Having family far away really sucks. It used to not be so hard - the kids were too little to understand what it really meant to say goodbye, and while Claudine is still in that phase, Mia is old enough to know that when we say goodbye, it means that the person won’t be there in the morning. She spent most of the evening on Aunt Lara’s last day very grumpy and distant (hence no photos of her). Guess you learn how to do that early on - distance yourself from that person so it won’t hurt as much later when they’re gone. But that never really works, does it?

In the middle of this weird week we met the girls’ first cousin. My brother, his new wife and baby were in town from California to meet with our side of the family for the first time. The girls love babies and aside from the fact that they looked absolutely HUGE next to him and decidedly un-babyish (um, yeah, Claudine is still my “baby”), you soon forget what it’s like to have a baby again in the house. The intent stares, the gurgling, the flailing arms, the frequent naps, the smiles that can light up a room, but most of all, the non talking. Good lord, I had forgotten that babies and little toddlers can’t speak in words. Our house is full of chatter from the girls all day long and aside from the occasional cry, I had forgotten how quiet babies can be. Yes, it was nice to have a baby in the house again.

Mark’s dad is in the hospital. He is on life support in critical condition. He is currently not conscious. Mark and his sister will travel to be with him in the next few days. Please keep him in your thoughts.

We have a birthday in the house today. It’s not a big one for Mark (unlike mine coming up this year), but our schedule was such that he had a nice 3 days off from working. We spent the weekend in the burbs with my parents, had a great Korean bbq dinner last night that had us so full we could barely walk out of the place, and had fun plans for today. Too bad the weather isn’t cooperating. It’s crazy out there! Torrential rain and 60 mph winds. Umbrellas are useless, people were struggling to walk. I guess we will opt for a birthday dinner closer to home. I also admit that I felt a wee bit of guilt making plans to go to MoMA and a birthday lunch at Momofuku with just Claudine since Mia was in school during the day. Oh, well…wasn’t in the cards, but shhh…you wouldn’t have told her, right?

It’s been hard to stay upbeat when there is so much suffering out there. I can stop watching the news or turn away from the images, but that doesn’t seem right either. I want to know what’s going on, I don’t want to push it aside. I’ve been thinking about the recent suicide of the NYU computer science professor as well. If you are unfamiliar with the story, you can read it here if you wish, but the jump from his 16th story balcony allegedly came after an argument with his wife over the care of their premature twins. Not surprisingly, there has been some discussion on whether or not fathers can experience male post-partum depression, which really is a topic that has not been talked about. Also of interest is this related article in the Daily Kos about the ugly and hurtful nature of anonymous commenting. This quote - “the Internet is not a consequence-free playland” - articulated what I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but I’ll save that for another post.

Parenting might be the hardest thing you will do. I know it is for me. There are really good days, there are bad days. And some days are just plain HARD. Yesterday was a really bad day even though we had all the intentions of a good day, especially with the weather thawing to a balmy 46 degrees. It was brilliant outside. We had plans. It wasn’t to be though, from every angle, and I’m still feeling the sting today. But you have to try and move on. The kids quickly do. But it’s disheartening to see a day go sour when you had plans to do something fun because ironically, you realize that you need more joy in your life and a rare day presented itself when every member of the family was free from commitments. It feels defeating.

As bloggers we curate content that is only a small slice of our life. What we choose to share is of our own personal choice and comfort level. I’ve been blogging since 2004 (via popgadget and babygadget). Before that I ran an Asian American webzine with a restaurant and food guide, so in actuality, I’ve been blogging much earlier than that (though we didn’t call it that back then, and good lordy, I had to handcode every single page of that massive site). After 4 years of blogging about baby products and gadgets, I knew that I wanted to return to a format that was much more personal. After a while, writing about pretty things, shopping and products felt empty and tedious, and while I do immensely enjoy reading all the wonderful design blogs out there (I really do!), I find the blogs that I gravitate towards the most these days are ones that are more personal, for all the reasons that some of you commented on in the last few posts (thank you, by the way).

One of my favorite bloggers, Metrodad, only posts once a month, sometimes with even longer lapses, but he has a dedicated reader base, judging by the comments alone, who await his posts. Why do they stick around? Because he’s funny and honest, and you sort of feel like you know the person (or what they choose to reveal) and you start caring about them (kinda weird, right??). I relate to a lot of what he writes and it feels good to be validated about your feelings when others are feeling something similar (and in a coincidence of all coincidences, we actually both wrote pretty much the same post on the same day). But when he revealed that he was in the process of getting a divorce, it was shocking as there were no indications about any problems in the marriage in previous posts. I respect that he held back, but opened up about it when he was ready. Now he blogs about being a single dad.

And so as we approach the 2 year anniversary of the blog, I finally have come to terms with what this blog is after fretting now and again that it might be too personal for a business-related blog. I’ve had some friends raise eyebrows about how personal it is, only because they wonder what customers might think when they see posts about kids and bits of our life when they were just expecting….what, cookies? I don’t know. I’ve thought about taking the link off of our W&S website for this reason, but I’ve decided to leave it alone. In my mind, it’s almost impossible to separate our life from the business. We started the business, among other reasons, because we wanted to make a change from restaurant life so that Mark can spend more time with the kids. All of that - dealing with business stress as we struggle of find a balance with family life, the challenges of being a dual self employed household in one of the most expensive cities in the world, figuring out the logistics of pushing 15 packages headed to the post office in a granny cart while walking your kid to school - all of that is intertwined. I doubt that if I was just writing about cookies, you’d stick around. All of it is a part of our story.

It happens every year on New Years Day. My parents come over, sometimes bringing other members of family, and the minute they step inside the apartment a flurry of activity takes over. Shoes and coats are off, grocery bags are plopped down on the kitchen counter and pots of water get put on the stove to boil. This year my mom called me from the car to tell me to put the water on so that it would be in a boiling state when they got there. That’s planning! That’s wasting no time!

The threat of snowy icy weather made this year’s visit questionable and so when the weather looked clear in the morning, I breathed a sigh of relief from nearly missing the traditional rice cake soup that is supposed to bring good fortune for the new year. ‘Cause you know that if something bad were to ever happen this year the superstitious Asian in me would immediately think back to New Years Day when we didn’t have that soup. Now, however, I can blame it on something else.

This year my parents also brought over traditional clothing for the formal New Years bow to your elders ceremony, except we only had 1 dress from when the girls both dressed up for their 1 year banquet birthdays (it actually only fits Claudine now). Alright, if having 2 girls close in age ever taught me anything, it’s the fact that you can’t just bring 1 thing that both the girls might want. We learned this lesson when we were at a mall last Christmas and bought Mia fairy wings and figured that they’d both share it, but this ended up with Claudine in tears and a trip back to the store. Now there’s a big fat freaking “what the hell were you thinking only buying 1 child fairy wings while coming empty handed for the other?!?”.

As soon as my parents swarmed around Claudine and got her all dressed, Miss C marched to our room like a woman on a mission to admire herself in the mirror. Mia wasn’t too pleased that there was no fancy Korean dress up clothes for her which is why she’s missing in so many of these photos, but this ain’t nothing that a little Good Fortune money can’t fix. I joke, but when we were kids and my cousins and I were subjected to bowing down before all our elders - and I say subjected because it often turned into a laughfest for the adults to see how the kids butchered the bow which has to be performed a certain way depending on whether you were a girl or boy - we’d count our money to see how we made out. Sounds crude about the money, but we totally earned it. Btw, the girls did not have to bow down to us or my parents which was a bit odd to me as I thought they would start the tradition this year, but apparently my parents just wanted the photo op (tsk tsk, I’m on to you mom and dad).

We also made a reference to the other side of the family by playing Mark’s grandmother’s ukulele while the girls performed the hula. No, Mark is not Hawaiian, but his mom was raised there, so close enough. Besides, I think all of us wish we were Hawaiian, especially Mia.

And just as they came in, my family left in a blur of coats, bags and activity and that is how we spent our New Years. What about you? Any New Years traditions that you MUST do, lest you be afraid of being struck by lightning and bad fortune?

Christmas dinner at my parents’ house was a fairly typical meal, but on Saturday night our whole family went out for dinner at this unassuming Korean sashimi spot on 22102 Horace Harding Avenue in Queens called Samdado. We’ve been there before, but not in a while, and I’d forgotten just how much food you get when you order a sashimi dinner special to share. We’re talking numerous small dishes, plates and platters of food and just when you thought you were done and there was no more room on the table, the waiters and waitresses would come around with even more dishes of food to put down.

All this for a mere $120, the equivalent of which would get you a 2 or 3 tier fruits de mer plateau at Balthazar or Blue Ribbon. Sure, you don’t get the ambience of a Balthazar by a long shot, or maybe the artful presentation of an impressive silver tiered platter, but what you do get is more than enough food to feed the 5/6 of us (you know, Claudine had like a shrimp). I admit that there were times I’d walk away from a raw platter experience at one of those places after dropping mad money, feeling satisfied but still hungry. And they usually don’t serve raw lobster so fresh that the lobster was still moving a little (!!). Guys, it’s true, and I bet you are thoroughly unnerved right now at the thought of that, but it was an experience even if it was a little too “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman”. Mia was a bit freaked out by it even though she totally ate the raw lobster meat, but Claudine thought the whole thing was funny and would swat at the claws with her chopsticks (see the photo above for her reaction). The very same lobster ended up in a stew that was served at the end of the meal.

I’m always so impressed with Mia’s adventurous palate. That kid will try just about anything, even picking up some gnarly looking clam that none of us wanted to eat. She declared the sea urchin her favorite of the evening (mine too as it was particularly good that evening) and she also enjoyed the various Pa Jun (crisp pancakes), one of which was made from pumpkin.

And those photographs that line the wall around the restaurant? I was told that they are reproductions of images that were taken by an American soldier during the Korean War and discovered relatively recently. Pretty amazing that they are in color, given that this was the early 1950s. The shot of the woman carrying the baby, which we sat under that evening, is especially meaningful. My mother was carried by her grandmother strapped to her back when her family fled with the refugees, on foot, from Seoul to Busan to escape the Communists (some 200 miles). She still remembers this vividly. Her family was separated during the journey at some point. It’s amazing sitting here in that restaurant, given my parents’ history and experiences, that this is the same life. My dad returns to Korea every few years but my mom and I have only been back once since we immigrated to NY in the early 70s, and we were not together when we made our sole visits. We all talked about making plans to go as a family to Korea, with the kids, with my brother…some day.

It’s fun, but not like I remember it as a little kid. Not to be such a downer, but somewhere around the time when I became a teenager, Christmas Day actually became somewhat anti-climatic. I used to LOVE the weeks leading up to Christmas - the anticipation, the shopping, the decorating, the city, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit let down on the actual day. It got really depressing when Mark had to work every Christmas for 5 years. It was just me and the kids for much of the day and I started to dread it just a little bit. So maybe this feeling is just a leftover sentiment from years past. Maybe it feels a bit empty because there isn’t other family around - Mark’s old restaurant work schedule and now the business makes it a bit impossible to travel at this time of year.

The girls, on the other hand, were all bubbly with excitement the moment they woke up and tore through the presents as soon as we gave them the go ahead. We had a really nice breakfast, and I mean a real breakfast with scones, eggs, sausage and hash potatoes, not the quick dump-cereal-in-your-bowl variety that has ruled the mornings every day for so long. We drove to the burbs for more presents. And I promise, in case you think I’m insane for writing such a lukewarm Christmas post, it gets better. I promise. More soon.