The first really cold day of autumn

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In the little outdoor courtyard that our building gym overlooks, the leaves changed color quite quickly. The week of Halloween on Monday, all the leaves were green on the trees. On Tuesday, they started to turn yellow. When Wednesday and Thursday came, the leaves gradually turned orange and yellow. Then by Friday, every single leave on all those trees were a bright goldenrod. Talk about a rapid change in color in just five days!

This past week, all those leaves have fully shed and fallen off. I do not envy those who have to rake leaves and clean all them up. We walked through Park Slope today down many blocks of endless autumn leaves covering the sidewalks and streets. Kaia eagerly kicked the leaves, hoping that at least some were crunchy. Unfortunately since we’ve had rain the last couple days, most were still quite soggy. She persisted and kept kicking them in an attempt to detect a “crunch!”

This was the first really cold day of autumn for us this season, a warning that winter is growing ever so closer. I wore a sweater, scarf, a thicker fall jacket, and even put my gloves on this late afternoon given the cold wind. Chris is already cranking on the heat in our apartment. And Kaia for the first time is trying to use little boxes as her “ice skates.” We decorated our little Christmas tree this evening, and she helped put up ornaments for the first time… and broke just one. As much as I hate the cold, I still love Christmas, and this is just a precursor to all the end of year travel fun that awaits us.

Cancer scare and radiation

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In the late afternoon today, I met up with a friend who was diagnosed with stage zero breast cancer. She ended up having to have two surgeries to remove malignant tumors in one of her breasts. The first surgery was always anticipated, but the second surgery came as a surprise to her because the MRI results came after the first surgery happened; this indicated that there were more cancer cells detected that required removal. In a few weeks time, she will begin three weeks of daily radiation, followed by five years of taking a daily cancer pill, which has many side effects, including potentially spurring early onsite menopause.

Over tea, she talked about her recovery (which was thankfully quick!), her medical appointments, and her general feelings about the whole cancer scare. On the one hand, she is thankful that this was all caught so early; you really can’t get better than stage zero! On the other hand, she feels miserable, realizing after the second surgery how much more this will be than she originally imagined. She’s the kind of person who always wants to busy herself with as many things as possible to stifle her feelings. But in times like this, I think it’s much better to just give yourself time to feel everything: sad, angry, distressed, like the world kind of wronged you in some undeserved, unfair way. American society always stresses productivity over everything. But we rarely give ourselves the time and permission to just sit in a feeling and just be. The second surgery helped give her a mental reset; she’s trying to rethink her life and daily motions and how she wants to be better and kinder… to herself. To me, this feels like a blessing in disguise to mentally and emotionally start again.

AI vs. real life

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My entire workflow at work is so different than it was a year ago. Now whenever I am putting together almost any document for work, whether it’s a Word document or a presentation, I am doing almost all of it with Claude’s support. I have master prompts, projects, and agents set up to do work and think like me. The writing has gotten so much better for when I need certain message to have a certain tone. It’s actually a little creepy, but comforting that I can get so many of these tasks done so much quicker than I used to.

I was chatting with my friend today over lunch, and she was saying she has a manager who basically cannot think without Claude’s help. Whenever he is on calls or in meetings with her, he hears and sees almost nothing. He has to reference every suggestion she gives to Claude, either in real time or after, and then get back to her. He recently was trying to choose a real estate broker in the Bay Area to help him sell his house, and he recorded all the calls, then fed it through Claude and asked Claude to make the selection for him based on the recordings. It was a little insane. It was as though he had completely abandoned and/or lost his ability to think.

That’s the thing, though. AI is not supposed to replace our ability to think, to see, to feel. It’s supposed to assist us with tasks that we need help with but just need to be more efficient and thoughtful about. AI is never going to remember the really important, core human things. It can never truly be your friend. It’s not going to ask you how that presentation you were stressed about went. It’s not going to remember the funny story you told it five years ago. It’s not going to make you your favorite coffee drink because it remembered your preference and your exact specifications for brewing. I am embracing AI in my personal and professional life. But I’m certainly trying not to spend all my time with it, or pretend it’s going to replace all emotional needs.

Cream of buckwheat: my new “malt-o-meal”

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When I was little, my grandma made a number of my meals. Although she mostly made and ate Chinese food, she did have some exceptions that were more western. She loved all fruit jams but especially marmalade. She also loved malt-o-meal, which is an American brand of hot wheat-based breakfast porridge/cereal. I had no idea what this was back then. But because I’d see her eat it, it looked delicious to me, and thus I wanted it. She got into a routine where she’d make it for both of us, and we’d always stir in lots of creamy milk and (usually Aunt Jemima’s) syrup on top. It was hot, creamy, silky, and super comforting. I really loved the silky smooth, slightly grainy texture.

I cannot remember the last time I’ve had malt-o-meal. But when I read a blog post about a recipe developer making cream of buckwheat with maple syrup and figs, it immediately reminded me of my grandma’s malt-o-meal. This writer’s Substack made me nostalgic for that hot, creamy, silky flavor and texture, so I went to buy buckwheat groats and ground them yesterday in preparation for today’s breakfast. I made it a little differently: I used 2 parts homemade soy milk to 1 part whole milk, 1/3 cup ground buckwheat groats, and then stirred in additional milk, a touch of maple syrup, and topped with hemp and toasted sunflower seeds. As soon as I had the first bite, it brought me back to the moments when my grandma and I would eat malt-o-meal together and how delicious and comforting that was. This will definitely be on fall/winter breakfast rotation for me. And here’s an added bonus: buckwheat is not only gluten-free, but a complete protein!

Self-serve and measure dry goods have been decimated at Whole Foods Columbus Circle

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Since Chris does a weekly Whole Foods grocery now, I don’t go into Whole Foods at Columbus Circle very often anymore. Occasionally if I forgot to ask him to buy something, I will go pick it up. I also do this if I need to get something and I don’t think he will get me the right thing. Before picking up Kaia today, I went over to Whole Foods with the intention of picking up King Arthur organic bread flour (on sale!), as well as pumpkin seeds (aka pepitas) and buckwheat groats by weight.

Unfortunately, I had a rude awakening while at Whole Foods: the wall that used to have a massive line-up of dried goods you could measure and pay for by weight… had been reduced by at least 70 to 80 percent. And what was left was the tiniest selection of dried beans, oats, and seeds. The pumpkin seeds were completely emptied out. Buckwheat groats were not even an option. So I went to the dried beans/grains aisle and picked up a package of buckwheat groats, which was the only available brand and type there.

I used to love that self-serve dry-goods wall. Every now and then when I just wanted a small amount of buckwheat groats or a specific type of seed or nut for a recipe, I’d go to that wall, pour out, measure, and then add a price label to the bag. This whole concept eliminates household waste and ensures you get just what you need, no more, no less. Since the pandemic, people get all grossed out by self-serve, and so a lot of these options have either been reduced or eliminated. I suppose it was inevitable and now an end of an era of one of the things I liked the most about Whole Foods.

Big Brother, aka Child Protective Services, is watching you

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Yesterday, my friend was saying that if she couldn’t find a babysitter to help out with school drop-offs and pickups because of her and her partner’s chaotic work schedules, that maybe she’d just ask another friend or me to help out. Her partner was not a fan of this, saying that we’re not babysitters or employees of theirs, but instead, are friends. And they shouldn’t be asking friends to do favors for us.

“But that’s exactly what friends are supposed to be for!” she insisted to him and shared with me.

I’m on her side with this. Friends are supposed to be part of your network, your community, your “village,” so if you cannot rely on them to help you when you are in a pinch, who the hell are you supposed to rely on? People love to make stupid, ignorant generalizations about “you can get a babysitter” or “pay someone,” but when it comes to parts of your life like your own children, really good, trustworthy help is difficult to find.

I made a joke with her and said, sure, I’d be happy to pick up your son if you need help. But is your son going to be happy if I showed up at pickup for him? The last thing I’d need is for him to leave his school kicking and screaming with me walking him out. It would definitely invite someone calling Child Protective Services on me. Nowadays, you hear insane stories of random people calling CPS on well-meaning parents and caregivers all the time. One of my friends does not even want to use real body part words like “vagina” or “penis” in front of his 4-year-old because he knows another dad who was just trying to do the right thing, call the body parts by their real names. He did this in public, where some random bystander called CPS on them. CPS made unannounced visits to their home for months after the first visit, and it was nightmarish.

I think about this when I am walking Kaia home from school occasionally, and she’s clearly dysregulated. She’s screaming, “I DON’T LIKE YOU! I DON’T WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND!” at the top of her lungs, all while pushing me away, thrashing her arms around, and like today, even biting me. A couple of times when this has happened, people have actually stopped to watch. And in those moments, I sometimes wonder if they are thinking about calling Big Brother on me.

I guess I have until Kaia turns 18 for someone to actually try calling CPS on me, so we shall see!

Influencing others in foodie expeditions

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I was out with a friend, her son, and Kaia today for an outing to Arthur Avenue, aka Little Italy in the Bronx, and the Bronx Zoo today. We ate lunch at an Albanian restaurant Chris took us to a while back, and then we made our way around the Little Italy area so I could show her some of my favorite spots. Lucky me, I also got all four of us free tickets to visit the Bronx Zoo today, courtesy of a parent in Kaia’s class who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society. So the day ended up being quite inexpensive for New York City!

While hanging out today, my friend let me know that she, her partner, and son did a day trip to Fort Lee yesterday, after I had told her about the big Korean population there, and hence the delicious, authentic Korean food. They took an Uber over there and spent about half the day exploring. They ate at a local restaurant and were blown away by the food. She and her partner especially loved the banchan dishes that came out at the beginning of the meal, all complimentary.

“You know, this is all really thanks to you that we are branching out of just eating Turkish, French, and Italian foods,” my friend said to me. “We’re so much more adventurous now because of your influence! I started experimenting with more food, and now I am getting S out of his comfort zone. And he really, really enjoyed the Korean meal far more than I expected! He was still talking about it this morning!”

This made me so happy; it probably was the one comment she said to me that truly made my day. I love it when I hear about people — anyone really — taking my recommendations on anything from food, restaurants, sights to see, tours, places to visit. For me, it’s the biggest compliment. Everyone has so many choices they can make in a single day, so for someone to take my suggestion/advice seriously and actually carry it all the way through, it always makes me feel ecstatic. It was already a compliment months ago when she said she started exploring more cuisines because of me. But when she said that her partner, who is notoriously picky and narrow in his food choices, actually was willing and embraced Korean food, I just sat there in shock and joy.

I recently read an article about how you can get people to like you. And one of the ways it mentioned was to tell people when something reminded you of them, or tell them when you did something that was at their recommendation. This is 1000000000% true. But this is only true if you already liked them at least a little.

Autumn in Inwood; and the “stalker” at the library

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Today, we spent the day up in Inwood, which is on the upper tip of Manhattan. The last couple of years, we’ve come up here during the fall, when all of the leaves are changing color and there are large swaths of gold, red, and orange leaves scattered all over the ground. We all enjoy stepping on crunchy leaves at this time of year, but unfortunately it has rained the last couple of days, so instead of crunchy, they were all soggy. It still made for some picturesque walking and some good photos, though.

After all the years of coming up here, we finally decided to enter the Inwood public library branch. Just two years ago, this branch was fully redone and renovated, so it looks quite shiny from the outside. We spent a good amount of time inside looking at the endless variety of children’s books, all so multicultural in many languages. I always think about this when I think about children’s books now, but the representation is so much greater now than it was when I was a young child. The interior, as we imagined, was really well done: spacious, well laid out, with lots of floor to ceiling windows and natural light.

A separated children’s reading room can be accessed through double doors from the main children’s area. Kaia insisted on spending time in there, so I joined her and read some books with her together. While we were in there reading together, Chris stood from the outside of the room, and through the floor-to-ceiling windows, he snapped several photos of us reading together to “capture the moment” as he always likes to do. Chris loves taking candid photos, especially ones that we are unaware of, or that can frankly be unflattering (he contests this, but what does he not contest that I say?!). Suddenly, one of the librarians comes into the children’s reading room and says hi to Kaia and me.

“Hi! So sorry to bother you,” the librarian began, smiling awkwardly. “I just wanted to ask: do you know that man there in the blue hoodie? He has been taking some photos of you, and I just wanted to make sure you were associated with him?”

I immediately started grinning. Chris can be so ridiculous sometimes, and he gives “zero shits” what other people think about his behavior. But to a regular bystander who has no idea we are together, his behavior can seem super stalker-like and weird, maybe even borderline “inappropriate”!

“No worries,” I immediately reassured her. “He’s my husband. He just likes to capture the moment!”

We both started laughing.

“Oh, thank goodness!” The librarian responded. “I just wanted to make sure we didn’t have an awkward situation on our hands and I didn’t need to call security! Hope you all enjoy!” And she left the room.

And there, you have it, my friends: This is just one of many endless examples of what a weirdo husband I have and what a weirdo dad Kaia has.

My kid’s palate: You win some, you lose some

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Earlier this week, Kaia came up to me and started grabbing my leg.

“Mama!” she said sweetly, looking up at me smiling with twinkly eyes. This usually means she wants something. She glanced at the kitchen counter, where she saw some bananas I just bought. “Can you make me some banana pancakes this week?”

Kaia has loved pancakes since she was a baby. Banana pancakes was likely her very first type of pancake I made her, and since then, she has consistently enjoyed and asked for them since. I’ve made many variations of pancakes for her over the years, but these seem to be her favorite.

I explained to her that work was very busy this week, so I wouldn’t be able to make the pancakes until this weekend. She doesn’t know this, but the bananas I’d use were actually overripe in the freezer, and so I needed to defrost those for these pancakes, as well. The bananas on the counter were for a different use. Luckily, she didn’t have a melt down and seemed to understand.

“That means you’re gonna make them for me this Saturday, before martial arts?” she replied, grinning. “I’m gonna have banana pancakes with maple syrup this weekend!”

Kaia started squeezing my leg. Though it was like she was tugging on my heart. This felt bittersweet, as in that moment, I wondered when she would become too tall so that when she’d grab me, she’d no longer reach just my legs anymore. It’s one of the many sweet parts of early childhood that I’ve always loved the physical feeling of.

The other thing I love about her pancake eating is that it’s definitely evolving. In the second half of this year, we started letting her have just a little bit of maple syrup regularly with pancakes. She does this really cute thing where she likes the maple syrup, but just on half of each pancake or each serving. And she prefers the maple syrup always on the side to “dip.” So, I never pour any maple syrup on top of her pancakes. It is always poured away from the pancakes, wherever on the plate they are. It’s cute that even at this young age, she has a preference (just like adults!) for maple syrup placement!

As cute as this is, Kaia is not a fan of every single thing I make. This week, I was excited to make my first butternut squash soup of the season, this time with my chicken/duck stock. Chris and I really enjoyed it; it came out thicker than I’d ideally like. I was planning to thin it out with more stock, but Chris insisted he liked the thicker texture, so I left it as is. Well, Kaia did not agree with this; she kept saying that it was “too thick!” and that it was “yucky!” Yet over the course of this week, she had three whole bowls to herself.

A week or two ago, she had butternut squash at school lunchtime. I asked her what she liked more, school lunch butternut squash or mama’s butternut squash. I did not get the answer I wanted.

“Butter Beans (that’s the name of the lunch provider) butternut squash!” Kaia responded enthusiastically. “It’s not yucky!”

Ughhhhhh.

Parent teacher conferences

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We’ve had parent-teacher conferences since Kaia was in daycare. We had them in 3K and 4K; all of them seemed fairly straightforward. We never heard anything that really surprised us about how Kaia behaves in class. She’s always been a very social, enthusiastic child who loves spending time with others. She generally respects authority figures while also occasionally attempts to test them. Today we had two parent-teacher conferences, the first with her English teacher and the second with her main two Chinese/homeroom teachers.

As expected, we heard about her growth in areas like attention span and writing mechanics in the short time she’s been in kindergarten, so almost two months now. One thing I have thought a lot about in our homework struggles, especially in the weekday evenings, is how maybe the muscles in her hands just haven’t developed enough, and that’s why she finds it uncomfortable to write… and thus dreads doing weeknight homework. One way to really develop that is to encourage her to keep writing in smaller spurts. And for fun things, she could do things like use a water spray bottle (strengthens the same muscles, surprise surprise, which she loves doing already!), roll and make shapes with Play Doh (which will need to be played with at the table, ONLY), and use kid-friendly scissors to cut shapes, tear paper, and crumple balls. Some of these were suggested by the teachers; others I looked up after the discussion. I think this could be another fun form of play that could help develop her hand muscles to make writing less annoying. And we all know she loves to draw and color, so of course we want her to continue that.

These are all the little things we don’t really think about as adults because we take these skills for granted; we’ve been doing them for so long, so we don’t immediately think these could be issues. But it’s comforting to know that Kaia has supportive teachers who want to help and can give us ideas at home to support. On the other hand, these are all things that are hard for me to relate to because unlike Kaia, I was not the youngest in my class; I was usually the oldest or one of the oldest (and biggest in kindergarten!). I also was writing letters (very regularly) before I even got to kindergarten. So this is about learning to be patient and helping my baby grow, which is going to be at a different rate than I remember for myself.