Birthday reflections

So I turned another year older this month, and had a few celebrations.

This post isn’t going to be about my birthday celebrations; it’s more of a reflection of what’s happened in this year, online and offline, and my thoughts.

And in case you’re wondering, my birthday isn’t today. It was some time back in the earlier half of April, and I meant to write this soon after. But one of my greatest flaws is my ability to procrastinate. Back when I was in secondary school, I even had this poster printed and stuck to the back of my file.

Erm, I still have the poster.

I guess I wanted to feel better about being such a procrastinator. And judging from the fact that I migrated my blog over to this platform 1.5 years ago and many of my pages (the tabs above) are not fully functional or working and looking the way I want them to be in my ideal world, I think I ought to win some award for being the world’s greatest procrastinator. Nevertheless, I’ve been working on it recently – the Recipes page is being modified and the drop-down bar now has, wait for it… THREE new tabs, instead of none. Whew! Did you just try to click on them? If you haven’t, please do so. I have painstakingly gone back to the ancient recipes and posts to edit them to the printable format and update some with new photos. It’s still my birthday month… so your presence is my best present!

I’m stuffing this screenshot into your face in case I still haven’t moved you to check it out! It’s still work in progress – more tabs are gonna be in place!

Just mouse over the Recipes tab to see the drop down menu and the tabs will bring you to a nicely categorised page of links with thumbnails

Now apart from finally getting off my ass to do some real editing on the blog – which explains why I haven’t been posting as often as I used to – I think I have also done pretty well this year, in my 6th year as a stay home mom. There’s one thing I don’t procrastinate – eating. And in the world of a stay home mom, that means cooking too. And I’m glad that I’ve made a difference to the health of my family by providing them with home-cooked goodness that tastes good too. And the increasing number of compliments from my family keeps me going definitely!

In this year, I also bore my heart twice on the blog about the Mom-revelation I had and shared for the first time a picture of me tandem breastfeeding when I shared why I breastfed for 47 months, and had to re-live the darkest period in my life. It wasn’t easy at all as I’m not the type of person that likes to share every little thing – I know, it’s such a paradox to be blogger. But that’s who I am.

In terms of homeschooling, I think this year has made me re-think some issues. I even thought about homeschooling beyond kindergarten, because I hung out with a group of homeschoolers every Friday from January – March and I realised that homeschoolers are … normal people. They don’t lock themselves at home and school the kids to death.

My kids with their best friends at the zoo

On the contrary, I’ve seen how many of these children have the opportunity to do other things besides sitting at the desk for hours on end. Nevertheless, despite the draw of homeschooling, I’m still taking part in the P1 registration exercise this year as I think the system still has its merits and is worth a try. I’m keeping my boy at home for another year at least though, and we’ve made the decision to let him skip Nursery next year. I’ve had to face a lot of resistance from my mil who believes he should already be at school and he’d have “problem catching up”, but I think the only thing he’ll be catching in school right now, is probably germs. He’s just 2.5 years old if you’re wondering. And I have a (2nd upper) honours degree in English Language and am trained to teach. I think I’ll do fine.

And so yes, this year, I’ve learnt that I don’t have to please everyone. It was never my job, and never will be. And with this additional year of wisdom, I’ve learnt to Let It Go.

Let the irritating comments go. Don’t let them bother me.

Let the negative and low moments go. Don’t brood over them.

Let the past go. Live for the present (and future).

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