Mary

You know what, I have an awesome wife. I don’t gush about her enough but I really should. Besides all the normal wife, mother duties she does, she is really an amazing human being.

She has taken on the role of our church’s Compassion International spokesperson and through her a lot of kids got sponsored at our church and at her work. She even won a prize through Compassion Int. for getting sponsors and won our family a free trip to visit our Compassion child in the Philippines! Well it’s actually her sponsor child that she has been sponsoring since college. I shouldn’t actually take any credit at all. But Mary corresponds with her child frequently and earlier this year we took on another sponsor child.

She makes beautiful jewelry http://www.perfect.etsy.com which she sells and donates 50% of the proceeds to charities like Compassion and Kiva. She is constantly making beautiful works of art for her friends, people’s weddings, etc. I even sold one of her necklaces to a co-worker (who loves it!). I just think it is so cool when people have a useful trade, and she is really good at it. I don’t tell her enough though. Mary your jewelry rocks!

Recently she was on TV on a show called Check Please Bay Area. She was so good! She had all the food jargon and talk down and she looked beautiful with her pregnant glow. I was really proud of her.
(See here for the episode: http://blogs.kqed.org/food/2009/05/10/check-please-bay-area-season-4-episode-8-408/ )

The restaurant she reviewed Sahn Maru is a Korean restaurant we frequent in Oakland. The owner of that restaurant was so grateful to her. When Mary went there for lunch with her friend, he came over and said he had been waiting for her to come in. He even told his sons to look out for her and call him immediately if they saw anyone that looked like her. I guess his business boomed after the show. Restaurants that get featured on Check Please Bay Area increase their business dramatically. He comped their meal and gave them all types of extra stuff. He was genuinely grateful, and that was the best part, that she could help out a local Korean business during this tough economic time.

We went to dinner their last night and the owner came over again and talked to us, gave us free Korean pancake, and as we were leaving he handed Mary an envelope! Inside was a check, of course Mary refused and tried to give it back like a hundred times. They actually made a scene in the restaurant. Christian thought they were fighting and he kept yelling, “Stop it!” He told her about his family’s immigration over to America and how he was so grateful that Mary thought of them. He told her to think of him as an older brother. It was really touching, the sincerity in his eyes as he was talking to her.

But it’s just things like that makes Mary such an interesting and awesome person. I remember when I first started dating her I took her to get this free wind up radio that she got for donating money to KQED. I was like why are you giving money to them!? But at the same time I thought it was very endearing. And she does stuff like that all the time. She is constantly finding free stuff on the internet and getting great deals for our kids through the Berkeley Parent Network. I am very lucky to married to her and our kids will one day know what a great mother they have.