one thing you must know...

...about my little cadence is...

...that no matter what...

...no matter how hard you try...

...you just CANNOT...

...separate this girl from her ball!

manhunt

there is a manhunt going on for a rape suspect right outside our home. helicopters have been circling around for the last hour and a half. the schools in the area are on lockdown. there are dozens of squad cars combing the streets and alleys. so i guess we won't be leaving home for a while.

UPDATE: now i hear the police are going door to door looking for this suspect. i've been listening to the radio (since we don't have TV reception). apparently, the police originally had the suspect in custody around 6am but he escaped when the squad car was in the vicinity of pratt and hamilton.

our little crankymeister

...on sunday, cadence set a new household record for one’s personal level of crankiness. i’m talkin’ inconsolably crappy mood. so much so that we gave up on the idea of going to church because the mere thought of being in a public place with her in that condition was too overwhelming for me. i would’ve needed some tranquilizers and multiple melon balls to get through that one.

(ah, melon balls…remember melon balls, josh?)

anyhoo, ted decided to clean up a storm at home, so in hopes that cadence would forget for a few minutes that she was in the foulest mood known to humankind, i took her to not ONE but TWO playgrounds. alas, i was so mad at her at this point, i didn’t even take my camera because i didn’t want to record any part of that day for posterity.

yeah, these photos were taken last week, BEFORE i knew what a crankenstein my little bundle of joy could be. hard to believe, ain’t it?

hopefully, sunday will be an exception to cadence’s usually sunny personality. i suppose it comes with the territory of parenthood, and i really can’t complain. we all have our bitchy days. it really is a sign of how happy cadence usually is that we were so blindsided by just one day of crankiness. and she’s already done so many adorable and sweet things since sunday, that i’m already starting to forget how bad it really was.

cadence’s vocabulary is expanding every day, it seems. she says words that i didn’t even know she knew. for example, when our neighbor’s dog started barking the other day, cadence looked at me and said ‘it’s a goggie.’ i didn’t understand what a ‘goggie’ was, but the next time there was barking, again she repeated, ‘goggie!’ and i realized that’s her word for ‘doggie’. she had never tried to say that word before, so i was surprised that she retrieved that from her memory bank.

and then last night, cadence started pointing up at our desk and saying, ‘bubbo! bubbo!’ again, i had no idea what she was talking about because she’s never used that word before. and then i saw that she was pointing at a bottle of bubbles. i couldn’t believed she remembered what that was because we’d never blown bubbles from that bottle since we moved 5 months ago.

her favorite thing to say (or yell, rather) these days is ‘it’s a COOOOO!’ as in ‘it’s a clue!’ whenever she sees anything that resembles a pawprint. this is a reference to the kid’s program Blue’s Clues, which unless you have regular exposure to preschoolers you have no idea what i’m talking about. anyhoo, we don’t have TV reception but we do have a few Blue’s Clues DVDs which she LOVES. so much so that we’ve decided to wean her off of the boob tube as much as possible before we do permanent damage to her psyche.

well, ted’s been busy getting our home in order. we got a new computer armoire for our dining room (which cadence liked hiding in until actually put our computer in it) so that we can turn the 2nd bedroom exclusively into cadence’s play room. the plan is that someday, SOMEDAY, cadence will sleep in there as well. preferably before she turns, oh, say, age 5.

we'll see...

i miss my dad...

yesterday would have been my dad's 68th birthday. 4 years ago tonight, he breathed his last. watching my dad die in that hospital room was one of the most pivotal experiences of my life thus far. but his life was one worth celebrating, and so i just want to pay tribute to him here with some photos i found.

my dad was born on may 2, 1938. this is a photo of him as a cocky teenager. by this time, he'd already lived through the japanese occupation, world war II and the korean war. not your average childhood.

my dad's family lost everything during the korean war, and they actually had a lot to lose to begin with. my paternal grandfather and grandmother were both dentists, and they had acquired quite a bit of property before they were forced to leave everything behind to flee from the North Korean army during the war.

nevertheless, my dad had many happy memories from his youth, and he managed to graduate from Seoul National University, which is the top ranked university in korea.

and here's my dad on graduation day with his buddies. my, they look like a savory bunch, don't they?

after teaching high school physics for a short while, my dad, who's always enjoyed writing, became a newspaper reporter. here he is on the job at the 38th parallel, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Koreas.

after almost a decade of post-college bachelorhood, my dad gave in to his mother's nagging to find a wife and was introduced to my mom. one of the first dates he took her on was to a meeting of the alpine mountain climbing club that he was an avid member of. for some reason, my mother still agreed to marry him.

my parents were married on september 28, 1968 in seoul. their facial expressions may look more appropriate for a funeral than a wedding, but that's the traditional Korean look for weddings. really somber.

this is one of my favorite photos of my parents. it was taken in wonju, my mom's hometown, right after their honeymoon. they look so freakin' young. and if you look very closely, you will see that there is a dragonfly on my mom's skirt, near her knee.

and here are my parents out on an outing with my dad's alpine club. my mom looks so cute in a beret, no?

my dad also loved skiing. when he was a kid, he made his own skis with pieces of wood. i'm not sure how well they worked, but i bet they provided hours and hours of fun, not to mention numerous injuries.

my dad loved skiing and mountain climbing so much that he actually traveled to the french alps to attend their alpine skiing school for a couple of weeks. being the reckless adverturesome type that he was, i believe there is a story that involved my father and a late-night alpine rescue team.

i don't know if this was taken upon departure for or arrival from that france trip, but he looks pretty sharp in that beret, no? my brother jim seems to think so. as you can see, back in those days, you wore your sunday best to the airport to see someone off or to welcome them home. that's my dad's mom on the right by the way.

although my dad's mom was a devout christian, and my dad had grown up in the methodist church, and he had even taught sunday school, by this time in his adulthood, my dad was more interested in climbing mountains on sundays than in worshipping god.

he spent all his free time and energy on his goal, which was to climb mount everest. he was in the middle of training to join an expedition to the himalayas when he experienced a serious illness that caused his kidneys to fail and cut short his dream of joining that expedition.

so there was my dad, lying in the hospital, weak and helpless, cursing god when my grandmother and her friends from church came to visit him and to pray for him. my dad defiantly and mockingly turned his back to them and refused to listen to their prayers. that night, however, as he lay alone in that hospital bed that night, he couldn't sleep. for some reason, he felt compelled to read the bible that my grandmother had left for him. and for some reason, he was deeply moved by what he read. that was the night my dad had his christian conversion experience, and his life was never the same since.

this is our family photo soon after my dad came home from the hospital. i was only 7 months old. see how puffy his face is?

and this is several months later in may of '73 when my cousin ike (the infant) and i were baptized at chongkyo methodist church in seoul. my cousin casey is the toddler on the left and my cousin kris is the toddler on the right. and that's my brother jim looking rather forlorn standing next to my dad.

and here we are going to visit my grandfather's grave in the hills. my mom didn't let me out of the house without a hat until i was about 3 because i was bald.

and here i am with hair finally. my brother's looking out into space again...i must be about 3 in this picture.

i have a vague recollection of this day. i think it might have been children's day, a national holiday in korea that celebrates children. i think we went on a picnic with my dad and maybe visited some park.

and this is our family on may 23, 1978 at kimpo airport in seoul, ready to get on a plane to our new life in chicago, IL. that's my aunt on the left and my maternal grandparents next to my mom. i am apparently busy getting a sugar high. i do remember losing my shoes on the plane and bugging the flight attendants. i also remember my mom crying a lot on the plane as she read a letter her dad had written her. my dad had just turned 40 years old a mere 3 weeks before getting on that plane to this country. he came here with barely any knowledge of the english language and without any prospects for a job. all he knew was that he wanted to tell people about jesus, and that's what he did until he died.

so that's about it for the photos. after that, my dad just gets older, and most of the photos i have are of him in that cult we were in, and i'd rather not get into that right now.

ok, one last picture...this is my dad and mom about a year before he got sick. he's visiting the rocky mountain national park in colorado. he always loved the mountains, so i thought it would be appropriate to end with a photo of him in the mountains.

my dad lived one heck of a life. he knew what it was like to be rich and to lose it all in a day. he knew hunger. he knew poverty. he knew war. he also knew the thrill of scaling great heights out in the open or of flying down a snowy mountain on nothing more than wooden sticks. he knew the joy of music. he knew the success of having front page stories and getting the 'scoop'. he'd survived avalanches and an almost fatal illness before he'd even turned 35. he knew what it was like to leave everyone and everything familiar to come to a strange and foreign land with a family depending on you for sustenance. he knew about the abuse that churches were capable of, and he knew the pain of realizing that he had participated in such abuses as well. he knew about pride, arrogance, fundamentalism, narrowmindedness. later in life, he learned a lot about humility and love and grace and mercy.

i miss my dad. i really, really do...

won't you be my neighbor?

when i got home from work yesterday, i discovered that ted and cadence were at the playground around the corner from us, so i grabbed my camera to join them. as i was walking around to the playground entrance, a bunch of kids saw me with my big-ass camera strapped around my neck, and they started begging, 'take a picture of me! take a picture of me!' so i obliged.

each time i snapped a shot, they would crowd around my camera yelling, 'let me see! let me see!' they were so cute...

we live in a somewhat sketchy part of town. some portions of rogers park, our neighborhood, have seen a lot of development recently. the part of rogers park where we're at, however, it's a little more isolated from the cool and the hip, and it's just kinda boring.

there are definitely a lot of low income families around here, and i often see little kids playing unsupervised in the playground. most of them are really sweet and seem to really enjoy getting a little attention from a grownup every now and then.

they even let cadence take their ball away...and she gets very possessive of any ball within a 50ft radius, whether it belongs to her or not, so the actual owner of the ball most likely won't get it back until we leave the playground.

besides stealing other kids' balls at our local playground, cadence also enjoys going for a joyride on ted's relatively new Volpe. we need to get her a helmet for a longer ride, and we're hoping that she'll enjoy riding so much that when she gets older maybe she and her old man can get tandem bikes and do some cross country cycling. it's a dream of ted's.