Beans The Spill: The Backup Plan

The "old and wise" used to say to the "young and stupids" repeatedly to always have a backup plan in whatever you do but seldom this immature nitwits do take notice.

To make it more interesting, last month right before Ramadhan, my maid ran away. It's the usual case with Indonesian maid here in Malaysia, after a certain period of time working with an employer, the tendency to run away is quite high.

I am not a person who thinks negatively about people. I tend to trust and respect people whenever I can. This includes our maid. She takes good care of Fahyim and displays motherly affection towards him also when one fine day she requested us to send her to her sisters and later on disappear for reasons I can't state.

We was caught of guard. We needed to think of a way to sort Fahyim out. My wife took 1 week leave to take care of the little guy. At first we can't believe that finally the time has come for us to send our only boy to the kindergarten and he is not yet 2 years old. We scouted for the nearest, most affordable and safest place there is in Bangsar and managed to filter them into two choices.

The first one was Kinderland which is situated in Jalan Terasek. It's near, it has vast experience (established in 1978) and the teacher to children ratio was quite good. There are a few negatives that I saw through my visit there was the maid. She looks fierce and gloomy. The fact that there is no Malay there, so there was no basic Islamic practice which is very essential to us. Plus, the kid screamed and hooked his legs on to my waist when I wanted to put him down.

We went to the next kindergarten near the place where we normally do grocery shopping called Peterana Kindergarten. Situated in Lucky Garden beside TMC. They just started business for not more than a year. A bit off on the experience side but it is Malay-owned and teaches basic Islamic. Not many kids there, they got 14 in total including the 4 years old and above. If Fahyim joins, he will be the fifth kid in the toddlers class. We were mesmerized by the interior design of this place. They make it child friendly similar of that Gymboree. The staircases was fully guarded with baby gates and the house is semi-full carpeted. When we are in the midst of touring the house, the principal asked another teacher to take Fahyim upstairs to play. Surprisingly, that little lad willingly and whole-heartedly surrenders himself to the teacher. I then looked at Diyanah and saw her eyes sparkle, she suddenly shoots a lot of questions to the principal enthusiastically.I know there and then that this particular kindergarten struck my wife's heart . We had a discussion with our parents and enrolled Fahyim the very next week.