3 Months

Some pictures of Siyuan in this 3rd month. He's weighing at 6.2 kg now, the nurse tells us :) And now when you put him on his belly, he can stay up for a while, look around and even try to grasp toys. The other day, he was sleeping in bed with wife, and he turned himself so he can try and wake wife up to feed him. :)

They Went Over to the Dark Side

Had to go to Sydney over the weekend for a business meeting, and made the mistake of taking a 9 pm flight out on Friday nite. Well, I had wanted to have dinner at home and spend a bit more time with Siyuan and wife before heading out. In typical Melbourne-Sydney fashion, the landing was delayed and by the time the plane landed, it was closer to 11 p.m., than the 10:20 p.m. scheduled landing time. The taxi queue was long, to say the least. But it had looked manageable with staff controlling the queue. Sure, the taxis came in spurts and we might have to wait a while, but at least there was order. This was a crowd of businessmen, holiday-goers returning home, some teenagers, retirees and families. Nobody seem drunk or on drugs. At 11 p.m., the queue controllers (for want of a better phrase) went home. A fellow directed a cab heading his way to a more deserving passenger ahead of him in the queue, and civility seems to prevail. 2 minutes later, he changed his mind, and he jumped in front of the road and stopped a cab heading to the front of the queue. He jumped in and forced the cab to drive off despite protests. You could hear the thoughts that went through all the minds - its everybody for themselves.
An Asian cab driver asked if there were other passengers heading the same way as his existing passenger. He was told off (for unknown reasons) by a man in his 40s, looking serious in his suit and suitcase (strangely, or perhaps not strangely, when two other cab drivers did the same thing a minute later, there were no protests.)
The tension in the crowd snapped, and people began to curse and swear. And some at the front ran for the cabs.

At that point I was already at the front of the queue, and then got shoved further down the road...where I managed to get a cab because it became rather chaotic up front. Lucky, I guess. In the cab, the driver told me that long queues past 11 was a common problem. I wonder if the ugly scenes were just as common then?

Holiday

Suffering from a flu bug, and with me on few days break, we decided we would head out to the Dandedong for a nite. We thought some fresh air would do us some good. We asked friends, who had kids, if they wanted to come along. They declined saying they needed more time to prepare for such trips. We got an idea of what they meant when we started packing. Instead of two haversacks, we found ourselves debating bringing along a pram, Siyuan's sleeping basket, how many toys and dappers. We ended up with at least three bags of Siyuan's stuff, and that's excluding his bed and toy.
We woke up late, struggled to fix a regulated traveling basket into the car, and headed out near noon in hot summer weather. We started to realize this was a bad idea. Never mind, let's press on. We then found that our accomodation was rather more way out than we thought, and worse still couldn't find any restaurants nearby. By the time we got there, wife (who's the driver) was exhausted. It was a beautiful place, but the prospect of having bread and instant noodles for dinner was discouraging.
Worse was to come. Siyuan, who was also down with the flu, decided he didn't quite like the new environment. His stuffed nose also meant he struggled to sleep continuously. And both of us forgot to bring medicine for wife, who also struggled to sleep with her nose.
To comfort him, I slept on the floor with his sleeping basket. At about 1 a.m. realized it was a very very bad mistake. Prepared for a hot day, I didn't realize it was chilling in the Dandedongs at nite. No more short breaks of this nature, we decided after this. We're better off, giving each other a couple of hours off by taking turns with the baby on weekend, we realized :)

Are you looking at me?

Who are you looking at punk?