We be Parents

A week late on the post, but here nonetheless.  Last week we made our first trip out of the state with Hazel, heading to the Boston area for my business trip and then down to Connecticut to my mom’s place for the weekend.  In the last post I mentioned that Hazel did great on the flight out to Boston – she mostly slept, bounced around on our laps, ate, and eyed the tv on the backs of our seats.  We survived too – traveling with a baby is definitely a whole lot different than the traveling I’m used to…so many more things to carry, much more time needed, worries about feeding, crying, and accidentally leaving some critical piece of baby gear behind!

Yenari and Hazel stayed locked down in our hotel the whole time I was at work both days – they didn’t leave at all without me!  Last post I had some photos of Hazel swimming in the pool, so I’ll skip ahead to the end of the second day.  Yenari checked out of the hotel around 4pm (thanks to their kindness in letting us have a super late checkout) and I made it back to the hotel after work to pick them up around 4:45.  Then it was off to the Southborough train station to pick up Liza and then drive down to Connecticut.  Again, Hazel was a travel champ, passing out and sleeping the 2 hours down to my mom’s house in Durham, CT.  After some dinner, chatting, and baby playing we went to bed.

The first thing on the lazy day agenda for Saturday was the arrival of grandmother and Hazel’s great grandmother.  Even though she’s a great grandmother she’s still ‘Nana’ to Hazel.  This was her second time meeting Hazel – she first met her when she was only about 3 weeks old, so Hazel was a lot bigger and more responsive this time around.  Here are a couple pictures of Hazel sitting and smiling with Nana:

Next up was a visit from my college friends Joe and Sophia.  They’re expecting a baby anytime now – Sophia’s about ready to burst!  We had a great brunch with them filled with baby talk, baby play, and catching up.  Here’s a couple photos of them playing with Hazel:

It was great to see them.  Best of luck to Sophia and Joe in the coming weeks!

That night my mom planned a dinner party to show off Hazel to many of her friends.  Some of these friends I’ve known my whole life, so it was great to see everyone and the excitement everyone had for Hazel and for us.  Here are a couple of (out of focus – guilty me) photos of the girls and the boys of the party:

After the evening of great company and excellent food Hazel was a bit cranky from the over-stimulation but eventually got to bed and slept well.  In general she wasn’t really phased by the 3 hour timezone switch on either end of the trip, so we lucked out in that regard!

The next morning Hazel’s aunt Kathleen came over and we had a great time playing with Hazel on the couch, with high spirits all around…photos of Hazel with my mom (meeeeeeeemaw), Liza, and Kathleen:

The whole Connecticut trip was great – we got to pack in a lot of time with a lot of great people without having to even leave the house!

The trip back wasn’t so fun though.  I’ll skip the full story and just mention: long drive back with tons of traffic on the Mass Pike, lots of traffic near Liza’s place with students returning to college, GPS suddenly not working leading to aimless driving through Boston, boarding pass that didn’t mention Hazel requiring second trip through security, Yenari and me being in different rows of the plane with others only agreeing to switch so we could be together halfway through, crying toddler keeping Hazel awake and crying, more crying, and finally back home.  It was about a 14 hour trip door to door and definitely not too fun, but we survived, and had a great time on the trip, so it was worth it…

Coming to you live from Framingham Massachusetts…where I’m on a business trip and Yenari and Hazel have come along for the ride.  We’ve been a bit lacking on updates recently despite a number of visitors, first meetings, and this trip.  Here’s a quick recap:

First off, we had a visit from my Aunt Janet (Janet Brown that is…two Aunt Janet’s if you’re counting) and cousin Morgan.  Here they are playing with Hazel:

Two days after the visit from Janet and Morgan, we drove up to Yenari’s Aunt JungHae’s house to see Yenari’s grandfather who had just arrived from Korea.  This was Hazel’s first introduction to her great grandfather and my first introduction to my grandfather in law.  Because this was the first time I saw him (and the first time Yenari saw him after getting married) we bowed to him and he gave us advice on how to have a good marriage.  When he came from Korea both of his checked bags were for us: a big and colorful playmat sent by Yenari’s mom and the second suitcase filled with food from Yenari’s grandmother.  He is a very sweet man and it was great to finally get to meet him and to see him playing with Hazel and keeping her entertained:

Hazel on her great grandfather's lap

Hazel hanging on the couch with her great grandfather

Just a couple days later my brother Andrew arrived for a short trip from DC to come see his niece for the first time.  Andrew balances a pretty wild schedule between work, law school, and breathing, so it was great that he was able to make it out to see us in one of his few free moments of the year.  Just after picking my brother up at the airport and visiting Yoni, his friend from college, we went to the Button’s house in Alameda for the annual bbq which was a lot of fun (as usual).  Hazel saw her first competitive croquet match! Here are a couple shots of my brother playing with Hazel and a video he took of her dancing (with a bit of Yenari’s help) to the Flight of the Conchords’ The Humans are Dead:

And finally…catching up to the present…we made our first big trip with Hazel yesterday, flying from San Francisco to Boston (yay direct flight, yay Jet Blue) and Hazel was a real champ.  She didn’t cry much – she spent most of her time sitting happily on our laps watching tv, sleeping, and eating…all the things ‘real’ people do on flights!

She and Yenari spent their time in the hotel today, and then when I came back from work we brought her down to the pool for her first swimming experience.  Here she is, decked out in her bathing suit doing her thing:

I can’t say that Hazel loved her first swimming experience, but at the same time she wasn’t crying, so it must not have been too bad.  The water was a little cold for her, but we made the best of the short experiment by taking a lot of photos.  And yes, Hazel has the fanciest swimsuit in the family – thanks to Sarah Lee for Hazel’s stylin’ Juicy Couture suit!  After the swimming we brought her back to the room and Yenari took a warm bath with her – definitely a more enjoyable experience for her.

And next up?  After I finish work tomorrow afternoon I’m going to pickup my sister Liza at the train station and we’re going to drive down to Connecticut to spend the weekend at my mom’s house and then drive back up to Boston on Sunday evening to fly home…

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The last week and a few days have been really fun because my mom and my sister Liza came for a visit.  Liza stayed a week and left this past Thursday, trading places with Duncan.  My mom and Duncan went down to a classic car race in Monterey for the weekend, but they’re due back any time now.

My mom and Liza were super helpful in their visit…playing with Hazel, burping her, arranging all her clothes, cooking, and giving our house the most thorough cleaning its seen in a long time.  My mom actually brought all her favorite recipes and let us pick out which ones we wanted for different meals – very luxurious.  They also watched Hazel during the day while I was at work so that Yenari could go get a massage.

Not only did they do all these useful and helpful things, but they had fun with us too!  Here’s a photo of Liza playing with Hazel just before heading out of the house:

And here are all of the girls at the tail end of a walk we took around the Stanford campus:

This was the second trip for my mom to visit Hazel and its amazing how much Hazel has grown and changed in the weeks between her trips.  This was Aunt Liza’s first encounter with Hazel and her first time spending any significant time with a newborn.  One of the nights when they were here my dad was also in the area on business, so we had a big family dinner – Hazel’s second time having dinner with both her grandmother and grandfather.  Here’s my dad with Hazel:

It was a great week with Liza and my mom, a nice stop in with my dad, and we still have a day and a half with my mom.  But the visits aren’t slowing down…tomorrow my Aunt Janet and cousin Morgan from Portland will be visiting us for dinner, on Wednesday we’re going to Yenari’s aunt and uncle’s house to see them and Yenari’s grandfather who is coming in from Korea – this will be both Hazel’s first and my first time meeting him!  Then…next Saturday my brother is coming for a three day trip after which I’ll be headed to the Boston area for a business trip with Yenari and Hazel in tow…we’re extending the trip a couple days to head down to CT to stay with my mom again.  Then, I think, the month of visits will end and the preparation for Yenari heading back to work will begin.

Yesterday Hazel turned 8 weeks old – it’s amazing how fast the last (almost) 2 months have gone and how much she’s changed in this time.  The last week has particularly seen a number of changes.  The most exciting one is that Hazel has started to smile a lot more…and these smiles don’t seem accidental like some of the previous ones, she smiles when she seems genuinely amused.

Here’s a photo of Hazel from this past Saturday night, taken when Yenari and I were singing and dancing for her to some Disney music:

While her smiles are more common now, they certainly still get us just as excited as the first ones she graced us with a while back.

The other main change over the last few days is that Hazel has become a much better sleeper, though writing this will probably reverse the trend!  We’ve had less trouble getting her to sleep and then once she does get to sleep she’s been sleeping for a lot longer.  On Sunday she let us sleep until around 11 in the morning – what a luxury! Now, that sleep involved waking up to feed/burp/change her at 1am, 3am, 6am, and 9am….but…it still was a lot of sleep!  The only problem with her sleep now is that she really sleeps a lot better when she’s in bed with us, sleeping right between us.  Some would probably yell at us saying that it isn’t safe, but we’ve been careful and we’re sticking with what works for now…though we’ve been trying to encourage her to sleep in her bassinet as much as possible.

We’ve also started in on another controversial topic – the pacifier.  Sometimes she gets very fussy at night and just wants to eat eat eat…except she eats so much that she ends up spitting up all of Yenari’s precious milk!  The was that she wasn’t really hungry, she just needed something to soothe her, and all of the swaddling, singing, bouncing, and rocking techniques didn’t do it.  Since her breastfeeding was already well established and she’d even gotten relatively good at taking a bottle (of pumped milk) we thought that the pacifier would be worth trying…and thus far it’s been very helpful, though we’re trying not to use it too often.

Hazel also attended the biggest event of her life – my company‘s summer picnic with 200+ attendees.  We were definitely worried about how she would handle all the people, noise, and the warm weather.  Her diaper bag was just about bursting with any and every supply we could think of – we were prepared for a hurricane!  And how did she actually respond to the picnic?  She slept straight through the 2 hours we were there, even with all my coworkers peeking in to see her.  The other exciting thing about the picnic was that there was a raffle for some prizes and I won one of the bigger prizes – a 12.1 inch digital photo frame that is now sitting at my desk at work cycling through tons of photos of Hazel and photos of Yenari and my wedding and honeymoon.  It was excellent timing to get a present like this as I wanted to have a photo of her at work but she’s growing so much I didn’t want it to get out of date.

The night before we had another visit from Sarah Lee and Hazel was able to catch her first glimpse of Guitar Hero as I brushed of the plastic guitar that has gathered dust for the last 9 months or so and rocked out to the tunes.  I think she was already sleeping when Yenari stepped back into the ring to show that she hasn’t lost her skills as a Wii boxing virtuoso (idiot savant?).  Hazel did wake up just long enough for me to play a game of Wii Sports tennis while cradling her in my left arm…I blame her for my loss since she made it a bit hard for me to get the backhand shots against the top rated computer player in the game.

The last outing of the weekend was to visit Yenari’s cousin in order to meet their new arrival, who was just 3 and a half days old on Sunday afternoon.  He slept through our visit, but it was amazing to see how little he looked even compared to Hazel and even though he was born at a healthy 8 pounds and 1 ounce.  We’re really happy that Hazel will have a second cousin who is the same age and who lives only 20 minutes away.

Here’s to an exciting 9th week!

I haven’t found the time to write recently – once Hazel falls asleep the urge to write doesn’t quite seem to popup, but I wanted to share a couple of recent photos from this past Sunday when my good friend Sarah Lee came by to meet Hazel for the first time:

Hazel is doing well…she’s finally graduated from wearing her little “don’t scratch your face” mittens and has her little fingers out in the wild.  She’s definitely a lot more responsive now, staring deaply in our eyes, frowning when she’s getting ready to cry, and getting pissed when we aren’t paying enough attention to her (e.g. when writing on this blog).

Her sleeping has been good, bad, and a mix of the two.  Two nights ago she slept for 5 straight hours – from 1am to 6am – her longest night-time stretch yet.  I felt – dare I say – rested when I got up for work that morning.  Other nights she’s been a lot fussier, wanting to eat all night, spitting up after eating too much, and not wanting to be swaddled (without which she won’t sleep for more than a few minutes). We’ve done some practice feeding her with a bottle to make sure she knows how to do it in a month and a half when Yenari goes to work.

And now to the congratulations – first to my college friend Rebecca and her husband Troy.  This past Saturday they welcomed their beautiful baby boy Ewan Duke Turvy into the world.  He weighed in at a big 9 pounds six ounces – probably close to Hazel’s weight at six weeks or so!  The next congratulations goes out to Yenari’s cousin Kisook and her husband Yong, who welcomed their (second) baby boy into the world:  Jason 건우 Kim.  We can’t wait to meet both of these little dudes!