2022

January 2022

Just entering the new year, weathering another Albertan winter. PY was about 6 or 7 months pregnant at this time. Also, PY and I got our booster COVID vaccine shots (so we both had 3 shots each).

February 2022

We visited a friend in Calgary. Immediately after the trip, Wynnie developed some symptoms. She tested positive for COVID with a rapid test kit at home. We confirmed it at a government test centre. So everyone had to isolate at home for about a week. PY experienced some mild fever, while I didn’t have any symptoms at all. In fact, my test results came back as “positive” but unable to determine the variant due to “low viral count”. I attribute this to the vaccines!

March 2022

Shortly after our mandatory isolation period, my father arrived to support us with the new baby for the next few months. Wynnie went back to daycare and instantly caught some sort of stomach bug which caused fever and vomiting. After a few days, she slowly recovered but unfortunately, PY got infected with it. One afternoon, she started vomiting too and that evening, she urged us to visit the hospital. To skip the long lines at the emergency department, we went to Labour & Delivery (aka maternity ward). Nurses triaged her and hooked up monitors. And surprise! She was actually in labour. The obstetrician on duty ordered an emergency Caeserean delivery because the baby’s pulse rate had already dropped multiple times while we were there, and the baby was breech (i.e. head up).

What else could we say or do?

So they wheeled PY off into the operating theatre and went to work right away, and thus, Kingsley was born unto us in the late hours of that Friday night, within an hour of the decision.

And as if we didn’t have enough excitement, I somehow caught food poisoning the next evening from eating hospital food. Nurses kicked me out of there because vomiting was considered a COVID symptom, so I wasn’t allowed to stay the night. So in my half lucid state from exhaustion and dehydration, I drove my sorry ass back home at 1am.

On Sunday morning, while my wife all by herself at the hospital, still in terrible pain from the surgery, the nurses told her that was being forcefully discharged. So, again, in my fatigue from battling the food poisoning, I drove all the way back to the hospital to pick her and Kingsley up. I don’t know how I had it in me to do all that without getting anyone killed because my memory of that day is very foggy.

April 2022

After Kingsley turned a month old, my father decided to cut his visit with us short by a month. So after sending him off, we were on our own.

May 2022

Our friends from Calgary came to visit for a weekend – visiting friends always meant a good time.

We also submitted a passport application for Kingsley, in preparation for our visit to Malaysia.

June 2022

The winter cold lingered for a long time and it was only truly gone in June.

We attended a circus show – there was a big top, with animals and dazzling acrobats and stunt performers. As usual, we had a number of picnics at parks to enjoy the nice weather.

July 2022

Peak of summer meant getting around and we visited friends in Calgary again. It was the first long car trip for Kingsley.

After coming back from the trip, PY tripped on the steps in our garage. She bumped the top of her head and heard cracking. She was in so much pain and couldn’t get up on her own. I called in an ambulance that took her for checks at the hospital. Thankfully, there were no fractures or other serious damage, but she was really sore for weeks from that fall.

Towards the end of the month, we went to K-Days, which is an annual 10-day exhibition in Edmonton. We spent two days there – enjoyed the Ferris wheel and funfair rides, ate some food and took many pictures. Unfortunately, Wynnie was just one or two inches too short of the minimum height to go on a majority of the rides there. At least we know that next year, she’ll be tall enough for more of them.

August 2022

We took part in the Go East of Edmonton tourism promo. It involved driving to the dozens of little towns dotted all around Alberta to collect stickers, with which we could enter a lucky draw to win some cash prizes.

The Mundare sausage!

One of the places we visited was Lac La Biche, towards the north of the province. We went on a hike. The weather was already turning into fall, so it was a bit too chilly to swim in the lake. Anyway, there was an advisory notice against swimming due to high levels of fecal matter, ack!

September 2022

It was our birthday month.

We tried glamping for the first time. We stayed in a comfortable yurt and barbecued some food.

I don’t really remember if we did anything else that was special, but we did visit the Telus World of Science museum in Edmonton.

October 2022

I made my glorious comeback into the world of speedcubing by attending the “Rockies Rager Fall 2022” cubing competition in Canmore. We stayed two nights there to make use of the time there to indulge in the beauty of the mountains.

November 2022

I had registered for another cube competition (“Sylvan Solves 2022”) that was on November 5. But I had to pull out at the last minute because two days before the competition, Wynnie decided that it was a good idea to try stick an ear pick down Kingsley’s ear. There was some bleeding and we took him to see a doctor. Thankfully, there wasn’t any trauma to the inner ear but we had to take him in for a follow up on the same day of the cube competition.

December 2022

To make up for missing the cube competition the month before, I attended another one called “FMC Canada 2022” which was held simultaneously at four different venues across Canada.

Our friends in Calgary informed us they had just received instructions to move back to Malaysia; their overseas deployment for work has finally drawn to its end. So we visited them in Calgary one last time, to handover some Christmas and parting gifts.

Unfortunately, during our visit, Kingsley caught some sort of virus, causing him to vomit. On the day coming back, I was infected and I was vomiting or having diarrhoea every 30 minutes on our 4-hour journey back to Sherwood Park. When we finally got home, it was PY’s turn to suffer the same things for the next day or two while I recovered.

(If you haven’t noticed, it seems like we get into some sort of misfortune every time we return from a trip to Calgary).

We finally received Kingsley’s Canadian passport so we promptly booked our flights back to Malaysia and made plans. The trip is in January 2023 so we already have something great and exciting to look forward for next year.

A week before Christmas, we threw a birthday party and invited Wynnie’s classmates from pre-school and their families over.

On the last day of the year, I accidentally drove into a ditch and got our car stuck in the snow. We were in an estate, so it was a less-traveled road. But in serendipitous manner, within minutes, neighbours who live nearby drove past in their truck. They stopped and rescued us. They had slings handy, just to pull poor drivers like us out! We so happened to have some dessert wine in the car and tried to gift it to them as a form of thanks but they declined, saying “(We’re) friends, (we’re) friends!”

2023 – Go help someone else! Happy new year!

That’s all the said, along with other well wishes. And then they were off; our angels – we didn’t even get to exchange names or phone numbers.

Great way to end a great year.