1. Celebrated my momma’s 60^th birthday. She was born on the 1^st day of CNY in the Year of the Tiger (Western calendar wud be February 18^th). Muffin Wang will be born in the Year of the Tiger too!
2. Gave out less Ang Paus this year cos the 2 red packets per kid ruling was valid only in 2009. Also, received less Ang Paus this year now that the baby bump is so dem obvious. I swear last year we were still happily collecting red packets ok!!
3. Had 5 rounds of Yee Sang without any of the “sang” ingredients. Meaning to say I picked out every visible piece of raw fish, abalone, sea cucumber, jellyfish and just ate the crispy, pickled bits.
4. Spent quality time with my family and my in laws. And got asked numerous times about when Muffin is arriving, is the baby a boy or a girl, and who’s taking care of baby when I get back to work.
5. I barely had to help mom with cooking and cleaning cos I is with child.
6. We had a crazy spread of delicious, yummy food everyday starting from CNY eve!
7. There were so many “free-to-view” fireworks in the neighbourhood *happiness*
8. For the first time, David and I had 2 visitors come for “pai nin” at our small lil’ apartment – one’s Grandma and the other is Dave’s Kajang High School classmate.
9. Never took so many cold showers in a day thanks to the unbearable heat!
10. My last CNY before I’m upgraded to a Momma!

So, if you’re looking at withdrawing moolah from your Account 2 to help you pay the 10% downpayment for your new home, you’ll need to submit the form 9C (AHL) which can be downloaded from the EPF website for free. You’ll need to follow the instructions there on how to complete the form, as well as what supporting documents you need to bring with you when submitting the form. Warning: Form is in good ol’ Malay.

You need to have the following documents in hand before you complete the form and submit the application to withdraw:

• Original and a copy of your IC front and back, on the same page
• Original and a copy of Savings account passbook or statement of personal current account from EPF approved panel of banks (account must be active)
• Original and a copy of the S&P agreement
• Original and a copy of the bank loan offer letter
• Original and a copy of proof of relationship (it seems this isn’t really required cos the officer told us we don’t need to show her the marriage cert)

If your purchase and loan is a joint-name, remember to make 2 sets of everything as you have to submit 2 separate forms per individual!

After that, get your bum bum to EPF office, take a number, wait your turn, let officer process your forms, check your identity, take thumbprints both left and right, and voila! Done in under 30 minutes. We were told we’ll get our money within 2 weeks, so let’s see how efficient our dear EPF really is.

Week 1

Check out new and current launches in Kota Kemuning. We really like this place for 2 reasons; one, to be close to my parents and two, the township is very well planned. There’s a beautiful lake for recreation and the commercial centre serves our daily requirements. A private hospital is being built and soon we’ll have a hypermarket in our vicinity! We have been living here in our very first property we purchased together (a 750sqf walk-up apartment) and have been loving it since!

Week 2

So we picked up some sales brochures the week before and presented our favoured property to father-in-law. We’re presenting it to him because he is generously contributing RM 100,000 for our new home! So, it is only appropriate for him to know what property we intend to purchase. The brochures didn’t help FIL visualize what we were actually interested in, so we decided to arrange for him to pop by and see the show unit himself.

Week 3

Parents-in-law came by Kota Kemuning and checked out the model house in the showroom. Minutes later we drove to the site of the construction to see the real deal. FIL’s face showed signs of approval. But still we weren’t sure if we needed to inject more “unique points” about the house to “sell” it to him. We got back to the car and asked if we should go for lunch, and thought we’d probably have another couple of weeks to think about it. It was then FIL said, “Let’s go book it now before it’s all gone!”

There and then in less than 3 hours we placed our booking! Swoosh, it happened so fast it felt unreal. Just like the same feeling we felt when my pregnancy test kit turned out positive. For a moment we were dumbfounded. We got ourselves a house we loved, in record time!

So what did we decide on? We purchased a unit in the Lagoon Villas, the latest addition to the Kota Kemuning family. With only a 125 units, the villas are really  duplex townhouses—imagine a double storey house above another double storey house. Without your own garden *phew* and we park our cars below our unit in the basement. This low density 4-storey townhouse comes with a lift (for those lazy moments) and is facing a beautifully landscaped garden and lagoon. It is a gated and guarded community including CCTV and intercom facilities with the guardhouse, a huge playground for the kids, a multi purpose hall for your parties, sports & recreational facilities and even a non-golf membership to the Kota Permai Golf Club.

Our new home is almost triple the size of our current apartment, at 1900sqf. It has 4 bedrooms and 3 baths, an ok-sized kitchen and yard and 2 store rooms. The quality of the interior is quite premium, and we won’t have to do much renovations once we get the keys to our house. We are also very happy that we don’t have to bother about a garden (cos we can’t even keep a cactus alive, seriously), or worry about having to paint the exterior of our house every couple of years. We even have covered parking wahoo!

So for the above we are paying a grand sum of RM 367,800! Date of completion is estimated by September 2012. Here are some illustrations of the Lagoon Villas and its interior layout:

The good thing about the 3 year wait is that we won’t have to kelam kabut with Muffin’s arrival and we’ll have more time to save. We’re SO looking forward to moving in!

With the help of a contractor (plus endless bags of cement, bricks, soil), he transformed the drawings and figures in this manual into a REAL life sized koi pond, so big you can swim in it. I’m not kidding.

I found out from Mom-in-law that he did extensive research over the innernet, and did the sketching on his own. He then “translated” the design to the contractor, and as of last Saturday (after almost a month of hard work) this is how it looks like.

Although he didn’t go at it hands on, I really am quite amazed at how he found all the information from the innernet and converted it into instructions that the Indonesian contractor could understand. Respect y’all. Oh yeah, and Father-in-law suggested we should swim in it before he releases the kois into the pond. I reckon, we should just release the kois into their new home.

p/s: It’ll probably be another 2-3 weeks before it’s 100% complete and I’ll post a pic of when the kois are reintroduced back into their new home.

• Park in your designated parking lot even though their lot is just next to yours?

• Talks like an auntie in the pasar but yet dresses up like a tai tai?

• Have in the common walkway 20 pots with soil but no plants?

• Hang their intimates over the stair railing knowing that the wind will blow it 3 floors down?

• Look like they are in the “escort” business?

• Practice golf swings at the children’s playground in front of your house?

• Keep repeating on their stereo that lame Aqua Barbie Girl song?

• Continues to use the same vacuum cleaner that causes the whole apartment block’s electricity to trip (including his unit) without fail every weekend?

• Blame you for the worms that are feasting on his plants?