The joy of chatting with kids

Nowadays, my nieces chat with me on MSN. Although I know it’s not appropriate for them to be indulging in instant messaging at such a young age, I try to put it to good use by advocating that they must spell correctly and write grammatical English when chatting with me.

Below is a recent conversation I had with my older niece. She was asking me about my MSN message that day which was “to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy”

Niece: what legacy do you want to leave behind?

Me: hmmmmm

Niece: your teaching?

Me: will leave all my books and chewing gums for you

Niece: haha

Me: hehehe. plus all my socks…ok?

Niece: you still have chewing gum? no, not your socks!

Me: hahahahaha. my socks are branded

Niece: never!!!!!!! and not the books. i hate studying. i will leave this for you (sends me document via msn)

Me: what's that file? (i receive document with list of chinese words)

Niece: my chinese homework that i did not copy. jade sent it to me (jade is her best friend)

Me: hmmm. why didn't you copy it in school?

Niece: no time. i forgot to leave two lines (double-line spacing), had to rewrite all the words

Me: your teacher is mad

Niece: then…ring…ring…the bell rings and it's time to go home. i only copied until no.5

Me: you dashed out of the classroom huh?

Niece: no, must say goodbye then line-up to go downstairs

Me: i still don't understand why you sent me the file. i can't write it for you. my handwriting is different from yours

Niece: i know. i just sent it to leave for you

Me: hahahahahhaa. so those words are your legacy?

Niece: yup. i want to throw them away but i can't. because jade may not send it to me again hahahahahha

Me: muahahahahaha

A big thank-you to my body

I hurt my right calf on the eve of Chinese New Year, pulled a muscle. While I was holidaying in Thailand with two other friends, a slip triggered the injury again. Was limping around for a while but luckily I had some salompas plasters with me, helped ease the pain. Because of the injury, I wasn’t able to exercise for a couple of weeks. When I finally had the guts to start jogging again, I took extra care to put my body weight more on the unhurt left leg so as not to aggravate the twice hurt muscle on my right calf.

This morning, while I was on my jogging rounds again, I saw two old ladies on wheelchair. One of them has been exercising at the park for many years, just like me. She used to walk around the park every morning. Her legs were kind of warped so I guess because of old age, they have become too weak now and she’s wheelchair-bound. The other old lady had both legs amputated, which probably was caused by diabetes complications. As I looked at them, I was really grateful that my legs are still strong and supporting me, allowing me to be mobile and run round the park as and when I needed a meditation jog. What I saw made me suddenly appreciate my body. Don’t we all do that? Only when we lose something we have, something we take for granted, then we’ll realise how important it is to us. So this post is to thank the various parts of my body, for allowing me to use and abuse you all these years. Will try to be more conscientious of your importance to me from now. Thank you body.