The Road to 40 Day 202/365: Daddy Duties

This day turned out to be what a typical day looks like for me.

Lunch was pretty easy today, as we still had leftover food from last night that I just need to heat up for Vino. For breakfast, I cooked some chicken nuggets. We got ready just in time, and we said our goodbyes to Che as we left for school.

Traffic wasn’t bad, so the car took us al the way to the dropoff area. From there, I told Vino I could still say goodbye to him after he reaches his classroom floor.

It took a few minutes, but I waited for him to wave goodbye before I left. Once I got down to the street, I saw that I won’t be able to catch my bus.

Had I left after I dropped Vino off, I would have caught it and got home early. But while I can still see him off and while he is still excited to wave goodbye like that, I’m always ok to miss the bus.

That was until I realized that a cleaner was scheduled to come by this same morning. I tried to take a different route, but I ultimately decided to take the cab going home.

While the cleaner did her thing, I was folding our clothes that were fresh off the dryer and the drying racks. One of the cleaning ladies folded clothes for me, but I wanted them to focus on cleaning the house, so I’d rather just be the one to fold the clothes.

After she was done, I went to the kitched to test out my new toy, a sous vide machine.

Che had expiring rewards points from her office that she needed to use and she thought about getting either a pressure cooker or this thing. I wanted to replace our existing pressure cooker, but then I thought that I don’t have a sous vide machine yet.

I marinated some chicken thighs the previous night, and I wanted to cook some of them for dinner and for Vino’s lunch tomorrow. I had a ready-made chicken inasal marinade and I made some teriyaki sauce from scratch. I then used the vacuum sealer to lock all those flavors in.

I set up the sous vide to cook my chicken for about 3 hours at 70 degrees celsius.

After checking on it from time to time, I was confident I could have lunch out and pick Vino up after. I had chicken curry at Queensway before heading over to pick him up.

I didn’t bring him a snack because he usually asks to play with his friends. As expected, he asked for some time to play. After they’re done, he said he was hungry, so we went over to the hawker stall to eat char siu pau and some blueberry juice.

I asked him not to take his tablet out, so we were able to talk a bit while eating. It’s just random nothings and speculative things, but it’s always fun to hear him talk about anything.

We headed home after his snack. When we get home, I usually head straight to the kitchen to prepare dinner. However, I wanted to make him get used to doing some academic exercises, so I sat with him for a bit before I got to work.

He’s pretty smart, but he’s very careless with his answers and he’s always unsure about everything. I’m hoping getting reps like these would help him gain confidence.

Dinner was a quick cook, since the meat is practically cooked. I just wanted to put some color on the meats, so I seared it in my cast iron. I’m still not sure if this was the expected texture of the chicken after the sous vide process, but I’ll probably learn about it more the more times I use it.

We went to the room early, with Vino saying he was going to sleep on his own bed. He and Che fell asleep quite quickly, which left me to watch something for myself. Currently, that was 24 for 24 – an HBO show where 24 chefs are tasked to do 24 tasks in 24 hours, with only 1 chef being declared the winner after the time limit.

I’m not sure what kept me up, but I wasn’t falling asleep. I had to force myself when it was around 12 midnight, because I knew I needed to wake up early. During this time, Vino’s head was suddenly on my back. Not long after, he rolled over in such a way that my thigh was suddenly his pillow.

I fell asleep in what felt like an eternity, only for me to discover that it was just 1am. I forced myself to sleep again, hoping to get some rest, because it’s going to be another day like this tomorrow.