Emily: “Regine, say - Aunty Heoh…”

Aunty Heoh is one of Regine’s caretaker at the daycare center.

Regine: “Ook Aa ah.”

Emily: “No, not ‘Ook aa ah’. Say it properly - Aunty Heoh… say it.”

Regine: “Ook Aa ah.”

Emily: “Repeat after me - Aunt…”

Regine: “Aunt.”

Emily: “Tee…”

Regine: “Tee.”

Emily: “Aunty…”

Regine: “Auntee.”

Emily: “Heoh…”

Regine: “Heoh.”

Emily: “Now say - Aunty Heoh…”

Regine: “Ook Aa ah.”

Emily: [Legs up in the air]

My soon-to-be 18 month daughter Regine has a nickname now. It was given by the principal of the nursery cum daycare center she is attending.

The Little Samseng.

*’samseng’ is a Malay word, that roughly translates to ’scoundrel’ in English…

I do not know what had my little girl done at the nursery to be granted such a name but, I guess it must have got something to do with her daddy’s 62% trait…

Right now, I’m still not sure if I should start get worried, or continue to feel amused by her increasingly bold shenanigans. I’m just enjoying every second of having her around…

Regine a.k.a. Little Samseng - that weights approximately a large sack of rice. Gives good workouts and plenty of muscle aches

Btw, in case you’re wondering, that’s my burly chest behind Little Samseng there. I think this is the first time it has ever been featured on this site. So, appreciate that already.

I was driving Regine home from the daycare center with Emily. Some asshole suddenly clears into my lane without an indicator and I reflexed,

“SHITTTTTT lah this guy!!!!!!! @#$%^&*”

And then I moved on… as though nothing had happened.

A little while later, I overheard Regine exclaim from the backseat,

“SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT”, like she was singing along merrily to a kiddy rap song.

Emily had to shush her up for good and chided me for being such an ass to say things like that in front of my kid. Mea culpa, I didn’t talk back.

I can’t help but think about how true it is when people say you learn bad things faster than the good. It’s always easier to pick up profanities and cusses than any proper vocab. That’s because the nature of human is always evil… that’s probably why we need religion and decorums to hold our shit together (there, I said it again).

Just look at Regine. It literally took her days to learn how to say “Hi”, “See you” and “Goodnight”… but it only took her a fraction of a second to pick up that “S” word.

For a moment there, I really felt like an ass.

Emily and I always like to ask Regine heaploads of dumb questions (now that she’s beginning to understand the language)… you know, something like -

“Where’s your nose?”
“Where’s your backside?”

… you get the idea.

Each time she was asked with those questions, she’ll never fail to point to the right part on herself in her own cute way - which then, we’ll zealously laugh like we’ve never seen anything like that before… (first time parents, forgive us)

I was exactly doing that yesterday after her bath, complimenting that little tummy of her’s like I always do…

Daddy : “Whose tummy is big big?”

Normally, she’ll just look at her own tummy and smack at it to make us laugh. But she didn’t do that yesterday. Instead, she looked at me square in the eyes and then schlepped towards where I was. She then crouched down, lifted up my T-shirt with her little hand and patted MY TUMMY repeatedly with the other.

I was like, totally dumbfucked with what she just did… and just as I was about to correct her on her obviously big mistake, she stood up and flashed me this devious smile… almost as if she was telling me “I pwn-ed you daddy, muahahahh!!”

There goes her 1 week pocket money… deducted in advance. That was clearly a hit below the belt by a 1 year old. We’ll see how she fares when I ask her about electronics next time…

Don’t you find it a bit intriguing that a lot of Chinese medicine seem to have a monochrome ‘face profile’ picture of the inventor/founder/whatever on its label? Well, that was why my Regine refuse to let go of a bottle of Chinese medicated oil she happen to find by the side of the bed the other day… after she saw a picture of a man on the bottle label…

She looked at the picture, then at me, then at the picture… and then uttered out loud…

“DADDDYYY… DADDDYYY…”

I almost choked when I heard that. Emily was laughing like a hyena having a stroke.

I’m sure she was looking at the picture on the left. And I’m even more sure, that I don’t look a wee bit like that rotund fart. (The right one is totally out of the scope). Needless to say, it was a case of mistaken identity - attributed to her relatively new state of face recognition software…

In my desperate bid to redeem my self esteem, I tried to correct her

“Nooo noooo girl, that is NOT DADDY. That is some uncle who looks like William Hung… NOT DADDY”

But the effort was futile. She’d still go,

“DADDDYYY… DADDDYYY…”

The more I corrected her, the more excited she got. I had to stop as I do not want that picture to get ingrained inside her mind. So I tried to steer her attention to something else, which kinda worked, but for only a short while. It was before long she saw that label on the bottle of medicated oil again, and went

“DADDDYYY!!!” [smile]

It hurts.