Incredible Facts That You Learn

Besides how cute she sucks on her thumb (or all of her entire left hand), how much she farts (and at impeccable times too... like right at your open hand?), that she can keep getting cuter with every tiny laugh and squeals of delight, I have come to discover these much of information about the world:

• In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak
• Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance
• Swedish people drink more coffee than any other race in the world (seriously?)
• Almonds are a member of the peach family
• The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing
• There is more than 25,000km of neon tubing in the signs on the Strip and downtown Las Vegas
• On average, there are eight peas in a pod
• Rice is the main food consumed for half the people worldwide
• The low rumbling of distant thunder is called "brontide"
• The fastest sneeze recorded was clocked at 166.7km an hour
• Barbie got her first car in 1962
• about a third of all Americans flush the toilet while they're still sitting on it
• Research indicates that mosquitoes are attracted to people who have recently eaten bananas
• Every person has a unique tongue print
• Liquorice can raise your blood pressure
• All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck on 4:20
• There are more chickens than people in the world
• There are more plastic flamingos in America than real ones
• A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes
• The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands in jelly
• Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns
• American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class
• Months that begin with a Sunday will always have a "Friday the 13th"
• Because of the rotation of the Earth, an object can be thrown farther if it is thrown West
• Cats can hear ultrasound
• It takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to circle the whole body
• The average person falls asleep in seven minutes (not me!)
• The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket
• 214 crates were used to transport the Statue of Liberty from France to New York in 1885
• The only thing that can destroy a diamond is intense heat (but why do we want to do that?!)
• The starfish has five limbs and can regrow four of them, as long as its central body is not harmed
• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear
• A tiger's paw prints are called pug marks
• A 55kg crocodile exerts a force of approximately 700kg between its jaws
• 26 minutes of slow dancing will burn about 420 kilojoules
• An average snail moves at a rate of 58cm per hour
• Vintage port takes 40 years to reach maturity
• Around four billion litres of petroleum is consumed throughout the world each day
• Blype is the name given to skin that peels off after sunburn
• People do not get sick from cold weather, it's from being indoors a lot more
• Chickens will not walk on ice
• Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying
• Sugar was added to chewing gum in 1869 by a dentist, William Semple
• Prior to the 1930s, diamond rings were rarely given as engagement rings
• An estimated 90% of the world's fresh water is located in Antartica
• In the 1800s, pink was supposed to be a baby boy's colour
• The word "dictionary" was not included in the first dictionary
• Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning
• The film "Titanic" costs more than the actual Titanic
• The largest traffic jam ever was 177 kilometres long
• Men are 6 times more likely to be struck by lightning than women
• To see a rainbow you must have your back to the sun
• Children grow faster during spring
• A Rubik's Cube has 4,325,003,274,489,856,000 possible positions
• Cats average 16 hours of sleep a day, more than any other mammals (need to check on my National Geographic first on this one...)
• Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete
• Madonna is related to both Gwen Stefani and Celine Dion (and I think Lady Gaga too?)
• The toothbrush was invented in 1498
• The first hair dryer was powered by diesel fuel
• The airplane Buddy Holly died in was the "American Pie"
• Koalas are excellent swimmers
• The penguins that inhabit the tip of South America are called jackass penguins (poor bastards!)
• A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime
• Ketchup was sold as medicine in the 1830s
• In the last 4,000 years no new animals have been domesticated
• Seaweed is used to thicken ice cream
• More people use blue toothbrushes than red ones
• Bats always turn left when exiting a cave
• Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most stolen from public libraries
• On average, a four-year-old child asks 437 questions a day (hmmm...)
• The bullfrog is the only animal that never sleeps
• Every year, the Moon moves a further 3.82cm from the Earth
• The Eiffel Tower has 1,792 steps
• If you attempted to count the stars in a galaxy at a rate of one every second it would take around 3,000 years to count them all
• Just 20 seconds worth of fuel remained when Apollo 11's lunar module landed on the moon
• The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows
• Elephants are the only animals that cannot jump
• Animals that lay eggs don't have belly buttons
• Slugs have four noses
• Flamingos are pink because they eat shrimp
• Camel's milk does not curdle
• There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar
• Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated
• Mageiricophobia is the intense fear of having to cook
• The tongue is the fastest healing part of the body
• Strawberries contain more vitamin C than oranges
• A one-day weather forecast requires about 10 billion math calculations
• The bird that lays the largest egg in relation to its own size is the Kiwi
• The average person spends two years on the phone in his or her lifetime
• August has the highest percentage of births
• Google is a number (1 followed by 100 zeros)
• There are one million ants to every human in the world
• Frogs cannot swallow with their eyes open
• Teeth are the only parts of the human body that can't repair themselves
• A quarter of the bones in your body are in your feet
• The largest pumpkin ever grown recorded a weight of 482kg
• A lungfish can live out of water in suspended animation for three years
• Proportionately, Earth's atmosphere is thinner than the skin of an apple
• Road Runner has only been caught by Wile E. Coyote once, on 21 May 1980
• Bananas grow on plants that are giant herbs, and are related to the lily and orchid family
• The average weight loss of a racehorse during a race is between 6kg and 10kg
• The male fox will mate for life - if the female dies, then he remains single until death (oh bless!)
• A 500gm loaf of bread requires 2 tonnes of water to grow the wheat to produce it
• Only two animals can see completely behind themselves without turning their heads: the rabbit and the parrot (don't even try this at home)
• There are more than twice as many kangaroos as people in Australia
• A tightrope walker is called a funambulist (what did you say you do again?)
• Flounder swims sideways
• The human eye can, given enough time to adjust, see almost as well as an owl's
• The rush of air produced by a cough can approach 1,000km an hour
• Greyhounds eyesight is the best of any breed of dog
• In the time it takes to read this sentence, 50,000 cells in your body will die and be replaced; and
• It takes a tonne of ore to produce one gold wedding ring!

The Big "3" Milestone

It seems when you stared like a deer into the headlights of your new baby's face, then realised that sleep was going to be a tense in the past that someone (usually with that smarty pants look) told you that it will all "fall into place" by the 3-month mark.

Well, I've news for you.

You do somehow find that things morphed into a unique pattern of their own. Surprisingly, one night, as you made it past 1 in the morning, the next time you heard a tiny squawk that woke you, it was 5:37am! It still takes a Herculean effort to get your little one's interest to well, keep staying interested in things around her, ensuring she gets her needed time to feed, play, talk (by the way, she's a real chatterbox!), look at different things or listen to various sounds in as many degrees or angles they come in, cook dinner (no frozen meals, what an achievement in itself!), get the dogs walked and behaved in such a way that YOU are the master, the garden looking that tad decent, rescue a dogged flower pot (and its contents), the trash thrown, the spring cleaning done...

And to step out of the house in not one of those tracksuits ensemble. But saying yes to coffee is probably a given that is taken with serious intent.

We hit our big 12 weeks today and what I'm going to say is that some days are seemingly impossible, some moments are hard, but as many as they come, you are guaranteed of even more of the most wonderful experience of your child wanting to be with you, to want to hold you and have you close by, to fall asleep in your arms, her tiny yawn, her cheeky smiles, how she bashfully looks away when you play peekaboo, how she always want to have a nice talk about everything that fascinates her from the moment she wakes and when she nods off in your arms right in the middle when you are telling her about the animals and just how that tuff of hair stubbornly stands up, like so many things that you haven't figured out... and it's all fine too.

Some moments are meant to pause time and forever to be cherished. Enjoy a snippet here of Myla's first language class!

Graduation

Well, we finally did it and finished off five weeks of grouping at the Early Childhood Centre. It's off to the big world now for all mums and bubs. The facilitator got us kids down on the mat to form a baby petal...


You can see that some of us weren't too happy about it. The rest of us were probably not even aware yet of what's going on!


Me? Notice the cute little green Elfin stretch? Of course I got to give a spin to things, I'm my mama's girl! :)

This is what we called the "calm" before the whipped up storm

Abigail has started cuddling up to Austin on the left. Eddie (on the right) - love his rhino outfit! I want :) 

Okay, Eddie makes it official now!

So as I was saying, I like to suckle my fingers to ponder on my next move... 

Right, THIS is a stretch! 

The kids looking up at all the hyper mums with half a dozen iPhone cameras hovering above 'em. 

Hey, look who's here! Welcome Isla! 

These two are probably going to marry each other in twenty years' time. 

Mama, not too close please! 

Okay, this one is for papa xoxo 

Isla and I, when we decided to coordinate our looking at the camera at the same time. 

What? You mean the moon wasn't made out of Cheddar?!

Mama & I

Just the two of us @ Spit West Reserve

(Tommy jumped off the harbour on his FIRST off-leash walk

papa had to do some cliff hanger stunt to rescue him)

Appearances - Work It!

Looking this cute does take a lot of work, you know!

Baby Fun 2.5!

Well, a lot has happened since our last post. For starters, the weather pear-shaped and then super days of winter warmth set in with the arrival of one of my favourite uncles - No.1! Of course I was spoilt rotten by my Uncle B and Aunt Vicki from Perth with lots of cute outfits, cuddles, guitar serenades and they even babysat me on a Sunday night so that mama, papa and Uncle No.1 could go out for some pint at the local!

Although I think I may have made Uncle B and Aunt Vicki a tad too tired with the amount of poo and pee that my system had administered that night. Needless to say, I enjoyed every moment of the changing table and I loved their attention. Ah, life as a baby is gooooooddd!

My Aunt Sophie, who couldn't visit from Sabah had my Uncle No.1 ran through some practice before my Cousin "Roland" arrives. Thought it was quite a hoot to take Uncle No.1 through my usual early morning chats, a poo change in between, a sip of milk there, another poo change again, and then we went basking in the backyard with Tommy and Chewy. That entire week saw mama and I taking Uncle No.1 out to the Manly Wharf Bier Haus for some sun, sip of the brew, and too much of pork a plenty for a dish. This was definitely a notch up from my Japanese dinner outing at two weeks old. We even managed to do a full cart of grocery shopping and watched a game of rugby with papa home. That week, my sleep pattern was quite the topsy turvy - so much happening in the house! I just absolutely wanted to be in the action, mama had to cuddle me in her arms and whisked me off to my cot for my much needed sleep... but I knew papa and Uncle No.1 were chatting downstairs, so I decided to pull my best giggles and well, mama couldn't resist my charms and we sat and talked a bit more. She told me a bedtime story of the possums and our dogs. Sigh, will have to wait for tomorrow I guess!

My first Yum Cha outing! 

Okay, not funny now.. quit the dumpling tease!

That weekend we went to visit Uncle Ravi, Aunt Usha and their children at Rhodes. We stopped by to join the mad hour of dim sum and Pu Er tea. I wolfed down my milk but wondered how all those dishes of duck, wobbly steamed bits and funny pork buns would taste to a bub like me. It was incredibly busy but I just sat back and enjoyed the attention from passer-bys and the odd waiter. Pink never looked this cute!

With Uncle No.1's visit coming to an end, so began the world of 3 + 2 = Myla, mama & papa + Tommy and Chewy... equals one happy, chaotic household that usually descends into some feral moments when Tommy senses an imaginary possum climbing the backyard tree. We got into papa's one-week paternity leave very quickly. Soon enough, we were roaming around town, checking out open houses, going for some shopping, they got to do some boring paperwork like filing in their annual income tax, I got heaps of attention and love my bath time (although I did work my lungs out when papa bathed me the other day, sorry!) Papa attended my mummy & baby group, we went to the Mudgee Food and Wine Festival at Balmoral Beach. I reckoned the jazz band was rather inventive although I had no idea how the wines were but judging from mama and papa, they looked pretty happy enough!

Hic! Milk drunk :)

What I Found In Two Months

• You are capable of this kind of love. Intensely.

• A mother's instinct works most naturally with a baby's cue, above anything else, including "that" experienced midwife or childhood nurse, or lactation consultant and sleeping specialist.

• Sometimes, all we need is just to cuddle.

• You will thrive, not just survive.

• Sleeping takes on a mode of efficiency.

• There is nothing wrong with the occasional scotch on rocks after a long day (make that a double if you have a particularly long arsenic day in which she cries blue murder).

• All is well when your baby daydreams by herself, and to only turn and look at you when you enter the room... and she smiles that special smile, just for you.

• Routine is only the big picture. You can't schedule a child.

• Breathing through the cries help mama and baby.

• There is nothing wrong with a baby crying. She doesn't speak your language yet. And it's usually regarding very basic needs - she is adept at letting you know.

• It can be a change of nappy.
• It can be "I'm hungry".
• It can be "I'm really hungry!".
• It can be "I need a cuddle".
• It can be "I need to go slower".
• It can be "I don't want to get out of the bath too soon!"
• It can be she wants to sleep.

• It can be all of the above!

• Your baby will grow out of her infant clothes - fast!

• It's never more fun to get her new stuff, especially for girls!

• Feeding time gets special when she stares at you in that devoted way.

• You will have a luxurious shower and blow dry your hair (even if it means under ten minutes in total).

• You both can snuggle together and get some real rest.

• You learn to listen more confidently to that maternal voice in you.

• You never really "lost" yourself, you just become more different, yet more in tune with who you are meant to be all this time.

• Motherhood is not an achievement, it's an everlasting lesson in life.

• A baby is truly a blessing.

• You can do it without all those complicated contraption.

• Slow can be better.

• Awareness is a new attainment.

• Not losing the moment gets more defined nowadays.

And your journey, your challenges, your rewards, will always be yours and yours alone. This is the gift from your child.