Settling Down 2012

I am back to the place I loved most – Sungai Petani. I know I am going to dread going back to Melbourne after this. Anyway, it took a while to clear and clean our house up to DH’s standards (and mine too) and resettled our stuff from Kajang. But we eventually did it in a week’s time.

Finding a kinder and day care for the children was not difficult. There are several options in our housing area. But I am having some reservations because this would be the first time for us and also for Luqman to be put under the care of a nursery. Aliyah and Uwais were both cared by a single babysitter before. So truth be told I have no experiences at all in dealing with day care centres. It doesn’t help that after 3 days at day care, he started vomiting and suffered diarrhoea several times a day. However, he bounced back in a day. And when Uwais also started suffering from the same thing, we figured that he got it from Luqman and most probably Luqman got it from playing with the tap water (and drinking from it!) They both just loved playing with water running from the water hose! An activity, which, they would never have been able to experience in Melbourne :-)

It was Aliyah’s school which was taking some time to be processed. Since she was never registered in the system before, I had to submit her application forms to the State’s Education Department in Alor Star instead of the District’s Education Office in Sungai Petani. And surprise… surprise… the staff with the authority to approve the application is super-duper busy! Considering I had received the approval of the Headmistress of our chosen school for Aliyah’s entry into the school, it just beats me how complicated can the whole approval/signing process be. 

After several days of dealing with them, I have decided to just wait. Maybe my expectations are simply too high. Evidently, this is Malaysia, tanahairku yang tercinta. Maybe they are some wisdom behind the matter. Only Allah knows. Meanwhile, I have resorted to enrol Aliyah into Uwais’ kinder in order for her to catch up with her Jawi and Qiraati and prepare all her schooling necessities. Hopefully, Aliyah will be able to start school before I finish my PhD!