Yesterday was a real palaver; La Serpiente gave us the real runaround and ended up being rushed off to school late, badly fed, teeth unbrushed, everyone cross at everyone else. Today she had a good sleep and woke about 7:15, and we were all copacetic. So much so that even though we had one of the most kamikaze drivers of the 75 bus in recent memory, I was still in a good enough mood to buy her a pain au chocolat and a babycinno at the Tiong Bahru Bakery.
Sadly I also purchased a coffee for myself. This was meant to be a great but I’d forgotten the stuff they make there has zero stimulant effect but laxative impact in triplicate; half an hour later I would be waddling to the office, clutching my guts and hoping to avoid embarassment. But for the time that La Serpiente and I spent outside the café, and walking to school as I tried to explain to her about ammonia, excretion of waste products and the effects of smoking, all was well.
My wife and I are both on antibiotics that have partially suppressed our senses of taste and smell. I say partially because I can’t taste anything nice, but I can still taste and smell bad things. Like the stink of piss in a back alley, for one. I suppose there’s some evolutionary advantage to being able to smell bad things: better to avoid treading in manure than being able to sniff the roses, perhaps? I did struggle to explain to La Serpiente about the nitrous fixing cycle in plants, the use of ammonia in bleach, and why smoking is bad for you, but I felt I made a reasonable fist of it. The schoolgates were without drama, and off I went to meet my coffee-fuelled horror.
This evening, my wife went out to see Sister Act at the Marina Bay Sands (we lucked into complimentary tickets and I figured I’d do better to babysit and put a dent in my work) so I put the kids to bed. As a great, or to mollify them while I ran baths, ate dinner, etc, I gave them a couple of cartoons on Netflix.
No kind deed goes unpunished. Ten minutes of the frankly execrable Max and Abbey later, and La Serpiente is telling me she’s scared of the Ghost Rabbit, when the episode it was in tool great pains to explain it was entirely fictitious. It’s like the utter terror that is My Little Pony, without the worrying racist subtext, but with even worse animation.
However, despite a few protests, they both went to sleep easily (as usual, two parents are less than half as good as one parent when it comes to bath- and bedtime) leaving me time to tidy up a few things I meant to do before I left the office, and pay for my luggage on our flights to Perth this Saturday, and change my birthdate in the airline’s system from 22 March 1986 to the correct date. And then spend ten minutes figuring out how to not pay for the travel insurance they really, really wanted me to purchase.
Living the dream here, living the dream.
