Remembering Luke

I grew up as an only child, and my parents taught me that in my culture, cousins are just like brothers and sisters, and family always is family.

The evening we found out Luke lost his battle with Leukemia, Emilia and Liam were having a rare occasion, "slumber party" together. I went into the room to be with them, as I watched their peaceful little faces, soundly asleep. So much feels from so many different angles... as a parent, as siblings growing up together, as a young, brave child thrown into a fight for life.

Spencer, Luke, Sarah, Liam, & Emilia, 2013
As parents we strive to protect our kids, nurture them, and prepare them teach for what lies ahead in the future.. a future that we hope is filled of wonderful experiences, but as life is, the future is unexpected and unknown. We hope our children develop strong character and perseverance to go through hardships, enough perception to find simply joys in everything, and will and determination to push and fight for achievement. But nothing can ever prepare for cancer, and the letting go of a child to cancer. Luke and his family were so courageous and brave in the fight, we hold them in our thoughts.

Luke, Spencer, Emilia, & Liam, 2012
Luke will always be remembered. He is a part of our family. Emilia and Liam didn't get to spent much time with cousin Luke, but the times that they did, they adored their older cousins, him and Spencer. We will miss his contagious smile and brightness. The kids especially will miss the laughter and fun they have with him.

Sarah, Luke, Emilia, & Spencer, 2011
Until we meet you again...Luke, be free and on to your next adventures.

School is OUT?! Summer is IN!!!

Holy Moly. Where in the world did the school year go?! Kindergarten has been an amazing time and new experience for all of us. Looking back at photos and videos, Emilia has really transitioned and grown this past school year. At the start of Kindergarten, school pretty much felt like play and socialization most the time, with bits of learning thrown in. But now.. the last several months, it's been full STEAM ahead!

These are some miscellaneous photos collected from the school year.

Early days of school.

Liam went from being one of the small kids in pre-school to one of the older kids now. He has made some really close friends that he is inseparable from at school. They play Superheroes every chance they get, which drives the teachers nuts.

Big kid now and carries a big backpack (instead of lunch tote) he received from his Auntie & Uncle.

Emilia's classroom.

The class had many field trips to learn and explore.

The kids also prepared projects to display and discuss during school exhibitions. The first exhibition Emilia presented at, her voice was barely audible. But as familiarity and confidence grew, by the end of the school year exhibition, she was holding her own.

The last exhibition's topic was "The Sandy Shores", which the kids were learning about through research observation.

Emilia's specific "Sandy Shore" focus was on the Snowy Plover.

The class held their exhibition at the aquarium where they got a chance to talk with aquarium visitors about their specific focus.

Emilia and some of her classmates.

Liam and his BFF.

Liam's pre-school "Moving Forward" ceremony.



Liam's "Moving Forward" certificate.



Both kiddos have really thrived and grown in school this year! They amaze me with the things they know and say. Both kiddos are book worms! Emilia is reading at 2nd grade level now, and Liam is reading high Kindergarten level. They have even started reading story time to each other, which makes my job way easier. All in all, it's been a busy, but good academic year.

Winning or Learning

In competition, there will be a winner and a loser, but there is no losing (unless you quit), only learning. This was a lesson from a recently kids library book that we picked up and read. The simple point of the story followed the emotions and thoughts of two young siblings' journey into competitive sports as they joined a soccer team. It went through the ups and downs of emotions, thoughts, insecurities, and struggles of the siblings as they learned about perseverance, to work hard to develop in skill, and to understand a bigger, personal concept of competition and winning through the game of soccer. They were guided by their dad to view each challenge and loss as an opportunity to learn, and that true winning is about what you can gain through attitude and perspective. Great simple kid story that was so direct with the message.

When my kids struggle, whether they are frustrated with not being able to do something right, or they want to give up, I remind them that there is no losing, just learning and to find what they can learn from the situation to become better.

The story we read coincidentally came at a great time, a few weeks before Emilia's first jiujitsu competition!!

Let's start at the beginning. Our dojo hosted a local jiujitsu competition and encouraged the kids to participate. It would be good experience in a kid-friendly format and have more kids from our own dojo attend. I thought it was a great short term goal for Emilia to keep focused on as we encouraged her to practice and learn in her BJJ classes.

One of the moms at the dojo made signs for all the kids.

Competition experience is so different than regular practice at the dojo. When we walked into the gymnasium, there were so many people there - People in the stands, kids in their Gis warming up or playing on the 6 competition mat areas, people going about with a purpose, getting ready for the competitions... the referees, the coaches, photographers, nervous kids, parents, etc. The feeling in the air was that of excitement and nervous anticipation. I could see my kids looking around and observing, taking it all in.



Emilia was simply being Emilia.. which I love! I tried to get her to warm-up, maybe spar with some of the kids that she knows, but she was really just taking in the surroundings, eating some snacks, and practicing her version of "cartwheels". Competition environment? It didn't change how she goes about things.

Emilia's version of "Cartwheels"



The competition was soon starting, and the kids were lined up and sat on the edge of the mat where they would be competing on. Emilia's bracket was the TODDLER DIVISION, AGES 4-5. We did not sign up Liam for this because even though he qualifies in age, Liam just doesn't have the base concept down yet. However, he wanted his Gi on and wanted to be a part of this too.. so we let him sit with the rest of the kids.

Emilia's first match was the 2nd one on the mat. The first match were two kids from her dojo, Henry and Cohen. This is representative of what I expected from kids in the TODDLER division. Well.. okay.. maybe not as much spinning around...

Henry and Cohen's Match


Then Emilia was up. Her match was with an unknown kid, not from our dojo. I had watched the kid during pre-comp practice and was already nervous because the kid seemed more serious and aggressive than the kids Emilia is usually paired up with in class. I was hoping that it would be a good learning experience that would drive her to understand why she goes to practice and learns these skills.

E's Match


The match, actually most of it, turned out to be quite unexpected. Emilia impressed me as I can see her focused determination. Kudos for trying! However, at the end of this video, I stopped filming because I could her her little voice crying. It was just loud enough where I could hear how hurt she was.. combined with gasps of breath in between, I also knew she was trying so hard not to cry. What happened was the boy did an arm bar maneuver on her and the referee did not stop it in time. The arm went into full extension, and hyper-extended the elbow joint. Actually, even when the ref did stop the match, the boy didn't let go. The ref had to pry the kid's hands off of Emilia's arm. I have never had an arm bar done to me before, but from what I hear, it is pretty painful.

Luckily Ryan was there to help check on Emilia. That particular sound of Emilia's cry, one that she rarely ever makes, hits a deep mama instinct. In fact, the mama next to me put her arm around me. No parent wants to see their kid hurt.

At TODDLER bracket, I thought it was ridiculous that someone teaches a kid that's only learned bladder control for 1-2 years, how to do a highly skilled and potentially harmful move, and to use in competition. Emilia has not learned the arm bar move nor how to defend it or how to get out of it.

I was beyond mad and upset, not because she lost, but because she was hurt in such an unprepared and unfair way. I could hear the other kid's dad in the background yelling "Arm bar! Arm bar!" while my brain was processing "Wait... kids do arm bars at this age? Emilia doesn't know arm bar!".

However, Emilia amazed me. This is PROUD MAMA MOMENT... she obviously didn't win, in fact, she was utterly crushed...(had to forfeit her 2nd match). But after we iced her elbow, filled her with the best medicine - candy, and gave into her every request the rest of the day, I asked her what she thought of the day's event and how she felt. She said to me "My arm hurt a lot. I really tried my best, but I didn't know the arm bar. I'll need to learn more and maybe next time I can win a gold necklace. Can we go to the beach?" (Note: She wants the gold medal because it is a pretty necklace!)

That's it. She didn't blame me, nor her instructors, nor the boy, nor the unfair match-up, nor the boy's parents that kept yelling for the arm bar during the match (and again at the sandbagger's 2nd match!), nor the judge (who felt really bad), AND she didn't blame herself (unlike me with lots of guilt). She was happy with her effort, and the rest of the situation, she accepted it as "it just is" and moved on to enjoy a beautiful sunny beach day.

As for mama, I learned as well. I spent the next week researching the culture of jiujitsu, learning about the different dojos and their teaching philosophies. Many dojos, non-Gracie affiliated, are geared towards sport jiujitsu, which is winning competitions versus a more practical nature of self defense in a nurturing environment. The dojo we go to is more focused on character development, which is why Emilia has not learned arm bars and chokes yet. This puts the kids at a disadvantage for competitions. That should have been stressed and made aware to the parents! However, apparently the topic of teaching young kids technical and potentially dangerous moves of joint locks and choke holds are highly debated, even though it is common in sport jiujitsu.

My kid's journey and experiences will be her own, no matter how much I try to control the situation and protect her, life is life. It will be unfair and unexpected. Situations like this only help prepare her better to face the unknown future. Somewhere, somehow... my little girl already inherently has the right attitude and perspective. She takes a loss as an opportunity to learn. In fact, she was mimicking the arm bar move at home the other day, solely learned from watching and observing because again, she hasn't been taught. Her heart, her mentality, her attitude.. is pure gold. She doesn't need to win one. She knows how to approach life, at 6 years of age, more than most people. Way to go baby girl!

May, 2016 : Bring Your Kid To Work Day!!

Okay, I am making feeble attempts to catch up with the blog. So continuing from where I left off in May.

One of the things I like about my work is that everyone puts in great effort to make "Bring Your Kid to Work Day" a pretty fun and learning experience for the kids. This year was Emilia's first year that she was old enough to attend. Even so, the lessons were still beyond her comprehension, but nonetheless, a good start and exposure to the fun world of engineering. This was the first year I also got to tour around with Emilia and check out all the different presentations from the various labs and groups.

The first stop was with my group, in the electronics lab, which started with a brief introduction on what the group does with examples of different components and stages of a product test cycle.

Note the things on the table. Kids got to touch it and relate to it pretty much as the insides of a fancy computer.

The demonstration was focused on sound waves, showing how different tones/pitches of sound could be converted to an electrical frequency and quantified on an oscilloscope. Then kids got the chance to play around with using a mic and watching their voice conversions. Our group was pretty mellow.. but I heard the later groups, with the older kids, were just taking turns screaming and laughing into the mic.

Sound Waves


Next stop was a visit to the Optics Lab, where some engineers from the Fiber Optics team put on a demo and discussion about light spectrum and diffraction.

I thought this demo was pretty fun. They started off discussing the concept of light and how our eyes interpret what we see based on the light and the medium the light passes through. They also had different shaped prisms, convex, concave, etc and laser beams, where kids had to figure out which way the laser beam would bend base on the shape of the prism they were using.

They ended with an interactive experiment where the kids had to look above the water and try to "spear" a fish (aka a coin) at the bottom of the water tank. The idea was that the light through the medium of water distorts the perceived location of our fishing rod (aka stick) and the location of the fish.

Light Diffraction Through Water


Next up was the Physics Lab. Here a group that works on failure analysis of boards and materials gave a demonstration about a specific instrument that measures spectral density of objects. They had a few items of "white powder"... sugar, corn starch, salt, etc. .. and without touching or smelling, just by looking, the kids were to try to find the one that was sugar. Kids tried to guess, and the engineers would put the white powder on the instrument and measure the spectral density to determine what it was.

Throughout most of these demos, Emilia was the silent one... sometimes doodling on her notebook instead of paying attention.

To provide incentive, I said I would give her a piece of candy every time she asked or answered a question. Low and behold, her hand started going up!

Second half of the FA group's demo, was Bob talking about another instrument, a scanning electron microscope (SEM), that scans a focused electron beam over a board surface area to create an image of surface topography and composition which helps with board failure analysis and debug.

That's already quite a bit of demos.. but there are two more. Next one is still part of the FA/Mechanical group. Here the kids got a preview of a very specific instrument called the Romer Arm and basic idea of how it works. The instrument itself is pretty neat. Once coordinates are provided, you move a laser scanner of the arm over an object, and it translates the topographical image based on recorded distance away from initial calibrated position. You can do it again from a different angle, and the software can combine the various scans so one can have a dimensional image that can be rotated, flipped, etc.

And last of the engineering demos, was provided by the the Cryptography team about password safety and hacking algorithms. Kids got a chance to learn how to create harder to break passwords and then they had to create a password based on the concepts they learned from the demo, and then the Cryptography team was going to attempt to break it. If any passwords were left unbroken in 2 weeks, the kid would win a prize. We thought Emilia had a good chance.. she came up with an AWESOME password. But alas, she did not win.

Total of 5 different demos from various engineer groups. Pretty awesome for the engineers and teams to set aside some time to do this for the kids. Not only were there demos, there as also simply fun engineering experiments for the kids to witness.

Behold... the liquid nitrogen rolling out...

Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream


And concurrently, someone had a great idea to do an experiment of the liquid nitrogen smoke bomb. In fact, the engineers here spent the week prior refining the quantities of liquid nitrogen to scalding, hot water to create just the right about of explosion and smoke for a giant smoke bomb effect. It concluded the "Bring Your Kid To Work Day" with a giant bang! =)

Nitrogen Smoke Bomb


Where was Emilia in all of this kid chaos? She decided not to be one of the kids to run in and try to put their hands on liquid nitrogen with hot water.. instead she stayed by the ice cream table, patiently waiting for the perfect liquid nitrogen ice cream.

And she was rewarded with a yummy giant scoop! That's my girl!