Our elder son is turning 5 years old next week which means for both my wife and I we had him by our side for nearly 5 years of our lives now. 

For a 5 year old, that is his whole 100% of his life together with us but for my wife and I it is a relatively small portion (5/33) of our life experience which is the reason why time seems to fly past so quickly. 

It feels like it was only a while back that he's still learning how to crawl and walk but in a blink of an eye he is able to run at full speed now. One of his favourite pastime is to watch the National Geographic and Animal Channel where he would silently sit in one corner and watch how animals run and hunt for their preys. His favourite animal creature is Cheetah, which explains why he likes to dash around the house in speed that we had to remind him to slow down. Give a few more years, he probably has his own ideas and would ignore our advice. 

To commemorate the time we spent together, we choose to keep the traditional way of album photos of each passing occasion we spent together. For instance, instead of glamorously inviting tons of visitors to our house to celebrate his birthday, we would instead bring him to Legoland and buy him a customize birthday cake. We try to keep such celebration short and simple but memorable and joyous.  

Being the writer inside me, I also love to write and document our experiences in a family and lifestyle blog which I kept separately from this finance blog I am writing. 

It has our fond memories of attending many different events that we attended such as the Children Dinosaurs Festival @ Gardens by the Bay in 2017, Toybox @ Sentosa in 2018 and all our travels moment in the past 5 years. 

Till now, we continue to believe in working hard to pursue and create more memories together. 

If you have read a book called "The Happiness Project" written by Gretchen Rubin, you would realize that she has a quote in her book that says like this: 

Many of us choose to lavishly spend our days but forget to live our years. 

I used to think that days like this flew by because we're such a busy society in motion. We live a life where busy is king and productivity is lucrative. Our schedules are filled with work life imbalance that we often are not able to differentiate between dawn and night because the sky is always dark when we step out of the office. 

Most of us who are employees of a corporation in this capitalist society are more likely to relate to this. 

We wake up early in the morning getting ready for work only to find the outgoing crowd rushing to the same direction we are going. After enduring most of our time during the day in our prison cubicle attending to our outlook email, we still have to occasionally deal with rude client who demands for unrealistic expectations, who then call for an unproductive meeting only to realize there isn't always a solution provided to the problem. 

Everyday is a battle struggling to get this happiness project right in our lives. 

As the years flew by, I remember what Charles Swindoll once said: "Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children" 

I am full of flaws and I am still working hard in refining them to get better, but I know my heart is in the right place. 

It's the only bank that really matters in the end.

Thanks for reading.