Baby J turned two months old...

Starting to develop some serious head control.

Having a child feels like you're counting time like a teenager does in relationships.  You celebrate weekly and monthly "anniversaries" (but I still refuse to call them that!) or "birthdays."  Jeongmin turned two months a couple days ago.  Here are some pictures of what he's been up to the past few weeks:

Baby giggles:  Awesome.

Hanging out with Nora, the daughter of my friends Amy and Andrew, just two weeks younger than Jeongmin.  He looks very smug here--he's quite the ladies' man already.

Daddy's belly is super comfortable.

He charms all the ladies.  Here he is with Min Gi's manager's daughter, Jisu.  He's already charmed her.

I love this picture.  It's captured the personality I see all day.

Min Gi has left his job to begin his new adventure as a full-time dad, and I have just one week of maternity leave left.  It will be hard to be apart from the little guy (very hard), but in some ways I look forward to returning to my job.

For more cuteness:

Baby: Weeks 7 -9

Thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  I've been crabby and impatient the last few days dealing with the end-of-pregnancy body blahs, but I'm still very thankful for many things in my life.  This list is not really in order, but here we are:

1.  Always and forever, I am thankful to Min Gi, who continues to surprise me with his patience, concern, love, and growth. He's about to be the best damn dad in the whole world to our little one--I can tell.
2.  I am thankful for the closeness I've had with my family this year.  My family is not always easy to get along with up close, but the last year has been one of a surprising increase in the depth and quality of my relationships with each of my immediate family members.  Most especially my mother, who at one time I believed I could never have the kind of close relationship I desired.  Do they still drive me nuts?  Sure.  But we are all in a very good place these days.  It was unexpected.
3.  I am very thankful for my mental health recovery.  Being depressed sucks (so y'all know).
4.  Despite the discomforts of the last few weeks, I'm thankful that my first time ever being pregnant has been so healthy and successful.  I know not everyone gets that, so even though I have griped and dealt with negative hormonal surges, I've been pretty darn lucky overall.
5.  I am thankful that I found a job I love and believe in and feel valued and competent.  This probably has contributed to #3 more than anything else.  I am thankful to my co-workers and for the opportunity that came about at such a fortuitous moment in my life.  And extremely thankful about how supportive they have been of my transition to motherhood.
6.  I am very thankful for friends near and far who have been patient with my funk earlier in 2011 and, despite largely electing to be childless themselves (so far for some), tolerant of my increasing baby-brain-ness.  I am thankful for the new friends I've made who are already moms (and some old friends who have grown close again because of this) and have been helping me through a lot of this.
7.  I am thankful for Min Gi's family who support us immeasurably from Korea.  I know he misses them a ton and I *will* find a way for us to visit them next spring or summer.
8.  I am thankful for the strides we have made this year financially as a family unit.  Compared to this time last year, we are in a much better place as far as working together to accomplish monetary goals.  We still have a long way to go, and I promise I'll start blogging about this again, but for now, Min Gi and I are just a lot more supportive of each other and a lot more comfortable expressing our true needs than we were.  It's pretty awesome.
9. I am thankful for the health of our other two family members--Saja and Princess--who have been through 5 moves in the last two years (one of which was international) and have adjusted stunningly each time.  Dear, dear kitties.
10.  Everyday, I am more and more thankful for the choices my privileged life allows.  I become more aware of them as I grow older, and sometimes it's hard to think about how lucky I am because of the difficulties I see, but overall, I'm a very lucky, lucky person.

Natural Disaster #2: Goodnight, Irene.

What a week it has been here in the DC/Baltimore area, folks.  And damn, I should really be careful about wishing for experiences.

Just as we were all coming off of the collective "phew" from the earthquake that caused very little damage and even fewer casualties, the weatherpersons started to project a path of doom for the Hurricane Irene creeping up the east coast to finally hit North Carolina on Saturday, pounding the crap out of most of the eastern sea board up into Canada.

We don't often get hurricanes in this area--they usually fizzle out to minorly annoying tropical storms before they even cause us any rain--so we aren't particularly equipped to handle them well.  The last serious hurricane here was when Hurricane Isabel found her way up the Chesapeake Bay eight years ago.  I was in college down in St. Mary's, which is a low-lying area surrounded by water.  I hunkered down for the storm a bit more inland (with my friend Amy, who is--interestingly enough--expecting her first child about a week after mine) and remember that the main effects were a loss of power lasting an average of 8-72 hours for most people, major flooding (I know some people who lost homes in Georgetown from that), and downed trees becoming projectile missiles that destroyed parts of homes, cars, and anything else they fancied smashing into.

The nice thing about a hurricane (and just about the ONLY "nice" thing about a hurricane) is that you usually have plenty of time to prepare for the doom. Which is great (because you can prevent a lot of casualties and some more severe property loss), but also sucks because you feel obligated to do a whole lot of things to prepare that may prove unnecessary because the path of the storm alters.

With the memory of Isabel in mind, after working my 8 hour shift at the crisis hotline on Friday (with lots of people calling to ask for info about the storm), I slept only a few hours and spent all morning Saturday prepping my folks' house for the storm and making some foods that wouldn't require the use of electricity to eat (pasta salad, anyone?).  Since my parents are doing a lot of home repairs at the moment, by the time I finished, I was dripping with sweat and the garage was bursting with renovation supplies, trash cans, plastic bins, and assorted lawn things.   Then it was time to shower and head back in to work.

The worst bit of the storm was predicted for this area between 10pm Saturday and 3am Sunday.  Well... I work 4pm-12am on Saturday, so I just packed up the blow up camping bed, an overnight bag, plenty of food, and headed in figuring that I would wait to leave until after things had calmed down.  I crashed in a co-worker's office after my shift ended and woke up around 7:30 am.  We only lost power twice during the storm, and it came back quickly (within 5 minutes) both times.

As my drive home (and Sunday evening shift at work with many, many calls from people in crisis because of the storm) proved, we were very lucky.  Every other neighborhood I drove through seemed to have some major property damage/power loss.  The ones between were completely untouched.  I'm grateful that my family's house was spared, but I know others, like Amanda, dealt with some major damage and long-term outages.  School openings were delayed in Southern Maryland.  People in Baltimore are still without power.  The news is saying the property damage is reaching record highs and at least 31 deaths have been attributed to the storm.

My husband found the whole thing exhilarating, but he was definitely anxious.  Korea is not a country that gets much in the way of earthquakes, thunderstorms (which DC has had plenty of in late summer), or hurricanes, so it was all new for him.  He worried himself sick about me, even though he knew exactly where I was and that I wasn't doing stupid things like driving home in the middle of the storm.

Generally, the people who analyze this sort of thing (like my friend Sam who works on NOAA's latest hurricane weather computer modeling) say that the DC metro area got off pretty light, and I tend to agree.  Although that doesn't really help the people who did lose a lot.  (Side note--I'm really going to have to have a rant one of these days about how not opening storm shelters until after the storm is well under way in a county that has a significant homeless population living out of cars and under bridges and bleachers is unacceptable.  Telling them to "stay in the basement" doesn't help, morons.)

Let's hope that was the last bit of "excitement" on the mother nature front for at least... say... the next three months.  At which point I'm sure that the labor and delivery of my feisty child will be about all the "natural" and "disaster" I can tolerate.

Overwhelmed? Just start...

Ok, so I really am ready to begin again with this blogging thing, but I'm having some troubles because I'm overwhelmed with where to begin, how on earth to play catch-up to my satisfaction, and the urgent desire to make whatever I'm posting extremely worthy of reading to those of you who have been waiting for my return (you know... all five of you, including Mom and Dad).

And I guess instead of worrying about all of the blogging "tasks" I want to do, I should just start by posting an honest admission that I am overwhelmed.  And then... to just begin.

So here I am.  Hello.  Welcome back, Diana.

I watched the final Harry Potter film today and wept like a little baby from about the point of Snape's remembrances to the end.  'Cause I'm an emotional slob like that.

I will not promise mind-blowing posting of epic proportions because I'm just going to try a little experiment for now.  I'm going to write something here.  Everyday.  Even if I think it is stupid.  Hopefully I will eventually have some stuff up and going again that is NOT stupid.

I'll share today that last night, I felt the first really good kick from Peanut.  I'm about halfway through the pregnancy and that flipping, weirdo feeling in my abdomen just made the whole thing Real.  Which is very exciting.  Scary, as I've said before, but I'm now much more positive and excited about the whole thing.  Especially since all the job stuff is worked out (for me... Min Gi is a whole other story), and I'm pretty settled into my new position.  I'm also moving in a week.  I will explain more on that, I promise, but that's in that category of Overwhelming that I'm currently avoiding.

So for now, I will go back to my homemade pizza dough that is rising (yes, I make my own pizza dough now... see?  A lot has happened since I've been a non-presence in my blog own world), and to the episodes of SYTYCD in my Hulu queue (yes, I still am madly in love with that show), and think about the fact that I MIGHT know Peanut's gender by this time tomorrow.

How are all of you?

What I Learned from a Bad Job...

I don't want to get into the specifics of the problems I had teaching this year for many reasons, but I would like to give myself some closure on my blog before I move on into the much more hopeful future that awaits me.  My last day with students was last Friday, and I cleaned out my classroom on Monday.  So now that I've finished and can finally breathe and feel like myself for the first time in MONTHS, here are some things I learned about myself while enduring this year:
...

1.  If you are dissatisfied in your work to the point that you must medicate, it deeply affects your self-esteem and self-image.

2.  There is a double-edged sword to the job security that a teaching job provides in that it lacks flexibility.  The consequences for quitting before the end of a contract are extreme.

3.  It is hard to be a generous, caring, understanding partner when you are profoundly depressed.  Corollary:  My marriage is worth more than my career.  I need to be reminded of this one sometimes.

4.  Bureaucracy can be more than a nuisance that you must rise above; it can make it impossible to do what you are supposed to do.

5.  Not all problems in education can be solved or overcome by the hard work and dedication of a single teacher.  Not even most of the problems in education can be solved that way.  Believing this is naive.

Much of my idealism about teaching (an especially about public schools) and my faith in my own abilities as a teacher have been blown up this year.  I have taught successfully in many situations and many different groups for six years, but this one year at a school that was a bad fit for me (to use the politically correct phrasing), has made me question all of my previous accomplishments.  I am not a person who backs down when facing a challenge or gives up easily, but this year just knocked the crap out of me.  I will not return to teaching again until I have had enough time to reflect on this.  I do hope that I one day decide to try again, and that the fear that I'm no longer capable of teaching students does not prove to win the day.  But I do not know.

For now, I'm loving my new job at the hotline, looking forward to a vacation over the July 4th holiday, buying big clothes for the expanding belly, and updating this blog about my recent and planned adventures.  That's right--I'm back, baby!