Tag: famiry

How I spent my 40th Birthday

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mythical wife, my brother and several close friends and I actually celebrated my birthday this past weekend.  Because my birthday fell on a Tuesday which is probably the worst day for a birthday to ever fall on, it made sense to do stuff on the weekend before.  It was a pleasant time to hang with people I love and eat and drink while my in-laws watched the girls.

It was probably for the best because as far as my actual birthday has gone, there wouldn’t have been any time for well, anything.

#2 is sick with strep where I’m probably prime suspect to have been patient zero that got her sick.  Subsequently, the new nanny got sick and didn’t come in, so as is the case when someone is sick, I had to eat the day and work from home and take care of both girls all day, and get no work done and miss the gym when I’m trying to stay on something of a routine.

However, being my birthday I refused to let myself get upset or fall into disappointment because nobody wants to feel either on a birthday.  I made the best of my day, and thankfully my workload could permit it, and I actually had a pretty pleasant day with my kids before the sickness started to really overtake #2.

Regardless of the circumstances and minutiae, I did get to spend my birthday with my daughters.  At the end of the day that is what matters and it’s always time well spent.

And this is how I bring in my 40’s.  I knew I would probably end up writing some sort of drivel for the occasion, and all I knew was that I was going to compare it to how I ushered in 30, where I was discovering a donut burger in Midtown in comparison.

Aside from the fact that I moved out of my old house and into a new one, met a girl that would have me, marry her and have not just one, but two kids, not much else really feels like it’s changed between 30 and 40.  I still brog, I still watch wrestling, collect blets, casually follow baseball, it’s just now I have my own family interspersed among it all, and my days are packed every day.

I don’t make big deals about birthdays, even supposed milestones like 40, because i don’t want to get my hopes up in the event things go tits up.  Frankly if I were a more selfish person a day like today might’ve constituted tits up but perhaps I’ve grown or my priorities have changed to where I recognize a day with my girls as good in every way shape or form.

Otherwise the only real things I feel like I need to concern myself with other than the litany of old jokes I can make about myself is to better take care and be cognizant of my own health and well-being.  But a day like today, even if it is the only 40th birthday I’ll ever have, just feels like any other day.  Same overload of chores, childcare, feeling overworked and having no time for myself.  Except I made a very conscious effort to not give into the usual feeling of despair.

Except if I’m lucky, I’ll get some cake to eat and some gifts to open up.  But bring on 40; I’ve got not intention of slowing down at the gym and I’m determined to get my running speed back to where it was pre-pandemic.

Dad Brog (#084): My health isn’t just my health anymore

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the last two weeks, I’ve had a dreadful cough. It started with sneezing, and then my chest filled with gunk, and since then it’s been a tremendous amount of coughing, scratchy throat, and then more coughing.  At certain times and conditions worse than others, but a noticeable amount of coughing going on.

I chalked it up to a seasonal allergy, since I am susceptible to pollen, and this year’s jizzing by Mother Nature has been particularly bad.  Mythical wife has been tired of hearing me coughing, and suggested I go to a doctor, just to get an antibiotic or something to help rush this shit along.  But being of the typical male who generally avoids going to see doctors, I didn’t, chalking it up to being on the mend and that the phlegm just needs to work itself through my system.

Today, #2 was diagnosed with strep throat.  She hasn’t shown any coughing, sneezing or any of the other typical strep symptoms, but she’s been incredibly fussy and was already headed to the doc for her 9-month checkup.  There, it was noticed her throat was a little red and after a quick test, yep it’s strep.

Now the obvious culprit is that her lousy dad might have had strep and didn’t know it was strep because he didn’t have anything other than a nagging cough, and I still don’t know if it’s strep or not.  But the point remains that the very likely source of my daughter’s sickness is the person I see in the mirror and having a coming to Jesus moment that I really should be taking care of myself better if not just for myself, but for the sake of others, namely my own family and kids.

You’d think after two-plus years of being in a pandemic I would have figured that out already, but 40 years of life haven’t really made it sink in until I really jeopardized the wellbeing of one of the most important lives in my world.  Regardless of if I am the reason is irrelevant, just the possibility that it could’ve been me is enough of a wake up call to where I need to get my head out of my ass and just fucking do better.

It’s things like these that are the most obvious but most invaluable lessons to be learned about parenting, as well as life in general if you have other people in your life. It’s just a shame that I have to feel like a fucking failure in order for it to sink in, but I guess in a Fight Club fashion, it isn’t until you hit bottom that you’re free to do anything, like learn something important.

Car conundrum

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Recently, I took my car to the dealership to have some maintenance done. Prior to my appointment, I got a message asking if I wanted to get an appraisal done on my car towards a possible trade in.  Considering I’ve already been thinking about a larger car since two kids have already made my current one feel like a Ford Festiva sometimes, I figured why not?  I was already going to be waiting there so there was no harm in seeing what my current value was.

Especially right now, where the car market is as volatile as the housing market and there’s been lots of speak about how used cars were supposedly netting way more than people were owing on them.  I’d gotten emails and snail mail over the recent months claiming that my car would be worth well over $20,000 which was amusing to me considering I still owed around $13.5 on it. 

I figured such estimates were bullshit and that there was no way my car would fetch that much once I were to get it officially appraised.

Well turns out that it’s not that much bullshit, because the dealership estimated my car at $24,000 to trade in.  It’s a 2019 with under 20,000 miles and in fantastic condition because I take care of my shit and the pandemic really prevented me from doing any real hardcore driving.

So, despite me not being that serious about switching cars just yet, these kinds of numbers make it very interesting towards the possibility of doing so now.

I get that the car market is similar to the housing market right now and I read the news too; I’m aware that the car business has been hit with staggering inflation right now and that cars effectively have become haggle-proof.  The demand for cars versus inventory means that if someone tries to be cute and haggle too much, the dealerships can pass and someone will purchase it for less trouble.

In “normal” circumstances, I would look in two years when my car were to be paid off, and I’d hope to appraise for like $4,000 and then haggle the shit out of 2-3 dealerships before hoping to get $4,000 down from a not-so inflated sticker price.

However in two years, my kids will be older and probably be in command of a whole lot more shit than they have now and I could already be too late in needing bigger then; especially when I have the opportunity now to potentially upsize and be ready for the future.

So what I’m looking at right now, is the opportunity to have nearly 8-9k in equity to put towards a new car, which is more than I’ve ever put down in the past.  Sure, it restarts my clock of payments back to the start for the next 60-72 months but frankly car payments are about as certain as death and taxes, and it’s really the exception to be without them.

I’ve been casually looking at numbers and basically $8-9k towards an inflated sticker price still seems like a more attractive option than waiting for then car market and it’s potential trade market to cool and hope to look for a bargain and that my car doesn’t appraise for peanuts in two years.

Currently, I could flip my $30k car and aim for a $40k+ car but only needing to finance like $35k~.  I feel like there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to do such if I were to wait.

However on the flip side, I’m concerned about the future of gas prices considering how easy it is for the price at the pump to flip on a whim, and mythical wife and I have had discussions about the disadvantages of owning a car that isn’t gas powered.

And that’s where I am now. Leaning hard towards capitalizing on my car’s current trade-in value and upsizing to a more famiry-friendly dadmobile, but hesitating on what exactly to change to.

Waiting and standing pat doesn’t seem as appealing because my car now already feels too small and capitalizing while the market is volatile seems like a good idea. I just don’t want to make a rash choice that I might regret, but time doesn’t exactly feel like it’s on my side.

Getting an appraisal was clearly a mistake, lol

Dad Brog (#081): Now we enter true hard mode

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Seeing as how my eldest has now crossed over the two-year mark, I can’t really call this series 2 Under 2 anymore.  So for the sake of simplification and finality, because these are what these posts really are, I’m just going to go ahead and just start titling these what they truly are.

So for the past month and change, has been The Best Month Ever, part 2 – a substantial chunk of time in which my mom has been staying with me, to help take care of my children, as well as the opportunity to bond with #2, much as she did with #1 back two years ago.  Her being here is a massive security blanket, as she is someone I trust unconditionally with my kids, and I always know my children are in good hands when I’m not physically present.  Which has been very critical seeing as how I have now returned to the office partially in my new hybrid work format.

Honestly, I think this visit has gone better than the last one, since aside from being the point person on #2, my mom has gotten to witness the growth and development of my first child, and it will never not make me happy to see just how much #1 loves her halmoni, and the rapid development of where it started with “halmi” at the start of the month, but has already corrected to a very well pronounced “halmoni” now.

We didn’t butt heads as often as we did the last time she was here, and probably by virtue of being in a job that isn’t sucking the soul out of me, my mental state was in a far better place now than it was back then, and I didn’t have my own head stuffed up my ass for the first few weeks of her visit this time.

In spite of how glad I’ve been to have my mom here over the last five weeks, it still has been somewhat of a roller coaster.  As mentioned, I returned to the office, which has embarked a whole new world of awkwardness of getting back to commuting and being in a place of business again.  I’ve started working out and running again which is a positive thing.  Unfortunately, as posted about not long ago, I had to put my dog down while she was here, which sucked massively in spite of knowing it was always looming.  And in the middle of this month, I took #1 to Disney World for her birthday, while my mom took a break from kid duty to visit a local friend in Georgia for the weekend, which was pretty good for all of us.

However, what wasn’t good was the fact that my daughter picked up a bug while in Florida, and I can remember the little shitfuck who was coughing all over the shuttle, and being concerned that my daughter wasn’t far enough away perhaps, and now I’ve got two sick kids because it’s impossible to separate #1 from #2 because they love each other.  It makes me really reconsider doing anything that puts either of my kids at risk, because Americans still can’t get their shit together, and frankly it’s not worth my kids getting sick for an egregiously expensive excursion in the first place.

Regardless, the point of the post is that the best month ever part 2 is coming to a close this week, and I have to take my mom back to Virginia very soon.  I’m eternally grateful for her help, and treasure the bonds she made with my daughters, but at the same time I’m absolutely scared and petrified at what lies ahead in the immediate future, with daily life without any sort of safety net anymore.

With me going back to the office a couple days each week, these are a couple of days in which it’s going to be just my nanny, in charge of both girls by herself.  This isn’t say I don’t trust my nanny, it’s just that I feel like I’m the only person in my world who really, really, really tries to avoid any and all scenarios in which my kids outnumber the present adults.  I know how hard double duty is, I’m on it way more than I wish I were, but shit happens.  My kids are handfuls, where one of them is now a two-nager who has some very strong opinions and wants to get her hands on anything and everything, and the other one is an infant that sucks at sleeping and requires the DaVinci code in order to get to nap for seven minutes.

Prior to this, I’ve always had the luxury of being able to work from home, so that I was always available if things went tits up, but that’s not going to be the case for several days each week.  Mythical wife and I agreed that we really only need to hang in there until the end of the school year, but that’s still nearly two and a half months to be going without any sort of safety netting.

As if two kids under-ish two weren’t already hard enough, going back to the office and sending my mom home, is truly going to be putting life into hard mode, and it’ll be a daily touch and feel test to see how things are going, but I have concerns that I may need to put some stress on a job that I’m really beginning to like, due to the realities of parenthood borne during pandemic.

Year two of forever (Dad brog #080)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Under normal circumstances, I would’ve liked to have written something on the actual day.  But mythical wife and I were at Disney World with #1 celebrating her second birthday, so appropriately understandable, I just wasn’t around to take the time to write and reflect.

And just like that, my first child is two years old.  Naturally, the passage of time has felt like a blip, and I can still remember lots of the finer details of raising my daughter, and the world she grew up in and has been living in, still amazed at just how things have progressed in that span.

Over the last year, between first and second birthdays, a lot has most certainly occurred.  Not long after turning one, my daughter really kicked it into gear and began crawling like a speed demon obsessed, which was a might’ve been considered a little late in the development game, but honestly that part didn’t last long at all, because before we knew it she was suddenly upright, and it was barely a month after turning one, did she take her first steps and frankly, she hasn’t stopped running around since then.

#1 basically eats everything in sight now, and she went from being introduced to solids to not just inhaling everything that’s put in front of her, but now an innate curiosity and determination to utilize utensils and not just eat everything with fistfuls jammed into her mouth.

Obviously, one of the more substantial occurrences to have happened within the last year was that even though she was just one year old, #1 became a big sister already, when #2 was born in July, and my household had to deal with the harrowing realization of being a house with two under two, and the hard mode of life we were about to embark on.

In spite of everything I may have written detailing the difficulty and hell that parenting under these circumstances might have been, one of the joys to have emerged from it all has been witnessing just how much my now elder daughter, loves her little sister.  What started off as hesitation and fussing about the new edition to the home, #1 has taken to big sisterhood quite well, and fewer things bring genuine happiness to my heart than seeing her open up her arms and envelop her little sister in big hugs, whenever the opportunities present themselves.

Not a day goes by where I don’t just stop and watch my child at varying points throughout the days, just to see what she’ll do next.  Not a day goes by where it doesn’t seem like there’s some sort of growth or development with her, most of the time pertaining to absorption of the things she’s hearing and her ability to repeat and recollect, which also means that I have to really watch out for using profanity around her, because much like this meme, there’s no doubt that she’ll remember the bad words forever.

But every night while I wind her down for bedtime, I tell her that I love her so much, and it melts my heart every single time, when she repeats the words “love you so much.”  I know for now it’s mostly just repeating the words that I’m saying, but I’m hoping that one of these days eventually, she’ll be saying it as a declarative statement of her own volition and with understanding the meaning of the words.

As much as I love her though, all the same, has arrived the time of toddler defiance; a lot more no’s, a lot more fussiness at being told what to do, and a whole lot more determination to do things herself and her way, and not necessarily how others want her to do things.  I’m guessing this is probably the onset of the suppose terrible twos, but really it’s still just the never ending adventure of raising a child that I’m clearly experiencing first hand for the first time.  Hopefully she doesn’t make my life too hell as mythical wife and I embark on this next chapter of our parenting lives, but I’m confident that our love for our kids won’t waver, no matter how much trolling and exasperation they’re going to inevitably test us with throughout our lives.

Either way, I thought I’d have more to write about this than this, but I am still a tired dad with too much on his plate, and not enough time to accomplish everything he wants to do.  Regardless of the circumstances, a happy belated-in-writing birthday to my first child, whom I love so much, and will always love so much.  I look forward to watching her grow and develop, from the good to the bad, and there will never be a day where I am not thankful to be her dad.

Happy trails, Chase the Face

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I told myself to not write anything before the fact, because that would be time spent on myself and not hanging out with the Face.  I still have no idea how people do this, where they schedule the euthanization of their pets, and then literally manage to operate their lives knowing there is a very real clock ticking down the remainder of their life.

Needless to say, the time between making the call to the vet and to the eventual saying of goodbye to my dog, has been real hazy, but fortunately for me, I’m the type of person who can throw themselves into work, just so that I don’t have to think about the anxieties of something like having to put my dog down.

Here’s a fun fact about me, Chase is actually the first dog that I’ve ever own, myself.  Every pet I’ve had in the past was either inherited, temporary or technically belonged to someone else, but not actually mine.  Chase was the first dog that I’ve ever adopted, paid for, and been solely responsible for in my entire life.

I adopted him on May 16, 2012, from the Atlanta Humane Society.  My home had always had dogs in it, and when it stopped having dogs in it, it felt like there was something missing.  I was single with no prospects at this time, so having a dog seemed like a no-brainer as far as unconditional companionship was concerned, and I wanted to adopt a rescue because I just felt that it was a more responsible thing to do, seeing as how the pet population is pretty out of control in general.

I had visited a couple of shelters leading up to eventually going to the Humane Society, and when I met Wind Chaser, I kind of felt pretty quickly that this was the dog that I wanted to adopt.  Say what you will about my general preference in dogs, maybe it’s an Asian thing or maybe it’s just me, but this maltese/shih tsu mix just kind of spoke to me.  So I paid the adoption fee in an Amazon donation, and shortened to Chase, was now my dog.

Continue reading “Happy trails, Chase the Face” →

Time to combat the dad bod

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Among the challenges that have emerged during the journey of raising a second child is that I’ve basically had to give up running.  I haven’t run since October, and it’s been way longer than that since I’d last had a formal workout in a gym.  Raising kids has a tendency to make stuff like exercise expendable in a day’s agenda, and it was bad enough I had to forfeit gyms due to pandemic, but throwing a second kid into the mix has taken running off the table for me as well over the last few months.

Needless to say, I’ve watched my weight do some rollercoaster-ing since the original lockdown occurred, and now it’s not headed in the right direction.  At first, my weight started to drop because I wasn’t eating well, often not eating enough, and with the gym off the table, muscle mass began deteriorating, so the weight from muscle mass presumably started coming off.  Eventually, running became my only real exercise, and doing cardio with no weight training meant that I could really only lose more weight, and I actually got my weight down to almost my peak high school weight, in the 170’s area, and I actually felt like I was looking pretty decent, in spite of the loss of all my gains.

Eventually #2 showed up and life went into hard(er) mode with two kids in tow.  With my job also ruining my life at this point and the challenges of raising two kids simultaneously, the running eventually ceased, and mythical wife and I more or less went into survival mode as far as our eating habits went.  We never had the time and/or energy to cook not-trash food for ourselves, and with the little time we did have, we have been eating a whole lot of garbage over the last few months.  My weight has been creeping up in this time, and it’s been especially noticeable when I’d be doing virtual job interviews and putting on dress shirts, and feeling the bulge and tightening in all the wrong places.

I normally don’t like to put too much stock into weight numbers, since when I worked weights I always spouted the whole muscle weighs more than fat thing, but with no weights in play, I knew that each and every pound that I’d gain was solely based on my own poor choices.  At the time of starting this post, I’d crept up to 192.4 lbs., and with the reality that I haven’t exercised in months, that means I’m 192.4 lbs. of fat fucking American embodiment of failure.

Anyway, my intention is to stop the bleeding, and to try and get back on the horse.  Due to the fact that #2 has been sleeping at night fairly well as of late, I had the confidence to get back on the treadmill and go for a run, the first one I’ve done since October 7th, 2021 (thanks Garmin fitness tracker).

It was the worst run I’ve had in probably 16 years, since I’m basically starting from scratch.  I was running at a pace that I had to keep slowing down .1 at a time because I was blowing out and getting gassed, and it took me nearly 40 minutes to traverse three miles.  Now I say traverse, because I definitely didn’t run the whole time, like I used to do my old workouts of non-stop running.  My pace was probably around 12 minutes a mile, a far cry from my old 9:50 pace, and I feel like I have a long way to go before I can competently get back to those kinds of splits.

But it was also the best run I’ve had in a very long time, because I actually got to do it.  And one thing I’ve always stated is that at no point ever, does running ever feel like a waste of time, and that’s absolutely one thing that I love, because I abhor feeling like I’m wasting time.

If all goes well, I’ll get back to a general routine of running every other day, which is good because running is also when I can try to catch up with watching things, since I can watch things on my iPad.

Furthermore, at the new gig, I’ve done some recon and my access to the fitness center has been activated, so I now officially have a place where I can hit some weights again, which I’m super excited to get started with.  I’m not really looking forward to the fact that I’ll be starting from scratch there, which means the inevitable soreness from doing, everything, is going to be pretty prevalent, but once it dissipates, I’m hoping to try and build back some of the muscle that I’ve clearly lost over the last two years.

It’s not the best stocked fitness center there is, but it doesn’t cost anything and has some free weights, so I can at least not feel entirely like a geriatric living on machines.  I intend to make the best of it, and declare war on the flab that I’ve amassed over the last few months, because how far I’ve fallen off the wagon is not okay, and there’s little I want more than to change that.

Changing the eating habits is probably going to be a bigger hurdle to clear, but at least if I have some exercise back into the rotation, that should help suppress some of the physical decay I’ve been allowing to happen to me.  I’d prefer to have the dad bod that actually looks like I work out occasionally versus the dad bod of the guy that’s let go of everything and will have to start buying bigger clothing because of it.