8 random facts about my mum

Got tagged by Wen and it made me thought a lot about my mum.

These are some of the things I can immediately think now of as I write about my mum.

1) My mum is 58 years old. She was born in the Chinese lunar year of the cow and she is a Taurus. This simply shows in her as she is a very hardworking woman and is never one who laze around doing nothing as she will also make sure she has things to do. Of course, she enjoys her short afternoon nap as a treat.

2) My mum helped me to take care of Brendan and she’s the best mum you can have. She makes a better mum than me in caring for Brendan. She’s always on her toes, and always ensure that Brendan eats his breakfast, lunch and dinner. They must be healthy, home-cooked food too.

3) My mum is not well educated, but she does lots of self-improvement and she reads lots of books to improve her knowledge and her grammars. She knows many things about herbs and plants and all health-related issues. In her past 20 odd years, she has taken a liking to cut out interesting newspaper articles on health, diseases, personal improvement, up to BGR, motivating stories, and many more. She’ll paste them on her scrap and there’s lots of them at home. In one of the scrap book, she wrote a short letter to us, her children, to teach us some of the important things in life, should she die early one day.

4) She loves going for her daily, very early morning walk to breathe in fresh air and to improve blood circulation. I’ve join her in her walks and for a person her size and age, she can walk very fast and very far. Walking is her favourite exercise. She also like learning about massage, acupressure points and accupuncture.

5) My mum mingles around easily with people. Before I had kids, I didn’t know many of my neighbours around the current place where I am staying. After I had Brendan, she helped babysit Brendan in KL for a while and during her stay here, I joined in her quest to know my neighbours. She’ll tell me that my right neighbour is good in sewing curtains and the auntie downstairs is a confinement lady and another auntie in the other block was bullied by her hubby and she’s all alone. They love chatting with my mum too.

6) My mum comes from a big family of 13 children. She’s the 7th child in the family of 8 girls and 5 boys. Being in such a big family means that the older children have to work while the ones in the middle will have to take care of the younger children as her parents comes from China and work daily in their own bread and biscuit factory from morning to night. Hardship was written on all their faces then, during the Japanese Occupation. They stayed in a big kampong house in the outskirt surrounded by rubber trees, plants, domestic animals as well as wild animals like monkey, squirrels, owls, etc.

7) Coming from a poor family also means that they survive of their own plot of vegetable and fruit plantation, as well as rearing lots of chicken and ducks and pigs to feed 15 in the family the factory workers. She used to help cook and go to the swamp to collect earth worms with her bare hands to bring it back to feed the pigs. Whenever she thinks of this now, she’ll squirm and not touch any worm. She also couldn’t imagine doing then in her younger days.

8) My mum was a very good runner in the school days. She was so good in sports that the teachers used to pick on her to represent the various sports categories in school. But having to work after/before school, cook and taking care of her younger siblings means that there is no such thing as going through sports practice for her. She’ll just turn up on sports day and run for her life.

I could going on writing more things about my mum but I guess the above 8 items are good enough.