A few months ago, I received a surprise package in the mail: it was the book Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God by Francis Chan, gifted to me from my dear friend E who wished that I would gain as much from the book as she had.

I had heard of Crazy Love on various occasions in the past, and I had even had it on my Amazon wishlist for quite some time, so the gift was very much appreciated. (Thanks, E!)

The premise behind Crazy Love is to challenge the state of complacency that plague many Christians today, and to encourage us to love God the way that He deserves to be loved. Because, as the author Pastor Chan puts it, “when you’re wildly in love with someone, it changes everything.”

I will not do a full review of this book as there are hundreds of it out there on the web. However, I do want to highlight five items from this book that made the most impact on me, and they are:

1. The movie of life is about God, not about us. So how is it possible that so many of us live as though it is about us? Who do we even think we are?
2. Stress and worry can be a sin. By engaging in these behaviors, we are implying that God is not powerful or loving enough to take care of what’s happening in our lives, and that the things we stress about are somehow exceptional. (This is, of course, not to say that we should just sit on our butts doing nothing. We should do all we can, but trust that anything beyond that is up to God.)
3. We should not assume that we are the good soil. (I am referring to the parable of the sower here.) If anything, most American churchgoers are the soil that chokes the seed because of all the thorns, which is anything that distract us from God. We should not be lukewarm — we should be willing to give everything to follow Him all the way.
4. If anything, we should be OBSESSED with God. We should be humble and always be mindful of pride. We should care more about God’s kingdom coming to this earth than being shielded from pain or discomfort. We should be more concerned with obeying God than being successful or being wealthy. (In fact, the wealthy are at a serious disadvantage spiritually.) We should give freely, and without censure. And we should not consider service a burden, because loving God’s people is a way of loving God.
5. Making investments to this life is foolish. How much time, money, and effort do we dedicate to the things of this world? Should not our investments be to Christ and the eternal life that we share with Him? A good question to ask ourselves is, “Is this what I want to be doing when Christ returns to this world?”

This book was a HUGE wakeup call for me — especially the points about stress & worry, as well as the strikes against pride and wealth. In fact, this book is one of the reasons I started to actively make time to volunteer again.

The only possible criticism I have for Crazy Love is that some people may see it as placing too much emphasis on our deeds — in other words, a works-based salvation. However, I believe that Pastor Chan’s purpose for writing this book is not so much a handbook, but a wakeup call for the Christians of America and other first-world countries.

I will end this post with a quote by Frederic D. Huntington, from Forum magazine in 1890:

It is not scientific doubt, not atheism, not pantheism, not agnosticism, that in our day and in this land is likely to quench the light of the gospel. It is a proud, sensuous, selfish, luxurious, church-going, hollow-hearted prosperity.

Having grown up in New York, I have been a New York Knicks fan since (my generation’s version of) the Knicks’s glory days in the 1990s. I cried when they lost the 1999 NBA Finals. Meeting Allan Houston was one of the high points of my life. And, I remained true to my boys in blue & orange despite their flat-out dismal performance for the past decade.

Being an Asian American myself, I couldn’t help but be intrigued when the Knicks picked up Jeremy Lin in late December. I had heard good things about the Harvard grad, but remained skeptical.

I guess I have been a victim of the Knickerbocker heartache for far too long, because I continued to stay doubtful when Lin made his debut as a starter last weekend and scored 23 points against the Nets. “It’s only the Nets,” I thought to myself.

But it wasn’t just a fluke. Because Lin then went on to score 28 points against the Utah Jazz, and then, last night, he led the Knicks past the Los Angeles Lakers with an astonishing 38 points.

I have officially hopped on the LINsanity bandwagon.

It also doesn’t hurt that he is smart, humble, and a dedicated Christian.

Just in case you missed it (or want to watch it over and over again like me), here are the highlights from last night’s Knicks vs. Lakers game:

And, because the nerdy handshake between Jeremy Lin and teammate Landry Fields (who is a Stanford grad) is too cute:

Aside from the fact that he is amazingly good at the game, there is also the sense of Asian pride that can’t be missed among my Asian-American friends. Even those whom I believed to be die-hard Lakers fans were rooting for Lin last night, and the world of social media just can’t seem to get enough of him.

You also can’t ignore the fact that Lin is the biggest sports topic in a city that just won the friggin’ Super Bowl.

Is anyone else currently going LINsane?

All three of the Knicks jerseys I own are of players who no longer play for the team. I can’t wait to pick up a new #17 jersey…but from what I hear, Jeremy Lin jerseys have been understocked and sold out everywhere.

P.S. — J and I can’t decide which of the following is a better nickname for Lin: “The Flying Dumpling,” or “LINja.” Admittedly, they are a bit racist, but you can’t deny that they’re clever.

…is that they will wake each other up in the middle of the night.

Claire had been sleeping 10-12 hours straight through the night since she was about 9 months old. And as you can imagine, all that changed when a screaming newborn came into the picture.

And while this issue wasn’t quite as bad during the second month of Aerin’s life, when she regularly slept 7-8 hours straight through the night, it has recently become more serious as Aerin seems to have hit her 4-month sleep regression a few weeks early — waking up practically every hour during the night for the past week.

Aerin has been sleeping in our room — in her bassinet, the swing, or on our bed — since we brought her home from the hospital. I know that once she outgrows the bassinet, we will move her into a crib. The question is, where will we put the crib when we do not have any extra bedrooms?

Option 1:  Have the girls share Claire’s room. But this can only mean additional months of restless nights for poor Claire. (Because at least now, the sounds of Aerin crying is somewhat muffled by two closed doors and a white noise machine.)

Option 2:  Put Aerin’s crib in our living room. But this means that we will lose access to our living room after she goes down for the night.

Option 3:  Leave Aerin in our room and just move in a crib. But this somehow feels unfair to both girls — Claire for not being around her parents as much as her little sister, and Aerin for not having her own room.

What would you do in our situation?

When we purchased our 2-bedroom, 1067 sqft condo 4 years ago, we definitely did not have babies in mind. (At the time, I wasn’t sure if I even wanted kids.) We didn’t bother to check the school districts, and thought that we would always use the second bedroom as a guest room.

For these reasons, we know that we will be moving to a larger place in a more child-friendly neighborhood within the next few years. But for the moment, we have to make do with what we have.

I ask my mother how she did it when my sister and I were young. Back then, our entire family of four slept together on the floor of a tiny room.

“No one slept,” she answers.

We do our best not to push our girls into stereotypical gender roles or characteristics. And while we would secretly love it if they turn into tomboys, we never force them to play (or not play) with certain toys and encourage them to allow their own preferences to develop.

As it turns out, our 16-month-old Claire is becoming the exact opposite of a tomboy.

She is, in fact, turning into a frilly girl.

Our suspicions started about a month ago, when we began to let her “choose” her own clothes. (We give her an option of weather- and activity-appropriate clothes to choose from.) And wouldn’t you know it — she would ALWAYS pick something pink.

And just in case it was a fluke —

“Why don’t we wear this pretty blue one instead? Or this brown one?”

She would vehemently shake her head and reach for the pink. ALWAYS.

(image source)

Now that her hair is getting long enough to pin up, we have started to put to use the many hair pins and barrettes we have received as gifts. She loves them and asks us to put them in her hair every morning. She will then take the leftovers and try to put them in my hair, as well as Aerin’s.

She has a jade bangle bracelet that J’s mother gifted to her when she was born…and insists on wearing this every day too. She even shows it off to strangers!

She poses in front of the mirror. She watches intently whenever I put on makeup (and loves it when I take a makeup brush and fluff it over her face). She is fascinated by jewelry, and I can already picture her a year or two down the road, playing dress up and draping all of mommy’s jewelry over herself.

Last week was Aerin’s 100th Day Celebration, so I decided to splurge a little and bought both girls adorable dresses from Baby Gap. When I came home and showed Claire her dress, her eyes lit up by about 100 watts. She laughed, and buried her face into her new dress. She took my hand and led me into her room, and motioned for me to change her.

The dress I had chosen for Claire has a tulle lining that makes the skirt fluff out. She absolutely adored this feature and kept playing with the skirt of the dress, swishing it back and forth. She wouldn’t stop giggling and repeatedly posed in front of the mirror. She spent the next hour or so walking back and forth between the mirror in her room to the mirror in J and my room to check herself out.

And when it came time to take off the dress? Banshees wailing. Niagara Falls. I couldn’t remember the last time she cried this hard.

Yep, we definitely have a girly girl on our hands. 

I cannot help but wonder where she developed these early preferences. Magazines? The little amount of TV we allow her to watch? Observing how others dress and present themselves? We have certainly not purposely encouraged these partialities, but could we have subconsciously done it?

Are we disappointed? Hardly. There are so many things that parents wish for their kids, but we never love them any less for not fulfilling them. If anything, we just see these instances as mere surprises.

Besides, as J — the metrosexual — likes to say, “Hopefully, now there will be at least one female in the household who cares about fashion and likes to go shopping with me!”

Welcome to today’s installment of Cool Tool Tuesdays, where I feature a favorite item from my life and spotlight it so that others who are not familiar with the product may also benefit from it. A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, hardware, material, or website that I have personally tried and love.

Do you have any questions about today’s cool tool? Would you like an item featured in the future? Please leave a comment to this post, or send me a message via my contact form. Enjoy!

As I looked around my room to find inspiration for today’s Cool Tool Tuesdays, my eyes rested on a pair of products I have never written about before — and I couldn’t believe I haven’t, because I have been using it diligently for the past five years!

This products are La Mer’s The Powder loose powder and The Powder Brush.

I think that the reason I had failed to mention them in the past is because I do not consider it an essential part of my beauty routine. In other words, I — like most women — can certainly live without loose powder.

However, I believe that they deserve a post because they are the only beauty products, aside from  my beloved MAC Liquidlast liner, that I truly consider HG (“Holy Grail” in makeup talk) because I honestly have never found any product that even comes close.

La Mer’s The Powder is one of the most finely-milled loose powders I have ever seen. It comes in four shades, including translucent (I use Crème), and it leaves a soft, luminous finish that is unparalleled: not too matte with just the teeniest amount of dewiness to make it look natural. In fact, many reviewers use the word “angelic” to describe the finish that The Powder gives you — and they’re right!

The Powder Brush is a retractable brush that is designed for both pressed and loose powder application, and just like The Powder, many users seem to become smitten with it after just one use.

Now I’m not sure if The Powder would work just as well with another brush (I’ve never tried it with other brushes because I got them together and I don’t own another powder brush), but I do know that The Powder Brush must at least play a small part in delivering the phenomenal result.

I like to use The Powder to set my makeup and add a finished look to my face. These days I’ll use it over BB Cream and that works just fine — while The Brush is still retracted, I’ll take the compacted, half-an-inch or so end of the brush that sticks out of the tube to dip into The Powder and pat under my eyes to ensure that my eye makeup stays in place. Then I will fully extend The Brush, apply more of The Powder and fluff it over my entire face.

The Powder is pretty expensive at $65 and The Powder Brush even more so at $75.   But you know what? I am still using the same powder and brush I bought over five years ago. The Powder seriously seems to last forever, because even if I only used it once a week (and I know I’ve used it much more often than that), that’s over 260 applications!

What’s more, I still have 1/3 of a bottle left! 

The only complaint I have about either of the products is that The Brush’s casing is not scratch resistant, and mine is covered in ugly scratches from the times I have traveled with it. But it still works fine, and that’s what’s important.

I highly recommend that everyone reading this go visit their closest La Mer counter and try these for themselves!