Recent picures of Lina around the apt

Playdates

Liz and Lina have been going on playdates more, and having folks over. Lina just LOVES other kids and babies. She loves to have other children around. She'll start pointing, laughing and sometimes yelling. Frenetic energy.

Here are some recent pics of a playdate at our place with Janet (and "Aju") and Charice (and Max and Maddy). I posted about them a while back...Janet and Charice's husbands, Taos and Ko, respectively, were both classmates of mine at Wharton. Liz met Janet and Charice in Philly and they bonded as LA transplants who were dragged to Philly. Now they are all back in LA with their kids. Ours is the youngest. Liz and Lina also just hung out with Janet (and Agnes) and Grace (and Christian). (Grace is also a prolific updater of her blog!) Charice and Ko just had another one recently!

Books

Liz and I were both book nerds growing up. Trying to instill some of that into Lina. She's starting to really get into books. As some of you know, Eric Carle is a famous illustrator and children's book writer. This year is the 40th anniversary of his seminal work "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." His illustrations have a very distinct style, and even Google chose to redesign the home page on the actual 40th day anniversary, in his style. Anyway, Liz recently bought Lina the book "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" Lina loves it! This morning, without gesturing, I asked Lina: "do you want to read a book? How about 'Brown Bear?'" She crawled right up to her book shelf, picked up Brown Bear and exclaimed "brunh brunh." Haha. I was proud...

Here she is sitting by her bookcase.

Bad blogger

I'm a bad blogger. Ever since I read this post from my boy Tim Kau in NY I've been feeling really antsy about my inability to blog consistently. And even @Hosive talks about the modern-day pressure of needing to consistently express oneself on social networks - through tweets, FB updates, Flickr uploads, FB picture uploads, imeem playlists, etc., etc. I do feel this persistent low grade stress, or annoyance, in the back of mind, for not being up to date on posts, tweets, updates, and pictures. My little sister-in-law Leener, for example, is an avid blogger and is so on top of her pictures, both on her blog and on FB. Most of my tagged photos on FB are from her.

I started this blog with grand ambitions. I wanted to comment on not just our life in LA - which has been dominated this year by the new entrant into the family - but also talk about the industry I'm in (music, digital media, etc.) and maybe even talk about travel, etc. I wanted to talk about interesting ideas that I'm ruminating over. And I wanted to write about meaningful things related to family, life, politics, faith, etc. All of the things I find on my friends' blogs...

But, at the end of the day, it's just hard to find any energy left to write anything. It's been a tiring year! And to be quite honest, I just don't seem to have any interesting ideas or topics to explore these days. And if I do, I quickly forget them due to general exhaustion. Well, things are getting a lot better. Lina is on a pretty consistent sleep schedule, and so our lives are a little more predictable. So, hopefully I'll be able to write more consistently on this blog again. But I'm not going to overreach. I'm gonna keep it simple. Step 1: I'm gonna post some recent pics of daddy's girl now...

Chores Part 2

Here's Lina doing more chores...sending some faxes for me, and loading the dishwasher...