Today Erica met her Great-Grandpa.
For me, I took pause to think about this special visit. For one, it’s a day like today that makes us miss our dear Grandma even more… to think how thrilled beyond words she would have been to meet Aston and Erica.
On the other hand, I was very happy for my Grandfather. I wonder what he’s thinking in this photo, we may never know until we get to see our own Great-grandbabies.
From the clues he gave though, I think he was filled with pride, concern, and happiness. For starters, he called to see if she was feeding well, and if she was getting enough milk. Second, he actually came over for a visit (he made it back in time for his TV shows), third- he got new prescription glasses (this, however may also be for the “ladies”), and lastly- he gave her a beautiful name that only a poet can.
This is one of those interesting instances where the English language isn’t granular enough to capture the meaning of the Chinese phrase. I’m sure this goes both ways for all languages, but we don’t have 23 types of snow here.
I didn’t know this until I had to buy an engagement ring, but if you have a good quality stone, bring it outside along with a lesser quality stone. Hold them both under the sunlight and look deep into the stone. The lesser quality will reflect the light back, but the better quality stone will have this brilliance or “internal fire”. I guess another word for it is the stone’s lustre. As soon as I saw this in E’s diamond, I knew that was the one. (shameless plug for J&M Coin in Metrotown).
Her name is Yuek Ying- “like the lustre of the jewel.”
My mother’s name is Yuet Ying, but the “Ying” part is pronounced differently and has a different meaning.
Car seat/stroller mahem…
Today we also went and got her a stroller. I’ll save this topic for another day, but I can say that it’s easier to shop for a car than for a stroller/car seat/infant carrier.
We can’t say enough about the staff at “Baby’s World.” They were the most helpful and informative staff, and their prices are competitive. We went back to “Baby’s World” because of the great information we got from Amy, and we are highly recommending this place to other parents because of the service we got from Nadia.
As mentioned, we went in for a stroller, and of course we talked about the car seat that we bought used, to make sure it fit into the stroller, etc. Nadia asked if our car seat base was installed properly.
When I went to pick up baby from the hospital, I looked at the car seat base instructions. I fed the belt through and made it look like the pictures. The base felt loose, but the car seat instructions made Ikea furniture assembly instructions look like a NASA flight manual, so I just trusted that the belt and base would work as designed.
Nadia took one look and said it’s not right. She climbed into the back seat and spent 15 minutes adjusting and reefing on the seatbelt with her entire body to get the correct tension. That woman is strong! Even after that, we needed a shim on the bottom to get everything sorta right. She recommended that we goto a car seat safety specialist to get it checked again.
I drive a Nissan Maxima, and our car seat is a Peg Perego. Those are two pretty common names in their respective fields. It’s not like I’m trying to jam the car seat into a 77′ Vega. I shudder to think what might have happened if we didn’t learn from Nadia how to do it right. The instruction manuals for the car and car seat were both sorely lacking.
I highly recommend for new parents to get the car seat installation double checked. My installation and her installation both looked the same, but looks are deceiving.