i have just eaten too many mini daim candies in quick succession. eight, to be exact. i was pretty sure i’d stop at four, and then six… and now i feel a little tight in the throat, so eight it is. when i impulse-bought a sack of them at the duty free candy shop in the singapore airport, i thought that maybe i now had too many daims, and that it would be a struggle to get through them. but now i see that the cunning daims, with their thick, milky chocolate covering, and their crunchy, salty toffee caramel centers, will have no trouble getting eaten. at all.

i am about to be buried in an avalanche of werk, and will certainly need sustenance. i recently read about someone designing a 144-page exhibition catalogue in four weeks (via india, ink.), so perhaps it can be done after all; i think i have three weeks, for 124 pages.

i wonder, though, if the designer of that catalogue looks after a kid all morning, going to pirate storytime at the library, or two playgrounds on the way to the supermarket to buy watermelon, or like this morning, a meander through the tokyo fiesta in martin place followed by a quick look-in at the lindt shop followed by a sushi picnic at circular quay followed by a clamber up the opera house steps to buy tickets for the babies prom, “yummy in my tummy” in a couple of weeks followed by a trek through the botanical gardens (including somersaults in the grass and duck-chasing) followed by a busride through the city and home followed by stories and successful pottytime and tucking in for naps (followed by eight daims and procrastination reading about the riot at target for stella mccartney frocks. people are crazy.).

my mum has a friend in singapore — her boss, really — whose daughter had twins a little while ago, and worked out this arrangement: the babies stay over at the grandparents’ house during the week, nights included, and then the parents retrieve them for the weekend, unless the boss’s daughter has like, a dinner to go to, or an appointment for a facial or a massage or something, then the babies stay at the grandparents on the weekend too. nightfeeds, night wakings… all done by the grandparents. she’s lucky that way.

because maeve is going through this phase at the moment, where her sippy cup has to be tucked in, and every last finger too, and if something should come untucked during the nap (or, even worse, during the night) then the keening begins.

“maybe her toes are cold,” said my mother, mishearing, over the phone a couple nights ago. “maybe you should put socks on her so she won’t feel the cold and wake up.”

“no, not her toes. she wants her cup to be tucked in.”

my mother is speechless for a time. “wha… her cup?”

“yah.”

“that is sooo funny!”

“funny meh? why don’t you come and tuck her in?”

anyway. so, mother’s boss’s daughter. works in the logistics department at apple. on a whim, i wrote to ask if she could do me an employee discount on an ipod shuffle. she said she had a spare one sitting on her desk, because they just give her one every few months and she’s had so many that she didn’t know who else to give them to anymore. and so she gave it to me. we picked it up on the way to haw par villa. i am lucky that way.

i christened it with “take on me“. mostly, though, i’ve been using it to listen to the mr brown show while doing the dishes after dinner.

i wonder if that exhibition catalog designer has to do the dishes.