September 18, 2025
Kyle’s 39th Birthday! Ollie woke up excited to give Kyle the card he made for him and Len, not to be upstaged, quickly put together a “birthday pillow sandwich” to give to him.
During homeschool today, rather than writing another letter Ollie wanted to write a poem for Kyle. I supported him a bit but most of it is truly his brainchild!
I booked Kyle a 90 minute massage this afternoon so when he headed to the spa, me and the boys took a cab to the nearby mall to work on our birthday mission. When we arrived at the mall, we were surprised to hear loud music and see dancing in the atrium. The dancing was mesmerizing to watch but the music was SO loud and Len quickly decided his ears couldn’t take it so we moved on to our mission.
The traditional bamboo dance in Malaysia is known as Magunatip, a centuries-old dance of the Murut ethnic group of Sabah. Dancers skillfully step between clapping bamboo poles arranged in a grid on the ground, a performance that requires tremendous agility, precision, and bravery. The dance originated with the Murut, an indigenous tribe of Borneo, and was historically used in healing rituals and as a warrior dance.
Kyle is a tricky person to shop for at baseline but we were also restricted by our minimal luggage space. We settled on a mesh, breathable baseball cap to add to his headwear and sun protection rotation on the trip. We also added a mini birthday cake, an avengers balloon, a huge mint chocolate bar and some Pokemon water bottles to our birthday haul before heading back to the hotel.
We fit in another game of bowling before going to Kyle’s birthday dinner. We split into teams for today’s game and Len and Kyle just edged out Ollie and I for the victory.
Since the boys haven’t found any coconuts on the ground this week, they’ve added a new rule where they can earn coconut points by winning little games with one another. The games usually end up being violent in some way and involve landing punches which we hate. When walking around the resort, they’ll often walk slightly ahead of us and we hear whispers of “coconut points” in between what they think are sneaky punches.
We went back to the resort “fancy” restaurant for dinner tonight to celebrate Kyle’s birthday. He and I picked a grouper to share from the fresh seafood display and the boys repeated their buttered linguini order from last night. Ollie somehow choked so severely on the linguini at dinner that he stuck his whole hand in his mouth to pul a piece out from the depths of his throat. Thankfully the rest of us had finished eating dinner at this point.
We lit a match and sang happy birthday to Kyle with the mini cake we had purchased back in the room. The cake was super cute but apparently tasteless. Thankfully we had the big chocolate bar to fall back on for a birthday dessert!
