Butterfly

Close your eyes. Picture a bumble bee foraging inside a room.

That happened with my daughter visiting the indoor play centre within a stone's throw from my home. We had bought the ticket for that place with an iconic logo of bumble bee some months ago, and yet didn't bring her there until the admission ticket was going to expire. I suspect that my procrastination may have been a hunch that my daughter won't be too excited to be an indoor bee.

After the indoor game, my wife decided to bring little Jasmine headlong to the beach. "Excuuuuuuse me?" I can hear the query already. "Do you really mean going to the beach in the winter?"

"Why not?" My wife's voice was calm as a summer pond.

My two-year-old did feel stuck indoors and, after taking few snacks, metamorphosed from a bored bee into a caterpillar. Yes, she did. She could not stop laughing whilst having pretend play with mum, who also crawled on the sand like a caterpillar. Yeah, yeah. Within a minutes, the two caterpillars turned into two butterflies running around on the beach.

Pure joy.

Behave

A little one near the end of her toddler months is about learning to pick up new skills in her rapidly expanding world. Now, if you ask me, what's about growing up with a little child is that we learn to enjoy the world of freedom, making way for more relaxed interaction. But you can't do that if you're not looking through the kaleidoscope of children.

Take a minute - and maybe a deep breath too - and imagine a kid stomping on sand castle, wearing nappy and her smile. Of course, it's my little Jasmine. Soon after I posted her photo online, I was reminded that she wasn't wearing trousers. Oh please! Shouldn't I dress up my two-year-old in her Sunday best at the beach? I say to myself, "Okay, hmmm, let's remove that picture."

I found out more about how two-year-old should behave when I brought Jasmine to a church wedding ceremony. Even if she kept using an "inside" voice, others around me could hear a toddler babbling to herself. Is this a taboo to interrupt the sermon by toddler words like "happy" and "Simba"? No. It's a sin. Without much ado, I was scolded and taught a lesson by someone behind me. Finally, I left with Jasmine, puzzled by the question if it's the two-year-old or the guy behind who was talking with words inappropriate to the age.

Deadline

It's hard to believe the magic of deadline.

Deadly as the name may sound, it is quite impossible to live without deadlines. To me, this is an absurd state of affairs. How could I have finished so many things like reviewing two journal manuscripts and writing reference letter for my intern before I took my week off? How could there have been so many applications just before the grant submission closes? Did I have to mention the deadline for tax return?

There is now little doubt that, in evolutionay terms, we mastered the skill of procrastination (from the Latin pro, meaning for; and cras, meaning tomorrow) first, before the natural selection of a tool that has become known as deadline.

Although discipline is a linchpin of growing, it remains for most of us to rely on the patrolling of deadline.

Copy

My patient leaned over and stared, her eyes wide open but not at me. She was paying attention to her laboratory test results on the clinic computer screen.

Natural though it seems, the patients' laboratory results in public sector hospital aren't supposed to be released to them. You'd better bring a notebook and a pen if you want a copy of the results. For that matter, the laboratory results sound like PowerPoint slides of a lecturer, who felt that keeping the lecture materials from the students is the way to make students pay attention to his authoritative lecture.

Won't you hate it when you can't concentrate on the lecture while you're busy with copying the slide materials? That happens with the patient who can't get access to the laboratory test reports. It's hard to argue who owns the laboratory results. Harder to fathom are the reasons of denying their free access to a copy of their health information.

I can't think of any.

Heights

What could be more dogtired than to sit through eight hours of lecture straight? What I have done, under the circumstances, is to either sleep or read other materials.

When I decided to attend an eight-hour parent educational class last weekend, I knew I have to bring with me quite a number of medical journals, just in case. And when I sat down in the classroom, I knew I should not have carried those journals.

The class isn't a ho-hum parroting of theories; it's a story about real people bringing up kids. I never realised the secret of slides on the playground until the teacher reminded me that children learn to walk upstairs before mastering the skill of going down. The design of a slide for those kids to slide down is great - it's amazing, actually.

And how about the traditional jungle gyms or climbing frames? They're disappearing from most playgrounds. Classical as the seesaws had been, popular as the smart-phone game Angry Birds now seems, jungle gyms have turned into dinosaurs. If the story of jungle gym strikes you as a nostalgic memory, you're not alone. I remember climbing heights - and the laughter - on the metal monkey bars that were arranged like Cartesian coordinates in a three-dimensional jungle. It's fun. I'd like to see my little Tarzan learn the thrills of exploring heights but those jungle gyms don't exist on the planet anymore.

Yeah, yeah. I know playground safety is the main concern. But the point is this: children have to gradually expose themselves to more and more dangers on the playground to conquer phobias. A child who's hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights, I have been told.

Safe, Or Save

Think of telephone keypad, and for both push-button and touch screen cell phone users, what come to mind is the standardized grid layout.

Imagine a scene when the telephone factory is running out of certain numerical keys, leaving the manufacturers no choice but putting whatever numerical keys available to fill up the keypad. With such undecipherable keypads, someone could still make use of memory (not many of us) to dial the right number. And I will not say I hate and smash such messy telephones but I will not say I won't.

Yes, dialing the wrong number isn't that bad to be howled about. What if the mix-ups aren't about the telephone keypads but the medicine?

That happened within the government hospitals. Those drugs we gave out to the patients look exactly like the random number telephone keypads. I think no one really knows what a drug looks like because, these days, its appearance keep changing with every new generic drug introduced by the public hospitals. That's why my kidney disease patient (that is, having drug treatment for many many years) could still be confused by the new appearance of pills and took double the amount of blood pressure pills.

Never mind what your hospital managers told you about the top issue of medication safety. They have a higher priority - if money is an issue, they will put anything else behind. There is not a hospital manager who isn't constrained by drug expenditure. The hard truth is, all hospitals go on at length cutting the drug budget, say, by comparing the price of generic drugs. Although brand-name drugs and generic drugs are supposingly interchangeable (another worst-kept tooth-fairy myth), they can differ substantially in their appearance. I'm not saying that generic drugs aren't cost-effective substitutes for brand-name medications. No, the question is not to judge if generic drug and brand-name drug are identical and, of course they never are, we have to accept taking generic drugs. But it seems that we're changing the generic drugs too frequently and totally out of our control.

Of course, we should not complain about things totally out of our control, such as the weather. As for the generic drug change, we seem to change them even more often than the weather change.

Wavelength

Remember the long queue in front of the telephone booth at the university dormitory? Not many - even though, as the common scene before the mobile phones have revolutionised the way we talk to our girlfriends and boyfriends.

If it's not because of the recent movie You're the Apple of My Eye, the picture could have faded in the society's collective memory. This movie has made itself a household name after its debut. There's no medium like the movies to give us the flashback pleasure of going young and fooling around. You're the Apple of My Eye is rife with incurably innocent and naive ideas that make us laugh.

I went to see the movie last week and almost laughed my head off. I'm not saying that we should follow the kids and appear stupid. As adults, it's easy to forget how boys and girls feel. Amazing as it may seem, getting on their wavelength is the only way to draw ourselves closer to the young generation. One of the important lessons from the book Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child is to imagine how we would feel if we were young. Instead of emphasizing that a kid should not whine when his brother received a birthday gift, we are taught to respond in a way to demonstrate our understanding - something like, "I used to feel jealous when I was a little boy and Aunt Mary got a gift."