Pantang

A pregnancy is not an easy thing to go through, especially so if you’re Chinese and even more so if you are moving house. There are just so many pantangs and customs, we couldn’t possibly follow them all.

For one thing, you’re not supposed to do any house renovations. The believe is that whatever nailing, drilling, demolishing work you do to the house will happen to the baby too. Everyone swears by this. Every single Chinese parent who has done any amount of house redecorating has a kid with some sort of mark, scar or minor deformity that they attribute to the time they ignored the renovation rule. Some say you don’t do any renovation work at the house you stay at, some say none whatsoever at any house you own, while some say its okay as long as the pregnant lady is not in when the work is being done. We decided to go with the one that is convenient to us so we say it’s okay to renovate our new house as long as we stay in the old apartment until all the work is done and that my wife only visits the new place on Sundays when no work is being done.

With regards to my RC car hobby, we came up with a long and complex list of things I can and cannot do. I cannot saw, drill, cut, tap, nail, grind or file anything when my wife is in. For health reasons, we’ve decided I also will not solder, spray paint, or work with any type of superglue, epoxy, solvents or aerosols when she’s in. I can screw bolts in with a manual screwdriver but not an electric one, and then only into holes that have pre-existing screw threads. I can cut things with scissors or nail clippers but not on the bed and preferably outside the bedroom. My wife had to sew a button on my shirt the other day and she followed the not-on-the-bed rule, so she did it on the living room couch, which kind of boggled me because wherever she was doing it, the baby was still going to be inches away from the needle.

Another extension of the no-redecorating rule is that we’re not supposed to move any furniture around. When we move into the new place, we’re buying a whole new set of furniture. It’s expensive but it just has to be done, because we’re Chinese. Around our current place, we’ve toned down the rule a little and separated the furniture into two sizes. Chairs and anything smaller are considered small furniture and it is okay to move them, which is a real blessing because otherwise we’d be dining on the floor. Anything bigger than a chair is big furniture with the one exception of the ladder, which to be fair, isn’t really furniture. Big furniture cannot be moved. Our air-conditioner service repair guy came to clean the unit in our bedroom yesterday and had to hunch over a tall bookshelf to get the dust out.

Strictly speaking, we’re not supposed to move house before the baby is born and some people say even not after. We couldn’t possibly follow everybody’s rules, so we’re moving in a month before he’s due.

The other day, my wife was at the dentist and had some cavity work done. The baby was really fidgeting inside her. She said it must have sounded really loud and upset him. Then she suddenly grabbed my arm and said, “Oh no! We’re not supposed to do any reno.”

I said, “But it’s okay as long as you’re not around.”

“But I’ve just been renovated!”

Baby Idiots

My wife and I are only just realising we're baby idiots. Our friends who are also expecting babies know all about cots, strollers, cradles, bouncing nets, car seats, high chairs, playpens, nappy liners, baby carriers, slings, changing tables, mattress protectors, milk bottles, bottle carriers, sterilizers and pacifiers. I didn’t come up with this list off the top of my head. I had to look up an email that my wife forwarded to me. The actual list is a lot longer but these are some of the bigger purchases we need to make. My wife and I are really panicking. We’ve all seen those movies about macho men heroes meeting their match when a baby suddenly falls into their care. I’ve always thought they were just exaggerated for dramatic effect. Now that I think about it, none of those guys had to do anything more than feed the baby and change a few diapers. Faced with this growing shopping list, I’m starting to see that taking care of real babies could be a thousand times more complicated than anything any movie could have to say on that matter. By the way, that was just the list for the baby. There’s also a list for mummy - breast pumps, nursing pads, nipple creams, feeding outfits and other things I’ve forgotten the names to.

We have bought none of these things. Our baby is due in another three and a half months and so far, we have bought about a dozen pregnancy books, a soft toy (probably not safe for baby use), and a story book. My wife has read all the pregnancy books. I’ve only read part of Paul Reiser’s Babyhood, safe in the knowledge that it contained not a single shred of useful information that could make me feel guilty about not knowing something crucial.

Coming back to the topic of baby items, I heard somebody use the word “pram” the other day. I don’t remember what was being said because in my head, I was really trying to figure out if prams and strollers were the same. Of course now, I know they are not, thanks to wikipedia. We are going to have to decide if we need to buy both.

One friend suggested we do some shopping at Mothercare. We tried but ended up wandering around the aisles hopelessly lost. We didn’t buy anything. We didn’t know where to start. Everything looked essential, yet we couldn’t possibly afford half the things we thought we needed. We tried to focus on something manageable and universally important, something simple and understandable, something we would have had as kids – milk bottles. When we found them, we were paralyzed by the variety of options. Do we need small bottles or big bottles? Would we need both eventually or right away? Should we go with the starter pack, or go for the bulk order? If bulk was cheaper, how many bottles would we end up needing?

We left the store without buying anything and felt horrible. Since then, it’s been a reoccurring theme in our baby shopping. We visited a few other shops and each time we’ve bought nothing and felt like bad parents. Guilt plays a big role in the marketing of baby products. In just about any item category, you can pick from a huge line of products catering to various levels of parental responsibility. When we were looking at car safety seats, we saw some price-is-not-a-factor models that met all sorts of safety standards and ease-of-use ratings, some medium range models with less reassuring credentials (presumably to keep costs down) and some that looked like high chairs with legs sawn off. Faced with these options, we really had to think how to phrase our questions without sounding cheap and irresponsible. We didn’t want to discuss anything out loud either because we didn’t want the salesperson playing us up against each other. We just talked in whispers, trying to figure out what each other was thinking and ultimately trying to come to an agreement on what kind of parents we wanted to be. It was futile, so we got out of the store without buying or learning anything.

We’ve always said we want the best for our kid, but faced with the mountain of things we are told we need to get, we’re seriously considering downgrading to wanting “pretty decent stuff” for him.

Some babies and kids we've met recently

Data Wipeout

Two days ago, I got this dll error on my computer everytime I started it up. It said something to the effect that one of my ActiveX files was doing something Windows didn’t normally allow. It didn’t seem to affect anything we use the computer for but it had us worried. I had not install anything on the computer lately. My friend came over the day before and tried to install something earlier but we never even got to the installation screen because my DVD drive didn’t want to read the disk. We didn’t even come close to partially installing anything, so why was I getting a dll error? Could it be caused by something we got over the Internet? Was it a spyware? Was it a virus?

I panicked and tried to get rid of it. I downloaded the trial version of a software called RegistryFix. It took a few minutes to scan the whole system, after which it found 71 problems with ActiveX plus a few problems with other things. Great! I clicked on the “Repair Problems” button and it repaired like 3 of the problems. To repair the rest, I needed to get the full version of RegistryFix. The “Purchase Now” button brought me back to their website. It cost USD37.00.

I wasn’t going to pay that much to fix a few registry errors, so I abandoned that option.

I poked around with the included software that Hewlett Packard and Microsoft threw in with the computer. Tried a Restore Drivers application that came from HP. It didn’t get rid of the problem, but there was a “Restore PC” button. I vaguely remembered doing something like that before. My wife was asleep then, and I’d just taken some cold medication, so my mind wasn’t in any state to operate or repair any kind of machinery but I thought what the heck, I’ll just click the button and see what screen comes up.

The next thing I know, the computer has shutdown Microsoft Windows and I got a message saying it will restore all the included software back to its factory state and leave all the data untouched. Do I want to continue? Why, yes of course.

A progress bar pops up to say it’s saving the data. Cool. When that was done, it started reinstalling all the software. It also said something about a partition, although I was in no state to remember what it said regarding that. All was cool. I read a book while I waited for it to finish doing everything. It had a message saying if I needed to do that again in the future, I could just press F-11 at the startup screen. It took about thirty minutes. Seemed a bit long for it to do what it said it was doing, but I didn’t worry.

When it was done, it was asking me to enter a username and to configure windows, just like it did when I first bought the computer. I had a sinking feeling. I used Sim as the username as always and got through all the questions really quickly. I checked the “My Documents” folder and it was empty. I looked around in Document and Settings and there were a two folders in there that looked like where I should look – Sim and Sim.something. I looked in both and couldn’t find my old documents.

I think that was when my wife woke up. I told her what happened. She was immediately comforting and supportive. We’d lost a lot of our photos plus some written stuff we’d planned for the website. We’d lost all of our recent photos from Cape Town, South Africa. It was late at night but we called a friend of ours who knew everything there was to know about computers and it turns out he was in Dubai, but we kept talking. He told us chances were we could get back part of the data if we went to a forensics lab to get it out of the hard drive but since we mentioned the word “partition”, that was “Very Bad” and he didn’t like our chances. We were quite resigned to the fact that we’d lost all recent photos. My wife consoled me and we tried to stay positive. We thought about what we had and how great life was and decided it was time to let go of the lost photos. We went back to bed.

In the middle of the night, I got up and remembered that message about the computer doing some sort of data saving before it did the restore. I wasn’t sure if it was a dream or not. I turned on the computer and looked again. I couldn’t find the old documents. I looked everywhere. Nothing. My wife said let it go. We went back to sleep.

The next day was a bright and sunny day and we both agreed we would just have a good day no matter what. My wife called from her office and said I should take a break from the computer and the office and buy a new pair of climbing shoes to do some indoor climbing (like I had been saying I would do for the past year). She said she talked to technical support at her office and the guy said all the new HP notebooks have the evil F-11 thing that wipes out hard drives, so we should just forget about the photos. I still regretted not backing up the photos before trying something so dumb. It seemed such a simple and logical step, yet I skipped it. My wife said it was just the medication. It was time to let go.

I wanted to have one last look before I gave up. I poked around in “My Documents” and in the root directory and in “Documents and Settings” a little more. Again, I found nothing. I thought I was being thorough but there were just so many folders and none of them looked like what I needed. Somehow, I had the feeling I wasn’t being thorough enough. I just stared at the C: drive icon. Maybe out of habit or maybe something else, I right-clicked it to check for memory usage. An unusual amount of memory was being used up. Hmm.

I looked at which folders were using up so much space. It turned out to be Documents and Settings. Hmm. I looked at the folders under that. The Sim.something folder didn’t use up hardly any memory. The “Sim” folder however, had like 20Gb of stuff inside. Hmm. I looked at the memory usage for some of the folders under that (Desktop, Favorites, etc) and everything looked normal size but then I realized this folder didn’t have a “My Documents” folder. Instead it had what looked like a “Sim’s Documents” folder. It had the bulk of the 20Gb. The next logical step was to check the folders under that but I really didn’t need to because I recognized the names of the folders as soon as I looked at them. They were my old stuff. Every single last byte was there - backup files for the webpages, lists of things to do, our photos from South Africa, See Ming surrounded by flowers, me in a bathrobe, the rainy day when everything was grey, the blurred pictures of the crayfish. All there! I felt relieved, confused, and a little stupid, but all-in-all, I felt pretty good.

My wife and I celebrated with some Bah kut teh for dinner. Life’s great even if we had lost the photos, but not losing them – that was a sweet bonus.