Daddy vs Albany

I gave mum a call on Monday. Upon hearing my voice she exclaimed, "Aiyah, why you never call back for me to wish you happy birthday?" I laughed and told her a belated one was fine too but she insisted there was a difference. I thought about it for a while and saw her point. Mum did not know how to call me overseas so she has always been waiting for me to call her each time. If were in the same situation, would I like my kids, grown up and moved out, to call me on their birthdays? I thought I would.


I told mum that Monday was a more important day than my birthday. It was little Albany's first day at school. Mum laughed and began to relate stories about my very own first day at the Kindergarten. I was a year older than Albany when I was enrolled into a "Playing Class" for 5 years old. It has been astonishing how I seem to have completely forgotten what happened to me when I was a young boy. For some reason, I have little recollection about any detail of my life before 7 years old. Was I abducted by aliens at one stage, only be be purged and memory cleansed due to a QC rejection? Or did I went through some sort of "National Education" by the PAP and got my brains fried? I guess that is a mystery I will never figure out.


Anyway, mum's tales of what happened to me on my first day of Kindy was extremely amusing for her but alarming for me.


Well, let's talk about little Albany first. According to Jen, she woke up enthusiastic about the day, brushed her teeth and changed into her school colours herself. Then she took breakfast promptly, went down and wore her shoes. In school she bid Jen goodbye and joined her class without a fuss. She told me she enjoyed the activities in school but admitted she cried once because she wet her pants. I consoled her and tried observing if she felt embarrassed in case that incident deterred her from going to school the next day. It didn't affect her. She looked at me in the eyes and told me as-a-matter-of-factly,"I shh shh underwear because my pants was too tight. I couldn't remove it on time." Then I found out Jen had tied a dead knot in her pants, thinking it was still loose enough for Albany to slip out. Apparently, that wasn't the case. So we gave Albany a crash course in basic knots. She took a deep interest in it but could not master it in time before bed time because her hands were too small to handle a shoelace bow. So Jen made sure she left the strings alone and Albany went through her second day smoothly without a wet drama.


Her dad's first day though, as told my grandma....


I was very attached to my 2nd sis when I was young. My mum said, I would go anywhere if I was told that my 2nd sister was going. However, even when Mum used 2nd sister as a prompt, I could not be persuaded to go to school. I was being mentally prepared more than a week prior to school but each time I would kick up a fuss and refused to go. On the actual day, mum had to bring me to the kindergarten on the pretext that we were fetching my sister from the bus stop. I started to wail the house down when she popped me into the kindergarten. She said my cries were so loud that she could hear it as she round Blk 14 until she got to the other side of the building, where parents would peek through the glass to observe their children.


It was the kind of old school wired glass louvers (left) all of us old farts were familiar with. According to mum, I realised she was standing at the glass and I started to climb up to the window and began to tap at the glass panels crying for her to rescue me from the PAP Kindergarten hell. Shrug, I guessed I knew what I didn't like right from the start.


My taps turned to slams. Alarmed, the teacher had to shut the windows and whisk me away to prevent an inevitable breaking of a glass panel. One by one, the parents left, slightly annoyed that they were unable to peek at their kids because one crazy kid decided to hit on glass. Mum said it took me awhile to be brainwashed into accepting the PAP kindergarten. By Friday, I was fully sold and began to look forward to the day I grow up so that I could serve the fucking army.


If I were to compare our First Day Report Card, things would look really ugly.




Well done Albany. Daddy's proud.