Back in the Game

Alex is a very cool and chubby chap. But immediately after his birth, the ethereal master switch that governs the daily events of the Farrand household was reset again, as it was when Baengy was born.

And once again, we find ourselves under the command of another tiny tot.

We have thus far surmised that he enjoys a snuggle, and a wrap.

And is becoming increasingly agreeable to the taste of milk.

Mother Farrand breastfeeds him when possible, but at times the (wailing) demand exceeds available supply.

He's nearly a month old now, and on most days of the week appears to consume his own bodyweight in milk.

Heather is a star.

As she has always been, in the role of Mother.

Alex lost his fetal name of Ga-ga, pretty much as soon as he was born. He just seems more like an Alex than a Ga-ga.

Ashley, on the other hand, continues to be called Baengy by just about everyone. I'm sure it'll pass in due course.

Alex opens his eyes for a few hours each day and has a look around. It sometimes seems as if he can see things, but at his age, he doesn't quite know what he's looking at.

If you zoom in and pay close attention to his pupils, you can see that they're just moving around in a somewhat random and leisurely manner. If I were obliged to narrate what I suppose he's thinking when he's looking all over the place, it would go a little something like this:

"I think I'm gonna have a little look towards the vicinity of my left now. Great. Ok, now I'm gonna have a look in the general direction of my right...A-huh. Now back to the left and up a bit. Cool."

Sometimes it seems as if he can see us. But then if you move, he continues to stare at the place where you used to be.

And then if you say "Aaaaalex!", he'll wiggle his eyes over toward the general direction where he thinks you are.

Australian Grandma and Grandpa kindly sent us some baby boy's clothes. But apart from those, we've just got a whole lot of Baengy's old garments. It seems a waste to go out and buy new ones.

I'm pretty sure Alex doesn't mind.

Baengy's also being helpful and seems to be acutely aware of the new household arrival. When Alex starts crying, she'll turn to us and say "Agi-ya!" (baby!), as if to alert us to the wailing, in case we hadn't heard yet. 

She also touches Alex very carefully sometimes and says "Yeppeuda", which means "pretty".

With a bit of luck, they'll grow up to be good chums.

Life feat. Lil Ashley

Last week I finally located my old middle school friend, Kenneth Wong on Facebook. Both he and I spent many an afternoon class at the Morialta campus producing various flickbook animations in our maths textbooks, in the vain hope that we would someday become famous animators. Only one of us succeeded. Ken is now an accomplished artist living in Shanghai. In the eyes of an uncultured scientist, an artist becomes accomplished when they no longer need to worry about employment.

You can see some of his handiwork here.

Ken and I spent some time catching up online, although how he circumvents the Great Firewall of China is beyond my understanding. When we were young and extremely geeky, some of our favourite topics of conversation were console gaming, science fiction and inanely hypothetical situations. I often claimed (on paper) that my quarks were bigger than his.

It's funny how some things change and some things don't, while time moves on regardless. In some of my more recent studies of the human experience, I've observed that time is indeed influenced by the gravity of any situation. 

The birth of our daughter has proven sufficiently situationally dense that it has distorted perception of time. In some ways it feels that things have slowed down to single frames of motion. They say that time compensates for this temporal anomaly by later accelerating and allowing children to grow up so fast.

Hoping not to let these events slip past the archives of memory, this young blogger will try to be more diligent in affixing them firmly to the walls of his little blog.

Sometimes we call her Ashley and sometimes 은서 (Eunseo), but overwhelmingly it's still variations of her fetal name of Big Baengy. It just seems more appropriate. Even Korean Grandmother prefers it.

Recent conversation in heavily accented Busan dialect:

Heather's mother: "Baengy is growing up very fast"

Heather's aunt: "What's a Baengy?"

Heather's mother: "My granddaughter."

These days, Baengy spends much of her waking hours trying out new facial expressions, oblivious to the situational context. For example, twenty minutes after absolutely nothing has happened, her face will suddenly light up in sheer astonishment.

Those in the neuroscience community should really try to identify the neurons responsible. 

Babies, in general, are heavy. Now I know why the arms of Heather's mother are so stocky - she had five kids. In order to alleviate the eternal conflict between a baby continuously wanting to be held and a parent having sore arms, the mothers of generations past have invented the hot sling.

Baengy doesn't mind being hot slung too much, and generally powers down into passive mode when confined in such a way. It's kind of like how a kitten freezes when you hold it by the scruff of the neck.

Babies generally cry for 4 main reasons:

1) Baby is hungry

2) Baby is tired

3) Baby has pooped, nappy is soiled

4) Reason indeterminable

Mothers have a special ear for distinguishing between the different cries of babies and can remedy an outburst with lightning efficiency. My insensitive man-brain on the other hand has a difficult time even trying to distinguish which baby is mine.

I kid.

Nonetheless, when Baengy cries and mother is busy, I tend to assume it's reason number one. Often times, I am correct.

After milk time, it's always sleepy time. Heather tells me that good parenting is all about routine.

Heather, like many of her Venusian compatriots, is an excellent multitasker. Why nature did not afford the female race an extra set of arms is beyond me.

See that little sticker on Baengy's left thigh? That's from her vaccination shot. One consistent truth we've identified is that Baengy is vehemontly opposed to all things vaccine-related.

I propose that it's because she has yet to understand the science behind it.

Yujin is Ashley's boisterous one year old cousin, who has evidently figured out how to open doors.

This is comical for the first dozen times, but thereafter its comedic edge declines. Yujin cannot yet talk, but engages in baby proto-talk, which is basically composed of a whole lot of babbling. Sometimes she'll finish a babble sentence by pausing with an expectant facial expression, as if waiting for a reply.

I always attempt a reply in her own language.

When I think of myself as a baby, I assume that being held all the time would be annoying. That just goes to show how inept I am at thinking of myself as a baby.

One thing I find fascinating is Baengy's patience while being repositioned. If you want to switch arms while holding her, or place her in a hot sling, all manner of extended clumsiness of a father-in-training can occur during the transition. She usually just waits it out and will occasionally flash you a sidelong glance, as if to say "Whatever it is that you're trying to do, you're probably getting better at it."

Evolutionarily speaking, having big eyes is good for seeing in the dark and spotting predators. Why a baby would need to do either of those things is still confusing to me.

Baengy has a love-hate relationship with baths. 

It's kind of like me and chicken feet.

Sometimes she'll do what we call a Monumental Poop. These considerable excretions often surpass the operational capacities of a wet towel/nappy change combo, and necessitate a bottom-washing session in the bathroom sink.

Baby poop is actually not so bad, by poop standards. If there were a scale for excremental disgustingness from one to ten, baby poop would be a one.

I guess ten would be the festering deposit of a carnivorous abomination with indigestion.

There are three amazing inventions in the baby world, each of which are worthy of a Nobel Prize. They are:

1) The pacifier

2) The new velcro on nappies

3) The hanging mobile

We'll address the latter two in a forthcoming blog post. We first introduced a pacifier to Baengy a few weeks ago, although we've heard that babies can get addicted to them. She and her pacifier are inseparable by a negative air pressure of about 60 psi.

I cut her toenails for the first time in her life on the 31st of July, 2011. Perhaps she'll like to know such things, when she's older. 

And perhaps not.

Raising a baby is no easy task, but is made considerably easier with family members around and the wonders of modern absorbant technology. Heather and Ashley have since moved to Seoul with me, after spending a month in Busan with Korean grandmother. Things are going well.

With a baby around the place, long term plans become considerably curtailed. On the horizon for us is a rocking chair, and perhaps a larger size of nappy. 

Have a good weekend everyone.

Birthdays, Babies, Brunch and Busan

I turned 27 late last month. I remember when I was around 8 years old, I couldn't wait to be a year older. Back then it always seemed that birthdays were an eternity away. Then as you get older you wish they'd stop coming so often. My personal theory is that although time is constant, our comprehension of it changes as we get older. When we're young, our brains are constantly processing so much brand new information that the experience of living seems to drag on forever. But after we've been around for a while, we get used to the same old stuff so our brain ignores a lot of things and time speeds up.

One of the customs we have in the lab is for everyone to pitch in for a cake when it's somebody's birthday. For some reason, I don't really like the taste of cake and haven't been eating it for the past few years. Cake is okay, I guess, but I'd much rather eat fruit. So I made a request for fruit instead of cake.

Here's the fruit-cake we created. Now that's what I call dee-licious.

We also had cherry tomatoes to put on it but we ate them the night before.

Heather booked me a ticket on the KTX for Busan. She always ends up paying for my tickets because my excuse is that I don't understand how to use the KTX website. It's true, but I also like it when she pays for my tickets.

Heather's mother made a traditional Korean birthday breakfast for me in the morning. Koreans eat mi-yok-guk on birthdays, which is a green seaweed soup. Other foods you can see in the photo are fish, eggplant, spinach and that yellow thing is called a cha-me, which is a kind of Korean melon. It was nice to get such an elaborate breakfast.
Posing for the camera is Ji-Ye. I told Heather that I needed summer shirts, so Ji-Ye chose a red one for me, and also a shirt with a big green apple on it.

Heather's parents are always nice to me. Although we can't communicate very effectively, they're always cutting up fruit and making tea when I come over. On the bottom right of this photo is little Ji-Woo who still has baby food all over her mouth because she just ate. For some reason, she likes to stare at me. It's probably because I speak a funny language.


Here's a video of Ji-Woo eating. Ji-ye is also asking me some questions in Korean, as she always likes to do.

Ji-Ye took this photo of me. These days she doesn't wobble the camera so much and is starting to take some half decent photos. Previously, all of her photos were things like a blurry foot, or a sideways door handle. But of course I would always say "Wow, nice photo... very abstract."

I don't want to hurt her photographical self-esteem at such a young age.

That last pose was a direct reference to this photo that I took of Ji-Ye a couple of months ago. But she somehow manages to be impossibly more cute.


We drove out to eat some duck for lunch that day. On the journey there, Ji-Ye started copying what I was saying. So I played that age-old children's trick, where you can use such an opportunity in your favour.

An old friend of Heather's had a son last year and he invited us to the first birthday. While the first birthday in the western system would be one year old, in Korea it's actually two years old. In Korean culture, the moment you are born, you are already one year old. To me, the Western system makes more sense. After all, how much do we learn in the womb?

The birthday party was at a buffet restaurant in Hwamyeong.

Here's Heather with her friend and his son. Heather's friend is the one who helped Anthony and me when we had to move house.

For dinner we went back to The Kitchen on Dalmaji hill to organise the wedding plans. I met the chef and he seemed very much on top of things. That day we ate pasta and these salads. The long salad had char-grilled giant mushrooms in it.

The food is always impressive here.

You never really miss the beach until you move away from it. And then you only realise that you miss it when you see it again after a long time.

Then it's like "Oh yeah, this is what I miss."

Anthony took us out for brunch on the Sunday morning after we spent the night drinking at Guri Bar in Seomyeon. We ate at Breeze Burn's which is apparently a hamburger chain that do good brunches. The breakfast was okay and the sausages were nice, but the tomatoes were a little unripe.

Here's Heather and me after a semi late night out drinking. In around 4 months, we'll be married. The more I think about it, the more I think "Hey, am I ready to get married?" But then I stop and think, why not? A couple of decades ago, it was pretty normal to get married in your early 20s. These days people say that 27 is still young.

I feel kind of young and kind of old at the same time.

After brunch we went for a walk along the beach and ended up at a small amusement park on the east side of Gwangan beach. In the photo is Anthony's new girlfriend, Rebecca. Rebecca is a wonjang (branch manager) at the Wall Street Institute, which is an English school for older students.

At the amusement park they have this 'Bucking Bronco'. The idea is to stay on for as long as you can. Heather stayed on for 60 seconds on easy mode. I stayed on for the full 60 seconds and won a free ride ticket. Anthony came off after 42 seconds, but he was only using one hand. That begs the question: Would he have stayed on for the full 60 seconds if he used two hands?

Of course.


Here's Anthony rounding up the imaginary cattle.

I've been attending the South River Toastmasters every week. In the photo is JP Singh, giving his final farewell speech after 2 years. He's heading back to India and then off to the States. JP has been one of the defining personalities of the club over the past couple of years. He taught me an Indian sentence: "Hindostani lo bohot acha he."

That means "I like Indian people."

Due to my schedule, I can't go out drinking as much as I used to. But I try and stick around for the second and third rounds on Wednesdays when I can. Toastmasters is a good place to meet interesting people.

For the third round that night, we went to the Rainbow bar in Gangnam. This place specialises in floor seating and 'hookahs', which are large bong-like tobacco smoking devices. The tobacco is usually flavoured with a fruity or musk aroma.

Who said life in the lab was boring? I spend my time amusing myself by making things like this creation, which I named Tapey-Man.
Although somewhat frivolous, he does have a purpose. His eyes are made of horizontal tubes containing yeast medium. I needed to get them horizontal to improve aeration in the shaking incubator, but there are no docking ports in the incubator that would hold them steady. So Tapey-Man provides a firm scaffolding so that the small tubes can be shaken at 250rpm overnight.

See, here's tapey man in the incubator. Look how happy he is.

For the record, this experiment was a success.

I went out to Itaewon with Blossom recently and we went for a walk around. There are many foreign restaurants in the area, but nothing says it better than this one. If I had a choice, I'd live in Busan, but otherwise I'd live in Itaewon.

That's all from me this week. Tomorrow I'll be going to the Toastmasters National Conference, so I'll post some of the happenings from there later. Oh and if you're wondering about the 'I like turtles' feedback selection below, it's from a Youtube viral video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y

Check out the link and see you next time!