HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY TO TOMMY, HOORAY!

I have been a bit busy recently because Tommy is an "eat-nothing" baby and whenever I try to force him to eat by spoon-feeding him, it normally takes about 1 to 2 hours for 60ml of either infant formula or baby food to get into his stomach. It is really much harder to feed him than Mew at the same age, although Mew was also quite well-known for her slow eating habit. However, we are lucky since Tommy, unlike his sister, seems not to have reflux problem. In a typical month, Tommy loses his appetite for everything (except, of course, breast milk) during about 2-3 weeks and loses weight consequently. Then the week after, he appears to gain back his appetite, finishing his meals quicker with less fights, lol, and regains his weight. During subsequent weeks, the circle of no eat-eat-no eat returns. It is so stressful for me as I spend all my time at home with him just on preparing his meals then feeding him without much success. I know healthcare professionals here and maybe almost all other Western-style moms would object me in this issue of feeding, but my mommy instinct does not allow me to "let him decide how much he wants to eat" because if I let it be, he could go several days without eating or drinking anything and only survive on my breast milk source which has unfortunately been diminishing.


Anyway, he is no longer a baby, yeah! We celebrated his 1st birthday last week and I am full of hope that being a toddler now, Tommy will be able to enjoy food happily like other babies.


Mommy has made a poem especially for you, Tommy, with all of the letters in your name and wish you all the best. This is a gift from Daddy and Mommy for you on your 1st birthday and hope it will be a keepsake for you.

To follow with the trend of having a cake smashing photo session on the 1st birthday of a baby, I decided to make a homemade 2-tier cake and a bunch of cupcakes with the letters in Tommy's name so that Tommy could smash cakes and the whole family could still have cakes to enjoy, lol. Honestly, I planned to order a birthday cake at a bakery but it turned out that the order should have been made at least 2 weeks in advance. Consequently I had no choice but baking and decorating the birthday cake and the cupcakes myself (they were all delicious by the way, :)).

I also made a simple pop-up card for Tommy and Mew made some cute cards with the sweetest words for her little brother.

Finally, here is the slideshow of the milestone birthday celebration of our Tommy.

TOMMY IS 9 MONTHS OLD

TOMMY IS 8 MONTHS OLD

Steve Jobs: How to live before you die

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Video of the Commencement address.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

TOMMY IS 7 MONTHS OLD

TOMMY IS 6 MONTHS OLD

TOMMY IS 5 MONTHS OLD

COOL GAMES TO TEACH ADDITIONS UP TO 10

To master additions up to 10 is among the most important arithmetic skills of first-graders. I have found out some great games online for Mew to practice this summer.

1. MATH LINES

In this game there will be lines of balls with numbers on them. You can shoot balls to add new balls to the line. When the balls you shoot and the balls beside it add up to 10, these balls will be destroyed. You can also destroy a group of same numbered balls with only one ball. When you destroy all the balls you can proceed to the next level. If the balls reach the hole, then you lose the game. Occasionally there will be coins that appear on the screen, you can shoot the coins to get the colours of the balls sorted for a while, it will be a lot easier. Use the mouse to control the direction of the shots and click to shoot. You can also press the space bar to swap between the ball to shoot and the next ball to shoot.

I have to honestly admit that I have eventually gotten addicted to this game, of which my current record is Level 11 and over 60,000 points accumulated. My next endeavour would be Math Lines X-Factor which involves multiplication, wow!

2. MAHJONG

Nice game requires kids to work out various problems of additions and subtraction using single digits from 0 to 9 with fun of matching tiles that yield the same number. There are 3 levels: easy, medium and hard. You can also play a timed version of game. Note that not all the time you will be able to clear all the tiles, just like any normal Mahjong games. You may need to seek the help of Hint function if you get stuck during the game.

3. NUMBER TWINS

Match pairs of balls that add up to 10. Balls can only be matched if they can be connected by a line that turns at most twice. An easy Pikachu-like game where your only challenge is time.

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!

HOW TO MAKE TRAVEL HANGMAN GAME

Do your kids always need something to entertain themselves, keep them occupied without boredom during travel, at the dentist's office or at the waiting room of the hospital or even while waiting for orders at the restaurant? What is more suitable than a travel set of a popular game such as HANGMAN that is compact enough to toss in your tote, self-contained (i.e. including as few as possible extra components to minimize the risk of lost pieces), being reusable (instead of wasting tons of pieces of paper), and finally costing as little as possible?

A lot of great products in the market offer the first 3 features, such as Hangman Flip-to-Win Wooden Travel Game by Melissa & Doug, Imaginetics Magnetic Hangman Travel Games, GO Magnetic Hangman Travel Game, Magnetic Game Tin: Hangman, but only a home-made product would satisfy the 4th crucial requirement of the lowest cost possible.

I reused the erasable memo board sent by 3 Amigos to advertise their restaurant for this purpose. That its size is only as big as a notebook sheet is perfect for a travel game. The board is heavier and more sturdy than a normal sheet of paper, thus no worry for creases, etc. You can try any erasable memo/fridge board available around.

The erasable memo board I got also has the marker attached to it so it made my project easier. However, you can be creative with attaching a dry-erase marker to the board by using adhesive pad, a flexible string, a chain, etc. If your marker's end tip has the eraser already, it would be a plus. If not, you can stick small piece of soft cloth (such as the kind of cloth for cleaning glasses) or sponge to the back of the board by a paperclip. Do not forget to toss in your bag  a pocket-sized pack of facial tissues and a small bottle of hand sanitizer solution. It not only serves to sanitize the little hands quickly but also helps to dampen the cloth or sponge to clean the marks left by the dry-erase marker as effectively as a whiteboard marker eraser.

Some sheets of Post-it could be glued to the back of the board so that your kids may scribble his words of the game, keep track of the game's scores, etc.

On the front of the whiteboard, to the left, use the permanent marker with a different colour to the dry-erase marker to draw the gallows where the hangman will be. To the right edge of the board, write all 26 letters of the alphabet in upper case in rows of 3 or 4 letters each with enough space between them so that your kid can use the dry-erase marker to circle any letter called in by the guesser. At the end of the white board, below the gallows and the ABCs, draw in permanent ink a row of dashes where the letters of the word would be written down in their appropriate places (usually 10 dashes in kids' game).

To play the game, the person who sets the word must announce in advance how many letters there are in his word, e.g. 6 letters so only the first number of dashes equal to the number of letters in the word (6 in this example) would be used in the game. His opponent (the guesser) then tries to guess the word by guessing letters. Once a letter is guessed whether correctly or not, the wordsetter will circle that letter by the dry-erase marker to show that it has been guessed.

If the guessed letter is included indeed in the word, the wordsetter would fill in the corresponding dash(es) with the letter. If the suggested letter does not occur in the word, the wordsetter draws one element of the hangman diagram as a tally mark, starting with a head. The amount of parts of the man can vary, affecting the number of chances of guessing. Usually the player guessing the word gets 6 chances (traditionally the head, then the torso, then the arms & legs one by one). Many players include a face on the head, either all at once or one feature at a time.

The game is over when either the guessing player guesses the whole word correctly or the wordsetter completes the diagram of a hanging man; whichever is earlier. In the first case, the guessing player wins the game. 

This Hangman game can be used to play in both English and French and is absolutely a great game for reinforcing and improving kids' vocabulary.

And do not forget to check out a very neat flash Hangman online game for English-as-a-second-language learners at www.manythings.org/hmf/.