Down the Rabbit Hole

Two months into motherhood, I have learned a few things about the challenges of being a parent. One of which is the importance of sleep . See, before becoming a mom, I had always thought that the late nights would be manageable because I only need four hours of sleep to function properly, based on my hectic lifestyle back in grad school, when I started working as a postdoc fellow and then a scientist, and then as a data science student. But the first weeks of motherhood proved me wrong QUICKLY. I learned how important sleep actually is. Sleep. Ever elusive but a necessity for good brain and body development for babies and a requirement to keep parents level-headed and able to take care of babies. During my baby's first weeks, he slept like a champ but for 30 minutes at a time... lulling him to sleep took a much longer time! I thought that I had to find a way to encourage him to sleep longer... and this search led me down the rabbit hole of the baby sleep industry. And my impression...

With the wee one's arrival imminent, I started asking around what the best diaper options are for newborns. Biboy and Barbara swear by Pampers but since there are so many diaper product lines now (even within Pampers), I'm kind of overwhelmed. So, I thought I should buy a few of different brands and test them when the baby is here. The scientist in me jumped on the opportunity to conduct an experiment to assess which one is best for the baby and which one I'd continue to purchase. I considered both disposable and reusable diapers with their pros and cons (including carbon footprints of throwing out disposables, and of washing and disinfecting reusable ones), I ended up stocking up on disposable diapers with eco-friendly claims. I figured I should buy the diapers in size 1 because the wee one, I expect, will outgrow the newborn size rapidly. So, the diapers I got were Pampers Pure , The Honest Company , Seventh Generation , and Dyper . At Buy Buy Baby , where I bought mos...

Celebrating one's birthday when an epidemic is preventing family and friends from gathering physically, is definitely a challenge. Tita Babie's birthday is a perfect example. We couldn't go to her house to celebrate because we are still ordered to stay home by the state. Naturally, she felt really sad. So her kids organised a video conference call so that at least we're gathered virtually. The wonders of technology are truly amazing. Tita Babie's birthday party on Zoom. I have forgotten who took this photo and shared it with the family. Val is also celebrating his birthday this month. He's working from home, where the Los Baños local government guidelines for the quarantine are even stricter than California's. He's alone on his birthday; the wee one and I can't fly over to be with him as he turns a year older. But the difference is that he's not as big on birthday parties as Tita Babie; and he's swamped with work... with several meetings goin...

While studying data analytics at UC Berkeley Extension , I came across the Bayes Theorem but I didn't have the time to really appreciate it due to the fast pace set by the course curriculum. So now that I'm on "maternity leave", I continue learning by reading Tell Me the Odds  by Scott Hartshorn (it's free on Kindle). This is officially my fourth book for the year (again, not counting the technical articles I've read prior to this book). I'd typically read through such a book quite rapidly; however, taking care of my son now takes a big chunk of my time. So I only read the book when I find five to ten minutes between feeds, diaper changes, burps, and bottle cleaning. The author simplified the explanation of Bayes Theorem using, as an example, the probability of obtaining a die from a bag of dice based on the outcome of a roll. That sounded interesting because I typically encounter statistics problems in which I'm supposed to calculate the probability o...

I am not a big fan of telenovelas because I never had the time to watch them before. But thanks to the shelter-in-place order not being lifted yet and because I am taking care of my son, I ended up watching this series... upon strong recommendation from Ate Grace and Kuya Nat . Crash Landing on You  is basically a story of a man from North Korea and a woman from South Korea who met accidentally in North Korea (she got sucked into a freak tornado while paragliding and she landed in North Korea... the title is all about her crash landing on him when he ordered her to go down from the tree where her paraglider got entangled). He helped her try to return to South Korea without being detected by the higher ranking authorities. The soldiers under his command helped him with this task, befriending the woman in the process. She finally was able to return home and continue with her family struggles (she was in a power struggle against her elder brother for control over their father's compa...

My third book for the year is Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Dissing Sandahl's book on The Danish Way of Parenting . I have to admit that I feel like I'm reading more books these days because I'm not reading as many scientific articles. However, I'm in the data processing stage at the moment so I'm really not focused on reading up on technical stuff. Just as a comparison, I read around 60 technical articles while developing the scientific paper that the team I'm working with has recently submitted for peer-review.  But I digress. I have been in Denmark a few summers ago and I know that its people have been touted as the happiest people on the planet; thus explains my curiosity about how the Danes approach parenting. What do they do that make their children confident and happy? The authors summarised their view of the Danish way of parenting into an acronym: P lay, A uthenticity, R eframing, E mpathy, N o ultimatums, T ogetherness. The bottom li...

This year, I join the ranks of women who are mothers. It's the first time that I have received "Happy Mother's Day" greetings from friends and family. All thanks to the little one who I gave birth to in mid-April. "Talk to the hand, Mom!" But because Mother's Day this year and my son's birthday were three weeks apart, I haven't had the chance to grow into the role of mom just yet... I still don't feel like the title. So far, I feel like I'm an automated and very exhausted feeding-burping-diaper changing machine, which goes into action upon the cues from the little one. However, each time the little one smiles or giggles (in his sleep; the conscious ones will start coming in another month), I feel very happy; it's true what they say: seeing your child smile is worth all the sleepless nights and the exhaustion. I'll take the sleeping gummy grin anytime.