Jazz Restored

My car do not seems to get along well with carpark pillars with red fire extinguisher boxes on them. Twice I had self-inflicted damages to my white Honda Jazz because of these pillars. And both times they were really at blind spots, so blind that I didn't see it till it was too late.

The latest was at the Mount Elizabeth hospital carpark on the last night of Lilian's stay. I reversed into a pillar while trying to turn out of the carpark and the driver's door got a fist size dent and multiple scratches. The scratches were so deep then it reached the bare metal.

I had thoughts to leaving it but the thought of rust setting onto the bare metal forced me to repair and restore it. Got two workshops to quote and the price were about the same. So I went with Khek Joo Motor Workshop. They specialise in paints and many forumers from Fit Jazz Club recommended him when they wanted to install or remove spoilers as they find his workmanship good and price reasonable.

Before repair and after repair

They needed a whole day for the job so I went early morning and only got back my car at 6pm. Boy was I impressed with the workmanship. The dented area was smooth and it looked like before. No trace of the dent or scratches at all. It costed me $160 which I thought was pretty reasonable. Below are the details if your car needs plastic surgery.

Khek Joo Motor Workshop
Blk 9004 Tampines Street 93
Singapore 528838 (Behind SAFRA Tampines)
Contact person : Mr. Ng - 96166658

Lucas has G6PD deficiency

Lucas tanning in Mount Elizabeth to bring down the Jaundice level

Lucas is back in the hospital due to climbing Neonatal Jaundice level. It's actually very common for infants, especially Asian infants, to get Jaundice from Day 2 of birth. In layman terms, the baby's liver is not mature enough to remove all the bilirubin (yellow pigment that's created in the body during the normal recycling of old red blood cells) yet. This condition should peak on Day 5-9 and come down to safe level after that (as the liver matures).

Xavier doing the home photo bed treatment

Xavier also had Jaundice during his first week of birth and he was put on home treatment. We basically rent the photo bed home and "tan" him at every opportunity. The photo light will break down the bilirubin and the baby will just pee and poo it out. It's a painless process (except for the need to poke to baby's heel for blood to test the Jaundice level).

The main reason Lucas had to be hospitalised was because he also has a condition call Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, or G6PD deficiency in short. It's a inherited condition where the blood has low levels of the G6PD enzyme. So what will happen is the red blood cells can break down more easily and cause jaundice (yellow appearance of skin) and anaemia (lack of red blood cells) when exposed to certain medication, chemical or food. So G6PD deficiency plus Jaundice usually puts the doctor on high alert and they usually suggest treatment in hospital (and their machine is more powerful then the home rented ones, as it "tans" from both above and below).

People with the condition lead a normal healthy life, as long as they avoid the "ban list" (at the bottom of the page of the NUH site). The most common items were moth balls and fava beans (also known as broad beans).  Moth balls and fava beans to Lucas would be like kryptonite is to Superman. And he probably have to take a different malaria pill when he goes NS in future.

The G6PD Favism Association has a FAQ on how one gets the condition. We were interested to know as both Lilian and I do not have the condition and neither does Xavier. Read at your own pleasure.

Now I like to dedicate this song to Lucas. Get well and leave the blue world soon boy.

Introducing... Lucas Lee

Lucas is born on 22nd July 2011, 1406 hours, at Mount Elizabeth Hospital. He is 3.525kg in weight and 50cm in length. He looks alot like Xavier when he was just born, except he has more hair.

And his cry are alot louder and more forceful.


We presented Xavier with a "present" from Lucas and hope their relationship starts off on a positive note.

Below is Xavier's reaction when he first meets Lucas.


Lee Zhi Kang, Lucas, 李智康, welcome to the Lee family.

Xavier's First Wind Instrument - Recorder

I wanted to expose Xavier to music and hopefully he gains an interest it in. So I got him his first instrument, a recorder. Okay I'm not expecting him to be able to play real notes on it now but to get a feel of it. And the recorder is cheap, $5.50.

So what did he think of the recorder?


Think he had fun as he could not stop giggling and laughing everytime he blows into the recorder.

Blog Revamp - roamingglass 2.0

I been toying with the idea of doing a revamp to the blog layout. Main reason is that I'm posting more collarge photos so I wanted the collarge to be bigger. However, as the old layout was a very old template (think 2004), Blogger.com doesn't support it anymore and since I do not know html codes, I do not know how to adjust the width.

New Vs Old

So the next best thing is to use the new "Blogger Template Designer" and do up a new template since its very easy to customise most things. Above is my new layout vs my old layout. I thought it might take alot of time to do it so I have been putting it off. But after reading that Andy from Sengkangbabies did it in under 20 minutes, I decided to go for last night. You can check out his post on where to find the template designer in Blogger.com.

So how do you guys find the new layout? Comments very welcome.

Xavier, 29 months on - Letting him draw his own lines...

This month is gonna mark a big change to Xavier's (and our) life as Xavier is gonna be promoted to Big Brother soon. He now stands at 97cm and weights 16.7kg.

We recently attended the LV's Parents and Teacher Conference where his form teacher and Chinese teacher updates us on Xavier's progress and development and what he has been up to in school. We were pleased with the positive comments. The teachers describe him as enthusiastic, fun-loving, a big brother his classmates, helpful and able to say complete sentences.


He does have his temper when he do not get his way (which I blame it on genes) and he gets excited very easily and would unintentionally harass his friends when he does that. We also need to speak and expose more Chinese to him. He usually replies in English to his Chinese teacher and his Mandarin has "kang-tang"  slang.

His form teacher discussed in details something she finds surprising about Xavier, that he seems to exhibit independent thinking. They had an activity where they have to piece the eyes, nose and mouth onto a face. The teacher demonstrated once where she starts from the eyes, followed by the nose and lastly the mouth. Xavier's classmate was next and she repeated the steps.

But when its Xavier's turn, he started with the mouth first, followed by the nose then the eyes. He seems to be able to picture the final goal and reach it by his own thinking, strategy and method. I found that interesting and began observing him a lot more nowadays.

Just the other day, he played with his numbers during his shower time where he would stick the numbers on the wall. And he did something I didn't think of before, stacking two numbers together and lining them up.

Just Friday I attended a children and newbie photography talk by Hart form Tomato Photo and one of his slide was that children are unpredictable. I couldn't agree more. We often heard of the saying "To think out of the box". I think kids are born with a blank canvas, they have no box to start with. Probably how big their canvas is is determined by genes and represents their full potential. To them, almost anything is possible. The box or boundaries on the canvas represents restrictions they have to work within and are due to our own values, social, political, financial and moral limitations.

Parenting tip: Often we are the ones who draw their box. We tell them dun do this, dun go there, dun climb, dun draw on the wall, stop running, stop lie down... etc. Sometimes it out of conveniences for us (I'm guilty of that) and unknowingly, we have draw a line or boundary on their canvas. Going forward I'm gonna let him explore more freely, as long as he is not endangering himself or others.