Hajj 2013, the journey to Jeddah.

This is a continuation of my Mini Series: Hajj. My last post was about me flying off to the UK for my Hajj preparation. Sorry this posts haven't got that many pictures. This is because I didn't want to document it in *that* way. Anyhow, here's the continuation......

My flight was on Thursday 3rd October 2013, at 10:10 am. Bear in mind, I only received confirmation of someone bringing in our passport on 1st October! That was very risky! Anyway, I boarded the plan on time and made way to the runway, that's what it's called right? Very model like. However, a few minutes later the flight had to turn back and we were told to get off the plane. We waited for a few hours and everyone got agitated. I mean truthfully, I didn't mind waiting as long as the plane was OK. So they checked the plane and had to fix some things on it. It's been three years now, I've kinda forgotten what it was. When everything was safe, we boarded the same plane. Alhamdulillah, the flight to the UK was smooth. I had to change my bus ticket to Leicester because of the flight delay. From here, it was obvious that the journey to Hajj is not as easy as we think it would be.

My stay in the UK was good. Everything went as planned and my Husband joined me a few days later. It was 1 and 1/2 day to our flight to Jeddah, to be exact.

On 7th October 2013, we went on the bus to Heathrow airport to meet up with our 'tour operater' for the hajj journey and to fly off to Jeddah. Everything was pretty dandy and smooth from the UK - Jeddah. But as we got to the airport in Jeddah, we slowly felt the tests we were getting.

We had to wait for our bus to arrive and bring us into Mekah. That's where we were going first because it was only a few days left to perform Hajj. We waited close to 6 hours at the airport. Whilst in Mekah, we had a few stops to go through. It's amazing how they greet all the Hujaj. We were given free food and drinks. They would stop our bus and made sure everyone got their snacks. As we were almost reaching our hotel, we were stopped by an owner of a restaurant. They're closing the shop and had some extra food left, so they decided to give us some proper meal. I think it was Mandhy Rice. After almost a day of travelling, that meal was very much waited for! Alhamdulillah and May Allah bless those people in their business and Akhirah. Amin!

Our hotel in Mekah wasn't close to Masjidil Haram. We stayed in Aziziya which is about 30 minutes away from the Masjid. On our first day in Mekah, we had a bus to bring us to the Masjid. We stayed in the Masjid for half a day and went back to our hotel. This is because we weren't familiar with the place and we have to go when the bus goes. As we went along, we made new friendd from different backgrounds and country. We have people from Bangladesh, Pakistan and also Morocco. Everyone came with one intention which was to get Hajj Mabrur! As we were staying away from the Hotel, we had either wait for the tour bus to bring us to the masjid or go on our own. Alhamdulillah during our stay there, people were competing to pay for the taxi fares! Everyone wanted some deeds of our Hajj. Money weren't an issue whilst we were there. After 5 days of staying in Aziziya, we went to Mina..........

Mina, that's a story on its own!

My third baby's 100th day and my 200th post!!

Masha'Allah! How amazing is that? Celebrating my 200th post with a story of my third child's debut to the world? It's nice to have a blog where I can jot down the important things in my life. At least, some of it. :) Just for the record, this baby was a rather planned one, because I said after I come back from hajj, I want another baby. And BAM, AllahuAkbar! That will be in a different blog altogether. Allah's miracles!

So here's how he went down or even, came out.....

My third pregnancy went by so quickly, at one point. Towards the end of it, when I became bigger and heavier, I felt like there was more than 24 hours in a day! I.just.wanted.the.baby.to.be.out.of.me like as soon as possible. People say that by the third pregnancy, baby will come out at least 2-3 weeks earlier. LIES!!!!! My baby hanged on to my womb for as long as he could. I felt like it's gonna be an induced baby. Every single time I attend my prenatal check-ups there were no sign of baby coming out any earlier. As keen as I was, I was still scared to go through the whole delivery process. So anyway, I gave up counting the days and just went with the flow. My final days were on the month of Ramadhan. I could've "easily" fasted the whole month but I kept telling myself I needed the food and energy in case baby comes out.

On the 21st Ramadhan 1435 = 19th July 2014, the last 9 days of Ramadhan, my Dad's company had Iftar and Qiamulail at their company's hotel. The plan was for Khalid and Aizah to stay with my parents, nephew and niece at the hotel because I just needed some time off from them. THE PLAN. So, I went to the hotel at 3p.m to drop them off for their sleepover. I was so sleepy and tired by the time we reached the hotel (yeah, it not only happens during pregnancy, I need afternoon naps! haha). I took an hour nap and got up for Asar prayers. Everything was well and dandy. I did not feel any sign of giving birth at all! At about 6p.m, my parents came to my room asking if we wanna join them for Du'a Selamat and Yassin recitation. I asked them to go ahead first because we were not ready. At about 6:30p.m I went downstairs and was just in time for the du'a selamat and my Dad's speech to officiate the Qimullail. It was a heartfelt speech as my Dad was  crying when giving his speech. I cried too (blame the hormones). But yes his speech did touch us in so many ways. :'(

When everything was done, I took the kids out of the hall to have some quiet time. By then it was nearing Iftar. At that moment, I had a few moments of 'stomach cramps'. It was happening every 15 minutes. Being the person that I am, so laid back. I said, no this couldn't be contraction. Probably just braxton hicks since I've not got that during my pregnancy. Before Iftar, I went to the toilet and there was stain. To say it was a stain was also very tricky because it was literally ONE teeny-weeny-itsy-bitsy brown dot. So I left it as it is but just in case, I did tell Iskandar what was happening and you can see the excitement on his face!Yeah, weird right?!

We went to our room to pray Maghrib because I just could not stand up to pray in my last trimester. So, the kids and my niece prayed in our room and I went to the toilet straight after. Had episodes of tummy ache and the cramps were coming closer at 10minutes interval. We went downstairs again to have our dinner. This time I knew it was contractions! I could not walk when it was happening and had to stop at every instance it was happening. Since it was my Dad's company's event, people were stopping me and asking me questions like, "when are you due?" "Your tummy looks so low." I just said "my due date is on the 21st July, so it could be anytime now" whilst bearing the contraction pain.

We got to the dining table safely and I made sure my kids had their dinner. By this time it was already 8+p.m. I also had my dinner as I did not have that much food during the day. Whilst having dinner I was already feeling the contractions every 5 minutes!! But nothing comes between me and FOOD! Everyone knows that! Just before I finished eating, my Mom asked, "are you going back after this?" I just told her, "I think I'm going to the hospital, I don't feel right." My Mom thought I was just pulling a fast one because I was gonna leave the kids behind. I was like whatever. Went to my Dad, told him I'm going to the hospital and of course he had to announce to the whole table that I was sooo due but still wanna come. So, we salam and kissed our parents and shoot straight for the car. At that point, I was really dragging myself out of the hotel. Asked the jockey for our car and they took their time to give our keys. HOW FUN! I'm sure it wasn't that long but it did feel forever!

Pic courtesy of Google

Oh, did I mention the hotel was in KL and my hospital was in Sungai Buloh? Oh and also, we didn't bring the baby bag or Red Book with us. Sooooo, we had to go back home. We arrived home at 9:30p.m, I told Iskandar I wanna stay in the bath for a while. Because in UK they'd asked to have a warm bath first before coming in. Warm bath will soothe the contraction. Iskandar prayed Isha' whilst I was just waiting for the contraction to "go off". As if! By the time he finished solat, I asked him to time my contractions and it was still every 5 minutes. So I came out of the bath, solat Isha' and rushed out to the hospital. Before that I managed to take my Qaseh Adinda supplement since I definitely need the energy if I was gonna deliver then.

Pic courtesy of Google

Arrived the hospital at 10:30p.m, Alhamdulillah it was so smooth sailing. Got our parking space easily and we walked to the maternity ward....dragging-ly!!!!!! I had to stop at every contraction!!! We registered at the counter only to know that husbands aren't allowed to go in for the check up. So they strapped me on the ECG and what nots for a good 20minutes. They told me my graph was "nice" since my contraction was quite constant. I have NOOOO IDEA what that means! I had to wait in the waiting room to see the doctor and there was so many joyful people who was asking me questions! Even though they know my contractions were constant, they still waited for an answer while I had to deal with the contractions myself! Then we went to see the Doctor which then told me I was already 5cm dilated! That's good news for me because at least I can be in the delivery room with Iskandar. Remember I said THE PLAN was for us to have our time since the kids are away, hey, why not make it memorable and have a date in the delivery room, yes?? No? ;)

Pic courtesy of Google

Little did I know, Husbands are not allowed in until the wives are about 10cm dilated. 10 CM ok!!! What theeeee? I really needed the support. I think I kept bugging them with the question "can my Husband come in now? I need to tell him what's going on." They 'assured' me everything is in good hands and he's well informed. Ok fine. The doctor came in again to break my waterbag. It felt soooo good to have my waterbag break. I know if they didn't break it, I will stay there forever. I asked the Doctor if my Husband can come in before he breaks my waterbag because with Aizah, literally 2 mins after my waterbag broke she was already coming out. The Doctor said, it's ok, we will wait and see. I don't think it will happen that soon. Alright, you should know, I thought. Tick tock tick tock. It was already 11:30p.m. The Doctor said that I was already about 6cm dilated, so accordingly I should be giving birth by 4a.m. earliest.....

WRONG!!!!!!! 12a.m I told the nurses I think I really need to push the baby out, I can really feel it. I remember the nurses taking their time putting their gloves etc and said, "tunggu ye. We all kena prepare, kalau betul baby nak keluar nanti takde barang2". I told them "Tak boleh tunggu!!! Betul nak keluar dah ni!!!!!" They just told me to selawat and zikir. So  I did. Then they checked me, I was already 10cm and they can feel baby's head! Remember my husband wasn't with me? Yeah they had to rush and tell Iskandar to come in. But they didn't tell him baby is soooo coming out! When he came to the delivery room all calm and collected, switch on the Quranic Mp3 for me and asked so what's new? I just told him I'm about to push!!!!! He quickly held my hand and gave encouragement. Haha Such a natural! :) However, at this point I just couldn't feel any contraction so everyone was just waiting. When it came, I just pusheddddddddd!!!Unfortunately, I don't really count how many pushes it was. The next think I know, baby was already out.

Alhamdulillah at 12:17a.m on 22nd Ramadhan 1435; 20th July 2014, Raja Sa'ad Salahuddin made debut to the world. He's such an amazing baby, Masha'Allah. Actually, all my kids are amazing in their own way.  Everything was well for the both of us Alhamdulillah. By 12p.m the same day, the doctor discharged the both of us. AND THAT'S WHY I LOVE GOVERNMENT HOSPITALS! I get so restless staying in hospitals that I kept bugging them I wanna go home so they checked me up and let us go on the day itself.

Three months on and he's still the same easy-to-handle baby that he is. SubhanAllah Alhamdulillah.

I'm sure you are all 'eager' to know my experience between UK care and Malaysia. I shall blog about it like I always say... soon! :D:D:D Insha'Allah.

Hajj Pilgrimage: EVERYTHING went wrong!

As I am writing this, a few Hajj jemaah have left Malaysia for Mekah to perform their pilgrimage. Can't believe it's been a year since! May Allah accept your ibadah and please make full use of the time you have there, this is once in a lifetime opportunity!

Anyway, by now, you might already know that I've been to Hajj and obviously came back safely because here I am blogging about it. ;) For those of you who sacrificed your busy schedule just to sit down and talk to us personally about our Hajj trip, we appreciate it so much. It's a different level of busy-ness here in Malaysia, so to have the time to get offline and talk face-2-face, that's an honour. But for those of you who have been busy with family and other things, we truly understand! It's not that easy to just get in the car and have a chat, especially if you're married! Errkk. I mean, I REALLY TRULY understand the situation.

Anyway, like I said in my previous post all of OUR plan went haywire when we decided to move back to Malaysia. We were supposed to fly off to Mekah from the UK in September but since our plan changed, we had to think of a way to get extra money to travel from Malaysia-UK-Mekah-UK-Malaysia. In June, we booked and paid for our Hajj package via online as we were already in Malaysia. After confirming our bookings we found out that they needed our passports for the Hajj visa a few months before departure. That wasn't the downfall.....yet!

We were told by the travel agent that we will only get our passport with the Hajj visa 2 days before departure!!! Of course that didn't work for us because we were travelling from Malaysia so we need our passport way earlier to make sure we get to the UK as scheduled.

The next 4 months was a REAL test of FAITH, masha'Allah. 

Since there was no turning back, we only had one thing to do..Which really, should have been the first thing we SHOULD do. Make lots of du'a. At that point in time, other than the obligatory prayers, performing solat hajat and tahajud was our second nature. We felt lost when we didn't perform those prayers. Waking up in the middle of the night wasn't a problem because we really wanted to perform Hajj and we know noone else could help us except for Allah. We put our trust in him and tawakal that everything will turn out perfectly as how HE planned. Even if we didn't get the chance to go this time, we didn't feel bad as we turned to HIM for help. Iskandar and I didn't put pressure on each other even though we really wanted this day to come. We hardly even utter about how much we want this opportunity to fall in place. Everything was done in our prayers. We begged ALLAH to give us what HE knows will be the best for us. We even left the travel agents to work on our visa and did not bother them with e-mails asking when we are getting our passports and visas. We left it all to ALLAH.

Nonetheless, the month of September came and we got real anxious as we were scheduled to leave to the UK in the first week of October. On 24th of September, I e-mailed the travel agent to get updates on our passport. And so they replied... asking Iskandar for his UK visa since they can't find it in his passport. Confidently I told him it is in his old passport which my brother have sent it together with the other passports. They replied that the old passport with UK visa wasn't with them. So I contacted my brother and he confirmed he DID NOT send the old passport to the travel agent. Things got even worse and to blame everyone at that time was an option. But I didn't, thanks to NLP and positive thinking. I pulled myself together and think of ways to get his visa to the travel agent as soon as possible. 

Alhamdulillah, the postal service in the UK is amazingly efficient so they received the passport in time, which was 5 days before our departure to the UK. Now things are supposedly going rather smoothly but we forgot, how are we going to get our passport within 5 days??? I contacted the post office and they said that if we are posting passports they will hold it at the custom for a month just to make sure that it's legit documentation. Of course we didn't have a month to spare!! So we continued thinking of ways to get our passport to KL. A few days before our passports and visas were approved, we had so many relatives going back and forth the UK and Malaysia but as soon as we got our passport we didn't have anyone.

But, Allah was there all along guiding us. My dad received a msg from his friend saying that they're leaving for Malaysia on the 4th October. So without hesitation, we contacted him and explained our situation. Alhamdulillah we managed to set for an appointment for the travel agent and my dad's friend to meet and pass our passports through him.However, Iskandar had to delay his flight due to some complications whereas I managed to get on the flight back to UK as scheduled. I had about 3 days to spare before our flight to Mekah. As for Iskandar, he arrived the night before our flight to Mekah.... phew! SubhanAllah Alhamdulillah!

So, you would have thought that everything would go smoothly by now right? I mean, we've got our passports AND visas! What else could go wrong?

Stay tuned for the next episode........ ;)

Hajj Pilgrimage : The Plan

‎This is one journey that I want to have in my memory.... forever! Ok, other than the birth of my children and their growing up stage and some other random stuff. But *this* right here, is an event that I will never want to forget! Inshaa'Allah.

It's best for me to start from the beginning, right? So, how did we even plan on going for Hajj? Well, we didn't really. See, every year during Ramadhan we will get flyers being sent to our house for Umrah and Hajj packages. Of course during that month you would only want to read sacred things and that is considered as one of them. As I was going through the Umrah packages for year 2011, I told Iskandar how it would be amazing to bring the kids for Umrah as we have visited Malaysia and a few other countries. It'd be nice for them to step foot in Mekah at such an early age. Iskandar, being the thinker and "financer" in the family was not too keen with my plan. So I thought how cheapo can my husband be! Yes the umrah packages aren't as cheap as going for holiday to Malaysia, it was double the price. I gave him the chance to explain his points. Then he said, "why not we do the mandatory first before taking the kids for Umrah". It didn't occur to me that he meant Hajj. He then suggested for us to save up for Hajj and try to do it as soon as possible. 

Hajj was not something I talk about everyday. Haha Duh! But you know what I mean. Hajj is looked at as an Ibadah for the elderly rather than youngsters. Of course we don't talk about it until we are about 40 years old, at least. So when my husband suggested Hajj, I had to ask "Are we even allowed to go?" because in Malaysia we'd have to wait for our name to be called before we can do Hajj with Tabung Haji. ‎Iskandar then showed me the price list for Hajj and how to go about booking it. Obviously the procedure of booking it is the same as booking any other holiday, at least in the UK. 

Without hesitating, I agreed to his plan and started planning on how much we have to save monthly in order to reach our goal. Truth be told, he wasn't earning a lot (+-£1500/month) and with one income we really had to make sure we took everything into consideration. Some way some how, after we have decided on going for hajj we were receiving funds from various source. At this time we haven't even told anyone about our plan. But money was coming in non stop. Alhamdulillah. We manged to save up at least £3000 within 4 months. The ticket per person was approximately £4000. I was so optimistic that we will be able to get the whole sum before the booking date.

Then we started telling our parents the plan to make sure there will be someone to babysit the kids. The initial plan was for my parents to come over to the UK to look after the kids since it'll be cheaper that way. However, we had to change all the plans when we found out we had to move to Malaysia for good. The plan from then on became bumpy and distorted! Everything we planned wasn't going OUR way!

To be continued.....