First

Picture a twenty-month-old baby sitting on a potty for the first time. There's a good chance that you can't hear the sound of poo-poo going into the toilet bowl. You don't need me to tell you that the laughter and victory cheering ("Hurray!") from the parents are the loudest at that very moment.

Seeing a baby grow has been a fountain of joy for our family. The baby's first smile. The first word of "mama." Her first step. The first sentence "It's wet because it rains." Most parents would rate these key milestones even higher than that of Neil Armstrong's moon landing. We will never forget them. Ever.

For every first moment, I'd been reminded, there is another moment when it ends. We tend to remember the beginning and then forget the end. You will remember when the first tooth appeared, but won't be able to tell when the baby stops biting her toys. You remember the first "Why" and never realise when the kid stops the "why's" (and, of course, the answer should be the beginning of "Why not?").

Tinkers

Shortly after the family trip to Taiwan, I packed my suitcase and headed for an investigator meeting in Seoul. No one will mistake a business trip with a family journey. I didn't, at least not knowingly.

Before boarding the flight to Taiwan one week ago, I came across Paul Harding's novel, Tinkers, at the airport bookshop. I thought of buying it but decided not to. I made a reservation from our public library system, now that it can be done electronically by pressing few buttons.

And then I received a notification the book was ready for pick-up today, just before leaving for Seoul. It turns out that this Pulitzer Prize winner made a good read. In Tinkers, an old man lies dying from cancer and kidney failure over the course of eight days. This dying man, a repairer of clock, is drifting back in time to his recollections, the opposite of winding a clock. Like free radicals, his story unwinds in a chaotic manner, but with a passionate theme.

And as if that's not enough to convince me that the gears and cogs of experiences are intertwined, I watched the movie Hugo on the aeroplane. That's another story of tinker who takes care of the clocks.

Travel

You might have been led to believe that holiday trip comes to an end after the arrival of baby. I don't. It's always a comfort to have the same view shared by others. That is the reason I purchased the book Travel With Children from the Lonely Planet shortly after my first trip with Jasmine.

As parents, we're no longer footloose travellers off the beaten track with itchy feet. This isn't to say we have less lovely memories for the family trips. We spent another brilliant week in Taiwan, where I wrote this blog together with my wife painting next to the lake - before my daughter woke up.

Like magic, travelling with kids is highly unpredictable and yet fun. Each morning we ventured out after packing the baby wipes, snacks and loads of plan (okay, and most of them not fulfilled at the end of the day).

Our idea to travel with kid is not to have structure; our sweetheart will suggest her own mileage as she goes along. Instead of checking out every detail of aboriginals at the cultural village yesterday, for instance, we ended up soaking in sunlight and chasing each other in a long stretch of pasture. My daughter's laughter looked like it's fun - and it is. If you come to think that those "must see" items on the travel guide sound irrelevant to a kid, that's because it is.

Ginkgo

The very first time I paid attention to the yellow triangular leaves of ginkgo tree was when I visited Hiroshima more than four years ago. After taking a stroll around the city, I saw quite a number of ginkgo trees. It is called Ginkgo biloba, "biloba" meaning "two lobes", which indeed its leaf is.

I learned more about Ginkgo after my recent reading of Survivors, written by the paleontologist Richard Fortey. This tree appears to have survived for a long time, even longer than the dinosaurs. The more I read about it and the more I thought of the ginkgo tree, the more impressed I got with it.

Living fossil of Ginkgo biloba has been found to survive the blast of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War, even though it was only 1.1 kilometres from the epicentre of the explosion. Ginkgo trees simply regenerated from scarred trunks one year after the total destruction. No question, it is a survivor.

For those of you who have seen the fan-shaped ginkgo leaves, you'll find veins radiating into them from their petioles. That means they are easily recognised in the fossil state, and fossils tell us that the ginkgo must have survived for 280 million years. And then you will reckon that Ginkgo biloba must have survived several mass extinctions. Atomic bombs, as Fortey says, is probably small potatoes in comparison.

Wild

A coda to this weekend's true delight is an outing with my daughter at the countryside, spending time under the tree and savouring its glamour and allure.

The lively walk was sprinkled with surprises. We met butterflies. We bumped into bird nest. We touched the ferns. It's hard to imagine a more funny way to learn the beauty of nature than playing with achenes attached to pappus of fine hair, watching them fly in the wind.

Which brings me to the scene with the glee of Jasmine pretending to eat the leaves of Ginkgo biloba before. She was one. It was another sunny afternoon, I remember, colder in temperature but warm with my kid's laughter. Jasmine resisted the temptation to laugh, when her mother's eyes bug out like a cartoon character's ("Wait wait, can we eat this leaf?"). You may call this acting silly. We think this is my baby's brand of humour.

In fact, there shouldn't be a time too early for children to have humour, and neither is there any age too late to play.