Childcare is an ongoing battle

 Posted on December 26, 2019  |  7 minutes  |  Wendy K

Some status update I haven’t been updating this blog for a while! Thing have been going well with life, but extremely busy. My new role at work is going well, while the baby has moved into a toddler phase. He’s walking, babbling (not quite talking in a language yet, but we’re not worried), and super fun to be with. After he turned 1, I started to feel more and more like a parent, like I’m raising a human being that can think, has a personality, has his wants and needs and free will. [Read More]
Childcare  working mom 

How to think about your career path considering baby

The ugly truth about how pregnancy/leave affects you career, and how you can put a positive spin on it by making career changes.

 Posted on July 17, 2019  |  6 minutes  |  Wendy K

This is quite a difficult post to write. I’ve been struggling with my career path for the past months, and I think it was related to my maternity leave and new motherhood status. Fortunately, as I’m making some changes to my career (I recently transitioned to a different role within the same company), I’m feeling a lot more refreshed and hope to share some lessons learned along the way. My own journey I’ve been very comfortable with my job. [Read More]
working mom 

On Sleep Training

All I can suggest is: Just do it!

 Posted on June 12, 2019  |  7 minutes  |  Wendy K

Disclaimer: I’m not a baby whisperer - I’m actually far from it. I’m more of a hacker, as is the title of this blog. So please don’t use this article as your sleep training bible! I initially started writing this post in January and never finished it. Thank you Alexis for nudging me for this one! Newborns cry… wanting something. Sometimes they know what they want, but most of the time they don’t know what they want, and neither do we know what they want. [Read More]
parenting  sleep training 

Traveling Overseas With 6-month Baby

 Posted on February 19, 2019  |  8 minutes  |  Wendy K

As stated before, I returned to work early so I could save some time to travel to Taiwan with the baby to visit family. We just returned from the trip! It was a very fun experience, even though it was a ton of work - I would call it a real “baby bonding leave” compared to my previous maternity leave. It was an ambitious trip, since we were in Taiwan for over 3 weeks, we decided that instead of spending the entire time at my parents’ house, we would take a trip to the east coast of Taiwan by train, and spend a week touring around. [Read More]
travel 

Lessons learned from my first two months as a working mom

 Posted on December 15, 2018  |  9 minutes  |  Wendy K

I’ve been back at work from maternity leave for about 2 months now. It’s been a journey coming back to work, to say the least. First of all, I’m SO HAPPY to be back at work! I took exactly 3 months of leave, and will save the rest of the baby-bonding leave for a family trip to Taiwan for 4 weeks. For me, the first month of leave was necessary for the body to recover, and the second month was more of a getting-to-know-the-baby time, and the third month was the real baby-bonding, mainly on sleep training the baby, learning to get out of the house and travel a bit, and that was when I started to crave for human (adult) interaction and when I started to write this blog :) [Read More]
motherhood  breastfeeding  career  maternity leave 

Why Breastfeeding vs Formula is just like Tabs vs Spaces

That breastfeeding journey...

 Posted on November 6, 2018  |  6 minutes  |  Wendy K

For the first month of my baby’s life, I struggled through the whole breastfeeding thing. I don’t want to go into too much details, so some bullet points of events/struggles: The baby was born early (but full term), so he was very sleepy, preferred sleeping over eating. He wasn’t latching on correctly (although, he was always too sleepy to actually tell if he had a good latch or not). Pediatricians worried about the possibility of jaundice since he lost 11% of his birth weight in 3-4 days of life. [Read More]
breastfeeding 

How I came to embrace being a mom

 Posted on October 19, 2018  |  10 minutes  |  Wendy K

This is a strange topic to write. I feel like by writing this, I’m going to seem like the reluctant mom, where my pregnancy was unplanned. But it’s the opposite - the pregnancy was very much looked forward to. So, one would find it hard to discover that… I never wanted to be a mom. I wanted to maybe have children, but I didn’t like the fact that having children would, inevitably, make me a mother. [Read More]
motherhood 

How My Work Experience Helped Me Stay Sane Caring for a Newborn

 Posted on October 11, 2018  |  7 minutes  |  Wendy K

To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect going into maternity leave. I had never been the “mom-type”, and just the idea of stay at home all the time with a newborn kind of scared me. I thought it would be very isolated, very exhausting, and very desperate. I asked a lot of friends for help, and usually they told me: “Oh, you won’t have time to worry about this. [Read More]
maternity leave  career 

How to Lose Pregnancy Weight by Not Gaining Weight

 Posted on October 2, 2018  |  7 minutes  |  Wendy K

I’ve never been on a diet except when I was pregnant. That seems ironic, since people usually look at pregnancy as the once chance in a woman’s life to indulge and to “eat whatever you want”. This seems particularly prominent in American culture - “You’re eating for two!” etc. I’ve always been very active - I was a basketball player in both high school and college. Played volleyball and also picked up rock climbing in grad school. [Read More]
fitness  weight 

Will I be so bored at my maternity/paternity leave?

What is possible to be done at parental leave without being too ambitious

 Posted on September 29, 2018  |  9 minutes  |  Wendy K

The anxiety Months before I even started my maternity leave, I felt very anxious about that “break time”: what would it be like? Would it be just me and the baby sitting at home, me slaving away, desperately waiting for anyone to come rescue us? I started asking people questions about what they do at this time. Friend A: Don’t worry, you’ll be SO BUSY with the baby, you won’t even worry about what to do. [Read More]
maternity leave  paternity leave  productivity