Day 351 - Lila

Thought of the day: Last night, I was shocked and saddened to learn that Steve Jobs just passed away. His 2005 commencement speech at Stanford was widely shared on Internet and it was an interesting speech to watch. During the speech, he said: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." What an inspiring message! When I ran on the trail this morning and was about to turn around and head home, I thought of his message. Yes, I had a lot of chores to do at home, but if I were to die today, would they have really mattered that much to me? Wouldn't I be happier if I had spent more time instead in the forest in this beautiful autumn day? The answer was definitely a yes. So, instead of turning around, I kept on running and spent more time on the trail than I would have normally had. It felt great when I eventually headed home. Thank you, Steve Jobs, for your important message and for all the rest you have done for the humanity.

Photo of the day:

Lila with a friend doing artwork in her preschool.  She was wearing a shirt she just tie-died in school. I hope she enjoyed her day as much as I had enjoyed mine.

Day 315 - Three Girls

Thought of the day: Disasters on the news are overwhelming.  Sad stories among friends and acquaintances are overwhelming. I don’t know if something is wrong with this world we live in or if it’s just a natural shift of awareness as we get older. Perhaps it's both. Resilient as we are, our capacity for pain and suffering is not boundless. On some days it seems so overwhelming and hopeless. In a way, it’s a relief to bear in mind that we walk on this earth for but a blink of time. As such, we will only accumulate a limited amount of burden and carried it over a limited distance. My friend also kindly reminded me today that what we suffer in life we treasure in arts. Arts can transform pain into beauty and make it more tolerable. Being so busy with life lately, I haven't been able to read or appreciate music or other forms of arts as much as I would like to and perhaps that contributes to the problem. The well of life needs to be constantly replenished lest it will dry up. Conscious of it or not, this is the struggle that we fight every single day.  Today is not my day but tomorrow it will surely be better.

Photo of the day:

My girls and Jasmine's friend playing in our front yard.  The well of life is naturally strong in early life. The most important  and formidable task of a parent is to help it stay that way, nurture it and make it even stronger over time.

Day 228 - Reflections

Thought of the day: We spent the day in Swiss Museum of Transport in Luzern.  The museum has several separate sections for cars, trains, boats, airplanes, etc.  All sections surround a large common square where a number of fun activities are available for kids while the adults can sit down and enjoy a well-deserved, quiet moment of coffee break.  Time and again I have found that Switzerland is truly a paradise for kids (and parents) as many things are designed with the kids in mind to ensure that they will have a good time. Of course, during brief visits like this, I can only get a glimpse of the surface of everything.  The experience of growing up here must have its hidden costs as the suicide rate remains pretty high.  Perhaps a unhappy person in paradise is a truly unhappy one as he has nobody to blame but himself, so as a result he is less likely to find sympathy and more likely to sink into despair.  The paradox of paradise?

Photo of the day:

Color reflections on the wading pool in the center square of the Transport Museum.

Day 207 - Dinner Table

Thought of the day: Jasmine made lunch today - a tasty rice noodle soup.  She was proud to make it and serve it to us.  She seemed to have grown up so much recently, which made me both proud and sad at the same time.  I was planning for Lila's 3rd birthday party this week, which reminded me of Jasmine's 3rd birthday party that we celebrated near a lake in the bay area.  It was a couple of years ago but I felt like it was just yesterday. Time unfolds in a strange way and it provokes emotional responses from us in unexpected ways.  Over the years, we will go through various stages of our kids' lives and we will keep missing the previous stages and keep looking forward to the new ones.  It's a continuous process with milestones that we both love and hate. It's the same thing for ourselves even though we often don't pay as much attention to it as it deserves.

Photo of the day:

Dinner table - we celebrated a friend's birthday in Laudisio's tonight.  Delicious food, good group of people, memorable evening.  Our lives are marked with milestones too and I am glad that we have the opportunity to celebrated one with her.

Day 206 - Happy Pair

Thought of the day: It was the first day of Boulder Spring Festival - there're many weekend festivals and fairs at this time of the year.  I took Lila out to downtown in the early morning so the rest of the family can take a break.  There were musicians, painters, photographers, craftsmen and vendors setting up booths along Pearl St.  A woman was transporting an orphanage girl's photo onto a canvas and she did an amazing job of capturing the poignant expression of sadness on her face.  Her almost-finished oil painting stood out in the merriness of the festival crowd and it served as a reminder that there were very different lives going on elsewhere when we were out celebrating spring.

Photo of the day:

Happy pair - a daughter and father in Pearl St's rock park.  It's one of the most popular places in downtown.

Day 188 - Girls

Thought of the day: I just watched the documentary "The Business of Being Born".  The movie explored the birthing process and how a natural process had been turned into a business and treated routinely as an ailment and emergency by medical professionals.  When I was still pregnant with Lila, I read the excellent book "Ina May's Guide to Childbirth" which delivered similar messages.  The information provided by doctors and by nurses who taught childbirth classes in a hospital setting was often one-sided and incomplete and only helped perpetuate the myth and disinformation of the birthing process.  The other side of the story is told by Ina May's book, this documentary, midwives, doulas and women who have had the natural, or alternative as regarded by some, birth experiences.  Sadly and inexplicably, not every pregnant woman has access to all the information that she is entitled to when she needs to make the important decision of how and where to give birth.  As a result, it's more likely for her to end up in a hospital and for the doctors and nurses to impose their wills on her and take control of the birthing process to make it more lucrative, convenient, and lawsuit-free for them.  That would help explain the rise of cesarean rate, which is currently at an astounding rate of 1 out of every 3 births in this country.  This has reached the level of an epidemic.  Right around Lila's birth, I distributed Ina May's book through a bookstore and other entities to pregnant women because I felt compelled to share the information.  Apparently that activity had not created enough impact as the cesarean rate kept on rising!  And it's rising in many other countries too, especially in China, where the cesarean rate is at a whopping 46%.  As a civilization, we are getting too technologically advanced to respect our body and too incentive driven to remember our soul.  We see the consequence of that in every area of our lives and the unnatural birthing process is just one of them.  Will we reach a turning point and reverse course?  I hope we will, and will soon.

Photo of the day:

My girls lying on the floor exhausted after some fun play in the house.  I love them more than what can be expressed in words.  I hope they will grow up in a world that's healthier in many ways than the one we reside in right now.

Day 186 - Girls

Thought of the day:  PBS Newshour is broadcasting a 6-part series called Autism Now reported by Robert MacNeil.  Robert came out of retirement to do the series because his grandson had autism so he had seen the ailment and the impact of it on the family first hand.  The story of his grandson was told in part-1 of the series and it was deeply touching. Autism is definitely on the rise.  It's now affecting 1 in every 110 children in America - that's a large number of kids every year - and it has been declared a national health emergency.  One part of the series explored the plausible causes of the rise of autism.  Only a small part of could be explained by a better detection and reporting of this disorder.  The main plausible cause for the rise lied in the toxicity of the environment - the 70,000 commonly used chemicals, some of which used directly on our bodies, could have an accumulative, unexpected effects on our health starting from the moment we were conceived, and in some cases long before that.  The long term effect of Agent Orange on Vietnamese kids is one dramatic example, but there could be many other not-so-obvious interactions between the environment and our body that we're not aware of.  One expert attributed autism to a genetic predisposition triggered by chemicals in our environment that broke down or overwhelmed our immune system.  The same thing could likely explain the rise of allergies, asthma, food sensitivities, multiple chemical sensitivities, infertility, cancer, and other ailments that we hear more and more of every day.  Our individual genetic make-up is playing a Russian roulette with the chemicals we are exposed to every day - it's scary to think about it this way but I don't see any positive way of describing the situation.  We can try our best to protect ourselves and our families and push through environmental regulations.  However, there's a lot that we don't have control of at this point in time, and the consequence is a human cost of development that is just impossible to bear.

Photo of the day:

Girls on the bike on Greenbriar.  Lila was napping on the bike seat.  The concern for our children can turn each one of us into an environmentalist like nothing else can.

Day 176 - Photo Exhibition

Thought of the day: Tonight I attended an interesting talk by Scott Carlin about his night time photography.  He used a tripod for a long exposure and while the shutter was open, he walked around and "painted" selected surfaces and objects with a flash light so they would be illuminated in the image in a way that he envisioned.  The result was some pretty striking images that I had never seen before.  At the talk, I met a woman who took self-portraits with her built-in laptop camera and then manipulated them with various cartoon like effects.  She came up with some pretty surreal images - some of them might be a little disturbing but they were in general pretty unusual and interesting.  People can be so incredibly creative.  A million people can have a million different ways of perceiving the world and a million different ways of expressing themselves.  It's constantly manifested in photography, arts, technology, and daily living.  I think each one of us is blessed with a unique vision and voice that can be nurtured when we're young; and when we are older and more capable, as long as we have the courage and conviction to stick to them, we may leave a unique footprint on the earth and enrich the lives of many others.  Indeed, much in the same way that the diversity of genes is essential to the survival of species, our individuality is essential to our collective survival. 

Photo of the day:

Today I went to Mia's 39+ photo exhibit at CU's UMC Gallery.  Her 39+ blog inspired my blog.  Mia's photos have a sense of daily progression - every day's image relates to previous day's image either conceptually or visually.  I'm  more focused within the context of a day as I try to inject a daily thought  that can be connected to the  image one way or the other.  I think we both found a way that worked for us.

Day 166 - Waiting

Thought of the day:  Today I had a cute conversation with Lila on the way to meet her little friend.  The conversation was carried out in a mixture of Mandarin and English in the car:

  "Where is Izzy's dad?"
  "He is out working."
  "Why is my dad not out working?"
  "Because he works from home."
  "I like my dad to go out working too."
  "But why?"
  "So that I can wait for him to come home every day!"

It would be priceless to see all the things that are going on in her mind.  Sometimes I can't help but feel that she is only letting out the tiniest bit of it, and that's already enough to surprise me and make me smile.

Photo of the day:

Waiting for daddy to come home.

Day 156 - Jasmine

Thought of the day: My in-laws left today.  The house felt big and empty with them gone.  I am already missing their warm and calm presence.  Jasmine took it even harder.  As adults, we have a lot of practice saying good-byes and embracing life's many changes.  We accept things as they come as we know that they are inevitable.  Not so for the kids.  I am sure she will get over it, but it had been a tough day for her.

Photo of the day:

Jasmine in the central park.  We had a nice lunch in Dushanbe Teahouse with the grandparents before they left today.

Day 148 - Copper

Thought of the day: After returning from a good day of skiing, I read and watched news for a short time but it was just long enough to get me depressed: house vote to ban public funding for NPR, situation in Libya, and worst of all: more bad news from Japan - it's hard to believe that the unimaginable human tragedy can get even worse.  So many bad news, tragedies and senseless acts in the past few years from all around the world - why?  Has it always been like that and I just haven't paid attention?  I can't help but wonder how much longer we can be cocooned in our comfortable life.  I can't help but fear when the tide of events will catch us.  I can't help but wonder where we are heading as a race.  Yes, I'm sure a lot of doubts and fears will dissipate by tomorrow morning when the sun rises and I have had a good night of rest, but will anything have changed fundamentally?  Probably not.  Looking at it in a positive light, perhaps all these doubts and fears are what it takes to keep us grounded, no matter where we are, no matter what we do.

Photo of the day:

Ski day at Copper: windy day, icy bumps, slushy runs - they desperately needed snow!  However, my recently adjusted boots were more comfortable and I had great company, so I had another fun winter day in the mountains. (Cell phone photo)

Day 137 - Jasmine and Bunnies

Thought of the day: The grand plan when we flew down to the bay area this time was to get some chickens to live in my parents' yard.  Jasmine was all excited and giddy.  Unfortunately it turned out that Palo Alto required a "chicken permit" and it was not even easy to obtain.  The "chicken permit" lady requested to inspect the coop first to make sure that it's "humane and up to standard".  And then we needed a signed letter from our next door neighbor, who's currently out of the country, to give us permission as the coop was within 25 feet of the property line.  In addition, only hens were allowed in the city and the chicks we could get were only about "96% female", which meant that there's a 22% chance that we might have to return one of the chicks if we got all six of them as allowed by the city.  In any case, it was certainly a lot more hassle to get a handful of chicks than one would have expected.  So when we visited a pet shop in Half Moon Bay and spotted a pair of cute and fluffy bunnies in a cage, we decided to get them instead.  No permits necessary so we could just take them home.  The chicken coop my dad built worked beautifully for the bunnies.  I think they like their new home - a lot.  They looked pretty sad and barely moved about in their cage in the pet store, but after spending a little time to get used to their new dig, they are now running about like all happy bunnies should.  Jasmine and Lila are excited beyond words to have these bunnies join our family.  Now they have even one more reason to visit the bay area!

Photo of the day: 

Jasmine was a little sad saying good-bye to the bunnies (behind her in the cage) before she left for Colorado. I was glad that her favorite stuff animal would keep her company along the way.

Day 132 - Hope You Dance

Thought of the day: This morning I read on the paper of a recent incident on a local hiking trail.  An older gentleman was lying bleeding on the trail and his situation was clearly calling out for help.  Groups of hikers and dog-walkers just walked right past him without stopping to offer a hand.  At the end, the poor guy had to basically crawl back to his car and drove himself to urgent care.  This story made me sad.  What kind of people would just ignore an injured older man and leave him lying on a hiking trail?  How do these people feel afterwards about themselves?  I am sure these people are not representatives of the general local population, however, I am not surprised that people like that do exist.  They are self centered and protecting their personal interests above and beyond anything else.  Some of them may also have been young and entitled.  I think it's an utter failure of parents to raise young adults who would behave like that.  This incident got me to think: as parents, how do we raise children with good moral values?  Action is worth a lot more than words, so it's necessary for the parents to set good examples for their kids.  And how about peace corps?  Some people say that by the time a person is old enough to volunteer overseas, his character and values may have been too well formed to be influenced for real.   So perhaps we should get them involved in community services early to broaden their perspectives when they are still young.  Unfortunately, there're really no golden bullets here.  There are influences that parents do not realistically have control of.  At the end, we parents just have to do our best and hope that our kids will find the light and grow into people with values and integrity.

Photo of the day:

Jasmine's friend giving Lila a lift up some stairways.  When an 8-yr-old is having so much fun playing with a 2-yr-old, I take it as a good indication that the older girl will grow up into a happy, caring young person.  The complete sentence on the wall  was: "When you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance." Dance they did - in the sun.