First Birthday

I’ll have to get some photos of Kenny’s first birthday photo from mother-in law.
People often comment Jinu looks like Kenny and Ava looks like me.

Do you think so?

The Family

With both set of grandparents very involved in their lives, our little Brooklyn mixed race household family is learning to combine old and new to make ours.
One of the thing I want to do this year is to create a proper family book/anecdotes/history/photos for us and our children.

This is my mom’s parents. I think this was taken a few days after their wedding took place. Isn’t my grandpa looking quite dapper here?
He’s been quite a dresser since his youth until his death. He was in printing business where he started his career at newspaper. Then he started his own printing company. I remember quite well visiting him at the printing facility where I was fascinated by all these tiny letterpress letters, stacks and stacks of trays, filled with different typefaces.

Everytime I visited their house, I would sneak into the storage to get some letters metal pieces out to play.
My uncle eventually took over the business when the grandpa passed away.

But with many industry, desktop publishing took over and he had to shut down the company.
I remember the day it closed and how sad I was.

What I will do in 2012

I will get less crap.

I will ONLY get stuff that are useful.

PURGE PURGE PURGE of all the old things that are not needed.

Logical reasoning head. Not quick knee jerk reaction to things (good or bad).

Look at the world with MORE positive prism.

A new year, a new challenge

A brand new day.

We had a grand plan of spending the NYE with friends. Then I got sick. Like really sick.
During our trip, just about everyone around got sick. (enter fever, vomit, dizzy, etc) There was a day I felt a little funky then I was ok after popping in some tylenol. I guess once I let my guard down, germs found their to be fully active. Damn.

But the magic potion (nyquil) did the wonders and today was a much better day.

I’m sad to see long stretch of family time that is a vacation is about to be over. It was great to wake up in the morning without a packed agendas. I hope family/work balance will reach another level this year.

Instead of giving myself a long laundry list of “what I wanna do’s”, Kenny and I are doing twelve 30-day challenges. Each challenge will result us a happy reward. If that works for our kids, it should for us, no?

Our challenges? We want to have a better grasp on scheduling of our kids after school activities. We want to have the house completely organized to the teeth and stay that way.
If we are happy with or result, we will treat ourselves a new king size bed. Woot.

Here is to our hopeful new bed!
and lots of scheduling and scrubbing!

Happy 2012.

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

I’m not sure what made me look up this book.
Because it’s that time of the year where you like to be reflective, I was looking at some sources to be inspired.
Somehow the title caught my attention on my Kindle. (more on that later) A chapter long sample got me hooked and I continued to read throughout my vacation until I finished it.
Written by the pioneering researcher Roy F. Baumeister with renowned New York Times science writer John Tierney, the book is written to understand the most coveted human virtue: self-control.

While I excel at certain things, I confess that my willpower in general isn’t all that. How many times did I promise myself never to have clutter at home? How many times did I vow to exercise more? and etc.. etc.. Am I a bad person? No. Would I lead more efficient life with iron clad willpower? Yes.

So I’m taking many suggestions from a book to heart and going to train myself to have stronger willpower. Ironically, it will take willpower to make sure I do follow the recommendations for stronger willpower. eh.. Well, time for planning!!

Miami Holidays

It’s great to be married to someone who’s actually born and raised in Miami and call Miami home.
We just came back from our 1-week holiday vacation thoroughly rested (Thank you grandparents!) and a few pounds gained(expected!).