His first morning, we made the first round of Skype calls. Cassie and Vivian got to be the first to see and hear August, followed by Cherie and my parents and brother and the whole Althauser clan at Steve and Claremay’s. I snapped screenshots during the calls. In hindsight, I should have actually had everyone ‘pose’ with August. Maybe in our next calls. Click on the image below to see the others.
Carly was asleep in the bedroom, so August and I napped out on the couch for a couple hours last night:
At first, March 10th doesn’t sound like a very exciting day for a birthday. But it turns out to be a pretty cool day in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_10. The Battle of the Aegates Islands? Maximian marching into Carthage? Alexander Graham Bell making the first successful phone call? The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? The arrest of Gandhi? Batista leading a coup in Cuba? 300,000 Tibetans surrounding the palace of the Dalai Lama to protect him?
Okay, it is a little violent (I skipped the fire bombing of Tokyo), but still cool.
But the best thing about March 10th? Just this Monday XKCD ran a comic about March 10th:
So take THAT everyone with the other 365 possible birthdays.
While Carly was taking a break, August and I simply hung out for about two hours. During that time I played this song on the computer and he immediately stopped whatever squirming he was doing at the time. We listened to it seven times before he finally started to fall asleep.
The band, Lullatone, makes really cool, modern, not-cheesy music for babies or any human. They are on a cool indie label out of Portland called Audio Dregs that releases all sorts of cool melodic music. Each album is only $6. Check out the whole label on Bandcamp and support a cool band, label, and platform (Bandcamp).
And here are the videos. We have a YouTube account, but we are posting our videos ‘unlisted’, which means you can’t see them just by going to our account. We’ll try to post them all here though.
These are some sounds from August’s first few days. I love podcasts and audio pieces, so I’ll try to do a lot of audio only pieces like this. I’ll try to post them here to the blog, but probably won’t post all of them. If you want to listen to them all, you can find them on our SoundCloud account.
While I was at work (August was a huge hit at school as I showed all my classes a few photos – they were quite interested in what the whole experience was like) August got to try out a pacifier, which he loves.
August, Carly and I came home from the birthing center around noon on Wednesday.
After the surprise of seeing the apartment decorated with the art of family and friends, Carly and August settled in and I spent some time organizing things before heading out (my first goodbye to August) and catching the bus to the airport to pick up Carly’s mom, Cherie.
Cherie and I returned around 7:30. Here she is meeting her third grandchild and second grandson for the first time.
Yesterday we travelled down to Hyewha to go to a cell phone store that speaks English. Ryan got a new iPhone 5S and Carly now has the iPhone 4.
After that, we walked into Kyunghee University and managed to find both their history museum and natural history museum. The first three museum photos show a couple of festive statues outside the library/history museum, Carly sitting in a cool chair and then a jar coffin in the history museum. Basically, it is two jars, or cups, that fit together to make a coffin. We’d never seen one before despite being to several history museums here in Korea.
Then we headed to the natural history museum and that’s where things got really interesting. It doesn’t look like it has changed much since the 70s and is filled with questionable taxidermy (look for the photo of the cats with the bulging eyes), specimens in bottles, pinned insects, and colorful murals that demonstrate a very 70s (I think) view of science, the universe, and especially the future. In particular look for the a very random diorama of the ‘Moslem Garden of Eden’, a cheesy robot covered in dead humans, and the vision of a future ‘oughtopia’.
You can check out the photos at http://flickr.com/gp/rcniman/8ED5U3/
Namdaemun is one of the gates of old Seoul. It is National Treasure #1. It was damaged by an arsonist in 2008 and for the past five years restoration work (using all traditional methods of stone and wood work) has been ongoing. It just reopened a few months ago so this was our first trip to see the restored gate.
