Author: Faith

Letter: Month Four

(I’ve been inspired by dooce to start writing monthly letters to E.)

Dear E.,

Today you turned 4-months old. And typical of this last month, you have a cold. Month four was a little hard on you: you came down with a double ear infection and a mild case of RSV. The RSV (and all of the horror stories I’ve heard about it) really freaked me out. I watched you like a hawk to see if your breathing became more labored or your rib cage sunk in when you breathed. But you only wheezed when you breathed and had a chest cough. It was still difficult to watch you suffer and not be able to help, though. You were actually one of the lucky ones; this RSV season has been so severe that at the local hospital they had sick babies with RSV packed three to a room. You recovered from both the RSV and the double ear infection you had in about two weeks. I had to give you tropical-flavored antibiotics for your ear infection and you took it like a trooper. My strategy was to make a happy face and excitedly say, “num, num, num!” and then squirt the medicine into your mouth when you opened it to giggle. You fell for it pretty much every time–sucker!

But now you have another cold. *Sigh.* It’s probably because in the last few weeks you’ve discovered that you can control your hands, to some extent anyway. You use that control to cram them (and any germs on them) in your mouth every chance you can get. You’ve also started being much more interested in your toys and you love cramming them against your face and cooing into them.

You’re such a joy to have around. You love to coo and giggle and gurgle and you like having ‘conversations’ with us. You’re such a cheerful baby and I think it’s largely because you’re such a good sleeper.


In the last few weeks you’ve fallen into a routine: I feed you around 6 or 7 pm and put you to sleep in your crib. After fussing for a few minutes, you fall asleep. (You can never just fall peacefully asleep–you have to fight it and cry for 2 or 3 minutes.) Your dad wakes you around midnight and gives you a bottle which you eat on auto-pilot while mostly asleep. You go back to sleep until 5 am or so when you wake up hungry and after I get you fed and changed you usually go back to sleep until 7 or 8 am. And you also take two or three 2-hour naps during the day. In short, you are an AWESOME sleeper. I feel very grateful to you because I’m a wimp and tend to fall apart rather quickly if I’m severely deprived of sleep. Your genial nature combined with your good sleeping habits make being your mother easy. Being your mother is so much better that I had dared hoped it would be. Your dad also deserves a big shout-out for handling the midnight feeding every night. He’s done it every night since you started taking a bottle and he does it without complaint–it is such a big help.

This month you turned 100 days old. To celebrate we took you to a Korean restaurant. You sat on my lap and gazed at the colorful food. I’m looking forward to introducing you to Korean food once you start eating solids. It’s hard to believe that you’ll start eating real food in only a few months time.

You’re growing so big – you have your 4-month checkup tomorrow and I’m pretty sure you’ll weigh over 16 lbs. All traces of the tiny newborn are gone and you’re now a full-fledged baby. Sickness aside, this has been a fun month. You take much more notice of what’s going on around you and like to sit in the little plastic seat we got you and watch what everyone’s up to. You are also fascinated by other babies when you see them at church or at friends’ houses.

You love it when your dad comes home and bounces you on his lap and asks you about your day. When your dad (and only your dad) is playing with you this deep belly laugh wells up and burbles out of you and your scrunch up your shoulders and laugh and laugh. You think he’s so funny and you love playing with him. It makes me very happy to watch the two of you together.

Every day you continue to be one of the best things that has ever happened to us. Keep up the good work!


Love,

Mama

Links I Like: Baby Edition

It seems like several bloggers whose sites I read are in some stage or another of having a baby.

Conception
Karen Cheng’s Snippets of Life: Karen is a talented graphic designer, Chinese-Australian, and mum to two adorable boys. And her and her husband are trying to conceive baby number 3, who they hope will be a girl. Follow the saga here.

Pregnancy
Amalah: Amy’s writing is sassy and funny (with some mild language if that sort of thing bothers you). She has an adorable toddler son, Noah. And after trying for a while, she recently found out she’s pregnant. Amy’s going to be writing a weekly pregnancy column for Alpha Mom throughout her pregnancy. She also writes my favorite beauty advice column, The Advice Smackdown.

Birth
Sweet Juniper: This husband (Dutch) and wife (Wood) team just had their second child, a boy. Their writing is well-crafted and thoughtful.

Adoption
American Family: AmFam recently reflected on the one year anniversary of the adoption of her daughter L.

Korean Cooking

My mom was in town over the weekend to visit my sister, Jan. When you put Jan and my mom together, there’s bound to be a lot of Korean cooking going on–both of them are experts at it. And after many long years of practice, I am an expert at eating their cooking! I’m lucky that Jan lives only 20 minutes away from my house. Because I have more free time during the day now, I’m planning on hanging out with her more and hopefully learning how to make a few dishes.


While she was here, my mom made makguksu (not sure on the romanization), one of my favorite Korean comfort food dishes. Made with an anchovy broth, these noodles are topped with egg, dried seaweed, Korean fish hot-dog, and cucumber. You can put lots of different things on top. The sauce is made up of soy sauce, ground sesame, green onions, crushed red pepper, garlic, and a few other things that escape me at the moment. It was delicious! It also took a lot longer to put together than I remember it taking as a kid. I asked my mom if it was taking an especially long time to make for some reason but she assured me quite thoroughly that it always took this long to make and just I didn’t realize it because as a kid I only showed up at the very end. Oops.

My mom and Jan also made up a big batch of kkakdugi kimchi, made from diced daikon radish. It’s SO good. They knew it’s my favorite kimchi, and so…

…they saved this gigantic jar for me! Wow. I don’t know if even N. and I can finish this before it goes bad. It’s a race against time!

Project Update 1: Armoire

Woodworking went really well this last Wednesday. I made a lot of progress, even though I spent too much time dithering about some of the dimensions. As you can see below, my plans aren’t super-detailed. I’m pretty visually-minded, and so it’s hard for me to decide what the dimensions should be from my lovely not-to-scale drawing.

Last week I sanded smooth and cut to size the 4 long pieces and 6 short pieces that will make up the side panels of the armoire. You can see how they fit together in the lower right corner of the plans. This week I used a router to cut the profiles and the grooves of these pieces so they can fit together.
My instructor found a spare piece of walnut laminate that he said I could use for the panels. It’s not solid wood, but it has a real walnut veneer on the front. The dimensions of the laminate panels determine the overall dimensions of the sides of the armoire, and so I put a side together to help get an idea of what I wanted the overall dimensions to be. It took me entirely too long, but I finally decided that the legs should be 7 1/2 inches tall. (I know, I know–7 1/2 is SO MUCH better than 8 or 7 inches! I’m glad you agree.) So I cut the laminate to size.

And then I glued the whole thing together. There was only enough time left in class to glue one side; I’ll have to do the other side next time. Even though I only got one side together, I was pleased with the progress I made this week. It usually takes me longer to get to this point and so it’s satisfying to have a side put together already. It’s makes it seem more like a piece of furniture in progress instead of a pile of sticks.

Next week: making the top and bottom of the armoire.

Mr. Grabby Hands

This last week or so, E. has discovered he has hands and that they are under his control. To some extent, anyway. He loves grabbing at things and trying to put them in his mouth. He’s more successful with some things than others. He loves clutching his burp cloth in both hands and cramming it against his face and kind of growling into it. Pretty cute stuff.

On a different note, yesterday I ordered my first print from Tiny Showcase. I’ve been on their mailing list for a while and would check out the prints from time to time. Anyway, this week I finally took the plunge and ordered this print.

It’s by Amy Ruppel, whose work I’ve admired ever since I saw an exhibit of hers at the Smith Family Bookstore in Eugene a couple of years ago. Even though you miss out on some of the depth of Amy’s work with a print, I’m still really excited about it. And the print even comes with two cute enamel pins!

It was a bit of an ordeal to order it, though. Because Tiny Showcase only does very limited runs of the prints, they can sell out very quickly. I logged on to the site right at 5:30pm MST when they release the prints, but the site kept crashing on me because of the high traffic. By the time I got my order placed, they were on print #188 of 200, so I barely squeaked in under the wire. The entire run sold out in less than 30 minutes!

100 Days Old!


E. turned 100 days old this last week. Via Wikipedia, “In Korea it’s common to celebrate the bek-il or the 100th day of life. This tradition was born from a time of high infant mortality when many babies would die before three months of age. As a result the 100th day is a celebration of life as the baby has survived the difficult first 100 days of life.”

E. is a quarter Korean and while we weren’t going to have a traditional ceremony I wanted to go out for Korean food last week to celebrate his bek-il. However, a blizzard blew in last week and we weren’t able to make it out. N. had the day off today and so for lunch we went out for Korean food.

We drove down to a little place in Provo called Sam Hawk. Because their kitchen is so tiny, N. and I usually call in our order ahead of time. Otherwise, the wait can be up to an hour and a half, especially if you get stuck behind a large group. The first time we ate there, it literally took us two hours to get our food. The waitress felt badly for us and brought us rice crackers to snack on and Korean fashion magazines to flip through while we waited. It was funny at the time, but not that funny since we were crazy hungry. And the rice crackers sadly didn’t cut it.

So yeah, we learned our lesson: calling ahead definitely pays off. When we were there today we received our food, ate, and paid the check before some families who had been there when we arrived even got their food. We definitely got a few dirty looks as we were leaving. I felt a little smug for being in the know, but also a tiny bit guilty. But the food was really good.

We started with some dukboki, one of my favorites. It’s sort of like street food and so not every Korean restaurant serves it. I loved eating it at the street carts in when I was in Korea. It cracked me up how the vendors would wrap the plate in a clean plastic bag, put the dukboki on the plate, and then peel off the plastic bag and throw it away when you finished. This is one of the few Korean dishes I can make at home.

The banchan included seasoned black beans, potatoes, kimchi, and mung bean spouts.

N. and I both had dolsot bibimbap. E. started fussing while we were eating so I ended up holding him on my lap, but I had to be careful to keep him away from the bowl so he wouldn’t be burned.

The food was super good. After lunch we ran some errands and then got some frozen custard before coming home (lemon chiffon–yum!) So all and all, it was a lovely Presidents’ Day.

Yay for Friday

Kimchi in space! (Thanks, Sandra.)

This morning I tried to download some video that I’ve shot of E. lately, but I haven’t been able to get it to work yet. Maybe I’ll have it ready on Monday.

In the mean time, I bring you A Fun Thing From Target:

This last week I saw these reuseable shopping bags at Target. There were three different styles ranging from 99 cents to $2. I got two of the bags pictured below for $1.49 each. I like that they fold up and snap into a pretty compact size but then they unfold and they’re about the size of a brown paper groccery bag. And they have handles. I’m trying to cut down on unneccessary waste, so I’m going to try taking these when I go shopping. I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to have the cashier bag my things in them though.

I’d like to not use so many plastic bags, but I’m not really up for being super millitant and harassing the cashiers if it’s too confusing for them. I hate being that guy. We shall see how it goes. I’m going to try and get my stuff bagged in them the next time I’m there.

I heard that Target created these bags last year to satisfy a new law in California, but I guess they’re rolling them out nationwide now. I found them in the $1 section and also by the groccery section of the store.

Have a great weekend!