“What do you want for your birthday?” B has been asking me this off and on for the last two months. So sweet and I wish I had something great to say other than

“Tea and some sleep and someone to please wash my hair for me”

“And I just want to go to yoga”

I used to just order a whole bunch of Asos clothes as my birthday treat. The thought of getting more clothes right now starts off as sounding like a lovely idea but then I balk at the knowledge that I’ll have to put them away in the closet neatly which I still am working on decluttering. Every Christmas we head back to Australia for the holidays and I do a crazy bunch of shopping for things I just can’t get for a reasonable price here in Indonesia. When it comes time to fly I get crazy worried about the excess baggage. After months of trying to declutter my wardrobe this year I decided that is it with the clothes shopping. I’ll only buy one or two really wonderful quality items, sorry, PIECES. More expensive but they will last and not date. I look at photos captioned “wardrobe goals” and think argh, no thank you. I get wardrobe envy at the sight of near empty closets so you get the idea of the turnaround I have had.

Not when it comes to baby clothes though. I may be having less of a turnaround and more of a redirecting haha. B sometimes asks me if I want to donate any of The Child (TC)’s old clothes and I look at him like, “who even are you?” But I tell you, if I could get my hands on some baby Dior I would be tempted to go minimalist too. Oatmeal and spinach stains on Dior though, hmmm, never mind. Also TC goes through two to three outfits every day. Sometimes after dinner we need to do another clothes change because TC decided to just grab dinner by the fistful and most of dinner becomes some sort of accessory all down the front. I’m flattered that my cooking was so enjoyable but I also feel like I could raise a few pigs with the dinner scraps that I am shaking into a pail at the end of every evening.

Incredible how our priorities keep changing as we grow up. I’m still growing up so who knows. Although I have been considering getting a necklace with TC’s name on it. Or a Pilates reformer. Preferably both. So there you go. But in the last few months I have just been prioritising experiences over anything else. In Sydney I was very pedantic about taking TC to the playground and Taronga Zoo etc. I went to the shopping centre but most of my time was spent in the children’s play area. After lunch, of course, and after I had picked up a cup of teh tarik, of course.

If we haven’t spoken about teh tarik before, it means pulled tea. I spent a huge chunk of my childhood growing up in Singapore and we would go for breakfast at these lovely shophouses. You could get all sorts of food such as chicken rice, fishball noodles or you could get kaya toast or roti pratha with some curry sauce. The roti pratha is my dad’s favourite. Anywhere you can find food like that there is a drink stall and you can get pulled tea or a really dark earthy coffee. The tea or coffee is poured back and forth at a great height until it gets really frothy and smooth. The person is practically standing on a ladder doing the pouring. Just before I became pregnant I stopped drinking coffee and now it’s been so long that I love the idea of coffee but my tastebuds have changed. It’s easy to get teh tarik everywhere in Singapore, a little less so here in Indonesia but still possible. Especially if you are determined. I’m extremely determined, driven by mostly that feeling of “I just want SOMETHING for a treat“. Can you still call something you get pretty much every day, sometimes twice a day, a treat?

Whatever.

I love tea and coffee house culture. It’s such a lovely feeling. We woke up extra early this morning (more like TC woke up extra early and decided to haul me out of bed) so I ordered some teh tarik with some roti pratha from a kopitiam my friend took me to. Whilst I waited, my dad was messaging me about ingredients for Chinese porridge and how to make it. We both bought the same rice cooker so he has been messaging me about that quite a bit since I am the only one in the family who reads manuals. (edit: he found his manual so he is reading it as well. We are the only two who read manuals in our family.)

I’m pretty easy going in restaurants but that cup of milky tea was half empty when it came. Soooooo just as well that I ordered two. It was a lovely start to my birthday weekend.

Now I just want some yoga and to wash my greasy hair.

What would you like for your birthday?

Listening to this as I type.