Being a mom

I've not had the energy to write in the past few days. As the kids grow, they have more and more demands.

Eldest girl, for one, had to compete in a girl guide speech competition last week. She asked me to discuss the points with her, which I gladly did. But...she wouln't have me suggest sentences for her ("I won't remember it if I don't write it on my own"- ok, proud of that, girl- "besides, you use big words that I don't even understand"- oh, well, I tend to forget that you are only 13 dear). After she had prepared the speech, she asked her younger sister to time her practice, which was supposed to be 5 minutes. But when I asked her to practice in front of me, hmm, she said "I have already practiced in front of aunty (who happened to be her girl guides' teacher at school)", and stubbornly refused to do it. I told myself, "that's ok big girl. You will learn what a hard thing giving speech is", and simply reminded her that a good speech takes a good deal of knowing what one is saying, and a good deal of practice.

To make long story short, she went for that competition, apparently forgot her points on the stage for some long seconds (enough to cause her aunty some panic), admitted to the judges she forgot the particular points she was going to say, and told them "seeing that I forgot, I'd just move on to the next one...". She managed to convince the judges in the second part, the impromptu speech, that she was quite good to get second place. And so she got second place at school level, and since she has to compete at district level next week, I have to be disqualified from being one of the judges, which I had been so looking forward to do :). Life's irony...At least she admitted that "it felt good not to have made a fool of myself on the stage, which I almost did". Hopefully, she has enough sense to practice for the bigger competition. But I know better not to remind her. When one is 13, aren't mom's words so not important?

Anyway, eldest daughter went to girl guides patrol leaders'camp this morning. I reminded her to prepare everything much earlier since a few days ago. As usual, despite her "ok, ok", she didn't really take me seriously. Ended up waking up late, making the brother and sister late to arrive at school, and forgetting stuffs that I had to send to the campsite later. Oh dear...I pray that the camp will change her a bit...please God, make her become more responsible (like I was when I was her age...at least that's what I think :)).

At least, despite the chaos and stress I had to go through this week, I had fun listening to JJ and Ian's (Hitz.fm, 100.8 fm) tongue twisters this morning:

"The freshly fried flying fish"

which is kind of normal.

"unique new york"

which is still ok.

But

"red lorry yellow lorry"

definitely sounded so funny spoken by somebody with an Indian accent (no offence to the person saying it on the radio this morning).

Life is still good...with all the little things that make it wonderful, like tongue twisters :)