Our Year of 2021
I started my September update and never really got it finished. Fall is always an insane month for me as it is the peak family photo time of the year. I will go back and at least finish that post later and let everyone know that I have finished the post.
I don’t really remember what I expected our 2021 to be at the beginning of the year. I definitely did not anticipate us to still be thick in the woods with COVID that’s for sure. Alas. It is what it is I guess.
2021 has really gone by fast. We did a lot of fun stuff and there were really struggling times as well. Just like I could say this to every single year, I say that our 2021 could have been easily the worst year, but at the same time, the best year we’ve ever had.
A quick recap for what happened in October through December.
October
With the weather being really nice, I tried to keep the kids busy outside as much as I could. We went to a lot of different parks. We also started a little mommy’s special Monday lunch time with the kids where I would take the kids out for lunch. The kids loved it for sure. We had Megan visiting us in the middle of October and the timing worked out perfectly for our baby announcement. Yup. If you don’t know yet, I’m pregnant. Still pregnant at least at the moment. And we are having a baby girl. It was really nice for me to finally have gotten over morning sickness by October. The months prior were pretty miserable for sure. Thanks to both me and Jonny hard working, I guess eating takeout for a couple of months straight was at least doable financially. Ha.
We switched our girl to private 1:1 piano lesson too and she had her first public performance in the mall. That was pretty cool to watch. While we have no intention to get her to be a professional pianist, it is still really nice to see her progress. At the same time, it has been a struggle too to figure out the best way to help her with her practice every day. How much is too much and how strict is too strict. You know what I mean?! I’m sure this will continue for a while to be a struggle.
Unfortunately, mom broke her wrist on a walk this month. That’s the big oh no for the month.
November
Well, Halloween marked our last fun time…when November hit, my kids started to take turns to get sick with all the bugs there are out there. After being in a rather virus free bubble for almost two years, my kids’ immune system against viruses had a major reset. Then they are back in the world with everyone around us seemingly has never changed their living habit regardless of the pandemic, our kids are just catching up on all bugs. And of course, when you are sick, it’s even easier to get another bug. Of course, as a mom with multiple kids, this is no news to me. It is just how it works—one starts something and then it passes around the entire family.
Luckily, I was able to get our oldest vaccinated against covid as soon as it is available. That helped me a lot to feel better still sending her out to school twice a week. The younger two were not as lucky though.
With me still working, kids still going to school, and me being pregnant, we have decided that we are just gonna get tested for covid in case regularly anyways. Now added in all the fevers, we have been tested so many times. All pcr tests came back negative…till this day actually.
We were able to go and do our turkey trot and Jonny for the first time beat Dad in the race. Wooo! Thanksgiving was pretty simple but good with family. Mom was able to come home for Thanksgiving from the hospital so that’s also good.
After Thanksgiving, we actually went to get a real Christmas Tree this year. It smelled really nice.
December
Well, with holidays and birthdays, December always has been crazy busy to start with. This year, it became extremely busy for me because I actually landed a big commercial shoot job. I was working for a car insurance company and they just launched their policy here in Arizona so they are hoping to get more location specific content. Doing a commercial job is way different from doing a regular family session. I learned so much throughout the entire process and I was so lucky to have friends and teachers to guide me through and to caution me away from some major disasters lol. The shoot was done in one day so that day was intense to say the least. I started the day around 4am and by the time everything wrapped up, it was close to midnight. I got the one shot I really wanted to get—not as perfect as it could be but I was proud of myself for getting that shot done.
I am writing a photography course on in-hospital Fresh 48 newborn photography. It is a pretty neat teaching opportunity but with COVID, hospital policies have been rather strict with how many visitors are allowed for postpartum stay. Miraculously, December we had a nice policy change which opened up the visitor allowances for me to go in to do sessions. I think the policy had changed again on Jan 11th back to be more strict but we will see if it stays that way. Anyways, this led to me having to cram in 3 newborn sessions in December as well. While it is not birth, these moms have been discharged at 24 hour marks so I was pretty much on call. As a matter of fact, I pretty much rolled out of our camp site at the commercial shoot, came home, took my kids to school and drove directly to Tucson for a newborn shoot and came back home.
Everyone was asking me if I was ready for holidays, I was like, well, not yet. I’ve got one more baby to welcome before I can chill. Haha. True working mom fashion I guess.
Probably because of the high intensity of work, while being pregnant and surrounded by sick kids for two months, I finally caught the bug and developed a really nasty sinus infection. I literally had a heating pad on my face for three days straight and still ended up needing antibiotics. My kids were pretty happy that mommy is taking the same medicine as they were. Shake my head.
We also started potty training this month and it has been exciting as it gets. There are days where I was surprised how well he did. And of course there are days where it is a literal Sh*%$#@^t show. The joy of parenthood.
We also now have a 7 year old in the house—full of energy, full of things to say and full of sass.
With a baby coming, Jonny has decided to hold off on applying to go back to school and move across the country for now. Will he ever apply to go back to school? What’s your bet? Ha.
He tried to go back to the office for a few weeks in the fall when it first became an option. That quickly stopped because of our kids seemingly constant fever. It’s definitely nice to have him close by and being able to work from home. I have been spoiled for sure because there are many times I could just go on an errand during nap time and only watch the kids remotely knowing that someone is on the property.
So that’s the last little bit of our year. We closed out the year on a high note for sure and we hope we can have some fun adventures in 2022. Well, I know we will.
Here is a visual for our year of 2021. I have been trying my best to keep up with my daily shooting still but in 2021, after being stuck at home, I started to venture into a lot of different genres of photography just to keep my creativity going. It is still my favorite thing to compile a slideshow at the end of the year and make a physical year book so everyone can flip through the pages retelling stories from time to time.
Back to School Mode
In my ideal scenario, with homeschooling, we would not really have too big of a change during summer times. However, it has been proven that is not the case. Even though we are not tied to the school schedules as much, there are still seasonal activities like city-run swimming lessons happening only during the summer break during the day. I guess this is part of the learning process for me as well for homeschooling.
We are very fortunate to have a great homeschool enrichment program close by. It is run through the public school district but it is only 1 or 2 days a week. I have always loved the part time classroom experiences. This way, my kids get to experience the more traditional classroom setting so they can still develop social skills needed when they transition back to a classroom eventually. I mean, in my mind, they will go to college which will have lectures and classes in a classroom. At the same time, I still get to help my kids with the Chinese speaking environment and pace of her learning in general.
Anyways, school started in the first week of August here, which seems pretty early since we were still getting a lot of excessive heat warnings and they had to cancel outdoor recess a couple of times. We opted for in-person this year. To me, the whole point sending my kids out to a “school“ is to meet friends and be social. It doesn’t make sense for us to do virtual on top of homeschooling now. To be honest, it has been a little nerve-racking for me with the current pandemic situation to have my kids in school. There is currently no mask mandate which means, the majority of kids around my kids are not wearing masks anymore. It is hard to do risk analysis these days because there is just so much we still don’t know about this virus and things could change rather rapidly. I guess we will take it one day at a time. I think for now, we are doing ok with this specific program but I am also ready to pull my kids back home at any time too if things get bad.
While my girl is in school, I get to spend some more time with just the boys. We’ve been going to a lot of parks lately because everyone else is in school and we can have the whole place all to ourselves. This is definitely a great perk of homeschooling. You don’t have to have classes at certain times or even certain days. Not that I am against people but I just like to have more personal space in general. And with less crowd, I feel a little more at ease letting my most active youngest child to roam free a little bit without me constantly chasing after him. Because we have been going to parks, my little guy has shown his great ability of climbing. Maybe he would enjoy rock climbing!
Our girl has been taking piano lessons for a little bit now. Her teacher is amazing in many aspects. She puts a good emphasis on performances and recitals which is great in my opinion. There of course is a fine balance between too achievement driven and too relaxed with progresses. I think with the group lesson, it is a pretty good place to be right now. We had our first in-class concert this month. All the students worked on two class pieces that they performed together along with the teacher. Each student also performed an individual piece accompanied by their teacher.
Learning an instrument is not an easy task. It takes a lot of practice and there are days where practice is just so hard. I am still trying to find my balance here too. Some days I feel that I need to be more strict and just make her sit down and finish the practice. Then some days, I feel that I need to let her be responsible of knowing how much practice she needs. One week, she complained that the easy pieces were too easy and the hard piece was too hard so she didn’t need to practice the easy ones and couldn’t practice the hard one. I left her be and the teacher called her out in class and told her that it is her job to practice not mommy’s. We will see how this piano thing goes in the future.
PS. While other parents bought flowers for their kids, I bought my kid a giant chocolate chip cookie. That’s the kind of parent I am.
The most fun thing we did this month was going to Sunsplash as a family. I have never been to a big water park myself and Jonny has not been in a long time. We have the ticket included in the Pogopass so we decided to give it a try. We spent 6 hours there and kids had a blast. I bet it would be even more fun when my kids are a little older but it was for sure a great choice for a family outing.
They had lockers so I just set everything in the locker for the entire time. It was actually pretty unusual for me to not have a photo device at hand but it was really good to not feel distracted and just have fun in the water. With that being said though, I still managed to almost lost my youngest once. Facepalm. There is this splash pad area for little kids. There is a giant bucket that will dump water regularly upon filling up. At one point, Jonny went on this advanced slide by himself leaving me with all three kids. The water bucket dumped water as I was just about to check on my little guy. After wiping off the water from my face, I could not spot him by the tiny water slide anymore. I thought he was behind the slide trying to get on so I went that way to check, which gave him even more time to run further on the other direction. I definitely had a mini heart attack when I realized that he indeed was not in the area anymore. Luckily my two older ones were really good at following instructions and stayed where they were so I could run towards the other direction trying to find this little guy. Luckily a super nice mom saw that my little guy walked out of the splash pad area alone and no one was following him closely and she picked him up and carried him back towards the splash pad area. Phew. The only reason I did not totally panic probably because I know that he knows how to float, which he already demonstrated at the waterpark prior to this incident, so if he falls into water, he won’t drown immediately. But still, that was scary. I later told Jonny that I am glad I did not have my phone with me at all. Even without the phone distraction, I already managed to almost lose a child once. I couldn’t even image how much more frustrated I would be if I had my phone with me and I was distracted.
Since I cannot bring outside food or drink except for factory sealed water into the park, and I don’t want to spend a lot of money purchasing those snacks in the park, I did my research and packed a big cooler. I got a pack of 10lb ice and threw 5 bottles of water in the freezer the night before. I brought another 20 bottles of cooled water as well in the cooler. We had a great fancy brunch at home so everyone was full for a while. Then I packed lunchables, some canned Chinese porridge and a bunch of other stuff. Since the admission is good for the entire day, we came out to the car for lunch and returned for the second half. It was an exhausting day physically but it was so much fun!
Ever since I become a mentor for the Click Community, I have the responsibility to write tutorials regularly. While I have always loved to teach, it can still get tough sometimes to come up with new content to teach because I feel that all the amazing people who joined the mentors team before me had covered every single aspect of photography you can think of already! Luckily, a member asked a really specific question about a technical setting. Ta-da. I decided to take the kids to the aquarium, aka the photography nightmare because of the crazy lighting haha, and to tackle this technical issue. Of course, I bribed my kids to be my assistant and bought them tasty shopping mall lunch as their payment afterwards.
One thing Jonny did this month that was pretty amazing was taking the GRE test. He got an awesome score, which is the highest he’s ever gotten including all the practice tests. I am definitely very proud of him for the result he got—I mean, if he let me help him more with his math, he could have gotten an even higher score but alas. He said that if he got above certain score then he’s going to get an iphone AND an apple watch. But we will continue to be super cheap and use our US mobil phone plan, which doesn’t even support stand alone cellular apple watch at the moment. Haha. I asked him if I could get an iphone too as a reward for all the time I spent taking the kids out of the house so he could study. He said sure. So now we are patiently waiting to see the new iphone releases and then by the time new iphones come around, we probably have changed our minds and decided to just stay with our current androids. LOL.
Now that he has taken his GRE, he will spend some time preparing for his school applications and then we will see if he could get into any of the schools he wants to attend. Fingers crossed. Of course, I am not looking forward to potentially losing the amazing homeschool enrichment program here but well, I am sure I will be able to cross that bridge when we get to it.
So that’s our August. I will start to get really busy as September rolls around—fall family sessions will be in full swing, or I hope ;) Then I still have my full time mommying job. The best luck to me for sure and I’ll take it one month, one week, or most likely, one day at a time and keep moving forward. Looking forward to cooler weather for sure though!
As always, thank you for reading.
We survived July!
This summer has flown past by just like that! In the past I’ve always had a pretty leisure summers where we could just chill and travel up north to beat the heat. This summer somehow became super busy for us.
To celebrate Independence Day this year, we decided to go to a firework show at Fiesta Mall on July 3rd. We put the little guy to bed and drove out for the show. The two older kids definitely enjoyed the show. I remember watching firework shows a lot growing up so this was a great experience for me as well.
July 4th fell on a Sunday so it was good change of pace as well since we are doing the major fun activities on Monday. We made a red, blue and white trifle for dessert. Apparently Jonny thinks that there should be jello in the trifle but the recipe I found says differently. We tried to make some jello last minute but we ran out of time. Oh well, the trifle was still super yummy. I did make it with a gluten free cake so everyone was able to enjoy the special treat. Of course, we went on a walk after dinner. This has become our Sunday tradition—a walk around the neighborhood after dinner. There is a Chinese saying—or maybe a Wuhan saying—Take a walk of 100 steps after dinner, you will live to at least 99 if not to 100 years old. Not really banking on this saying for longevity but at least we do enjoy the accompany and chats for these walks.
This year our church was able to bring back the annual tradition of the July 4th breakfast so we had a busy continuation of celebration on the 5th. Lots of good food and lots of swimming happened that day.
I was called to be one of the photographers for our stake’s girls’ camp this year. They were going up to a camp ground, but unfortunately there was a fire. Everything got moved locally last minute and as the leaders were scrambling to put together a fun experience for the girls, I was getting pretty excited about this opportunity. For one, I did not grow up in the church so I have no idea what a girls’ camp look like. Two, it’s always fun to do fun photo projects. I was at camp for three full days, pretty much shooting for 12+ hours each day. I had no idea what I could expect, since I’ve never been to camp before, the first day was a little tough. I had two cameras strapped on me with one having a flash attached the whole time. So much actions were happening so I was chasing around a lot. It was a little overwhelming and taxing physically because I was pretty much literally holding my arms up for hours and hours straight. At the end of the night, my shoulders and even the back of my hands were hurting. I texted my friend who is an amazing wedding photographer and straight up told her—I totally gained a new level of respect for you wedding photographers. How do you do this?!
It was a learning experience for sure for me. On day two and three, I switched my focus and approach and decided to just go back to my usual way of shooting and gear set up. And I let go of chasing after every single moment and just stayed with some of the interesting stuff for longer period of time to make sure that I get a good photo. It was a much better approach and much more enjoyable for me.
They went to this arcade place(as shown in the first image) and I decided to get on the rides with the girls trying to get some photos of how it feels to be on the ride. I have to say, it was not the best idea to bring a camera onto a ride—I was focusing on the girls on the same ride cart with me so my eyes were telling my brain that we were not moving, however, my body was flying all over the places. Yeah, to say that I had to take some time to recover to settle my stomach is an under statement. With that being said though, well worth a try. The things we are willing to do for good photos.
To help respect the privacy, I won’t share their images here but it was a blast for me to be able to spend three full days doing what I love and figuring out how to solve problems on the go.
Unfortunately, while I was out at camp, Jonny got in a really bad car accident. He was on duty for the evening swimming lesson for our little guy. A car pulled right in front of him out of a parking lot and there was no time for Jonny to really do much about it so he T-boned the other car. Even though it was the other car’s total fault, we still had to deal with the consequence. Luckily the two older kids were acting out so my babysitter was kind enough to offer to watch the older two for another hour so Jonny could just take the little one to his class. It turned out to be a blessing indeed because otherwise the other two kids would have to experience the trauma too. And luckily, we have good carseats installed correctly and the air bags were all working well. I didn’t have my phone on me at the time of the accident so after I was done with shooting for the day I saw this really weird voice message from Jonny and then this message telling me to give him a call when I can. I listened to the voice message first and realized it was an accidental call from Jonny and it recorded the conversation at the accident site. My heart just dropped and I thought about the worst case scenario immediately and gave Jonny a call right away. When I heard that everyone was ok, it was such a big relief. Even though our van was totaled, at least the people were all ok and that is the most important thing.
Our insurance was helpful and was pretty on top of things and helped us to get it all settled relatively fast. The only problem was that apparently it is the worst time to need to buy a second hand car! The prices are just insane. But we need a car to house all the kids and their carseats…we just had no choice but to actively look for a car. We found this private seller who was moving out of the country for work and we did get a decent deal out of it. Hopefully this new van can stay safe with us for a long time!
I went back to pick up all the remaining personal items from our old car at the junk yard and wow it was tough to see how bad shape the car was in. We signed the title over to insurance company and got our payments. Then reality finally hit me when the whole active process was done that wow, I could have lost Jonny and my baby boy. Or if I were not at the camp, it would have been me and all three kids in the accident. It is such a good reminder that we can never take it for granted that we will have the people we love for however long time we would like.
PS. it worked very well for me for a couple of days to be really patient with my kids and just be appreciative about their existence but how funny we are as human beings, as time goes by, I find myself getting frustrated with the tiniest things my kids do again and want to just scream at them. Oh human.
PPS. we have been joking that our white van got tanned so now it’s a darker shade. Ha.
Since I was busy with all these stuff and my kids swimming lessons, I got so behind on so many other things. I did not get pretty much anything done with all my other projects. But this time, I have been rather at peace with the fact that I am not getting as much done as I would like. It is indeed important to make sure that I take care of myself first so I am at a better state to handle all these problems/tasks that are not going away anytime soon.
We have been enjoying watching the Olympics too. It is always inspiring to see how hard these athletes work to achieve that level of excellency. My kids have been especially fond of watching the swimming events because they have been working on their strokes this summer.
So that’s what was going on in July and I’m glad that we survived all the curve balls. School starts in 1st week of August here but I don’t think I’m totally ready to go back to school mode yet especially when we are still getting excessive heat warnings often! We did get a good amount of rain recently so that’s always good!
That’s all for now. I’ll talk to you next month!
A month (pretty much) spent in water
Well, as many of you know that our older two kids have been trained with Infant Self Rescue(ISR) lessons since they were little toddlers/babies. Our girl is super comfortable in water and she loves spending time in the pool. I have always felt that if she could work on her strokes, she will be able to build up her strength more and enjoy water even more safely. However, with Covid last year, I did not feel comfortable sending her anywhere because, well, you just cannot wear a mask in water nor social distancing much at all. I was glad that I did not feel the pressure. I was able to get our middle one back to his proficiency in swimming all by myself last year and this year pretty much. I mean, he has been in lesson since he was one so he’s definitely got this.
This summer, I initially only signed up the two boys for swimming lessons thinking that I would not want to over schedule myself. However, when June came, with everything was happening, Jonny moved back to work in our house for a while. I realized that I just had to take the kids out of the house so they are not driving Jonny crazy or driving me crazy by having to keep them quiet. Since we are going out of the house anyways, I thought, might as well go swimming. So I ended up signing up my older two for swimming lessons through the city and my youngest with ISR to get him water proof.
So long story short, my days have been like this the entire month of June:
Swimming lessons—> Get a snack—> Lunch—> Quiet Time—> Swimming Lesson again.
And repeat.
Don’t ask me how many shades my kids are darker now compared to when summer started a month ago.
I know I have shared this in the last email but when I sent out the email, I was just notified that I am officially a mentor to the Click Community(formerly known as the Clickin Moms Forum). I did not know what exactly I am supposed to do and all the detailed benefits I was going to get yet. I probably should have known before I applied for the job huh. But oh well, here I am. It is really such an honor to be selected as a mentor. We currently have 18k+ active subscribers to the forum and a total of 1100+ ClickPros. And out of all the ClickPros, we currently have 36 Mentors and I am one of them. This is pretty huge for me. I have always doubted where I stand when it comes to photography. I did not get a degree in it. I only started to get kinda serious about photography about 5 years ago—compared to many people who can easily say I have been doing this for 20+ years, I am such a newbie. I actually only stumbled upon this genre of documentary family photography after we got back from China last year. And now, I am selected to teach.
I know I have always said that my childhood dream was to become a teacher. Of course, more in line of an engineering teacher. However, I have to say, the sound of photography mentor is pretty good to me too!
I definitely now have a lot of responsibilities to help on the forum, including a mandatory tutorial each month. Honestly though, I have been enjoying the pressure. You gotta learn something well before you could teach it well. There are already times when I started writing a tutorial and realized that I could not write it clearly with the language an 8 year old can understand. Or I did not have enough images to support what I was trying to teach—gotta do what you teach as an example! So I went back to shoot more content and to dig deeper on those subjects. It has been fun to learn.
As mentors, we do have the AMAZING benefit of free or low cost education. Even though I said earlier this year that I will just focus on my own doings rather than spending so much time taking classes as I was last year. Well, it literally didn’t last for even a month and now that I get to take classes at a low cost, sure enough, I already have lined up so many classes for the upcoming months and even years I think. As someone who did not really do that well in school in the past, I have to say, it is just so enjoyable when you are learning about something you really love.
Anyways. I know this is probably super boring to people who does not care as much about photography. However, it is just super exciting for me. Jonny says that this is the ultimate dream of Amy’s—getting unlimited free stuff. Haha. Touche!
Oh, btw, a random fact/life tip I learned from one of the mentors during our get to know you activity—if you wear sun glasses and cut the onion, you will not tear up. Well, I tried it and it worked! I literally did not shed even one tear! Well, I probably have shed some tears of joy but, you get what I mean. So yeah, I already love this group of women so much even if I only get this one tip on life from them.
Out of frustration one day about not knowing where to take the kids to that is not too hot and not too crowded, I decided to give Pogo Pass one more chance. I was so upset that they did not extend their passes for more months because a lot of the attractions were closed and none of the sports events happened. I felt like such a waste of money last year. However, with a family of 5 now, pogo pass is indeed the cheapest solution to having a sampler of all the fun stuff around town. So I swallowed my pride and got us all a pogo pass again. I immediately registered us all for a Diamondback MLB game as our family night activity. I’ve never been to a baseball game before and none of the kids had either. Dback has been having an awful season so we had a really empty stadium lol. It worked out well because my kids got to climb up and down the stairs. Dbacks actually won ending the 15-game losing record. They should pay us to watch their games more so they could win more!
On a side note, I tried to look up the Suns MBA west conference finals tickets and decided that you know what, maybe I’ll just subscribe to youtube TV or something and watch it at home. I did not realize how expensive those tickets are at this stage of the game! Anyways, now I know.
We seem to have come out of the crisis mode for now at least. I have learned that with mental health situations, no news is good news sometimes. We definitely still have challenges but I am so relieved that we seemed to have hit the rock bottom and now we are climbing out of the darkness. It is a good feeling for sure.
I don’t know if there is anything I could do to help raise awareness and become an advocate yet. I don’t think it’s the right time or if it will ever be a right time for me to do a photo essay on this subject. But I surely do hope that someone out there is doing a project/story on this subject and maybe one day I will be able to find a good angle to tell a story about this topic so it is no longer a taboo and we can have an open heart to accept both the good and the ugly side of this issue.
So there you have it! June has been pretty good. Still feels that times goes by way too fast these days and I definitely am still working on the art of slowing down. However, I have been enjoying getting up early in the morning. Jonny would never see this coming I guess haha. Honestly though, it has been a good feeling when I have already gotten stuff done by 8am. So thank you so much for the obligation that turned into my motivation to get up early.
Thank you as always for reading. See you next month!
PS. After two weeks, or even less, Jonny has gained a brand new level of appreciation towards his own office space in the basement at the mansion in the front. He has since moved back out of our little house for work. Well, the reason? Should be pretty obvious. I was a little sad that I was not able to get a picture when he was working here. But I am happy that he’s able to stay focused better these days at work!
So many celebrations. So much frustration.
May went by fast. In the month of May, we had a lot of celebrations going on. At the same time, there has been a lot of stress and frustration. I guess that is life.
I turned 32. I mean you don’t really count the years after you turn 30 until you are about to turn 40 right? I don’t know if it’s just me, I feel that I kinda lost the ability to gauge people’s ages these days. The other day, we had someone giving a talk in church and he mentioned that he is 23. Somehow it just hit me like wow, I feel old. Not in a sense that I feel bad about myself but maybe this was the first time I felt like I am getting old. Then another day, I looked at my three little kids and I felt like I am such a young mom in a sense that I’m still in the thick of it when it comes to motherhood. It’s a weird feeling. With that being said though, I do feel grateful for being one year older. I do hope that I am one year wiser than before. Oh, and I for sure enjoyed all my birthday freebies.
Soon after my birthday, we had the mother’s day celebration. Being a mother myself now has helped me appreciate my mom’s effort in raising me to be a good person more. It is a hard job to be a mom.
Jonny and I celebrated our 8th anniversary in May with a little staycation sans kids. It felt great to be able to just spend some time together as a couple. I mean, we definitely still have our date night every week but with the pandemic this past year, we have resorted to mostly watching TV or movies at home. So it was really nice to be able to not having to worry about taking care of the kids for a little bit. We were looking at some of our notes from our dating time and one note referred to something as “evil cat—black powder“. We both have no idea what this means anymore but it brought us a good chuckle. I’m glad that after 8 years of marriage, we still love each other. As a matter of fact, we probably love each other more now than before because we’ve experienced so much more together and we have gotten to know each other so much more. Anyways, here is to at least another 8 years. How about that ;)
Well, you probably have noticed by now that I don’t have a lot of photos to attach this month. Not because I have fallen into a creativity rut. I have been shooting A LOT. But I have not been able to sit down to edit and I’m so backed up that my computer is screaming at me that my disks are getting full again.
However, I do want to share this though:
We’ve made significant progress on our own decluttering endeavor. The image above was taken in April(I finally edited in May) and now we have taken care of that entire pile of stuff. I know I briefly talked about our attempt to declutter last time but I just wanna give you an update on that. As someone who lived in different countries and cities, and who loves to travel in general, it is actually a really awesome feeling to know that if we need to move, we can easily pack up and go!
Speaking of packing up and go, well, we are not moving(yet at least). However, we have been moving things around our house for sure. There has been some new situation rising within the extended family that I won’t go into too much details about but it definitely has affected us in big ways. Currently, we are trying to figure out what boundary we need to set and what role we should play in a complicated situation like this. There has been a lot of frustration on my end for sure. The frustration is actually not so much towards anyone but towards the fact that I don’t know what I should do and the fact that I kinda feel helpless when it comes to situation like this.
It’s kinda ironic that May is Mental Health Awareness month. To be honest, I am definitely guilty of brushing off the topic of mental health in the past. To my defense, I was never really taught to pay attention to mental health growing up. However, I didn’t really try much harder either when I become an adult. Now I am forced to be aware of this issue and to face it head on. I so wish that I could have had more education before. I so wish that this topic is more widely discussed. I am glad that at least I took the Emotional Resilience workshop this year so I have some tools to handle some of the difficult choices in front of me.
If you are someone who believe in the power of prayer, I would really appreciate if you could keep our family in your prayers just so we could have the strength and wisdom to make the best decisions we can.
Since I am always looking for the silver lining, I have found myself focusing on counting my blessings these days. I am grateful that I have photography as a way to process my emotions and to keep me distracted when needed.
I am also grateful that my kids have been of good cheer like always. Kids at this age don’t quite understand what is going on however I do believe that they feed on our energies too. They can feel our stress. They can feel our anxiety. They can also feel our joy if we show them.
We had been doing a hybrid homeschooling model for this past year and we are on summer break now with the public school districts. With homeschooling though, I don’t really think there is a need for an official summer break. We have been working as a family on our science units these days. It has been really fun to have this family study time—we learn together. My kids are learning different skills at their own level—my oldest learning about the actual academic content, my middle one more on fine motor skills as well as some of the academic stuff while my youngest on how to not scream constantly. lol. Me? I learn as well about how to be more in tune with the spirit so I can recognize the individual needs and talents of each of my kids. I still get frustrated because wow do we even need a reason for the kids to start whining?! However, I do feel that I have become more chill.
I am also grateful for Jonny who is working very hard every day to bring home the—water. I don’t even want to start to think about the number on our next water bill but honestly, I’m glad that we are in a relatively good position where we are ok with the kids just playing with water pretty much all day every day. It is fun. I have always loved water so sometimes I feel that I am having more fun than the kids.
Speaking of Jonny and work, due to the current situation, we have decided to try and see if we can actually self-sustain with just our little house without expanding our space into other areas of the property. After a year, Jonny is finally officially working from home(he was working in the basement at the front house on the same property). We moved our furnitures and I reorganized our spaces. I told Jonny now it feels like we moved into a new house. Ha! And surprise surprise, when we don’t have much stuff any more(except for Chinese books), we actually have “a lot” of space. I might do a photo project on our attempt to live and work and school from our little house.
I am also grateful for my new calling in our Primary Presidency. It is truly an amazing opportunity to work with all these children. When I was little, I always said that I would become a teacher when I grow up. I definitely did not see myself as a teacher this way however, I couldn’t be more happy about where I am now. I was preparing for the lesson and I had a little inspiration on how I could teach the concept of agency a little better. There is something special about sharing my knowledge to help others, especially if I am sharing with little ones.
Here are some of the things I’m currently working on myself and I figured that with all the craziness these days, I probably should have it listed somewhere so I can hold myself accountable.
I am taking two photography workshops so I need to stay focused on my assignments and continue to practice daily.
I am working with a mentor to edit the images I took on our trip to Wuhan and see if I can get that story together into a book to publish and to get it into gallery exhibitions.
I am working on my emotional health awareness. I am slowing down and be intentional and mindful about my feelings. I need to get back to my morning pages. Well, I need to get up earlier.
I am working on—always working on—being more patient.
I am working on my garden. Hopefully I can take good care of the garden so I can have more stuff to harvest this season.
Let’s see if writing down the to do list helps me to be more organized and focused on the important stuff.
Well, it’s getting late and I probably should get to bed, like 5 hours ago. Ha. Thank you for reading my ramblings this month. We will see what June holds!
I'm only one month late for the quarterly report
At the end of 2020 I was not quite sure how I would feel about 2021. Honestly, like I have said many times, 2020 has been easily the worst year I’ve ever had because of all the people and opportunities lost along the way. At the same time, 2020 has been easily THE BEST year ever in my life too. I’ve never spent so much time, quality time as well, with family. I had never felt so freeing to just do my own thing and not care much about what others think. I had never made so much progress in my photography. The list goes on and on and on.
I was anxious about 2021 mostly because deep down I want 2021 to be different from 2020. But I don’t know if it will take a turn for better or worse. Fortunately, and unfortunately, time doesn’t really give you the option to get ready before it flies by. Here we are in 2021. And you know what, it has been pretty good so far!
I saw a friend doing these silly string fights and I thought this would be a fun way to welcome the new year. Well…It turned out that the kids didn’t quite have the finger strength to shoot the strings out far enough straight out of the can. I said to Jonny that next time I know I need to get a shooting gun for the silly string fights—they actually do sell those plastic guns specifically for the silly strings, who knew! Of course Jonny said never again. Haha. I mean, it was a real pain to pick up all the string from the lawn.
With the pandemic and everyone staying at home, you would think we would have less laundry. Nope Nope Nope. We somehow had to do way more laundry than before. Or it felt like so. Luckily, I found a way to escape from literally drowning in laundry.
We decided to go up north to a friend’s Cabin in the White Mountain area. We always loved that little a-frame cabin. Another friend of ours from church recommended some childhood favorite spots near by so we had this amazing secret spot all to ourselves the entire time. I’ve never done snow sledding before so I was having a blast too myself. The kids had lots of fun in the snow too. In fact, we had so much fun that we decided to stay for one more day so we could get one more sledding session in before heading back home.
Since we decided to stay for one more day, we spent our Sunday there. Of course, watching Music and Spoken Words is only done right if you watch it upside down I guess. I gave up my fight because after all we were on vacation and they did sit down nicely to watch me give a talk remotely.
I am so behind on editing photos so most of the photos from this trip are still just sitting on my computer. Hopefully I get to it some time soon. My computer is screaming for more storage space now.
Speaking of the computer, did any of you see the new iMac release? Well…definitely not my favorite. I guess I will wait for a little more to retire this very faithful laptop of mine which was purchased in 2013.
Last December, we found a baby tortoise in our backyard. Yup, you read it right. The kind that would grow to about 100 lbs. Our kids begged to keep it as a pet. Well, they didn’t quite beg but I agreed. From what I researched, it is actually pretty low maintenance to keep a tortoise. You just gotta plan for enough space for them to grow into in the long run. Earlier this year, I was inside and I set the tortoise bin out in the backyard for it to get some sun. I didn’t realize that our little guy had went out and dumped the bin. By the time I went out, our tortoise was missing. I was SO SO SO frustrated and upset. It was like I lost a child. Man it was not fun.
Luckily and quite miraculously, my boy randomly found him camouflaged under dried leaves under our big bush in the corner of our yard. Phew. Now we take extra caution when our little guy is out there so he doesn’t release the tortoise accidentally again. Also, do you know these tortoises, at least when they are just a baby, actually moves really fast?! They are not slow at all!!! Maybe not as fast as bunnies but they are definitely not slow.
Jonny has been training for marathons. You are welcome. Due to covid, they didn’t have the phoenix marathon race we usually participate in. Jonny and dad drafted up their own route and did a marathon together. Dad paced Jonny the entire time, which is very nice of him to do. I took the kids to one of the parks they ran through to cheer them on. Then we came home to wait for their return. Jonny did it!
Since January, I started two 3-month workshops. One photography related called Quietly Loud—which actually describes my brain rather accurately. I have been thinking a whole lot about my identities especially after this past year. The pandemic and our journey back to the US and then how everything was in the US had impacted me a lot on how I see the topic of identity. I try to write about my thoughts but often times I find myself too busy or too tired at the end of the day to be able to sit down and write. Photography this past year has become my major way of expression and healing. There are so many occasions where I didn’t know how exactly I felt or how to express my thoughts; I turned to photography. Since I haven’t been able to do much with client works, it has been really nice to just do what makes ME happy. I have taken so many photos just to experiment and I had lots of fun. Now when I look at those photos, too many of them as Jonny says, I don’t feel overwhelmed anymore because many of the photos were meant for me to just enjoy the creation process. When the process was done, the most important part is done. This way I can feel better at not really doing anything else with the end results. That has been also freeing.
The other workshop I did was the Self-reliance class through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints on Emotional Resilience. I really enjoyed my last self-resilience class on starting and running a small business. I didn’t doubt at all I would enjoy this class. Even with the class being held on Zoom, we were able to appreciate the group and the support so much. Maybe we lucked out but we really did have an amazing group of people. After the 10-week course, I wouldn’t say that I am now 100% emotional resilient already. But it definitely helped me to develop some good habits and strategies. I, of course, am once again amazed by our church’s effort on developing these curriculums and offering them for free. I would highly highly recommend the self-reliance classes. Let me know if you are on the fence or if you are curious about what it is! I can answer your questions!
After the huge hassle we experienced during our evacuation process, I decided to finally apply to be an American Citizen. Because I had to take the civics test and the fact that I just like to really understand what I am getting myself into, I spend quite a bit of time studying the US history and the US government. I learned a lot. I really do feel grateful for the Constitution and how the government is set up here. Of course, I still don’t like politics as much but I now understand why it is important for the people to have our voices heard. And I am grateful that I was able to pass the test and officially become a US citizen.
Of course, because of the timing of my citizenship test and all these incidents of violence and tribulations, I was really questioning the concept of identity. I am still trying to figure this one out and i’m sure my perspective will change in the future. I definitely am still wondering what it really means to be Chinese Chinese; what it means to be an American; and what it means to be a Chinese American.
At this point, I think I hope to look beyond these two key identifications—nationality and race. There are so many more ways to identify someone. I identify as a mom. I identify as a daughter. I identify as an artist. I identify as a business owner. I identify as multi-lingual. I identify as someone who is frugal. I identify as someone who is optimistic. I identify as a teacher. I identify as a follower of Christ. I identify myself as a child of God.
Ultimately, ideally, if we can all identify ourselves as children of God and we are all brothers and sisters but we belong to the same family. Then we can look past the differences to find similarities a lot easier.
On a different note, we were able to be part of the history by volunteering at the vaccine sites. Both Jonny and I did two shifts—I was going to do a third shift but one of the kids decided to get a scratchy throat that day so I stayed home to volunteer as a mom. Haha. It was REALLY cool to feel that we are helping. I got to meet some fun people and it was just an amazing experience. Hopefully I can get to volunteer again at some point since they are still in huge needs of volunteers. As a perk of being a volunteer, we got all of the adults here on our property fully vaccinated by the beginning of April. Woo Hoo!
Definitely not jumping back to hosting our 100-people parties right away but it was such a good feeling to have some friends over the other day for the first time. I am not even a hugger but how I missed those hugs among friends.
Speaking of vaccines, my parents were able to get their second dose of vaccine recently as well. Even though now the world is collapsing due to covid in India, with more and more people being able to get vaccinated, it gave us a slight feel of relief. Perhaps soon we would be able to reopen the borders so we could go back to Wuhan to visit my family, who has all stayed covid free this entire time. Or maybe my parents can come over to visit us again some time.
We are continuing to work on our gardens. Well, I am working on them and the kids are helping with eating the vegetables. We planted lettuce and we had way too much lettuce. We planted some radishes. The radishes were sooooo fun to plant because you don’t see them above the ground and when you pull them out it’s like a little surprise! My kids would just go and pull one out and munch on it. I never have been a big fan of radishes but I’m glad that my kids are eating them. We also planted peas and my kids ate them all straight out of the garden. “Peas” is actually a word my little guy learned to say before Mama. Oh well.
We planted too much Collard Greens and I had no idea how to cook them. We had them in soup, with bacon and…even raw at some point. We still have too much so we are hoping to get some neighbors to take them off our hands instead of wasting them.
Now I’m hoping to get some tomatoes and squash next. We will see how those go.
Our boy turned four! Wow, I actually just typed 3…he turned 4!!! He asked for a horse cake. Well…Let me just get some horse figures and put it on the cake instead. He also got some legos. He is really good at following instructions and build legos. However, he is definitely not the best at organizing and putting away lego pieces…so now one of his planes is missing some parts on a wing. I’m glad that he is not an actual engineer now otherwise those planes would be in big troubles.
This year one of the highlights so far is that I actually got an article published in an international magazine. I was super excited and went to Barns and Noble to get another copy of the magazine I’m in. If you are interested, you can totally go to B&N to look for Click Magazine Spring 2021 Issue and you will find my article towards the end. It is crazy to have a 4-spread article in print!!
We have two birthdays in March. This boy of ours turned 32! He is so old now—says the person whose 32nd birthday is in 3 days. I definitely think Jonny has grown wiser as he grows older. He chose a carrot cake for his birthday so I spent most of his birthday making that cake. Ha. It was a little too delicious.
As another part of Jonny’s birthday present as well as our forever on-going effort to minimize the stuff we have, we started the deep declutter process and we have gotten rid of SO MUCH STUFF this past couple of month. I was skeptical initially because come on, with kids, I have always been told that I just shouldn’t expect to have a clean house right? But at the same time, I was just sooooooooooo(ox1000000) done with my struggle with cleaning up all these stuff from the floor all the time. I was on board for real this time. So far, our house has finally come to the point where cleaning and tidying are no longer overwhelming. We still get messes but it is a lot more manageable now. I love it.
We have also been trying to gently nudge others around us to declutter a little bit too so we can have a less cluttered basement at the main house. This way I don’t have to worry about my kids, aka the tornado, breaking a lot of the “might be important“ things there. We’ve made a lot of progress for sure.
Kids are growing up and getting more and more mischievous these days. We love them though ;)
Now that all little ones can walk quite well, we can go one walks and have some fun. We are so grateful for this neighborhood and all the amazing neighbors we have here.
We dyed some eggs this year and we had an egg hunt as well as the traditional basket hunt. We dyed 16 eggs and we counted 15 at the end of the hunt. No one will ever know what happened to that one lost egg. From the smell test, I know it is not inside of our house.
We found this poster the other day. I told Jonny he should keep it in case one day he actually runs for Vice President. LOL. Why not the president? I guess you gotta stay humble? Haha. For now though, Jonny is working hard. It is nice to have him work from home so his commute switched from 2-hours pre-covid to 2 minutes now. Also for me, it’s nice that some times if I had to run a quick errand, I could leave the house during nap time and he could be on call in case of emergencies. His company just released the phase-back to office plans so we will see when that day actually comes.
It’s that time of year again and sure enough, we have a new litter of kittens. This time we have two. I already called Arizona Humane Society to possibly come to get the babies and the mom together for adoption. We definitely need to fix our cat problem here at the neighborhood. But…it is true these kitties are pretty adorable. Well, also, I need to clean that window well.
We have been busy that’s for sure. It is always good to be busy with things. It is also important to take some time to just slow down and enjoy life. We went to the botanical garden for a leisure walk the other night for Family Night. I wanted to take some plant photos but it was not really anything urgent. It was a nice day with some cool weather too. It was pleasant. I probably should do more of those walks with the family.
Wow, you made it all the way here?! Let me just give you a big hug!
I’m sorry for the long updates with the past two posts. I will try to get on a monthly schedule so we can stay in touch regularly and the updates won’t take up too much of your time.
For the mean time, Happy Mothers’ Day and I will talk to you in June!
Catching up on the updates
Well, as you can tell, I definitely am really bad at this journaling thing. If you have any tips on how to keep a good journal, send them my way!
Since I did the digital decluttering last year, I was able to really stay off Facebook for my personal news feed. I am in a few groups but that’s it. It has been a great experience without the noises on Facebook. Since I am still “trying“ to maintain my business at this point, I felt unease about totally giving up Instagram since it is an easy portfolio platform. However, I’ve made it to work by only scheduling posts in advance and only commenting on my computer.
I wanted to share my updates here on the website but I failed to set up a good system to let everyone know that I actually did write a blog. Haha. Well, good news is that I haven’t really been on top of this updating thing since last year so you are not missing much. Another good news is that now I have set up the email list so family and friends can actually get my updates now. Yay!
So here goes the quick catch up on all the important updates for the past…couple of months.
Jonny looked at the thousands of photos I took and said to me “Amy, I love all these documentary stuff but do we have like, one family portrait?“ Of course, I rolled my eyes and said “Nope. But I mean, we can go take one.“ So we did. I’ll save you from the frustrating first attempt where I totally failed to plan for unexpected freezing cold weather. After all, we managed to get some nice family photos. I’m pretty sure a random family took a photo of us taking this self portrait with my tripod set up on a rock and a stuffed dinosaur toy stuffed between the tripod legs to get the kids attention. Anyways, happy holidays!
With Covid, things have been a little different. Well, a lot different I guess. Jonny’s company Christmas party turned into this trip to the drive through Christmas Light Show along with a mailed in snack pack. Honestly, I actually might like this way better. With three little kids, anything that helps me dodge any of the formal public appearing is much much appreciated. Kids had a blast. We two adults had a blast too. I was sitting backwards on the driver’s seat for the entire drive through so I could get some fun photos. My back was complaining big times afterwards but I think it was worth the pain—for me, literally.
Covid can cancel races but it will never cancel the readiness of these runners. Ever since Dad did his first neighborhood marathon, we’ve had quite a few self-mapped races here around the neighborhood. We might not have a Turkey to pace the race, but we surely did have the turkey trot. Dad still won.
Even though we are not expecting anyone to visit, we still put up our Christmas lights. In the past years I was always the one who went up on the roof but this year, I got the more difficult job—on the watch for our little guy. He is just everywhere. I’m glad that we have extra help to block him from running straight into the street.
I got this Advent(ure) Calendar for my kids and we scratched off an adventure every other day leading up to Christmas and did a lot of fun projects. The most fun part though was undoubtedly the scratching part.
Christmas Eve was nice and simple. We got a rather pleasant surprise at the end of the day from Julie when she showed up at the door playing beautiful musics with her viola. That was one of the absolute highlights.
Had our annual nativity story.
Christmas Day was as exciting and tiring at the same time as usual.
We’ve got a birthday girl here turning 6. She requested an ice cream cake this year for her birthday. And of course a balloon 6. She doesn’t really request to buy anything so of course, this mama here decided to let her have her wish.
And just like that, we welcomed 2021!
I actually captioned this image—hold still, 2021 is coming. So let’s see what 2021 holds for us all.
My Photo was Printed in Click Magazine! | VOICE Image Collection 2020 |
I have to admit that it is an extremely exciting feeling to receive the Click magazine in the mail box with one of my own images published and my name mentioned a couple of times. I participated in the VOICE photo contest this year and I had one image selected to be included in the final collection under the Broken Reality category and one image as an honorable mention in the Her category.
Voice is an international photography collection created entirely by women.
Through each photographer's unique lens, the Voice Competition & Collection provides a platform for real women to share real stories. With almost 40,000 images entered annually, Voice is one of the most powerful visual documentations by, of, and for women around the world.
#SEEHERVOICE
2020 has not been easy in many ways and it pushed me into a dark corner that I’ve never been in before. Coming into 2020, I started the year with high spirit—I had a grand plan about life and about my photography. Knowing that we are going to visit China, I had a huge list of ideas for the images that I would like to make. I also was rather hopeful that if I got to get some of those ideal photos, I could enter the images to some contests to win. However, soon after we arrived in China, Wuhan my hometown to be exact, we went in lockdown mode. Looking back now, I was absolutely consumed in anxiety and disbelief. The only thing I could have focused on was trying to survive—being safe from the virus as well as not having a mental breakdown. I had no desire to pick up my camera most of the days and I only took photos because I committed myself to this 365 project to take at least one photo a day with my big girl camera. So many days, I literally had one click, literally one click for the sake of pressing that shutter at least once that day. Because I was so distracted by all the noises around me, and was still so hang up on my to-shoot list, I missed so many shots that would have been much more valuable to me and my family than winning any award. Then all a sudden, we were talking about being evacuated back to the US. The whole evacuation process was a grueling experience itself and that is another story for another day. When we were finally aboard on the flight out of Wuhan, the epicenter at the moment, we had already spent 12 hours in a freezing cold closed off airport going through all the health screenings and security checks. I had been wearing my baby and standing up and walking for 12 hours. My two older kids had crashed to the point that they were totally dead asleep and my husband and I had to carry them. But we were just glad that we were finally aboard, as a whole family, heading out of the epicenter.
Our evacuation plane was a cargo plane retrofitted with temporary seats. There was no overhead bins for luggage and we were sat together in a row of 6 connected seats with another person outside of our family being on the isle seat. My husband told me that I had to take some photos. I knew that he was right. So I handed him our sleeping baby so I could pull my camera bag out from under the pile of bags under the seat. I took a total of 7 photos and I put away my camera.
The people in hazmat suits were all embassy workers and they were doing their last checks before we took off. They shouted through a hand-held speaker:”Let’s get you guys home! We are in this together and we will get you home safely!” Little did we know that after this 12-hour leg of international flight, we still had two connection flights with long layovers in between before we got to our quarantine center. Little did we know that we would only find ourselves in a worse pandemic situation soon after we were discharged. Little did we know that how much this whole experience would shake my identity from the core.
This image has caused huge waves because this is just not something you see every day. As a matter of fact, I don’t know if the US has ever done an evacuation from China in recent histories, let alone coming right out from my home town. While I am extremely proud of this image I took and glad that this image has started many valuable conversations, I equally hated this image because it took away all the attention from the images that meant a whole lot more to me personally. I started to seriously doubt my ability as a photographer to make great images without the help of an epic historical moment such as this. I started to feel that I didn’t deserve any of the praises and awards because I was purely lucky and I should have worked harder. I started to question whether what I held dear to my heart—all the other images from my day to day life—actually had any value.
We often talk about imposter syndromes or calling ourselves our own worst critics, but this has been on a whole different level for me. Somehow, I could not get myself out of this dungeon. I did not want to look at any of the photos I took in China this year or even many of the photos I took later during this year.
Amongst all the internal whirlwind about photography, and the real craziness of life, I stumbled upon the VOICE competition.
Yes, I stumbled upon it. I can’t even remember how I found out about it now. I had no idea how big of a deal it was. Each participant could submit 3 images into each of the 13 categories of the contest for free and you could submit additional entries. I picked a few images, submitted and called it good. I forgot about the contest even until I got to know that they were going to stream the critique/picking for the semi-finalists. I always love watching critiques so I watched the streaming and to my surprise, I actually saw two of my images making through to the semi-finalist round. I could not believe it!
I first shared this image on Jan 31st on Instagram when we were in Wuhan because I had not cooked for 2 weeks. We had a feast every day--three meals a day for us 7 people. My mom cooked all these meals.
Two weeks later, my family was already evacuated back to the US leaving my parents behind in China. During quarantine, our meals were provided. We were very well taken care of but the food was definitely nothing fancy. We would FaceTime my parents as a daily check-in to see if they are still safe and healthy and with time difference, it worked the best to call during our breakfast time, close to midnight China time. Then I started to notice that my mom and dad would say that the seemingly only ok food we were having were making them hungry but they had to calculate how many eggs they could eat each week so they didn't have to go shopping often. Or my mom would jokingly say that we packed away all the late night snacks so my dad should just go drink another cup of water. That's when I realized that my mom literally used up all their good food storage to spoil us while we were there and packed all the snacks they had for our trip back leaving nothing for themselves after we left. And that's the moment when I was so glad that I took this image. That's the moment when this image changed from a picture of my mother cooking to simply "Mama".
Having this image recognized as an honorable mention award, top 2% among all the 40,000 international submissions, meant a lot to me. When I shared the evolved story about this image, so many people from all over the places reached out to me telling me that this image and the story had brought tears to their eyes. It is absolutely heart warming for me to hear that people can resonate with my stories. With this image, I was finally pulled out of that dungeon and was finally peaceful about the fact that I did take important and good photos. After all, I am telling important stories.
It took quite some friends, who have no problem telling me how much some of my photos suck, looking in my eyes and telling me that I did a good job and I should be proud of my work, and having my photo published in a major photography magazine for me to get over this major internal obstacle this year and to move on. I am really proud of myself for what I had achieved this year, having made awesome photos and more importantly, overcoming my own fears and doubts.
While it will forever be one of my deepest regrets that I missed some of the shots when I was in China that I know I would never be able to make up for, I now know that what matters is the next shot I take rather than the ones I missed. While I am still far far from where I would like to be eventually, I am really happy about my growth and I can’t wait to keep learning and keep shooting and keep telling stories.
The Fun Part of Being An Adult
When I was in college, or maybe started in high school, I was fascinated with Lomo cameras. Maybe it was part of me trying to be rebellious, I loved the quirky and artsy feel of lomography. Plus, those are film cameras so it was extra cool. I remember a cool little shop close by to my house selling lomography cameras and I’d go there so often to look at the cameras in hope that one day I can justify getting one with the money I made/saved. Unfortunately, that never really happened. I got a nice big camera and I thought that I was too cool for those toy cameras.
After honing my skills for my real big girl camera, I felt like I was missing the carefree creative part a little bit. Everyone these days seem to have a lensbaby so I was finally looking to maybe get myself a lensbaby. Then I stumbled upon this Holga Lens for my big camera. It is a pure toy lens since everything is plastic and it is like $15. I thought, hey, maybe this will finally be my chance to get that Lomo photos I have been wanting to take. So I got this lens, yup, the $15 plastic lens. Somehow it gives me this weird sense of satisfaction because while everyone else is chasing after those really expensive lenses, I get to be different and just have a fun toy. And it is just so fun to enjoy this fun part of being an adult—I get to be the kid I wanted to be without having to really justify it.
I haven’t been able to play with this lens much yet but I am super excited to experiment more!
Watercoloring These Days
In August I followed a drawing book and did one drawing lesson a day for 30 days. I would sit down and just draw for half an hour to an hour when my two boys napped. If you know me, you’d know how much I love a good nap. However, spending a little time on drawing was very calming and soothing—more so than taking a long nap. I didn’t have a plan in place for September so often in the afternoon, I’d be just working on my to-do list items. It was still good to complete my other errands but I just felt that I was missing something.
There came the Mesa Art Center Snail Mail Creative Catalysts Project and I thought it would be nice to try a small watercolor piece as my contribution. I did two in one day and I had so much fun. I hadn’t done watercoloring for a while so I thought, there gotta be some kind of short daily lesson books on watercoloring and it might be fun to do watercoloring this month.
So I found this book 15-Minute Watercolor Masterpieces: Create Frame-Worthy Art in Just a Few Simple Steps by Anna Koliadych. Perfect! I’m just gonna follow along. There are more than 30 lessons in the book so it will take me more than a month to finish the book but I’m ok with that. Who knows if I will fall in love with watercolor afterwards and just keep going for a while.
Maybe it’s because I don’t think I am an expert on painting or drawing at all—I just cannot draw human faces well somehow—I feel much more free to draw and paint. I’m just enjoying the process and when the end result is not as good as I expected, I can easily say—ooops, that didn’t work—and quickly move on.
I definitely need to do this with my photos these days. The better I got, the more I want for myself and I quiet often forget to just have fun and create for myself. Who cares? Right? Especially that I am taking photos for my family, I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t come back at me after decades to question me why I missed that one shot somewhere or my photos were not as perfect.
Anyways, so here are my watercoloring stuff these days.
"You know you can just say Thank You, right?"
I feel that I have gotten to know some really cool people lately and they are such big inspirations to me. I wanted to just go and tell each of these people how much I admire them and how much I appreciate them being an inspiration to me and just how cool of a human being they are. However, this insecure me held me back. What if they find me weird for wanting to reach out and just say thank you?! Would it be just embarrassing if they totally ignore me because they’ve heard enough praises or because the recognition from someone not so important at all like me means nothing to them at their level? Would I scare them off because they would be afraid that I’m trying to get something from them by saying all these compliments? Would they feel that I am just flattery? This list can probably go on and on.
As part of my grand attempt to understand myself, I too have been thinking about why I think like this. Am I alone in this or is this more common than I think it is?
I think this has something to do with me not being able to accept complements well too. Maybe it’s because I was taught that there is always someone better so anything that potentially makes you prideful is bad. Maybe it’s this Chinese tradition of always showing that you are humble that makes people feel like they are doing something wrong if they acknowledge their own hard-work. Woah, I just realized that as I am writing, this might even be part of the whole idea of each individual is only paying his due diligence for the big goal of the nation—don’t ever take credit for individual efforts.
Anyways. I had to learn to accept compliments. I vividly remember when I first came to the US and people would just come to me at the bus stop on campus and compliment on my shoes or ear-rings and I would blush and freeze without words in reply. Whenever someone excitedly came to me to tell me how good I was at something—that food you cooked tastes so good or that doodle you did was so cute or really literally anything—my response was always: Nah, I’m ok and I could be better.
Then Jonny totally called me out—You know you can just say Thank You, right?
I didn’t know that! How dare I just smile and say Thank You?!
Well, now, I know.
While I was still struggling with whether I should just go tell these people I don’t know well how much they inspire me, I got a message from a friend of mine telling me that I am such an inspiration to her and I am such a cool human!
Well, I don’t think I ever had anyone telling me that I am cool. (That might not be totally true since I think Jonny has told me that I am cool before, once at least. ) I’ve always tried to be cool but always ended up feeling awkward and not fitting in with any of the cool kids. I have to say that hearing someone calling me a cool person made my day. It was not coming from anyone with authority but just from this good friend I care about. It actually meant more than me ever wining any awards. I guess I might actually be kinda cool in some weird ways.
It was not an easy adjustment to feel comfortable about compliments but these days, I do find myself willingly saying Thank You more when someone complimented me. Another good thing is that, I feel more comfortable giving out my compliments too, gradually, but I’m getting there. I now definitely feel that it is possible to have this genuine desire to just say a simple Thank You for being awesome without any other string attached. The single action of showing my appreciation makes me happier myself and that would be enough. At the same time, others can also share with me these simple genuine appreciations for what I have done so why not just happily accept them and feel proud?
Thank you for saying thank you to me. Thank you for letting me say Thank You to you!
Baby Perspective
I have been wondering what life is like from my baby’s perspective. Is everything so big to him that it is fascinating and exciting? Or is everything so big that it is extremely scary? How does my baby feel about his siblings? How does my baby think of his mom and dad?
It has been a fun yet challenging process to figure out how exactly my baby views the world. While it is hard sometimes to physically get to see his point of view, it is more challenging to understand what does the world he sees mean to him. As a mom, I definitely appreciate gaining a new perspective to understand my children better.
Digital Declutter Experiment Report
Jonny was reading this book called Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport and he decided to do this crazy digital declutter experiment for the month of July. Always having crazy ideas and always trying to live a minimalist life, Jonny has suggested many different ways that I could change to live a happier life. First Marie Kondo, now this digital minimalism. To say that I was skeptical was an understatement. In my mind, I was definitely defending my digital life—
You are the one who’s always watching stuff. Of course it would be easy for you since you don’t run a small business. I didn’t spend that much time on social media and my phone, it was all scraps of time. If I don’t chat with people on social media then I won’t have any adult conversation especially now during the pandemic. Don’t try to solve my problem, I’m an adult. My phone is my way of escape from toddler tantrums—you can walk away to your office but I can’t!
I mean I liked the fact that Jonny is now much more present in our life. Would that be enough for me to change myself? Not yet at least. But at least, I agreed to check out the book myself and see what it’s about.
Fast forward to the end of July. I finished the book and thought that YES! I have definitely become a slave to my phone and the whole digital world. What is worse is that my mental health has been hugely affected by the way I use digital devices and resources. Especially at the end of July, with COVID still raging here in Arizona and nobody seemed to care and everyone started to question the legitimacy of this virus while my family has pretty much gone back to normal life in Wuhan, I was just straight angry. I was angry at everyone—myself, the kids, Jonny and of course everyone on Facebook. Since I knew that I wouldn’t want to be glued to my phone during the day, the only time I thought I’d check my Facebook was the first thing in the morning and I could put away the phone for the rest of the day. So smart! Of course, 100% sure that I’d come across a comment on someone’s thread that would totally fire me up. Then guaranteed, I walked into the day being angry and I had this negative thing in my head that I would have to constantly try to make sense of. Honestly, I was just so done with the way I was.
So I told Jonny, I would do the experiment starting on August 1st. As much as I hated the way I was acting, I was still not willing to just give up my phone right away. Ouch. By July 31st, I clearly remembered me telling Jonny after I wasted an hour on a meaningless argument on Facebook—
I am so done with social media and I am SO READY to start the digital decluttering.
Here are the things I decided to do as my digital decluttering guidelines:
No Social Media!!
Wechat—Check Family Group Once at 5pm
Check Email Twice A Day—9:15am and 8:00pm
Check Text Message Twice A Day—with email
Work Time—9-10pm on photos, assignments(I was doing an intense photography workshop)
Call People to Say Hi.
It might be surprising but the whole point of the digital minimalism is not anti-social or anti-technology. It’s actually trying to help us to build stronger real connections. It sounds heartless but it is so true that a “like” on social media is literally just one byte of information and it doesn’t mean much at all. Actually, I am definitely guilty of just liking someone’s post in fear that I would offend the person if I don’t “like“ as all the others do even though I honestly couldn’t care less about this person’s personal business.
Anyways, I outlined my rules and off social media I went, without announcing my departure. This is not a short break, or at least I hope, that it could lead to some more permanent changes. Also I was just curious to know who really cared enough to notice that I was gone.
During August, I decided that I needed to make sure that I actually call and chat with people. Being stuck with three kids at home is not the best way to fulfill my forever urge to have a good deep mind burning conversation. So instead of scrolling through FB feed or instagram, I scrolled through my phone contacts. I called people—at least someone every few days. Some days, I called multiple people. I have to say, it was SO nice to be able to hear people’s voices. I chatted with people about many different things, parenting, church, schooling, relationships, and even racism and politics. I learned a lot from others and I feel like heard too. Literally.
Of course, by doing this, I subjected myself to the cruel fact that I would find out who truly are my friends and how many friends I have. Sadly, there was one day, I made like 20 calls and left each of them a voicemail and no one answered and no one cared enough to give me a call back. I mean, I didn’t try too hard to try and call again and I know that people are busy. And these days people just feel that you are selling MLM if all a sudden you are calling people so they avoid random calls. But still, it says something doesn’t it?
So thank you so much for the people who actually picked up my phone call and chatted with me or took the initiative to call me. It means so much to me. You probably have no idea how much I appreciated that phone call.
I know there would be hard days when I would want to just escape the whining and I would be attempted to reach for my phone. Or if I get bored then I would want to reach for my phone for a pacifier. I decided to read more books and also start this drawing lesson. I read way more books in this one month than the total amount of books I read in the entire 2019, or even plus 2018. I also followed this book called You Can Draw In 30 Days given to me as a gift earlier this year. I did one lesson a day for 30 days. I obviously have not become this expert drawer/painter but I absolutely enjoyed sitting there and sketching and shading and see all the lines and shapes come into something real. Oh, I did it during my boys’ nap time. It was my quiet time and I enjoyed it a lot.
I also tried to just go out to areas where I don’t have much signal at all. I took the kids to the Salt River a couple of times and we saw wild horses. Of course, the kids loved the sand and sticks more than the horses but it was good enough for me to get some peaceful time out with no one around.
Of course, one major thing I did…was to use an app to block my applications and websites on my computer and on my phone. I know how my will power is. I needed something stronger to help me to start with and hopefully I can get into a good habit. I deleted the social media apps on my phone and turned off all notifications. The fact that it is an extreme hassle for me to get on any of these distractive stuff has helped me to not wanting to get on my phone or my computer much anyways. There’s nothing wrong with some tough love for myself right?
Now, I found this month a lot easier than I expected. I think one major advantage I had was that I was taking this amazing photography workshop(Visual Rhetoric by Courtney Larson). This is probably one of the best things I’ve ever done. It was kinda like the Self-reliance class I did a few years ago too. You get to interact with the teacher, and the workshop attendees. You work toward the same goal together and there are assignments to hold you accountable. The best thing, we get to do live chat each week. Especially under our crazy circumstance of this pandemic, being able to see the same awesome people every week and chat about the things we love is just a pure blessing. I don’t know how exactly I can make this sustainable in the future—obviously I can’t be taking workshop after workshop every month. Or can I? Well, I might have been doing this for the following months of this year, ooops. But no regret. So eventually I think I will need to find out a good way to just keep in touch with the new friends I made during these workshops and we will have our own private zoom parties maybe. Or really, hopefully we can get out of this pandemic soon so I can actually go hangout with people in person.
Obviously, life with three kids will be crazy. Period. But honestly I felt peaceful. I felt content. I felt inspired. I felt good. I definitely wonder now, how much I need to know about the world around me. It’s a hard balance to find between focusing on my own stuff and not to be ignorantly full of myself in my head. It will still take me major efforts to be a good friend and find good friends but I think it will be worth the effort to find true friendships. And the most important thing is that now I know I can gain back the control over my life—digital, social and any life. That is the most freeing and comforting gain from this experiment.
Especially now that we are still dealing with all the political stuff around us and this COVID crisis and everyone is just yelling at each other, I feel more in need of peace and control in my life than ever. While I might not know the latest data on covid anymore, I feel safe because I know enough.
So if you need to find me, just call me. And if you get a call from me all a sudden, I promise that I am not trying to lure you into any MLM schemes. I just haven’t been on social media and I want to say hi and catch up.
October updates:
So in September, I got back on FB and Instagram. Honestly, I didn’t miss much. None of the things I missed would have changed my course of life, not even for that day. With me still running a business and trying to find my community, I felt like I had to share more content to be seen. I definitely fell short on the calling and chatting with people. And like I expected, I felt a lot more anxious than in August. I would go and check if people had interacted with my content or if people had replied my messages. I did not like it.
So now, I’m dialing back again. Gotta enforce it while it was still hot and fresh. I haven’t found myself caring too much about Facebook. So I actually will just unfollow everyone on Facebook except our church facebook group and our neighborhood group and my Fit4Mom group. I probably will just check my facebook once a week if not once a month now. I will move here to the website totally for my updates and I will continue to make an effort to reach out to the important people in my life through other ways—email, phone calls and maybe even letters(give me any excuse to use my fountain pen, haha.)
Instagram, I still don’t know. I don’t even know why I care but I do. So I’ll have to figure this one out. My justification is that photography is a visual art and it’s just easy to see people’s work at one place these days. But maybe there is a better way that I am not aware of. Not totally true because I could just go and be on the ClickPro Daily Project Page. Maybe I’ll just move over there? I don’t know. So stay tuned for my decision about instagram. If you care at all.
Day In The Life
What is a Day in the Life project?
Essentially, this is a documentary photography project where I document one full day of our life on a regular day. I have approached it as an hour-by-hour project, where I take a photo on the hour of what is happening or a full on documentary approach to just keep shooting throughout the entire day.
Why do I want to do this?
It is the details in our day-to-day life, rather than those milestone big events, that will quickly fade away in my memory. I want to have a visual record so I can remember down the road what our daily life was like in that year.
Pour Some Creativity Juice | Photo Fantastico Contest Experience | Arizona Documentary Family Photographer
Have you ever thought what you could achieve with 48 hours from start to finish? I remember that rush of adrenaline when I was a student working on my final paper and the deadline is fast approaching and I barely made it by a hair. Well, I normally wouldn’t recommend this approach to any student. However, after being stuck at home since January, I think some healthy dose of this kind of thrill is much needed by now. Conveniently, I stumbled upon this photography called Photo Fantastico three days before the contest started. I immediately signed up.
Unleash your most creative self in a contest unlike any other!
*Create 5 images in 2 days.
*Compete with photographers from across the globe
* Win prizes
*Be forced to create an incredibly creative photo collection!
Here came July 20th 10am, I hopped off my workout zoom call right into the clue(prompt) reveal party zoom call. Maybe it was the exercise or maybe it was that excitement for this unusual new contest I’m about to participate in, my heart was definitely beating fast. And we got our 5 clues:
Highs and Lows
Street Scene
AM/PM
Unexpected Visitor
How Fabulous!
Now I’ve got 48 hours to come up with 5 images that go along with these clues and are coherent within the set. Well, technically, 55 hours but with my kids nap schedules and buffering time for uploading my submission, I decided that I better have something ready within 48 hours. So it began!
First I started to brainstorm under each clue and see what it means. Perhaps the fact that it’s the first clue, I spent a lot of time on the pair Highs and Lows. It can be literal. It can be figurative. I have recently done a challenge with flying a kite; I’m working on a home project to document our pretty unique life and living situation; I am constantly trying to just tell my story as a mother of three young kids. These were my first reaction and I started to try to expand along these lines hoping to find a good cohesive line of story for the rest of the prompts. However, I couldn’t make sense out of these separate tidbits. I thought to myself, it would definitely be easier if I could first write a story and then break up the scenes into five segments.
A couple of hours had passed and I need to start to make some lunch for the kids. First change of course. I’ve never felt more inadequate in storytelling than this moment. I wish I had finished the Masterclass on creative writing and storytelling. Do I have time to go and finish the second half of that class now? Probably not. Precious time!! While lunch was in the making, my brain was definitely not in the kitchen. Surprisingly I did not burn any food. Haha. During nap time, I started to google “how to write a short story“ and “how to write micro stories“. Honestly, the more I read other people’s short stories, the more inadequate I felt in story writing. I started to listen to songs and musics hoping to find inspirations. I texted the clues to my mother-in-law and told her to come up with a poem or a short story with it and hoped that I could possibly use her creation as inspiration or at least for my other personal project. I also gave the five clues to my daughter and asked her to draw stories for the different clues.
I realized that she used each prompt to create an individual story but as a whole, these stories were cohesively her. Funny, imaginary and full of love. I recorded my daughter telling me all these stories actually. I gave it a thought that maybe, I could also have a series of stories that are not related but all with the same theme? Quickly I gave up on that idea because it was too much work for too little time. Maybe it will be a fun project on my own for the future to create a series of stories based on my daughters’ drawings. But I did come up with another idea—are there any kids’ short stories or micro stories? Then I stumbled upon this pot of gold:
The Lost Balloon
by Evaleen Stein
O dear! my purple toy balloon
Has flown away! and very soon
It will be high up as the moon!
And don't you think the man up there
Will wonder what it is, and stare?
Perhaps hell say, "Well, I declare!"
Or, maybe if it chance there are
Some little boys in yonder star,
And if it floats away so far,
Perhaps they'll jump up very high
And catch the cord as it goes by!
At any rate I hope they'll try!
This is a poem called The Lost Balloon by Evaleen Stein, a not so famous American female poet, included in the book Child Songs of Cheer published in August 1918. Well, with it being almost August and us being in a pandemic, I immediately felt drawn to the fact that there is this book called Child Songs of Cheer published back then. I looked up the book but there isn’t much information on the background information on either the book or the poet. I also found it rather interesting that the ratings on Evaleen’s works are not that great, according to goodreads at least. Nonetheless, after a century, I found this poem and was inspired by it. My kids enjoyed this poem along with her other works in the collection. On a side note, my husband and I have been talking about how everything is entertaining these days including books. We have been wondering what books from a hundred years ago looked like and how kids were reading/listening to stories back then without the constant screen time stimulation. Anyways, this one little poem just spoke to me on so many levels.
I decided to tell a story that’s adapted from this old poem with a spin of my kids current favorite made-up story of Bob the Alien. So I sketched up my plots and ordered my balloons.
My ideas: 1. Highs and Lows—balloons are flying highs and lows and that’s how much my kids love their toy balloons. 2. Street Scene—My girl lost her balloon so she’s chasing her balloon in the street. 3. AM/PM—the balloon got caught in a big tree and my girl will go look at it in the morning and at night.(Cue—my attempt to do an awesome astrophotography shot for the PM with balloon still stuck in the tree.) 4. Unexpected Visitor—Of course the comet! 5. How Fabulous—Bob the Alien turned the balloon into a star and brought it back! I had two evening gold hours, two mornings, and two nights to get all these shots in.
We have been having unusual cloudy days this week somehow and of course on the days of this contest, we didn’t have my favorite golden hour sunsets pretty much at all. My kids were already in bed but I peeked through the window and saw that slice of golden light shining, I grabbed my girl out of bed and did a few shots. She was not that thrilled because she was just about to get to this exciting part in the story Dad was reading. I was not feeling too happy about the images because we were losing light fast. So I called it good and send my girl back to bed and decided to give it a try to hopefully get a shot of the comet somehow through the clouds.
I climbed up to our roof for the first time. I had my phone out trying to locate the stars behind the clouds. Then I laid down and just stared at the sky for a long while, by myself. It was quiet. I still had all these thoughts rambling through my head but it was a nice quiet time without interruption from anyone or any devices. Eventually I just gave up because there were just too many clouds and I couldn’t see any stars. I probably should have just taken the long drive out of the city but oh well. I had a headache anyways so let’s just get some rest and we will have a busy day ahead of us.
I woke up late because of the headache I had the night before so as soon as I woke up, I jumped right in to shooting.
These were pretty good images to show that the kids were having fun with their balloons and they took the balloons everywhere they went. They were pretending that it were their birthday. However, it was not as good as I wanted the image to be. So I kept shooting. Gotta work hard and it’s totally ok to have a lot of not so good photos to get THE shot.
I was hungry. I was hot. Can you even imagine how much the kids were whining at this point? Yeah, we better get the kids some breakfast. I asked my husband to take a behind the scene photo of me taking photos and when I saw that photo, I had a new idea. (Btw, Creative editing and Photoshop are allowed in the contest but you just have to use the materials created within the contest time frame.)
Kids were fed so I got them out of the house again. To give them a break I just let them play in the backyard while I climbed onto the roof again. Man, it was not a good idea to climb up to the roof in Arizona in the middle of the day without wearing gloves or thick pants or good shoes or sunscreen. I was just burning. But again, it is just an amazing view from up high to watch my little kids running around. Yeah, now I started to regret that I did not get the drone I wanted. Oh well, climbing up to the roof is not that bad after all because I found a new angle.
Then I thought, hey, how about shooting from this angle with my girl looking at the balloon stuck in a big tree. I tied up a balloon in the tree and then asked(more like yelled at) my girl to go over to the tree and look at the balloon up there and I’ll just take one last photo and they can go back into the air-conditioned house instead of being baked in the scorching Arizona sunlight.
My girl was rather upset that she had to do one more photo so she did not want to look up to the balloon and literally just walked away back inside right after I got this shot.
But I knew that I just got THE shot.
Now, good thing is that I got the shot. Bad news—I knew that this would be the shot for the prompt of Highs and Lows as the opening of a story. With an opening strong, I felt that I had to keep the story more interesting to have a good climax. The balloon is already in the tree so how do I get a street scene? It doesn’t make sense to chase a balloon anymore. Maybe someone peeking from the street and saw my kids trying to get the balloon but couldn’t reach it?
I tried my Gopro but it was too wide. It was a nice looking view with my long lens…Well I would need to set up my camera in the street and use a remote to trigger it and duck down behind the fence to send my kids up a ladder trying to get the balloon. But then what about my AM/PM?! Nah. Not gonna work.
With lunch time fast approaching and me still running around our house covered by sweat, kids happily got promised with happy meals for lunch. Thank you nice sister from our church for sending my kids their birthday McDonald giftcards. Then I thought, hey, it would be cool to create a scene where my kids saw the balloon store and wanted a balloon but wish not granted! So we drove to the party city store and parked at different spots in front of the store with double blinker on and I took some photos. The we rushed back home. Well, I did take one more stop to get my kids each a frappuccino as a little reward on top of their happy meals. There is no shame to bribe my kids for photos. Haha.
In order to make sure that my story is actually smooth and I would not exceed the word count limit for the write up, I spent some time to actually write down my story that I was trying to tell:
“Hold the string, otherwise...” Lolo’s loud grunt cut off mom’s sentence. Lolo barely stepped into the backyard. Immediately her head dropped. Frozen for a few seconds, she then said,”It’s too hot. I’m going back inside.” After picking up lunch, Lolo rapidly tapped her right hand on the window.“There Mom! Only two dollars! Please!” Mom actually flipped the turn signal! She changed to the left lane and turned up the radio. “Can a red round balloon still turn into a star?” Lolo asked. Finishing up Lolo’s favorite impromptu bedtime story of Bob the Alien, Dad said, “perhaps Bob would catch the balloon when it passes by and check for you.” The next morning at only 5:30am, Mom woke up to Lolo’s loud squeal:”Look Bob came!” In the backyard mom saw Lolo dancing, with a gold star balloon. How fabulous!
I got the closing shots and sent the kids to bed. Now the last shot would be the comet shot to represent Bob the Alien’s unexpected visit. I climbed up onto the roof again. Now, we are still having cloudy days but we had a little clearer sky throughout the day so I thought that I could at least get something—maybe just some stars if not the comet. I mean, our neighborhood is actually relatively dark at night and we could have seen a lot of stars on a summer night. However, the luck was not on my side.
Now my awesome astrophotography shots were not happening for sure.What do I do? I thought. While lying on our hot roof, I thought that I could choose to indicate that an unexpected visitor, like a friend, came to deliver some goodies at the door including a new balloon. But that was just too cheesy of a story and just in a lack of some childish magic. It was getting late. I had to go to bed and get some sleep before my baby gets up in the middle of the night. Then I thought, what if I create a comet in my photo somehow? I tried to create a comet with flying by airplanes. Then it hit me…What if I just use my phone flashlight to do light paint somehow? So there I was, late at night standing on top of my roof alone trying to create a comet illusion with my phone flashing at different angles. Soon enough, there was a helicopter circling around the neighborhood with a beam down. It didn’t catch me in the spot light though, so maybe it was just searching for a criminal I thought.
I’ve got the raw images and I still have to edit them. I wanted to reflect that nostalgia feeling in my series since I was originally inspired by a poem from 1918. Also I wanted to make it less technical—meaning less showing how good a photographer I am as in parallel to the fact that Evaleen was not that famous or good of a poet back then but still the work made an impact because of the content rather than the technics. I had my series done for proofing at 2am, 15 hours before deadline. In the morning, I printed the 5 images out and pinned them to the wall to actually look at them in the old fashion way. Then I made some adjustments on the tones in some of the images and was happy about my collection. I submitted the collection a few hours before the deadline.
I told my husband the night after I submitted my entry:
Man that was hard. But it was really fun!
Looking at submissions from previous years, I was not expecting to win anything. This whole contest was mostly to push myself a little further on my creative journey. At the same time, it was just a good clean fun thing to do for myself when I have been stuck with kids 24/7 for six months now.
The judging and award ceremony was live on a zoom call the next day. That’s the thrill! Since I was not expecting to win, I was muted without video showing. I was putting my baby to take a nap when I was watching the submission collection slideshow. There were some real AH-mazing sets! By the end of the slideshow, I was ready to give my applauses to the winners and try harder next time. HOWEVER, guess what, they announced the first Best-of-Prompt winner for Highs and Lows and there I saw my name. WHAT?! I definitely did not expect that. I had to scramble to put my baby down in bed, unmute myself and turn on the video when they were trying to find out if I were there. That was actually really cool and unexpected that I actually won. It was really nice to hear what the judges had to say about what they liked my image and I thought that I successfully conveyed my message there. It was also VERY cool to be able to have my image in front of so many photographers I look up to. Honestly, I didn’t even remember what they said the prizes were since I was not expecting to win. The whole experience itself was worth the participation already and now that one of my images actually won, it was even better.
This is a super long post. I know I know! So if you have made it all the way through, wow, thank you!!!!
I really wanted to share my WHOLE experience as I went through this fun yet challenging creative process.
There are some very valuable things I took away from this process:
We are our own worst critiques so don’t be too hard on ourselves, especially as creatives. Or in life in general. We are probably better than we thought. Also, while we cannot please everyone out there, our work speaks to people in ways we might not even expect. Just like Evaleen Stein wasn’t that famous back in his days and she didn’t get extremely good ratings nowadays, her work still impacted me in a positive way. Hopefully I can just keep sharing my work and my thoughts, then one day my images or words might make an impact on someone’s life. That is good enough.
Creativity comes from outside but also more importantly from within. One thing I did NOT do during this process was to look at other people’s photos for inspiration. I wanted my photos to be totally mine. You can get inspirations from a lot of different places rather than someone else’ existing images and try to replicate. I read a quote once: “Inspirations are for amateurs and for the rest of us, we just get to work.“ Don’t get me wrong, it is VERY important to study other amazing photographers’ work. However, it’s more important to actually just get to work. If I didn’t climb up onto the roof again during the day just trying to experiment from different angles, I would not have gotten the shot that won the award. Sometimes it is pure luck but I also do believe that hard work warrants better luck in the long run.
Find a good community. It was just amazing to see how supportive everyone was during this whole process. All the submissions are amazing one way or another. Some are stellar in technical aspects. Some are pure awesome stories. Some provoke strong emotions. Some bring smiles to my face. To me, we are all winners. And it is TRULY a good feeling to be able to recognize each other’s strength and be happy for one another. Yes, this is a competition, literally. However, I felt more strongly about community over competition through the process. If you feel like you don’t belong to any of the existing communities, then create your own. People likeminded will find your existence valuable.
If you think life is boring or you are stuck, just say yes to something crazy and give it a try. Or go find a personal project and work on it. Just go and do something about it, something. Don’t wait for a better opportunity. I actually signed up for a visual storytelling workshop that will start soon so if I had waited, technically speaking I would have been better prepared to win. I’m glad that I didn’t wait till the next round to start. These past few days have been one of the absolutely highlights of the year. Especially now that we are facing all the craziness in this world, this little project was a nice escape from my other problems even for just a little bit. I was refueled.
There is always room for improvement. It’s kinda funny that the more awards I’ve won, the more I feel that I’ve got long ways to go. It’s just super humbling when you compare your work against other brilliant works. I am getting better and better at critiques on my own work. I know this might sound contradictory from my first point, but I think it is a good thing to know how to critique my own work setting emotions and attachments aside, from a pure professional way. Even with my award winning image, I already feel that I could make it even stronger with some tweaks. It’s just exciting, to me at least, to know that I still could get so much better in the future.
A lot work goes into amazing results. The longer I’ve been taking photos, the more I know that it takes a whoooooooole lot of work to become a great photographer. There is no shortcut. There is no overnight fame and fortune like winning a lottery. If I am not where I want to be, I simply have to put in more hard work to get there. Guess what, along the way I will fail. Many many times. I will fail miserably at some point, then again and again. But it is OK. It’s all part of the journey and part of the learning. Then I am better than ever before.
Well, that’s what I have been doing these past couple of days. Thank you for listening to my ramblings and my thoughts.
If you are into photography and you want to get some creativity juice flowing, you definitely NEED to check out the Photo Fantastico Contest for their next run in November. Maybe we will compete together!
Let's Fly A Kite | Arizona Documentary Photographer
I’m doing this summer photo challenge and the prompt of the week is Flying A Kite. Well, first off, I’ve never been good at flying kites ever. Two, we don’t get much breeze here in Arizona—we either get nothing or haboob dust storms. With that being said though, what challenge would it be without it being challenging right? So let’s fly a kite!
But we don’t have a kite. So…let’s make a kite first. How hard can it be to make a kite, right?
Well, the steps are simple and clear but when kids are involved in the making, things don’t usually go as planned. And, yes, I’m blaming the kids. Ok ok, the actual fact is that, I might be crafty but I definitely don’t know how to make a kite. I helped the kids to tie their frames together and I immediately realized that the cross is not symmetric. Oh well.
Of course, my boy wanted to get his hands on the project too. He picked up his scissors and went directly for the thread that’s forming the frame. I was so close to screaming NOOOOOO! Somehow I calmed myself down and asked him what he thinks he needs to do to fix it. He actually came up with the idea that we could just tape it back. We tried it out and it worked ok. I mean, probably still affected how a kite can fly but at least we don’t have a broken kite for the moment. Lesson learned, just roll with it because the kite might never fly anyways.
My girl’s favorite part was probably making the tail for the kite. She mede the bows and tied them onto the string. While I was attaching the tail to the kite, she realized that she could blow on the bows and they would spin. How fun! Until…
The string got all tangled up. My girl said that we could just cut it off and then make a new tail. I was trying to teach her a lesson about being patient and trying to fix things before getting a new one. I spent the entire nap time trying to untangle these 8 bows and I gave up at the end. I was like, forget that. Why did I spend so much time on a kite that probably would never even fly?! I told the kids, hey, look, our kites probably would never fly but we are gonna still give them a try. Also, if somehow our kite did get up into the air, the string might break and the kite might fly away. We can always make new kites right?
Look at me, I am doing such a great job lowering the expectation for my kids so they wouldn’t throw a tantrum later when we actually try to fly a kite.
Surprise surprise, our kites, never got to fly! Ha! We tried and tried. Most likely it was because the frame was too heavy and it was not symmetric enough. However, the kids still had fun running around holding the kites and just watch the tangled tails fly in the air. And eventually it turned into a chasing game and see who can escape from daddy.
The attempt to fly a kite definitely failed but my kids still had a lot of fun. My girl told me that we could try again next time when there is a dust storm so we get stronger winds. She also told grandma later that the kite we made together was her favorite kite. Thanks kiddos.
Even though the kite spent most of the time surfing on our lawn dragged by my kids, it has been quite a fun experience. At least now I know I am not that good at making kites and we can joke about it. And regardless, my kids love me for spending the time working with them to attempt to make and fly a kite. That’s what matters the most, isn’t it?
A Celebration in Pandemic | Arizona Documentary Family Photographer
Covid-19 has been around for a couple of months now in the US and July 4th is now here. Independence Day celebrations had always been a fun part for me and for the kids. We usually had family and friends over at our place for a party and then we will have fireworks at the end of the day. This year, with the pandemic things are definitely different. So what do we do? We don’t want to just cancel everything in life but we also cannot risk having a little too much fun for the short moment and then causing long-term damages to our healths and family relationship. It’s never an easy decision when dealing with unprecedented situations.
We decided to skip the family dinner together since most of people in our extended family do not feel comfortable dining together and mingle in a closed space and it is still too hot to have everyone eat in the backyard. We would get together for fireworks later at night while social distancing.
This is what it looks like having a firework show during a pandemic.
We set up the chairs for each small family with great social distancing in between. Everyone is wearing a mask to protect the high risk parents. And we lit up the fireworks and watched from a far.
I was trying to figure out how I feel about this whole celebration in pandemic thing. Honestly, it was a pretty unsettling eerie feeling. We were together but we couldn’t even see what the people from across the lawn are doing. Our kids and their cousin are definitely excited to see fireworks, but they couldn’t really share the joy from so far apart especially when they are also wearing protective headphones.
At one point, some neighbors set off these huge fireworks. Then everyone was just watching the big firework while ignoring our little firework.
It happened to be full moon too. In Chinese culture whenever we see a full moon we think about reunion of the family. In a sense, we were indeed together as a family, but honestly, I felt the most apart and disconnected than ever. Maybe it’s just me. I need to have either physical connection or a good quality time to fill my cup. I wonder if this is the best way to stay connected. I wonder what we could do to make sure that we can meet the needs for human connections and a sense of union.
At least I know that my kids had fun and that would be enough for now. For the long run though, we gotta figure something out so a celebration can feel a little bit more like an actual celebration.
I'm a FINALIST--2019 Shoot & Share Photo Contest Results | Arizona Family Photographer
I’m proud to say that I made it to be a finalist in the largest global annual photo contest!
At the beginning of each year, there is this GIANT global photo contest happening—The Shoot & Share Photo Contest. It is probably the world’s largest contest. It’s free. It’s super fair. It’s amazingly fun. We had 583,150 photos in total submitted by photographers from all around the world. Yes, you read it right. We had almost 600K photos.
And guess what? I actually made it to be a FINALIST! Yay!
Ok. Let’s recap just in case you are not familiar with how this contest works and why this is actually kinda a big deal for me.
In the contest, each photographer are allowed to submit 50 unique images total into 25 different categories. Then all the images will be put into random set of 4s in each category to be voted on. When a voter gets on the voting page, the screen will show a random set from a random category and the voter will click on his/her favorite and then a new random set will show up automatically. Once all images have been seen enough times(probably hundreds and hundreds of times at least), one round ends and they will make a cut at the bottom and the top images go into the next round. After 12 rounds of voting, we will have the winners and we will be able to see each of our images’ placement in that category.
Being an engineering major, I’d just like to play with the numbers for a sec here. Each of us can submit up to 50 photos and we have a total of close to 600k photos, the possibility of finding one of my own image is…pretty much close to zero. Of course, the algorithm is a lot more complicated than just a possibility calculation here. This is why this contest is actually really fair. It’s a pure popularity contest but there is no way anyone could affect the results just because he or she knows a few more people in the circle. You get the idea.
This is the second year for me to be in the contest. I do it mostly to hold myself accountable—having an annual competition helps me to push myself harder to create contest quality images throughout the year. Also this is an amazing learning opportunity. I mean, seriously, where else can you see so many photos from all over the world all at one place?! With that being said, while I know I still have long ways to go to be where I really want to be in the industry, I compare with how I did last year more in this contest than with how other people did.
Without further ado, here are my results!
As you can see, this year I have 27 images out of my 50 submissions ended up in the top 30% while I only had 5 images in the top 30% last year. This is a huge jump for me and I’m really happy about the improvements I’ve made within this one year.
I also have one image that made it to the finalist round, top 500, and placed 336th in the Family Photo Category(with a total of 41,257 submissions). I’ll have to say, it feels GUUUUUD to be among the top 500 family photos in the world. And as a family photographer, I am super excited that one of my clients’ family photo placed the best.
At the same time, I also entered a few images of documentation of my own family life into the lifestyle/documentary category and I’m soooo glad that many of them placed well too. While I LOOOOVE all my clients’ families, I just can’t love any family more than my own. It is just special to me to see that people really like to see the real life stuff too.
While I might have spent way too much time voting, I’m definitely beyond excited to see the results. Of course, I’ll have to say THANK YOU to all the families who have trusted my vision and let me create magic in the past year. You probably have no idea how much it means to me to have a family fully trust me with their family photo sessions—starting from the location choice, to personalized styling, and all the way to the fun intimate session experience. What even means more to me is that in this industry where weddings are the obvious special occasion to be remembered, so many people have put their effort, emotions and investments into preserving family memories as well.
It has been a good year and here is to an even better year of 2019! Let’s make some magic!
Enjoy the little slideshow I put together <3
Little Traveling Dress | Mesa Arizona Family Photographer
One Little Dress, two countries, 6 states and 8 photographers. We each had a week to create what speaks to our heart and now it’s time to reveal how creativity works magic with each individual differently. This is Amy Dangerfield’s journey with the Little Traveling Dress Project in 2018.
A couple of months ago, I was trying to come up with some fun projects for myself. I saw that there are many people who are doing traveling dress projects—essentially, sisterhood of the traveling pants but dresses and for photographers. Then I thought, how about doing a traveling dress but for little sisters?! I bounced the idea of a Little Traveling Dress Project to a few friends of mine and many of them jumped on board quickly! How exciting!
On August 27th 2018, I ordered a dress and our Little Traveling Dress Project began.
One little dress, two countries, six states/provinces, eight photographers.
We all had the same dress for a week to create. We will not reveal the work we have created until everyone had a chance to finish their journey. This is where magic happens. And the whole project was finished just before Christmas.
For the past few months, we have all been anxiously waiting to see what the other people had created and today is the day! It’s our reveal party today! Please follow along and find out how creativity works magic with each individual in an amazingly different way.
I’m so excited to share my part of the journey and you will be able to link to the other 7 photographers’ work as well!
Originally, when I started the project, knowing that I would be the last person to play with the dress, I was planning a BIG EPIC vision in my mind. I was going to have my girl wear the dress. I was going to make her all gorgeous. I was going to take her to all these epic places around the valley in Arizona.
HOWEVER, when time went by, my vision changed.
I had been digging into my soul a little bit about why I am doing all these photos. I realized that ever since I have started my business, I have felt more insecure and more inadequate than ever. I look at other people’s photos and think—I want a house like that with a big window and pure white walls so I can take better photos with better widow lights; I want to go to those epic places because dang those locations are so cool; I want to have darker dinning table so it looks better as a background when I take photos of my kids make cookies…The list goes on and on. I realized that, I ALWAYS have a vision and what I am trying to do is to create something out of my norm to fit into my vision. So instead of trying to make epic lifestyle like our normal way of living a life, I want to find the beauty in our seemingly normal life.
SO, instead of taking road trips in this pretty dress and makeups and flower crowns, we just lived a good normal life, but wearing a pretty dress.
It’s close to Christmas. My family doesn’t really have Christmas traditions as we never grow up celebrating it. But it would be nice to help my kids to get into the holiday feels. So we went to a Christmas Tree Lot. The owners there were super nice and let my kids run through the trees. They even pointed out that they have colored trees in the back.
My kids were beyond excited to just run free there.
I’ll have to say, I’ve never seen a happier face in a tree lot.
Our Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, set up a Giving Machine in downtown Gilbert this year to make it easy for people to give in the holiday seasons. It gives you such a good warm feeling when you know that you can give because you have been given much. For my kids who are still very young, it can be challenging to find service opportunities for them so we took advantage of the giving machine and stopped by after we ran in the tree lot for a good while.
We explained to the kids that we get to give something to people and children who are in need and they get to choose what they want to give. Both of my kids took it pretty seriously and looked at the menu/list of possible items for donation for quite a while. My boy, who loves balls more than anything, decided to donate soccer balls. My girl actually decided to donate some building-block toys and also funds for after school program so other little friends can go to school like her and play with blocks too! They were literally shouting with joy when they see the items they chose was donated through the giving machine.
There is no place better than home.
I mean, seriously. This should be the case. If you are like me before drooling over other people’s home, you got change. Not saying that we should use it as an excuse to never clean dishes or vacuum your carpet just because you love your home no matter what. But seriously, this is our life now and we should love it no matter what.
Dance in the street in front of the house even on a super overcast and cold day. Walking through irrigation rivers at home and pick up flowers and dirt. Who cares if people driving by think that we are crazy. We are home and we are happy.
One of the awesome perks about living in Arizona is that we get super amazing citrus in the winter time.
And, lucky us, we LOVE citrus.
When we found out that a few of our own citrus trees have gotten sick and we are not going to have many good fruits this year of our own, we were really sad. Good news is that we have a great citrus orchard close by and every year they host citrus picking events. Just before all the oranges and grapefruits got picked this year, we went in the orchard to enjoy the view of an approaching harvest.
Of course, when there is food to look at but not allowed to pick any, all her energy goes into a goofy ball and shows up in every single photo I attempt to take.
It is Christmas season after all. With little ones at home, we tend to decorate the house a little later so all the ornaments can stay on the tree for a little bit and all the lights can stay on for a while. It took about 5 days for our tree to become bare on the bottom 2/3 and our lights on the tree to totally go out. But while it lasted, we had fun having a festive house.
When there is a little “devil” tearing everything down at home, you gotta balance it out with a little angel.
So yeah, these are what I’ve done with the Little Traveling Dress. These are no where near what I had envisioned at first. They are not epic. They are not that artistic. They are not the ones that stir up the darkest dust in your soul and make you think.
HOWEVER, each one of these photos
MADE ME SMILE.
Yes, for that week, I was almost constantly taking photos for my girl. I was always thinking what fun stuff we could do. I gave my kids so much more attention than before. I was not on social media. I was not comparing myself with other moms. I was not comparing how my kids are with other kids.
While these photos might not mean anything to other people, they mean the world to me. These reminded me of the pure joy of being a child. These reminded me of the pure joy of being a mom. These reminded me of the joy of simply being alive and enjoying life to the fullest.
My girl’s name means Life. She is full of life. Her simple brightness is epic enough to light the world—at least my world.
Like I said, even the eight of us who had the chance to create using the same object, had different perspectives and angles. My journey with this little dress helped me to confirm my why—Life is crazy, but life is good. And I’m loving it.
I surely hope all of you can feel the joy of this little girl and be inspired to find and focus on the simple, small, seemingly insignificant joyful moments in your life AND document them! When life gets hard, which is almost every other minute especially if you have a few little munchkins in your house, look back at those small moments that bring smiles onto your face.
Hope you all had a wonderful 2018 and wish you a happy new year in 2019!
To follow along our reveal party with our Instagram Loop starting here: @amydangerfieldphotography
To check some of the other 7 photographers’ work on their blogs starting here:
Sabrina: https://forever22photography.com/2018/12/30/the-little-traveling-dress-project
Tracy: https://www.tracydawnphotography.com/blog/
Susan: https://www.susan-rice-photography.com/blog/2018/12/29/the-little-traveling-dress
Erica: https://woodsywondersphotography.com/uncategorized/a-little-traveling-dress-project/
Life with Spina Bifida| Spina Bifida Awareness Day 2018
It is Spina Bifida Awareness Day today on October 25th. October seems to be the month of awareness, but to me, it is a special month to remember what life is like with Spina Bifida.
I don’t really talk about this with people other than close family or friends so many people probably are not aware that my daughter has a birth defect called Spina Bifida. There is a great article on “What is SB?“ on the Spina Bifida Association Website explaining the ins and outs of Spina Bifida you can check out if you have a few minutes.
I was 24 weeks pregnant and we were living in China. I just remember me being alone in the examine room while my husband was waiting outside in the lobby, hoping to poke the technician a little bit to find out if we are having a boy or a girl (it is actually illegal in China to reveal gender during pregnancy) and then was notified that I should wait in the hall way to get a second scan by another expert because there might be something going on. Ever since that morning, all I know is that we’ve read so many documents, seen so many different doctors and done all the possible tests during a pregnancy.
The Chinese doctor said that it did not look good. Our baby might not be able to ever stand up, or walk, or read, or live a normal life. “You guys are still young and you should try again.” the doctors recommended.”Oh and remember to take folic acid next time.”
They mean well. However, they just don’t have enough experience with cases like this. The good thing was that we have access to doctors from other areas in the world. We went to an Australian doctor in the city where we were and she helped us and referred us to multiple neurosurgeons around the world to get a further diagnosis and an action plan for us. And one of the neurosurgeons actually became my daughter’s actual doctor now, which is really cool to me.
What is Spina Bifida to us? My girl’s official diagnosis is Lipomyelomeningocele, a word I still can’t remember how to spell. It means that her spine was not closed during the initial forming stage and has an opening on her spinal tube. And because of the opening, her spinal cord instead of being dangling in the spinal tube, it was stuck on the inside lump of her back and was pulled out of the spinal tube. She has a bump on her back. Because of the spinal cord being attached to a fat lump and pulled, some nerves are damaged. She had surgery when she was 6 months old. We didn’t know what nerves were damaged exactly and we still don’t know how some of her nerve-functions will be(including being potty trained and being able to walk on super sharp rocks).
I don’t usually talk about her condition mostly because when you look at her, you would not have guessed that she has Spina Bifida. Quoting her grandpa: “ The only thing that’s not really normal with her is that she started speaking way too early.” I as a parent, don’t really want to make it a big deal. I don’t think she is disabled enough for me to go around and say that I’m a special need parent. I don’t think we’ve really suffered as much as some of my friends who have real challenging special needs children. At the same time, I don’t want people to always say, oh I’m so sorry that this happened to her after knowing about it. I don’t want people to ask me “did you take folic acid last time?“ because I surely did. I don’t want people to treat her differently because now they know she is actually sort of different.
However, I think it’s a good time to actually bring it up. Mostly for me. But also for my daughter. And probably for people who might not know about some of the special conditions that come with life.
For me, I just want to say to myself—you are a good mom. You did all you could have done and you made the right decision to bring her to this world. You were not selfish because you were afraid of the pain of abortion and it is always good to respect life.
For my girl, I just want to say to her—you are different, but we are all different, one way or another. Go live your life the way you want and don’t let others dictate your life. And go make friends with people who are different from you.
For other people who might be hearing about this for the first time—please don’t feel sorry for us and don’t put a tag on special need children. See beyond their disabilities and focus on what amazing things they could achieve.
I’ve tried to channel my inner sorrow and the dark little spot associated with this. (Oh, believe me, I’m not saying that it was not hard. ) But every time when I focus on the fact that I went through the craziest pregnancy as a first time mom and there are so many uncertainties ahead of us, I just feel really down. And I simply don’t like it. When I spend too much time worrying if she will ever be totally normal or if I am doing all I can to protect her future siblings from having the same trials in life, I see myself buried in doubt and fear. I simply don’t like it.
While it’s healthy to express feelings, which I’m definitely not very good at and am working on, I think it can also be a good idea to just focus on the good, the bright, the positive.
During that pregnancy, time seemed to be frozen at times and to be flying by at other times. The crazy pregnancy definitely prepared me for any possible pregnancy tests—blood test, MRI, amniotic fluid test—come what may and I will deal with it. It also brought me ever closer to God. It was a good lesson to learn to stop asking why and instead to ask how I can do this thing. It was awesome to be able to get closer to family as well. It definitely helped my little family to hold together because it was seemingly us against world at some point. It was also really heart warming to really see how much my family cared about me even though their way of saying love at first was slightly different from how I wanted.
I’ll have to say that it was really cool when my girl beat all the odds and started crawling before her surgery. And then see her stood up by herself. Then see her running through rock piles. Then see her getting potty trained(mostly). And of course, it is just cool to hear her talk like a champion in both Chinese and English. I try not to be too prideful and brag too much but it is really the best thing to see your baby grow and be strong. It is also a great confirmation to me that I made the right decision back then to keep going.
Having a kid who needs special medical attention is also a very humbling experience for me. It reminds me that we all have weaknesses and how little we know. I have to trust her medical team. It’s also a great opportunity for me to practice my patience. I can remind myself that she might never be able to do certain things as fast even though she could speak faster than I could sometimes. It has also helped me to not taken things for granted and also to not over think. Not saying that I absolutely don’t actively parent all her behaviors, but I sometimes do look at her and say, hey, this might be just a three years old being a three years old, or there might be actually something going on developmentally in her brain and we will figure it out in its due time.
So, if you are friends of mine. Yup, that happened. And we are glad to have our perfect little girl in our lives.
If you are pregnant and are struggling with a diagnosis of a birth defect—you are not alone! There are amazing communities out there. Talk to other people who have gone through similar situations. No matter which country you are in, there is help and hope. And I’m here if you ever need someone to talk to :)
If you are a new mom or a woman who is thinking about getting pregnant but is scared of things going wrong during pregnancy—It’s totally normal. I had this gut feeling before I found out about it actually and I sometimes think if I actually jinxed it. But it’s also ok to just let go and go for it. Things happen and that is just part of life. Embrace the uncertainty and it can be an empowering experience if you let it to be that way.
If you are someone who just learned a new word today. Yay! You are better than I was. I didn’t know until I saw it on my ultrasound paper. Good for you!
There are so much I could say about life with Spina Bifida but I don’t think there is any better way of showing what life is like than living it!
So here is my little girl who has Spina Bifida and also someone who is extremely talented with language, who is absolutely creative, who is definitely full of life. And now, hopefully, you are aware that there is a birth defect called Spina Bifida and it does not define the capacity of someone’s life!
Thank you for reading! <3
