored us.

The hubby, by this time, was fuming.  He never did have much patience on an empty stomach.  When they finally opened their counters, we found ourselves traipsing all the way to the other end of the airport to get to our boarding gate.  Once inside, we discovered that there wasn’t much duty-free shopping to look at, nor was there a terribly good choice of cuisine available - definitely no Shanghai dumplings or Dim Sum.

My fried rice was disappointingly “underwhelming” and the hubby’s noodles little better.  By the time we were served our lunch on the flight, the hubby was so hungry that he gobbled down the aeroplane food as though it was the best tasted food he had ever come across.

Based on this short experience, I’m not sure that the hubby is too keen to revisit Shanghai again.

A pickpocket is bad. A snatch thief is worse. But the lowest of the low has got to be the mugger who mugs a kindly old gentleman like this one:

Yes. He is my grandpa. One of the sweetest old men I have ever known. He’s 92 years old and he was mugged right outside his house. I can only thank God that he wasn’t hurt but it makes me sick to think of the coward who could perform such a dastardly act.

Announcing the arrival of my handsome, future world champion golfer (I’m his mother - that gives me the the braging rights to state whatever I want):

Gavin Goh Khye Wern

He arrived safely at 5:33pm on January 27. At 49cm tall, he weighed in at 4kgs. Here are a couple of photos.

I will be on a blogging hiatus for the next month since I’ll be heading into the hospital for my induction tonight. If I can, I will update the Baby Blog within the next week or so. Please feel free to visit me there.

We’ll be back with more updates as soon as baby and I have settled into a routine.

The Seven Year Itch is defined as the boredom a married person experiences in their relationship after about seven years where they contemplate starting a sexual relationship with another person. Why seven years? Beats me. I suppose you could also ask the same thing about “the six degrees of separation“. Why six?

Well, it seems regardless of whether you’re married, in a defacto relationship or just an exclusive relationship with the same person for a number of years, I guess everyone is susceptible to the seven year itch. I can’t really say I’ve personally experienced it. I guess I’ve been fortunate, or unfortunate, depending on your perspective, to have never had a long lasting relationship, save the one that I am in now and even then I could hardly define my two year plus relationship as long lasting. Nevertheless, I’ve had friends who been dating their partners for eons only to fall apart after everyone had deemed them soulmates to be bonded together forever.

Inevitably, each time, the stated reason why the relationship died was because it had lost its “spark”. Just what exactly is this “spark”? The romance? The excitement? We all know that that is just something that happens at the commencement of a relationship and it usually fades as we get to know our partners better. So what exactly is meant when we talk about “spark”? Or is it just an excuse to check if the grass really is greener in another field?

If I would have to define the “spark”, I would say it’s those little things that we do for our partners that are totally unexpected, but appreciated by our partner as gestures of love. We often do these things early on in a relationship, but as the relationship progresses, such little gestures fade away as we fall into the humdrum of everyday life. After a while, the relationship progresses to one of companionship and we start to wonder what happened to the “spark”? We even start to wonder if perhaps we’ve simply “fallen out of love” with our partners. In steps someone new, bringing the romance and excitement of a new relationship, and suddenly we’ve fallen prey to the seven year itch.

Recently a friend of mind had an affair outside of her five year relationship. She described her relationship before the affair and it certainly sounded to me like she was going through the so-called “seven year itch” phase. During our conversation, she had also said, “If **** had asked me to marry him two years ago, I would have and I would have been settled.” She was convinced that marriage would have made the difference in stopping the affair from happening, but I wonder…

Is it fair to state that marriage would stop such affairs from happening? If that were the case, then how do we explain the increasing rates of divorce? Is it the general notion that something legally binding would act as a greater hindrance to the development of an affair? Or are we just fooling ourselves into believing in the power of that piece of paper?

Back when the hubby and I were planning our wedding, we had a clash of cultures. My Christian faith meant that I should not participate in any form of ancestral worship and hubby could not allow a Christian ceremony, even if it were just a blessing service, if I would not fulfil the requirements of his ancestors. It was pretty much tit for tat.

I spoke to various other couples in similar situations for guidance on what I should do. Some of those couples had agreed not to perform any of the ceremonies and it had been my intention to follow suit. As the wedding day drew nearer, I realised that for me, our marriage would have been meaningless without our pledge to each other before God. For me, that piece of paper was just that - a piece of paper, tedious and necessary paperwork but nothing more. The true sanctity of our marriage lay in our pledge to each other. For my hubby, the sanctity of our marriage was symbolised by the lighting jost sticks and serving tea to his ancestors.
So for us, it wasn’t about that piece of paper. It was about our individual practices that meant more than any piece of paper. Then when I think about what Soul Doctor said, I realise that for others, nothing is required - not a piece of paper, and not a symbolic ceremony. What really binds us together is that which is in our minds. To keep the faith with our partners, we have to keep fanning the flames. For individual couples, keeping the passion alive requires different actions, but the important thing is that we continue to do what is necessary throughout our relationship. The real danger is when we stop doing these things.

They say that the wisest person learns from the mistakes of others. Well, I’d like to be wise and the lesson I have learned is that a simple gesture, even one as small as putting a little more effort into my preparation of dinner, is sometimes all that is necessary for me to express to hubby that I care. Perhaps it’s easy for me to make such statements since I’ve never experienced the seven year itch myself. Regardless, I’d like to think that it’s just a question of how we deal with it individually.

There’s an article that talks about how couples beat the seven year itch which makes for pretty good reading. What I’m curious to know is this: is there a way back after a couple experiences the seven year itch? What I mean to ask is: is there a possibility of saving the relationship once that boundary has been crossed? Being the hopeful romantic that I am, I’d like to think that there is, but then again, it takes two hands to clap therefore both parties have to want to salvage the relationship before anything can happen.

A few days ago, I read a post on Big Big Planet that got me thinking about the good old days of being free and single. I won’t lie and say that marriage is all it’s cracked up to be because there are many moments of ups and downs and sometimes during a moment of an extreme down, one starts to wonders why we even persevere with it at all. Those are probably the times when we’re most proned to reminisce about life before tying the big knot and thinking, “Wasn’t it so much better back then?”

Even though these thoughts fleet through my head every now and again, I think the best thing about getting married has been this blessed little baby I now carry inside my womb. Call it “becoming a Mummy”, but I never thought someone so small could mean so much to me even before he is born. If I seem obsessive over him and easily antagonised by external influences, however well intentioned, it’s probably because I am a first time Mum.

Getting back to the point on the advancement towards marriage… With all things in life, there must be progression and this is what I believe leads to marriage and subsequently, children. We start to get older and suddenly we question our mortality like it’s the first time we’ve discovered it. Perhaps we’re all just selfishly afraid of old age and cannot bear the thought of growing old alone, so we marry a person and surround ourselves with children as part of a personal insurance policy that we won’t end up alone.

Soul Doctor wrote: “Maybe my man and I are the new kind of ‘insecure’ people who give little trust to a piece of marriage paper that is believed to be able bind two person together, given the fact that it is easy to file a divorce.”

She calls it an ‘insecurity’, but I look at it as a sign of self assurance and confidence in one’s partner. I applaud her courage in taking a bold step within an old-fashioned society that still frowns upon such modern thinking. I feel I might have liked to have had a child out of wed-lock, except that I know it would have landed one of my relatives in hospital for a cardiac arrest, so I went ahead and did the right thing. Then again, whether you can call it the “right” thing depends on an individual’s definition on what exactly differentiates “right” from “wrong”.

It is true that is far too easy to file for a divorce these days, easier perhaps than it is to get married. I was recently helping a friend compile his legal documentation so that he could marry someone from China. After cutting through tedious amounts of red tape, he remarked to me, “I think it’s easier to get a divorce than it is to get married.” Indeed, it would seem that way…

With the obstacles staking up against marriage, one might wonder if it is worth the effort, especially if you take into consideration the “tug-of-war” that inevitably ensues post marriage as described in Big Big Planet. But if I get really metaphysical about it, I suppose all these struggles and obstacles are merely to make life interesting as we progress through this journey searching for balance, harmony and peace. In reality, we don’t really want balance, harmony and peace, what we secretly yearn for is excitement, change and controversy although we pretend that we don’t.

So is that all it boils down to? The idea of marriage is just another way of keeping our lives interesting? Is that the reason why some people cheat on their spouses? Because of the lack of excitement, change and controversy in their lives? I suppose this is whole different can of worms that I won’t talk about here.

Well, I would like to think that hubby and I got married because of love. Will we still be romantically in love after twenty years down the line? Well, if I’m still blogging, I’ll tell you.

It was the anniversary of our marriage registration yesterday. I’d almost forgotten until the hubby mentioned it while we were on the way to our prenatal class at Pantai Hospital.

Isn’t it ironic? I’m the woman and I have to be reminded by my husband that a year ago from yesterday we were legally married. I guess I never thought much about it because I’d always considered our real anniversary to be the day we had the ceremony, but I suppose yesterday was still legitimately as much our anniversary as January 8 is.

I suppose most people usually consider the ceremony as the more important part of the wedding, but from a technical standpoint, or rather, a legal one, it’s the registration date that is the real anniversary - isn’t it?

Oh well… Happy registration anniversary, dear…

They say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Well, I’ve never professed to have had any culinary skills. I can cook but if is somewhat debatable whether you can consider what I produce to be food. Minus my spaghetti bolognaise (which I confess I cheat with the recipe but I’m not about to reveal the secret to my success for that lovely little “under 30-minute” dish here), there really isn’t anything else I can claim to cook with any real proficiency.

My previous attempt to cook a nice Chinese meal was a severe disaster. I managed to spill half the bottle of salt into the eggs, my stir-fried veggies looked like mush (and tasted like mush), and the packet sauce I bought to flavour my meat dish was so full of oil it could make your heart stop just by looking at it. Needless to say, the hubby was quite unimpressed by my thirty minute effort to whip up a meal.

I’ll confess that my weakness in cooking lies in the fact that I find it tedious if I have to spend longer than thirty minutes in the kitchen. I also dislike recipes that require me to think a day in advance what I’m going to cook the next day because of the preparation involved. But even I was quite abashed by the slop I produced so I was determined to make last night’s dinner a hit.

In my attempt to vary the food, I bought two new types of veggies I have never cooked before. Thinking that with a variety of two I was sure to get at least a 50% hit rate, I went along on my merry way. Sad to say I came up with a zero because hubby hated both of veggies that I bought. I don’t think I did too badly as far as preparation and taste were concerned. It was just unfortunate that the ingredients weren’t agreeable to the hubby’s palate.

Perhaps the problem is that I love to experiment with my cooking and the problem with experiments are that they often do go wrong. Then again, if I were content to stick to the same winning combination, we’d probably be eating the same food everyday. The other problem is that I’m far too easy going where food is concerned. I’m the sort of person who eats to live and I ended up marrying a man who lives to eat.

I guess it’s all part of the learning process of being married. Somewhere along the way, we’re going to find the middle ground. Until then, hubby’s tastebuds will have to endure some suffering and my ego will have to endure some bashing.