OMG, We're On Our Own!!!

Week 5 is finished, John's mom left this morning, and we are officially on our own with no training wheels. Aaahh!! To our dear friends and family, be on notice that we took careful notes these past few weeks and will be calling you in the near future to start redeeming those offers for babysitting and free dinners...lolz. This was a big week for us. Cassie celebrated her one-month birthday, a significant milestone in the Chinese culture. It also means that we're no longer house-bound, and have the doctors' permission to take Cassie out and about in public. Carrie's been taking her on 2-3 mile strolls each day. Additionally, Cassie got to visit the Campbell Farmer's Market as well as downtown Los Gatos. Being able to take her out definitely opens up our options immensely, which has been nice. She's been getting more and more alert the past couple of weeks, but that's really only translated into more time with her being awake and screaming. We were rewarded this week with her first real smiles though, which as you can see from the picture, are ridiculously cute. Starved for more pictures?

• Week 5 pictures including some from the past month shot by John's mom
• Week 2 pictures that were posted a while ago but weren't linked until recently
  

How to Entertain a Newborn

It's a rare moment when Cassie, Carrie and John all get a moment to rest their eyes. Certainly a moment worth capturing.

As Cassie spends more time awake each day, we find ourselves at a loss for how to entertain a newborn. The books tell us at this age she can differentiate black and white, and should be able to recognize faces within about 20 inches or so. But other than that, we're not really quite sure what she's interested in. When she's not asleep and not eating, her attention span is only about 5 minutes before she gets bored and starts crying. From family suggestion, we picked up the crib-mounted Symphony in Motion toy which she seems to be amused by. But, not having a crib yet, makes using it kind of tricky. Any suggestions are welcome! :)

We have a new photo album up with pictures of her third and fourth week. Enjoy them over at Picasa.

End of Week 3

"Pondering."

We have reached the end of our third week as parents. Carrie's mom left a week ago, we survived a week on our own, and John's mom arrived yesterday for the two week Grandma second shift. Cassie is noticeably more alert now, and is awake 7-8 hours a day. It seems like her vision is starting to come in, as she spends a lot of time looking around...this picture is typical of her during the day. She continues to be a pooping machine, pooping about 10-15% of her body weight each day. If she were a 150 lb adult woman, that would be like 20 pounds of poop a day. Gas pains will occasionally wake her up from a nap, but that's pretty much it. She slept soundly through the traditional July 4th fireworks extravangaza in the Campbell area.

We've Survived Two Weeks!

On the one hand, the last two weeks has just flown by, it's hard to believe that we've already survived this far as new parents. Then again, when baby Cassie is inconsolably crying in the middle of the night, it feels like it has gone by very slowly! The next week should be an interesting test as Carrie's mom heads back up to Auburn, and we're on our own with John back at work. In other news, we are in post-production for the next edition of our DVD. Let us know if you'd like to receive a copy.

Check out pictures from week two.

Night Feeding Video

We feed the baby about every 3 hours, 24 hours a day. Thought it might be interesting to some to share a video of one of the late night feeding that John does with Cassie. The 1 hour feeding is trimmed down to just about 7 minutes of highlights. Special bonus, a buttastrophe caught on film! The sound is pretty quiet because it's the middle of the night, you may want to turn up your volume if you want to hear everything.

Wow, What a First Week!

Wow, what a week! Baby Cassie's first week was eventful, fun, educational, and filled with tons of visitors! She had visitors every single day of the week, both at the hospital and at home. It's fun visiting with everyone! We're starting to settle into a regular schedule when Cassie cooperates. Carrie has had the chance to get out of the house and take a field trip to Target (w00t!). John's been able to get out of the house to even play softball for a bit. Nana's been cooking up a storm keeping everybody very well fed. Pops even descended upon the house with a carful of Costco bounty to host a barbeque at the house. Nobody's going hungry, that's for sure. Here's some pictures from the first week.

Sleepy, Stinky Sweetie

We're about halfway through our first week with the baby, and everybody's starting to settle into a routine. We're certainly running into our fair share of speedbumps along the way, but so far so good (knock on wood). Cassie, we've discovered, has a sick sense of humor. She's a sleepy newborn, which makes all of our visitors think that she's just an angel. So far, John's been taking the late night feedings (between 1:30-3:30am) to try and let Carrie get a 5-7 hour block of uninterrupted sleep. Ironically, Cassie has been 2 for 2 in choosing that feeding for her stinkiest buttastrophe each day. Here's some links to share:

• Are you starved for more pictures? We have photos from her first 24 hours posted up at Picasa.
  
• If you have an iGoogle or MyYahoo! page, you can add this blog to your page. Then new posts will just show up there, and you won't have to continually check the blog to see if we've posted something new. You can subscribe to that RSS feed here.

It's been wonderful having so many friends and family come to visit and meet Cassie. Thanks to everyone who's taken time out of their busy schedules, it certainly helps us maintain our sanity to touch base with the outside world from time to time.

Baby Cassie's First Video

For those who won't be able to see baby Cassie in person, we took the opportunity to shoot a little video to share. This is a rare moment when she is both 1.) awake and 2.) not screaming. After the first day, she's had a few moments where she's alert and looking around, and it's been really neat to see her take in the world.

Welcome Home, Baby Cassie!

We got discharged from the hospital today, both mom and baby checked out healthy. Cassie came home in her stylin' Ferrari-red carseat and didn't peep the whole time, just taking in the outside world for the first time. She loves her room, loves her bed, loves the decorations mom put up, and even let mom take a nap for a few hours while dad and nana took care of her. Firsts today: bath, buttastrophe, new outfits, new swaddling blankets, new hat, socks, mittens, bottle.

Ridiculously Good Looking

"I'm pretty sure there's a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking. And I plan on finding out what that is." -- Derek Zoolander

Today, Cassie had recovered a lot from the enormous effort of coming into the world and was much more alert and awake than yesterday. She took the opportunity to work on her breastfeeding skillz. We discovered that, like mom with chicken on the bone or shellfish, she gets pissed off when she has to work too hard for her food. We also discovered that, like dad, she's a little narcoleptic and sometimes falls asleep while eating.

Introducing Cassandra Jane Wei

Cassandra Jane was born at 1:35am early on Father's Day, happy and healthy. She's 7 pounds, 6 ounces, and 19 inches long. Both mom and baby are doing well. We are at Good Samaritan Hospital for the next couple of days and happily taking visitors. Please give us a call if you'd like to come visit the baby at the hospital or at home when we check out.

Carrie has officially started labor!

We made our first trip to the hospital very early this morning at 3:00am after Carrie had had contractions for about 4 hours, but were sent home because she far enough along. We were just admitted officially on our second trip to the hospital and Carrie is working on bring Sparkle into the world.

Scheduled: Monday, June 16

Carrie's doctor has decided that she will be ready to have the baby anytime next week, so we have scheduled her to check into Good Samaritan Hospital on Monday morning at 7:30am. Of course, if she goes into labor before that, we'll go before that. But Carrie will definitely be in the process of having the baby by this coming Monday. Stay tuned to this blog for the latest and up to date news about Baby Sparkle. You can subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking the "Subscribe to Posts (Atom)" link at the bottom of the blog. This will allow you to add it to your iGoogle or My Yahoo page, and automatically be notified of new updates without having to regularly check the blog itself.

Two Weeks or Less

We are now inside the two week window. Carrie is officially on maternity leave, our overnight bags are packed, the nursery is all setup, all the baby appliances have fresh batteries. It's just a waiting game now, everybody's on-call 24/7.

San Francisco Weekend

As Carrie's due date gets closer and closer, our vacation getaways get closer and closer to home so that we can be near our home hospital. With just about four weeks left, we spent this weekend in San Francisco to enjoy some of the joys of the city. We had brunch with friends at Luce, got massages, had afternoon tea at the Palace Hotel, enjoyed some shopping in Union Square, and had a sumptuous dinner at Postrio. One of the more pleasant surprises, however, was the Intercontinental Hotel, where we stayed. It just opened in February in SoMa and is beautiful. Because of the promotional special rate, we were able to stay on the club level 32nd floor with stunning views of the city. With the club level, we also had access to the club lounge. The picture is of Carrie watching the Bay to Breakers crowd on Howard Street pass by below as we enjoy a free breakfast in the club lounge.

The Baby's Getting Big

Carrie had a doctor's appointment today and they did an ultrasound just to make sure that everything was going well with the baby. The picture is a little grainy and it's a little tricky to make everything out, but they're estimating Sparkle at about 7 pounds right now. With a little over a month to go, it looks like she's going to be a pretty big baby!

New License Plates

It seems that everyone in California has vanity plates on their car, they certainly seem more popular than in any other state. Ever since moving here, John has wanted vanity plates but didn't want something dumb or that he would get tired of after 6 months. So after 9 years, he finally settled on "GTDRPTP", a reference to his Mustang GT convertible (GT Drop Top). They arrived this week and look fantastic!

Pebble Beach

The common piece of advice that everybody continues to give us as Carrie's due date approaches is to spend time together and take those weekend getaways that you want to go on before it becomes hard to. So last weekend we went on our third "last big trip" to Pebble Beach. We spent the weekend down in Monterey at the luxurious Lodge at Pebble Beach. We had some great food, amazing weather, and lots of time to relax. Since golf is difficult for Carrie at this point, we spent Saturday kayaking in Stillwater Cove, which is a protected bay that sits between the 17th and 18th holes at Pebble Beach. The water was smooth as glass, and we saw leopard sharks, harbor seals and lots of sea otters. We also had the opportunity to catch the bagpiper at Spanish Bay as he walked the dunes at sunset. And John got his golf fix in at the beautiful driving range at Spyglass.

4D Ultrasound

Ray, a friend of ours, works for Siemens and has connections into their ultrasound division. As part of their research and development, they need models to see how their latest and greatest machines are working, so Carrie had an opportunity to go and model with Baby Sparkle. We got to take home some pictures and video from the session. This is one of the pictures where the baby is smiling and looking forward to coming out two months from now.

Bon Jovi in concert

Today is our three year wedding anniversary. And to celebrate, we took Baby Sparkle (her new nickname) to her first concert at -2 months old! It's a good thing that we generally share the same taste in music. We've been wanting to see Bon Jovi in concert for a couple of years now, and when the opportunity arose to sit in the 20th row, smack in the middle of the floor, we jumped on it. They played all their old hits as well as the new hits from the last two albums. Even Sparkle seemed to enjoy rocking out.