• Alana still isn’t rolling over. We had her torso propped up on a pillow once, and she rolled over from that, sort of by accident, but she doesn’t roll over on a flat surface.
• Alana can sit up quite well now, and only occasionally falls over. When she does fall over, though, we’re reminded that she still does have quite a ways to go, coordination-wise.
• Alana can stand up for short periods of time if she has something to hold onto.
• Alana started with limited solid foods (rice paste of some kind, and mashed fruit) about 2 weeks ago.
• Alana is really loving Newton, and sometimes smiles and shrieks at him while she totally ignores us, her parents, frantically trying to entertain her.
• Alana is usually quiet, but sometimes gets all gabby and does a long string of noises. Today she said “baba”! I don’t think it was intentional, but it was very clear, and I even got it on video (on Flickr).
• Alana likes cold things. She likes it when we give her a bottle of cold liquid to play with.
• Alana is already fascinated by iPhones, iPads, and TVs! (We try to shield her from them, mostly… for now!)

That’s all I can think of for now. If there are any other things I should be mentioning, let me know.

Baby

• Still enjoying Alana! She’s a happy baby.
• Alana loves sitting up, but she can’t turn over on her own yet.
• Alana has had a few little tastes of food, but is not eating any yet
• Alana frequently sleeps through the night now (roughly 9pm to 6am)

Work

• Our first iPad app, an interactive pinyin chart, has been released!
• We’ve bought all our furniture for the new office and moved it in
• We connect the internet service to the new office tomorrow night (critical!)
• We’ll move all our crap to the new office this weekend

Commercial

So Alana beat out 50 other babies and won the “honor” of diaper model baby. It took 2 days of filming and a one day photoshoot (in February). They were quite considerate about not tiring the baby out, and being really nice to her (Alana seemed quite happy the whole time), but in the end SS felt it was a bit much, and doesn’t think she wants to do it again. (I pointed out that it also takes up quite a bit of Alan’s caretakers’ time… In this case, SS, her mom, and the nanny all went for most of the three days!)

The “Unicharm” diaper commercial is coming out in May, and will be in TV and online. The photos will also be in magazines. We’ll get a DVD of all that stuff.

Defending my Daughter’s Honor

So SS has been taking Alana swimming at that baby swimming place near our home. Recently the place put up a promotional poster featuring various happy babies that had been swimming there. But they put up Alana’s picture too, without asking us, and it was the only one featuring full frontal nudity. Not cool!

So I went over there and kinda chewed them out a little. They apologized and agreed to “remove” Alana from the poster.

The thing that pissed me off was the manager’s response “but we got the permission of all the other baby’s parents.” (How is that supposed to make me feel better??)

In general, people in China is not as sensitive to privacy issues as parents are in the States, so it looks like this is an issue I’ll have to stay on top of in the future.

Noises

Alana’s making more and more noises… She’s gone beyond little babbling noises and started doing rather long, loud sustained noises. They’re not really cries or squeals. For now they’re still pretty cute and harmless. Hopefully she doesn’t start horrific squealing soon.

New Office

Our company is growing, and when we add new full-time employees and interns this summer we won’t have room for everyone in our current office. So it’s almost time to move again already.

Originally we were thinking of moving up to the 3rd or 4th floor of our current office building, but when we calculated the (somewhat extensive) renovation costs that would be needed, we realized it wasn’t such a bargain. The place we ended up choosing is called Central Pod (I know, more “pod”…), and is in a much better location for all our employees (no longer a short walk away for me, but still pretty close).

The office itself isn’t big, but the building is beautiful, eco-friendly, and full of natural light, and the meeting rooms and kitchen are shared, so we don’t need to build those ourselves. In fact, there are no renovations required at all… just furniture. So we’ll be busy with that this April. First day in the new office is May 1st.

Gonna have to edit this one a bit…

People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. They don’t have to work hard to get good grades, they never really have to do much to get ahead. The major challenge of early life is school – and school is designed for average people. So intelligent people just breeze through.

But there is a point where every intelligent person faces something that requires more than intelligence. It requires hard work, it requires the ability to fail, it requires being able to do tough tasks, boring tasks. For the first time in their life, in spite of their intelligence, these intelligent people are challenged, and they start failing. Like when they first attempt to create a start-up.

And that’s where most of them retreat. They focus on things they can’t fail on, and ignore the other important things. They start to blame other things (like the school system). They procrastinate. They refuse to face new problems because they know they will not be able to handle them, and this does not fit into their worldview that they are invincible.

Conclusion:

Being intelligent is like having a knife. If you train every day in using the knife, you will be invincible. If you think that just having a knife will make you win any battle you fight, then you will fail. This believe in your own inherent ability is what will kill your start-up. Success comes from the work and ability you put in becoming better than the others, and not from some brilliance you feel you may have within you.

So don’t believe that the brilliance of your idea is what will make you successful. What will make you successful is when you are out there every day, doing something new, challenging yourself, trying new methods, studying new ways, having a lot of small failures, then getting better every day.

So a few weeks ago, SS and I decided that our long term plan for taking care of Alana (especially once SS goes back to work) is to hire a full-time nanny. After comparing the costs, and thinking about it a bit longer term, we decided it made a lot of sense (and was within our financial means) to hire an English-speaking Filipina nanny.

So, to make a long story short, all in the span of one day, we interviewed a nice lady named Jenny, hired her, she moved in with us, and the Chinese yuesao has moved out already! Kinda crazy that it all happened in the span of a day. (We weren’t planning to kick out the Chinese yuesao immediately, but the agency needed her if she was free, and she needs to keep finding new jobs to earn a living…)

Anyway, Jenny is super nice, 34 years old, Catholic, and has two kids back in the Philippines aged 11 and 14 she’s supporting. Her English is pretty good, although not amazing. She’s really sweet, though.

Already I’m seeing changes in SS, who has to manage the new nanny. Whereas before, SS could kind of be lazy and let her mother handle a lot of that, the language barrier means SS now has to step up. So she’s learning how to say things like “walk the dog” and “bring in the laundry” which she just never had to learn the proper English for before. This is really good practice for SS; she hasn’t had much reason to use English at all since she earned her MBA.

So, God willing, our new nanny will be with us for a while. It’s a little weird, but I’m really happy that we’ll creating more of an English-speaking atmosphere in our home, which means that Alana will have a much easier time growing up truly fluent in English. This also means she’ll have to work less at (and we’ll have to invest less into) improving her English in the future. We’re making the investment now, and it’s going to pay dividends our daughter’s whole life.

So we’re pretty happy about the situation. More details later…

Last night we booked the tickets for Mom, Dad, and me to fly to the Philippines on Feb. 1 and return on Feb. 5. It will be good to finally see Greg, Rose, and little April over there. (Mom and Dad’s overall trip dates are Jan. 24-Feb. 9.)

Alana’s birth abroad has been reported, and we’ve successfully applied for her U.S. passport. After we get that (in a week or so), we’ll be able to apply for her social security number. SS has also applied for Alana’s Shanghai hukou (户口). According to the Chinese registration, Alana is from Hubei (following her maternal grandfather’s heritage, rather than he foreign dad’s or her maternal grandmother’s Taiwanese roots). That’s pretty weird.

I’ve been fighting a nasty cold (mostly a bad phlegmmy cough). I’ve had it for about a week, and it just got really bad. I stayed home from work today and slept in. I’m doing some work from home today.

SS has been dealing with a plugged duct in her breast all day (it’s 3pm now). It’s really pretty bad. There’s a nurse over here massaging it for her, working through it, but it’s clearly VERY painful. She’s had this issue once before, and got through it, but it seems a little worse this time.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and we’re going to 7pm mass. I’m taking one of my new clients with us, who isn’t even Catholic, but he’s curious and wants to tag along. Christmas dinner will be at our place tomorrow, and SS’s parents and some of her relatives are coming over. Should be nice (but I sure hope my cold starts to clear up soon!).

I guess that’s it for now. Merry Christmas!

So here’s how it’s going down…

Next Friday, Nov. 11th, we’ll arrive at the hospital at about 7:30am. The C-section will start at about 9am. Following the birth, SS will stay in the hospital for 3 nights. She’ll head home with our newborn on the following Monday morning (Nov. 14).

I’m still very busy, and things are about to get busier! So it goes…