Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas!  Yesterday we spent Christmas Eve with my mom, Huong and a few friends.  We started off the day with a mad scramble to finish cleaning and decorating everything, which unfortunately got a little stressful.  We pulled through though and our place looks amazing now, with the Christmas tree, lights and baby furniture all up.  This was also the first time we spent Christmas with my mom, and that turned out to be a big success.  Cooked food, played games, took lots of pictures, lots of laughing and merriment all-around.  I even got to play Gears of War for a bit while my mom played Blockus with Lily and Huong.  Hopefully we can make this a yearly tradition with our daughter, so that we can all enjoy the magic of the holidays (even the stressful scramble to get everything prepared :-P).

For today we're supposed to go over to Lisa's for her Christmas party.  She's also stressed out scrambling to get everything prepared, at least she sounded like that on the phone with Lily yesterday.  It's kind of funny though because she keeps saying how similar Lily is to her mother-in-law but in reality she is much more so, especially the freaking out/stressing out parts.  I think she's in denial, trying to draw similarities between the parents and other people so that she doesn't have to think about how much Chris and her are like their parents ;-).  

But I digress, the reason I brought Lisa up is because on the phone Lily jokingly offered that my Christmas present to them would be for me clean their living room (because apparently everyone is saying how dirty is :-/).  Her immediate reaction was somewhere on the line of "Danny clean??!!  But he lived with a bunch of guys and it was a pigsty!"  While this is a true statement, anyone who's only known me for the past several years would be very confused by that.  That's because over the past decade, both Lily and I have changed significantly.  If our past selves saw us today, they probably wouldn't even recognize us (and when they find out that we're their future, they'd be dumbstruck with horror :-P).  An easy example of our evolution is too look at our living situations over time, as that's fairly representative of our personalities at those moments in time.  I started out in a college dorm where I think we maybe vacuumed 3 times a year, to a small apartment together a few years later where we had Gum Gum's furballs rolling around old western tumble weed style, to now where our place is vacuumed/swept/mopped on practically a daily basis.  We used to horde everything, buying random storage furniture to accommodate our pack-rat ways, to now where we're purging stuff as fast as possible.  We went from a hodgepodge of diy/ikea furniture to a much more minimalist consistent theme from a variety of different stores.  Even the grocery stores we shop at now are different.  And finally I went from lazy sitting around getting nothing done to lazy lets make it so that it takes the least amount of effort to get to satisfy our goals (i.e. let's automate the crap out of everything or make it more efficient).  A good example of this is our vacuum.  We went from a crappy Bartell's vacuum to a Dyson DC21 (4x the cost!!) plus a Mint automatic floor sweeper.  Ten years ago I would have thought that to be crazy, but today it's totally worth it, because it helps me clean faster and do a better job of it.

Now seeing how we live today, why would Lisa still have that as her immediate reaction.  There's always the first impressions last forever.  However I think it's more of the fact that Chris and her haven't changed much so she doesn't really she change in others.  If I look at their lives and the way they live now and compare it to say seven or eight years ago, I'd say it's pretty similar.  Sure there are minor differences (they now own a house, etc..) but overall it's all in the same vein of hodgepodge diy, just enough to work but not enough to make them truly happy.  For example they just went through a kitchen remodel, where the own reason it was even started was because Nick and Ivan pushed them and did most of the leg work.  And when they talk about their kitchen, one of the first things they say is that their cabinets are from a place they like to term "Inferior Cabinets" because it's already warping, screws are coming out and they're missing handles.  That sounds so much like them, and if we had taken their past selves and put them in the same situation, I believe the same result would occur.

So I guess the moral of this is that you should also continually examine yourself and see what small improvements you could make.  Over the years you'll become a hopefully better person, one that you might not even recognize anymore.  If you don't make a conscious effort to do so, you'll just stagnate :-P.

Conscious Fathering

Sorry it's been awhile since I've found time for this :-P.  We're on the final stretch and our daughter will be here anytime in the next three weeks.  We just finished all our classes, had the baby shower and are finishing up cleaning and preparing our home.  This is really happening and we're about as ready as we'll ever be.  In my last class, Conscious Fathering (class just for guys), we were using dolls to learn how to hold a baby correctly, and while I was holding it, looking at its face and imagining what it will be like with my daughter, I felt something that I never felt before and can't even really describe.  In previous classes working with the dolls, I didn't feel anything and was just going through the motions.  I'm not sure if that means I'm ready, but something is definitely different now.

I also got three main points about being a father from that class:

1. If your baby is crying, immediately check on them.  They cry for a reason and you might not know it, but you should try to figure it out anyways. Even if you don't manage to figure it out, they'll learn that you are always there for them, no matter what.  Lots of people say that you should let the baby self sooth otherwise you'll spoil them, and even in the class when the instructor first asked how long should you wait before checking up on a crying baby there were varying responses.  However babies aren't even capable of manipulation until they're 1 year old, and even then, don't you want your baby to think that you will always be there for them when they need you?

2. It's the quality of time that you spend with your child, not the quantity.  When you are with your child, be there, focused on them.  Children are smart, they'll know whether your mind is there or not.

3. Finally, think about what fatherhood is, and what kind of father you want to be.  Write it down and refer to it every now and then as a reminder, because every father will lose there way at some point.  So here's my first pass at what kind of father I want to be:

* provide a safe environment
* establish traditions, both cultural and new ones, and have them feel the magic of the holidays
* impart on them an understanding of their cultural history, but not to let it bind them
* read to them, play with them
* present for their important events
* provide just enough pressure so they have ambition, but not to the point where that's all they worry about
* supportive in whatever path in life they choose
* the kind of parent where they will feel comfortable talking to me about anything
* no corporeal punishment
* open minded
* forgiving
* be there for them always, no matter what happens
* material/financial provider