It’s really just been more of the same the past month.
Except that I had a lot of renovation work done in the apartment - an agreement with the landlord and our new lease agreement. It required me to leave the house with Jack for hours on two days...I relished the excuse to escape.
Yi Hui is still very dear. And growing. Cooperating. Being civil. The ‘consequences’ for calling so often seemed to be working and the phone calls had been significantly cut down. And on the days that I had to answer the phone which had been ringing all evening with, “Well, I guess this means that you don’t want to walk to school with Jack tomorrow.” I’ve been glad for the opportunities to sleep in, or not have to answer the door.
“Yi Hui-Free Days,” I call them.
However, we had fallen into a pretty do-able routine. For the most part she was consistently meeting me at 7 for the walk to school, coming by for a reading lesson in the afternoon, if I was available, and only calling once from her grandparents when she returned home, and once from her dad’s place when she went over there to sleep. If this was all she called, then I would meet her the next morning to walk to school with Jack. She talks to Tyler, she likes him. He has warmed up to her a little. She still things Cameron is mean and should be scolded. “He stick his tongue out. Go like that.” she shows me.
“He learned it from you Yi Hui. Cameron never stuck his tongue out until he saw you doing it to him. I think if you stop sticking your tongue out at him, he’ll stop doing it to you.”
It was a positive direction on all counts. Then a week ago Sunday she got sick. Need antibiotics sick. The first part of the week she stayed home from school and was bored out of her little mind. She had nothing better to do than to call me...or James. All day long. She started showing up at the door again when she started feeling better.
With one more week left in the Singapore school year, there was even one day off: Hari Raya Haji on Wednesday. By then I was working on a bookshelf refinishing project and had the pieces out in the “common area” of our “lift lobby.” There was no escape.
She asked me what I was doing and I said that I was working on a painting project. Did she want to help me? YES!
Actually she kept me company. And I found it kind of funny. She and the neighbor boy Dharvin showed up to help and I gave them each sandpaper. Showed them how it’s done. Showed them again.
It was no small project! There was one large table Cameron uses as a desk, and two 6’ bookshelves that needed to be refinished. As I’m sweating over them, in clouds of paint dust, the kids came and went and tried to work and kept asking, “WHEN ARE WE GOING TO DO THE PAINING?”
I told them “WE ARE DOING THE PAINTING! This is called ‘PREP WORK’.”
It kept them busy and it didn’t slow me down to have them around really. I liked the company, and there’s no WAY my own kids would be interested in spending their mid-week holiday doing volunteer sweaty manual labor! And as usual it took much longer than anticipated. In fact, out of the stain yesterday, and the hardware store out of stock today, the bookshelves still sit up against the wall in the lift lobby, surely irritating my neighbors.
Cameron was upset 5 days later when he saw that the underside of the lower shelves were not painted in faux wood grain of the rest of the shelves. They were mostly blotchy solid black. “You LET her paing MY shelves???” he asked, mock horrified.
“She WANTED to help me, and I let her have some fun on places that you’ll never really see. I suppose it would have been different if you wanted to work on the project with me...”
He didn’t have anything to say about it after that....except a few hours later, he said, "Thank you mom. I love the shelves."
*an excerpt from The Chronicles of Clementi Ave 2 - My adventures with Yi Hui
Except that I had a lot of renovation work done in the apartment - an agreement with the landlord and our new lease agreement. It required me to leave the house with Jack for hours on two days...I relished the excuse to escape.
Yi Hui is still very dear. And growing. Cooperating. Being civil. The ‘consequences’ for calling so often seemed to be working and the phone calls had been significantly cut down. And on the days that I had to answer the phone which had been ringing all evening with, “Well, I guess this means that you don’t want to walk to school with Jack tomorrow.” I’ve been glad for the opportunities to sleep in, or not have to answer the door.
“Yi Hui-Free Days,” I call them.
However, we had fallen into a pretty do-able routine. For the most part she was consistently meeting me at 7 for the walk to school, coming by for a reading lesson in the afternoon, if I was available, and only calling once from her grandparents when she returned home, and once from her dad’s place when she went over there to sleep. If this was all she called, then I would meet her the next morning to walk to school with Jack. She talks to Tyler, she likes him. He has warmed up to her a little. She still things Cameron is mean and should be scolded. “He stick his tongue out. Go like that.” she shows me.
“He learned it from you Yi Hui. Cameron never stuck his tongue out until he saw you doing it to him. I think if you stop sticking your tongue out at him, he’ll stop doing it to you.”
It was a positive direction on all counts. Then a week ago Sunday she got sick. Need antibiotics sick. The first part of the week she stayed home from school and was bored out of her little mind. She had nothing better to do than to call me...or James. All day long. She started showing up at the door again when she started feeling better.
With one more week left in the Singapore school year, there was even one day off: Hari Raya Haji on Wednesday. By then I was working on a bookshelf refinishing project and had the pieces out in the “common area” of our “lift lobby.” There was no escape.
She asked me what I was doing and I said that I was working on a painting project. Did she want to help me? YES!
Actually she kept me company. And I found it kind of funny. She and the neighbor boy Dharvin showed up to help and I gave them each sandpaper. Showed them how it’s done. Showed them again.
It was no small project! There was one large table Cameron uses as a desk, and two 6’ bookshelves that needed to be refinished. As I’m sweating over them, in clouds of paint dust, the kids came and went and tried to work and kept asking, “WHEN ARE WE GOING TO DO THE PAINING?”
I told them “WE ARE DOING THE PAINTING! This is called ‘PREP WORK’.”
It kept them busy and it didn’t slow me down to have them around really. I liked the company, and there’s no WAY my own kids would be interested in spending their mid-week holiday doing volunteer sweaty manual labor! And as usual it took much longer than anticipated. In fact, out of the stain yesterday, and the hardware store out of stock today, the bookshelves still sit up against the wall in the lift lobby, surely irritating my neighbors.
Cameron was upset 5 days later when he saw that the underside of the lower shelves were not painted in faux wood grain of the rest of the shelves. They were mostly blotchy solid black. “You LET her paing MY shelves???” he asked, mock horrified.
“She WANTED to help me, and I let her have some fun on places that you’ll never really see. I suppose it would have been different if you wanted to work on the project with me...”
He didn’t have anything to say about it after that....except a few hours later, he said, "Thank you mom. I love the shelves."
*an excerpt from The Chronicles of Clementi Ave 2 - My adventures with Yi Hui
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