Day 43

Epic day was epic.

I wake up to Stormy deciding that it is time to wake up. I have no choice in the matter and drag myself out of bed. Stormy decides that she just wants to watch TV. I feel cheated. I put the TV on while I prepare her breakfast. At this point I may have fallen back asleep on the sofa. I manage to get her away from the TV and she asks me to play Lego with her. We start to build a zoo, but before too long she tells me. “Daddy. Stop. You’re playing wrong.” I ask her how you can play Lego wrong, but she’s adamant that I am.

The day really begins at about 10 when I have her dressed and ready to go out. We make a list of everything we’re going to do today. It’s surprisingly long. We start by scooting into the office to print off the rules poster from yesterday. Stormy seems excited that my office is empty. She keeps asking “are we doing something naughty…”. I keep explaining that I’m allowed to go into the office on the weekend. I don’t think believes me.

It’s then time for lunch. We stop at Lau Pa Sat and order chicken rice for her and noodles for me. We have the food in 2 minutes. It takes her an hour to finally eat enough to earn desert. We order an amazing looking Korean chocolate desert for us both to share. Stormy looks at it with amazement. 30 seconds after I take this photo she decides that she wants something else. This degenerates quickly.

Hell hath no fury like a 4yo who got exactly what they wanted but then changed their mind.

Eventually, I give in. Two deserts later and we’re off on the next errand. We hit the supermarket to buy flower seeds, a lighter, and marshmallows. These are all relevant to the next few hours. We beat the rain home, but are pretty much locked inside for the rest of the day. We start by replanting her little pots. The Bok Choy has died during her trip to Australia so we replant some flowers, lavender and strawberries in their place. I suspect some of these won’t grow, but that’s a lesson for her to learn. There’s no respite for me as we go straight into building a wave machine experiment out of tape, skewers and marshmallows. She’s too young to understand the physics, but is interested nonetheless. Whether she’s interested in anything more than eating marshmallows I will never know.

Once we’ve finished I encourage her to put the rules poster, that we created yesterday, on the wall. I want her to see what she agreed to every day. We can also mark off when she does (or doesn’t) meet her obligations. She is more excited about Blu-Tac than anyone has any reason to be. At this point it’s starting to get dark. We take the lighter and some sparklers I found from her last birthday and light them up outside. She’s having fun. She asks lot’s of questions about fire and combustion. “Why does it go black?”, “Can I light the other side?”, and of course “Can I do it again?”. I try to explain about magnesium and how the sparks are made, but I’m out of my depth. Luckily I have time to read up before we take the rest of the sparklers out tomorrow.

Just before dinner we reach our final agreement. If I move her toys into her room she’s going to sleep in her own bed. A quick check with the measuring tape and I agree. Watch this space.

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* For those who missed the context, I’m not actually single. My wife has started a 5-month contract in Australia (yay). This is a Very Good Thing™. Stormy will be staying with me here in Singapore and I have great help both remotely (from my wife) and locally. I’m writing this purely for fun and to practice writing. :-)