Wan's wedding preparations

My second son - Ridzuan is getting married in April - months earlier than he expected. A  normal Malay wedding is full of tradition and needs a lot of preparation before hand - for some even the engagement ceremony is again full of age old customs and traditions. There's the merisik ceremony, in which the groom's parents goes to the bride's house to formally propose. In this ceremony, the groom's parents will normally bring a ring as a sign of intent. After the usual chit chat and social niceties, the parents will broach the subject to the girl's parents. If the parents agree, then a dowry and an engagement date is  set.  

In Wan's case everything was made easy by Emma's family  and we agreed to have the wedding in April. Since then, every weekend has busy for me. This week it's putting on the final touches for the door gifts - the thank you cards. I'm glad nowadays we can get almost everything ready made. We bought all the gifts a few weeks back at Nilai. What with teaching and rushing around getting the preparations done, I'm left with very little time to read or  with anything else. As with most Malay weddings , we will have the  bersanding ceremony where the bride and groom sit on a dais and receive blessings from their family and friends. The dais or pelamin is a raised platform upon which the young married couple will sit. They will be dressed resplendently in wedding finery and the dais will be decorated to make it look like a throne. After blessing the couple, guests will receive a token, normally an egg to symbolise the fertility of the marriage.  All preparations will be done by the family of the bride and groom ( ie. the mother) and there is literally tons to do. The flowers to be ordered, door gifts to be prepared, the dais, the wedding finery, the food to be catered or cooked... guest list to be drawn up and invited. The mother is wedding planner, financial advisor, gift buyer, postman and flower arranger.

This is a picture of the dais that we have to prepare in the typical Malay wedding. I'll post actual pictures later!

This is the dais or pelamin on which the bride and groom will sit

I may complain about having no time to pursue my favourite activities but I'm excited and happy. After all, it's not every day that my son is getting married! However I still have time to read ! Just finished one book in fact - Then Comes Seduction by Mary Balogh, another Huxtable family saga. But I'll tell you about it later.

La Mer

My cats (without Chichi)

Ginger

Mulan is six months now. Soon I'll have to take her to be spayed, a job I don't really look forward to . She has started bugging Ginger too - chasing Ginger around the room. Poor Ginger has been told by the doctor to lose weight. She  weighed about 5.95kg  yesterday when we took her to the clinic. The naughty girl refused to take her antibiotics so we had to take her back to the clinic. Dr Sam said she's a bit overweight so we have to make sure she exercises more!

 Ginger in her favourite sleeping position

 Mulan however has not gained any weight since I took her from Min my sister. She's a fussy eater and doesn't really like to eat the dried cat food, preferring the canned variety. I wonder what to give her instead, since the vet says its not really nutritious enough.





 This is Karupin, one of the Persian monsters. He's quite old, or at least older than the others. His favourite activity is sleeping and being combed by anybody.

Karupin or Apin as we call him is 10 years old and the last of my sister Lela's persians. Lela used to have half a dozen of them at one time!

 

This is Momo, the twin monster. Like Apin, his favourite activity is sleeping and maybe eating.I can never get a picture of Momo because he is either under the sofa or under the bed, his two favourite sleeping places. He has two baskets, - sometimes he goes there when you try to comb him because he hates being combed! Once I had to resort to cutting his furballs and left him patchy for a while.Another things he hates is visiting the pet groomer and once they even had to give him an anaesthetic just to groom him! After that I stopped taking him to the groomer - I'd rather do the grooming myself, even if the results are not that fetching.

This one is Blackie, who is actually more grey than black, giving a pose. Wan my son says she's more monkey than cat!

And this is Mulan, sleeping blissfully