Wednesday, July 30, 2003
An old classmate from SAIC days just had her first baby and just sent an invitation for a "Baek-Il". Baek-il means "one hundred days" and is a Korean tradition that began when infants rarely lived beyond a hundred days. The 100th day became a marker to celebrate the baby's life and the mother's recovery from her labour and delivery. Tradition calls for the parents to collect rice from friends and neighbors to make dduk (rice cakes) for this special occasion. Since Soyoung and Phil don't own millstones to grind up the rice into flour, they have instead mailed out sheets of rice paper to friends which can be decorated and written on, which will ultimately be collected into a hand-bound book and given to Skye when she is of an age to be able to receive this gift.