Born to be loved

Looking back briefly the terrible year 2020. Thought we started in the best way possible with a family trip in Kauai island in Hawaii. At a beach on the west side of Oafu  I vaguely but clearly remember I heard during the stay about the outbreak. Little did I/we know that virus would start ruling the entire world within a month or so. Once the lockdown or any regulatory action kicked in, we did have kids stay-home, sisters came over to help as well as full-time babysitters, then we moved from California to Georgia per wife's scheduled work changes. This whole thing was as stressful as everyone else feels. One positive side is that both of our kids have been healthy the entire year!! I'll mark 2020 as the first year neither kids didn't go to ER nor stayed overnight at hospitals! We saw the last year that older brother HG's asthma had been already getting better and he went to ER only once, but we didn't expect him to get this much better at the age of 5. Toddler AK

 Being in Atlanta, Kennedy Space Center in Florida where the rockets launch is just about a day ride away. With my wife's far relaxed work schedule in her Fellowship program (compared to Residency), we planned to go see the new chapter's opening for manned flight. Launch got postponed twice, resulted in us booking the hotel 3 times. Thanks to the hotel's generous policy under covid, we cancelled 3 times w/o fee. For 4th scheduled launch, our schedule didn't work so we stayed home, hoping it'd be postponed again. No, everything seemed to work. History made. Congratulation to the humankind for the new chapter. It's ok, our season for rocket launch observation challenge has just begun as well (although we're not yet sure how many opportunities left before we move out of the area). Instead of going to Florida, we went up a local rocky hill, explored the mysterious bugs, under the 3 stripes in the sky. Clearly we were a state away from the space center so those h

Previously, shortly after our 2nd son AK was born we worried the 1st son HG's mental ups and downs due to him facing a new life with a young brother. While it is indeed still concerning after 2 years, HG's been doing great in general as a elder brother. Now we've been worried more on the younger one. AK has been showing physical aggression for months. He slaps parents, his brother, cats. He also bites on his brother, more so than on parents. While I do feel sometimes he might not mean to attack by slapping/hitting because I see him smiling so that he may be using the action as part of playing or any way to simply interacts with others, a lot of other situations his hitting comes with fiercely saying "no". So he does use it as an offensive expression. Biting may be the same. Whenever he does it to me I feel it's more like playing, similar to cats' play-biting. However, whenever he bites on his eler brother is during the fight. This time in particular, covi

Coming from California (and from Tokyo previously), separating flammable and recyclable items at home has been nothing special. Then here I am in Georgia. Turned out the city we've moved in implements a progressive recycle category, as it seems to me at least. Some things I've found:   AFAICS, there's no state-wide law in Georgia that mandates recycling (wikipedia.org) . Wish I were wrong though. City of Decatur's recycling program: with 3 bins (not j ust one for all kinds of recycle, which was the case in Sacramento, CA) that the City offers for free (decaturga.com).  City of Decatur separates more items than Sacramento, CA? The apartment complex we've moved in, unfortunately, doesn't seem to separate trash at all.  Decatur Farmer's Market offers their own recycle station . It's one of our favorite grocery places, so very convenient. Unfortunately,  only a few types of plastic are acceptable. In City of Atlanta, t here seems to be a bet

A recent article on Sciencemag.org reveals some researchers and organizations in Japan don't seem to respect employees' private plans. Asking about private life is just against the manner in modern society (but apparently in some part of Japan, incl. the group of faculty at U-Tokyo, country's THE top institute, it is not yet acknowledged). To the worse, the those interviewers in the article take the private piece of info of the interviewees into hiring decision. Hardly acceptable. I might have been a higher risk employee as a spouse of surgery trainee with 2 kids who frequently get sick, so that there were many days I had to get off of work to pick up kids from school and watch them at home or took them to ER, stay at the hospital for a few days. I'm just fortunate that the employer understood the risk and managed everything accordingly -- I was asked to travel minimum number of times. Abundant flexibility for deadlines. Elder brother HG was last hospitalized in Nov. 2

At the end of May I dropped a post saying I wanted to remember how miserable the life of residency from the spouse' perspective. Today I do think so still. We have 10 more days to go before my wife m's surgical residency to be done, although this last rotation turned out to be as brutal as usual. I keep hearing m groaning whenever she managed to come home early enough so that I'm awake. But, I know her enough so do myself. Vows made in these storms will easily be forgotten in the calmer weather that is supposed to be waiting for us (right?). Usually I don't mind that to happen when there's little things that I think we or anyone can learn from the anecdote. This time, however, not because of us or someone's learning purposes, but because of kind of my dream to talk with our own kids when they grow up about how shitty their parents were thinking the life was back when they were little, the very experience of us while having welcomed the kids in this world, havin

It feels absolutely surreal when I heard my wife m saying her 5-year residency will end at the end of June, merely 30 days away. For some reason I thought it would be a few weeks longer, which would have made significant difference on my/our mental. Anyways, looks like we've already turned the final corner of this rough, brutal, nerve-wrecking, hopefully enlightening, but simply long journey. The last dance should be rewarding and celebratory, if this is a "normal" job, but looks like that's not the case with m -- with or without covid-19 daemonic situation. Anyways, I can't imagine how we'll feel about the life of post-residency just yet. But I do want to NOT let the vows made in storms to be forgotten in calms. Yes we can't wait to be freed from this cage that has limited us in so many ways, but at the same time I do not want to forget how we feel, how miserable, desperate, exhausted we've felt, what we got, what we dealt with or couldn't deal wi

4 weeks passed since stay-home order took a legal effect in Sacramento, CA. The daycare our kids go to, Merryhill School, actually strove to remain open after the non legal stay-home directive was initially placed in the area, which we appreciated. But it was and is totally reasonable to close the school at that moment with the surging volume of potential threat to our immediate society as well as to the entire world. We live in such a crazy moment. These 4 weeks have been pretty routine. I should say that is kind of a success, as some child development experts say maintaining routine structure is extremely helpful for kids' mental health so we aimed to establish the set schedule, 7 days a week. Biggest question initially was apparently who are going to watch kids while both the parents work. My wife m is obviously a first-order essential worker as a surgery trainee and I'm a work-from-home veteran (besides that, part of my employer's work is essential too as some of ou