Dear friends,

Thank you for your messages regarding the birth of Julian C. Zhang. Yes, the name is official now. We named him this way so that we could follow the Chinese tradition to give all three boys a common Chinese character as the first character of their given names. For the record, here are the boys names:

Jasen Andrew Zhang - Zhang Jie (great) Sheng1 (life) 张杰生
Jeremy Brian Zhang - Zhang Jie (great) Ming2 (bright) 张杰明
Julian Charles Zhang - Zhang Jie (great) Liang4 (bright) 张杰亮

Someone may say Ming2 & Liang4 should be for the twins, which is a good point. But then the alphabetic order would be wrong. Besides, they will be pretty much like triplet when they grow up given that they are only 19 months apart.

We intend to make all the first names sound gentle, instead of strong. To make a balance, we gave them some most popular and manly middle names. Their middle name initials, ABC, would make sense not only because that's the alphabetic order (BTW, we called the twins little A and little B for a few days when they were born because they were tagged by the hospital this way, and we still label their bottles A & B to this day), but also they will be identified as ABC - America Born Chinese.

Enough discussion with baby names. For the more important part of the message, Fong and Julian came back home last Friday. She is still recovering, while he has a big appetite - he's a better sucker for sure :o. We have to feed him with formula in between breast feedings for the time being. This, plus the fact that Julian is born big (8 lbs 9.5 oz, 20.5"), kinda support my "prediction" that he may out grow his two brothers.

Thank you again for your congras. I'd like to reply to your messages individually, but that's only possible when I'm back to work. (Yeah, I'm looking forward to returning to work, 'cause that's the easier one of my two full time jobs :).) But I have to mention one message from Shifang (USTC 812er) that said "I guess your Rock band is complete." That's was EXACTLY what I had in mind back a few months ago when we first learned it's going to be another boy. Not that a girl cannot be a member in a rock band (and I enjoyed a decent concert by an all girl Chinese rock band called Cobra a few years ago when they toured USA http://www.oocities.org/yingchao_zhang/ChinaRock/cobra01/), but it is certainly much less common. My second thought was I could have a volleyball league of my own some day. Volleyball has been a major way for me to keep in shape, but I haven't been able to keep up with it for a while :(. The third thought went like, oops, there is problem, because the two disciplines tend to make the hands grow differently. I guess that's a one big reason why I can't make much progress both on my guitar and in a volleyball court :(. At the end, I realized that the consequence is unimportant. It's all about enjoying family life together :).

Let me stop the flow of my thoughts here, 'cause it can go on and on... Thanks for reading through and sharing my joy. Only one bad feeling I have is that I feel the joy is somewhat built on top of my wife's suffering experiences throughout the two pregnancies and the birth giving. She went through both C-section and labor with a little cut (forgot the medical term). There is no better choice here, only one worse than the other depending on what aspect you look at. I truly hope the medical science can be advanced quickly to a point that women wouldn't suffer at all in this process... or perhaps men can share some of it, for the willing ones, of cause.

Yingchao