Officially now a yuppie family

Robby & I ambitiously sent out our first Christmas cards - 100 of them. What a feat. It took me two days to order the photos, write the holiday letter, buy the stamps, & assemble the envelopes. I sure love Costco.

Lots of things going on.

My grandpa Gong Gong passed away on Friday, December 11th, three days before my birthday. The funeral is in two days at Rose Hill Memorial Home in Whittier.

Gong Gong died at 96 years old, and before his fall and hip injury, he had few physical ailments - prostate cancer (common in older men), asthma, blindness, & deafness. I know 40-some-year-old people who take twice as many medications as he was taking before he died. His healthy took a downward spiral after the hip injury. Sitting in a hospital bed 24/7 sometimes seems more harmful than helpful, but he had a lot of healing to do & daily mobility was out of the question. Last week, he had a stroke in the majority of the left hemisphere of his brain. This affected the right side of his body. This also put him in the ICU for 2 days. My family went back and forth about life support. Luckily, his death was painless and quick, and my grandmother did not have to see his body invaded by tubes of fluids, running on man-made machines. She has lived her life for him more than for herself, so his death starts a new life for her at 89 years old.

Deaths and births have been occurring simultaneously in our family recently. Last summer, my paternal grandmother died less than a month before my niece was born. Robby and my wedding was shortly after that. This year, my sister gave birth to twins over Thanksgiving, and three weeks later, Gong Gong dies.

I can't say that any of this unfair in any sort of way. Our genes are resilient in old age, and we live for a very long time. When I was a child, I knew that I was very lucky to have known all my grandparents and that at one point in my life they would all wither and pass in a short period of time. I've so fortunate to have spent so much time with them.

I'm now 30 weeks pregnant & supposed to see the doctor every 2 weeks. Baby is doing well - kicking & punching all the time, like there's an earthquake in my belly. It's a strange feeling to have a little being incubating in my body.

Thanksgiving is finally over!

Robby's mom flew over from Germany and brought us lots of gifts. One large, hard-covered suitcase had nothing but goodies from Frankfurt: 6 bags of muesli, chocolate with hazelnut (our favorite), marzipan, delicious traditional German Christmas cookies, olive oil, a bottle of kids' carbonated drink called "Robby's bubble", bedding for the baby, etc. It was so overwhelming!

Ma only spent 3 days with us. We took her for Indian food (pani puri, mmm), sushi, Mexican, and a big American breakfast. We also saw the Globe Theater from England perform Shakespeare's Love's Labour Lost at Santa Monica College. We helped her buy a Macbook and took her to frolic in the lovely aisles of Target. We also had Shanghai-nese dim sum with my parents. It was a wonderful weekend.

Then, we had a hectic Thanksgiving weekend that involved a seven-hour drive up to San Francisco. It usually takes 5 hours. We thought we were clever to leave on Tuesday, but we left our house at 4pm & hit traffic on the 405 through West LA. Not fun.

Nonetheless, visiting family is always a blast. Tiring, but fun. My oldest sister gave birth to a set of cute girl twins on Wednesday. We participated in a birthday dinner and birthday party for my four-year-old niece. Robby watched Ninja Assassin. We had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with 13 family members, including an auntie who was visiting from Beijing whom I hadn't seen in six years.

We spent another seven hours driving down to Los Angeles on Sunday night (with a million other travelers). It feels good to be home with our fish Practice Three.

Time to buckle down and finish these two terms papers. They're due next Tuesday, and my fall semester at USC will be over! Now, if I could only finish these papers...

P.S. Baby kicks all the time.