Janice's Watercolour Paintings

We noticed that Janice likes to draw and paint, so we enrolled her into a drawing class for kids. So far for the last couple of months, she has attended weekly drawing and painting class with a private art teacher, Ms Diana Lim in Sunshine Plaza, 91 Bencoolen Street.

I have captured some of her paintings here. She seems to be quite creative and tends to imagine and paint her own drawings instead of taking advises from her art teacher. Her teacher explained that at her age now, she is at the stage of self-exploratory and curiosity where she enjoys mixing her own colours and paint her own way.

Is there any good art school around in Singapore? I was wandering if the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) do provide lessons for young kids. We hope to develop Janice's drawing and painting interests if she wants to go further.

What is watercolor painting?

Baby Rachel at her First Reunion Dinner

We were at my mom's place for the reunion dinner to usher in the "niu" year on sunday evening, 25 Jan 09. I brought in the roasted duck, roasted chicken and roast pork which we bought from Jurong West's market while mom cooked some of our favourites. We have white cabbage soup with fish balls, meat balls, sotong balls, fish maw etc, sambal tiger prawns, nyonya ayam pongteh and spinach with abalone.

This year, we have my sister's newborn baby girl, Rachel who is 6 weeks old to join us for the reunion dinner. My sister has placed Rachel in her roller bed beside the dining table. Rachel is fast asleep when we finished our dinner. What a sweet and lovely baby girl.:)

Janice in Yunnan, City of Eternal Spring

We went on a 8 days tour with Chan Brothers Travel to Yunnan, China from 5-12 Apr 2008. We visited the major tourist regions such as Kunming, Dali, Lijiang and Shangri-La. As we coached along the rivers and mountains, we were fascinated and awed by its diverse cultures, breath-taking natural scenery and pleasant climate in Kunming, the capital city, celebrated as "City of Eternal Spring".

Yunnan province is situated in the southwest of China which covers a total area of 394,000 square kilometers. It is home to 26 ethic minorities which give a rich color to the land. They contributed with their colorful costumes, their traditional songs and dances to the attractive life.

Yunnan attractions include Jiuxiang Scenic Spot, Stone Forest, Lijiang Ancient Town, Tiger Leaping Gorge, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Dali Ancient City, Erhai Lake, Three Pagodas, etc.

Janice put on the 'Bai' tribe costume which we bought from Yunnan and she is delighted to pose for some photo shoots when we were back at home.

Janice went Bald

Janice is 4 months old when she went bald including her eyebrows. It is a tradition practise as advised by our parents to trim off Janice's baby hairs and allowed her to grow her new hairs from nought. According to them, this would result in more abundant, darker, denser and healthier hair. We even trimmed off some of Janice's eyelashes, which I learned from my colleague, who told me that this would make her eyelashes to grow out nicer.
Janice has given us so much joys and laughters each day (... of course we have our "headaches" too). She has grow into a beautiful little princess and is 5 years 4 months old now.

Her hairs, eyebrows and eyelashes have also been growing and these are 2 recent pictures taken when she is about 2 months before her 5th birthday.

Isn't she lovely? :)

I Delivered my Baby Girl at Home

Janice was only 2.345 kg, 46 cm in length and 30 cm in head circumference when she was borned on 29 Sep 2003, about 1 month premature ahead of her estimated due date. I can still clearly remembered what happened that fateful morning. Here is my story......

My wife, Jenny woke me up at about 6am that morning, complaining that she felt pain in her abdomen. I got up quickly and told her that we would drive down immediately to see her gynaecologist, Dr Kang Wee, at KK Women's and Children's Hospital. Her estimated date of delivery was on 24 Oct 2003.

About 15 minutes later, just when we were about to leave the house, she indicated to me that her abdomen was very painful and she felt like wanting to empty her bowel. She has no strength to walk or stand. I knelt her down in a crawling position and told her to do her breathing exercise to relax her down a little. Thinking back, I was grateful for the 10 sessions of 1.5 hour of antenatal programme which I attended with my wife from 11 Jul to 26 Sep 2003. This antenatal programme helped us to cope with changes associated with her pregnancy, prepared us for the labour & delivery and provided us with tips to care for our newborn. What I learned in this programme had somewhat helped me to react appropriately to deal with this once-a-life-time, heart throbbing situation that I encountered on the early morning of 29 Sep 2003.

She remained unbearable of the pain and keep wanting to go to the toilet. I suggested to lay her down on the dry toilet floor and told her to relax and concentrate. Jenny was bleeding from her vagina and she told me that she could feel the baby coming out. Hearing that, I almost freaked out. I remembered saying a little prayer to God, not to let anything bad happened to both my wife and our baby girl, as I rushed to make a 995 call for an ambulance to seek immediate help. I ran out to the living room to open our main door and gate before dashing back to the toilet to be with her.

Back in the toilet then, I helped to spread her legs and went through her breathing rhythm slowly to relax her and the baby down. I told her not to push too hard before the ambulance arrived. The next moment, her vagina started to open and I could actually see a small patch of hair from the baby's head sticking out already. I told her if she could, to control her breathing a little and not to push too hard. I made another attempt to call 995 again to hurry them up. Now, I could see 1/3 of the baby's head coming out already and while trying to hold the baby head, two paramedics came in just in time to help me deliver our baby girl safely at 6.50am. With the umbilical cord clamped and cut, the paramedics helped to wheel both my wife and baby downstair to the waiting ambulance and rushed them to National University Hospital, the nearest hospital from home. Along the journey, Jenny delivered her placenta in the ambulance. Jenny has her wounds sewn up with 1st degree tear at 3 places in her womb. Thanked God that both mother and daughter are well and were discharged 2 days later.

Her obstetrician, Dr Kang Wee at KK Women's and Children's Hosiptal gave us a full refund of the Inpatient Premier Maternity Package which we took up with her.

I am glad God has given me this opportunity to play an intimate part in bringing my little baby girl, Janice into this world. Thanks to the 2 paramedics who have helped me with my baby too. Thank you very much, guys.

This toilet is Janice's place of birth.:)

The Story of Thomas' first Blog

I started my first Blog in Jan 2009. I have heard a lot on blogging but did not find the time and effort to do one myself until now. Amazingly, I did created my first personal homepages using HTML way back in 1997.

Currently, I am enrolled into the second semester of the Master of Science in Information Studies with the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. I took up the "Internet and Web Technologies" module and as part of the coursework assignments, each student is to develop a Blog and examine how such Web2.0 technology can be used for collaboration and knowledge sharing within an organisation or among group of users.

I spend some time browsing through the various Blog hosting websites to look at some of the best tools to help me setup my first Blog and manage my web publishing needs. The more popular ones include the followings listed below.

1. Google-owned Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/)
2. Yahoo 360 (360.yahoo.com)
3. MSN Spaces (spaces.msn.com)
4. WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org/)
5. Blogsome (http://www.blogsome.com/)
6. Movable Type (http://www.movabletype.org/)
7. Textpattern (textpattern.com)
8. LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com/)

A web site review from Forbes.com, finally help me to decide on Blogger. I have extracted the comments here,

"Have you noticed any of the millions of blogs out there whose addresses end in blogspot.com? Those are all hosted by Blogger, Google's blog application. Blogger prides itself on its quick setup time and ease of use (indeed, we set up a test blog in less than a minute), with a large Create Your Blog Now button on its homepage. Once you get everything set up, however, managing the look and feel of your blog is not as easy as it might seem. For instance, you can pick initially from 12 well-designed templates (your choices expand to 31 once you're already set up), such as Dots, Minima and Sand Dollar, and then if you want to edit anything, you've got a dense chunk of code to work with. There is nothing in between basic and advanced. Still, basic posting is easy enough with Blogger's what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor, and you can even post via e-mail to save time. Blogger also finally added an image upload function in June, where you can post images to your blog and let Blogger host them. Also, for those looking to earn income from the traffic to their posts, Blogger makes it easy for you to enroll in Google's Adsense, a program to run contextual advertisements on your blog.

BEST: If you want to have Blogger run your blog to get all the advantages of its easy and quick set-up, but you also want to host it at your own domain name (to have YOURBLOGNAME.com, rather than YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com), you can simply enter your host password into Blogger and it handles the rest.

WORST: No categories for posts, just big archive lists. Also, you can't get rid of the Blogger logo and header hanging over the top of your blog.

I look forward to learn more about blogging and to look at how blogs have reshaped the web, impacted politics, shaken up journalism, and enabled millions of people to have a voice and get connected with one anothers.

If you do have some good references on blogging, do point them to me. Cheers!