I am looking forward to head back to work, but I am dreading the thought of leaving Paul alone (the longest I've been away from Paul is 3 hours nia, for a hair cut). Sniff, days like this I wish I were working freelance or working from home.

In this video, Paul says he loves his milk (or at least, I imagine my Paulie can talk already!).

(Taken with the iPhone, tak tau kenapa merah sangat. Sorry, I didn't bother to do any touching up. But well, this was Paul, at 3 weeks.)

A month later, I took Paul sleeping in the same pose.

(Taken with my Nokia 5800.)

He's grown. *Am happily satisfied*

Of course Paul's papa doesn't hesitate to call me the moo moo cow of the family these days.

*sigh* another two weeks or so before I head back to the hectic world of Public Relations again.

…

I was thinking about the law of attraction and how true it is in my case. All my life, or at least, all of my adult life I've been thinking that if I ever get married, it has to be around the time I'm 27 years old – and that isn't really because I'm THAT eager to get hitched – rather, I've been 'planning' that if I ever have to attempt motherhood, I want to do it before I hit the big three-O. And lo and behold, we registered our marriage when I was 28, got pregnant about 6 months later, and Paul came into our lives when I'm into my third month of being 29!

I think that's the Law of Attraction working in my case.

…

So, if it works THAT well all the time (and I sure hope it does), these are the things I want THIS year:

1. I wanna head my own corporate communications department this year.
2. Salary increment of 30% this year please.
3. Weight loss to original pre-wedding weight before June this year, thank you very much!
4. Paul's first words to be 'mama' please!
5. Please let the maid we employed be a very good, trustable and reliable help around the house.
6. Eric's results at work to improve tremendously.
7. All those damned stretch marks to fade by the end of this year!

There! I hope seven sincere desires aren't too much to ask for.

…

The day I went into labour, I had just completed the organization of a communications workshop. Earlier in the afternoon, somewhere around tea break, I was stealing a cuppa freshly brewed coffee (here's the truth: I continued drinking caffeine during my pregnancy, occasionally though), and munching on some mayo-sandwiches and pandan cakes offered by the hotel when I felt the distinct pulling ache that had gone missing for many months. But I was busy trying to make sure the entire workshop ran well, so I brushed the pain aside and went back into the seminar room.

I sort of forgot about the period-like pains, and lasted in workshop until about 6.45 pm. We quickly wrapped up the day's events with a post-mortem meeting and then promised to see each other at the office, the next day. And so I left for the carpark, with my bag, keys and all, satisfied that I had done a fairly good job.

Then the aches sort of returned again. Sort of, because they really weren't that bothersome, but somewhere, deep inside, I felt this strange need to call Sivin's wife just to check in.

Contractions? Not sure, just a frequent hardenings of the belly, but the gaps between the contractions weren't regular.

The pain? Not too sure either, not painful, just feels like a typical period day.

Where are you? Driving on the way back from Sunway to Damansara, stuck in the LDP jam.

Why don't you just U-turn back to the hospital to a quick check? Just to buy a peace of mind. If nothing's up then you can go back and have dinner with Eric.

And so I took her advice, made a U-ie at the Western Digital flyover turning, and got stuck in a half an hour traffic jam before finally reaching Sunway Medical Centre at around 7.45 pm. I parked my car, and strolled casually to the Accidents & Emergency counter, and casually told the nurse, 'Err, I would like to see if my contractions are regular, and if I am already in labour, but I'm not sure where to go.'

I think the hospital staff were more panicked than I was. Very quickly I was put into a wheelchair (to my dismay, because I didn't like looking like an invalid), and whisked to a labour room. I was asked to lie on the bed, and then they started doing all the necessary preparations.

'Ma'am you're already 3 cm dilated…' said the midwife as she did a check on my cervix.

'Oh. Okay, can I go home then?'

'NO! You're supposed to call your husband already.'

'Now?'

'Yes. Baby is going to be delivered tomorrow morning, most probably.'

'Oh. Can I go home for dinner and a shower first then we'll come back?'

I think the midwife thought I was mad, because she had this strange look on her face as she passed me my mobile phone so that I could quickly call Eric.

I think it was around 8 pm them.

…

My husband took around one hour to beat the LDP jam. He gave me a call halfway through to tell me 'don't give birth yet, wait for me', and when he arrived, he was all red from the excitement. The doctor came at around 10 and decided promptly to break my water bag.

As he did the honours, the doctor told me, 'Remember yah, the pains will be quite bad, so you may want to consider an epidural. And don't get so nervous, don't scream during the delivery, cos you'll need the energy to push.'

I was shivering from the sight of the damned silver thing he used to poke inside me. It was HUGE and freaked me out, and sent me into nervous shakyness! My doctor then said, 'It's going to be worse than that thing going inside you so be prepared. I'll be back at around 6-7 am in the morning, I think you should be fully dilated by then.'

'Can I shower first?'

'You can take a nice hot shower…'

'Can I eat dinner first? I'm starving.'

'No dinner, just milo and one piece of biscuit. Then the nurse will give you an enema.'

(GAH, should have eaten before I came to the hospital.)

Tradition says that women in first time labour typically take 1 hour to dilate 1 cm, and you need to be 10 cm dilated so that baby's head can pass through the birth canal.

…

By 1.30 am, I was already 8 cm dilated.Now I was feeling the pain, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

How shall I describe it? Imagine really really bad period pains (like, if you took some leong fun, or pineapples, on day two of your period where the flow is quite heavy), coupled with really bad diarrhea sensations, and you just CAN'T wait to go and poo, but you're not allowed to go to the loo at all cos some damned midwives and your idiotic husband keep holding you back.

Instead of letting me go to the toilet, the midwives promptly set up the Entonox, gave me a mask and told me to breathe through it, and they called my poor doctor back.

Now Entonox is a mixture of nitrous oxide and oxygen, regularly known as 'gas and air', and more commonly identified to the layman as 'laughing gas'. I was breathing in so much of it that by the time my doctor arrived at the door (around 2 am) I was high on laughing gas, very conscious of my surroundings but totally incapable of controlling the words that were popping out of my mouth.

I laughed at the doctor and said sorry he had to come back so early.

When the nurse was checking me for my dilation again, I laughed at Eric and said, 'Oooh Eric she is so so so much better than you okay.'

(To this day Eric goes around telling people what I said in the room…)

I was giggling through the pain and contractions, and then later, I was scolding the damned people in the room 'eh I just want to go to the toilet, let me go first, do my business and then I'll continue.'

To one end I kept on saying, 'I just want to shit lah why you guys so evil don't let me shit one.'

So when it came the time for me to push, the midwife said, 'Okay, now you can shit, shit!!!'

(Eric loves recounting this story since I likened the whole process to a scene where everyone was looking at me poo and I just didn't give a fuck because the shit took so damn long to come out.)

The whole process, like so many mothers would describe, was so exhausting. It really didn't help that my last actual meal was at 3 pm, and consisted of only coffee, a slice of sandwich and a small piece of cake. The gas didn't help either, because I was so drunk on it, I was actually sleepy, and Eric said I passed out a few times. There was even once where I told everybody, 'Ok like this, I sleep for five minutes first then we continue okay?' – to which the whole room went 'NO NO NO.'

Twice, I think, Eric had to slap me, because I had fallen asleep while pushing.

It took about 45 minutes of me and my lousy pushing, and then finally at 3.55 am, we heard a loud baby's wail, and then, Paul came out.

He looks so grumpy! It's as if somebody dragged him out of him beauty sleep inside his mama's belly.

…

A few weeks later, Paul looks like this:

I know I've been pregnant for some months now, but it still takes away my own breath to realize that I am now a mother. And isn't my kid just adorable?

Every day, we got used to speaking to this little miracle growing inside of me – in the day, I took my meals extremely consciously, took my pills religiously, and each day as I went about my everyday routines, the feeling of little Paul moving inside me always left me breathless.

In the nights when I returned home from work, Eric would snap out our newly purchased camcorder, and we would do video recordings of 'the days before baby was born'. My fridge was filled with jelly cups then – sometimes my cravings would hit in the middle of the night. Every night after dinner, Eric would cut up persimmons and apples, and we would watch 'disallowed, gross' shows like Fringe, and catch up on Top Gear episodes.

We would close our nights around 11 pm, where Eric would sing 'The Lord Bless You and Keep You' to my belly, and tell our little miracle of our hopes and dreams for him, and then dozing off, the nights used to be long andweary, since it was difficult for me to find a proper position, and poor Eric had to retreat to the living room in the final month of our pregnancy.

Such was pregnancy to us, a total-life changing experience, that set the two of us off into a whole new routine of life for nine months or so.

Little did we know that when Paul was finally born, things would go totally havoc!

They call Paul a mini-Eric because he has his father's eyes! LOL, this kid is FULL of the funniest expressions, and every day is an experience in itself.

So well, Paul says hello, he likes all of you, and in the next post, he wants his mama to write about how he came into this world two weeks before his estimated arrival date! Till the next time…

We took this photo about 3 hours before Paul came to planet Earth. I was 3 cm dilated, the doctor had just broken my water bag, and we're happily chit chatting away.

Shhh.. I'm actually banned from using the Internet for fear of the computer affecting my eyes…

Anyway, when the month is over, and my P1 is back at its tip-top working condition, then I'll blog about my birth story (my birth story! who'd thought I've joined the motherhood league!). Till then, bye!

Or a very haphazard superior?

…

8 years since I joined the workforce, and I am still trying, wondering.

Kononnya Islam itu agama yang mementingkan keamanan dan keselamatan. Kononnya.

…

You know, I'm sorry if this sentence bites, but seriously, the kind of Islam practiced in this country, the one that is propogated by UMNO, the one that has @NajibRazak spouting counter-1Malaysia comments in the light of this crazy, crazy #Allah word controversy, the one that turned it into a controversy in the first place, THAT kind of Islam, is the only kind of religion in the world I know that claims that God, Allah, belongs to them.

Or as far as I know, and have experienced, whereever I've read, even the MOST fanatical of Christian sects, or Buddhist groups, devoted Hindus, and so many normal Muslims I know, any talk of God is always of humility, reverence, respect.

Of belonging to God.

Not the other way around.

But in this country, it is a case of 'Allah' is mine. God is mine. And I will die defending My right to keep Him for myself.

Pencinta keamanan, kononnya.

Really, really, annoying.

And there are more than just one Mr or Ms Emo. There are many now, these little millenium baby-boomers, the offspring of an affluent generation, who're rich enough to afford their children classy overseas educations in the best of the foreign schools, branded apparel that're so pricey each piece exceed the average Joe's monthly salary, and the coolest gadgets and toys to get around town in .

So the resultant adult-child, Mr/Ms Emo, born into an absurdly rich family, has a blog that records the depressions of life as reflected in broken Jimmy Choos and frayed Louis Vuitton scarves. Recaps of Mr /Ms Emo's New Year's Day celebrations  are really painful moans of how heinously disastrous the past year was because, alas, alas, it didn’t quite turn out the way poor little rich girl hoped it would. Life in Malaysia is akin to 'purgatory' because the streets of glamourous London or New York or Paris beckon them with the memories of 'true joy' they once experienced in a not-too-distant life they used to lead there (as parent-sponsored STUDENTS, mind you!).

Day after day, you can almost hear the gnashing of teeth from young adults like this, going on and on and on over how hopeless it is to live a life to pathetic existence in lousy Malaysia, to have to drive through the horridly potholed roads of Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya,  to have to survive with faulty Nokias or Blackberries, to have to endure horrendous English spewed from the mouths of less-educated Starbucks baristas who can't make a coffee as good as the ones they used to savor from the 'real coffee' bars of Manhattan.

Like, can you get over it already? Life isn’t designed to revolve around your sparkly coutured wholesomeness, not everyone speaks impeccable English, and yes this country sucks, but so does the rest of the world, didn't you already noticed?

So it's true. I have no space in my heart to understand and love rich kids who lament and sigh about life EVERY single day on their blog. It is hard for me to understand and be tolerant of rich kids who write fantastically, having the ability to spew verbal diarrhea at every turn; especially not when that diarrhea consists of complaints about how terrible this country is, how sad it is that they were unfortunately enough to tear a whole in their incredibly expensive cocktail dresses. I find it hard to shrug off such stockpiles of attitudinal holier-than-thous, translated into paragraph after paragraph of monotonous drone over how pathetic their lives are.

I sort of sense that kids like this, are trying to prove a point that THEY LIVE NORMAL LIVES, which they don’t. Rather, the truth is, from my window and where I'm standing, they're just plain weird, poor little rich kids who don't know how to appreciate what they already have. It’s like they’ve got everything going for them, with beautiful skin and lovely clothes that allow them the luxury of looking better than they actually look, thanks to visits to Sothy’s and the opportunity to dress up in the top of the range designer offerings. And yet these kids have no ability at all to look life in the eye and laugh at it, much less the ability to look in the mirror and take themselves less seriously.

What’s worse is their complaints always, usually, revolve around how sad it is that people don’t seem to want to take this world seriously.

But seriously, is there a serious point to taking this earth, this life, so rigidly serious? SERIOUSLY?

….

I'll admit it, since I have been accused once of being Ms Emotional on the blog, and now that I’m at this stage of my life, I think I can finally understand why so many called me annoying. Because being overtly emotional, or ‘emo’ in today’s slang, IS depressingly disgusting, and it drove people away.

Of course it also attracted people who came back again and again to read and shake their heads in disgust at the 'oh woe be upon me' drama I was displaying in full glory in this blog. Having said that, I really hope I'm long past that phase, because being 30 and complaining about the viciousness of life tires the pysche and definitely isn't healthy for anyone.

I'm 37 weeks pregnant according to babygaga.com, and 38 weeks pregnant according to babycenter.com. My estimated delivery date is 20 days away and pardon me, but I am scared stiff. Therefore, I'm going to do what that wise person said, and put down a list of things that I'm fearful of:

• That I can't take the pain and I'll pass out.
• That baby's head is too big for the birth canal and I have to go into a C-section.
• That the sight of the epidural needle, should I have to take one, will make me pass out (I have a phobia of needles, so the thought of the needle scares me much much more than the thought of labour pains)
• That I'm halfway driving home from somewhere when birth contractions hit me
• That I'm halfway driving home from somewhere when my water breaks!
• That I'm in the midst of conducting a meeting or speaking to an audience when my water breaks (I have a training session coming up on the 13th of January!)
• That I go beyond 40 weeks
• That I won't get thin
• That baby doesn't want to drink my milk
• That baby cries a lot at night
• That I'll look hideous during delivery and Eric takes a photo of me and twitpics or facebooks it
• That I'll poop during the delivery, and it hits the doctor or midwife's face (this is a real, real fear, ok?)
• That I'll tear badly
• That my cervix takes forever to dilate
• That baby looks like a Na'vi (cos I got naughty and went and watched Avatar, despite what the old folks say)

Let me see.

…

I still feel scared. Alamak.