We celebrated Father’s Day early on Wednesday, since Mio and I will be back on the East Coast this weekend on Dan’s first Father’s Day. I cooked some yummy barbecued baby back ribs in the slow cooker, and Mio and I presented Dan with this handsome blazer from Gap. Doesn’t he look sharp? 🙂
I just dropped off Mio’s birth announcements at the post office this morning. It took me a while to stuff, address, and stamp nearly 200 envelopes, but I’m proud to say I finally got it done! 🙂
Special thanks to the hubby, who meticulously sealed each envelope with wax, so that we could send them out in style. 😉
It’s been a month and a half since Mio was born, but we have been a little preoccupied with her arrival…. Better late than never, right?
I designed the birth announcements myself, with some beautiful photographs that our friend Tea took of Mio and our new little family. I can’t wait to share them with you!
In the meantime, keep a look out in your mailboxes for the announcements to arrive. ♥
Sunday was Mother’s Day, and this year was my first time celebrating it as a mother myself. It still feels a little surreal that I’ve become a mother and that this day will now hold a special meaning for me for the rest of my life. Though it’s only been a little over a month since I have joined the ranks of motherhood, it’s already been such a wonderful and life-changing experience so far.
For my first Mother’s Day, I awoke to this cutie:
Later, Dan surprised me with a colorful bouquet of flowers.
Our friend and uber-talented photographer Tea came over to take some photos of Mio for us, and she brought me some flowers as well! So thoughtful and sweet of her… thank you, Tea! 🙂
Thank you also to all my friends who sent me Mother’s Day cards and e-cards to commemorate my first Mother’s Day… I was surprised but of course very touched to receive so many from everyone. You made my first Mother’s Day truly memorable! ♥
In the evening, we went out to dinner with Dan’s family to celebrate at Yusan Sushi. So happy I can finally eat sushi and sashimi again! 🙂
We ended the day by taking some photos to remember our first Mother’s Day together… 🙂
I couldn’t help but be consumed by an overwhelming feeling of gratitude this Mother’s Day.
I have always been thankful for the amazing mothers in my own life — my own mother who gave birth to me and raised me with love, my mother-in-law who has always welcomed and embraced me from Day One with such warmth, as well as my grandmother back in Hiroshima whom I rarely get to see but writes me letters every month.
But this year, I have even more to be grateful for. For the wonderful husband I have and for this precious, precious daughter we have brought into this world together. I feel like nothing I have ever done in my life warrants this incredible gift that has been bestowed upon me. I have never been — and never will be — the most beautiful, the most talented, the most successful. I am as imperfect as they come. But somehow, despite all of my innumerable flaws and shortcomings, I have been given so much in this humble life of mine, and now have been entrusted with the greatest blessing yet.
I look at Mio and am dumbfounded that she loves, trusts, and needs me more than anyone else in the world.
I am so undeserving, and I wonder if I ever will be worthy of all of this.
It’s been almost a week since we welcomed our baby daughter into the world, and we have been kept on our toes! Besides the conventional challenges of adjusting to parenthood and the sleep deprivation associated with the feeding and sleep schedule of a newborn, we’ve had a couple curveballs thrown our way to add to the mix.
We were discharged from the hospital on Sunday evening. Normally, we would have been discharged from the hospital 24 hours after birth (provided you had a regular vaginal birth without any complications) so we were expecting to leave Sunday morning, but I had actually had a fever break out towards the end of my labor that continued to persist for a few hours after the delivery. The nurses at the hospital continued to monitor my temperature and blood pressure in the postpartum recovery room, and they didn’t want to discharge us until it had been 24 hours since my fever had gone down. By the time 6pm of Sunday rolled around, Dan and I were both packed up and eager to leave the hospital and get home. As nice as it was to have the nurses running around and taking care of us, we just wanted to have some privacy and freedom to get our new little family settled back at home. Mio had been incredibly peaceful during our time at the hospital, doing great with breastfeeding, sleep, and diaper changes, rarely crying in her first 36 hours out of the womb. It had us thinking that perhaps this whole life-with-a-newborn deal wouldn’t be too difficult after all.
And of course, as soon as we returned from the hospital, we were proved wrong. On our first night home, we were kept up for virtually the entire night because of Mio’s shrieking and crying. We tried everything we could think of — feeding, burping, diaper changes, swaddling, rocking, changing her into different clothes to see if she was too hot or too cold… nothing seemed to work. She finally went to sleep in the early hours or the morning, but by that time, we only had a couple hours before we had to wake up to take her to her first pediatric appointment at the clinic in Richmond.
So Monday morning, we drove bleary-eyed and harried to the clinic for Mio’s checkup. We first went to the lab to get blood drawn for a bilirubin and hematoid test. When they stuck the needle in Mio’s foot, she screamed and cried uncontrollably, as you would expect. We then went to the pediatric unit to have her weight checked and to hear the results of the tests. The results were not very good. Mio’s weight had dropped since birth, which is typical of newborns, but the pediatrician told us that she was concerned that her bilirubin was pretty high — a sign of neonatal jaundice. 🙁 The pediatrician told us to put her in indirect sunlight by the window, and to come back for another blood draw test the following morning. We followed her directive and did just that, and that night was yet another rough night with bouts of inconsolable crying. Despite our efforts, Tuesday morning’s blood tests (through which Mio cried once again) showed that the bilirubin was still high and that Mio’s weight had dropped even more, losing close to 10% of her birthweight, which is considered borderline dangerous to the baby’s health. The pediatrician noticed that Mio had become increasingly lethargic, and told us that she wanted us to start supplementing her feedings with formula temporarily, and come in the following morning for yet another test. The best way to get jaundice to go down is to make sure the baby’s getting fed enough to flush it out of her system, but my breast milk hadn’t completely come in yet and so Mio was still only getting colostrum and some transition milk at that time. From the outset of my pregnancy, I had really wanted to try my best to breastfeed as much as possible and not have to rely on formula so when I was told that, I felt like a failure that I already wasn’t able to give Mio enough to keep her healthy in her first few days. Of course, by this point we were desperate and willing to do anything to help bring the jaundice down, so we started feeding Mio formula along with whatever breast milk I was producing. Wednesday morning’s tests showed that the bilirubin had gone down and that Mio was gaining her weight back, and the pediatrician told us that things were definitely looking better and that we didn’t have to come back for any more tests, provided that we didn’t notice anything abnormal in the coming days. My breast milk finally started to come in yesterday, so I’m hoping that I’ll soon be able to get Mio back on solely breastfeeding so I won’t have to depend on formula to keep her well-fed.
It was a stressful and worrisome few days for us new parents with the whole jaundice issue, but it is finally going away and Mio seems to be doing much better in the last couple days. She’s also been doing better at night, only waking up for feedings and diaper changes, and there has been a lot less of the colicky crying that we suffered through from the first couple of nights. (Thank goodness!)
Dan has been on paternity leave this week, so it has been really helpful to have him around during this first week — without him, I may have lost my mind with Mio’s health complications. Dan’s mother has also been incredibly helpful and she stayed with us through Thursday, helping make meals, clean, and take care of Mio when we were at wit’s end and needed some extra sleep. My own mother is flying in from Virginia tonight and will be staying with us through next Friday, so it’ll be really nice to have her here as well. I’m so grateful for all the support and help we are getting from our family and loved ones — the transition into motherhood would definitely be a lot bumpier without them!
As for myself, my recovery from childbirth has been going pretty fast and smoothly, much to even my own surprise. There’s still some pain here and there, and I am definitely taking things easy and napping occasionally while the baby sleeps, but I’ve been pretty mobile and have been able to go out and about every day since returning from the hospital without any issues. I’d say energy-wise, I am almost back to my usual self! I am definitely feeling a lot more able-bodied than I was towards the end of my pregnancy a week ago.
Here are some photos of Mio from her first week at home with us…
It’s been over a week since the devastating M 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit Japan, and the nightmare only seems to have gotten worse in the days that have followed, with a nuclear crisis and shortages of food and water in the affected areas. I’ve been keeping up to date with our family and friends in Japan on the phone as well as on Skype, and some of their stories have been unimaginable and painful to hear. It’s difficult to believe such an industrialized country as Japan — one of Asia’s wealthiest — is now suffering such deprivation; the nation has surely never seen such hardship since World War II.
As we reported immediately after the earthquake and tsunami, we have confirmed that all of our family and friends are safe, but we have since found out that Miho, one of Dan’s cousins who lives in Miyagi Prefecture (where the epicenter of the quake was as well as one of the areas that was hardest hit by the tsunami) has lost her home to the tsunami. She has been in a shelter for the past week (presumably with her family) and of course her safety and wellbeing is more important than anything, but we cannot fathom how awful it must be to lose your house and see your town wiped out in a matter of minutes. Dan’s parents are trying to send some financial relief over to their family to help them rebuild. For the moment, we’re worried about whether or not the shelter she is in has enough food, water and resources to sustain her and the other victims, especially in the snow and freezing temperatures that have fallen upon the affected areas in recent days. Please keep Miho and her family — as well as all the other earthquake and tsunami victims — in your thoughts and prayers.
I have been following updates on the disaster situation in Japan regularly every day, whether it be via online news or watching streaming news from Japan on my NHK World TV Live app on my phone. (Luckily, I happened to get the iPhone right before this tragedy struck and have been able to keep up with news directly from Japan 24-7 with this app, even now when the American TV coverage is no longer so focused on Japan.) It’s been difficult to watch the situation turn more and more grim in some respects, but I have also been moved and inspired by the human stories that have surfaced amidst such a horrible disaster: The four-month-old baby who was rescued unscathed and reunited with her parents after three days. The 60-year old man who was rescued after being swept 10 miles out to sea. The loyal dog who heroically refused to leave his injured fellow canine’s side (ultimately getting both of them rescued and taken into veterinary care). The heroic Fukushima 50, the nameless 200 men who have stayed behind and are working around the clock to control the situation at the nuclear plant, while everyone else has been evacuated. The elderly man who, after being rescued three days after the earthquake, told reporters with a smile that “Let’s rebuild it all again.”
It has been noted by the media that there has been no looting or violence in Japan following the earthquake and tsunami, which is unusual in the wake of a natural disaster, when chaos typically tends to breed social anarchy. Many have praised the Japanese for their discipline, mutual respect, and allegiance to keeping societal order, while some have criticized them for their stoicism and apparent lack of emotion. As this article mentions, however, this can be mainly attributed to the fact that Japan is a group culture in which people are socialized from when they are young to put group interest above individual interest — although such a culture may have its criticisms, in this case it has strengthened the social cohesion of the nation in the face of tragedy. Make no mistake — the Japanese victim hurts like any disaster victim in the world. But as the article notes, he or she has been raised to prefer to mourn as quietly and privately as possible.
Reading the tweets from Japan on the PrayforJapan.jp site, I’m amazed that even though these are the people who are most in need of comfort and hope in these darkest hours, ironically it is their words that have instead moved me to tears and given me the confidence that Japan will overcome this and face a brighter tomorrow. Their words exhibit courage, strength, resilience, compassion, honor, and hope — I’ve never been more proud of the motherland and of the Japanese blood that runs through me.
I have also been touched by my fellow Americans’ concern and efforts to reach and out and send relief to the Japanese victims in their time of need. On my way home from work the other day, I couldn’t help but tear up when I saw a group of young children playing their instruments in front of the BART station, with large cardboard signs indicating that they were raising funds to “Save Japan.” It was been inspiring to see that as we live in an area where there is a sprawling Japanese and Japanese American community, local community organizations and Japanese businesses have all put forth efforts to help out in their own way. The JCCCNC has set up a relief fund with which 100% of the donations will go directly towards citizen relief efforts in the most affected areas. Several Japanese stores and restaurants have set up fundraisers and pledged profits from sales to be sent to Japan to offer relief  and aid. As an interpreter in Washington, DC, my father  has been attending conferences held by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission every day to communicate with Japan this past week about their nuclear crisis and how the NRC can send support and help. Working in 8-hour shifts with other interpreters around the clock, he’s been fighting the exhaustion so that he can help Japan in the best way he can. He was also asked to translate a speech by President Obama in support of Japanese citizens during this trying time. Although everyone has their own way of helping, I really believe that every bit of effort makes a difference.
I wish that I could do more, but I feel that all I can do at this time is send monetary donations to support in the relief aid and continue to pray that Japan will recover as smoothly and as soon as possible to see a brighter day.