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!
