Down the Rabbit Hole

Who would've thought that a routine appointment with my OBGYN would end up with me delivering my firstborn? Funnily enough, I just sent an email to people I work with the day before, stating that I wouldn't be checking emails often from that day forward because I'd be prepping for childbirth (aka I'd be preparing the baby's space and supplies two weeks before I was scheduled to give birth). Anyway, I just finished my prenatal exam when I noticed that I was bleeding. I checked with my OBGYN if the bleeding was normal; she told me to rest for a few minutes for observation. She then conducted more tests on me and determined that it was safer for me to deliver the baby at this point in my pregnancy than to wait for my baby to go full-term. So instead of going to Happy Lemon for my weekly boba tea fix, I drove straight home and explained to Mommy that I was being sent to the hospital's Labour and Delivery unit for induced labour. She was scared, to put it ...

And we're now down to the last 12 weeks of pregnancy! In a few weeks, we'd finally meet the newest addition to Val and my families. The second trimester made me feel like I was back to my old energetic self. Though my belly was growing steadily, I felt good and had a healthy appetite. But the third trimester, according to the pregnancy websites I've been browsing, is all about my body gearing up for childbirth. Which means the return of several uncomfortable symptoms and a lot of stress. And I have to agree, somewhat because... My third trimester began in the midst of a pandemic.  I had a cold and a cough, which got me calling the OBGYN between appointments just to ask what medicine I could take to alleviate the symptoms. I even felt sick enough to stop attending barre classes for a week. This was a good decision because without the additional physical exertion and despite my lowered immune system because of pregnancy, I was able to start recovering sooner than dur...

There are days when I question why I had to learn needlecraft (knitting, crocheting, black embroidery, quilting, and tatting) and how to use a sewing machine back when I was in high school. But thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic —medical experts recently started recommending that people wear cloth masks when they step outside their homes to take the pressure off the shortage of medical-grade respirators and surgical masks—a lot of people started posting YouTube videos of how to make these cloth masks at home. John Muir Medical Centre and Kaiser Permanente (two of the hospital systems in the Bay Area) also issued patterns and instructions for making these face masks; we could make some for our personal use and we can donate them to hospitals as well. I'm now glad that I learned how to sew. Thank you, to my teachers in Home Economics in UPRHS for pushing me to learn these life skills. I'm nowhere near as good as my friends who now sew costumes for their kids or those who actually...

The COVID-19 pandemic  has pushed medical and data scientists into placing their results and their interpretations out into the public as pre-prints; many of which are not reviewed by their peers and  may be premature. I find such practice very disturbing because many of these studies have been done hurriedly and are immature.  As a scientist who has been tapped by technical journals to review articles in food science and rice genetics, and rice grain quality (plus the occasional request from Val to pore over thousands of rice science articles to help him find and summarise impact assessment studies... which I do using natural language processing ), I have seen my fair share of papers which shouldn't see the light of day because the authors did not demonstrate that the methodologies they applied or their interpretations of their results are solid. It's almost like receiving your undergraduate degree or your graduate degree without having your research manuscript,...

Anna and I start our typical Philippine Easter Sunday before the crack of dawn for the traditional Salubong in Sta Cruz, Laguna with Mommy's side of the family (actually, we typically attend processions there from Good Friday to Easter Sunday; I typically spent Maundy Thursday with Tita Ising and Tito Sibing for Visita Iglesia ). After moving to California, our first Easter Sunday was also spent with family; it was Gabriel's first Easter egg hunt . This year, Easter is unique and very special (if we want to put a positive spin on the COVID-19 pandemic): it is a time we are sheltered-in-place... but far from being celebratory, this Holy Week is a time to reflect about the fragility of life; it shows how important faith and hope are for everyone, not just during the peak of the pandemic (we see news of people, including health workers, being hospitalised and dying without saying good bye to their families) but also afterwards when economies restart and people who survived thr...

Finally! I've submitted my heat maps, databases, and inputs to a second paper I contributed to, as a data scientist/analyst, about food choice behaviour in Eastern India ! I finally have some time to "rest" until the baby pops. By "rest", I mean: prepare the baby sleep and changing area, attend online childbirth classes, go to my prenatal medical appointments, catch up on reading parenting books, and find time to attend online barre classes. But first, I wanted to work on some of my almost-finished colouring projects. Both are from Johanna Basford's Secret Garden. I am planning to frame and to hang these in the baby's nursery (which may still change because black-and-white portraits of baby animals have also caught my eye). Anyway, I used Staedtler triplus fineliners to ink these pages, a few flowers and leaves at a time. It took me more than a year to finish them because I was working on them only when I didn't have anything to do for hours (...

Yesterday was supposed to be last day of the San Francisco Bay Area's shelter-in-place order. But we received a public health advisory last week that extends the order until May 3rd .  This is expected because the USA is nearing peak resource utilisation, based on  projections  made by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, assuming social distancing is enforced through May 2020. So, it appears that Mommy and I will remain officemates for the next few weeks; except that I'll be on "maternity leave" starting next week and will probably mainly act as her IT support while waiting for the baby to arrive. Anyway, yesterday was a big day for her because she had her very first online meeting via GoToMeeting. Her company's higher ups organised a virtual meeting to update employees on what's going on. I had a bit role in this meeting, showing up on screen for a few minutes as I taught Mommy which buttons t...

Yeah, I know, reading "The Importance of Being Little" by Erika Christakis (2016) is a few years too early for me because Val and my firstborn has not yet arrived. But after reading Bringing Up Bébé , I got intrigued about how to raise a child in the toddler stage. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Rochie Cuevas (@rochiecuevas) on Feb 5, 2020 at 11:02am PST The bleakness of the U.S. pre-school situation that the author presents to the reader to the point that makes homeschool education a viable option (for households with one parent who can afford to stay home and teach). My impression is that pre-school teachers are painted as inadequately trained in child psychology and are not equipped to create learning scaffolds (like personalised follow up questions) that stretch a toddler's capacity to think. Government policies, on the other hand, seemingly over-concentrate in making unrea...

COVID-19 shelter-in-place or not, the wee one's arrival is looming. So on Biboy's day off, we set up the C230's back seat with an infant car seat base and we assembled the stroller system. He made it look easy but he said that it's a difficult process because the base has to fit snugly and levelled into the backseat. (By we, I mean that Biboy did all the work. I took photos and videos, and watched how he attached the car seat base onto the backseat.) Anyway, Val an I opted to buy the Graco Modes Bassinet LX travel system after looking at our options at Buy Buy Baby. The Modes Bassinet LX is a three-in-one system: it's an infant car seat carrier that converts into an infant bassinet, and then becomes a toddler seat. The infant car seat carrier is not very heavy; a major consideration because once the wee one is sitting in it, the carrier will be a lot heavier. Another consideration is the ease in attaching to the car seat base and the stroller: the Click Conn...

Thanks to the COVID-19 epidemic, people have started hoarding on supplies. Grocery shelves for rice, toilet paper, hand sanitiser, infant formula milk, and rubbing alcohol are empty for a few weeks already. The weekend before the shelter-in-place order was issued, Ate Maddie, JP, and I went to grocery shops to find the household items that they're in short supply of. But we ended up unsuccessful. CVS, Grocery Outlet, and Lucky were all out of stock for the items that they needed. Then Anna and I went to Walgreens, Grocery Outlet, and CVS right after my OBGYN visit . We even ventured to Target. Still, we couldn't find the items that we were about to go short of. The empty shelves at Target, illustrating the temporary disruption in essentials brought about by the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order. With our toilet paper and rubbing alcohol supply dwindling (and because I used to be responsible for a continuous supply of raw materials and packaging materials—a short assig...