Dear friends,

It's been a long time since I visited efx2 or wrote anything here. We're back in Malaysia now. We came back around mid February and I went back to work 2 weeks later.

I don't think I can keep up with maintaining this blog, anymore. So I'll just say my farewell. I'll still be at facebook where I use my real name. Many of you who are there have already found me, I think.

So long.

Baru tengok pengumuman di laman web masjid yang esok Jumaat ialah Hari Raya Aidil Fitri. Ingatkan hari Sabtu, rupanya lebih cepat lagi.

Tapi sebab orang Melayu lain pun mesti bekerja juga, hari Sabtulah baru boleh pergi rumah orang. Budak-budak pun akan pergi sekolah macam biasa. Bila petanglah baru kami beraya. Kebetulan adik ipar akan datang sini esok, sempatlah dia beraya. Kalau raya hari Sabtu dia akan beraya di udara, tapi sebab sini raya hari Jumaat, sempatlah dia beraya di sini walaupun tak sempat di Malaysia. Nasiblah kena bertugas di hari raya. Yang paling suka hati bila dia datang ialah anak-anak saudara di sini yang dapat bekalan dari Malaysia - bukan kuih raya tapi makanan ringan Malaysia seperti Twisties, Kopiko, Mister Potato dan adik-beradiknya.

CB suka sangat hati tak payah bangun sahur pagi esok. Letih bangun dan kurang tidur. Aku kata kat dia tak baik melompat-lompat nak raya. Orang masa Ramadhan ni suka sebab dapat pahala lebih bila beribadah. (Sebenarnya masa aku kecil dulu pun sama juga suka hati melompat bila nak raya, malah lebih lagi dengan main bunga api dan sebagainya.) Dalam kelas dia ada 4 orang Islam, tapi dia seorang saja yang puasa jadi banyaklah soalan dari kawan-kawan. Di Jepun dulu lagilah pelik, satu sekolah, dia seorang saja yang puasa.

Aku pula memanglah rugi, sebulan tak puasa. Semput tu nak mengganti tambah pula dengan menyusukan anak. Kenalah ganti puasa sikit-sikit nanti.

Aimi baru saja pergi cucuk BCG semalam, jadi dia kurang sihat. Badan agak panas dan malam tidurnya kurang nyenyak. Dah lahir cepat, dapatlah dia beraya. Pakai baju tiny baby sajalah. Mak dia pun bolehlah beraya dengan baju kurung, tak payah jadi mak buyung.

Ok, Selamat Hari Raya semua. Maaf Zahir Batin. Berhati-hati di jalan raya. Semoga selamat tiba di kampung.

Aimi came home last night. Alhamdulillah she is well enough to finally leave the hospital. The siblings are elated and the cousins are happy too because the cousins couldn't visit at the hospital. Only own siblings and adults are allowed to visit there.

Before she could go home, I was required to spend a few nights at the hospital to establish feeding and to ensure there was no problems for me to take care of her. I ended up spending 3 nights, rooming in at the special care baby unit parents room.

She finally came home 32 and half days after she was born, 30 days before her actual due date. She weighs 2.21 kg yesterday. She hasn't had her BCG vaccination because the hospital had no stock of the vaccine. So we'll have to make another trip for the injection. Well, there is also another appointment with the physiotherapist that she has to go back to.

At the hospital, she wore the hospital clothes. They have a lot of preemies clothes, but yesterday when she was coming home, she had to wear the newborn 0-3 months clothes which were a bit too large for her.  I didn't buy any early born clothes because she is not that small and I don't think she'll need them for long. In fact, I haven't bought many clothes for her, because I thought I still had a lot of time to do so and after the birth, I had been busy going to the hospital everyday to do any shopping. Now that she's home, I don't want to bring her out to prevent any infections. So, she just have to make do with whatever we have at home, now.

I put my correct birth date on my profile, but it appears as 30th March there. Why?

I tried to put up some photos in my blog but they wouldn't appear. How to do it correctly, anybody knows?

Aimi took her first bath today, on the 27th day after she was born. A fact that I didn't particularly pay attention to with the other 2 kids, since it was done almost immediately after they came home, and everyday. Here I need to learn how to take care of a baby over the cold autumn/winter.

My kids have birthdays on the 28th, 29th and 30th of August. No, it wasn't planned that way, it just happened.

First of all, thank you Keith for restoring my old posts. I know I will have to go through it one by one to reset the permission, but I don't think that's my priority now.

I know other people are busy tweaking their blogs. Mine will have to look this way, perhaps for a looooong time. I have enough on my plate as it is, and I'm just grateful to have a new blog with the same old friends around.

We're leaving for the hospital in about 30 minutes time. Aimi's next feeding is due at 10:30. She's on 4 hourly feed, 54 ml each time. When I'm at the hospital, usually only once a day, I will try to breastfeed her. Sometimes I'm successful, at other times, she just continues to sleep and has to be fed through the tube at her nose.

I'm no expert, but I have learnt quite a few medical jargons related to premature babies. Life is never boring. You always learn new things, no matter how old you are. Aimi still has some problems with her oxygen saturation level, but she can control her body temperature now.

Aimi should be pronounced the Malay and Japanese way where "Ai" rhymes with "eye". But most of the nurses call her Amy. It's not easy for them to say my name correctly either. Anyway, it does not matter that much. Amy or Aimee means beloved whilst in Japanese Ai means love, and Mi means beauty. So she is still loved, whichever way the name is pronounced.

I have to go get ready now. Later.

I signed up for a new blog and I hope my old posts will be restored. Thanks, Keith.

It's very rare for me to be able to access efx2.
But on this rare occasion when I'm here, I have an announcement to make.



The baby is here. Yes, she arrived 2 months early. I had a pre-term labour and she was in breech position. So I was forced to go for a c-section last Thursday. So, I didn't feel much labour pain but now I'm having the post-caesarean pain instead. There's also the pain of seeing all the tubes, wires and needle marks on her. And now I'm home, there's the pain of being separated from my baby.






I gave birth on the 30th August and was discharged on Monday 3rd September. Baby Aimi is still in the Special Care Unit. She may have to stay there for about 5 weeks, ie until the time she's supposed to be full-term. But I really hope and pray that she won't have to stay that long. She weighs 1.84 kg (about 4 lbs 1 oz) at birth which is rather big for her age. She needed to be given help in breathing at first but now she is already breathing on her own.

She still has tube for feeding and I'm expressing the milk for her. The hospital lets me borrow the machine for a 10 pound deposit. I hope to try to nurse her directly tomorrow. Poor Aimi has to sleep alone in the hospital.

BTW, Junior and CB will start school tomorrow.

What’s my problem really? I cannot access EFX2, not even my own blog. Once in a while I could reach the main page but when I clicked on the comment button or any of the links there, I would be told the page was not available. This happened both in IE and Firefox.

It’s really frustrating to write a long reply at the comment section only to lose the connection and everything that I had written. CB was also disappointed when she tried to update her blog and lost everything she wrote after submitting the entry.

Is it something in our Internet setting? What should I do to rectify this problem? Can anybody help me? If this problem persist, I'm afraid this will really be a sayounara from efx2.

Efx2 is going to be 4 soon. I love efx2 because it has similar features to Modblog. The interactive feature that allows us to keep track of our comments at other people’s blogs and the responses we receive; the friendly and helpful international community, the ability to limit the access to our blog by deciding which entries are private, for friends only or for the general public.

However if I cannot access my blog most of the time, what’s the point of having it? In fact, I had almost given up on efx2 and decided to go back to blogspot. As for now, I’ll just have both. On the rare occasions I get to access efx2, I’ll try to write here. Most of other times, I’ll just write at blogspot, even if nobody reads it.

Sometimes writing just for the sake of writing can be rather therapeutic. No reader to impress, nobody to hide from, so you just let the thought flow. It feels just like when I began blogging 5 years ago. Oh, how I treasure the freedom of being unread and unknown, sometimes.

To all of you who had left comments at my blog thank you very much. I’ve already explained why I could not reply to your comments.

Schools are going to reopen in less than 2 weeks time. I wonder how the kids will do at their new school. They will need time to get use to the local accent. Well. Not only them, the mum has to learn that too. Everyday, they watch cartoon on TV but those are American programmes, not British.

Their school uniform requires yellow T-shirts. It’s so hard to find them. Why does the school have to choose yellow? Why not red or white or blue, then I won’t have a hard time trying to find the shirts?

By the way, last weekend we celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary by visiting Bath. However due to the wet weather the Bath trip had turned into Shower instead. My photos did not turn out so nice due to the lack of sun.

The kids’ birthdays are coming soon. Did I mention that CB was born 2 days before Princess Diana was killed in the accident? Since it’s the 10th anniversary of her death, there have been quite a number of programmes on TV lately. And of course, it's Malaysia 50th Independence Day Anniversary too. There is a celebration in Hertfordshire but I'm not sure whether we would go or not.

What else to say? I haven’t read Harry Potter latest book, but no worries since I’ll be able to borrow it from the local library. Libraries are good for a non-income earner like me. In about eight and a half hours time I have an appointment with the midwife for my Week 30 check-up.

So good night for now.

Salam and hello everyone! I'm back!

We arrived in Malaysia on Friday night, 29th of June, applied for our UK visa on Tuesday the 3rd of July and the visa was approved on Friday.

We went back to see my parents in Taiping on Saturday and returned to Klang Valley on Monday. I couldn't attend the efx2 meet at Mid-Valley. I hope those of you who went had a lot of fun. We originally planned to leave for the UK on the 14th of July but due to late bookings (we couldn"t buy the tickets before we got our visa), we only could get tickets for the 17th.

We left Malaysia around noon and arrived in the UK around 7:30 pm local time, the same day. The house only got the Internet connected last night, so that's why it took me so long to update this blog. We did go to the library but only to borrow books. What a luxury to be able to borrow 10 books for 3 weeks! On top of that there's more than one library. With 4 kids (including my niece and nephew) to take care of, I could not use the Internet there.

Both CB and Junior are registered at a nearby school and they are supposed to start on the 5th of September in Year 6 and Year 2 respectively. Both of them being end-of-August babies, they'll be the youngest in their classes. With the Japanese school system starting late, CB only had 3 months of Year 4 and is going to skip year 5. Junior had never attended a primary school and he didn't even go to a kindergarten in Japan but he will go straight to Year 2. I hope they won't have a very tough time coping with the new challenges. I asked their teacher if there is any homework to do over the summer holiday, but the teacher said just get them used to life in England. So I just let them do the exercises from books that their aunt bought from WH Smith. That's not even everyday. Am I being too lenient on them?

I am not comfortable telling people where we are since my blog is in English and we're living in an English-speaking country now. It's just sufficient to say we're in the south of England.

I have to go now, and I'll try to update again soon.

Today is our last day in Urasa. We're planning to leave on the 10:49 Shinkansen this morning. Before that we have to remove the futon that we slept on last night, from the apartment. There are rubbish and old clothes that we wore yesterday and last night that we want to throw away. We had sent 5 large luggages, 1 small and 2 hand-carries using the Takkyubin service to Narita Airport 2 days earlier earlier, so that we don't have to carry so many things on the train.

I still have to carry this laptop and my handbag. The kids will carry their own backpacks. CB is actually using her randoseru, the Japanese schoolbag. My husband will have to carry the document bag and the clothes bag. My parents-in-law who are here for the graduation also has one bag. We are spending the night in Tokyo at Inai's house.

Our flight is going to be at 13:30 tomorrow Insya Allah and we hope to arrive in Malaysia by tomorrow evening.

I don't know how long this blog will be in hiatus since I will be very busy and might not have Internet connection for quite sometime. So I have to unsubscribe from all my buddies' blogs. Sorry! See you, whenever I'm back online again. Mata, ne.

I went for my last check-up before we left the country. Finally my weight has gone up. I weigh 45.1 kg now. I had a different doctor today, he could speak slightly more English than the previous one. But still I couldn't talk much to him. I've decided to see Dr Delaila my regular OnG in Malaysia, once I reach home. It's much easier to talk to a doctor who can speak both Malay and English.

The doctor was concerned that my urine test showed a positive for sugar. I wasn't worried at all but I didn't explain to him. No need to bother with my limited Japanese and his limited English when I'm going home in a week's time.

Actually I took some honey (due to my cough, I've taken a lot of it) just before we left for the hospital for my 10 am appointment. So that could be the reason.

Another reason is in my earlier pregnancies, my doctor had also detected positive sugar in my urine but a blood test showed that I was actually having hypoglycemia not hyper. I had low blood sugar and that made me feel faint when I had to stand for a long time. All the sugar that I consumed came out in the urine, resulting in my body having low blood sugar. I was advised to take more sugar, then.

Actually, I'm very sure I have consumed less sugar since I came to Japan. No teh tarik or much sweet Malay cooking for me. So, why should I be worried. However, my husband insisted it was because I've been drinking soda and Pepsi. (You caught me there!)Well, not much really. Once or twice in a week or two, is not much, right?

Anyway, just to be sure in 10 days time, I'll see a Malaysian OnG. By the way, Dr Delaila has a Japanese mother.;)

This is the photo that I had used for my first logo at efx2. The bottom part was cropped for the logo because I wanted to focus on the mountain.

It was autumn, 25th of November, 2005 exactly. Even if we decided to live in Tokyo after Urasa, we might not be able to see this view again.



Countdown: 8 days to go. Mountains of packing yet undone.

*This post is in Malay*

Tinggal 3 minggu lagi nak sayounara, banyak pula hal yang timbul. Tak boleh tidur, pening kepala fikir nak buat apa. Penat bergoogle talk sampai ke tengah malam. Dahlah waktu Jepun, 8 jam dulu daripada orang di sana. Berbincang tentang masa depan yang tak pasti.Mana satu pilihan hati.

Ambil peluang yang dah sedia ada depan mata dan duduk lagi di negara yang banyak masalah bahasa ini atau ambil risiko pergi sana dengan harapan dapat ganjaran yang lebih? Budak-budak mestilah suka dapat berkumpul dengan sepupu dan datuk nenek. Tapi aku sendiri suka ke tinggal dekat dengan "dalam-undang-undang"?

Kalau aku tak mengandung, memang lebih mudah untuk buat keputusan. Sebab itulah aku fikir memang ada hikmah yang tersembunyi, aku ditakdirkan mengandung pada saat getir macam ni, dengan EDD yang memang mempunyai pengaruh yang besar atas semua perancangan untuk menaiki kapalterbang terutama yang jarak jauh. Takkan nak berulang banyak kali atas alasan nak meneroka peluang yang ada di sana. Terberanak dalam kapalterbang nanti macam mana?

Ya Allah, berilah petunjuk agar kami membuat keputusan yang baik bagi diri kami, keluarga kami, masa depan kami dan agama kami. Amin.

So the news is out that our PM is getting re-married this coming Saturday. No more speculations after this.
Congratulations to Dato' Seri Abdullah and the future Datin Seri Jeanne Abdullah.

Last Sunday we went shopping. We just wanted to buy some cheap souvenirs for friends and families from the 100 yen shop. We ended up buying a lot of chopsticks and erasers in the shapes of sushi and other Japanese food.

My husband has no office to visit and he might have no time to meet up with friends, but just in case we bump into any. I will visit my office to apply for an extension of my no-pay leave. I've heard from someone that the maximum unpaid leave we can take is up to 3 years. That means I can apply for only slightly above a year more. After that I might have to opt for an early retirement. But we'll deal with it when the time comes. Who knows I might be allowed a longer leave.

I'm not so worried about my colleagues. When I came to Japan in 2004 under JICA, I had already brought back souvenirs for them. This time, we're on a tight budget. Maybe just some Japanese chocolates or sembei (rice crackers) for them.

I'm still contemplating on buying a lacy parasol for myself. Maybe I won't use it much, but it is a unique souvenir from Japan, other than fans and yukata (cotton kimono). Japanese women use very nice lace parasol during the summer. They are really scared of getting dark skin. Or is it due to fear of skin cancer? The one that I like cost almost 2000 yen. I know with that amount of money I can buy 20 plastic umbrellas from the 100 yen shop. I've tried to look for a cheaper parasol. But the cheaper ones don't look so nice or they come in black colour. To me, a parasol should be white or cream or any light colours. Black would seem just like an ordinary umbrella. If I can't find a cheaper one, I might buy it.

I also finally bought a dress that I'm going to wear on the flight home. The ones at the maternity section in JUSCO are rather pricey. I found a baby-doll dress which is not meant for pregnant women, but the price had been reduced from 3,900 to only 980 yen. My husband asked what I'm going to wear it with. I said some black pants. I could still wear my old pants, but at BIRTHDAY, a store that specialises on children clothes, I found a maternity pants for only 300 yen! That's less than RM10 going by the current exchange rate. I know why it's cheap. It's rather off-season. No pregnant Japanese women are going to wear that thick pants in the summer. It's corduroy. But I'm going to England whose summer is definitely a lot cooler. And if summer in Japan ends in October, autumn in the UK begins in September. We saw my sister-in-law's family picture last August where they were all wearing jackets. There is no way we are going to need a jacket in August, here in Japan. Not even after sunset.



The black part of the dress is made of knitwear material so it's very light. The inside is just a t-shirt. It has a small bow but you might not be able to see it in the picture. Anyway, the bow will be covered by my tudung.

So I'm very happy with my purchases. I won't buy any shoes here because the shoes that I have are still okay. Malaysia definitely have better choice of shoes, so why should I waste my money.

For my husband's graduation ceremony on the 27th, I think I'm going to wear my dark purple maxi. I have 3 of them jubah, 2 black and 1 purple. I don't want to wear baju kurung or kebaya because I've worn them many times during other international events.