When I first read Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters , the daughter I had in mind is a toddler and myself a dad with strong biceps to carry daughter around. I picked up the book again this week. My daughter has grown up a lot since the last read. The fact is, I haven't been any stronger as a dad – and chances are I am simply older.

In part, I believe, this is because men spend most of our time working for someone else, and don't carve

Mention number two to the second-born, and they're quick to grumble.

Oh, look how enthusiastic the parents are with the first child - and then the second. When I polled some parents about the number of snapshots for their first and second children, the most common answer I got was "huge." Huge difference, they said, between the first (volumes) and the second (a few).

I don't have to bother with shortchanging mine, because my daughter is a single

Electrocardiogram is the most common, but not the only, way for doctors and medical students to study the human heart. Those squiggly lines are the graphical display of each heartbeat's electrical activity. Instead of listening to the heart, we can tell its tempo and rhythm by taking a look at those waves, like what most musicians respond to musical notes without listening to the songs.

Not all musical notes are pleasant to recount. And electrocardiogram tracing can sometimes narrate a sad story. Many a time we declare patients dead

It's a rainy Saturday morning, and I finished seeing my patients before 10 a.m. After locating the bus route on Google Map, I checked the documents and headed to the bank. I told myself I had to get there within office hours. In many ways, the efforts to squeeze time settling bank account signature issues is even more daunting than the fight to see my patients. I can see patients as long as the wards do not having official opening hours, adding whatever number of hours I

I often tell my daughter to look at things from an opposite side. Just as an "unlucky" adventure in Oliver Jeffers' book What's the Opposite can turn out to be a lucky event. Who knows? How about the female figures hidden in the famous picture of The Beauty and the Hag? Make sense?

A lot can happen when you think you've had bad luck.

My daughter's school field trip was cancelled last Friday after the weather forecast of thunderstorms. I cancelled my leave,

Imagine your kid has a curious soul with a great deal of spur-of-the-moment ideas - as yours probably are. Many a kid will come up with activities beyond our comfort zone. An example is bringing a frog, a hamster, a goldfish, a dog, a cat and three kittens to your sister's wedding. At first glance it sounds silly, suited only to a weirdo's world. Not so. My daughter and I read about this idea in a children's book

Teachers are supposed to prepare lectures with meticulous attention to details and rules. Students should be told right from wrong. Well, that's the theory, anyway. Teaching medicine is a different story. It's not that simple. Although we can find protocols and guidelines (and even treat them as the Ten Commandments chiseled in sapphire), many of them don't work in real life.

Impractical rules aside, doctors are more often wrong than right. Well, surprise, surprise. In the lecture hall

The British novelist C.S. Lewis once described the value of a book this way: "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally - and often far more - worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond."

With a single sentence he moves us to another level of reading, and to a new experience of reading.

To learn why a book should be read and reread for everyone who is aging (that's all of us), I've been

"Close but not too close" is the motto for our children's development.

This is what I learned after reading Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way for Parents . I bought this book at the Art Gallery of New South Wales last month.

There is hardly a greater gift to us than finding a book with a theme of cultivating a child's creativity.Now that I look back through my way of upbringing my daughter, I realise that I might have intervened too much, inserting my own

Robin Sharma, author of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari , once wrote, "Never go anywhere without a book under you arm."

How true. So many of us spend time idling on commute time and standing in line. As a matter of fact, the U.S. News and World Report reported that, over the course of our lifetime, we will spend five years standing in line. I repeat, five years in a lifetime.

Is idling a must? Not necessarily. Is the waiting a