Baptism photos

Pierre Thibault is one of the best Catholic priest we have ever come across. He is completely open-minded and admits that the Church doesn't always have all the answers, and lots of crap things have been done in its name, but so has a lot of good. After long examination of our values and faith, Fabien and I took the next step to make a promise to God to bring up Sophie within the Christian community, in spite of the doubts and questions we still have. That other discussion is kinda deep - won't go into that now*..

3 September 2006 was really happy and beautiful day (with lots of champagne and yummy food!). Sophie's theme colours (selected by mummy) are pink and yellow, and her theme animal comes from Sophie's World - the rabbit. So we bought lots of pink and champagne roses, and gave out dragees packed in pink and yellow rabbit - shaped sachets...

It was all really cute and girly!

Click on the photo to bring you to the flickr photoset!

Where does Mum stop and Baby start?

This is a reflective random post that I was thinking of whilst (still!) uploading photos of our vacation.

Every other mommy that I know (including my own!) had morning sickness whilst pregnant. I had a dream pregnancy with no symptoms. Even the yoga-as-pain-relief delivery worked pretty fine, except for that retained placenta blood loss which made me feel like roadkill for a while, but at least I was unconcious for the gruesome bits.

So when my friend Elaine asked me to give her the down and dirty details of motherhood, I couldn't really tell her any horror stories about pregnancy and childbirth. The biggest mothehood challenge for me is figuring out where Sophie starts and I end.

In the begining, I meant this quite literally, because Sophie used to think that she was one long extension of my boob. Now we are working on getting a feed/nap schedule cast in stone (after the general chaos of holiday travel), so the question morphs to one of parenting philosophy.

Having a baby is a tremendous incursion on your personal freedom. Okay, so you exercised freedom of choice to have a baby, but how much does that curtail what you subsequently do? I don't have any great insights into the matter, but I can share 3 examples of how I put into practice my own philosophy of where that balance is struck.


First I've chosen to nurse Sophie for a reasonably long period of time (at least 6 months). Her pedeatrician (*French of course!) agreed that I can drink alcohol, preferably just after the last feed of the night, because it would have gone from my system before her next feed 6 hours later. So I usually have a couple of glasses of wine with dinner after Sophie has gone to bed. The only thing is, sometimes she is still hungry after her last feed, and wants a second helping. So she gets the alcohol in the milk once in a while. Does that mean a complete ban for me? Hell, no. She's getting a taste for Pauillac really early. Check out how she grabs that champagne flute.

Second I drag a 10 week old Sophie on a last minute holidays with me, because I want to do the same kind of stuff I used to do before having her. I don't know if she enjoyed it as much as I did, because she sure won't remember any of this. But it may have delayed her development of a regular schedule. Oh well, guess we have to work on it now that we are back in Turin.


Third I realise that buying her lots of entertaining toys really means buying myself some time on the computer to keep in touch with family and friends by email, skype or this blog. My full time job is showing Sophie lots of new stuff, reading her books, and translating wookie-speak into actual mom-commands. But do you read personal email whilst you are in the office? You need breaks in any full time job, and "Mom" is 24/7 FULL time .. I will be the first to admit that Sophie's toys are for my benefit! Maybe she could be even smarter or develop even faster, if I spent more time with her and less on my laptop. But I have chosen my own pleasure and entertainment over those marginal minutes of interaction time with my kid. But hey - she doesn't seem to mind.

Do those examples make me out to be a selfish or irresponsible mommy?

I don't think so.

But it is figuring out the answers to questions like these which constitute (for me anyway) the biggest challenges of motherhood.

Back in Torino

We got back from a 7 hour drive from Troyes last night. This is the first long summer vacation that Fabien and I have taken with Sophie and we really enjoyed it. There's a ton of photos to put up and show off, but just a soundbite for now. We've mainly spent our vacation in:

1) Fontainebleau - looking at the castle, INSEAD and Horse Week

2) Lille - where Sophie got baptised by the same priest that married Fabien and me

3) Hardelot - where Sophie actually enjoyed dipping her feet into the Atlantic

Yeah - I know this looks like a "Visit France" tourism advert, but it is really a lovely country, especially when you get to stay in somebody's house!

Specially for godparents, grandparents and other parents -
Sophie just turned 4 months yesterday and can flip from her back to her front and do lots of little baby push ups, speak Wookie to her reflection in the mirror, play quietly for up to 20 mins by herself with her toys, and generally charm the socks off most people.

She has also shared teething toys with various dogs in return for tasting their fur balls. I think she likes labrador fur best. ( I can just hear my mum fainting now) heheheh ...

But really I am convinced that the breast-fed baby has a whole bunch of antibodies because she has never been ill despite happily kissing dogs whenever her parents aren't looking.

So to for my friends with babies and babies to be - Breast is still Best

Why are you working as what you are?

Fabien and I were talking about my imminent return to the working population.

One of the key issues was whether I should be a private practice lawyer, a PSL (professional support lawyer), or public sector lawyer (e.g. in NGO) or whatever?

It's contrary to popular belief that lawyers are an unethical money-grubbing lot. But it is true that there is alot of emphasis on money (e.g. I just worked on a gazillion dollar deal! Resolved a mega-million dollar dispute! Hire me, and give me a whopping great bonus!), probably much more than emphasis on ethics. The interesting part is WHY?

One theory that I have heard is selection bias. People who are naturally competitive tend to be lawyers/investment bankers, and whatever else makes a lot of money. And the entire purpose of making alot of money is not just about IWC watches and Manolo Blahniks, but because the amount of money you make equals points scored. You took exams and competed to get into a good law school, then took more exams and competed to get into a good law firm. Once you are inside that good law firm, are you going to just suddenly stop competing?

Alain de Botton has a great book about money and competition called "Status Anxiety". It's a well recognised phenomenen - you see status anxiety in chimpanzees as well as law firm associates.

In an ideal world. I would like to be the happy private practice lawyer who responded to the negativity about the legal profession in Jeremy Blachman's book review of "The destruction of young lawyers" The fact that this lawyer had time to read blogs and email was a good sign...

So in a completely personal context, the question is : Do I want to spend all my time in the office? And probably miss out on many monents like this?



Sophie is getting so cute - she has long and intense conversations with her parents now. We just need on working out how to translate all that she says into English and French - she seems to speak Shyriiwook and Elvish.

On the Road again...

Just enjoying the last bits of summer in Torino, this week we are driving to France (leaving on Saturday morning). We will be in France for 3 weeks and come back on 12 September.

This is of course, not an invitation to rob our house, but you can come water our plants (which will probably be dead and gone by the time we come back)...

Boy Weekend

view from the car
Originally uploaded by vacheorange.

If you want to go to French Engineering School , you have to study for competitive exams to get in when you are around 17 years old. Fabien and other brave muskeeters studied for those exams at Denis family's holiday house in the mountains near Grenoble. They used to spend the whole summer day studying in the library of the lovely wooden house, and then run to the lake and play football or swim to release all that pent up tension.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because everyone that studied in that house all passed those exams and went to the same engineering school, and have remained friends till this day. Denis's wife is expecting their first child, and (with a premenotion of things to come) Denis decided to have a "boy's weekend", back at this house, so the guys spent time on golf, football and swimming in that same lake. I think it is pretty important to let them have their time doing their guys stuff. It is cool that all the wives (yep, they are all married!) get along well with each other, and we can do other things together whilst the males show off their BBQ skills.

So Sophie and me hung out with the girlies! Alex (Jean's wife) gave Sophie her first small piano concert and me and Sophie had walks around the mountain to encounter the dangerous alpine wildlife... (okay, so it was a kitty).

Click on the photo see our photo-set!

First Little Foot in the Water

I've jumped on the bandwagon, having been inspired by Moxie's swim and
Laetitia's singing to upload stuff on Youtube as well.

So this is a very brief snippet of Sophie's first little foot in the Mediterranean. I would like to do a bit more with Quicktime - like rotate the dang image, but it keeps urging me to upgrade to a pro account for the princely sum of USD 19.99... I am seeing how long to go before I cave in and get it, but in the meantime you can take a look at this video and tell me if I should let Apple make more moolah off me...

photos!

Whoo Hoo - the photos are here. Click on this image (thank you Mini!) to view the photoset of Sophie's first holiday! Dusty roads, ancient archeological sites, gelatos tangy from the salty ocean spray... A Beautiful holiday for Sophie and me.

Of course after all that careful packing, they had to lose our luggage in Rome. A mixed blessing because then I realised how little we really needed (I just lived in my orange bikini!). Although it was still a relief when the luggage arrived.

Sophie is a natural born air traveller (she better be - with parents like hers). No difficulty with take offs and landings and airplanes in general. She just latches on to my boob like a pro, and sleeps through the flight. Even the flight attendants were impressed (and they see alot of babies everyday).

Travelling alone with an infant can be challenging at times. Most times, we were lucky, and good samaritains helped me when they saw me struggling with stroller, luggage and infant. If you ever see a lone traveller in such a situation - do not hesitate to help them out, they will be entirely grateful for it. I am so tired from all the transfers we made - was joking to Fabien that I need a holiday to recover from my holiday!

The good news is that we are going on a short break tommorrow - for 5 days in Grenoble, and then Fab has to spend a week in Prague for work (but I think we will not accompany him) and then we set off for 3 weeks in France. This European tradition of taking long summer holidays in August is a great idea. The work ethic here is just much more sensible than in frenetic Asia.

Anyway, the closing thoughts are these: Life is almost entirely what you make of it. You can choose to let your whole life change after having a baby, or you can try to hold on to your identity. This trip was at times tough, but the enjoyment and the renewed sense of self which I got from it, the deeper friendship with Chiara (who invited us to Sicily) was all entirely worth it.

Later after Grenoble!