Mark’s mom had the foresight to hold on to the legos that Mark and his sister played with as kids, just in case either of them wanted to pass it down to their kids. We decided on our last trip to Seattle this August that the girls would like to have them. These are vintage legos from the 70s and 80s – you can tell because the colors of the pieces are in the classic primary colors – and there are a lot of them.

The girls have literally played with these legos every single day and I love how they’ve integrated them with their other toys, like this.

Really not sure what’s going on here with the legomen and the Hello Kitties. It sort of makes me feel uncomfortable.

A new family to share on The Mixed Race Project: Christine & Matt. They live in San Francisco and have a 2 year old daughter, Maile.

Thanks for your continued support and suggestions for the project. I’m working on trying to get more diverse families in the future, particularly with older kids as well as families with adopted children. As with anything, it’s a matter of logistics, time, and the challenge of scheduling!

Totally frivolous post today and sorry to bore the guys who read the blog – you know, all 5 of you – but boots! I’m never that girl anymore who finds that deal or flea market steal, mostly because I don’t have the leisure time to browse anymore (wish I did!), but the family and I were visiting our friends who sell at the Hester Street Market in the Lower East Side the other week and I spotted these boots for sale at a booth selling vintage clothing. And hey! Size 7, just my size. That hardly ever happens to me anymore. From what I could tell, they had never been worn and now I have a new pair of $400 Swedish Hasbeens for nearly 85% off.

Also, do you wear Oxfords? Specifically gray wingtip ones? I don’t usually, but I picked these up on final clearance for really cheap. I don’t know…the verdict is still out…it feels a little 80s throwback here…too preppy for me…maybe the argyle socks don’t help…

I love Fall. Too bad it refuses to stick around. We’ve had some pretty warm temperatures for this time of year which is not bad, per se, but it would sure be nice to get some Fall weather around here before we dive into winter. But strange weather aside, you can tell Fall is really here because this is our season, for the business. Mark’s been baking crazy amounts of cookies – sometimes in the thousands daily, we’re stocking up on supplies for the holidays and booking December markets. This is the time of year when he rarely gets a day off, not until December 24th.

Oh friends, I tweeted something a few weeks ago that I have to remind myself over and over. There seems to be so much instability in the air, so many things that have fallen through for me recently. In this shaky economy I can only rely on my creativity, my motivation, resilience, and determination to succeed. I can’t be paralyzed by fear and the unknown. In that sense, we are controllers of our own fate. We have to make things happen for ourselves.

To that end, I can’t thank you enough for all the wonderful comments, emails, support and encouragement about the Mixed Race Project. Thanks to those who have shared their own stories. I have read through them all, twice even. There have been some questions about the project and I will try to answer them soon. I am also working on getting a few more stories up, but first…sleep….

I have a new project to share with you today, something that I’ve been working on for a few months that finally launched on Friday. I got the idea for The Mixed Race Project earlier this year and I swear, sometimes I’m surprised that I managed to put it out there at all. Have you ever worked on a project where you over think the concept and idea to the point that you start doubting yourself? There have been so many doubts and reservations with this project from the start. I wasn’t confident in my photography skills and was afraid I wouldn’t do these families justice. I didn’t necessarily want to focus on the politics of race because it’s such a sensitive topic, however I didn’t want to completely ignore it either. I didn’t know where the balance should lie. I was concerned, because of the logistics of travel, that the families I would be photographing would only be representing a small segment of the multiracial experience, that the project would risk not telling the stories of those who have had a hard time being accepted by their communities. I knew that the project would be richer if it were more geographically diverse and I worried about the criticism of that.

But sometimes you just have to hold your breath and push through. I knew I believed in this project, partly because of the many positive comments and emails from you, dear readers, whenever I shared photographs or wrote about the girls in the context of their mixed race background. I also realized that in my research, I wasn’t finding images of multiracial families that I was curious to see. In many cases, photos of mixed race people always seemed to focus on the face. I was more interested in seeing the family in the context of their homes. I thought it was more revealing of how we lived as multiracial households to see glimpses into their everyday lives.

The online response to the project so far, has been overwhelming. It validated the idea despite all the reservations I had. I think I was too focused on whether the photos were good or worthy enough – this is a photo project after all, and one that I’m using to focus on improving my skills. This was certainly true when in San Francisco I panicked because I didn’t anticipate the foggy and cloudy lighting conditions, so I ran out and bought an expensive flash that saved the shoot, but that I still don’t really know how to use. I am learning all the time and with each shoot. It wasn’t until I received my first set of interview questions back from my gracious volunteer families that I realized none of that stuff mattered. I just needed to put it out there. The photos will improve with time, but I do hope the heart in this project shows through.

We have 2012 calenders! And they’re are now available for sale here or here. Hope you like them!

It goes without saying that not a day goes by that I don’t have some kind of Apple product in my hand. I spend more time with my computer than probably anything else in my life. Steve Jobs and Apple have impacted my life in ways I can’t even fully comprehend – the way I work and create, the way I capture my children on video and in photos, the way I communicate and share, and most notably in my 16 year career as a designer.

I’m part of a generation who didn’t grow up with computers. Other than those early gaming consoles like Atari and ColecoVisions, we didn’t have a computer when I was a kid. I remember somewhere along the way I took a “computer graphics” class in high school creating primitive, clunky line drawings and programming very simple commands, but it was still a novelty back then. Even at Cooper Union, I typed all my papers on a typewriter and we learned 2-D design (that’s what they called it back then!) the old school way, with markers and vellum paper. It wasn’t until I transferred to Evergreen and started sequencing music in electronic music class that I would use a computer. I was 21 at the time. And ironically, it wasn’t until I met Mark, who had one of those early Macs, that I would use an Apple computer.

It was during our years in Portland, from 94-96, that the computer would have any real significance in my life. For a year I would shut myself in Mark’s room for an hour a few nights a week to learn Photoshop and Illustrator on his old Mac. The screen was so small. There was a lot of squinting. And then when I moved back to NY in 1996, I bought my first Apple computer, a Power Mac 7600.

I guess Apple and me have been inseparable since then, particularly during and after grad school at NYU. And it was always Apple, nothing else. I grew up witnessing the impact of personal computers on our lives. I knew what it was like before, and I can’t even imagine what our lives would be like without.

But beyond the products, Steve Jobs was an inspiration. A man who believed in form and function and good design. A man who gave us a choice of *fonts* on the computer (!) and made the computer so insanely intuitive to use for the first time. A man who introduced us to things that we didn’t even know we wanted and can’t even imagine life without once we had it in our hands. What I keep thinking about right now is not so much what he’s given us already, but what he could have given us in the next 10, 20+ years.

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

“Have the courage to follow your heart & intuition. They already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

“If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Thank you Steve.

Remember this post? The post where I decide I was fed up paying crazy expensive health insurance premiums and switch to a cheaper but suckier plan? I just wanted to follow up because it’s been 8 months since that post. So did I make the switch? Yes. I received a letter informing me that my premiums would go up $200 to $1650 a month. That wasn’t a surprise. My premiums have been going up roughly 15% every year, but what had been a marginally manageable bill was becoming an increasingly unaffordable monthly expense.

So what’s happened in the 8 months since I made the switch?

Nothing.

This is what I anticipated. We remained healthy and went to the doctor just a few times for minor checkups.

But I have an extra $5000 in the bank from the $600 that I am saving every month by switching to a cheaper plan. I don’t touch this money except to pay for other health related expenses like visits to the dentist (we don’t have dental insurance), visits to the vet and the euthanization bill for Tobi (which ironically was our biggest medical expense for any of us in 3 years combined). I’ll keep building on this money and eventually pay for things like braces for the girls and other medical bills that might crop up. The money is for nothing else because I’m paranoid about incurring unexpected expenses since we have a higher deductible and insane out of pocket maximums. You can plan for some things, but you can’t plan for everything.

You can say that I came out ahead so far and the decision was a smart one, and yet I can’t help but still feel a bit unsettled. It’s still a gamble.

This year a close friend of mine got diagnosed with early stage cancer. She’s fine now and thankfully had excellent healthcare and excellent insurance through her partner, but it did make me think about a lot of things as I witnessed the diagnosis and treatment process with her. It made me realize that had it been me, if I had been diagnosed with cancer, my treatment and medical bills would have been a different story. That maybe I would have had to make certain decisions based on costs, rather than the best healthcare that I could find. That I might have bills that would have wiped away our entire savings. Is it fair? Hardly.

Recently my mom had to undergo a myriad of medical tests to see if there was an underlying cause to some mysterious ailments she’s been having. She had everything done – stress tests, EKGs, brain MRI, cardiology and neurology tests. It all came out negative, thankfully, however she thought twice about taking these tests because she wasn’t confident that her insurance would pay for it. They’ve failed her in the past, but her doctors urged her that she couldn’t wait. My parents are in their mid-60s, have paid their fair share in taxes (more, I’d say), and have always had to pay for private insurance because they are small business owners like us. Is it fair that their MRIs and certain hospital bills get routinely rejected by insurance? No.

It’s still a gamble, isn’t it?

Families are an ever evolving, often complex set of relationships, aren’t they? I look at my parents and my kids, particularly my dad who my brother and I had an uneasy relationship with growing up at times, and see how easy it is between him and the girls. It’s not something that you could ever know until it happens, much like how you don’t really know what kind of parent you will be until you become one. But this…seems so natural (uncooperative family photo poses and all).

And then there is this:

I can tell you that it took my dad a while to accept the fact that my brother was having a baby 2 years ago, mostly because it was a surprise to all of us. It didn’t happen the way that maybe he envisioned it might happen. There was a time when my dad and my brother did not speak for a few months. At one point my brother resigned to the possibility that his kids might not have the same kind of relationship that my kids have with their grandfather. I think as first generation Asian Americans and kids who grow up identifying mostly with American culture, we expect our immigrant parents to accept our decisions no questions asked. I just told my brother to give him some time.

He is right in one sense. My dad doesn’t have quite the same relationship with my brother’s kids as he does with mine, but this is because of distance and nothing more. My brother and his family live in California and we only see them once or twice a year. They were in town to celebrate my nephew’s 2nd birthday and his new daughter’s traditional 100 day celebration.

So it would come as a bit of a surprise to hear my dad make a speech during the party with our whole extended family. That he would be the one to say that despite the fact that maybe the additions to his family might not have been what he envisioned when he thought about it abstractly years ago before any of this ever happened, when he looks at his children’s spouses and his 4 grandchildren, what he sees is family.