Sickness

When it comes to sickness, nothing comes close to the severity of a sick baby.

Mention that to parents, everyone invariably remembers the first time one's child got sick. I wasn't that impressed with the chapter on "When Baby is Sick" when I first read What to Expect the First Year. I managed to read that chapter again today; I fetched the book whilst packing the bag in a hurry to bring my febrile princess to the hospital last night. (What else could I smuggle when there was a full truckload of worries?) Though I had never called sick when I fell into pieces, I stayed with my baby this time and requested an urgent leave today.

I learned a lot from this reading. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention because I didn't need the book to teach me the ropes to manage a daughter running a temperature of 39.4 degrees. That bit, yes, I know. Believe it or not, the most difficult bit is how to be parents of a sick baby. How strange! Now I understand what the authors meant by "An infant's illness, even a mild one, usually hits mummy and daddy harder than it does baby."

Grasshopper

There is no such thing as universal truth in the world. There never was.

Anne Lamott wrote that it took years for her to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught her. I tried thinking of words that I told my little sister when she was young. And I did discover Anne Lamott is right.

One green spring afternoon, I'd been enjoying myself in the garden while my little sister waited for the surprise his brother brought home. I didn't disappoint her. I caught quite a number of grasshoppers. "Grasshoppers?" she asked. She opened her eyes, and then her mouth joyfully. And for the first time in her life, she got fascinated by the little creatures that hopped around inside a plastic bag. She could not even remember if she had taken time to breathe while she enthused over the grasshoppers. It took her a minute to catch her breath after being overwhelmed with joy. She then phoned up our dad and told him the great news. "Yeah," she said, in her childish but enthusiastic voice. "They look funny, jumping here and there! Can you see them?" With that, she held the grasshoppers close to the telephone mouthpiece.

We all laughed – what a witty thing to show our dad over the phone!

Seriously, we were wrong. That was then. This is now. Should I foresee the subsequent development of 3G cell phone decades later, I dared not laugh at my sister.

Sibling

My younger sister is delighted and said it is the happiest day of her life. She gave birth to a boy this morning.

And as the nurse pushed the gurney carrying her baby out from the operating theatre, I rushed in my eagerness to take a peek. I was so overjoyed to meet my baby's cousin. The truth of the matter was, I was reading Only-Child Experience and Adulthood when I waited outside the operating theatre.

I was a middle-child of three children, and have been struggling to imagine my baby being an only child. I would not go so far as to say that the only-child must be spoilt. In no way am I suggesting a bad connotation of the phrase "only-child." Only-children are a a growing phenomenon. None of this is good or bad; it just is. Still, I have always loved the chance to become a brother who understands his sister from head to toe. After all these years, I still find myself calling up my kindergarten memory of saving all the pleasant tea time snacks to bring home for my younger sister.

Nearly nine months ago, I made a phone call to my sister and had a casual talk. In a minute or so, there came a signal, like a jerk on the string, that she's expecting a baby. Though it seems like just a wild guess (okay, maybe my secret wish) when my sister herself had not seen the two lines on the pregnancy test, it's actually true when I proved it by asking my wife to show it by ultrasound the next evening.

Everybody in my family thought that I am prescient and awfully good about crystal ball. "It's simply a brother who knows his sister well," I replied.