HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014

It has been almost 5 months that I left my blog gathering dust. We have had lots of major and luckily positive changes over the past few months. Tommy has been frequenting the daycare on daily basis. We were all amazed at how quickly and easily he adapted to a new stage of life, lol. He loves going to the daycare everyday and never sheds any tears nor clings to his parents' legs when saying goodbye in the morning. He enjoys every minutes at the daycare and even leads a small group of boys who adore cars to race around the activity center despite the fact that he knows only a handful of English words. The only thing we are not happy about sending Tommy to the daycare is that he still eats nothing there. This lazy guy is so getting used to be spoon-fed that he will not touch any foods by himself unless someone helps him. And he never gets hungry no matter how little he has in his tiny stomach since morning until late afternoon. Consequently Tommy has lost 2.5kg since starting daycare. Our prince is no longer a chubby boy. Instead, we get a skinny one. Besides, Tommy shows little progress in his speech skills. He can speak individual words (mostly English) or repeat even a full sentence either in English or in our native language though. Imagine how adorable he is when he asks you, "Mommy, what are you doing here?" in his cute tone when you are washing dishes and gifts you a kiss.

Mew is currently in Grade 4. She is doing very well at school compared to her classmates, but still far from our expectation, especially in language arts. We are considering changing her school next year or sending her to a tutoring center so that she could advance further academically. Her keyboard lessons have been proving of good value when she now can play Fur Elise after 1 year of learning. But Mew is still very lazy in practising her lessons. We also had to cancel her fine art classes with much regret due to her lack of efforts in practising at home. Her swimming lessons continue though and we hope that she could reach the highest level by the end of next year so that we could be guaranteed to have equipped Mew well with at least an important survival skill.

I have moved out of my snail shell finally and got an administrative job. It suits me well because it does not require me to be sociable while allowing me to take advantage of my analysis and research capabilities. More importantly my office location is very convenient to drop/pick up Tommy daily and the working time is standard. Only two things are still bugging me: remuneration/future prospective of the job and I am soon getting bored with the job because it seems to underutilize my abilities. I still have too much of free time on my hands because I satisfactorily complete all the assigned tasks promptly. I have even tried to ask for more tasks or dig out new tasks without my supervisor's demand to keep myself busy but still, I hate the feeling of having no important project to work on, to think over it, to be challenged and to find solutions to solve problems. Oh, and the worst consequence of my returning to the workforce is that we as the whole family will not be able to visit our country every 2-3 years as before. I could not take 2-month vacation with my current job (or any job honestly) and 2-week visit including return flights is simply too short. What's a dilemna!

Anyhow, another year is knocking on the door just in the next few hours. I hope it will be filled with good health, new hope, love, joys and happiness to all of us.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014