Warning...Long Post

A lot happened this past weekend. Ayden endured the hour and a half long Kuk Sool test and earned her yellow stripe. We are very proud of her. She was beaming after she received her stripe. Below are pictures from the test. The video clip is of her doing form. Because her form is shorter, she got confused at the end when she should have stopped but saw others were still going. Then she realized I was filming her and she became very embarrassed.

The same day Ayden tested, her beloved Ariel died. Not Ariel the mermaid but Ariel, her beta fish. Funny how different my girls are. Saturday, I came home to find an empty fish bowl in the kitchen sink. I went up to say "hi" to Ayden and she made no mention of her fish dieing. When I asked what happened to Ariel, Ayden said, "Oh yeah! Ariel died and we flushed her down the toilet." She said this with a tone of excitement. I'm sure she wasn't excited that Ariel died but that something different and exciting happened.

When Nicki/Rosie died, Taylor was extremely distraught so I wanted to make sure Ayden was okay. This is how our conversation went.

Kaohly: "Are you okay?"
Ayden: "Yep"
Kaohly: "How are you feeling?"
Ayden: "Good"
Kaohly: "Are you sad?"
Ayden: "No. It's okay that Ariel died. She got her head stuck in the sea shell and she died."
Kaohly: "What did you and Daddy do with Ariel? Did you bury her like Rosie?"
Ayden: "Nope. I prayed for her then Daddy flushed her down the toilet."
Kaohly: "So you're okay with Ariel dieing?
Ayden: "It's okay Mommy. We can just buy a new one at the pet store. They have lots of fish there."

Through out this whole conversation Ayden was smiling and playing and that's when it became so clear to me that my girls are polar opposites. Taylor is serious, takes personal accountability for everything, is extremely diligent, and feels emotions with great intensity. Ayden is silly, practical, logical and very "matter of fact". I can't believe I made these two very different but amazing girls. I don't know if I could possibly love anything more than them.

On the health/Weight loss front, I broke 160 late last week. After a not-so-good weekend of eating, I'm surprised that I've remained steady at 159. That's 23 pounds down from 11 months ago. The holidays really set me back. Realistically, I am hoping to be 150 by summer time. After that I'd like to lose 10-15 more pounds. I would still be considered over weight for my height but at least it will be lean weight.

Oh...one last thing. For those in the Twin Cities, there will be a screening of a film by a Korean Director about hierarchies and dynamics in the Korean family called, Family Project: House of a Father. Probably not much different than the family structure of a many East Asians so I'm sure even if you are not Korean, you'll be able to relate. The director will be present at the screening.

Date & Time: Monday, March 24, 2008, 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location: Auditorium, Bell Museum of Natural History
http://onestop.umn.edu/Maps/BellMus
10 Church Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455
Cost: Free and open to the public

Beginning with her own personal story, director Yun K. Jo considers current hierarchies and dynamics in the Korean family. After spending much of his professional and social life away from the family, her father, a pensioner, realizes that his close relatives have become strangers. The director's mother, a little embarrassed and disapproving of the camera's presence, confesses to her daughter of having repressed her own ambitions and desires for the sake of the family and expresses her bitterness about having been treated with indifference by her husband, mother-in-law and children. For the children, now adults, communications are also difficult ? between themselves and with their parents. An ethnographic portrait of an ordinary Korean family at a moment of great social change, when the extended family system is being deconstructed.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR: Yun Jo studied sociology at Seoul National University, Korea, and obtained her MFA degree in Film/Video/New Media from the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. Her great interests are the subjects of family and gender. Her first student film was a video documentary about childcare, followed by A Lullaby (1998) and Lost Tree (1999). Yun has also worked on video installation pieces, such as An Experiment on Gender and Gesture (2001), which was shown in many galleries both in Seoul and Chicago. Her video documentary Family Project: House of a Father (2002), which she directed, shot and edited, has been screened at many Film Festivals and was awarded the Grand Prize at the Women's Film Festival in Seoul. Now she is pursuing her PhD and teaching undergraduate film classes in Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida.