Category: Kids

I believe all parents have many fears and some fears are so real that some don’t event want to be parents. The fear I had when I found out my wife was expecting was “what if i don’t like how my baby looked”. Let’s be honest, not all babies are cute, some looked downright irritating. I’ve been to enough baby full month and 1st birthday parties and I can’t honestly say every baby I saw was cute.

Call me superficial, but this is a real fear for me and it stayed at the back of my mind all the time, more so than rational issues like “can I afford a kid?”, “am I ready to be a father?”, etc. I find rational issues can be sorted out, but I can’t change how my baby look.

How many of us have spent time on games that allowed us to customize our own character? How much time have we spent on that? Will you just take any character randomly? Most likely not right? But this is real life we are talking about, we will be stuck with the way our baby look all the way, no customisation and nothing can change that.
This fear stayed with me all the way till my wife’s delivery. The moment came, time to face my fear, time to face our baby.

When I set eyes on my daughter for the very first time, I smiled. I liked what I see, just because she is my daughter, I won’t impartially say she is cute, but from the honesty of my heart, she is beautiful beyond words and just like that, my fears are gone.

After a few weeks of being a new parent, I kept asking myself was I just lucky to have such a beautiful baby? What about my next child? Then It dawned upon me. My child is beautiful to me because my child is a product of my wife and I. My child looks familiar as she have the genetics from both my wife and I. My eyes, my wife’s grace, my nose, my wife’s lips. No matter how our baby looks, she is going to look familiar, she is going to look like the product of our love. Its amazing, this whole genetics thing is amazing.

So I went on to have 2 more girls and I never had that fear again, instead I was excited to see how our baby looked. They looked familiar, very familiar.

Happen to see a guy at McDonalds going back to the counter to say that they have got the order wrong after having fully eaten the whole burger. The puzzled look on the operationalised crews’ face sparked off a chain of events such as checking the order in the system, asking detailed question about the original order and wanted to find out if they got the order wrong and if so how did the mistake happen. As a bystander in another queue, it was obvious, the guy simply wanted another burger for free.

I sat down with my daughter Cleo and started to have a conversation about homelessness and this is roughly how it went.

Me: Cleo, do you know what is being homeless?

Cleo: Yah. When you got no place to stay.

Me: Why do you think some people are homeless?

Cleo: Because they never study properly.

Me: For some people maybe, but there are a lot of other reasons too.

Cleo listens on attentively while scooping the Oreo McFlurry into her mouth while looking up at me.

Me: Some might have been very successful businessman, but ended up owing a lot of people money, hence have to sell off their house, cars, everything to pay off those he owe money to.

Cleo nods with understanding.

Me: Some made really bad mistakes and the people in their family and maybe even friends don’t like him anymore and kicked him out of the house.

Cleo nods with understanding and you can see she is thinking.

We went on having our afternoon snack with Clara trying to sleep on my arm after a tiring afternoon of gymnastics.

Me: Cleo. Do you think its worse being homeless or being in jail?

Cleo stopped scooping her ice cream and started thinking about her new understanding of being homeless.

Cleo: Jail is better.

Me: Why?

Cleo: Because at least there is food there and also some place to sleep.

I smiled at the answer in my heart. Not because I think thats the right answer, but because she made an honest logical conclusion herself.

Me: So do you think its nice to be homeless?

Cleo: No.

I’m glad we spent that afternoon together.

So its been about 10 months now and my little #goingout project is going on consistently. Its really easy because my lift lobby have good lighting in the morning and a spacious studio like wall. So while my wife and helper get ready all the logistics before we can go out, we use this time to try out interesting poses and funny expressions.

Now, my daughters take it as a routine already and they all will automatically get in line to take a picture. Imagine 5 years later. I hope we can keep this up.