The Road to 40 Day 115/365: Back to Normal Monday

Che is now back in Singapore, and everything feels back to normal again.

It was a rollercoaster past three months with her traveling and spending most of her time in the PH. Vino and I had to get used to operating by just the two of us on a daily basis. I took a lot of photos to send to her to let her know we’re ok.

Now that she’s back, my photo reel is back to having mostly screenshots of memes or automatically downloaded pictures or videos from Whatsapp or Viber.

I woke up around 4am with Che getting up to get a cup of water, I think. I closed my eyes a bit and saw that it was 5am, which was a little bit too early still. 6am was a sweet spot, as it allowed me to cook rice properly.

We had 4Fingers for lunch the day before, and we decided that his leftover chicken bites were going to be his lunch for this day. I only needed to airfry and cook sausages for our breakfast.

Vino and I set off as Che stayed home for a while, since she didn’t have an early call and it was raining quite hard. Luckily, traffic wasn’t so bad going into the school, so we were dropped off inside.

I got back home to see Che choosing which shoe to pair with her outfit. I’m not an expert on this, but over the years of being a sounding board for her on these things, I have gotten better at offering my opinions.

It was still just before 10am, so I thought I could do a lot of things. And then I saw the bed and fell asleep while doomscrolling. When I woke up, I tried to make the most of the time I had left by folding laundry and clearing up one of Che’s bags from her last trip.

For lunch, I had leftover burger from last night.

Vino asked for a hotdog and a burger, but only took a bite of the burger after finishing the hotdog sandwich.

It was still gloomy, but at least it wasn’t raining anymore when I picked him up. He was telling me stories about what happened in school, which was refreshing, even if it was mostly the games he played with his friends.

While we were on the bus, I told him that he might be shocked because I replaced the background of his tablet with a picture of my favorite football player. He was smiling, but a bit irritated, I feel like, because he was asking if he could go on the web to find a different picture to replace what I did.

I said it was fine, but he should see the picture first.

When he got home, he saw the picture and just smiled before taking a bath. After he was done, his friend called him on the tablet, and they went on to play while talking.

Meanwhile, I went to work in the kitchen. I have been thinking of cooking breaded pork chop since last week, but I didn’t get a chance to. Now that Che is back, I thought it would be nice to cook it for her and Vino.

I thought about something soupy, but I didn’t have the ingredients I wanted.

Che arrived just in time for dinner. I had just pulled the last piece of pork and was cleaning the last bowl that I used to cook. The kitchen wasn’t much of a mess, at least.

I tried doing a tonkatsu-style method for our pork even if it was a bit thin. I hammered it with a meat tenderizer, dipped in plain flour, then egg wash, and then into my seasoned breading before going into the hot oil.

I let it cool down and let the oil drip before I chopped it up for dinner. I left some out for both of their lunch packs tomorrow.

After eating, I went to wash the dishes while Vino and Che had Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2 in the background. They were playing Restaurant Tycoon 3 on Roblox. I had a good restaurant in Restaurant Tycoon 2, but I haven’t started with them yet. So at least Che has Grow a Garden and this game as their thing for now.

I went to take a bath after cleaning up. When I returned, Che was telling me that Vino was giddy about his tablet’s background. Needless to say, he didn’t change it anymore.

It’s cute that he wasn’t too proud of it when he first saw it, but I guess he was really happy about the reason behind it being the background of his tablet.

Vino slept later than usual – but close to his old sleeping time – while Che and I tried to watch another episode of Beyond the Bar. “Tried” is the operative word because I fell asleep again.

I’ll try to catch up on the episode tomorrow while they’re away.

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