When our boys were growing up through their childhood & teenage years, my wife Theresa & I aspired to keep 2 simple promises. A happy home to grow up in, and a broad education.
As a family, we were privileged to have lived abroad in Boston in the last year of my specialist training with the National Skin Centre, Singapore. While I did lab research at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Theresa, with initial help from visiting grandparents, gave Calvin & Daryl a carefree childhood. There were no classes in Montessori "early education", or special Math & Science "enrichment". Instead, there was lots of learning through play & each weekend, we planned for little driving adventures in the beautiful New England countryside.
Back home in Singapore, they had more contact time with doting grandparents while we introduced them to creative art, drawing, piano music, swimming, martial arts and all manner of ball games. There was time to fly kites & model aeroplanes and lots of freeplay inbetween. Honestly, on thinking back, parenthood was a truly enjoyable time for us.
Having appreciated the great outdoors in America, we've also taken the boys on leisurely family vacations back to various parts of North America. Of course there were the enchanting excursions to man-made theme parks like Disneyland & Universal Studios but we specially enjoyed rustic road trips through giant redwood forests and across great deserts, to see spectacular mountain ranges, canyons, geysers, rivers, waterfalls & lakes. I didn't realise then that the mountains were beckoning to Theresa. She had always harboured a secret childhood passion to climb a mountain peak & only years later did it become a reality.
Today, we're glad to see Calvin fulfilling his ambition to become an architect in Melbourne and Daryl finishing an exciting officer cadet training course in the airforce. Whether it be Theresa summiting Mt Kinabalu in 2008 & 2010, Calvin aceing his architecture programme or Daryl aiming to be a pilot-officer, I sincerely believe it's what the good professor, Randy Pausch prescribed in his Last Lecture (please see my previous post), chasing our childhood dreams.
It's nice that Theresa & I now have more couple-time for our own pleasurable pursuits. Like Latin dance, movie dates, regular nature hikes in MacRitchie forest and planning for more adventuresome trekking abroad. We'd like to think of Life as one great scenic drive; taking the time to smell the roses along the way, making happy memories together. Call it our
joie de vivre.
