Sofia's 100 Day Birthday

This past Friday was Sofia's 100th day in the world! This milestone is a popular one in Chinese culture, but to be honest, I wouldn't have even remembered it had Cherry's mom not reminded us. To commemorate, we took this blurry photo.

Hopefully, blurry photos will be a thing of the past for us, because I just purchased a Canon Rebel XSi the other day here: Canon eShop. It is refurbished, but after doing some research, I feel pretty confident that it will do just fine. Plus, it comes with a free bag and $150 off if you use this coupon code at checkout: 121EOS

So, the days leading up to big 100 were still pretty exciting. Sofia is picking up a lot of fun little tricks. For instance, she loves looking at herself in the mirror, despite her poor face being covered with a rash:

Her neck strength and leg strength have really increased, so we've been practicing her "walking":

I also heard her laugh for the first time last week! Cherry says Sofia's been laughing for some time now, but she was never really able to do it on cue. This video shows otherwise:

Stay tuned over the next 100 days!

Super Fifi Bros.

Sofia is still struggling with her eczema/rash thing, so we took her to the dermatologist today to get 'roided up (a typical treatment for eczema is steroid cream). To help her get ready for the power up, we dressed her up proper:

Happy Three Months, Sofia!

Today, at 7:55 PM, Sofia will be THREE months old! Time just absolutely flies by when you have a kid!


The last few weeks have been really tough on Sofia. The cold weather really did a number on her face, drying it up something fierce. To make matters worse, it started peeling. And to make matters even more worse, the blisters must have gotten infected, leaving my beautiful little girl looking like this:



We've gone to the doctor a few times and are trying a few different ointments as a result, but the toughest thing is keeping her from rubbing her face. We've often had to resort to being mean and giving her the straitjacket treatment! :(


Hopefully, she won't have to deal with it much longer - we didn't even get a chance to properly celebrate her third month birthday...

Phoenix Wright Orchestrated Soundtrack

After almost two years, I've finally finished the original Phoenix Wright Trilogy late last night, rocking Sofia to sleep! It's a bit bittersweet... these games had fantastic stories but the games themselves were sometimes frustrating beyond all comprehension. Thank goodness for GameFaqs, that's all I can say!

The series also has awesome music. I didn't get enough of it playing the games over the years, so I came across this orchestral arrangement on YouTube. Very nice!

Ignore the last two songs in the playlist. Not sure how those got in there. Otherwise, Enjoy!

Saving With Baby

Welcoming a new baby to the world has been a wonderful experience. There are not many things that give me more joy than making my daughter smile (which I can finally consistently do now - Cherry was able to do it a while back by dancing like a monkey in front of her. My technique is a little more "hands-on" and less silly-looking - I help her into a standing position and then tilt her down to my face - and she seems to love it!)


That said, new babies do incur some expense. Of course, there are the expected recurring expenses such as diapers and wipes (we haven't gone into formula yet so that hasn't been a cost). We ended up spending a bit on a new automatic pump, but it has been a life-saver. I think the manual pump was starting to give Cherry carpal-tunnel syndrome or something! For the record, we highly recommend Lansinoh products - we've used their breast pads (something that I never would have dreamed of - basically these pads absorb leaking milk and prevents it from soaking mommy's clothes, which is also a problem that I'd never considered), lanolin cream (addresses sore nipples), manual pump (which is wonderful unless you have to pump more than 3-4 times a day, which is our case), and now their Affinity Double pump. This pump is fairly inexpensive (about half!) compared to many other models, but we like it because it is small, features adjustable speed and power, and is easy to clean - even moreso than the manual pump, which is a HUGE plus because you have to clean pretty much every feeding!

But anyway, enough about that tangent. Most of the costs mentioned above actually haven't amounted to very much, thanks largely in part to modern internet commerce. Via our credit card's online marketplace, which features 5% cash-back when purchasing goods on Walmart.com, the aforementioned breast pump came in more than $10 cheaper than it was at the store, which doesn't seem like much, but these little costs do add up!

But where internet shopping has really helped out is on diapers and wipes. Amazon.com has a wonderful program called Amazon Mom, which essentially is a free trial of Amazon's Prime membership. Basically, Prime offers free 2-day shipping on any Amazon provided product, which means, for us, that we can be running low on diapers but get fast enough turnaround via Amazon to get resupplied at their lower online pricing. That's where Amazon Mom really kicks into gear. By being an Amazon Mom member, you get an additional 15% off of many baby goods, such as diapers.


But, that's not all - any time you spend $25 or more on a baby goods purchase (basically any time you buy diapers in bulk will qualify), you extend your Prime benefits by another month (up to one year). And that's still not all! You can couple Amazon Mom with Amazon's "subscribe and save" service to achieve yet more discount (another 15% for most baby goods). Basically, with this service, you tell Amazon to send you another of the same item at a specified periodic rate (e.g. monthly). It's perfect for things like diapers and wipes. It's also non-binding - you can actually cancel any time, even before your first "reload", and you still get the discounts! To demonstrate the savings, name-brand diapers at Wal-Mart are typically about 22 cents per diaper (some $40 for a pack of about 200, plus taxes). The same diapers are found on Amazon (with no discounts) for about 18 cents per diaper. With the Amazon Mom and Subscribe and Save discounts, this drops to a measly 12 cents per diapers, dropping the pack from over $40 (including taxes), to just over $30. Safely assuming one pack per month or so, that is over $100 in savings per year, on just diapers alone!

Product expenses aside, one major hidden expense I did not anticipate was the increase in utility bills. Power usage has gone up, but not in a huge way. Where we experienced a rather large impact was in our water bill. Prior to Sofia's grand entrance into the world, our typical water usage was around 2000 gallons per month. In her first month, this number went up to around 5000 gallons per month. (Fortunately, the bill does not track usage one-for-one, but it still represented about a 50% increase in the water bill - approximately $30). We attributed this increase partly due to having to flow her bath water constantly to get the right temperature, but the largest part was without a doubt the water we used to clean her bottles and the breast pump after each feeding (6-8 feedings per day). Plus, I had a leaky toilet.

So, over the course of the next month, we went about fixing the problems. I discovered that the toilet was leaking simply because the ball wasn't floating high enough to turn off the flow - this was rectified in true Grantis Mantis fashion by me bending the metal lever such that more leverage was available at the current floating level. Next, I had heard that using a full dishwasher instead of washing dishes by hand every time typically amounted to about 30% reduction in water usage (for the purpose of washing dishes). In the past, we had never really used the dishwasher much, because we figured there is a tradeoff between power and water, because we never really had enough dishes by the end of a day (or two or three) to run the dishwasher, and because we tended to need our pots and pans multiple times over a day or two, so those would have to be washed by hand anyway. However, with the additional people in the house and the added responsibilities, it now made a bit of sense to run the dishwasher every couple of days.

The last action was to figure out what to do about washing the bottles and other stuff. We couldn't simply not wash them. What we ended up doing was collecting the rinse water we used to wash the bottles and pump parts in pails and using the pails to flush the toilet. For those of you who don't know, toilet bowls are designed to flush when water rushes into the bowl - it really doesn't have anything to do with the built in reservoir or anything else about the design of the toilet itself. In a given day, we can collect sometimes close to 20 gallons of water, which we would then use to flush the toilets throughout the day. At about 1.6 gallons per flush, this saved us a substantial amount of water over the course of the month.

All said and done, our last water bill came in at just around 3000 gallons of usage, reducing our bill by about $20, or just under $10 over pre-Sofia usage!

The last task, then, was to counter the anticipated power increase due to using the dishwasher more often. This tip I owe to Kenny, who is also a real economy-minded guy here at work. FPL, the main power company in Florida, has a number of programs and incentives designed to help conserve power. One of these is called "FPL On Call". With this program, FPL installs a controller in your house that will shut off your central cooling/heating, electric water heater, and pool pump (as applicable) in times of extremely high demand. In exchange for "borrowing" your power, FPL credits subscribers to the program up to $136 per year, depending on your appliances and options. The biggest credits are awarded if you allow the controller to shut off your appliances for up to three hour blocks. Now, before you go all crazy, the shutoffs can only occur during absolute peak hours and also only during "core" working hours, i.e. from 9-5 on weekdays, so you won't freeze to death on winter nights or melt over hot summer weekends. Plus, these extreme demand periods happen extremely infrequently - the guy who installed ours said he'd installed his in 1996, and it had only been activated one time for less than one hour, about ten years ago!


So, those are some of the little tips and tricks we've learned to help you stay afloat, even with a new addition to the family! Each tip on it's own just amounts to about $10-20 in savings per month, but together over the course of the year, it's still a few extra hundred in your wallet!

Fifi the Hutt Can Hold Her Own Bottle!

More updates!

A few days ago (about a week I think), Aunt Sarah let us borrow this baby chair to help Sofia sit up. Now she really looks like a little Hutt!


Needless to say, that isn't the most flattering photo we've ever taken of Sofia. Fortunately, we have several, much more cuter pics!

Exhibit A, Super Fifi:


Exhibit B, Astro Boy Fifi tummy-timing with Daddy:


But the purpose of Today's post is actually more to document yet another fun milestone for Baby Sofia. Late Thursday night, we actually had her support her own bottle, all by her lonesome!


It won't be long before she's driving!

Sofia Loves Reading!

We started playing music and reading to Sofia while she was still in the womb. Not having a point of reference, I can't definitively claim whether or not it influenced her personality as it is today, but from the very first week, she would be calmed when we sang the songs that she'd listened while she was in her mommy's belly, and singing to her is still a pretty good tactic today when she is upset about something.

Reading has also been a big part of our relationship. Cherry reads to her in Chinese, and I read to her in English. Ed took the amazing photo below of me reading Curious George to Sofia:


Sofia really enjoys reading tremendously. We've often read for forty-five minutes straight before my arms get tired holding up the book! Very early on (around 3-4 weeks old or so), she would focus her eyes on the pictures when we held the books up, and then shuffle around when we put them down or turn the pages, then refocus her attention immediately once the pages were in her field of vision again! Recently, she's also tried to "read" on her own, cooing along when she sees a book in front of her!

Lately, she's started to notice the TV too, though. We'll have to work on some ground rules soon, I guess!

Baby Sofia Milestones, Entry No. 1

So, I've decided that it would be a good idea to document the little things we notice about Baby Sofia's growth, development and behavior in the Baby Book posts. This way, when people ask me about baby raising in the future, I can quote Sean Connery's Dr. Henry Jones, Sr., "I wrote them down in my diary so I wouldn't have to remember!"

So, this last week was a pretty exciting week for Sofia's development. Cherry says its been happening for a while now, but I just noticed that Sofia wriggles when you tickle her body now. She doesn't laugh because of it yet, but she's had a few laughing episodes already, just sitting there!

A few weeks ago, we started practicing developing her leg strength too. She can now "stand up" from a squatting position so long as we support her arms for balance.

Sofia also has started noticing her hands more. Now, when we hold her in a sitting position, sometimes she will play with her own hands... before deciding to suck on them... Thanks, Uncle Ed, for setting a bad example! She will also grab at your clothes when holding her upright or at blankets that are draped on her. I can't wait to see her grab some toys!

Lastly, all of our practice tummy-timing is starting to pay off. Sofia has seemingly remembered how to flip over from her tummy onto her back. She did it once at about three weeks old, but must have gotten too fat too soon because she didn't start doing it again until recently. But now, she's figured out how to flip herself over pretty consistently!


See you next time!

Winter Break Wrapup

My winter break is over, but I think I had enough fun and excitement over those 11 days. A few days after my family brought Wei Wei's family over for an exhausting surprise holiday dinner, we took Sofia and Cherry's mom to Brevard Zoo. The cooler weather must have been better for the animals, because I'd never seen so many of the animals come out so close to us in our previous trips to the zoo. We even saw the elusive Red Wolves up close and personal - we never see those!

The next day, my good friend and kung fu brother Kir-Wei and his girlfriend, Victoria, came to visit. He got to our house pretty late; despite leaving the Disney park at around 7:40, getting out of the parking lot added almost an hour to the expected 1 hour, 15 minute travel time that it usually takes to get from Kissimmee to Melbourne. So, they got in around 10 PM, but we hadn't seen each other in over five years, so we had lots to talk about. To save them from getting into Fort Lauderdale (their final destination before going back to med school in Boston... brr!), we invited them to stay the night, which they appreciated.


The next evening, we headed out for a little journey of our own as well. After cleaning the house, we packed up all of Sofia's stuff, including her bottle equipment, stroller, changing pad, and crib, into the trusty tC and headed down to South Florida to visit my parents and siblings. When we got there, Mom had prepared a nice multi-course meal for us - the first of many good meals we would have over our stay.

We gave Cherry's mom a brief tour of the house and I showed her some of our old photo albums. I've often lamented that I don't have any idea what Cherry looked like as a child or a baby because they don't really have any photos of her. In fact, I only have this one photo in my possession, but it's pretty special - despite being taken in the 80s, it looks like it was taken in the 50s, really highlighting how rustic China was back then:


My family, in contrast, has numerous photo albums, and the number of photos, especially in recent years, has gone up exponentially because of Ed's new camera equipment! While looking through our old albums, we identified how much Sofia looks like I did when I was a baby! What do you think?




The next day, on New Year's Eve, my family took Cherry's mom to her first American movie theater experience. It just so happened that the free movie event traditionally held by me and Melinda's orthodontist, Dr. Krumholtz (R.I.P.), was being held that day, so we had a number of options. We ended up selecting TRON: Legacy, which I thought was a good choice for Cherry's mom because you really don't need to have much understanding of the language in order to appreciate the images and sounds. To me, going to the theaters has never been about seeing the story - in fact, I tend to get a better feel for stories by watching movies at home. Rather, I usually reserve the movie theater for movies that have larger than life cinemetography - like superhero movies or films like last year's Avatar. TRON also falls into the category of a movie that is probably better served in the theater than on my 50 inch TV at home with shoddy sound!


That evening, we went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Fort Lauderdale with many of my parents' friends, who got their first opportunity to see my daughter! After dinner, Cherry, Sofia, and I went home while my family took Cherry's mom with them and the rest of the party to the New Year's celebration in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

For New Year's Day, we had a special event planned. Five years ago, we went to Vizcaya mansion in Miami with Cherry and my grandparents. I even included this event in the customized calendar I made for my parents this Christmas. Vizcaya is a huge house built by John Deering, an agricultural machinery manufacturer with too much money and no heirs to spend it on, in the early 20th century. This vacation home of sorts features hundreds of pieces imported straight from Europe, including a number of curious European crafted China-inspired pieces. Cherry's mom, who grew up in a rural environment, doesn't really share my enthusiasm for nature and the great outdoors - in fact she harbors an irrational dislike of trees. However, she appreciates big cities and architecture, both of which Vizcaya, and Miami in general, have in droves.


We spent about three hours at Vizcaya before heading out to dinner at one of my parents' favorite Chinese restaurants in Miami. I have to agree - this restaurant is way better than the one we went to on New Year's Eve. Unfortunately, its name escapes me! Before dinner, we demonstrated once again the versatility of my trusty Scion tC - it seems Sofia rather enjoys feeding in the front bucket seat, and we were even able to change her diaper using the folded down front bucket as a changing table!

That night, an all-important event occurred: I had my first experience with New Super Mario Bros. Wii! On the new special-edition Red Wii with Wii Remote Plus, the new Wii Remote that has Wii Motion Plus built right in so as to not have the additional bulky attachment at the back end of the "hilt"! I wish I had Wii Remote Pluses instead now... But, back to NSMB Wii, I had experienced the excellent New Super Mario Bros. on DS way back when it came out in 2006. I did feel that it was a little on the easy side, but it was a wonderful throwback to old school gaming. New Super Mario Bros. Wii takes care of that "too easy" feeling. Plus, the co-op multiplayer aspect takes the game to a whole new level of crazy fun. My friends who have played the game before commented that they thought the multiplayer was just too crazy, since it makes it fairly easy to kill your allies. But I feel that with the right team in place, the multiplayer allows from some pretty creative strategies that make the game that much more interesting. Plus, part of what makes Nintendo games fun is the chaos anyway! See exhibits A and B: Mario Kart and Smash Bros. franchises!


Our last day in South Florida was highlighted by a trip to Kyojin buffet. Cherry hadn't had sushi since getting pregnant and had been clamoring for it for months. Plus, it was an opportunity to introduce Cherry's mom to sushi and the concept of all-you-can-eat buffet. Amusingly, one of her first reactions was coming up with the idea to bring a large container to bring food home... and that is why there aren't that many all-you-can-eat buffets in China...

That concluded Sofia and Cherry's mom's first visit to my parents' house, as well as my winter break!

Happy 2011!

Happy New Year everyone! 

2010 has been a very eventful year for me and my family. I added two more Masters degrees to my resume, Cherry completed her UF degree, Ed finished his year abroad, I began exploring a new job opportunity, and we went on a pretty amazing vacation to Alaska. 

But tonight, I am spending New Year's Eve quietly at my parent's house with Cherry and the newest member of our family, Sofia!

 Best wishes to everyone for a great start to 2011!