On family, looking back at 2017, I owe heartfelt gratitude to my dear wife Xiao Hui. Due to her decision to move in with me to Penang (from Singapore) in 2016, and moved again to Subang Jaya by the end of 2016, we were in a more stable situation in 2017. Tirelessly, Xiao Hui took good care of Yee Chern at home when I went to work, watching our boy growing up fast. We are in good agreement on how to raise a child, and we have been very patient and loving with Yee Chern.
Yee Chern is now 19 months old. His intelligence and learning ability simply keep amazing us as parents. He seems to understand quite a great deal of words and phrases, learned to execute our instructions perfectly and even picked up our conversation sometimes (therefore xh and I have to be careful when talking about him). We are more delighted that he picked up reading habit from the resources and environment we built for him. We regularly bought him good books and read together with him. We bought and install a kid’s bookshelf in the living room, put all his books there so that he could access to those anytime he wants. Now he can pick any book, flip and read by himself. At the recent Big Bad Wolf book sale, we managed to visit the venue 2 times scanning through the children book sections carefully, filtered and acquired 40 very interesting and inspiring books for him (spent about RM400, super worth it).
Yee Chern was definitely not early in some of the milestones of child development. He could only walk independently when he just crossed into his 18 months old. Both of us were thrilled when he finally discovered his own ability (Xiao Hui screamed out loud in the video recording at that moment, just to show me who was at work). Actually he could have walked by himself a month or two earlier but he took more conservative and careful approach not letting go his grip on our hand (or even finger/s). Therefore when he first walked, he did with good balance and barely fell down. Now he is still considered slow in speech (according to MOH guideline), and is arranged a session with a MOH specialist. Actually he is found rather often talking to himself in baby babble. We can somehow imagine that once he could talk, he could be rather talkative.
Last year 2017, as a family, we had been travelling to many places, including Jogjakarta (Indonesia), east-coast United States, and Seoul (South Korea). Xiao Hui and Yee Chern had also followed me to Penang and Johor a few times for work trips. Yee Chern had to endure/adapt to changes in eating-sleeping schedule, sometimes it was difficult for him (and his mum). His behaviour and preference changes on dietary type and timing, and his bed/nap timing, are sometimes hard to predict. There were meltdowns at times, luckily most of the times those happened at home. He usually behaves rather well in the presence of guests, friends or family (thus they often only see the cute and mild side of him). To my pleasure of unique achievement, last year finally I could put him to sleep alone without mum’s presence for 3 times (although it would still be 10,000x his preference to have mum instead).
After Yee Chern turned 1 year old, Xiao Hui has been on the hunt for a job. We are mulling to send him to a daycare centre should one day Xiao Hui secures a job. Until the end of 2017, XH had no such luck. We hope that 2018 could be the year of breakthrough for Xiao Hui and our family. (If you wanted to ask about the second addition to the family, we couldn’t tell you about any plan yet).
In 2017, it is heart-warming to see Yee Chern becomes more charming to both sides of our family members as well as our friends with higher level of self-awareness, responses and interactions. Particularly he has improved relationship with his cousins Jayden, Jazzra, Brayden and Leann; they happily accepted him and played more with him.
We are delighted to see the return of Soo Leng from the US, and look forward to see bro How and her in our neighbourhood soon this year 
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