After giving birth, time becomes so precious that I cannot afford 2 hours to swim (including transportation and shower) and one-hour Zumba classes anymore. Apple Fitness+ came out in December 2020, the year with intense COVID and when people stay home more. With postpartum recovery and the pandemic, TV workouts are the most convenient for me. Since I already have an Apple Watch, I started a one-month trial 3 months postpartum and have been loving it. I’m sharing some issues and suggestions for the app, after submitting this feedback to Apple.

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After spending many hours supporting two languages (English and Traditional Chinese) in one WordPress blog, I decided to move the second language to a separate blog. I lost the page count on some of my Mandarin posts, but blogging life has got so much easier since then. Here are two plugins I’ve tried and the issues I encountered.

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After leaving the postpartum hotel, we experienced the first sleepless week taking care of Ruby on our own. For the first 2.5 months, I was mostly struggling and learning to breastfeed. After I got more confident at breastfeeding, we transitioned from one bottle feed a day to all breastfeeding. Right before she turned 3M, she started sleeping through the night (5+ hours). Later on, I read a lot of articles and books about routines during my parental leave and kept experimenting via trial and error with her. Here I will share my own learning experience to establish a routine after 3M, what worked and did not work for us.

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After my mother-in-law in the US left the hospital giving birth to my husband, she went back home and helped plant trees in the backyard the next day. When we told her we are checking in a postpartum hotel after the hospital, she was surprised. In Taiwan, it is very common to spend about a month either at a postpartum facility or at home with a postpartum care lady. In either case, food and baby care are the main focus to let the mother rest. Since we had a small apartment, we decided to go to a postpartum hotel nearby for 20 days (how we picked the facility and more details about our stay in Mandarin).

Normally I love taking pictures of food and new places, but I was really tired during my stay and only had a few snapshots.

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As we prepare to visit family in the US after the COVID-19 situation calms down in Taiwan, we want to register Ruby’s birth with the US and get a passport for her. As a Taiwanese citizen, she can already travel to the US with a Taiwanese passport but we thought it’s easier to report her birth as soon as possible. In this post, I shared some notes from our preparation and visit to the AIT in Taipei.

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Ruby was born in Taiwan and has dual citizenship from her parents, but the US does not know of her existence until we register her birth with American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) (more details in this post). Since her dad is American and mom is Taiwanese, her English last name follows her dad and her Mandarin last name is with me. The rest of the post is about the process to acquire an English birth certificate with a different name from the translated Chinese name.

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For a new mom, pregnancy and labor were difficult but there were lots of resources. Labor was a lot of pain, but it went by fast at least. On the other hand, breastfeeding was the most challenging part of motherhood in the first few weeks for me. I thought I had read a bunch and attended classes at the hospital during pregnancy, but in reality, it took so many days and nights with tears and stress to get the hang of it. Every woman has her own journey, and I’d just like to share mine in case it might help anyone with similar struggles.

I keep updating the post as long as I am breastfeeding, so far three months in!

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I’d like to dedicate the first post of this blog to how the blog was created. As a developer, I like to have full control and tinker with the code. WordPress is my top choice because it’s open-source, provides the most flexibility, and allows me to set up an instance on a server easily. Still, I encountered some issues along the way and shared my notes here. Alternatively, WordPress.com is another way to create a WordPress blog.

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