Born to be loved

October is one of the two most beautifully comfortable months in Japan - we finally see the end of the sub-tropical weather while we relish the fertility of the result of the humid-hot Summer. Actually signs of Winter come rapidly so that we see often ups and downs in the temperature, night time it gets cooler and you definitely need long sleeve or even jackets. Toddlers should dress warm. HG spent more time with the grand parents on my side and grandma's sister (M-chan). Everyday he usually wakes up around 6, dozes off and chants by himself in the bed along with me, then gets up exploring the bedroom that's stuffed with traditional Japanese decor (or simply a.k.a mess). By 7:30 grandmas have his breakfast ready so we go downstairs. Then either one of grandmas feed him while I have breakfast. While I try not to let the grand parents take care of HG the entire time, they offer watching him almost all day during our 9-day of the stay at their home. I know staying with

Almost everyday since his arrival at dad's home town in Tochigi, new people have come to see HG. Today his grandma's sister, M-chan, came to see him and help us. She's going to stay for a few days. He played well while dad was out for municipal health check (one of the purposes of the Japan visit this time :p -- I got a full check including stomach and vowel cancer screening that cost me $5. Yes, five-dollar) In the afternoon I tried to put him into sleep in his bedroom; it is where my grand parents (would've been his great grand parents if they were alive) used to sleep, with tatami (畳), shoji (障子) and all the traditional decorations. There he was way too excited by seeing so much fascinating objects and would never fall asleep so I let him just do what he wanted. Grandmas ended up taking him on driving where he instantly fell asleep (as usual when he goes on a car). No food photos from today but I know he ate A LOT. His mother now worries he's overfed, so

HG's 6-week journey apart from mom is coming to an end. We're finally flying back to Sacramento today. Before we review this long, blessed trip, warmhearted reunion with both grand parents, here are some pictures from his first air travel without his mom. He did surprisingly well! Even though having only slept for four hours during 11-hour from San Francisco to Tokyo Narita, the rest of the trip he did not get too fuss like we were worried. Key was, as every parent friends suggested, to keep him entertained with toys and snacks. The latter was the most effective. Before the flight I did not expect at all to find some of my time in plane but I was even able to read some of my work stuff. Here are some photo recap of the outbound flight. Nervous? Just finished eating yogurt as his morning routine at SMF airport before checking in. Uber ride by a normal sedan from our home to the airport was just a little challenge with 2 suitcases + 1 carrier luggage + his str

At his age of 13th month we finally lowered the mattress of his crib. Since then he seems to be sleeping well, or even better than with the previous height of the crib mattress. With our crib from IKEA we can choose at which height we set the mattress. Now that he's reached 30in the level at higher position is too low for him so that he can easily get out of the crib. In fact he's been tall and manipulative enough to do that since the last couple of months...it's just we've been able to handle him crawling out of the crib and so did he, so that wasn't really a priority to us. Image from https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/www.manualcdn.com/html_preview/ikea-gulliver-crib-27-1-2x52-assembly-instruction/bg1.png Finally, I set the mattress at the lowest position. The work took me almost an hour but half of it was to figure out how to do so. I actually found the crib is made easy-to-use for this task -- the number of components that are needed to be screwed

Since the last post, HG has been admitted at a hospital, twice, for respiratory issue. We knew that babies are the most susceptible to health issues. It's just every time it's so sudden, and heart breaking to see him suffer. A little bit of situation for the two incidents; it was my wife who noticed the difference of the way he breathed for the first case, soon before she was going to bed for the night. He was coughing so often, and, I can tell better if I recall from now but I couldn't at that time, he was breathing hard. My wife took him to the emergency room at the hospital she works for immediately and they ended up staying over that night there and two more nights for total before getting discharged. At the second case, which is actually ongoing at the time of writing, he again started off coughing all night and the next morning it was me who found him breathing strangely while his mother's absence. Video of him (his belly while breathing, to be more precise) hel

It's been almost a month since the last post...admittedly we aren't that deligent in leaving an online record for our son, although life has always been centered at him for us parents. He's been fine, he might be (hopefully) done with the sickness "initiation" at the daycare. For a couple of weeks he was getting diarrhea. Our guess was that it overlapped the moment when his mother stopped breastfeeding and we introduced mixing formula with the preserved breast milk. I don't know. So it's also been awhile since we've introduced "cry-out" sleep training on HG with some basis on authority, mostly babycenter.com . Now almost three months having passed, we admit that our first approach didn't work out; I can think of a few simple reasons: (1) we noticed that it's most likely the milk that gives him the comfort to fall asleep no matter how many times we repeated "cry-out and calm-down" cycles (see the previous post about what

As per the title. HG made it for the very first time as far as the dad remembers. Hoooooray! Here's a chat log with my wife last night who was at all-night shift, which might help explaining how I did: Me: ﾌｰ Trying out another less-cry night. Since he was happy I didn't want to make him cry much as possible. So I decided not to leave by his side. Instead, I pretended to be asleep on the bed right next while he was playing. In the end he started crying anyway so I let him lay down in my arms and then he instantly passed out. I was even able to take a quick nap during then so I feel kind of refreshed. May not be that bad this is. WifeM: :) How long did it take him to play before he fell asleep? Me: Hm, entire routine began around 630 and I left bedroom around passed 9. Wow...it took that long. WifeM: Wow   As we've been trying/struggling with our sleep training with him we haven't seen much progres

Father of HG (a.k.a me) is about to turn the age. Ok, almost 41. My 40th year in this world was truly an epoch-making; a new life added to my family. My 40 years of life in a nutshell is filled with others who let me alive. Without them I wouldn't have been here today. Suppose I'll live another 40 years, hopefully, this latter half will be where I let others live; loved ones, church families, friends, colleague, neighbors... Without son and families I would never have had come to this thought tonight (while I was making my last supper by myself in my 40th after I put him into sleep (wife at work tonight)). Not bad at all life is. 0-year old on top of 40

So I'm on a short paternity leave. Well not really. I'm back in my country and away from my family and lovely son for an undetermined period, meaning my return date can't be fixed yet at the moment. Reason is that I'll be getting an immigrant visa interview at the US Embassy and I'll have to hand in the passport to them, which they claim to return within typically a week or so (Apparently they need to keep the passport because visa will be weaved/bound in to the passport). Already begun missing my adorable, although it's only day#2 since I left him! Today's post is, however, going to be not about child care since I'm away from him. Instead, it's about how to go home as soon as possible once I get my passport back. My current return flight won't work because simply it's too soon from the interview date so there's no way I can hope to receive my passport by then. So choices are, I first change my current return flight to a date with am

Our sleep training week#1 is over. I think we did a very mild start; as cry-it-out method seems to be a challenging moment for the parents, we didn't go that extreme. The way we've been doing is to lay him down on the bed (after bath, quiet time like bedtime stories) and feed him a mil bottle and wait, then by the time he seems drowsy we leave him alone. For the last week we waited for only a minute since he starts crying, as my wife couldn't hold any longer whenever she was at home with us, but I know we'll have to wait longer to let HG learn better how to soothe himself. And whenever my wife or I went back to the crib, we bottle-feed him (which he seems to drink very well, much better than he does before the cry), caress him until he gets calmed down. I thought it went well even as a limited version. The very first night he cried multiple times, but from second day he only needed one cry session before he fell asleep. It went well maybe because it was simply

Well not much sense in the title... Now HG finally seems to be recovered from a month-long sickenss consists of fever, cough, ear infection and runny nosey, a very immediate problem for his parents is his lack of sleep...yes he wakes up in the middle of the night, many times. As usual we fall back on babycenter.com that always gives us evidence-based insights. Looks like many sleep training methods can be grouped into two; Cry-it-out (CIO, lol) and No-cry. Because we thought no-cry method is basically how we've done so far with HG (and hasn't really worked out), we're applying CIO method starting from today. We'll see how this go... Those worrisome nights are hopefully over finally...

It was already 2 weeks ago when HG and we went back just for the weekend for M's friends' wedding. Since it was also Easter weekend we saved Sunday to attend the Easter service at our church in Dallas. HG was actually at not the best condition, so were his parents. And apparently this 1-nighter roundtrip with multiple transits was exhausting...since then daddy has been sick (still). But we were so glad to be able to attend the wedding, see the friends introduce HG to old friends.

 Look how convinced he is for getting water from the cup (instead of like, from bottles)! Took me (130s) for an hour and half to bathe him and put him into sleep tonight. I guess that's the critical path for which there's no easy shortcut...

Our son just started making "m" sound. (Most likely) without knowing, he's been saying "mamma" all the time today's afternoon on his mother's lap.