Parenting on Purpose

2019 marks the 5th year of my company, The Social Factor . I am enjoying what I do on a day-to-day basis, and am very thankful that I made my big career transition 5 years ago. The Lim Family 2019. I truly enjoy the time I have with the family. Flexibility in my work hours allows me to enjoy many precious hours with the kids, something I would not have been able to do in my previous position.  Back in 2014, I was employed in a comfortable full-time position, with regular working hours and a fixed income that was sufficient to pay the bills, send our kids for one or two enrichment classes, and allow us to go on regular trips each year. However, I was restless. I had been doing the same thing day after day, year after year. I wasn’t confident that my salary was going to grow significantly even if I continued to work at the same company for the next few years. I felt that I had been working for bosses for more than 10 years of my working life and that I needed a change. This p...

The sun came out in all its glory. We seized the opportunity, and set up a picnic lunch in Shenandoah National Park, a gorgeous natural scenic site overlooking the Shenandoah River and Valley from which it is named. It was surreal to simply enjoy the beauty of the Big Meadows site, a vast area that apparently contains the highest concentration of rare plants in the Park, as well as an abundance of animals not found anywhere else here. After lunch, we attended one of the ranger programmes, which was a guided walk along the Appalachian Trail, the longest hiking-only trail in the world. This is a massive trail which spans some 2,200 miles (about 3,500 kilometres), and cuts across 14 states in the Eastern United States. It runs from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. Ranger Ginny, our guide for the hike. Her fascinating stories provided tremendous insights into why the trail was established and what it would take to embark on such a journey. It was conceiv...

What would you do? You live a fairly comfortable life. You work very hard, and you get to live in a fairly comfortable house. But it does not belong to you. And it never will. That’s the law. It’s been that way, and that’s the way it’ll always be. Then you hear about an opportunity to go away to a distant land. You know it’ll likely be very hard; and you may not live as comfortably as you’re living now. But you know that the land will be yours. For you and your descendants. Forever. When the Irish left for America in the 1700s, that was the dilemma that they faced. And a number of them chose to leave their fairly comfortable life in Ireland in hope of a better life in the newly discovered land of America. Life was hard, and the immigrants had to build their houses from scratch, but if they succeeded, they would be able to live in a place that they could call their own. That was what we learnt from the Frontier Culture Museum, an excellent museum which chronicles the life of early...

We cannot visit the southern state of Virginia without understanding its role in the Civil War. After all, it was here in Virginia, in 1865, at the famous Appomattox Court House, where the top Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union forces, led by General Ulysses S. Grant. This act of surrender was considered by many as the closing act of the Civil War, and Lee's surrender effectively meant that the North had won the war.  While it was too far for us to drive to the town of Appomattox, we instead decided to visit the town of Harrisonburg.  Stopping by the Visitor Center, we realised that the town was at the crossroads of two major highways, the Valley Turnpike and the Rockingham Turnpike. And because the entire region was one of the most prosperous agricultural counties in the country, it was known as the "bread-basket of the Confederacy". Whoever controlled the region controlled the food source for the South. T here were therefore many historical s...