The Road to 40 Day 10/365: Back to regular Mondays

by | May 20, 2025 | Strawberry-Filled Donuts

For the first time in three weeks, Vino is back to school on a Monday.

We’ve had two long weekends back-to-back, and even his teacher made a mistake on the weekly update.

It takes a while for Vino to get up in the morning to go to school, but when he gets up, he’s in his usual bright self.

As a self-admitted helicopter parent, I’ve made a habit of checking if he’s fine after I drop him off. From his first day of school, I have always dropped him off to school. Even if we still had Ate Jen, I would choose to go and drop him off.

In his early days, he would cry and try to run back to me. As he grew older, the tears became less and less, except for the first few weeks of the Vietnam experience.

Throughout this whole experience, he has found a habit of looking for me and giving me a thumbs up to show that he’s fine already. It’s really nothing much, but it’s become a fun habit for me to watch out for in the morning.

I don’t even know if it still holds the same meaning for him. He would usually just do it out of habit, sometimes he wouldn’t even smile. But it’s still nice to see him look back and wave.

On this day, I prepped two lunch boxes because Che requested to have one packed for her as well.

It’s not a regular thing we do, because the packed lunches are usually catered to what Vino can have. But if Che knows she’s going to be too busy (and maybe lazy) to get off her chair and buy food outside for lunch, she would ask me to make her a portion.

Knowing what I’m going to pack for Vino also contributes to her decision to ask for an extra serving for her.

When Vino started school, I would plan out the week and buy groceries accordingly. I’d cook something for snacks and then something else for lunch while also preparing a different breakfast.

Sometimes though, he would not finish his food, which is a bit frustrating. Later, I got lazy with snacks because it’s such a waste of food and effort if he’s not going to eat it or runs out of time to finish it.

Now, I usually wing it and prep the night before. It has worked for us, but Che isn’t able to think in advance if she would want lunch for herself.

I’m hoping I get more time to focus on this soon.

I picked up Vino from school, and on our way back, he asked to drop off at an earlier bus stop so we could walk home. It takes a bit of effort because it’s an uphill climb, but it was nice that he wanted to do it.

On our way up, we talked about football and Brawl Stars. I know it’s an opportunity to talk to him about other productive things, but I’m happy to let him build his confidence by talking about things he wants to talk about instead of being preachy about things I think he needs to know.

Before going home, I got some ingredients from the shop for what I planned for dinner.

I’m still transcribing the transcript of the interview I did the other day, and one of the things we talked about was her love for Thai food. I then tried to look up a recipe for Thai pork basil and combined a few concepts to come up with a minced pork dish.

I can’t name it anything, because it’s not one or the other. So it’s minced pork with carrots, string beans, and potatoes, with a sauce that’s a mixture of light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, oyster sauce, fish sauce, sugar, and pepper.

It was deliberately a huge serving so that we could eat it for dinner and for both of them to have it for lunch. I will know later when I wash the dishes if they ate it well.

We’re slowly finishing Resident’s Playbook on Netflix. When before, we could watch maybe 3 or 4 episodes before we sleep at 2AM or something, these days, both Che and I stop at around 12-12:30AM even if we only watched one episode.

Looking forward to finally getting closure on this one. It’s not that bad and it has moments, but it’s difficult for me to get invested in the love story of the main characters because of the”visual” of male lead compared to the female lead.

I stand by this, and if there is anyone who disagrees, I quote the famous TikTok guy, defender of Vella – “feyt me.”

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