Little Squirt is just blabbering away now. At one point, I thought I heard him repeat after me when I do a friendly, “heyyyyy!” on him. He is also showing signs that he recognizes his name, as he is likely to turn his head when we call him. Now whether that is conscious or not on his part, I don’t really know. But it feels so nice to be able to receive something back when interacting with him.

It feels like such a long time ago when he was a 5 month old (roughly 20 weeks) fetus in my stomach.  That was just 2 weeks after I had to go for the imminent amnio test which freaked the hell out of me – physically and emotionally.  It was also the time when I had my second ultrasound – a highlight of the doctor’s visit for us to get a glimpse of the mysterious little human in me.

Like Spud, our doctor could never capture a good image of him. He was always moving, turning and playing gymnastics in my stomach.  Either that, my doctor was not a very good sonographer; as, an ultrasound scan to him would be more of a functional thing for him to do his job. Even when he pin-pointed Squirt’s profile to us (that’s his face, his cheeks, his stomach…), I still don’t know where or what exactly that he saw! Here are a few of the ultrasound shots of which I haven’t been able to make much sense of…They all looked like a big, fat blob to me.

Squirt’s a good 7.5kg now, if not more – and in the last check-up, even his pediatrician was surprised at how “well-rounded” he was at his age.  Squirt.is.big.

And, he comes with big smiles. He is this wide-eyed smiley, chunky baby and when he gets really excited, he flaps away like fish out of water.  He screams his excited screams as he tries to reciprocate or just to get attention. That being said, I noticed that he get over-stimulated quite easily – too much noise and too many people around him (read: chaos) usually bothers him , although it usually does not take us too long to calm him down if we take him out of the situation. I can’t really blame him – noise and chaos bother me too!

Squirt has been a far cry from his reflux days and it is something which we really are grateful for. We are looking forward to the day when we can finally get him off his medication.

A happy baby makes a very happy mummy. For now, I can only count my blessings that so far, Squirt has, in some ways, cut us some slack. He is quite a  joy to be with.

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It was 7.30 am…and yet it was looking like it was already 6pm in the evening. The sky looked menacingly threatening.

As Silver Bullet drove us to drop Spud off to school, pitter patter of raindrops started to fall from the sky. There was no lightning bolts or thunder, but just dark, dark skies. Traffic was already bumper-to-bumper. Images from the morning BBC news on Sandy that had happened in New York was playing up in mind. It almost looked like I had walked into a set of a scary movie. It is, after all, Halloween.

It was still drizzling when I walked to work, after dropping Spud off in school with her Halloween costume and a Pumpkin Bucket filled with what looked-like a ghoul cupcake I baked the night before. As usual, I am always one of the firsts to get to the office. And, on days like this, I don’t expect most of my colleagues to show up before 10 am.

I love the peace and quiet at this time of the day. With a cup of coffee in my hand, I turned on my laptop and spent a good 5 minutes looking out of the window next to my desk.

The horizon looked eerily menacing; reminding me of some sinister scene from doomsday-like movie. More dark cloud were pooling in, making the scene looked so sombre that I had to still-frame it. I could hear the wind howling against the windows, and passing through the building at such great speed.

Moments later, it began to rain. I could almost smell the rain through the glass panels, putting me in a little bit of a momentary hypnotic state. Snapping myself out of it, I realised that we had triumphed just another chaotic morning at home. Indeed, this morning seemed particularly brutal – the kids were up really early (before 5.30 am!), they were acting up, the cats were in the way and we parents were subjected to highly stressful situation in trying to pull things together so that we can get out of the door in time for one kid to go to school, and then sending ourselves to work.

Still, much has to be done today. My day at work has just begun, but at least we made through another morning unscathed.