So we blacked out the house on Saturday night. The Lizzy McGuire movie ended just right at 8pm and the kids were thrilled and ready for the blackout.

We lit the candles and the house was filled with a nice glow. We turned off ALL the appliances except the fridge. I was so bemused to read the Earth Hour story in ST the next day that one family was watching television in the dark - hello??? Its not about just dimming the lights people! I thought that was really funny and a bit snarky of ST too.

The kids asked what we were going to do during the 1hr of darkness. At first, I was not very sure myself. Having no access to electricity meant no tv, no computers etc - hence no noise. I didn't realise how familiar those were, how much we relied on them for background noise and for 'entertainment' until all of that was gone.

I realised that with the darkness and the quiet, it was as if we stood alone on an island of darkness amid the light from other houses. The uncertainty and the quiet was quite unique (a bit unsettling at first since we're all so used to lights on, whirring of the fan, sounds from the tv etc) and magnified the sounds we don't usually pay attention to - the crick of the crickets, the swooping of the bats, the noises from the neighbour's house, our voices...

Earth Hour made me realise one thing - that with the use of electricity etc, not only does excessive use impact the earth's energy resources etc, but also that with electricity comes the tv, the computer etc - all these take away time and awareness from families, from people. When we've so much 'other stuff' to occupy our time and attention, we forget about what to do when all these are gone. To just relate, to sit back and have a good conversation, to listen to each other, to use our time creatively to play etc.

Had it not been for Earth Hour, my kids would just do the same old thing on a Saturday night - watch a dvd (which they did just before EH) or play on the computer and that's it. Instead, we ended up sitting outside talking about why and what EH was all about, we played a rather loud and boisterous game of 'Monkey', Lolita ate her dinner in candlelight, and we all laughed and cheered Trinity on as she ran up and down the length of the house as if on a private unknown 'race'.

The kids also realised that we were the only ones in the neighbourhood with the EH blackout. All our neighbours had lights and tv and fan on at full blast. They asked me why we were the only ones doing this. I said every family makes their choices. But our choices can impact a lot of people. Climate change might not affect you and me immediately, but it will affect us and our children's children one day. And for us, we choose to make the tiniest of difference. It may not be much, but its better than nothing.

When it came time to switch the lights back on, I felt a bit disoriented - too much light now! The kids enjoyed blowing the candles out. We had a minor incident when Trin dipped her hand into a pool of liquid wax and spilled it over our wooden coffee table and her nightdress. And I ended up spilling wax over my handphone!

But apart from all these tiny hiccups I thought EH was quite a success - in my house at least.

Blacking out for Mother Earth

I never thought I could do it - spoilt brat that I am, but I did.

Sleep without aircon I mean.

For the past 2 months, we have been sleeping without the airconditioning on. It did not start out of altruistic green ideals of saving the earth and reducing global warming, but just because Owain was coughing a great deal in his sleep. We suspected the cool air had something to do with it. So for his sake, we pulled the plug. It helped that the next couple of weeks after that, Singapore experienced a cool spell with temps sometimes dropping to 22deg at night. Lovely!

Sleeping with the fan on and the windows wide open was actually cool enough. I adjusted quite quickly and so did Owain and Trinity.

With that, it was time to introduce the joys of fan-life to the other kids. They protested vehemently against this of course. But finally about 3 weeks ago, KH and I went fan shopping. We bought this state-of-the-art stylo-mylo fan that could tilt up and down, rotate 360deg and came with its own remote. This went to the girls' room while Isaac got his own fan too. To ease them into it, we allowed them to switch the aircon on for the first hour and thereafter programme it to turn itself off.

So far so good.

KH is pleased - it means considerable savings on the electricity bill, which is reaching record levels in our home. I am pleased too - it means no more pails and bathtubs at the foot of the bed, no more listening on tenterhooks in half-sleep for new drips and leaks in the middle of the night and of course, no more nasty coughing in the middle of the night for Owain. It also helped my sinus problem considerably and I find myself hardly sneezing in the morning anymore.

The only drawback is that night sounds become a great deal clearer - for example, I noticed the neighbour's five dogs start howling every night at 11pm sharp (I don't think I want to know why!), the lone speeding car's revved up engines sound especially abrasive and I had the 'pleasure' of being party to my neighbour's son yelling at his uncle for being "nothing but a drunk!" And I guess if I can hear them so clearly, I bet they can hear us clearly too with the windows wide open at night. So we're careful to keep our night sounds down too.

With a much reduced aircon usage in the house, taking the bus and MRT instead of the cab, we're slowly cutting back on energy use. I'm still a long way away from being a green activist though. The other day Lulu joined me for lunch and we were just talking about the Rs - reduce, recycle, re-use. She's more enthusiastic and dedicated than I am in living the three Rs. She even tried making her own plastic bag out of all the used bags! It is inspiring (not to make the bags, but to walk the talk)!

I will keep on trying and doing my own small bit to save Mother Earth. Refuse more bags when I shop (I now either stuff what I buy into my bag or I stuff them in my foldable shopping bag which I always have with me in my handbag), separate my trash more religiously, stop ta-paoing food from the canteen, refuse offered disposable cutlery when buying food, avoid sanitary napkins (try the mooncup one day) etc. I need to work on my shopaholic tendencies to fit the reduce and re-use profile, but that takes time and hard work. :-)

Meanwhile, there is one thing I can do.

This Saturday, the Chongs will join over 250,000 individuals (I am individual number 259, 503) and more than 19,000 organisations worldwide in the Earth Hour blackout. There will be lots of activities going on all over Singapore on that night. So if you're in the mood to celebrate the event with the rest of the human tribe, there are lots of options.

But for us, I think it would just be a good idea for the kids and I to just stay home, have a candlelit meal, read by candlelight etc, just for that hour - knowing that by doing so, we would be contributing in our own small way, to creating awareness and reducing energy use.

Naysayers may think we are just one tiny family in this big wide earth, so how much can we do? But if there are more and more families who just make the tiniest of efforts, so much more can be done. I am reading Six Degrees: Our Future on A Hotter Planet - and it can be quite frightening a scenario if the global temps go up by even 1deg. I may die by then or be very very old before any of these prophecies and projections come to pass, but not my children, and not my grandchildren. What do we leave for them when we consume so recklessly today?

So if you're not planning on doing much on Mar 29 2008, Sat night from 8pm to 9pm, turn off your lights, turn off your aircon, turn off your tv, turn off appliances, light up the candles, have a meal, sit around, read a book, tell stories, nurse your babies.

For sure, you know a tiny yellow house on Riang will be doing just that.

Fragile ties

A friend sent me an email announcing her impending divorce. After 12 years, it was finally enough.

A colleague recently revealed that he has been separated from his wife for a couple of years and the divorce was finalising in a few weeks. She has custody of the kids and he is devastated to lose them. All those times we saw them together as a couple socially? All for show. To preserve a sense of normalcy and family for his children.

Someone else I know has filed separation papers and is suspecting his wife of having an affair. They have three teenaged children.

Another guy I know comes home from a trip and catches his wife in their bed with another man. He files for divorce. She gets the kids. People think its his fault.

My daughter comes home and tells me that her friend is sad - her daddy does not want her mommy anymore and has moved out. Her daddy loves another woman.

An old friend has taken a long-term lover, remaining married in name to his wife only. The woman is an independent, self-sufficient businesswoman, she is a companion he takes comfort in. He says he has nothing in common with his wife anymore.

Another daughter comes home and tells me of her classmates, twin girls who care for each other now that their mother is ill in hospital with cancer. Their father has walked out on their family. They come home to an empty house, fix their own meals, and attend parent-teacher meetings on their own - no parent in sight. I know, I saw this myself. It tore at my heart to see the girls come in, sit before the teacher, knowing that every other of their classmates in the same room was acccompanied by one or both parents. I heard snatches of the teacher's monologue - "...work hard and make your mother proud... do it for her..."

It is hard to hear these stories. Heartrendingly painful. I feel at a loss - what to say to my friend, to my colleague, to my children. There are no words. I am always tongue-tied and I feel incredibly stupid and helpless.

Hearing all these stories just makes me sad because none of these couples or these families were formed with this sad end in mind. No one gets married knowing they will one day be divorced. Or wanting to be divorced. Everyone starts out madly in love, believing this will last forever. My old friend who has taken a lover used to write about his wife in the early days of their relationship - I still have those letters. Reading them now, I wonder what he would have said then if he knew that 10 years after marriage he would find another companion and lover? He, who thought the sun rose and set on her everyday.

When does the rot set in? What is the first sign of rot? Why does it set in? Is this something that every marriage has to go through? Does every couple have to be tested in some way? Do all relationships have to go through a make-or-break patch?

These days I see wedding couples taking their wedding pictures and I shake my head cynically. The frills and furbelows and posh wedding, the $100,000 renovation for the marital home - all well and good, if it lasts. The divorce rate is going up. Marriage is more a game of musical chairs where we swop spouses when we get divorced. People see no permanency in the institution anymore.

And then, there are the children.

When adults split up in a marriage, I used to think the kids suffer badly. Today, I still believe this, but with a slight difference. The kids still suffer, but I believe a self-confident, self-assured child who is matured enough to see and understand the reasons behind the split, will not take it as hard. It is children who do not understand, who do not receive compassionate loving explanations, who are not nurtured before during and after the split, who are so bewildered by the change, who fare the worst emotionally.

Is there ever a 'right age' for kids then? When do you leave a flagging relationship - when the children are really young - so that their memories are limited and the resultant gap not so painful? Or wait until the kids are all grown up, as adults, before you slash the ties? After all, the rates of divorces among the silver-haired generation is rising - more and more couples splitting up when the kids are grown up.

To me, I don't think age matters. I think kids will be hurt no matter how old they are. Far more important to handle this well from the beginning - with honesty, truth, compassion and lots of love and communication.

I think what makes me sad about this is the knowledge that a divorce shifts the very foundation of childhood. Children of divorce grow up a lot faster. Perhaps they realise, a lot sooner, that the world can be a nasty place sometimes. Or perhaps they, like my daughter's twin classmates, due to circumstances are forced to be independent from a very young age.

Sad though I am about divorce, I also believe that it may not be the wisest thing to stay in a bad relationship "for the sake of the children". What do you model when you do so? Sacrifice? Fortitude? Is that the best you can do for your children? Or is it better to acknowledge to the children that one has made a mistake, it is not their fault, but having made a mistake, one has to rectify this and cut ties, painful though it may be now. But better the hurt now than a simmering long-term resentment and bitterness that seeps into and corrodes life, takes away every ounce of hope, optimism and joy that one has. Life is so short. Why shorten it even further?

By all means, I guess we have to try to work things out, go for counselling, try everything we have to save the marriage. But if it comes to a point when it is dead, then its dead. No point flogging a dead horse.

And for my friends, well, I don't judge their actions. I can only listen when they want to talk. As for all those children, in particular the twins, I just want to mother them all. Particularly the twins.

Its been preying on the edges of my mind for sometime, about doing something for the twins, but I am not sure what. I don't want to come across as a busy-body or to be intrusive. But ever since I saw them at the parent-teacher meeting, I think no young girls should be left like this. I think I will ask the form teacher and sleep on this a bit more. Perhaps a network of mothers can be formed to give them some support.

Spooked and thinking...

KH was in Shanghai last week so with some time on my hands, I brought the kids to the movies.

While the kids watched Horton, I took on the horror flick Rule #1.

Rule#1, directed by Singaporean Kelvin Tong, has had some good reviews which piqued my curiosity about the film. The story revolved around two cops who worked in the Miscellaneous Affairs Dept of the HK police force. As world-weary detective Ekin Cheng explains, everyday the police force gets about 185 phone calls. Inevitably, the majority will involve some crime or other. But there will be a handful of calls which start with "There's something strange going on in my house..." And those are the cases taken up and investigated by the Miscellaneous Affairs Dept.

I won't spoil it for you but will say that the plot was good and there is a twist at the end. I was expecting something along the lines of The Others, but this was something different and totally unexpected and I quite liked the surprise. The movie has its share of tense and 'shocky' moments, complete with eerie soundtrack, that left me covering my ears in tension (which is why KH always laughs at me when I say I want to watch a horror movie - I 'watch' with fingers over my eyes and/or fingers stuffed into my ears at the key tense moments!). The hunky and intense Shawn Yue (whom I liked for his roles in Infernal Affairs and Protegy) lent a brooding, angsty air to the movie. Uh, I have to say that I did not like Fiona Xie in the movie. I thought she was very posey, too pouty and one-dimensional and at some points, the saccharine was really an overdose! Luckily she didn't appear too often in the movie.

So I learned rule #1: There are no ghosts. Or at least you won't hear the police dept telling you there are! But keep an open mind, as the detective later says - ghosts and spirits are really everywhere, some are just trapped into a sad cycle on earth, unable to leave the place in peace. They don't want to harm you, they just want to keep repeating their tragedies in an unending loop, stuck in time. I think this is sad and not entirely impossible to disbelieve. And if this is so, perhaps ghosts are more to be pitied than to be feared.

Overall, a nicely satisfyingly creepy suspenseful movie that left me a tad creeped out as I went home - even as I was surrounded by five boisterous little kids. With all that noise and activity, you would think that even the most intrepid of ghosts would be scared off! But my imagination still went into overdrive that night - particularly on the crowded bus number 105.

The minute we got on the bus, my eye was caught by a couple sitting at the back - both were dressed black and styled along the lines of a cowboy's or line-dancing couple's rodeo get-up. But it wasn't their dressing that caught my attention. It was their skin colour. They had a skin tone with the same familiar pallor of death that all the ghosts in Rule#1 seemed to have. Chalk it down to bad SBS lighting. Or particularly good movie make-up. But that couple's whitish, chalky skin and dark undereye shadows really spooked me. I've never seen anyone that pale - they looked like they were very recent blood donors to some thirsty vampire! I kept looking from them to other people in the bus, trying to figure out if it was my imagination or just the light. But everyone else looked brown, healthy and normal! Didn't help that the lady, cadaverically thin, stood up and volunteered her seat to my kids. In that split second, I didn't want to take it. I know I know, stupid me right? I should just say yes, and thank you gratefully and snap out of the horror-movie nonsense, but I couldn't. Finally, I could not bear to embarrass the ghost's - I mean lady's - kindness and so plonked Cait on the seat while I scuttled off to another, all the time keeping an eye on Cait next to the pale-faced man.

We made it home in one piece, all blood intact, with the kids chattering away about Horton. Which brings me to the movie. I had watched Horton separately with Owain and Trin (who behaved very well during the movie!). I enjoyed it immensely. Dr Seuss's characters, always so flamboyantly rendered, took on a 3-D magnificence on the big screen when they came to life in full technicolour glory. Hues of purple, teal, orange, violet, mauve, fuchsia, egg-yolk yellow, and so on burst to life on screen - very beautiful!

The story itself was interesting. Horton the elephant has discovered life on a tiny speck which he caught on a dandelion. But no one would believe him. They think the elephant's gone loony talking to himself. Mrs Kangaroo, anal and controlling, could not believe that there was really life but feared the anarchy which would ensue in the jungle if Horton could convince the other animals that there was really life on that tiny speck. What she could not see or hear could not possibly be real. So she incited Vlad the vulture to get rid of the speck and later stirred up a lynching mob in the other animals when Vlad failed. Meanwhile, life on the speck is really a microscopic world called Whosville. The mayor of Whosville was the only one who could hear Horton. No one else in Whosville believed him that there was life beyond their world, that a voice was coming through the clouds and speaking to him. This being a kids' cartoon though, there was a happy ending of course.

But it struck me how similar it was to life, to the way we think, and the way we behave etc. We all run the risk of being so closeminded to just the known and the familiar, the tried and the proven, that we ignore possibilities out there - possibilities that we might be wrong, that there are other options and scenarios and realities. We sometimes act just like Mrs Kangaroo and the mad mob, refusing to consider alternative points of view. Just because these may not be immediately obvious or proven.

I thought of the medical profession today, and how resistant it is to change, to possibilities like home births, drug-free, intervention-free births, water births etc. The reality for them is not a birth, but a delivery - one fraught with risk, danger, that needed help and intervention, that should take place in a hospital in the presence of doctors and nurses. They no longer see birth as what it has always been: just a normal life process, like breathing, seeing, eating, thinking. And because they don't see it like this, they miss out on seeing the awesome power and beauty of life being born into the world. The pity of it is, the mothers and fathers and families also miss out. And those who try to point this out, end up like Horton - derisively labelled quacks, charlatans and witchdoctors.

I also thought about religion, and how we can be so blinkered that we refuse to acknowledge that there might be other realities that may be just as real to other people. If only more people would live and let live. Then it being Holy Week and I being a Catholic (albeit not a very good one), I thought about how the Pharisees acted like Mrs Kangaroo and her lynch mob, hellbent on destroying a dissident. A dissident who said things they did not believe in. A dissident in danger of fracturing all they have ever known or believed in. We do a lot of harm when we act in fear and ignorance.

Luckily that story too, had a happy ending.

A year behind

We went for a one-hour observation and assessment session with a speech therapist at Dynamics OTC on Saturday afternoon.

It was confirmed that Trin is about a year delayed in expressive speech.

The therapist thinks Trin has no problem with receptive speech but says her articulation and lack of vocab, slowness to string 2-word and 3-word sentences does show a lag of about a year. According to the speech development guidelines someone of Trin's age should have a vocab of at least 250 words. KH and I looked at each other a bit comically then - Trin's vocab was nowhere near that range! Maybe about 100 words if I am being really really optimistic - but nowhere near the 250 mark!

The therapist ruled out apraxia (she had good muscle tone near the mouth, no slackness and drooling) and ruled out autism immediately (her eye contact and social skills were very good). Given my experience with autism, that was never one of my concerns. Her gross motor and fine motor skills were also not in question.

Still, at least now I know for sure: she is a year behind.

I also know that early intervention is best. But at charges of $160 per hour, and with say, an hour a week, this was going to add up quite considerably. At this point, it would be quite a stretch for us to afford this.

So the alternative is to pump up her vocab at home - we have to be diligent about getting her say things, naming objects, using verbs and getting her to use verbs.

I think Trin is slowly catching up. This morning Mum and Dad praised her for howling "I want to go!" last night when they left my place. So we all have a part to play at home. All of us - Lolita, KH and I, the children, Mum and Dad - we'll just flood her with words and get her say all of them. And keep at it until we build her vocab. We will be her speech therapists. Meanwhile, I will still go on the polyclinic-KKH referral route - (1) leave a paper trail and (2) therapy will be a lot cheaper if and when we finally get it.

And I guess this also answers my question about part-time vs full-time work doesn't it? I'll have to be a lot more hardworking as a mum though, spending more time with her and engaging her more often. There will be more floor work, more puzzle work, more excursions alone with her. I don't deny there is a fair amount of guilt where Trin is concerned, for me. Different babies have different amounts of chemistry with me and for Trin, maybe it was harder to live up to the form set by her sunnier, brighter-spirit of a fishball brother. I have been guilty of the "leave it to Lolita" syndrome for too long. I won't make sweeping promises I can't keep, but you will see me more often with Trin from now on.

Herd Immunity

I was reading Joanna K Jones' site on vaccination awareness and learned something new today.

I have always (could kick myself for not questioning this further) agreed with the 'herd immunity' argument - that if vaccination in a population fell below a certain percentage, you would see epidemics in the population. But today, reading the article on herd immunity, its like a light clicked on up there.

I am giving a small extract of her article. The rest of it can be found here at the Vaccine Awareness Network.

"What Is The Herd Immunity Theory?

The herd immunity theory was originally coined in 1933 by a researcher called Hedrich. He had been studying measles patterns in the US between 1900-1931 (years before any vaccine was ever invented for measles) and he observed that epidemics of the illness only occurred when less than 68% of children had developed a natural immunity to it. This was based upon the principle that children build their own immunity after suffering with or being exposed to the disease. So the herd immunity theory was, in fact, about natural disease processes and nothing to do with vaccination. If 68% of the population were allowed to build their own natural defences, there would be no raging epidemic.

Later on, vaccinologists adopted the phrase and increased the figure from 68% to 95% with no scientific justification as to why, and then stated that there had to be 95% vaccine coverage to achieve immunity. Essentially, they took Hedrich’s study and manipulated it to promote their vaccination programmes. (You can read about this in Greg Beattie’s book, ‘Vaccination’, by the Oracle Press, Australia, 1997).

Why Vaccine Induced Herd Immunity is Flawed

If vaccination really immunises, then your vaccinated child will be immunised and therefore protected against any disease an unvaccinated child gets. If he isn’t, his shots didn’t work. We should also examine whether or not the vaccines actually do provide immunity and in which populations epidemics occurred. Was it the unvaccinated children spreading disease as they would have parents believe? Or were those epidemics already in previously vaccinated people?"

In AP, ie locally, you have mothers posting about their children who get chicken pox despite being vaccinated. Same for mumps. This should come as no surprise because in the US, Canada and all over the world, there are documented cases where diseases surface in the very populations which have been highly vaccinated.

There have been outbreaks of whooping cough in babies who have been vaccinated - just ask actress Kate Winslet, whose fully vaccinated baby still had to be rushed to hospital with whooping cough.

Chicken pox outbreaks have been documented in schools in the US where the majority of students have been vaccinated. There are more cases of children getting meningitis today than there ever were in the 19th century when vaccination was non-existent.

The live polio vaccine (ie those oral drops which are still given to our children in school today!) has been discontinued in the US and replaced with the IPV (inactivated polio) because of the very risk of causing the infections that the vaccine hoped to suppress. People vaccinated with the live polio continue to shed or excrete the live virus for several weeks after vaccination. Those vaccinated with polio have to be very very careful with hygiene - but can you honestly trust any 6yo to be so? Hence my decision not to vaccinate Caitlin recently with polio. With two totally unvaccinated children at home, I don't want to risk any outbreak of polio in the home.

If you have the time, browse through the articles on the Vaccine Awareness site. Very interesting reading.

Very seldom do I post an anti-govt rant here on my blog. This is not meant to be a political soapbox. But it is still MY blog and I am letting off steam.

I was doing my tax returns dutifully like any good Singaporean yesterday when I noticed two things, 1) I cannot claim working mother's tax relief for Trinity Rose. The govt only allows us to claim for 4 kids. 2) I am not eligible to get any Parenthood Tax Rebate of $20,000 for Trinity either. Again, it stops at 4 kids max.

Hello, I thought we're facing an aging population and dwindling birth rate and hence, larger families should get some incentive/recognition from the govt? Er, not the case apparently.

Some years ago... when registering Cait for kindy, we were nicely told by the school that fees can be offset by the Baby Bonus. Unfortunately for us, Cait was born 9 days shy of the 1 Apr 01 start mark for the Baby Bonus. So we don't qualify.

Recently when I was preparing the documentation for Cait's DAS assessment, I noticed that therapy fees etc can be offset by using the Baby Bonus. Yes, would be nice IF we had any Baby Bonus to begin with!

Then when I surfed Dynamics OTC's site to book a speech eval slot for Trinity, again there was that fine print - claimable from Baby Bonus.

And then of course came the tax-relief discoveries that Trin was not eligible for all these reliefs.

I am so hopping mad. Each minister/MP I meet, I make it a point to insert these pet grouses - but there is nothing much they can say or do.

Cait is not entitled to the BB because she is born 9 days 'early'. Why can't the govt just be fair to all those born in 2001 by letting all babies born in that year to be entitled to the BB? I can understand that there are start dates and inevitably some babies will miss out. But in a single year, within the same cohort of her peers, there are children like her who will miss out through no fault of their own, but simply because they were born ahead of the scheme. And in case you think the BB is small potatoes, it isn't - because the BB can be used for other siblings and it is a dollar for dollar savings scheme - meaning the govt will match parents' savings for the child, up to a max of $18000. Hello, this is not small potatoes!! Especially not when you have 5 kids! Families like ours need this more than ever.

Then comes Owain. Again, not entitled for the BB. Why? Because when he was born, the BB did not extend to 4th children. So just because some govt joker did not plan ahead enough and the scheme keeps getting 'adjusted', children like mine miss out. It was only after his birth that the scheme was revised to include the 4th child.

And along comes Trinity. Being the fifth child, there are absolutely no breaks - no BB at all since it is only up to 4 kids, no tax breaks etc. Right now, if there is a Chinese national who chooses to come in to Singapore, take up citizenship and has 3 or 4 children, these children benefit far more than Trinity who is a natural born Singaporean!

So let me get this right - Singapore needs more babies. Hoping to get these, half-ripe carrots are half-heartedly thrown to the crowd. But even then, not many people are significantly biting. Yet, for families who DO choose to have more children, these families and their children are denied the very same carrots.

Yes, the govt will come back to say: well, we did say those who can afford it can have more. Ah, by whose definition is the word 'afford'? KH's salary puts him and us out of the range of most subsidies, rebates etc that the govt hands out - and this includes lowered subsidies based on healthcare since means testing will come into the picture soon. But his salary (and I say 'his' because my half-time salary does not go much into household and family expenditure) feeds 8 mouths in this household. And out of the five children we have, we now discover that one by one has some form of special needs. Special needs means therapy, assessments etc - all of which mean more money.

Sure, the govt then says - you can choose subsidised care in the polyclinics, referrals to KKH etc. But I think it is no secret how long the queues are like in polyclinic referrals for special child development diagnostics and treatment. Cait's teacher told me she referred two girls last year for dyslexia testing - early in the year mind you - and now, the girls are in P2 and they are still waiting!! Do the powers that be not know that early diagnosis and early intervention provides the best opportunity for these children to catch up? Or do they not care?

Oh sure, I will still do the polyclinic route, just to create enough of a paper trail for school records, but I cannot afford to wait months just for a diagnosis or intervention.

And so if I go the private route, it means money. And as I said in my previous post - parenting a large family with special needs is simply overwhelming already, and now, potentially financially draining. So every bit counts - every BB that my kids ought to get matter.

I know there are people who are much worse off, yes God flay me alive for complaining. But I just feel very bitter about the unfairness of these stupid policies where right hand does not seem to know what left hand is doing and in the end, the ball is dropped. Families like mine fall in the crack - we are not poor enough to enjoy the handouts/rebates/subsidies. But we are not rich enough for the lack of these not to matter. In the meantime, we pay our taxes like everyone else.

I ought to just migrate. Don't think I have not thought about it. But KH will never leave. No matter how he sneers and scoffs at govt policy from time to time, secretly he still loves the homesoil far more than me.

Maybe I should just divorce him, sell our house, take the money and jump ship with my 5 kids - run and settle in Australia. Now that is a fantasy...

This is why I need to send Cait for a psych evaluation. It is clearly reversed writing. Mirror writing in fact. This was also the same hint that told us that Gillian was dyslexic back then. I am waiting for the feedback from the school and I will send this back to DAS as soon as possible.

So now, I am counting on one hand, one daughter who has dyslexia + ADHD, one son whom I think is a high functioning Asperger's boy and now, one more for the dyslexic count.

And did I tell you I have made an appointment for Trin to see a speech therapist for an eval too? Next week. We will know then.

Parenting is challenging in itself. Parenting special kids is even more challenging. Parenting a large family full of special kids is really...