Aching for Life

Well, well, what do you know - 3rd trimester has begun! Baby T continues to flip and kick and nudge and burrow his head into my various organs, and my belly continues to balloon. 18 Weeks Here I am back at Week 18 - still running!  That feels like a distant dream now.  I remember feeling quite prominently pregnant, and wondering if some motherly lady would stop me and scold me for running while pregnant. That looks like a little bump to me now! 19 Weeks On December 12, we went in for the anatomy ultrasound. We brought along two DBS lai see packet - one with a little girl, the other with a boy. We then asked the nurse to put the lai see packet with the gender of our baby into a larger envelope for us to take home with us. She had to put some post-its on the lai see to make sure we couldn't see through the envelope.  Hehe. I was dying to open the envelope that night, but Ryan eventually convinced me that it would make a good Christmas present to open it on Chr...

Ryan was known as Mr. T when he taught middle school one summer during college.  After I got married, I was called Mrs. Takasugi by my students for about one month, and then after that it was Mrs. T.  So it's only apt that our as-of-yet unnamed child be called "Baby T" for now. This is a post I've been meaning to put up for a while - a picture-history of the growing baby T. It all started last August, when we were busy saying goodbye in Hong Kong, making as many fun trips with friends and family as possible, eating out a lot, and trying to pack here and there. "2 weeks"  (Don't ask me why in the world when one conceives one is considered "2-weeks pregnant." Beats me, but this is how the doctors count it!)  This is our first "family" picture, taken when Baby T was a mere zygote (or possibly morula?).  We had no idea. We were busy having fun at our junk boat farewell party that church friends had organized for us. Great day...

Blurry hummingbird Well, we haven't written since we left Hong Kong! So much has happened since - we've gone on several adventures, and there's a major life update.  Those will be longer write-ups, so for now, let me use "bird-spotting" as a transition from our life in Hong Kong and our life at Stanford. I've always loved spotting birds, and when I was still living in Sheung Shui with my parents in Hong Kong, I would sometimes get distracted from my weekend morning quiet times looking out the window for little white egrets. I would watch them a while, admiring their wings when they flew or the curve of their necks as they stood in the water. At Stanford, we live in an area of graduate student housing called Escondido Village. For the first (fall) quarter, we were living in an apartment in a midrise building, on the 4th floor. A tall tree stood in front of our apartment building, and I would be surprised to look out the window at times to see little je...

Grandpa passed away last week. I won't be able to attend the funeral in LA, and so I'm preparing a note for one of my sisters to read at the memorial service. And so I've been thinking about his life - the wars he lived through, his days as a general, fighting through bleak, cold winters (and the many impatient hours I spent with him half-listening to his stories); his arrival to the States, his years working humbly as a custodian, though he had been a headmaster in Hong Kong. He had a temper - I saw that a little bit, but mostly heard about it from my father and my aunts and uncles. He made mistakes as a husband and as a father, but he also quietly bore with much. He loved to write. When we were younger, we would write letters to him and receive responses in his trembling, austere script.  He did calligraphy as well. They were never as good as those of my maternal grandpa's, but they were far better than anything we could hope to aspire to.  When I was taking phot...

In my Form 4 (10th grade) English class, we've been watching The Blind Side . Even though I've watched it multiple times, there is one scene that always hits me. Leigh Anne sets up a bedroom for Michael and Michael says, "I've never had one before." Leigh Anne says, "What, your own room?" Michael says, "No, a bed." Leigh Anne tears up and quickly leaves the room. What hit me about this scene is not that I teared up with Leigh Anne. Rather, it's that I didn't. I am stunned that her heart can be so wrenched by the thought that a boy would grow up without a bed that she starts crying, because I am unmoved. My dear Form 4 girls told me after watching this movie that it was too touchy-feely, and asked that we stop watching Hollywood-feel-good movies. Being smart, worldly young people, they are suspicious of emotionalism and bored with good people. They have a point, of course. Much of the pathos in the movie is not subtly presented, ...

Dr Tom As you can tell, I (Bea) have been spending a lot of time lately going through our wedding photos and editing them and picking ones out to post and eventually to put in an album. It's been fun to do it - reliving some wonderful days six months down the road. But it also caused me to feel the same anxious insecurity with my options and choices and gnawing obsession with comparing that plagued me throughout the wedding planning months. I thought after a wonderful day of worshiping and committing ourselves to God and each other, an unforgettable honeymoon, and months of deep enjoyment of being my husband's companion would put to sleep all those concerns about superficial things - the dress, the hair, the pictures, the decor. But going through pictures made the horrible questions of "what if" flare up in full force. I looked at friends' wedding pictures on Facebook, and wished our photographers had captured moments like those in these other albums, givi...

Finally getting some time to breathe. We are almost done with grad school apps! Just one more day to go. Here are some more pictures from the day. Ta da!  Reception - grand entrance. Funny kids :) Cutting Veronica's awesome cake! Hugging the baker More funny kids 07 joy Look at this one of us and the 07 girls, obligingly posing. Now see what the 07 boys were doing Katherine, Bui and Emily! Waiting... And waiting... Attacked by lavender! Our beautiful ushers