You know you are a dinosaur when the teenagers today go out and they don’t need you for transport home. Instead they come home by GrabCar (equivalent to Uber).
Yes, this is our baby, M2 the teenager, coming home with friends after dinner on a Saturday night. And on top of this, they all slept over, with permission of course.
Teenagers these days, I have no words to further elaborate.
Today our M1 turns 20. My goodness, 20. I am speechless. When I was 20, I was in college, probably pulling in long hours to finish my design assignments but definitely having the time of my life, away from Mom and Dad.
Well, what goes around comes around? The firstborn is away at university, probably pulling in long hours to finish some Food Science assignment but definitely having her time of her life, away from her Mom and Dad.
Every year when the girls’ birthdays come around, it makes me ponder about what we have accomplished for them and with them or just their accomplishments alone. No different this year…
I am very proud of our firstborn for what she is today and how matured she has become – a wonderful and responsible adult. But no matter how grown up she has become, she will always remain my baby.
Happy birthday my dear. Love you to the moon and back!
Another Sunday dinner adventure at the mall! This was many moons ago.
It was at a crowded Japanese French restaurant and the three of us were seated at a table next to a young mother and her girlfriend. The baby was in a stroller.
I glanced over and the most high-tech looking baby stroller caught my eye. I have never seen anything like it before.
It was a beautifully engineered piece of contraption that doubled as a high chair and a stroller as well as a shopping cart without taking up a lot of space in the restaurant.
The baby was cute I must admit but I was more taken by the stroller and for a moment, wished how nice it would have been back then when my girls were babies that such amazing contraptions existed. I don’t recall there was.
Not that the one we had back then was not practical. It was. It was a lightweight foldable sturdy Combi stroller that lasted for both our girls. But glancing over my shoulder again at the red and grey thing, I couldn’t help but mentally compared that our stroller was not quite the three-in-one.
Although it moved the girls well without us having to carry them, it was hard to hang shopping bags at the back without the stroller toppling over. This situation became quite a balancing act especially if the child wanted to come out and the back was weighted down with purchases.
Also by comparison, our stroller was way too short at dining tables of most restaurants. The poor child would be looking at our knees instead of being eye level with us if left strapped down. The baby in the red and grey contraption however, was gurgling away at his mother happily. Cute.
Strange that I would rave about a baby stroller, something I certainly have no need for these days. Smitten not by the baby indeed.
After three wonderful weeks with M1 home with us for her Christmas holidays, she left for the US this morning. Sniffle…
We had to wake up in the wee hours of the morning, and left for the airport by 4.20am for her 8.00am departure for Japan’s Narita International.
Heaviness filled my heart. No words can express the void a mother feels every time the child leaves home for the pursuit of education. No matter how grown up they have become, they still remain our baby.
I shouldn’t cry or feel sad. After all, she starts the year as a Junior, midway towards her Food Science degree. Seemed like only yesterday when she left home to bravely travel by herself to start her Freshman year at university. But a Junior now and a seasoned traveler. How time flies.
I must say thank goodness for Skype and WhatsApp. With technology, we are able to get updates during the course of her journey when phones are allowed to be used. And with Skype, we talk frequently during school terms unlike the dinosaur era when I was in college. The only mode of contact was phone calls which were very short and expensive and of course, snail mail which Dad wrote me. A lot.
As always, I will be tracking her on flightaware.com and probably with anxiety as well. By the time this post is published, she would have flown almost two hours for the first leg. Hopefully, there’s no weather delay enroute to San Francisco thereafter.
Safe travels and pleasant flight while I try not to cry… Sniffle.
The cleaning bug have gotten the best of me because I am also cleaning out stuff from the office. Two decades of design work sure has a lot of portfolio pieces to show!
To my utter delight, I unearthed a couple of pieces of drawings on my desk, done by the girls when they were very young. Now for the life of me, I cannot recognize whose style it was. It could be M2 when she was probably four or five years old but there are also some elements of M1’s style. Hmm… memory has totally failed me on this.
But it does not matter, these are treasures and stick figure drawings are totally so us! And very cute that everyone’s names are listed even for the flowers. Tickles me to no end that my last name is spelled backwards – EEL instead of LEE. Angie Eel… hahahaha. This is definitely M2.
What’s even more delightful was the clever use of space when typographically challenged. The letters go downwards, a horror scenario which the graphic designer in me would never do but trust a child to do it. And I think she did it well.
Such treasures, I will have these framed up!
While some things never change, some things do and we have to learn to go with the flow. Otherwise, we will be more dinosaur than ever.
When I went off to college and came home for the holidays, the aircrafts that I flew in were mostly the Boeing 747-400 model and I thought this aircraft was very comfortable. I loved the B747.
When M1 came back last week, she flew on United Airlines. And for the SFO-NRT leg, it was a B747 and because there were no personal entertainment units, she did not appreciate the aircraft like me. The final leg home was with a Boeing 787-8 and she thought, thankfully that was much better.
I believe the B747 model has been replaced with newer and younger fleets by most airlines of the world except a handful like United Airlines. And you realize things change when your experiences that you cherish differ from your offsprings.
When I was younger, I would save every penny of my allowance and waited until there was an opportunity to go buy a cassette or two of my favourite musician(s). Then with my Sony Walkman (also purchased with endless savings), plugging in to my music was the best thing in life.
These days, like me, my M2 says she cannot function without music. So her iPod and a set of headphones go wherever she goes. And how does she get her music?
Spotify.
In fact, recently she asked if she could subscribe to Spotify Premium and hubby allowed; she ‘paid’ for the monthly subscription with her allowance. Now this makes you really open your eyes and acknowledge that things and time have changed when the need for the same thing has evolved with technology. Going out with the girls, I have also evolved, allowing them to plug in their music in my car instead of subjecting everyone to my CD choices of Jacky Cheung or Michael Buble.
Hmm… Maybe I should consider getting Spotify and perhaps plan a vacation flying off somewhere long haul with any aircraft other than the B747-400.
Technology today sure is amazing, changing the way we live, how we lead our lives and keeping us connected 24/7. When M1 went off to university in 2015, we were able to track her flight path live online. And we did just that with anxiety but also with comfort knowing exactly where she is. And when she came back on Tuesday night, we did the same and went through the same again.
When I flew off to college dinosaur years ago, there was nothing of these sorts or even the Internet available. So poor Mom and Dad waited anxiously for 24 hours or so until I arrived and heard from me.
With M1 for every step of her journey, we get an update – leaving for the airport now, checking in, boarding soon all via WhatsApp, see a location checked in status update on Facebook yet unaware of more updates on other social medias that young people use (this dinosaur does not use SnapChat, Instagram, Twitter and goodness knows what else) and of course track online with flightaware.com to see the flight path live.
For all these, I am thankful we live in this era now. But I still fret anxiously like Mom and Dad did. Some things never change. Technology may make our lives easier and more connected but it just cannot replace the human emotions.
So thankful and happy that she arrived home safely and without much delay or problems.
Since last night, there’s anxiety. It was a restless night but for a good reason. M1, our firstborn is homeward bound! Finally. Yesterday evening at 6.30pm, way before she headed to the airport, I had wished her a safe flight and told her we will see her in 30 hours.
Yes 30 hours. But when this is published, we have another 13 hours to go. Like her previous trips, we were tracking her flight path on flightaware.com
This trip home, she is not flying the usual flight path because she’s taking a different airline. There’s an additional San Francisco stop before Narita International but minus a Singapore Changi Airport stop before Kuala Lumpur. That’s why we are not down in Singapore to pick her up like last year.
A long journey for her – slightly more than 20 hours of flying sans delay hopefully, and not inclusive of the layover time at the different airports and change in time when crossing the International Date Line. I lose track counting with so many time zones involved. Shudder… All I know is that she started at 5.30am (Pacific Standard Time) on Monday morning and we see her at past midnight (our local time) Tuesday night.
So did I sleep well or not at all last night? Forty winks probably or maybe just 38 or 35…
It’s exciting knowing that a week from today, our firstborn will be home for the Christmas holidays! We can’t wait. One more week to go…
It’s occasions like these that I want to will time to hurry up. Other days, I wish time would slow down for me to enjoy the children. They grow up so fast and too fast.
M1 is finishing her sophomore year at university. How quickly time has gone by. Somehow it feels like it was only just yesterday that we sent her off and now, she will be back for her second Christmas break! This year, she will fly directly into KLIA, unlike last year where we drove down to Singapore for her.
Ooooohhh… Can’t wait.
It sure is nice when one does spring cleaning and stumble upon nostalgic things.
Every year, at the end of the school year, we would do a spring cleaning at home especially to gather all the school text books to give away. Usually we would pass them on to friends who have kids who could use the books the following school year. This year M2 and I decided to also clear out some old toys.
My goodness! Over the years, my two girls have acquired quite a fair bit of toys and plushies. They are much older now and hardly play with these anymore. So it’s time to give these away. I would vet through the conditions before putting them in the ‘give away’ box.
And from the nightly efforts, I discovered some of MY old toys! My Playmobil set. My goodness. I have kept them all these years, hoping my children would play with them. And they did.
It was pretty nostalgic. We had fun playing with them! And yes, we are still keeping them.
Angieneering 
Remarks