Joni swings herself & climbs the play tube

Joni swings herself and climbs the play tube for the first time.

Joni enjoys Christmas decorations

Joni loves Christmas decorations, especially Christmas lights. Here she is enjoying them with her cousins Benjamin, Jeremy and Daniel at a mall.

Joni plays carols on the piano!

When we visited the Bear and Lizzie, Joni saw her daddy playing Christmas carols on the piano and wanted to give it a try

Click on this small photo to see all the photos.

Joni toots an Ocarina & has a fun time at the park

Last night, I handed Joni one of my polyclay ocarinas and she managed to get a toot on it! She had been watching with fascination as I played it before that.

Click on the small photo on the right to see the other photos we took that day.

We also took her to the park and she had a great time:


Ultrasound of #2 at 12 weeks
On 11 December, we went for an ultrasound at the 12th week checkup.

Blessed Christmas!

SciFi cars in Malaysia

I couldn't believe my eyes when, driving home from work today, I saw this car:

Yes, this is a real, undoctored photo! (The only thing I did was to enhance the contrast.) A real car with the license plate NCC-1701! This in Malaysia, a country which does not allow personalized license plates.

Here is a close-up of the plate:
Later, I overtook the car and parked by the side of the road to wait for it to show up and waved at him and he stopped and introduced himself -- the car belongs to Richard Si, and, not surprisingly, he is an avid Star Trek fan. So I got a photo with him and his car:

But Richard's car is not the only Sci-Fi car on Malaysian roads. One quite common model of the Malaysian car Perodua MyVi looks like an Imperial Stormtrooper from Star Wars from the back:

Joni & her pink handbag

Joni was really cute with her pink handbag at church today. Click on the small photo to go to the photo album.

Joni in November

Here's a bunch of photos of Joni in November, as well as a video. Click on the small photo to get the photo album.

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Baby # 2 is on the way

Just one week after Joni's first birthday, we confirmed that baby #2 is on the way!

Click on the small ultrasound photo to see a larger version.

Joni's baptism

I baptised Joni at home since we are currently members of a Baptist church, and Baptist churches will not baptise babies.

Baptists practice "believers' baptism" which means that they will not baptise babies because the baby is too young to understand enough to believe for themselves.

Most other Christians -- Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, Catholics, Orthodox, Reformed, Presbyterians, etc. -- baptise babies because babies born in Christian families are considered part of the Christian community, and also because we believe that baptism is a sacrament -- something holy which God does -- while Baptists believe that it is purely symbolic.

However, I consider this point (sacramental vs symbolic) a belief of secondary importance. This is why I am happy to be a member of a Baptist church in spite of my disagreement about this. I believe that our unity in Christ is more important than these secondary issues.

Please feel free to ask me if you are puzzled by this difference, or why I believe in the sacramental view.

Click on the photo above for the other photos of the event, as well as the liturgy I used for the baptism.

Joni's 1 year old!

Joni's grand day out

For a long time, Joni refused to sit in her pram, but recently, she started sitting in it again, so we took the opportunity on the Deepavali holiday to take her to Sunway Pyramid.



For the photos, see here.

Joni all dressed up for church

Wow, Joni looks so grown up dressed for church!

Click on the photo for the full album.

Joni as Little Red Riding Hood

Grand-Aunt Lee Lee made this little red riding hood for Joni's cousin Sophie, but Sophie is too big for it now, so it was passed to Joni.

Joni started walking last week, at almost 11 months.

Click on the photo to see the rest of the Little Red Riding Hood photos.

Merdeka!

It's baby Joni's first Merdeka! (Independence day in Malaysia is 31^st August)

We pray that by the time Joni is old enough to vote, Malaysia will have had many years of being a true democracy.

Here're some photos of us outside our house decorated with flags.

Joni in July

Here're some photos of Joni in July, including this one of Joni "pole dancing" (Click on the photo to go to the album.)

Cute babe at a bar wearing a see-through shirt

I happened to see this really cute babe wearing a see-through shirt and no bra at a bar, so I snapped these photos.

Joni's new play area

Ok, after those three posts against bigotry, I'm back to my favourite topic: Joni!

Our living room is oddly shaped, with a 3 meter X 3 meter area due to a crooked staircase that we never really knew what to do with. So we turned it into a colourful padded play area for Joni using rubber letters & numbers mats. I glued down the letters so that she can't peel them off. (Thanks to my sister's prior experience with these mats.)

Click on the photo on the right to see more photos of it.

Racist rumours against African students

One of my friends who is really a good and upright person forwarded me an email supposedly written recently by someone named Lim Teng Seng who claims that the Lim Kok Wing University is covering up a kidnapping and rape by a student from Botswana. It goes on to make racist generalizations about Africans. (The letter turns out to be at least 2 years old, as I found a copy online from 2006.)

It asks people to keep forwarding this email to put pressure on LKW to give justice to this girl, which is why my friend forwarded it. However, what this kind of email actually does is to foster more racist stereotypes against Africans.

What spurred me to write this blog is because such racist rumours crop up way too often, and very often it's against Africans. Ironic that it comes right after my previous blog post about Malaysian artistes working for anti-racism.

A friend of mine is a lecturer at LKW and she said, "I don't have any experience with Botswana students in this manner and haven't heard of any. My classes have a lot of African students but had no such experience.They submit their assignments and do their presentations on time. God has been good and has given me good students so far. I cannot generalise any group in this way. There are many hardworking students among the Botswanians."

Even if it were true that some Botswana student had kidnapped and raped a girl, it is wrong to slander all Botswana students. Let us ask ourselves, how would we feel if just because one Malaysian student kidnapped and raped a girl in Australia, then people in Australia start categorizing all Malaysians as kidnappers & rapists?

Let us not spread racism!

A few years ago, this kind of racism caused some African students to be arrested on suspicion of rape & murder. There was a huge racist outcry against African students. Big headlines were splashed all over most newspapers.

Turns out that the Africans were completely innocent, and were only victimized because people gave in to racist sentiments and suspected them. The actual rapist - murderers were local Malaysians!

And there were no big headlines declaring the Africans innocent! Instead, a small article on the inside pages. And the majority of people continued to assume that the Africans were murderers and rapists.

This kind of stuff really makes me ANGRY. Africans are also human beings, made in the image of God. And we Malaysians commit terrible sins against them by perpetuating the stereotypes.

Sure, there are individual Africans who are evildoers -- just as there are Chinese, Indian, Malay, and "lain-lain" Malaysians who are evildoers.

But to racistly stigmatize a whole continent is evil.

Be Ye Glad

In these days of confused situations
And in these nights of a restless remorse
When the heart and the soul of a nation...¹
Is threatened by racist politicians

I am encouraged to find that our singers,
Our artists, and NGO folks,
Have gotten together a video
To promote love among all races:



The Malaysian Artists for Unity did this completely free of charge. The video & everything else is free for downloading from their website.

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¹This is a reference to the song Be Ye Glad by Michael Blanchard [lyrics][video/YouTube]

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Muslims in America

Ok, today's blog entry has nothing to do with Joni for a change.

I came across this video that brought tears to my eyes:


It's noteworthy that this was done in the most bigoted part of USA, the South. And yet, the majority of the people who said anything defended the Muslim woman. 6 people supported the bigoted store clerk, 13 stood up for the Muslim woman, and 22 said nothing. The ABC TV people made a big deal about the 22, but I think they were just intimidated -- it wouldn't have made a difference if it was some store clerk being belligerent for any other reason than hating Muslims.

For all we disagree with America's foreign policy, one thing about the Americans is their sense of human rights.

I think a similar thing would happen if it was a Christian in an equivalent part of Malaysia who was being refused service... but how about if it were a Jew?

Joni visits grandparents Chai

Joni visited her grandparents on the Chai side of the family and her cousin Dylan (10 days younger, Ian's sister's son) was also there.

Click on the picture below to see the photos.

After Diane and Simon left with Dylan, Joni had fun on daddy's former bed:

Joni, the bouncing baby

We made a video for Joni to greet her cousin Antony for his birthday. In this video, you can see that Joni is an examplar of the term "bouncing baby girl"!


Joni loves to jump up and down. When she's in the mood (which is quite often), hold her like that and she'll jump up and down and up and down and up and down ...

Late March & early April photos of Joni

We just uploaded a bunch of photos from Juliane's cell phone camera so I decided to make a new album consisting of those photos as well as photos from the same time range from other cameras. (Click on the photo to the right for this album.)

Around the same time, Ian's uncle and aunt from Australia also visited. Click here for those photos.