Unusual Singapore Things #10

Eggs are sold in cartons of 10.

Things I’m Loving #2

It is September and my eyes are not itchy, red and swollen and my nose is not running like a tap.

Whilst I miss the changing of the seasons I am not missing HAYFEVER.  At this time of the year in Melbourne I would take my antihistamine nasal spray with me at all times and my antihistamine eye-drops. (I gave up anti-histamine tablets years ago as they made me shake and my heart race).

I have been a lifelong sniffler and always had tissues on my person, and yet I only bought out first box of tissues in Singapore yesterday.

I am loving being allergy free!

A Melodramatic Mummy Rant

I don’t normally write motherhood posts.  It’s not that I have anything against ‘mummy bloggers’ but this is an Expat blog and I try and limit myself to ‘Expatty’ (that is so a word!) stuff, but I need to vent.

The Big Missy is on her very first school camp and she has had the good fortune to be overnighting at Singapore zoo and doing some pretty amazing behind the scenes stuff.  She has been incredibly excited for the past few weeks, and we drove up to school yesterday with all her gear chatting about all the fun stuff that was going to happen.

Then we got her gear out of the car and said hi to her friend.

Then my stomach dropped. I had bought her a ‘foam mattress’ as per the information note, about an inch thick and the sort you’d find on a foldaway bed.  Pretty much everyone else had a yoga mat, which (I guess) also fits into the definition of ‘foam mattress’.

She got upset and I felt like a complete idiot. How did I miss that?

From that moment on I have been swimming in a pool of mother guilt.

I had a restless night wondering if she was OK and hoping that she wasn’t getting picked on for my massive stuff up.

I also know that I have blown this out of all proportion as by the time I left her to board the bus she was playing with her friends, laughing just like she normally would.  The other three girls in her tent were excited that they would all be able to  take turns on the big comfy FOAM MATTRESS and all was right in the Big Missy’s world again.

But mother guilt reared its ugly head and won’t leave.

For me, the killer of camp is that my child – to whom I have spoken to every, single day of her life – is completely out of contact.  I have no idea if she fell exhausted into a deep sleep after her evening at the Night Safari, or if she sobbed herself to sleep.

how the heck am I going to cope when she goes away for a couple of nights next year TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY?

 

*melodramatic mummy rant over*

Putting The Jigsaw Back Together Again

When you move countries you spend weeks, perhaps months, dismantling the entire infrastructure of your life.  You disconnect all the utilities (gas, electricity, phone, internet, water), take the kids to their last swim/piano/craft lesson, you sell the car, lease out your house,  put your belongings into boxes, say goodbye to friends and family, and you start anew.

For a while you live untethered by the ties that bound your life previously.

Serviced apartment living is pretty cool.

For about a week.

And then you  yearn for those familiar ties that gave your life routine, structure and security, and you set about recreating the life you left behind.

Then real life begins again.

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And that’s where we are at the moment – real life.

We have a car, furniture, friends, kids activities, pictures on the wall, photos on the book shelves and all the accoutrements of our life in Australia.

It is a different ‘real life’ than we had at home.

One of the things we both wanted out of the move was to spend more time as a family.  Just the four of us.  Stripping back our life and being together, instead of constantly running in different directions.

My husband walks the Missies to their bus stop every morning and waves them off to start their day at school. In Melbourne he never saw them until he got home of an evening when everyone was tired and grumpy.  We spend the weekends together and we’re connecting as a family in a way that we didn’t before by getting out and doing things together.  We are looking to each other for support and fun, rather than to others which was often the case before.

Should this time in Singapore bring us nothing else I shall be eternally grateful for the opportunity to connect as a family in this way.

Settling

We have been in our house for six weeks .  Or it could be seven. I could check but I can’t be arsed, quite frankly.  So, let’s just say we’ve been here since mid-July.

The house is not a house in the Australian understanding of that word.  It’s called a ‘cluster house’ – a low density (by Singapore standards) development of 34 townhouses with a communal pool area.  Roughly half the houses are occupied by locals and the rest by expats, and all have three storeys plus a basement and heck of a lot of stairs linking it all together.

Ours is more than likely the barest as we brought very little furniture with us.  We’ve bought enough to make it comfortable but – so far – have resisted the urge to race out and acquire stuff to fill up all the empty spaces.  We got rid of heaps of stuff before we moved and I’m enjoying living lighter.

It’s not quite ‘home’ yet, but it’s getting there.