Sophie's Arrival

Here are the details:

Sophie Lee Chan was born on May 28, 2010 at 7:23pm. She weighed 6lb 9oz and was 19.25 inches long. Needless to say, I'm happy, excited and exhausted. More to come, but here's a pic.

When are you coming Sophie?

Sophie's late. It's week 41. We've decided to induce labor since Mary's fluid levels are low. We started at about 9pm last night. It's been about 17 hours since we started the whole induction process. If you're not familiar with it, it starts with a medication to loosen the cervix (cervidil). That takes about 12 hours to take effect. According to Mary it was very painful to administer because it's placed right by the cervix... That start contractions for Mary. They were fairly mild overnight and got worse this morning. She was very brave and handled all the contractions well. The next step, which just happened, is for her to receive pitocin, a synthetic form of the hormone oxytocin, which mothers create naturally as they begin labor. Mary has decided to get an epidural before getting pitocin, which I think was very smart. That went smoothly and she's trying to nap now before the storm later.

This is all making it very real. I'm excited to see Sophie, excited to be a dad. The worst part about it all is seeing Mary go through all this. I wish there was a way for me to make it easier on her. She is taking it like a champ though...which is why she deserves the wonderful push gift I got her - but that's a surprise.

More to come...

Sorry. This is my first new entry in a while. Most of you already know, but Mary and I are expecting a baby girl in May. She is currently about 27 weeks. Check back here often for updates on the new baby. Here is an ultrasound picture from about 20 weeks.



Speaking of new babies, we welcome Adam Willett today! My new nephew was born at Southern New Hampshire Medical Center earlier today. He was 6lbs 12oz and 19 3/4 inches long. I'll post his picture soon.

How old am I?

Random...I was working out at the gym today and I see someone with a Tufts football t-shirt on. Woah...a Tufts connection. They're so few and far between that it immediately sparks a conversation. The first question? Of course...what year are you? His response: 2008!! Class of 2008...man, I feel old.

The business seat

I know I've been promising some pictures from the Singapore leg... A big thank you to Suasti for the two very professional pictures. This is us having high tea at GoodWood Park Hotel.

The black pepper crab picture already makes me hungry just seeing it. I am definitely willing to say that Singapore has the best crab in the world!


Now that the honeymoon is over (how sad...), I can give you my opinion on the new Cathay Pacific long haul business class seat. You can find lots of pictures and details on their site, but for those that travel often, the seat configuration is similar to the Virgin Atlantic, Air Canada and Air New Zealand (and soon Delta) Business Class products - a fishbone design where each person sits at a 45 degree angle. I've flown all three of the airlines mentioned that do have this type of seat, and I must say that all of them felt roomier. The Cathay ones are tight. Mary absolutely hated the design because there was a big wall separating us. All in all, still excellent Cathay service and I like the true horizontal bed, but I would have expected more from Cathay. Next time...gotta fly Singapore!

The real goodbye

So sad...we are now sitting at the airport in Hong Kong. We just arrived from Singapore..the last leg of our honeymoon...
 
The good news is that Sinagpore was a great time - catching up with Suasti and Cianta and their girls (Kiana and Talisa - both of whom are extremely cute and smart), eating pepper crab and chili crab, river cruise (ie the 30-minute boat ride where you see all there is to see in Sinagpore!), high tea and shopping with lots of discounts. and all that in the 30 or so hours that we were here in Singapore. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the St. Regis. For those of you that don't know, service at hotels in Asia and Singapore in particular is really top notch, but the St. Regis is in a league by itself. This is going to sound like a commercial, but trust me there's really aren't that many hotels that I would comment on - not that the others are not good, but they're standard 5-star hotels. The room at the St. Regis was very classy, with a couch and a sitting chair. There were two chandeliers in the room and the bathroom featured a claw-foot tub with a tv, a
6-spray head shower and double sinks with marble throughout. There was a 50-inch plasma tv with a 5 speaker Bose lifestyle DVD/surround sound. Best of all, each floor has a dedicated butler basically to take care of your ever need including tea and coffee at anytime, snacks, packing/unpacking, etc! It was incredible service.
 
Hi Suasti and Cianta! For everyone else, they seem to be doing really well. As I said earlier, the girls are amazing cute and smart. Both are very talkative - mind you they are 2.5 and 1.5 years old. The took us to high tea at Goodwood Park Hotel, a famous Singaporean hotel. High tea was a great time. Basically, a buffet lunch with savory snacks - but since we were in Asia, it was a good mix of spring rolls with sweet chili sauce and ham and cheese croissants. Suasti also did a photo session of us by the stairs, the pool and garden. We got 3 of the prints already and we are excited to see the rest! She's a great photographer.
 
Mary's new favorite store is G2000. Kinda like a H&M - trendy style clothes but cheap. We went to 3 different G2000's in Hong Kong while we were there and bought a lot of stuff, and when we go to Singapore, we asked Cianta about them (he also likes it, but probably not as much as Mary) and discovered there were several of them here. We also went to 3 different ones here! The last one we went to, we spent S$350 (~US$235), but many of the items were already on sale PLUS we got 10% for being foreigners, $20 off for this raffle thing and $25 of the tax back when we got to the airport! That was my favorite part. Mary's shopping now in the airport...sigh...
 
Well, that's it for now. I'll post some pictures from Singapore later, but I just realized I never once took a pictures with Suasti, Cianta or the girls! How dumb of me. Ok...we are boarding soon for home. See you in 16 hours.

the long goodbye

I'm sitting in the lounge at the Male International Airport waiting for our flight back to Singapore. We'll have about 30 hours in Singapore to see the sights and enjoy some chili crab!

I told you about our final dinner last night at Fish. This is a picture that the waiter took for us. Aren't we dark?? I guess that's what happens after a few days of equatorial sun.


Our last day at the W was very sad. We were both sad to leave. It really is an amazing place, expensive, but amazing. We do want to return to the Maldives at some point, though it's probably not all the realistic in the near future. I'm not sure that we would stay at the W again though. Not because we didn't like it or didn't think it was worth it, but there are so many high-end hotels here. The Conrad, two Four Seasons, the One and Only and countless others. I would just want to see what the other hotels were like.

Our seaplane ride back to Male was about 20 mins. Mary and I purposely sat on different sides of the plane so that we could take pictures. Here's one I took. I pointed out which bungalow was ours.


Once we got to Male at 4pm, we had a few hours to kill before our flight. We knew this before we left, so we set up a guide with the W to tour the city. Fortunately or unfortunately, the city is very small and we finished our tour in about an hour or so. We stopped once for a drink while our guide went to pray (the Republic of Maldives is officially Islamic, so he has to pray five times a day). We also had dinner and did some shopping - where we totally got ripped off, but that's ok. It's our honeymoon, right? Mary thought our guide was a little sketchy, but I thought he was fine.

A few things I learned from our guide.
-There are roughly 300,000 Maldivians but only about 100,000 live in Male
-Maldives was formerly both a British and Portuguese colony and gained independence officially in 1953, but became a Sultanate again in 1954. The current Republic was formed in 1968.
-Maldivians have one of the highest per capita GDP in all of South Asia

Random thought - I think the honeymoon is a good time to figure out how to do things as a married couple. I mean, we have lived together for over a year so we've figured most of that stuff out, but now that we're married, it's different somehow. Things like who carries the passports or takes care of things with the hotel reception or who answers which questions when you meet people...we've had nearly two weeks to figure those things out.

excuse me...this is my table

We started the day with breakfast as we always do. Delicious as always, but two stories from breakfast. There is a chef there that takes a la carte orders of eggs, pancakes, waffles, dim sum, fried rice, etc. I thought about what I wanted today, and I went up to him and ordered two eggs over medium. His response..."that's a new one. I've never heard of that." He said it very calmly, so I thought for a moment he might have been joking. But, sadly he wasn't. Second, when we go to get breakfast, we are sat down at a table, we get up to go get breakfast and for some reason (probably because I'm a bigger pig), Mary heads to sit down first. For the second day in a row, Mary sat back down at the wrong table! At least there was no one there today. Yesterday, she actually told someone that they were in the wrong table! Ha.

Today, we went to go snorkeling after breakfast. Unfortunately, the rain yesterday and the high winds kicked up a lot of sand in the ocean. The water was very cloudy and you could barely see a foot in front of you. So, it wasn't that much fun. Add to that the water was very rough today, we stopped snorkeling pretty early on. We chose to sit out by the pool and then the beach. The sun was blazing hot, and I only lying out for a few minutes, but I am totally burnt on my front side now! This is pretty bad, much worse than my back. Hopefully, it feels better tomorrow since we want to do some last minute snorkeling before we leave.

We had also planned to use the resort's SeaBobs. That's the official name, but the resort people call it the James Bond machine. They are basically handheld propellers. I'll post pictures soon. You hang out to one in front of you and pull a trigger and off you go, like being pulled by a dolphin, but these are fast! They can go up to 25kph (~15mph). Best of all, you can dive underwater with them. They were super fun, probably the most fun I've had here. But it was expensive, $170 per hour to use. I asked how much they were and he told me about $25k. Crazy huh?

For dinner, we went back to Fish restaurant, where Mary and I both had some local seafood. Mary got the local lobster that she loves. They asked her how much she wanted and told her it was $30 per 100g. She replied that she'd like a 1-pound lobster. Finally, the waiter suggested that she come up to the tank and just choose which one she wanted. She loved the dish though. I had fresh caught grouper. Also excellent.

After dinner, we went to the club. Yes, the club. It's called Fifteen below and is pretty much set up like any small club in New York. This place was literally beneath the Fire restaurant and had a few tables and some bed type things. We sat in one for a while, but since there are only 80 or so guests at the resort, most of whom that do not want to go out to a club, there were only about 10 people in there. After one drink, we got bored and came home to find our bill...mind you we already pre-paid for the room itself (which included breakfast everyday) and the round-trip seaplane rides and our bill still came out to $2000! oh well. With still one day to go, I asked Mary if she was sad that the honeymoon was almost over and she said no because it had been a very memorable and wonderful trip. I agree, but I'm still sad it's almost over...