As I look back over another year in Shanghai I realise I have spent more time in this city than in any other place as an adult. Working for over six years in one school, getting married to a local, buying an appartment in a working class Chinese neighbourhood and raising a ‘joint foreign enterprise’ child are approximate to laying down roots. However, I am still a foreigner and will always be somewhat alien even if I become really really good at giving taxi directions and wielding chopsticks.

School time operates much like a carousel. You get relaxed spells during winter and summer holidays interspersed with unrelenting weeks of busy pressure as if one is running a sprint and a marathon at the same time. However busy it gets during term time, I always know that teaching in an international school is a lot more engaging than teaching disinterested Bristol yoof and eventually the carousel will turn to reveal the next holiday. I’ve survived before and I can do it again.

But, I also take heart from the awareness that I need to thrive in order to survive. I enjoy my job and sometimes I am even quite good at it. It’s easy to get stale and complacent after several years working at the same post, but I am fortunate to get fresh impetus from the energy and passion of colleagues. I was fortunate to be play a small supportive role in the Learning 2.010 Shanghai education technology conference at Concordia in September (http://www.learning2.asia). One major outcome of this conference was to ignite discussions within our department about the way to allow ICT to break out across the curriculum by working more closely with other subjects. The impetus came from my colleague Adriaan and it looks like we have some momentum to move forward.

I am more of a tinkerer than an advocate. Our department has been using Moodle as a tool to share resources and activities for more than three years. I started using Moodle when I was still in the UK and it struck during my first years in China that the crippled state of the Internet required us to build our own walled garden where we could curate, host and share learning resources.  Moodle would have remained a pet project of the ICT department, but two years ago Nick and Adriaan helped to push it forward.

First, we persuaded the school bosses to give us  a server to play with so we could make Moodle available to the wider school community. Then the prospect of a swine flu outbreak made it necessary to provide a digital backup plan for learning to continue in the event of school closure, which fortunately did not materialise. Still, the foundation of the facility took root thanks to Nick’s tireless enthusiasm until it became firmly established in the school’s culture by the beginning of this academic year.

Jake was still a baby this time last year. It has been amazing to see him grow and develop week by week throughout 2010. My online behaviour has been rather reticent during the last year, except for occasional video posts showing off Jake on Facebook. He is a fearless little boy who takes great delight in showing off his physical prowess whenever he can. By the time he was ten months old, he was already walking very well.  We cam back to the UK for a month in July. Our highlights included witnessing him mount John’s stairs without any help whatsoever and laughing with glee while filling his nappy in front of an assembly of geriatric scrabble players. Since our return to China, Jake’s hair has become increasingly wild and curly while his daring exploits at the local KFC slide has followed suit. In short, Jake is a little action man who loves the ELC music DVD and a fickle succession of reading books about animals and monsters ranging from Maurice Sendak to Julia Donaldson. We spent a few days before Christmas in Hainan Island. Jake was ecstatic when encountering the beach, the swimming pool and any escalator. It’s been a delight to watch him grow up this year from a baby into a proper little boy.

Shanghai Expo opened its doors at the beginning of May. Where we lazy or ungracious for choosing not to go. I enjoyed the spactacle of the architecture from the bridge on my way to school every morning. Shanghai was certainly a better place to live during the six months of the exposition, but I did not fancy the idea of queuing up for hours in the sweltering heat to spend fifteen minutes in a pavillion just to say I’d been there.  I am thankful for the six months moratorium on heavy construction that the made the noise and dust less polluting than it was before. It’s business as usual again since the Expo finished at the end of October. The building crews are working 18 hours a day on the site across the road. The outcome will be another tower block to obscure our view of the Nanpu Bridge after months of dirt and noise.

In some ways that pails into insignificance when compared with the individual acts of pollution I have to encounter on a daily basis when wheeling Jake around the back streets of Puxi. Acts of selfish pollution include smoking, even more smoking, spitting, reckless driving and inconsiderate parking in front of entrances for wheelchairs and pushchairs. Two weeks of holiday allow me to be more  philosophical about my prospects of changing an adolescent culture to be more compliant with my wishes about airs, graces and basic safety.

The weeks, months and years have started to blur together rather like the imagery from Maurice Sendak’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’.

And he sailed off through night and day
And in and out of weeks
And almost over a year
To where the wild things are

The carousel turns and I’m still in Shanghai. My lack of online activity reveals a busy, engaging year (offline) in terms of my professional and personal life. Happy new year. What will 2011 offer?

I’ve been using Vimeo recently. It has a basic free service that lets you upload upto 500 mb of videos each week. All video hosting sites display uploaded footage as compressed flash streams, but Vimeo viewers can download the original file. This is very good for my parents who want to see my baby son Jake reach his milestones in high quality video. It has standard embed and sharing to show the video in this blog and in my Facebook feed. I am a little concerned about the new terms of service from next month that disables the download feature after a week. I could pay $60 for a premium account that enables this feature, but what happens if this site suddenly stops working in China?

Jake Crosses The Bridge from Matt Seigal on Vimeo.

Call it paranoia, but I have been trying out alternative solutions. I have just activated the free two month trial of Apple’s MobileMe. This offers upto 20 GB of online storage, which can be shared with others. It is convenient that it integrates so easily into IMovie, but it took some research and Vaper’s Video tag plugin for WordPress to be able to embed the uploaded Quicktime movies into my blog. I need to remember to add a link to the file if I want my family to download high quality videos of Jake. I’m confident that MobileMe will not be blocked in China, because it is not available to subscribers in this country and it is expensive at $99 a year. I may be tempted to shop on Ebay or Amazon for MobileMe at a discount of upto 50 percent.

I also tried the Indian video hosting site Viddler. Each uploaded video can be upto 500 mb and viewers have a download option that is not yet restricted to paying customers. Videos can be crossposted as an embed into blogs, but this feature does not seem to include Facebook. Perhaps Viddler will be blocked if it catches on as a place to host sensitive footage, but it’s not a household name like Youtube so it may slip through the cracks of a social media crackdown.

Another solution was to use ftp to upload a Quicktime video to my Dreamhost server and to embed the video into my blogpost. This works in a very similar way to embedding MobileMe videos. The advantage is I can move my blog and videos together if my site is ever blocked. The disadvantage is that I am paying for a basic shared hosting plan and performance may be slower than other solutions especially if the files are large. It may be OK, because I only serve videos to a few people.

There are other solutions, but these are hampered by practical issues. I could use Witopia as my virtual private network to hop over the Great Firewall of China to upload footage to Youtube and other blocked services, The problem is that Witopia has been painfully slow in recent weeks and Chinese friends will not be able to see my videos. I could upload videos to Chinese hosting sites like Tudou and Youku, but they are slow outside China and do not offer download options as far as I could see.

What is the best way for someone in China to share videos with the outside world? I’m going to use Viddler, MobileMe and my personal webhost. I hope that no more video sharing services get blocked. If they do then I have a way to share my memories of Jake with my family around the world.

Textbook parenting differs between China and Europe. According to Chinese custom, postpartum women should observe bed rest for a month after the baby is born (yuezi). The child should not go outside under any circumstances except to go home from the hospital. When the baby reaches a month old the father is meant to cross a bridge cradling his child. It is also customary to shave the baby’s head and make a paint print of the baby’s feet and hands for posterity. The Chinese make a calligraphy brush from the baby’s hair. It is also very common for the grandparents to move in and takeover, making decisions about everything from the mother’s diet to the child’s future career.

Europeans are happy to introduce fresh air to newborn babies after only a few days. Postpartum women drive. It is frowned upon to feed babies with formula milk if the mother can produce her own. Newborn babies should never have a haircut and they should only ride around in a car sitting in a car seat fastened with a safety belt. Food allergies are common so breast feeding women should not eat peanuts if there has been a family history of hayfever, asthma or eczema. Half of my family are Jewish so it is very normal to circumcise an eight day baby boy. This never happens in China. Every culture has its own views of parenting.

It’s a minefield, which I think blew up in our face when we chose to shave Jake’s head on Tuesday. Here’s some background. Jake was suffering from cradle cap on his head. We tried to cut it a little, because his head was hot and sweaty and it was not very easy to apply cream on the rash. Our trim was not very successful so we called a professional company to come and shave Jake’s head. Two people have questioned me about this suggesting shaving our baby’s head was inappropriate, but it did not hurt him. He was asleep for most of the time and a head shave feels more like a gentle massage than anything else.

Jake’s First Hair Cut from Matt Seigal on Vimeo.

Jake is the centre of our life. He is a very happy, healthy child and everything we do is designed to ensure that is the case. We would never do anything to cause him intentional harm or discomfort. I am sure we will make parenting choices from time to time that fall outside of the expectations of people in China and Europe. That is inevitable, because parenting viewpoints are so contradictory between our different cultures. Jake is also our child and we will decide how to bring him up even if it is not in line with other people’s expectations. End of sermon.

Jake Crosses The Bridge from Matt Seigal on Vimeo.

The most recent was shot yesterday.It’s the Chinese tradition to mark a month of a baby’s life by crossing a bridge. In this case we crossed Nanpu Bridge and two at Century Park. We went early before the park was too hot and busy. We also hired a large 6 seater quadroped bike to take us around the park.

Jake was unphased during his second outing and I’m pleased to say that I didn’t forget to take any footage this time. I didn’t post any videos of Jake going to Kebabs on the Grille last Thursday, because I forgot to take any video or photos of the occasion.

Jake at 27 Days Old from Matt Seigal on Vimeo.

The second video shows footage of Jake playing and having a bath. Notice how he is alert and able to move his neck around. Babies often get to this stage after a couple of months and Jake was only 27 days old when we shot this.

He is utterly fearless.
Jenny says he feeds like a wolf. He only cries when he is hungry. He is not too bothered by heat or a soiled nappy.

He is strong.
He is already starting to kick and move his neck like a child who is nearly two months old.

He is aware.
I’ve been warned by friends that newborn babies like to sleep, but Jake spends several hours wide wake during the day. He stares at us intently. We’ve had fun singing to him, telling him stories and showing him flashcards.

He is getting bigger.
A health visitor measured him and told us he has put on weight. His birth weight was 3.35 kgs, but now he is over 4kg and he has grown in length from 50cm to 55cm. He drinks about 500ml of milk each day, including Jenny’s breast milk that accounts for about 30 percent of daily intake.

Jenny’s parents told me that he looks 70 percent European and 30 percent Chinese. I’m inclined to agree, but I arrived in this world choking on my mother’s cord and I’m pretty scared of large gatherings. Jake seems to have inherited his mother’s strength, wits and fearlessness. Long may that continue.

It’s really nice having my family home. I normally get cabin fever if I am stuck inside all day, but it feels very natural and grounding to be at home spending time with Jenny and Jake. He looks like a cross between both of his parents, but it is incredible to look at my son. He looks so clean and pure like a version of my younger self before I was contaminated by the world and its people. Jake is his own person who will eventually make an independent life for himself, including all its triumphs and setbacks. I still look at him and see nothing but possibility.

Mum and baby are much more comfortable here. Jake has been wearing some new clothes and he had his first bath at home, which he really enjoyed. We’ve had a few visitors who think Jake looks very healthy and handsome. I have to agree. We bought some special postpartum health food from a company called Guangheitang. They publish a magazine with pictures of cute babies, but I’m pretty sure that Jake’s peachy complexion and big almond eyes would win him a spot in any advertising campaign.

Colleagues and friends keep asking how tired we are. It’s early days. Jenny has just come home from hospital, but we are lucky that we have a yuesao nanny who is helping us take care of mother and baby for the first two months. This takes the pressure off us a little as we learn how to become good parents. I was a little frustrated that she was taking over to the extent that I didn’t feel I was getting enough hands on contact with Jake, but I made it clear that we want the nanny to help us be better parents rather than pay someone else to do all the parenting for us. We’re getting her to teach us all the tricks she has been employing to keep Jake safe, happy and healthy. It will take a little while to master the arts of nappies, winding and baby bathing. but I’m having lots of fun learning how to be a good dad.