onvural.net – melih – family man

The babies have fallen in love with playing hide and seek. Except… there’s no mystery to how they play 🙂

The game usually goes something like this

Amelia and Luka go into bed time delay mode by suggesting a rousing game of hide-and-seek. Amelia usually says something along the lines of, “Mummy, Luka, Mummy, Luka you be a dinosaur. Me and daddy hide in daddy’s bed.”

So let’s break it down… a successful game of hide-and-seek seems to involve

1. Dinosaurs chasing you down, and attempting to eat you. There’s a lot of cannibalism in our family as the babies are so sweet that cheeks, chins, tummies, and feet are regularly eaten. This has clearly translated into their play
2. Knowing where someone is is a requirement to the game
3. The “dinosaurs” need to make loud noises pretending to not know where the hiders are.
4. When the “dinosaurs” finally pounce on the hiders everyone squeals in delight

That is, unless you’re Luka. You see if you’re Luka then you can’t wait, and you pull the covers down, pop out of the bed, and yell, “Mummy. I here!” over and over again until you’re discovered. And then you squeal in delight anyway.

What will those goofballs think of next to not have to go to bed. I can only imagine 🙂

I always tell people that I have 3 babies:

• Amelia


• Luka


• OpenTok

And all three have had an amazing year. They’ve gone from needing epic hand holding to having a village around them that makes them better than I could alone.

At work, the hardest part has been learning to trust that others can love the product as much as I do. The team I’ve built makes me feel so confident in the wider set of problems that we’re solving. And now, as they develop their own ideas, I’m really seeing what OpenTok will be. It’s really amazing.

This past week at swimming class my other two babies surprised me so much. Luka is getting so damn confident. Amelia did the older class by herself, and she was just amazing!! And the whole time all I want is to hold them back, and feel like I’m on control and can help them.

But as I said to my team at TokBox, my challenge this quarter is learning to let go. I guess it’s destiny that it all has to happen at once 🙁

Darling Amelia.

You turned three years old today.

What a year we shared together. You started school last August, and you’re getting ready to “graduate”. We’ve moved house, travelled across the US, met elephant seals, learned to communicate, did potty training, and so much more.

You hate to sleep. Especially alone. In fact, you weren’t sleeping through the night until just recently. And breaking that pattern was so incredibly difficult.

Your favorite songs were:

• Anything by Miley Cyrus but especially “Wrecking Ball”
• Anything from Frozen but especially “Let it Go”
• ABCD
• Old McDonald had a farm

Your best friend could be any of:

• Lilah (from school and soccer)
• Lucy Green
• Luka (you guys can’t stand to be apart… or together)

Your favorite activities were:

• Gym class every Saturday morning
• Swimming
• Going to the zoo
• The Pet Store on 31st and Judah
• Scooting in the park
• Hanging out with Doruk

We travelled to

• North Carolina (twice)
• Myrtle Beach (and we’ll never do that again)
• Pescadero over Christmas

Your major life events were

• Starting school in August 2013
• Moving to a new house in February 2014
• Learning to scooter around the neighborhood
• Surgery in May to close up another hernia

Developmentally you continue to amaze us. Your speech is fantastic (even though you can’t hit a pronoun to save your life). You’re athletically so talented. Fast. Coordinated. But you’re still a bit shy around other kids. You’re much better with adults.

You love Luka so much.

And you give the best kisses that any dad could ask for.

Happy birthday darling Amelia. When you’re finally old enough to read this, I just hope you’ll still curl up in my arms, and fall asleep on my shoulder, and not be too big to be my baby girl.

I love you.

Luka is now bigger than Amelia in weight (34 vs 32 lbs.), but she’s holding on to those 1.5 inches with all her effort.

I genuinely wonder what happens when he passed her, and how their power relationship tilts.

Right now, more than weight, it’s really about motor skills. But man he’s catching up fast, and then she’s going to have to be smarter.

They grow up so fast.

Today is my half birthday. The last one of my third decade of life. That’s right… I’ll be 30 in November.

And so it was quite fitting that so many fun things happened today.

First… Micky got me a subscription to National Geographic magazine! When we went up the North Coast for Easter, the house we rented had a million issues of NatGeo around. We said, “Wouldn’t it be a cool subscription?”, and it looks like Micky pulled it off.

Yes – I do celebrate my half birthday. Get over it 🙂

Then… the kids start chattering away at their bedtime. This is really a Luka driven thing. So there’s squeaking, and some chatting. Then some yelling. Then a voice from the hallway. But it’s not Amelia’s voice. And Luka is in his crib.

Well, Mr. Luka James had pulled his baggy off, crawled out of his crib, opened the door (big no no for Amelia who was trying to stop him), and walked into the hallway – quite proud of himself.

Oh man, oh man. These kids are going to get me.

Anyway, today was a good day.

And she’s up and on her scooter. What a star!

Today, I told Luka on my way to work, “Luka, I love you” and he says back to me, “Thanks”.

🙂

They’re just goofballs. Long may it last.

Amelia has just gotten out of surgery for a new hernia she developed a few months ago.

All is well.

Hopefully this is the end of the road with her oemophalocele related stuff. You can never say never, but it would be really nice.

Thank God we live in San Francisco where the best of the best in pediatric and neo-natal surgeons can be found. Sometimes these things happen for a reason.

There’s a place called Slide Ranch by Muir Beach in the North Bay… and it’s amazing!

It’s a working farm, and today they held an open house for kids. They were showing folks how to make pickles, milk goats, sheer a sheep, and a bunch more. We went to gym, hooked up with the Greens, and then made our way over to Muir Beach.

I get so nauseas going north on CA1. It’s just too windy for me. But we were only on it for 10 miles or so to get to the farm. We got our stickers, and headed straight for the goat milking. I tried to get the kids to do it, but they wouldn’t. I jumped in, and it didn’t go so well 🙂

The babies got face paint done. Amelia got a black sheep and a bee. Luka a tiger!

We had a picnic lunch, checked out the bee hives & chicken coop, and then ended our adventure by trying to felt a cat. That went awfully 🙂

It was tons of fun though!

Now for the pictures…

On the walk to school today, I found a worm on the sidewalk. I figured it was a goner anyway, and so I picked it up, and handed it to Luka.

The poor guy survived a full day of school, and we released him into the wild when we got home. I don’t think he’s going to do very well though…

Update (4/5/14): This post was written in the future anyway, but today we discovered what happened… he got eaten by a colony of ants. They were finishing him off just as we got there. It wasn’t pretty 🙁

We went to go see Frozen today with the babies.

They’ve both been learning the songs on YouTube, and they recognize the various characters. So after gym (given it was raining like crazy), we decided to book tickets, and make a go of it. The Greens came with us.

They both loved it!

Amelia sang along to the songs. She kept asking about where her favorite characters were, and why they were sad, or happy, or scared. Luka sat in Micky’s lap, and just watched the whole thing. He was so focused. I don’t know if he blinked once in the 90 minutes.

I’m so glad that this was their first movie theater experience.

A wonderful movie. A wonderful time. I even saved the ticket stubs so that they can throw it into a memento book one day. Really, we should start it for them… that’s a cool idea.

Amelia’s favorite was Anna and “Let it go”.

Luka was unable to articulate 🙂

I hope Disney keeps cranking them out at this level because it was really great, and I’m really excited to see more like it.