Silver Linings

I tend to think of myself as a rather cynical person.  Despite this, I am also a little bit of an optimist.  So while I don’t really take things at face value and can be rather pessimistic when I think about outcomes, at the same time I can usually find an upside to whatever misfortune might have befallen me.

Annoying.

And so while this week has been a little on the rough side for me — single parenting an active preschooler and a baby with sleeping issues — there were some good things about it as well.

• Tomorrow Mark comes home after a week in TX.  And while HK to TX tends to be his roughest trips, at the very least he got four nights of uninterrupted sleep.  Color me jealous.
• And if everything goes as planned, this trip will have been Mark’s last business trip for the year.  Fingers crossed!  (Although now I’ve probably just jinxed myself).
• Sleep deprivation for me usually means daily trips to Starbucks.  And had I not been so tired this week and so terribly in need of coffee all the time, then I wouldn’t have found out that Starbucks is offering their holiday lattes again.  Yay!  Plus in keeping with trying to live just a smidge greener, I bought my own Starbucks tumbler so now every time I buy a latte that’s one less cup that goes into a landfill (not to mention I save HK$3 on my coffee).  So technically the more I drink, the more money I save and the better it is for the environment.  It’s the kind of logic that guys tend not to understand (“So I spent $100 on a new pair of shoes but they were half-priced so really I saved you $100″) but it’s how my mind works so there you go.
• Because Mark arrives tomorrow morning, I signed him up for a spa day in the afternoon which means I’ll be single parenting again for half the day.  To be honest, I’m a little burned out and not looking that forward to it and I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of something low maintenance to do with the kiddos for about five hours.  But had I not been looking then I wouldn’t have found out that Clockenflap, a big music and arts festival, is going on this weekend at Cyberport so we’ll probably check that out.  By no means will it be low maintenance — outdoor concerts with two kids in tow — but at least it’s just down the street from us so if I need to check out early it won’t be too bad.  And as an added bonus I have an automatic blog topic for Sunday.
• I had been slightly worried about Julian’s eating the last few weeks because it seemed like he went from eating 8 times a day to just 5 times now in a rather short amount of time.  His 4-month appointment today confirmed what I had suspected — he’s lost some weight.  But his weight is still in the 75th percentile (vs. 98th percentile at 2 months) which is where his height is as well so I guess that means he’s proportional now.  At least I don’t have to hear from his doctor that he’s overweight anymore.  And at least she stopped comparing him to her dog this month (although the nurse kept mentioning that he looked like a girl.  But no one pays attention to nurses anyway.  Just kidding if you’re one of my nurse friends.)

Anyway, that’s about all the optimism I can muster for one evening.

Oh Sleep — How I Miss You!

I realize I’m only on day 6 but this blogging every day for a month thing is getting to be a pain in the butt. Mostly it’s because I’m so tired. Julian decided this week that sleeping at night is purely optional and naturally this coincides during one of Mark’s longer business trips so I have no backup to help out with those sleepless nights. And sadly, I looked at him this afternoon and he had some really dark circles under his eyes. Poor guy — so worn out for a four-month-old. So in lieu of a real post, here’s a picture of Julian instead. Asleep. You know, wishful thinking and all that good stuff…

A Music Recommendation Of Sorts

I recently downloaded a children’s album from iTunes by They Might Be Giants.  We have an older one from them called Here Come the ABCs which Noah could really care less about but their latest one is Here Comes Science and it came with video versions of all their songs so I thought it might be worth a shot.  Noah loves watching the videos (they’re animated so no surprise there) but the cool part is that he’s actually picking up a couple of things.  His favorite song is Speed and Velocity so now he knows that velocity is speed plus direction; thanks to Meet the Elements he knows that people are made up of elements (although he sometimes slips and says people are made of elephants…they are quite close in pronunciation…); and that paleontologists study dinosaur bones, mass extinction and dig up fossils (thanks I Am A Paleontologist).  Still, there’s only so much science you can pick up from music videos.  Take this conversation we had at lunch today…

Noah: Mom, a shooting star is not a star.
Me: That’s right Noah. Do you know what it is?
Noah: It’s a meteor that’s falling down in the sky.
Me: Yup. And do you know why it shines like a star?
Noah: …um…well…like in Ben 10 the shooting star was falling and it changed direction because it wasn’t a star, it was the Omnitrix and it almost landed on Ben and a watch jumped out and he could turn into so many aliens.*

Uh, I guess so.

*Correct answer: The friction as it travels through air produces heat and light.

Remember Me?

My blogging has been ridiculously delinquent this month. Ironic since October was so busy and so many things happened — big and small things alike — that I would want to remember and keep track of. Things like:

• My parents visiting for two weeks.
• Mark’s brother visiting for a weekend — making him just the second person in our family who has met Julian (counting my parents as one unit of course).
• Julian hitting the three-month mark and going from colicky, screamy baby to an incredibly well-behaved angel baby.  Weird.
• Our first parent-teacher conference at Noah’s school.  Or, as I prefer to call them from now on, “Go on, tell me just how awesome my son is” conferences.

Suffice it to say, I’ve got some catch up work to do.  But because I’m also a bit of a masochist, I’ve also decided that for November I’m going to do this whole NaBloPoMo thing. NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month, is a challenge where you write a blog post every day for a month. These days there’s a challenge for every month but it originally started out as just November and really, I’m not ready to commit to more than one month right now. So hopefully for me, you’ll be seeing a lot more entries next month. And hopefully for you, they won’t be boring as dirt.

Until then, here are a couple of pictures. I always get a kick out of seeing how weirdly similar (yet different) my two boys are and I see that “alike, but not” thing so much in these two pictures. The first is me, Mark and a three-month-old Julian at Ngong Ping village this month and the second picture is me, Mark and a two-month-old Noah at his baptism four years ago.

You see? Alike, but not.

Waiting

(insert Jeopardy theme song here)

I haven’t felt very bloggy lately.  In fact I haven’t felt very much like doing anything for the last week or two now.  But I’m guessing that my new lethargic, exhausted, wiped out phase has something to do with the fact that I only have two weeks to go until my due date (July 8th.  Eek!).  Mostly I’m just tired or else have absolutely no interest in doing anything — not reading, not knitting, not going online and chatting with friends — nothing.  Unless it involves popping out a baby (or obsessively playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook.  Which is a terrible game.  Seriously, everyone — stay away from it if you have a competitive bone in your body or are even slightly obsessive-compulsive.  It will suck you in and not let you go).  Still, it’s not like I don’t do anything all day and with Noah at home for one more week before summer school starts up, we’ve had a lot of time to just hang out.  This is both a good and a bad thing.  Good because the boy is hilarious and it’s so much fun hanging out with him trying to anticipate the weird/embarrassing things that will come out of his mouth.  And bad because spending this much time with him tends to make him super clingy and I’ve been trying to manage his expectations about how things will change once the baby comes — particularly in respect to how much time we’ll be able to spend together.  And by “clingy” I mean clingy.  Literally.  Like when we sit down for lunch he’ll eventually scooch his way across the bench until he’s practically in my lap and in the mornings he’ll climb into bed with me and pretty much lay on my back like a baby monkey until Mark pries him off.  Of course whenever I ask him why he needs to squish me, his answer is, “Because I love you so very much.”  Well, if you put it that way…

Anyway, so that’s a really convoluted way of saying that I’m behind on my blogging, as well as my excuse for not being around lately and reading your blogs as well.  So hopefully if I can muster up the energy then I’ll be playing catch up in the next few days.

A New Blog

Because Jae is such a foodie, she wasn’t content to just have her regular food blog, but she decided to start up a group food blog as well where our little group of internet friends could share some of our favorite recipes.  In her words, “We’re a bunch of young moms of all different backgrounds and circumstances with one thing in common…We don’t know what the hell to cook for dinner.”

It’s still in its beginning stages, but come check it out if you get a chance.  If nothing else, with this group of women if the food isn’t good then at least the journey there will most likely be entertaining:

Feasties

For My Sister on Her 30th Birthday

My little sister is celebrating her 30th birthday today.  Well, I guess “celebrating” isn’t quite correct — dreading is probably more accurate.  Personally I looked forward to turning 30 so I can’t say I really understand where her angst is coming from.  After all this is a girl who is still young, beautiful, intelligent, funny, caring, giving and is engaged to a man who she is madly in love with.  But I would be remiss if I neglected my big-sisterly duties and didn’t try to dole out some unsolicited advice anyway.  And being a one year veteran of my thirties it’s not like I don’t have any experience.  So without further ado, I humbly present to you…

Cathy’s Keys To Happiness in Your Thirties *

*disclaimer: since I’m only 31, these rules are still in beta testing

Don’t use anyone else’s life as a benchmark to measure your life and your accomplishments against.  Just remember that nobody’s life is perfect and what they choose to let you see never tells the full story.  They have their issues too — I guarantee it.  Ignore what everyone else has done, forge your own path and do what’s right for you.

Thirty is not the end of the world.  It’s the perfect time to apply all the things you learned while you were stumbling around blindly in your twenties only now you’ll have a better idea of what you’re doing.

It’s never too late to start over if that’s what you decide you want to do.  People do it all the time.  It may be a little harder, but it’s never too late.  Never feel like you have to settle.

Use a lot of butter when you cook.  Butter really does make everything better.

Drink more water and less soda.  Soda will rot your teeth out.  Seriously.  They did a study on this and found that sodas wear out your enamel (except root beer for some reason).

Find a hobby that you enjoy and that you can do alone — knit, crochet, quilt, scrapbook, build miniature ships in bottles, read, learn a new instrument, pick up a sport, whatever you’re good at.  One, it’s fun to discover new things about yourself and two, later when you’re married and have a house full of rugrats, you’re going to cherish your alone time and having something to do when you finally have time to yourself makes it more enjoyable.

Call your older sister more often!

Learn how to say no.

Don’t ever stop learning about things — whether it’s stuff you don’t know anything about or stuff you’ve always been interested in but never got a chance to study in school.

Vote.

Back up the data on your computer.  Seriously.

Adopt a charity of your choice or take up an issue that you are passionate about.  Sometimes it feels good to focus your energy on something outside of yourself — especially when you’re feeling really down on yourself.

Do something selfish and completely just for yourself at least once a month — get a manicure, get a massage, hide away at a cafe for a couple hours with a good book, make other people watch the movie you’ve been dying to see no matter how chick flicky it is, take over the tv at night and hide the remote control, eat cake for breakfast.

Take lots of pictures.  You don’t have to print them, just store them on your computer if that’s easiest.  One day you’re going to look back on this age and think, “Wow, those were some good times weren’t they?” and you’re going to want some pictures to help you remember.  And make sure you’re in some of the pictures — you won’t realize until you’re older and wrinkly that you spent most of your time behind the camera and then you’ll wish you had pictures of yourself when you were younger and hotter.

Finally, this little gem is from Mark and it’s here only because he made me promise to include it: “When they tell you don’t walk towards the light, you just tell them you’re going to change the lightbulb.”  He also made me promise to tell you this, “People measure age by the days, weeks and months that pass.  But I measure age by the events in my heart and in my mind.  That’s my true age.”

And Mark’s advice leads to this last one from me: Don’t listen to boys — they talk a lot of nonsense because they want to seem relevant.  Just nod at them and then go do what you were going to do anyway.

Happy Birthday Carol!!

Moving Revelations

After four days, we’re pretty much unpacked and decently settled into our new place.  Being both pregnant and lazy, I managed to get out of a lot of the hard work. However I did volunteer for the job of putting away our boxes of books because I get pretty obsessive about books and organizing. I’m not so bad that I organize them Dewey Decimal style, but I like to separate fiction from non-fiction, and then organize my non-fiction by subject and then height.  Fiction is easier to organize — prettiest books at eye level and books by the same author are grouped together. That’s normal, right? It’s actually been a pretty interesting task for me. One thing I’ve always believed is that you can tell a lot about a person by the type of books on their shelves and had I not known either myself or Mark, based on our books there are a few assumptions I would’ve made about us.

First, based on the massive number of parenting books on our shelves, I would probably have deduced that Mark and I are the world’s most incompetent parents. Seriously, we have an entire row of shelves devoted solely to parenting books — the What To Expect series, Supernanny, the Baby Whisperer, everything by Harvey Karp, toilet training for dummies plus a number of books on child nutrition. Whoever said that children don’t come with instructions obviously hasn’t seen our bookshelf.

Second, you can pretty much make out the evolution of our religious thought. Next to our bible sits a couple of books on biblical criticism (the first seeds of doubt), followed by A Purpose Driven Life (a final stab at faith which coincided with Noah’s birth), which is next to God Is Not Great (full-blown skepticism) which is next to a book on eastern religions. Also interesting is how our evolution occurred in order from the tallest book to shortest. Interesting and convenient.

Third, I love how well-traveled our books make us look. I already knew we traveled a lot, but seeing our guidebooks on the shelf — from Italy to England, Hawaii to Japan, Mumbai to Australia — it’s like visual confirmation and I love looking through them and refreshing my memory on the places we’ve been.

Fourth, we are linguistically challenged. We have books and cds for learning Japanese, French, Russian, Tagalog, Mandarin and Cantonese. Guess how many languages we speak in real life? Yep. Just English.

Fifth, I love looking at the development of our culinary tastes. There’s the basic How To Cook Everything followed by several books from various Food Network chefs (Alton Brown, Giada De Laurentiis, Tyler Florence and even one by Rachael Ray — who I hate) followed by cookbooks put out by our favorite restaurants or by regional cuisine, which all eventually gives way to baby food books and books on how to cook for picky eaters.

One thing I do find a little sad is what little trace there is of who we were before we settled down and had Noah. Hardball and Bill Clinton’s biography are the remaining evidence of our past interest and involvement in politics. Gone are the books analyzing elections, bios of other presidents/political figures, tomes on political philosophy — they’ve all since been replaced by business books. And those gajillions of English classes I took in college are represented by Catch-22 and The Clockwork Orange. All of my classics — Orwell, Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, Austen, Chaucer, Spenser, Donne — all gone (or most likely, put away in storage). Of course, the sense of sadness and nostalgia is tempered by the growth I can see on my shelves. Discovering new authors and new genres is always exciting so I can’t say it’s been a total loss. And at least I know I have some old friends to look forward to rediscovering once we get back to CA and pull our stuff out of storage…after we buy a few more bookshelves of course.

The Nevan and Noah Show

As you probably already know, Mark, Noah and I are in Tokyo for Christmas this week. What you may not know is that by some freak chance, Mark booked us a room at the same serviced apartment that Jae, Dave and Nevan were staying at before moving into their real apartment. So for about three days it was all about the Nevan and Noah show.

On Saturday, we met up in the morning so we could let the boys wreak havoc on the unsuspecting patrons at the Starbucks down the street. Noah was pretty shy when he first saw Nevan and spent the first five minutes hiding between my legs, but he warmed up soon enough and he and Nevan picked up where they left off in Sydney back in August — with a lot of screaming, invitations to each other’s houses, and mischief in general.

Take Two

Mark and I have pretty much told all of our family the news, so now that my first doctor’s appointment is over and done with, we’re making it official for everyone else. We’re having another baby.

I’m due on July 6, 2009 and according to the doctor, based on the baby’s size (a whopping 2.44 centimeters — just under an inch), he/she is about nine weeks and two days along. It’s about two weeks further along than I originally thought so personally I have my doubts about the due date so I guess we’ll see. Dr. Doo also gave me an ultrasound at my appointment. I wasn’t expecting it and didn’t think you could even see anything at 9 weeks, but I got to see the little guy/gal for the first time, I saw the heart beating and saw him/her moving around a bit. It was awesome. And it made the pregnancy that much more real to me rather than to just know I was pregnant because I’d had three straight weeks of nausea (which, trust me, isn’t as fun and glamorous as it sounds). Anyway, here is the little guy/gal:

For anyone unfamiliar with ultrasound images, the jalapeno shaped black thing is the placenta and the white blob inside it is the baby. The baby’s head is the roundish thing on the bottom right. And you see that bright white spot in the middle of the baby? That’s his/her heart. Not the same as being able to see and hear it beat, but still cool nonetheless.

Anyway, so that’s about it. Mark and I are both pretty excited so you’ll probably read a ton of pregnancy-related posts in the near future but we just wanted to share the news.