Because family matters more.

Last Monday, I took urgent leave and made a last minute trip to Malaysia to visit my grandpa. You know how we always give ourselves the excuse that we will visit someone when we have the time but the time never come before it is too late?

I don’t want that to ever happen to me again ever since my maternal grandma passed away 2 years back. So, I had to skip a training at work and brought the entire family on a road trip to visit my grandpa. After all, he is turning a century old next year. The stars aligned that day and my uncles and aunty were going to be there too and I figured I couldn’t miss this impromptu family gathering.

I can’t tell you how glad I was, because of the smiles that I was seeing on my grandpa’s face the entire day. He just sat there and watched the kids in fascination… The kids also clocked in some precious memories too while I relived my childhood through their eyes.

He is peeping downstairs from a hole in the floor. My grandpa cut a hole in the floor on the second storey of the shop house so that he can check on who is ringing the doorbell downstairs. As a kid, I had so much fun with the hole because it is so fascinating to watch people from right above them. I remembered even tying a string to a small bucket and lowering it downstairs and fetching small items up. My brother and I spent a lot of time fighting over the hole.. and guess what? The 2 brothers did the exact same thing. Ahhh…

Jerry also found a toy that I used to spend a lot of time with. Something that is almost non-existent in most of our households these days. The fly swatter!

Jerry spent hours running around the house swatting all over the air because he isn’t fast enough to actually hit any flies. Do you think the kids need the ipad/gadgets? They just run round and round the shop house swatting everything in sight and happiness is when…

I swatted a fly and the kid is so happy seeing the dead fly! Man, even I took a long while to swat one. To think I used to compete with my brother on catching the most number of flies alive. We were quite the experts back then and it was our favourite past time in a small town where there is no recreational activities available.

The 2 brothers ran up and down the stairs, hung out at the balcony for a while, watched and made friends with the house dog, speak with the talking pet parrot in the house and enjoyed the attention lavished on them by everyone else. The most important one being…

This picture is worth a million bucks to me. The happy face of grandpa. the smiles of him all day and the kids standing close by. When we left, Jerry even gave great grandpa a big hug and Jerome sent a flying kiss his way. Lovely memories like these made me feel rich. Definitely worth the day spent and the amount of time I spent driving on the roads. I was super tired that day, spent a big part of the day driving non stop, surviving on 2 hours sleep from the night before and having to work the next day despite arriving back in SG quite late at night. Hopefully I can make another trip soon.

Have you visited your loved ones lately? Have you been putting off the visit again and again? Don’t. Make some time for the people that matters. You’ll never regret it.