Welcome to the Chen Family Blog!

A little bit about ourselves...

Before Baby
A and I met in Evanston, IL when we both started school at Kellogg (not the Cereal company, but Northwestern's Business School).  We were in the same section (go Moose!) and although we became friends pretty early on, we didn't start dating until much later.  This is probably one of the first pictures we took together. Can you spot me and A?

After graduation, we both moved to San Francisco. At that time, A was working on his start-up company and I joined eBay.  In 2009, A proposed to me in Seoul, Korea!  Here is a picture of us shortly after the proposal and at our engagement brunch.

We tied the knot in 2010 in Kona, HI and that was the beginning of the Chen family!

Pregnant with a Baby!
We learned that I was pregnant in May of 2012.  Here was the positive pregnancy test! I took two of them to just make sure that it was real!

We were so excited about the news, but obviously very cautiously optimistic because we knew that there could be various obstacles in growing a baby!

I had a pretty tough first trimester... I lost my appetite, was averse to a lot of foods and visited the porcelain bowl quite often.  With all of my morning sickness (actually, all-day sickness), I was convinced that I was having a girl.  And I was right! Here is an ultrasound from the appointment where we found out that we were expecting a baby girl!

The second trimester was a lot better and I was lucky in that my tummy didn't get too big.  We took the opportunity to do a little bit of travel and do a bit of eating during the second trimester, including going to Oahu (Twice!), Kona, New York and Chicago.  Here is a picture from our official babymoon in Kona, where we got married.

I felt pretty good the beginning of my third trimester as well, but towards the end of my pregnancy, I felt a bit heavy and tired a lot.  It was really hard to find a comfortable position to sit and sleep and I was waking up a lot in the middle of the night so wasn't able to get a lot of sleep. A lot of people told me that it was my body getting ready for the baby - since I wouldn't have the opportunity to sleep through the night after the baby arrived!  Since it was our first Christmas with our baby, we decided to buy our first Christmas tree. Here I am, posing with the tree with a Google+ t-shirt that A got me!

Baby arrives!
Our baby's due date was January 10, 2013, but my water broke the morning of January 4, 2013.  When my water broke early in the morning, I wasn't sure if it was really my water breaking! But after the inital leak, I ended up getting a gush of fluid and I knew the baby was ready to come out! We headed to CPMC and arrived there around 6am. The hospital was busy that day!   Unfortunately, there was meconium in my amniotic fluid so we had to monitor the baby a little more closely.

We had a few scares during labor because our baby didn't seem to react to the pitocin very well, but everything turned out ok.  I was fully dilated at around 3am on January 5, 2013. After almost 3 hours of pushing (I wasn't sure I'd survive that!), our baby girl arrived!  She waited till January 5th to come into this world so that she could share her Grandpa's (E's dad) birthday with him!