I wish that baby monitors came with a screenshot function. (Any baby equipment companies reading this?) Then we wouldn't have to deal with crappy cell phone photos like these: Five minutes later...
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Lately I have been plagued with awfully vivid nightmares — ones that jolt me from sleep and keep me up the rest of the night. Take the one from a couple of nights ago, for example: J is killed in a horrific accident. At his funeral, his parents and I get into an argument regarding the future of Claire and BebeDeux — they want to raise them in Hong Kong while I want to raise them here in the U.S. As their birth mother, I have legal custodial rights over them and vehemently refuse to raise my children in a country I have never even visited, which results in J's parents ceasing all contact with us. I sell our condo, taking a great financial...
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This week has been one of the longest of my life. I know that an appendectomy — a laparoscopic appendectomy, no less — is considered a fairly common and simple procedure in modern medicine. But with the pregnancy having slowed my healing time in addition to lowering my threshold for pain (both very common pregnancy symptoms), I am still in quite a bit of discomfort. Perhaps the biggest complication that the pregnancy brought to the procedure was that due to my enlarged uterus, the incisions had to be made a lot further away from each other. So for the first few days after surgery, I could feel — by way of pain — the path where the laparoscope (the camera) had made its...
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I have never been the type of person who proclaims "Genius!" whenever a child learns or picks up new skills. While I would smile warmly at the parents who had just bragged about how their kid is already reading at the age of 3, I would think inside my head, "Pssh. Lots of people know how to read." I have found myself holding Claire to similar standards as well. Yes, I am happy whenever she reaches new milestones, and praise her greatly for them. But unless I see her doing something so extraordinary — something I know only a very few other kids can do — I will continue in thinking that she is a perfectly normal and ordinary baby. A...
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Yesterday, our daughter Claire Emmanuelle was baptized. :-) I know that many babies usually get baptized a lot earlier than our daughter's 9 months. And the main reason for the delay was due to our church's serious stance on baptism — we, as parents, had to take several classes to prepare, to decide whether we wanted her to be baptized or not, and to finally become eligible. According to our faith (our denomination is Presbyterian, more specifically PCA), baptism actually does not automatically save, and there are two reasons for this. The first is that there is biblical evidence that at least one man went to heaven without being baptized: the thief who was crucified next to Jesus. The second, and more central reason,...
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