Rock Band

Last weekend, we were at our friends' Kyle and Tina's new house. They've got a room setup to play Rock Band, a fun video game where you can play guitars, drums and vocals. Carrie took the opportunity to karaoke a little, and Cassie enjoyed watching mom play some video games.

Segway Golf

You know how when you're playing golf and sharing a cart with somebody, how inefficient it is to have to drive to each other's balls, and how annoying that you can't take the cart up to the green side? San Jose Municipal Golf Course has solved that problem by introducing Segway personal transporters to their fleet! You can rent a Segway for your round for about the same price as a golf cart, and it is WAY more fun. The Segways have jumbo off road tires and a "holster" for your clubs. A free training class is required, but it's fun and takes less than an hour. John played San Jose Muni recently, and took the class with a couple friends, Jason and Kyle. Good times!

Superbaby!

Cassie's newest trick is that she has started laughing. This is at the same time that she is starting to interact with people more, and is able to play with toys on her own. She really likes her Exersaucer that she got from her cousins Kelsey and Skyler, and she's been having lots of fun with her Giggle Puppy toy. We've discovered that she really enjoys playing Superbaby (as Carrie demonstrates in the picture), despite the ab workout that it requires for mom or dad.

We've started adding to Cassie's Month 4 photo album. Check it out if you're starved for new pictures.

Cassie Bear

It's been crazy the last few weeks, and we've been a little delinquent in getting blog posts up. You might want to scroll back a few posts to see if you missed anything, we're posting a handful of items retroactively today.

John's started playing ice hockey and is currently skating twice a week. This morning, Carrie and Cassie came to watch practice at the early morning skate. Because the ice rink is cold, Cassie got to wear some of her winter clothes. This particular outfit is courtesy of our friends from the Campbell family. Loves it.

Hail to the Victors

Carrie pretty much got to have her way with Cassie's ultra-girly nursery. But at least there's one piece of positive influence in her crib.

Even Cassie Gets It

It's Cassie's first Michigan football season. She's been watching the games and is excited to be a part of the Michigan family, but even she gets it. Her expression pretty much says it all.

Yumyums and Burpies

Cassie loves to eat. She doesn't so much like it when her bottle's taken away. But a girl's gotta burp.

Happy Labor Day

We enjoyed a wonderful holiday weekend, mostly just at home with the baby. On Labor Day proper, we went over to Julie and Dave's house for a little barbeque. John shows off the versatility of the Baby Bluetooth...hands-free parenting!

Starting Month 3

We're starting our third month with baby Cassie. At her last doctor's appointment, she was 12 pounds, 9 ounces, and 23.5 inches long - putting her in the 90th percentile for both. Since our last post, she has achieved a number of firsts:

• Smile: She now smiles on her own and is close to laughing. She makes cooing and exclamatory noises at things she finds funny.
• Punch: She can visually recognize her toys and is able to reach out and bat at them. Is occasionally able to actually grab a toy of her own accord.
• Sleep: She has started sleeping through the night. She goes to bed at 7pm every night, is waken up at 10:30pm for a feeding, and then has been sleeping from 11pm until 6:30-7:00am in one single stretch.
• Crib: Cassie has graduated from her little bassinet to a big girl crib that John assembled. She seems to really like it and no longer has to sleep on an angle, having grown out of some of the gas and acid problems she has early on.
• Road Trip: We successfully took our first road trip to South Pasadena last weekend to attend our cousin Jasmine's Red Egg and Ginger party. Cassie was a very good girl on the 8 hour car ride down and back, and slept amazingly well in her pack and play while we were at Joe and Yen's house.
• Clothes: Though she just turned two months old, she has effectively grown out of her first set of baby clothes and is now wearing her 3-6 month sized clothing.

As an aside, it has not gone unnoticed that the photo album on our new photo webserver with the professional photo shoot has been hammered with hits. We find this interesting because we thought these pictures were amazing, and yet nobody commented on them when we posted the link on the blog. Hope all you lurkers out there are enjoying the investment we've made to enable your viewing.

New Fileserver

For those of you who are close to us, you know that we tend to be early adopters of technology, especially when there is a clear and present need. Granted, we often recognize that "need" several years before "typical" people do, but our early adoption is almost invariably to meet a need. We have just installed a brand new RAID5 NAS with a total effective capacity of 2 TB. The new 1080i HD camcorder that we got before Cassie was born consumes a massive 8 GB/hour of video recorded, so we almost instantly consumed all of the hard drive resources we had in the house. The new fileserver meets that need, in addition to being an iTunes media server, backing up all of our PCs to a single self-redundant source, and most relevant to all of you...acts as an external photo web server. We're not sure if this will be a permanent host for our images, but we're currently testing out how it works. Long story short, we can now host our images to the entire internet straight from the hard drive that they're stored on. No uploading to Snapfish or Picasa or flickr. The photo albums work like any on-line albums you've seen before, except that all the picture are available in full hi-resolution. So you can download them straight from the source and send them to print on your local printer with no loss of quality. Seriously, does that get any cooler?

Since this blog has been Cassie focused as of late, we've made her pictures available first. Check them out at: http://jbwei.selfip.com/photo/ You don't even have to create an account, they're available to view right away!

Who Let the Dogs Out?

As with many infants, Cassie's hungriest time of day is in the afternoon, typically around 4-5pm. To stay on schedule however, we don't feed her until 6:15pm with a snack only as needed at 5pm. And for the week 8 schedule, we'll be dropping the 5pm feeding altogether. We've discovered an effective way of distracting her until it's time for her evening feeding is rocking out to some music.

Cassie's Photo Shoot

As mentioned in earlier blog posts, Cassie had a photo shoot the other day. Our friend Hawk, who took the amazing pictures for our engagement and wedding, came over to the house and took some picture of us and Cassie. I'm not even going to front, they're stunning. Check them out yourself.

Normality Returning

We're starting to see elements of our old life return. Cassie is cleared to leave the house, so Carrie takes her to Starbucks every morning, and has taken her around town to Babies R Us, Costco, Target, the grocery store, etc. Carrie is also cleared as healthy and recovered, so she's been able to go to the gym and workout for the first time in two months. We've started accepting external social engagements again, meetings friends out at bars and restaurants, and even bringing Cassie to a friend's house for dinner (though, that was less than successful). So all in all, turns out life doesn't completely end with a baby. ;)

The Theory of Scheduling

Anybody who's had a baby knows that there are a million and 1 opinions about how to raise a child, and everybody is eager to convince you that their method is the right way. Every book has fundamental conflicts with every other book, so it's impossible to take everybody's opinion to heart. Carrie read dozens of books getting ready for Cassie's arrival, and the one that made the most sense to us was Gina Ford's very influential (and equally controversial) Contented Little Baby Book. The essence of the book is to put babies on a strict schedule to help them establish a routine and healthy sleep schedule. We're in week 7, and Cassie's daily schedule looks like this:

• Wake up at 7:00am
• Major 5oz feedings at 7:00am, 10:45am, 2:30pm, 6:15pm, and 10:30pm
• Minor 2-3oz snacks as needed at 5:00pm and between 3:30-4:30am
• Scheduled naps at 9:00am-9:45am (in stroller), 12:00pm-2:30pm (swaddled in crib), and 4:15pm-5:00pm (swaddled in crib)
• Bath time at 5:45pm every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday
  
• Bed time at 7:00pm

At her last doctor's visit, she weighed 11 pounds, 6 ounces. The typical guidance is that babies should get 2-3oz of milk a day per pound of body weight, so we have 31oz of daily feedings scheduled for her. At 7 weeks, Gina Ford's regimen enforces no more than 4 hours of nap time during the day to encourage good sound sleep at night from 7:00pm to 7:00am with only minimal interruptions for feedings.

Overly strict and regimented? Many people think so. But by the fourth week, Cassie had fully embraced the schedule to the extent that when we deviated by 30 minutes one day, she freaked out and was upset all day. We like knowing that we can have regular meal times for ourselves each day. It's nice to know that Cassie is at her happiest in the morning (when we scheduled the photo shoot) and that she's in bed by 7:00pm every night (when we tell friends it's too late to visit her). Knowing when the baby is going to be eating, sleeping and times she's likely to be fussy (just before a feeding), makes it infinitely easier to schedule doctor appointments, figure out when to go to the store or the gym, and when to have visitors.

We're not willing to swear by the book yet, Cassie could just be a coincidentally good baby. But we've enjoyed the structure and guidance it's helped us establish.

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.