An Auspicious Photoshoot

Incontiguous thoughts swirled, like milk in hot coffee.

A lab meeting tomorrow. An experiment to reschedule. Some emails to send. I should really start learning Korean again. And start running too. What's the weather going to be tomorrow? Probably too hot for running. I haven't blogged for a while. Maybe I should fire off a post before sunrise.

Who said insomnia couldn't be productive?

Well, I don't know if it's insomnia per se if it's primarily due to a tiny member of the human race with a disproportionately loud voice, wailing to the lyrics of a song that goes "waaaa, wa-wa.... waaaaaaaa"

But look at her! How can anyone be upset at such an adorable 3am wake-up call? Certainly not this stalwart young... slightly tired....  zzzz ...bloggerrr zzz

....

Surf Lifesaver Ashley! Hooray.

This photoshoot occurred when she had just turned 50 days old. She looks pretty much the same these days, but right after she was born, her face changed a lot each day.

I think it had something to do with being suspended in amniotic fluid for nine months.

This photo is on our desktop and gets a lot of chuckle-mileage. I used to be rather ambivalent towards the old Anne Geddes calendars in my youth.
But recently I've detected a stirring in the neurons of my brain responsible for the appreciation of baby-studio photography.

The studio photographers must know a thing or two, because I've long since tried to get Ashley to put her arms that way and keep them there. Even after carefully explaining to her that I'd like to replicate the cuteness seen in the studio photographs, she only holds the pose for a nanosecond before her spring-loaded arms pop out, upwards and into the air, like some kind of victorious jelly.

I suspect some kind of 3M adhesive patches were used.

Our little one really is an angel. Although definitely not the angel of sleep.

Cheonsa-Ashley. Bringer of cute insomnia.

Ashley has progressed in leaps and bounds. While before she was incapable of lifting her head or controlling her legs appreciably, she can now turn her head autonomously and kick in a sensible manner. Sometimes she'll kick us when we change her nappy.
Well, it's not really a kick, but a cuter version of a kick.

A kicketty-kick.

Baby skin is quite possibly the softest known material in the universe. I'd gladly use Ashley as a pillow, if not for the weight of my head. Come to think of it, babies are pretty well-designed in general. They smell quite nice and can usually be found in the same place you left them last.

Heather is a star-mother. She sleeps with Ashley in the spare bedroom and sings her back to sleep during her nightly outbursts of baby-song that penetrate every crevice of our humble abode. Ashley soon falls back to sleep, dreaming of whatever it is that babies dream of. I like to entertain the idea that they're about milk, mother, blurry images and muffled voices. 

In the mornings when I go in to greet her, she gives me a toothless pseudo-smile, like some old ajosshi. -"Keep you up at night? Who... me?" - And sometimes she gurgles softly as if she's trying to tell me something. I always gurgle back.

So even though good sleep is a good thing, a multitude of other good things are making up for the loss.

And that brings us to 4:30am. Time to get back to sleep.

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.

Korea Toastmasters Conference 2011

The readers who occasion this blog from time to time are funny, smart, handsome and/or pretty. Or so I assume. They're also a forgiving bunch who digest awkward opening paragraphs with formidable skills of intellectual gastronomy. Thus I feel quite comfortable beginning this post with a tangential thought that I had, upon awakening at 4:30am this morning. You see, I didn't buy an air-conditioner for our Seoul residence because I tend to leave important purchases until they become painfully necessary. Heather and Ashley have various forms of temperature control at mother-in-law's house in Busan. But I'm not so lucky here. So I awoke, rather warmly, a little early. I think I'm a sensitive sleeper.

Anyway, that tangential thought.

If you're familiar with the blogging world, you'd probably know what a tag cloud is. It's a bunch of words, usually in the sidebar that have varying font sizes showing which words are used most frequently by the blog author. Do I have one? Wait. No I don't. Anyway, in molecular biology, we have a machine called a microarray. What a microarray can tell you is which of your genes are at different expression levels when compared to somebody else's. For example, one of your hair genes could be expressed at a higher activity level than your friend's, while your sweat gland gene could be lower. A microarray tells you what biological differences there are between you. If I was a blog and you were a blog, and genes were words, then a blog microarray would tell us how different our tagclouds appear. 

Does that make sense? I hope so.

So here's my tangential idea: Imagine all the spoken vocabulary that Koreans use in a day and translate it into English. We'll call that the Korean vocal tagcloud. Also imagine an Australian vocal tagcloud (already in English). Now compare the two using a microarray. What we'd see in the results would be the words that are more frequently used in one culture than the other. My guess is that some conspicuously overexpressed words in Korea would be ones like 'burden,' 'endure,' and 'delicious,' while Australians would overexpress 'G'day,' 'mate,' and 'relax.' 

We'd probably use the word 'barbecue' equally.

So the main point here is that the words 'burden' and 'endure' are a curiously frequent part of the Korean lexicon. During my time in the Korean tertiary education system, I've often felt that some of my fellow students are enduring some kind of burden. This causes them to pick subjects they're not particularly interested in, and study harder than they'd like to. Perhaps a more preferable alternative is to navigate life through intrinsic motivation.

So this all leads to the Toastmasters National Conference, that I attended a little while ago. You see, Toastmasters is an education system built purely on intrinsic motivation. It's a whole bunch of volunteers helping each other improve public speaking in their spare time. Amazing? Well, not everybody thinks so. 

In the photo above is Kiminari Azuma, a public speaking champion and our special guest from Japan. Kiminari told us a few useful things that day, one of which was his habit of always accepting speaking challenges by default.

Everything gets better with practice. I remember my first day giving a speech. I had a tail between my legs and waffled on about something that was of no interest to anyone.

We held the event at BEXCO in Busan and it was attended by a few hundred members from around Korea.

Here's our club, the South River Toastmasters. Quite possibly the finest club in the universe. I've just finished six months as president, which has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

The winner of the national speech competition was Frank Lev, from Sincheon Toastmasters. Members reach their zenith at the nationals, and it's an inspiring show.

The other half of my education comes from the lab. In the photo above are the boys of the Tsang Lab: Professor Tsang, Akechai and Dr Vahlberg. Our professor just finished his annual 3 months in Korea and is now back in Ottawa. Actually, I have to video conference with him in approximately one hour (8am every Tuesday). 

The only thing I dislike more than 8am Skyping, is 7am Skyping.

But we still manage to have our fair share of fun. Nothing says fun more than green bottles and shot glasses.

We've been going out a fair bit recently. Saving money via cheaper alcohol tends to cause an increase in the amount spent on Tylenol. But if I buy cheap Tylenol, then it kind of balances out.

Oh look, it's Ashley. Me and Ashley are already best friends. She's busy developing a personality and is now nearly two months old. 

Some people have pointed out that my legs are hairy in this photo. 

Hey, man. Stay focused on the cute baby, not the hairy legs.

She gets very excited by milk. When she's about to be fed, she opens her mouth and starts hyperventilating. And sometimes she smiles when she dreams.

I assume it's because she's dreaming about milk.

This photo is from when we were still in the maternity ward. Heather and I are proud parents. Having a kid is definitely no easy task, but a good thing to do. Hat tips go out to all the other parents and those who appreciate them.

And now it's time for me to start the day. 

Have a good one, everyone. 

Our Daughter's Birth

Our little one is just over a month old now. She's with her mother in Busan, and I'm heading down there every second weekend to visit. The past month has been a rainstorm of activity with KTX bookings, diaper changes and all manner of things in between.

Things are going fine now, with a lot of support received from friends and family. Heather is seeming comfortable and is an excellent mother. The birth itself though, was a stressful event.

This is the story of how it all happened.

We entered the Areum Women's Hospital on Monday the 23rd of May at 10pm. The ETA was actually May 20th, but we wanted to wait for a natural birth if possible. By that time our little one was already a menacing 3.6kg, a big baby for a small mother. Taller mothers tend to have easier births, so say the midwives. The head of our daughter was 10cm wide, considered a large lump to pass. Bigger is not always better, in the world of births.

After some deliberating, we decided to choose labour induction via intravenous drip. The baby could be out in a matter of hours, they said. But every ward-wisened midwife knows only too well that every pregnancy is different.

Monday night passed with contractions a few times per hour. All I could do was attempt the act of sleep on a chair next to the lady of the day, as she lay uncomfortably on a hospital bed. Tuesday morning arrived, with the advice to walk around. Heather and I trolleyed her various drips (shown in the photo above) out into the corridor, and we shuffled slowly up and down the hallway. By this time she was feeling a fair amount of pain, and receiving what I could only imagine to be a very bad stomach cramp every 15 minutes. 

Tuesday morning passed excruciatingly slowly into Tuesday night, with mother-in-law ferrying food from home. Heather was not allowed to eat, and I was feeling very uneasy. The feeling could be described as riding a rollercoaster for the first time, backwards, while blindfolded. Deep down you're pretty sure that things will turn out okay, but that doesn't make it any less scary.

At 6pm, the nurses told us that the baby wasn't coming anytime soon and to retire to a hospital bedroom and return if there were further developments. Heather and I went to another floor and I fell asleep at 8:30pm. Heather rang my cell phone at 10pm, telling me she had gone back to the birthing room again.

If there ever were an understated euphemism in the world of medical nomenclature, 'labour' would be it. Heather was in an extremely uncomfortable state, twisted in an unnatural posture of pain on a delivery bed. Her toes bundled up and shuddered every 5 minutes, as labour reared a nasty dose of all-consuming pain. Attempting what reassuring conversation I could, along with hand-holding, it became clear that the pain experienced was not a regular knife-in-the-gut kind of jab, but some kind of blunt-edged sword inserted into the stomach and twisted slowly for 90 seconds at a time. At the end of each extended contraction, all she could do was gasp for breath and wait for the next one.

Heather had been in labour since late Monday (although her water wasn't breaking), but the nurses on night duty weren't particularly alarmed. They gave me a blanket and put on some piano music on a CD player. There, in that overwarmed maternity ward, holding the hand of a wife in pain and utterly unable to do anything but wait, I listened to a recording of a single person playing a piano. I have no idea what the meaning of it all was, but that's exactly what happened. The nurses told us to wait until 8:30am, when the doctor would be back. That was around 4am. For Heather, it was turning into a matter of whether she could survive the intensity while remaining psychologically stable. We kept conversation going, but anytime I asked her a question before a contraction started, she was physically incapable of replying for two minutes. At the end of the contraction, she had usually forgotten the question. We both did what we could to reassure each other. From time to time she would bang her wrists on the bed rails, repeatedly and hard, to try and distract herself from the pain.

Babies get born every hour in the Areum Women's Hospital during the daytime, but almost none at night. The longest hours that I've ever experienced passed, before the doctor came in, performed a cervical check and pulled back with a concerned expression. The cervix was dilated but the head of our baby was not where it was supposed to be. We then had two options: keep waiting or choose surgery.

There are a few things that are useful to discuss beforehand between a mother-to-be and her closest ones. Those would be: whether to induce labour, whether to use an epidural,  and in what scenarios a Caesarean will be chosen.

In general, natural births are a good thing, in a scientific sense. Passage through the birth canal can clear the airways of the child, and although damage occurs, it is not as bad as getting surgically eviscerated. I maintained my previous opinion, which was that the choice of surgery would always be up to Heather. Mother-in-law wasn't particularly keen on anything but a natural birth, but developments had left us little choice. Heather had been for 2 days without food, endured 36 hours of pain and there was no guarantee that further labour would orientate our daughter in the womb properly. Labour is also an extremely stressful experience for the baby. Heather chose to go under the knife. 

I concurred, and resigned myself to the skill of the doctors on duty.

Her mother was still under general anaesthetic when this photo of our daughter was taken, exactly 12 minutes old. She was placed slightly upside-down in a baby bed, to drain the mucus from her airways. Shortly after this, I was allowed to hold her with carefully washed hands. She was clearly awake, and for a brief moment she stopped crying, but was shivering from the temperature drop.

How did it feel?

Well, I was expecting some strong waves of emotion, but mostly I felt relieved, tired, happy and still a little worried all at the same time. It was definitely a good feeling, but in every sense of the word, I was exhausted.

Heather was out of action for a few hours, but mother-in-law and I were allowed to stare at our baby through the large windows of the intensive care unit. Baengy was awake and yawning every few minutes.

She was looking peaceful, but also as if she'd had a bit of a rough time. The first things I noticed were that her ears and mouth were exactly like her mother's.

After writing down the birth details, the first thing that the nurses of the Areum Women's Hospital do is to record a tiny ink footprint and handprint of the baby. It's a good way to avoid baby mix-ups in the intensive care unit.

Heather couldn't walk for a day or so, but was eventually back on her feet. My professor gave me some time off and I was allowed to stay at the hospital for a few days. One major difference between Korea and most western countries is that births in Korea occur at special birthing clinics, which also have accommodation options. Most mothers will choose to have an extended stay at the clinic for a couple of weeks before going home. This provides the benefit of being looked after with meals cooked, and the babies are taken care of by nurses while the mother recuperates.

Breastfeeding occurs whenever the baby awakens, with the nurses ringing each mother's bedroom. It's an interesting system, and one that I've come to appreciate.

The food is designed to be very mild and bland. It also serves a secondary purpose of getting everyone looking forward to going back home.

We soon named our daughter Ashley Farrand. Her Korean name is 이은서 (Eun-Seo Lee), suggested by her Korean grandmother. So her registered name is Ashley Eun-Seo Farrand, a delightful ethnographic mix of names. 

Ashley means Ash tree meadow, and Eun-Seo is from the Chinese characters which mean rising to, or achieving, dreams or aspirations.

Each day immediately after her birth it was clear to see her becoming visibly healthier and awake for longer. Very satisfying. Viewing times were in the afternoon, which were always the highlight of the day.

In Korea, they wrap up infants in these little sausage roll type affairs. Besides making the babies look hilariously cute, it also prevents them from injuring their fragile bones.

This video is of Ashley on her third day of life outside the womb. She's looking around because she can sense the movement of her bed, but newborns are actually blind for quite some time. They start seeing simple shades of black and white after a few days, but it takes longer for their brain to figure out what all the information means.

Heather took this photo of Ashley on her phone camera. 

I distributed it accordingly.

Here's one of the responses that made me chuckle. Rebecca is also pregnant, and due to give birth in early December. I wish both her and her husband loads of good luck.

Ashley is feeding and growing normally. All the medical tests were passed with flying colours and she's received her first vaccination shots already. 

She doesn't like needles - that's one thing she has in common with her parents.

There are a lot of things I like about this video, from the slow yawn to the expression of annoyance that subsides after the nurse repositions her head. 

Diaper changing, breastfeeding and crying during the night are the main activities going on these days. Newborns are a 24 hour liability, and Heather is performing marvellously. I'm doing what I can to participate, but the real action starts when they both move back to Seoul, which will probably be in a month.

In the end, I can only describe the process of birth as an ordeal, to which males can only ever participate at the periphery. It's a worthwhile ordeal to go through together; stressful, but of epic value. Some fathers tend to wait outside the maternity room or at home, but I imagine many women would appreciate their partners close by and staying, or pretending to stay as positive-minded as possible.