It is bad enough with the nausea, the messed-up taste buds and the return of her bionic Six- Million-Dollar Nose (giving her a Six-Million-Dollar Sense of Smell), she also has to contend with the social stigma of having a third child.

Yes, the stigma is still there.

I think the Government really did too good a job with the Stop At Two campaign in the 1970s.

The combination of population disincentives — like progressively-higher hospital fees for each additional birth beyond two, and the removal of maternity leave for the third child and beyond — and the cute posters of the two happy sisters under a transparent umbrella, pretty much convinced Singaporeans to go easy on the child-bearing.

Except my family. My dad, brave and courageous man that he was, decided not to abort my third brother.

You wouldn't know it looking at his quiet manner, but he had a real defiant fire in his belly, and he was not going to let something as trivial as Gahmen policy stop him from having his third child, nine years after his first (and six years after his second).

Sure, after two boys, my parents were kind of hoping to have a girl, and as it is with these things, No 3 turned out to be a boy too. Ah well.

The population disincentives were not the only obstacles my parents had to deal with. My dad told me that at the hawker centres, where we used to eat as a family of five, people stared and gave us disapproving looks. As if our family was responsible for single-handedly bringing down the GDP of Singapore and depleting the scarce resources of our tiny island.

Well, my third brother is now a major resource for our tiny island — human resource.

You would think that decades after that family planning boo-boo, the taboo of having more children would be gone. But it is still there, ingrained into the very psyche of Singaporeans, despite the new incentives.

Many of the reactions my wife has been getting about our third one have been congratulatory. But there are just as many negative ones, ranging from "tsk tsk" to "Oh my goodness, why did you decide to have another?" to "Have you gone out of your freaking mind?"

You can imagine, this is not very encouraging to a woman who is already dealing with the challenge of having an autistic first-born, and who has just returned from a Bangkok holiday with a whole load of nice new clothes to wear.

Nice new clothes that fit only un-pregnant women.

Hell hath no fury like a woman with a whole bunch of nice new clothes she cannot wear for the next year or so. It will take many durians to placate her.

But having experienced the joy of two kids, we are determined to let Faith have another sibling to play with, to give Isaac another sibling to share the task of watching out for his special sister, and to fill our household with more sounds of laughter and joy.

Yes, we feel a little chaos, mayhem and milk vomit on our sofa, is good for the soul and keeps us centred.

I was reading the news about the opening of Primary 1 registrations and was wondering what it would be like.

We probably will not be experiencing it for another three to four years, when Isaac gets to attend school. Faith, though now four, will probably not be attending primary school when she turns six. But that's okay, she is a happy child and we will let her learn at her own pace.

I am also wondering how I am going to fit the whole gang into my regular saloon car in future.

Singapore is not a cheap place to own a car (when I tell Westerners how much it costs to buy one here, they laugh and do not believe me). Petrol has this bizarre way of going from a 10-per-cent discount to a 26-per-cent discount to a hike, all in one week.

And who knows what new congested road will be blessed with the ERP magic wand treatment?

Yes, I know. I can also use the highly- efficient public transport system in Singapore, where there is healthy competition between the two very profitable train and bus companies, and you can get a taxi half-an-hour before midnight.

The rising cost of health is also something that worries us.

A wise taxi driver once told me, "In Singapore, it is better to die quickly than to fall sick!"

But I am told I should not worry. On top of the improved medical insurance and the handy Medisave (or what some people call, your-money-you-won't-see-till-you-die), our Minister for Health says that a good son-in-law is also a good source of medical insurance.

So we have Medisave, Medishield and Medi-Son.

And if you do not find a good son-in-law to help you pay your medical bills, never mind. There are always hospitals in JB and Bangkok.

Who knows? Maybe in future, we can even out-source to find children and relatives to look after us in our old age.

mr brown is the accidental author of a popular website that has been documenting the dysfunctional side of Singapore life since 1997. He is now looking for places to buy banana fritters at night, when his wife has her banana-fritter cravings.

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