Day 50

I saw the best of Stormy today.

We spend the morning in the most hipster way possible — brunch. I had arranged a play date with a new friend so we scoot out to a cafe and playground in Dempsey Hill. The scoot itself is very pleasant. Stormy chats away about her school and her friends. She feels like a real person in that moment. It also makes me feel that, perhaps, I don’t talk to her enough. Although really, I think it’s she who doesn’t talk to me enough.

Brunch is delicious and fattening. At least for me. Stormy doesn’t touch it and instead asks to watch YouTube on my phone. Her new friend follows suit and we fathers are left with no choice but to watch them get sucked into the YouTube vortex. After we finish the meal, we drag them away from the phones to the playground. We bump into one of Stormy’s school mates and the three of them race around the playground. They only stop when it starts to rain.

It’s too early to finish the play date, so we walk up to the local ice cream shop to wait out the rain. Stormy orders (and finishes) an ice cream bigger than her head. We say goodbye and scoot home. Stormy is well behaved and chatty on the way home as well.

We fill the afternoon by watching a movie and playing with her toys. I can’t convince her to leave the house again, so dinner is the leftover brunch from the morning. As I’m getting dinner ready, she asks the best question of the day. “Can [one of my best friends] live with us. I don’t have a people brother”. I explain to her that a) his parents would miss him and b) she doesn’t need a people brother when she has such good friends. She’s sad when I then remind her that we can’t give her a brother.

The rest of the evening is a battle. She refuses to sleep, and even uses the rules we setup against me. “I’m not going to sleep yet. My room is a little bit messy. So I’m tidying it up.” Green sticker for tidying, red sticker for sleeping.

And it continues. Even as I was writing that last sentence, she comes out to me the computer to remind me that “she’s staying in her room”. The irony of coming out and telling me this is completely lost on her.

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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. :-)