Huang Kid Khronicles

March was really busy for Amy and Lee at their respective jobs, and it didn't help Lee that he was sick twice and battled allergies in between. Jada continues to enjoy her ballet class and Aaron starts baseball next month. Weekdays were a fire drill for us all, and weekends consisted of chores, play dates, and naps. Good times all around.

I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to make Jada's author celebration at school yesterday morning, seeing as I had meetings both before and after. But I was able to conclude my first meeting, race over to her school, and then bug out in time to make my second meeting. I couldn't stay long, but I took copious pictures and videos while I was there, while mingling with Jada and her friends and their parents. Jada had prepared a story about when her pet crab died, as well as a hardbound research book on dolphins. Both were very good, and demonstrated significant progress since the last such gathering. I can't wait until she brings them both home so I can read them some more. I'm so proud of our little author and researcher.

Yesterday evening after Amy had put the kids to bed, I, doped up on cold meds, decided to duel Amy on her "Glee" app by following up her rendition of Kanye West's "Gold Digger" with one of my own.  Here are her two tweets from last night (top one is her singing, bottom is me singing):

Just recorded "Gold Digger 4" using Smule's #Glee app http://glee.smule.com/song/solo/999933 - go gleek it! #Smule

Just recorded "Gold Digger(lee style)" using Smule's #Glee app http://glee.smule.com/song/solo/1000202 - go gleek it! #Smule


In a turnabout of roles, Aaron and Jada yelled down to us to keep it down because they were trying to sleep.  To which Amy and I reply: "Get down, girl, go 'head, get down."  When the whitest girl in America duels with a weary father/consultant trying desperately to get over a head cold, America wins.

 Jada's Sunday School teacher has encouraged the kids to memorize key Bible verses and call them to mind through the Lenten season whenever they see an Easter bunny or a cross.  Jada's is Romans 5:8.  You can watch her practice in her room in the video below.

Still recuperating from a cold and at the end of a draining week, so why not run myself and the kids ragged come the weekend?  Amy wanted no part of our mad itinerary and stayed home; clearly she is more intelligent than I.

8:30a - We head out to the Y and take their scooters this time rather than car or bus.  While Jada revels in her wheels, Aaron quickly tires of pushing and ends up chasing her by foot while I lug his wheels.  It's going to be a long day and I have to carry this thing around with me? 

9:30a - I get in an abbreviated session of lifting and swimming while the kids are in the kid watch room.  We take a quick walk to the El station, transfer to the trolley at 30th Street Station, pop back above ground at 19th, and scooter our way to the Franklin Institute to meet my friend and his son.  They're members so we get in free, which is great because that's how we roll.

12:30p - We stroll to the Shops Comcast Center and grab Chinese food before parting ways.  The kids and I head a few blocks east to Pennsylvania Convention Center to meet another friend of mine and his three girls at the Philadelphia Home Show (or, as I like to call it, fantasizing about jacuzzis for grown-ups and trick-or-treating for children).

2:30p - We leave the Home Show with bags full of brochures and candy, meander through Reading Terminal Market, grab some soft pretzels, and head back to the Convention Center to let the kids run around some more.  They have to catch a train home so we part ways.  I decide to add to my growing load of things in my canvas bag (wet swimsuit and towel, two scooters, paraphernalia from various contractors) some essentials from nearby Chinatown, since we're so close by. 

3:30p - The kids scooter from Chinatown to the subway stop, we ride back to our neighborhood, and they scooter from the subway stop back home.  By now, Aaron is much more into the scootering, and Jada is continuing to love her wheels.  And I am happy, though weary, that scootering allowed us to go a little further than if we had to do it all by walking.  Meaning this won't likely be the last time Sk8er Girl and Runnnboi will be seen zigzagging through downtown traffic on their wheels.

Living in urban Philadelphia, nature is not actually that far away.  Clark Park and Fairmount Park are hard to top as urban parks.  Even closer to home (literally), albeit on a much smaller scale, is our Bird Sanctuary, a dead space behind a bunch of houses that the local community association took control over a few years ago, and since then us neighbors have helped tame it into a really great place for people of all ages to hand out in.

So last weekend, when Jada had not one but two play dates with classmates, we ended both get-togethers in the Bird Sanctuary.  As you can see from the pics and video, the kids all had a great time.  Nice to have nature so close to our house - literally right outside our back door!

Jada's two front teeth have been so loose that they protrude from her mouth at a 45-degree angle. Then, yesterday at the playground after school, she was engaged in horseplay with her friends, got smushed in the mouth, and one of those front teeth started bleeding. It was time to go home anyway, so we scurried home, Jada alternating between cries about blood and excitement about finally losing her tooth. But when we got home and I offered to yank it out, she clammed up. Twice she scampered upstairs to try to do it herself in the privacy of her own bathroom, and twice she failed to summon up the courage to just give it a pull. So fearful was she of it hurting that she teared up several times just at the mere thought of it, and decided that while she wanted it out before bedtime, it would have to be Amy to do it. Finally, we did everything possible - eat dinner, brush teeth, put on pajamas, read stories, and pray - and just them Amy came home from work. Laying Jada against her chest, she got a tissue, grabbed hold of Jada's tooth, and - despite some wiggling and protests from Jada - pulled that thing clean out. Jada sprinted to the bathroom to rinse her mouth and take a look in the mirror. I waited for her to stop crying and then snapped a photo. The tooth next to it is pretty loose itself. Maybe that one she'll pull out on her own. For now, it's good to have a professional nurse practitioner in the house.

Apologies in advance for the excruciatingly boring nature of today's post. Ever the documentarian, every once in a while, I like to catalog my days, both for my future self as well as for my many suburban friends and family members who are fascinated with our urban ways of life. Today's post has an additional purpose of demonstrating how much of a mule I am at times. It's funny how Amy and I are high-powered economic consultant and psych nurse practitioner by day, but by morning and evening we are bag-carrier, maid, and cook for a couple of kids. Strange how life works sometimes. Anyway, Monday was catalog-worthy, so here goes: 7:00a - Been up since 4. Praying, running outside, lifting at the Y, showering, shaving, dressing. The kids get up, get dressed, and amble downstairs for breakfast. The kitchen is a blur of eating breakfast, fixing lunches, washing dishes, putting away other dishes, and cleaning up. 8:00a - It's a two-block walk to Jada's school, and then one more block to Aaron's. (Pick-up is even more convenient, as Jada ends up at Aaron's school after-school.) I walk five more blocks to the subway stop, and within five minutes am downtown. My office is two blocks more. Morning commute, including two kid drop-offs, totals less than 30 minutes, ten blocks walked, no cost (Transpass = unlimited rides), no gas consumed. Piece of cake, except for the facts that on Monday I am literally a mule, carrying my work bag (which includes my laptop, which I bring home so I can work some on the weekend), my lunch, Aaron's blanket and sheet (which Amy has washed over the weekend), and Jada's ballet bag (so I have it when I pick her up after school). (The kids will often pile on me by asking me to carry their lunch boxes and backpacks, so that they can run free.) 8:30a - I cram some work in before walking a block to a PATCO stop and taking a ten-minute ride to Camden, New Jersey. I emerge a block away from my meeting destination, Cooper Health System. Fare is $2.80 round-trip, or 30 percent less than the toll to cross the Ben Franklin Bridge, to say nothing of gas, parking, and traffic. 5:00p - After I return from my Camden meeting, I have three more afternoon meetings back-to-back-to-back, totaling two hours. Monday is actually a light day for me in the context of this week, as Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday will combine for a whopping 18 meetings totaling 18 hours. Since I have nine hours per day of work time during normal business hours, it doesn't leave much time for work, of which I have a lot this week, so it's daunting to think on Monday that I'm just at the beginning. 5:30p - I've cut out early to grab Aaron and Jada, walk them six blocks to Jada's ballet class, walk Aaron four blocks home, eat dinner with Amy and Aaron, clean up while Aaron gets ready for bed, walk four blocks back to Jada's ballet class, walk Jada four blocks home, and feed Jada dinner. Normally, we're home from school by 6ish and done with dinner and baths by 7ish, but Mondays we run a hair longer. 7:30 - Bedtime is winding down, and Amy flees to the basement for some alone time to ride the bike, catch up on TV shows, and sing. I get my stuff ready for tomorrow, put out my exercise and work clothes, and then curl up in bed with a book for about 45 minutes of reading before I crash. It's manic, mundane, and mulish . . . it's Monday.

Jada cajoled her way into letting us let her take Amy's camera to school to take pictures of her classroom's pet chicks. Amy's camera is on its last legs so we figured if Jada lost it, it wasn't the end of the world. Plus we would see if she could be responsible. Well, she was. Two days, in fact. Of course, while she took lots of pictures of the chicks, she also hammed it up with her friends. I predict we will see these same poses in ten and twenty years.

Many of you know that Aaron and Jada's school, PIC, has an annual plant sale.  If you are interested in getting a great price on a wide variety of plants, and supporting a great school in the process, you should go to http://parentinfantcenter.org/, where you can click through to the plant sale website (or just go directly there at http://picplantsale.myshopify.com/).  Pre-orders can be submitted up until April 15, and pick-up is May 4 (4p-6p) or May 5 (10a-3p).  If you order anything, please include our name in the order so we are aware of your order.  Many thanks!

As a follow-up to my post last week about Aaron's struggles with letters and numbers, I wanted to talk about the importance of failure in a child's healthy development.  Failure, of course, is scary and embarrassing for mature grown-ups; so why should we steer our kids in its direction and give them chances to meet it head-on?  It's for these reasons we parents often trip over ourselves to sing our kids' praises whenever they do anything good, quickly shoo them away from the scene of anything they're bad at, and insist that their activities are similarly disposed.  (Trophy for everyone on the baseball team, anyone?)

A colleague of mine had an eye-opening experience at work this week regarding the consequence of this kind of childhood.  (I am blurring some of the details to maintain confidentiality.)  A recent college grad who is a new hire on the job and who my colleague is mentoring said, during a team meeting, that he had never failed at anything.  And it didn't come across as arrogance.  Rather, it was a statement of truth; things he did well, he continued to do and got better at, and things he did not do well, he stopped doing and never revisited.

This youngster is bright enough that he's good at plenty of things so as to compensate for avoiding other things he's not good at.  But I pity him dearly.  After all, unless you are preternaturally gifted, most everything in life is hard, and takes some effort - and, yes, some failure - before we even become competent, let alone excellent.  Avoiding failure, far from freeing you, cages you terribly. 

Failure is uncomfortable, to be sure, and kids' psyches can be fragile, so I'm not arguing that the other extreme - constant haranguing, never feeling like you measure up, not ever getting a chance to "put points on the board" - is any healthier.  But it's an important life lesson to learn how to fail, how to harness those feelings of failure, and how to persistent through multiple failures en route to success. 

When my kids hit a wall - and, while they have their talents, they are far less naturally gifted than many of the kids of my smart friends, so they will hit walls a lot more often than many of their peers - I hope to be the kind of dad to come alongside them.  For comfort, yes, but also to let them know that failure is good, because it identifies areas where we can improve, and also to teach them how and why to persist.  For very little in life that is worthwhile is obtained without some effort - and, yes, some failure. 

My kids are at an age that it is important for them to learn that while it's fun to have fun, you have to take care of business first.  I for one bang this message home hard.  Chalk it up to my Taiwanese upbringing: always take care of business first, then you can go play.

Jada is learning this lesson the hard way.  She is enamored with her friends, and loves nothing more - even after seven hours of school and three more hours of after-school - than to socialize with them some more at the school playground after I pick her and Aaron up.  Now that the weather is nicer, more kids and their parents are making a stop there on their way home, to let the kids burn off some energy and so the grown-ups can chat.

Ah, but no playground for Jada if she's not done with her school homework for the week, or if their bedroom and play area aren't clean.  And so one day earlier this week, as we passed the playground and one of her dearest friends came running towards us inviting Jada to come play with her, Jada looked at me with puppy dog eyes, and I shook my head matter-of-factly and walked her and Aaron right past the playground and all her friends.

To compound matters, later that evening, after Amy and I had sent Jada and Aaron upstairs to clean up before bedtime, I went up and saw what could only be described as a disaster zone: chairs upturned, papers everywhere, toy bins turned over.  It had been awhile since I had spanked them on the hand, but I wanted to get the point across.  And I directed my fury at Jada, and explained to her that this was one of the main reasons there was no playground that day. 

It pained Amy to see Jada cry - not from the physical pain I had inflicted her, but from the sense of having missed out on something she wanted badly - but it gave me grave satisfaction that Jada was experiencing the sweet sting of discipline.  Minutes later, she and I were snuggling as I read bedtime stories, so I know she knows I love her and am doing all this out of love for her. 

Sure enough, homework was done and things tidied up the next morning.  In life, sometimes we need to brought to place of hurt - in falling short, in letting down your loving dad, and in not getting to enjoy something longed for - in order to grow.  I'm proud of my little girl that she is growing.

Aaron's parent-teacher conference was earlier this week.  Very informative, although on one key point it wasn't new information as much as confirmation of what we already knew, which is that he's pretty far behind on his letters and numbers.  Most of his classmates can sound out words and read simple sentences; Aaron isn't even close to knowing all the letters and numbers.  He's doing passably in other areas, so it's possibly there's something specific going on for him, which we'll ask his doctor and hid development pediatrician during upcoming visits.

For two Ivy League parents, it is a little disconcerting and we are worried but trying to take it slow.  It doesn't help to constantly see how advanced the children of other well-educated friends are.  For now, we're trying to strike a balance between not pushing too hard on the one hand, and making sure that Aaron doesn't quit on himself just because he's not good at something on the other hand.  We were also given some toys from school to try out on Aaron at home, to try to extend progress from school into the home setting, and to augment existing methods we already use. 

In the meantime, we're rooting for the little guy, celebrating the areas he's strong in, and trying to push him in areas of weakness and help him not be afraid of failing so long as he's willing to keep at it.  If we succeed, those are some good life lessons. 

Earlier this week, Aaron and I were in the kitchen having breakfast, and he says to me, "Excuse me, wah!"  Come again?  A few minutes later, again: "Excuse me, wah!"  I chalk it up to some weird thing he and his friends are saying.  Finally, he says it a third time - "Excuse me, wah!" - and explains to me that that's what his teacher says when she's speaking French.  Ah, he hears "Excusez-moi!" as "Excuse me, wah!"  Well, excusez-moi.

Yesterday afternoon we had no plans, so everyone in the Huang family was free to gravitate to whatever they each wanted to do.  Aaron cozied up to the TV and sat alone, mouth open.  Amy was exhausted from a long week of work so caught up on sleep all afternoon, working in some massive piles of laundry before and after a much-needed nap.  I announced my need for a nap and was able to get my wish, and then headed to the study to start working on my taxes. 

And Jada?  Well, whatever her daddy is doing, of course.  Her preference is to ever be on the go, but if we are all stuck at home with nothing exciting to do, I'm who she seeks out, regardless of what I'm doing.  So even though I was just shuffling through a bunch of receipts from last year, and punching numbers into a spreadsheet, that's what she wanted to do, too.  She requested a place on my lap and said she wanted to help, so I plopped her on my lap in between me and the computer, and asked her to hand me receipts one by one as I reviewed them and decided what I needed to do with them.

A couple of times I asked her to get off so I could figure something more complex, which involved shuffling through multiple papers.  During those times off my lap, she would wait dutifully in the chair next to me, and then once she was allowed back on my lap, she would hop back on and resume her helpfulness. 

Of course, I could not help but walk her through what I was doing and why.  But mostly I enjoyed her company during an otherwise boring task.  And, most of all I enjoyed the fact that my little girl, if she has nothing else to do on her social calendar, wants nothing more than to be with her daddy and to do what he's doing, even if it's just taxes.  That ain't bad for a father.

My college buddy once pointed out that Santa Claus is confusing, because kids are never sure if they are supposed to be "good for goodness' sake" or because they'll get stuff.  I'll leave "good for goodness' sake" for later; I'm fine with my kids needing incentives in order to do the right thing.

Case in point: earlier this week, Aaron woke up before Jada, and, unprompted, started cleaning their play area.  When I went upstairs to check on him, he announced to me what he was doing, and made sure to point out that he was doing it even though no one told him.  But when I called him downstairs several minutes later for breakfast, he started howling.  It turns out that he wanted a reward for his good deed, which was to watch TV before breakfast.  I explained that that isn't usually allowed, so while I was super happy that he had cleaned the play area unprompted, he would still have to come down for breakfast.

The howling continued before abating, but even then it was clear he was hurt that he didn't get his anticipated reward.  I compromised by saying that if he finished his breakfast and got ready for school, he could watch five minutes of TV before we left the house.  That seemed to satisfy him, both in terms of getting to do a favored activity as well as in terms of receiving something, however small and symbolic, for his good deed.

Amy and Lee slogged through a month of being sick, having lots to do at work, and juggling house projects (curtains for Amy, closet organization for Lee).  We celebrated Jada's birthday twice: her friends came over to make Valentine's Day card, and then family members came over for Chinese and cake.  Aaron and Jada finished up their swim classes at the Y; Jada will continue on with ballet at a nearby studio until May, while Aaron starts T-ball in April.  Social activities included our annual trip to the Auto Show downtown, plus a couple of birthday parties in the neighborhood.  Our church hired a new pastor and we got to know her, her husband, and her three children.