Huang Family Newsletter, January 2010

It was a bit of a whirlwind in the Huang household this month. Lee worked around the clock and into the weekends during the first half of the month on a big proposal for his firm, and then went straight from that to bringing Jada out to California to see his parents.

It was a big uplift for Lee's mom to see her granddaughter. Later that month, she was successfully transferred from the hospital, where she was recovering from pneumonia, to a sub-acute facility only a mile away from their house. Lee's dad is recovering himself, from his last surgery, but has had enough energy to spend 12-20 hours a day at Lee's mom's bedside.

While we were in San Jose, Jada got some fun in, too, going ice skating and hiking for the first time, going to the children's museum downtown, and playing toys and video games with her cousins. Back home in Philadelphia, Lee survived the early morning wait in line to register her for kindergarten at the neighborhood school: no small feat given the school's immense popularity.

Aaron turned 3 and got gifts suited to his current likes: chunky cars, pajamas with trains on them, and animated monster DVDs. He has a special behavioral class two afternoons a week, so he now stays home with Amy from pre-school on those two days.

Amy is thick into her final class at Penn, a behavioral therapy course. She somehow manages to stay on top of all the appointments, paperwork, cooking, and cleaning, albeit at the expense this month of catching a cold. In the midst of it all, we bit the bullet and got a babysitter one Saturday afternoon and snuck out for two blissful hours of uninterrupted adult conversation.