🌻Summer: A season of adventure

Summer started out a bit dicey but ended up with a series of back-to-back adventures. Some of these things might even be more fun than golf!

Wedding

We got ceremonially married in Toronto after 3 COVID re-schedulings. I going a little bit batty leading up to it. One day, I picked up my head and realize wow we have 8 weeks until our wedding but life is just so busy it took us a few more weeks to actually do anything so my thoughts are simultaneously:

• Wow, it turns out it’s possible to have your wedding dress tailored by the nearest seamstress between meetings, book a florist and choose flowers in under an hour, and hire a make-up artist via IG in 5min.

• Friends are like wow, I can’t believe you have a baby, a start-up, and planned an international wedding. It’s every bit as hectic and unpleasant as you’re imagining and I would not recommend this experience to anyone!! A lot of good friends couldn’t make the wedding because the invites were going out so last minute and my mother-in-law had to pull some last-minute heroics to get the event across the finish line. I felt bad about both which are things you want clouding your thoughts leading up to your wedding day.

It was an incredible day. Some highlights:

• The speeches from our friends and family. Everyone roasted me but JP got off scot-free. My parents gave a speech originally written in Chinese which was translated and one parent delivered each language which was special to me.

• Doing a choreographed first dance. We showed up at a dance studio with a YouTube video. The poor instructor was like “so that’s a Viennese waltz, you are supposed to be working on it for at least 10 weeks earlier if you want to do that”. And we replied “ah, we’re flying out of the country in 4 days, what do you think we can cram in 2 lessons?” It turns out a whole entire dance! It was the most capital R, romantic thing, I’ve ever done with Justin. You get held and twirled by the love of your life while someone croons oily love lyrics - and you don’t just do it once at the official dance, you get to do it 50 times during practice and it’s just as lovely each time.

• Hearing the updated version of vows from Justin in front of all our family and friends that we hadn’t seen in person for over 2 years. Our legal wedding was back in 2019 so we were able to reflect and celebrate all the ways we’d worked to live up to our original vows. JP who is mysteriously good at all things delivered his vows from memory.

• Seeing little froggy in his little toddler 3-piece suit!!!

Froggy is humongous walking talking Froggy now

Froggy has been growing by leaps and bounds. He’s not even 18 months but he’s larger than the 2-year-olds on the playground and wears shoes for 3-year-olds. He’s starting to communicate with us in his own baby language and we’re eagerly awaiting the use of English or Chinese. Tragically, his choice of word for no is ma-ma-ma-ma-ma…

We found him a spot at the perfect little Chinese English immersion play-based daycare a 20-minute walk from our house. It’s been amazing for us:

• Froggy lives an indulgent life at home and we find it’s great for him to learn he is part of a larger society at daycare. He gets many opportunities to practice life skills like waving hello and saying goodbye and advocating for his needs (he’s learned to cry to get attention after nap time). He’s made a good friend, we’ll call her Koala, who helps him find his stuff when it’s time to pack for the day.

• Daycare gave us more flexibility in our day. There’s a longer range of hours for drop off and pick up if we have a meeting later in the day. The daycare has redundancy built in so we don’t have to arrange alternative childcare if one of the teachers is out.

• He loves daycare. On the very first visit, before we even enrolled, he strode into the classroom, picked out a book, and handed it to a teacher to read to him. He has a little purple tiger backpack and I am very satisfied seeing his face light up when he sees it.

• Froggy recently became a genius froggy!! He’s like a sponge now learning new things every day - he knows dozens of animals in Chinese and English and that coffee machine sounds means Daddy’s around. Justin’s mom came over and within the week, she taught him to push his kitchen step stool to the sink, climb up, wash his hands and face, and push the step stool back!

As Froggy gets older, it’s been enlightening seeing the grandparents interact with him. I find seeing JP’s mom with Froggy and then my own mom with Froggy explains a lot of why JP and I turned out the way we are. Justin is a competent boy scout. I march to my own terribly offbeat drum. JP’s mother gifted Froggy some crayons and a watering can. When Froggy colors with JP’s mom, she has him sit on her lap and colors a whole picture with him, guiding him so he says in the lines. At home with my parents, Froggy scribbles on anything his heart from coloring books, to magazines, to furniture, adding some bright colored dots and lines anywhere his artistic eye wants. Watering with JP’s mom means walking from plant to plant making sure all the plants are watered just right. Watering with my mom means filling the can with anything he’d like whether it’s water or pebbles and pouring the contents on whatever he’d like.

Honeymoon in Italy

Rome is the first place I visited in Europe back in 2012. My college bestie, Sarah, and I did it on a shoestring student budget, gorging ourselves on free hostel breakfast each day and setting off the explore the wonders of western civilization. I was worried it wouldn’t live up to my memory of it but it was so much better.

• I fell in love with the tours. Every single tour guide I had in Italy had a PhD in a relevant subject and their expertise made the ancient world feel close and real to me. They talked about not just what happened, but why it happened, and how modern humans know it, and brought it back to the ground we were standing on. It was especially satisfying particularly because we know so much about ancient Rome so questions are met with deep nuanced answers. One of my favorites was a garden tour of the Vatican which takes you behind the scenes to the Pope’s private gardens (recently opened up as the current one works too much to enjoy the gardens so he had them opened up to the public) which was about the garden but about how the Vatican is run (ex purely logistically, where they source the robes that the cardinals wear?)

• We visited JP’s family in the Italian countryside. They live in a beautiful hill town with 500 people just outside Lucca. The village’s local claim to fame is they were the source of many great plaster artists in the late 1800’s. What’s wild is we were the first visitors from his branch of the family in 40 years! We saw the church where JP’s grandparents got married, the grandparents old house with their flour mill intact. The family hosted us at a rooftop restaurant and it was so beautiful, I cried about knowing I wouldn’t experience it for a long time again. I think another reason I cried is that I’ve been wanting to see my grandparents in China for a long time and we haven’t been able to. JP’s aunt and uncle recently went to visit after us and it made us really happy to see them connecting too.

Burning Man

There was a Burning Man ticket sale at 8pm on the last day of our Italian honeymoon. The odds were against getting tickets but we got them and figured it was a sign that we should go. One last hurrah to close out the summer before we settle back into fall and the season of working. This was our 3rd burn and possibly my favorite yet. Year 1, I was gobsmacked but really sort of a visitor. Year 2, I felt the magic was tinged with a sense of alienation — too much spectacle, not enough human connection that year for us. This year was better because we’d started figuring out a way to gift in non-material ways that felt authentic to us. We ended up getting to know a lot of the humans who helped build the city and art. I found it moving how much they put into gift joy to others and nurtured a spark in my heart to make some sort of creative contribution. I always thought my contribution to BM and this world would be practical in nature.

Turning 30

It felt good to turn 30. I was worried it’d come too soon and that I wouldn’t be ready, especially during some of those mid-20 years like 25 and 26 where it felt like the years would fly by so fast and I wasn’t making any progress toward being the person I wanted to be by 30. 30 is the magical age by which I needed to be a “real adult” because my parents had me when they turned 30 and got real jobs to be able to support me.

I have just one frivolous regret that started creeping in last summer during my hot mom summer. I spent a lot of mental energy trying not to “chou mei” (stinky beauty aka narcissistic) but secretly wanting to be beautiful. It feels sinful to write out even now, married with a kid living in the suburbs.

I feel like I was in my 20s for a very long time and am ready to be 30. All the dreams of adulthood — career, family, and friendship that I longed for so long, I possess now. Better than merely possessing, I have the satisfaction of knowing all these things I earned and they’re securely mine. It’s not humble to say it like that but I know how long I’ve wanted these things and how earnestly I worked to get them for over a decade now. One friend complained I was boring to text and I dutifully bought a book on comedy, a book on texting, and a book on writing to remedy the situation.

The surprising thing this how adrift I feel again. 28, 29 felt secure. I’d done the leg work and just needed to stay the course to the finish line of 30. But BOOM, it’s like I’m 20 again? Asking myself what I want in 10 years today feels even more open-ended and mysterious than when I plotted out my life a decade ago.

I didn’t randomly forget to script anything post-30 like some cartoon character that wanders off the drawn world. My parents wanted certain things for me for the honorable and loving reason that they thought that’s what would set the foundation of a fulfilling life for me. I prioritized doing those things first because they’ve become the things I wanted for myself too. If those things were done by 30, then I figured I’d have earned the luxury of freedom and an unscripted adventure. I just thought this would feel more like an open-world RPG like Morrowind or Breath of the Wild and less like a blank canvas of time staring like you.

On to fall

Summer was great but summer was a lot of back-to-back adventures. I was worried I wouldn’t be ready to give up the Seattle summer paradise. The paradise blooms with so much energy because it’s short - I couldn’t live like that year-round. As the fall colors come in, I’m ready to settle into a more productive period. There are books I want to read, milestones at work to tackle, and a new decade of goals to chart out. The cozy rhythm of fall and winter is perfect for this sort of introspective work.