Angel's classes

Angel attends two classes every Sunday - art and craft at 1pm and ballet at 4pm. That means every Sunday about 5 hours of our time is reserved to bringing her to the classes, waiting for her to finish, fetching her, and feeding her lunch in between.

People might think that it is because we want to train her to be skillful. But actually there is only one reason why we do it - Angel loves them.

I don't want to send her to a class just because it "might be useful" for her in the future. She's only three years old and she's supposed to do what kids are supposed to do, which is to play.

All this started by us observing Angel and what she likes. We noticed that since very young she likes to shake her body to the music on the TV. She would try to follow the characters' movement by swinging her arms and jumping up an down.

Knowing that Angel has rough character, I suggested that we let her try hip hop dance, but apparently the classes are for older kids. So we brought her to a ballet trial class. Immediately after the first class we could sense Angel really enjoyed it and she wants more. She even asked us to get her the pink tutu on the spot. These days, after lunch at around 3pm she would nag us with "I want to wear pink dress" because she can't wait to dance!

Similarly, we noticed that Angel likes to paint ever since we brought her to try sand painting. And often Angel would come back from school proudly showing her art work. That's why we brought her to the weekend art trial class and she seemed to enjoy it. These days, she refuses us to carry her when the class starts. Instead she wants to walk up four storeys by herself to get to the class.

Angel is not very good at both classes. In fact, she's probably one of the worst students in there. In ballet class, she's rough, doesn't follow instructions well. It took her a long time to learn to walk on her toes, and she can't sit down in a graceful manner. In art class, she doesn't know how to hold the pencils and brushes the correct way, she often wants us or the teacher to hold it for her, and she would always draw outside the edges.

5 hours every Sunday is a lot of our time. Sometimes we even think about pulling her out of classes so that we get more rest. But every single time we see her come out of the class rooms with a big grin on her face, proudly showing us her ballet sticker book or art work, it just makes it all so worth while.

One more from Gold Coast

So sad. But so beautiful

I'm deeply touched by this.

One of my favorite photographers in the world, Jonathan Canlas, photographed the funeral of a young child, Penny Thomas.

Gold Coast, Australia

It is our tenth year wedding anniversary and we had been thinking about going for a long holiday. But decision is never easy when you have a young child. The United States? Europe? Asia? We debated for a long time and we had actually decided to postpone this trip to next year when we're more free and we could save more money for it.

And then I saw some Scoot airline promotions to Gold Coast. It's been many years since I last visited Australia and I was suddenly missing the place a lot. We quickly decided that this would be our holiday as it is great place for families and kids. So we did just one month later.

Beaches, theme parks, shopping, zoo, strawberry fields, country roads with fantastic view, farms, and small towns. It was definitely one of the best holidays we've been on. We love Gold Coast.