TOMMY IS 2 YEARS OLD! HOW TIME FLIES!

Tommy is no longer a baby: he has become a little man already! He is so sweet, adorable and of course, the most handsome guy in our home. Imagine in the early morning when you are still sleeping soundly, a little hand touches your face gently and a kiss is put on your lips, How could you blame the little person who has just waken you up for breaking your sweet dream? because he IS your sweetest dream coming true!

Tommy's most favourite toy is undoubtedly CARS, all kinds of cars. His favourite activities including taking apart all breakable parts of any car such as wheels, steering wheels, windshield, etc. and inserting tiny items into the car's body. He could pretend play with any car comfortably on the laps of his parents. Tommy also loves playing Wii (specifically Super Mario Bros) with his Daddy and Mew, although most of the time he hides in a bubble. He loves Mew's room very much and enjoys spending time on the bed with his sister. If Mew closes her room's door, he will run to Mummy or Daddy and cry out terribly.

Tommy is a little slow in learning to talk at his age but it is not a big concern for us though. He is trying to imitate words from video clips and could even count by himself without any help from us from 1 to 10 in both our language and in English. He also can point to different shapes and speaks their names in English (but his pronunciation is not yet accurate). He could also recognize alphabets and their names in English. He can arrange number puzzles correctly from 0 to 9 too.

Tommy's favourite food is noodles, any variety of noodles from udon to vermicelli, spaghetti. He would find out very quickly if we plan to cook noodles and run into the kitchen to ask for some. If we finish the bowl of noodles without sparing some for him, he would definitely cry miserably "Het, het roi!".

Oh, and Tommy can imitate his Daddy and Mew in doing push-ups every day. How funny it is to see three of them performing the same pose!

Mommy decided to make a homemade birthday cake again this year for Tommy but in the shape of a car. Everybody knows that Mommy is never interested in cooking (honestly Mommy hates cooking!) but store-bought cake is too sweet and the quality of ingredients could not be guaranteed, that's why Mommy had to opt for a DIY cake. Google is Mommy's best friend and after a few days of Internet browsing, Mommy had some ideas for making a 3D car-shaped cake with all the ingredients, utensils and tools available at home.

The cake itself is a normal sponge cake baked from cake mixes (too lazy to make it from scratch). Mommy baked it in a rectagular pan and cut it up in halves and topped one onto another. With some scraping, cutting with a sharp knife, it became looking like a real car. Then Mommy made a sheet of marshmallow fondant from scratch according to the instructions from the Internet and covered the cake fully (after frosting it with strawberry jam). Four wheels were Mini Oreos and Chocopies. Mew helped Mommy to decorate the car with sprinkles, edible gel pens, Campino candies, etc. It turned out a beautiful cake. Mommy was so glad to see that her first attempt in making a professional-look-like cake was not bad at all. Thank Mew for lending Mommy a hand to make this fabulous birthday cake for Tommy!

We also had a warm and yummy party to celebrate Tommy's 2nd birthday at home. Mommy made an edible fruit bouquet instead of fresh flowers to add some flavours and colours to the party table as well. 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO OUR TOMMY! LOVE YOU SO MUCH FROM DADDY, MOMMY AND SIS MEW!

A MAGIC MESSAGE FROM SANTA FOR TOMMY

Magic Santa reveals the magic of Christmas to Tommy in a video (click this line to open it)

BOO! IT'S HALLOWEEN !

CUTE HALLOWEEN DANCE OF A 21-MONTH-OLD PUMPKIN AND A COWGIRL'S SINGING

HALLOWEEN WITCHED PUMPKIN AND COWGIRL ON THE WAY TO TRICK OR TREAT

HALLOWEEN WITCHED PUMPKIN AND COWGIRL DANCE TO THE RHYMTHE OF THE WHEEL ON THE BUS

TOMMY IS 15 MONTHS OLD

Here is our little prince at the age of 15 months in the park, on his sister's bike.

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