Fall!

Fall is definitely here. A lovely 10 degrees and sunny on Sunday meant a good day for photos! We also had our Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday.

Grace and I are doing well. I'm still working hard to complete two books by the end of October (can it be done? I'll try...), and Grace is working hard on improving her sleep. She's doing well. She is not getting me up as often. The other night she left from 8:30pm til 5am. That was pretty long and not the usual, but I am confident those long stretches will become more frequent.

Lots in store in the coming weeks. Trip to Buffalo tomorrow, going to a pumpkin patch on Saturday, my sister's baby shower on the 25th, Halloween, and my birthday on Nov 3rd.

Still here

I have been taking a very much needed internet break these past 5 weeks. It's actually been nice to be away from the computer and be communicating with family and friends, shopping, eating, and even relaxing. The only bad part is that I have not been keeping up with my friends back in Korea or keeping up my blog. I have no idea what's going on with my many real-life, blogger, and facebook friends.

I will try to write an update post sometime soon. I have extended my ticket to November 7th so that I can write two books while staying here with my parents. Time for bed!

Serenity Now, Right Now

Day before departure. Many things to do. Grace woken up three times by noises in apartment. Milk carton dropped on floor. Spilled coffee. No lunch. Disorganized packing. Last minute shopping trip a disaster. Crazy man sits next to me on train. Arrive in D-mun to find everything is closed. Just today. Going home with no gifts. Arrive home. Sejin's good-hearted attempt at packing has me puzzled. Hungry. Must attempt web check-in. Must pack.

48 hours to Canada

Wow. The time certainly has flown. We've been in our new apt for a week and in two days we go to Canada.

The aptartment is shaping up slowly. I think Sejin and I deserve some kind of award for what we've done so far. We've wallpapered the remainder of the living room and the whole bedroom, unpacked and got mostly organized, all while watching a little baby. I've done all this on virtually no sleep. I'll post pics of the improvements.

Grace has been a "challenge" lately. During the day she's been fine. We've been moving her from her chair to her walker to the floor and surrounding her with many toys as we get organized. She does really well at entertaining herself. It's at night when the madness begins. Since we've moved in, almost every night she's been waking up at least every 2 hours. Last night she woke up about 7 times. I slept a couple of hours this morning when SJ took her for me.

Yes, this could be due to the move and the new environment, but things have been heading in this direction for a while. She was doing well at 5 months, waking up 2-3 times a night. I thought we were getting somewhere. But around 6 months she started waking up more and more frequently and will not go back to sleep without nursing. Now at 7 months, I'm nearing the end of my patience. If we weren't going to Canada in a couple of days, I would do something drastic, like stay at a friend's one night and let Sejin do his best. But it is useless to try anything now. We'll see how the trip goes.

Sleep deprivation is a terrible thing. Now I know why it has been used as a method of torture. My mind just isn't funtioning at full capacity. I have to write everything down. I've lost motivation to cook proper meals or exercise. Luckily Sejin has been here to keep me going. But when we return, we both plan on working. This won't be possible if I'm only going on a couple of hours of sleep a night. A big change is needed.

Now to start packing our bags.

Moved in...sort of

We're in. But things are not where they're supposed to be. In the past, I would just work really hard for a couple of days, pulling some late nights to get it all done. But now I have one serious limitation that starts with a G.

Poor Grace is not adjusting as well as I thought she would. Serious trouble sleeping - nap time and night time. She is in some realm of overtiredness I did not think existed. Excellent fun. She hasn't cried a whole lot since birth, but in the last couple days she has been so whiny and there has been crying. She must be thinking, When are we going home?? Tonight she crashed at 8:00 and has woken up three times since then and it's now 10:00. Somewhere in that time I made the final decision not to have any more children.

I'm too tired to write more. Unfortunately I am not really looking forward to our trip to Canada in one week (sorry mom and dad...). I am traveling across the planet with a cranky overtired baby that can only nurse to sleep. That should be an interesting blog post.

Book done, some wallpaper up

Just finished writing a coursebook. It will be book 1 of a 3-part series. Another writer who has far more time wrote the other 2 books. *sigh* I'm hoping to get more of this work when I return from Canada. If I can, I may have to get someone to watch Grace so that I can work more during the day and less at night. Grace goes to sleep around 8:00 these days and then it's work time. Of course, I surf and chat here and there, but the work usually keeps me up too late and I can't get a good sleep even if I want to.

We're moving in a day. It doesn't feel like it. Last time we moved we went through all our stuff, got rid of junk, had everything organized and ready to go. This time we will probably end up moving junk and getting rid of it when we unpack. Grace + work + misc stuff left us no time to get ready properly.

The only thing we did manage was to put up a bit of wallpaper in our new living room. It went surprisingly well. It's not easy work, but the pre-cut pre-glued strips of wallpaper are great. It eliminates a lot of steps. It's not a perfect job, but it looks a heck of a lot better than it did. The only problem now is the plug in the middle of the wall near the ceiling. It's there for a wall-mounted air-conditioner, but ours is a standing unit. I can either stick some wallpaper over it, or get some kind of a wreath or decorative thing to hang over it. I didn't take proper before pictures because I didn't think I would post before and afters. This is the best I can do. Now that we know how to hang the paper, we'll probably order more for the bedroom because right now it's the ugliest colour you can imagine. Some kind of grayish purple.

Our Internet will be disconnected tomorrow night and reconnected on Monday. Hope the move goes well!

Serenity Now

I was reminded of this Seinfeld episode this morning after Grace would not go down for her morning nap, although she was rubbing her eyes wildly. I put her down from sleeping on my shoulder four times and each time she either woke up immediately, or woke up within ten minutes. Something's going on... maybe a tooth waiting to pop out, or else the plumbing's backed up again. Serenity now!

Improvement

The woodwork was painted yesterday. I didn't feel like going all the way to Uijeongbu to choose a colour, so I had simply told Sejin: ivory. I figured anything is an improvement over the bright blue that it was. He took photos today and it does look better. Clean.

The wallpaper arrived today. It's a heavy box. I hope I made the right decision. As I said before, either a really good idea, or a really bad one. We'll do that on Wednesday.

Grace still enjoying the sitting position. Tonight she sat in the centre of our bed for a good 10 minutes just staring at us. No smiling. It was kind of weird. Her posture was sort of gorilla-like and she looked territorial as well. Sejin took some good pictures of it.

Today I had one of those guests that doesn't 'get' when to leave. A dear Korean friend of mine who is 7 months pregnant. She's really lovely, but I think she must be bored. She arrived before 2:00. Around 6:00 I started hinting that we had to start getting Grace in the bath and ready for bed, but at 8:00 she was still here. Sometimes it's difficult to explain to people without kids about the importance of the nighttime ritual. It's especially important for Grace since I've had problems with getting her down at night at a reasonable hour. She's pretty sensitive about sleep. Now that she's going down again between 7 and 8:30 (this took work!), I'm not going to mess with that for anything. I ended up just starting the routine while she was still here and a couple times she looked kind of horrified. She said to me before she left, "Are all babies like this?" I don't know if it was in reference to Grace's resistance or the amount of work it took to get through the routine, from bathing to changing, feeding, reading and then finally putting her down. When I finally whispered to her, "Good night! Good luck with the baby!" as she headed out the door, I was exhausted and ready for my ice cream reward.

Overwhelmed

Moving is always hard, but it always feels good when it's done. Trying to keep that in mind.

This week we have a tonne of things to do, from going through our belongings and getting rid to junk to wallpapering! Yes, we are wallpapering ourselves. I'm not sure how good of an idea this is. We've ordered the wallpaper for the living room and we will attempt to put it up on Tuesday or Wednesday. If it goes smoothly, we will order more for the master bedroom. The cool thing about where we ordered our wallpaper from is that it comes in pre-cut strips. They are roughly the length of the wall, so we won't have to mess around with a big roll. They are nicely cut and have glue on them already. Luckily I took pretty good measurements last time I was there, so I was able to order the exact number of pieces. For the wall along the sofa, I chose (what looks like) a nice cherry blossom pattern. For the TV wall, a simple light beige. This could either look really good or really, really bad. I will post before and after photos.

Other than that, just trying to keep my head on straight. Grace is doing great. Today she sat on the floor by herself, back straight for about 15 minutes. I was spotting, of course, but she did incredibly well. She was turning and looking at us and playing with some blocks at the same time. What really amazes me about babies is that one day they can't do something, then the next day they surprise you be being able to do something really well, like they've known it all along. She surprised herself, I think. She sat there squealing and smiling for a while. Very cute.

Some laundry and book work to do this afternoon. Tomorrow we may head up to Uijeongbu to see how the woodwork paint looks. The painters were there today.

Igloo Self Photos

We finally made it over to Dapsimni to take Grace's photos at Igloo Photo Studio. We were going to get 100-day photos and we just kept putting it off and putting it off. That turned out to be a good thing because she's super cute at six months and better able to hold her head up for photos.
There are three rooms at Igloo. We booked room C, which is for infants. There are things like baskets, bumbos, lots of pillows and toys for support. It is also the cheapest room. They have a full wardrobe that you can use, but we used mostly our own stuff. We took a walk through the other rooms, and they are pretty cute for toddlers. We might take Grace back for her 1 year photos, or try another "self" studio closer to our new place.

We also rented their camera. I was afraid of using it, but it turns out they have it all set up so you don't have to adjust anything on it. There is one of those huge photographer light/flash things on wheels that you can move to adjust the lighting for each background. I regret not fooling around with the lighting more. Next time.

We rented the room for one hour, which was enough for Grace, but for an older baby, I would book for 2 hours. But even after one hour, we were just exhausted from all the wardrobe changes and trying to get Grace to smile. She was kind of dazzled by the new environment and didn't want to smile much. That was kind of disappointing, but we managed to get a few good ones.

The quality is not quite professional quality, but for what you pay, I think it's pretty good. We paid 50,000 won for the room rental, camera rental, and the CD with all 800 photos that we took. Sejin was the photographer, as he got frustrated with my slow picture-taking. This was good because he managed to take A LOT of photos, but I kind of wish we had traded off because I think he missed some good angles (sorry Sejin).

I'm sure there are lots more of these self photo studios, but I just didn't know about them before. I think it's a great idea to save some money and get some good photos out of it. It was a lot of fun, too. So much better than the Sears portrait studio at home!

Sorry Facebook friends... You've already seen these, I know...