Monday, September 17, 2012

Music workshop at the Playeum

Writing the blog is one of those little frivolous things that i do everyday at lunch that gives some time for my head to come out of my day to day work and reflect on the simple pleasures in life.

It is also one of the experiences that can sometimes be very emotionally intense that changes fundamentally how you experience an event in life because you have to, in writing the blog, experience it again. As such, it gives you a chance to reanalyze a situation and determine whether anything in it could have been changed.

We had an awesome time at the playeum yesterday. There was a program on tootsie Roll Rap - a workshop combining poetry and music. Parts of it was somewhat advanced for the kids, but they really enjoyed it, especially Anjali, who came up with some rather cheeky poems about husband


There is something very funnny about listening to your six your old putting a tune to "My daddy is a dementor who sucked out my soul"

There is a lot of Harry Potter going on at home these days. We finished HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban and I overheard Anjali and Sophia playing with wands (pick up sticks). It went something like this:

Anjali: I am going to turn you into Voldemort.
 Sophia (with a bit of thought): I am going to turn you into Sirius Black
After that, we took a double decker bus for an "adventure" as Anjali called it. It was an adventure, but more on that in a minute.

We were discussing in the bus on how to add verseus to the daddy poem.

"My daddy is a hippogriff?", I suggested
"To friendly", said Anjali
"Right", I said, thinking. "How about ... an acromantula?"
"Too medium", by which I supposed she meant that it was not scary enough, and sure enough...
"I want daddy to be something very wicked, like Dementors or Voldemort", she said
"Ok... What about a Basilisk?", I asked.
"Thats good", she said.

We got off somewhere along Dunearn Road to wait for our bus back. It was 852, a SMRT bus. We were sitting on the front row and I noticed that Anjali's hair was falling over her eyes.  It was when i was digging my handbag for a hairclip that the driver put a sudden brake and the kid fell forward.

There was an inordinate amount of blood and a couple of open cuts. Some friendly people in the bus took us to the 24 hour clinic and we found out that she needed to go to NUH to get stitches.

We ought to get frequent  visitor discounts for Sunday visits to NUH.

The doctor wanted to put Anjali under a partial sedation - the kind where you have to fast five hours, since he was sure that no five year old would sit through stitches while conscious. But the doctor hadnt reckoned that Anjali had been previously under sedation, and knows about the many many digestive disadvantages of a sedative drug. Also, given that the kid has a Coat's surgery coming up I didnt want her to be sedated twice in two weeks. So we spoke with her and she agreed to the procedure on local anasthesia. I was surprised that she agreed, there is always a risk with a five year old that she would chicken out half way through the process, but we told her all sorts of things, about how Sophia would tell her friends how brave Anjali had been and how mummy had had an anasthesia when I had had my teeth taken out (thankfully that was fairly recent and she remembers that in the evening I was able to read to her and was feeling fine in a day or so)

We put her on the procedure bed and husband carried Sophia while I held Anjali's hands and kept up a senseless banter. It is amazing how much you can talk when required and how little of it makes sense. I went from topic to topic, from Harry Potter to visitng Romania to going to school and wearing pink clothes and to how I had to have seven stitches on my forehead while I was a baby and fell down while playing hopscotch. I am not sure how much it took her mind of things, but it also helped that Anjali asked me for six dollars if she sat through the procedure. I would have given her a lot more than six dollars if it meant avoiding sedation, but anyway, since she asked for six dollars, it was six.

We returned home at half past ten, watched a bit of Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban (can a movie be honestly so bad and so misrepresentive of the book) and went to bed

Going back to Harry Potter, I am amazed at some of these little details that worm their way into children's brain. We were returning from the hospital and Anjali was experimenting with her stitches. She said that they hurt if she kept her mouth quiet but didnt hurt when she talked. And then husband told her about how the anasthesia would wear off and then it would hurt her and about how she would need to take painkiller regularly for a couple of days. Then immediately she says

"Its like that laughing spell"

"What laughing spell?", I ask her

"Like the laughing spell that Professor Flitwick teaches Harry and Ron. it wears off after a while"


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