Monthly Archives: September 2023

Cute developments of my Kaia Pookie

Posted on by
Reply

Every day, it seems like my Pookster is doing something to surprise us. It’s hard to keep track of all her new words, gestures, and habits given she’s developing so quickly. Some of the things she’s done recently that have made us smile, laugh, or marvel at how much she is learning are briefly noted here:

*When she is very fond of something and wants to keep holding it, but you try to take it away, she immediately starts saying quickly, “Let go! Let go!”

*If you ask her a question, and she doesn’t know the answer, she will immediately say, “Don’t know! Don’t know!” then put her hands up as though “I dunno!”

*When she wants you to finish doing something with her she doesn’t like, like brushing her teeth or putting her hair up in pigtails, she whines, “Come on! Come on!” Other versions of stopping said action also include: “All done! All done!” or “All good! All good!”

*She is singing full lines of her favorite songs, like “Move on back! Move on back!” from “Wheels on the Bus.” She’s actually sung broken parts of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” for a while now, but the lines from “Wheels on the Bus” have been new out of her mouth as of late.

*She is able to look at both photos and pictures of objects and things and name them without any prompting or assistance. She can also identify a handful of people, including her favorite Suma, Chris’s mom.

*She’s figured out how to open our kitchen cabinets — from the top. Yep. The time has finally come. Chris had to set up the magnet children locks on one, but I’d imagine in a short time, we may need to install them on *all* the kitchen cabinets.

*She knows how to twist open regular (not child-locked) pill containers. This totally freaked me out.

My baby is officially 21 months old today – not really a baby anymore, but regardless, she will always be my baby. How time flies. I’m so freaking lucky to have her and all her sweet cheekiness.

Albanian food off of Arthur Avenue in the Bronx

Posted on by
Reply

Living in New York City, we are spoiled to have almost every ethnic cuisine on earth represented in this great, big metropolis. Chris and I are also just inherently curious about cultures other than our own, and especially their food, as food is the easiest gateway into learning about another’s culture. While there are certainly many cuisines we have yet to really try, one that we finally tried today was Albanian. And funnily enough, it was in Belmont right off of Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. As I was reading about the restaurant we visited (called Cka Ka Qellu, named after a proverb meaning “what we happen to have”), I found out something funny that I hadn’t even though about before: over 20 years ago, a number of ethnic Albanian refugees fled a genocidal conflict in Kosovo, and a lot of them ended up in New York City working in pizza parlors all over town. This explains why a number of the city’s pizza parlors had other side items like cheese and spinach bureks on their menus; it was the Albanians’ way of introducing a taste of their home to New Yorkers who were originally coming in for a slice of pizza.

We had our main Saturday meal at Cka Ka Qellu and had an assortment of delicious dishes, from tarator, like the Albanian version of tzatziki; fasul, a rich white bean soup; and mantia, which are veal meatballs with a choice of being served in a thick, white yogurt sauce (which we, of course, asked for). This quaint, farmhouse-like restaurant even had a pizza oven up front, baking all their fresh breads from scratch. The bread here was soft, pillowy, and incredibly delicious!

Most people wouldn’t guess we’d trek up to Arthur Avenue for Albanian food, but on this trip, we did. We did make sure to pick up some Italian staples, though, like dried pasta, canned San Marzano tomatoes, Italian pork sausage, and fresh mozzarella.

There are so many delicious things to eat in the world, yet so little time. If only we could try something different and new every day!

Kaia’s stubbornness and cuteness wrapped into one action: holding hands

Posted on by
Reply

I am clearly biased, but I think my sweet Kaia Pookie is incredibly cute. She is so cute that sometimes, I just want to squish her little face and eat it. I still have no idea where the idea of “eating” someone or something cute came from, but alas, I use it when it comes to Pookster. I can’t help it; she is just super adorable. She doesn’t have her same fat rolls or chubbiness that I always admired from over a year ago, but sometimes, I still stare at her in wonderment and cannot really believe she is here with us. She is my sweet miracle baby, my bundle of joy that is growing and developing endlessly. She has lots of strong opinions and can be incredibly cheeky. She especially hates holding hands. She gets SO mad when you try to hold her hand while walking outside. It’s like she’s saying, let me be independent! Leave me alone! I will go where I want to go! The exception to this is when there’s a lot of strange, new people around, or when she wants help going up and down the stairs.

Oddly, though, since our Virginia trip last week, she randomly does want to hold hands. She will demand that her hand be held after getting out of her high chair at home post-meal time. She even wants her hand held while she’s in her stroller. She will either demand, “hold my hand!” or “hold me hand!” and then look up at us expectantly. I love these little moments so much because I know that sooner than we think, they will all be gone forever and just a distant memory. So I am still maniacally trying to capture all the moments as often as possible without totally running out of Google Cloud storage space.

Kaia counts in English and Chinese

Posted on by
Reply

As much as I can hope and dream about it, it’s very unlikely that Kaia will ever be fully bilingual in English and Mandarin Chinese. I probably speak Mandarin Chinese at barely a 5-6 year old level, if even that, and as I’m teaching her Chinese, I’m learning and re-learning Mandarin Chinese through helpful YouTube videos and even on Udemy. She’s mastered a lot of fruit, like how to say grapes or cherries in Chinese. She knows what I am saying when I tell her to watch, look, or listen. And recently, I’ve been trying to reinforce how to count from 1-10 in Chinese because she’s been learning that in school for English. So far, it looks like during their daily morning circle time, they are sticking to counting from just 1-10 in English now. So I tried to mirror this for her in Chinese.

Kaia easily counts from 1-10 in English. She’s been doing this for the last two months. Sometimes, she randomly will skip one or two numbers in the sequence when distracted, but she knows how to say all of them. I recently started adding in Chinese, and while she’d look at me contemplatively, I knew she was absorbing what I was saying just based on her thoughtful facial expression. This week, she’s counted up to ten, though it’s clear she’s a bit shyer around this: her voice is much softer as she says the numbers in sequence in Chinese, and as she gets to ten, her voice is almost a whisper. But when she finally did it, I couldn’t believe how proud I felt; I could tell she was feeling victorious as well! She had this big smile on her face and started bobbing her head back and forth. She loves to seek our approval, but I hope to instill in her a sense of pride for her own accomplishments and that many times, that can and should be enough.

Wearing sweats or workout shorts as part of my daily uniform

Posted on by
Reply

A lot of people speculated that after the height of the pandemic was over, people would tire over “athleisure” wear, like sweats, yoga pants, and gym shorts. While I have noticed on the streets that there are certainly more people dressing up, whether that’s for work, meetings, or fun evenings out, I still notice lots of people who dress exactly like I do: t-shirts, workout shorts, sweats (in the colder months), and really DGAF. Because I work from home full time, the most I will do to “dress up” is to wear a little makeup and perhaps change my top into something that is a little less casual. For more “serious” meetings or when there are higher level people on calls, I “dress up” by putting on a collared shirt or a slightly fancier blouse. That’s usually how you know I am making an “effort.” On the bottom, since no one on a Zoom call can see this, I will always be in shorts in the summer, or sweats in the winter. This is how I roll.

I’m very cognizant of this when I go to Kaia’s school for pickup. I notice the other working parents coming in, likely from an office, in their business or business casual attire. I also notice the ones who likely work from home or freelance wearing t-shirts and shorts like me. The owner of the daycare asked me if I worked remotely full time or was hybrid when he first met me. He obviously knew it was one or the other, and I definitely was not full time in the office just based on how I was dressed — then in shirts and a very casual t-shirt. But now that I work from home and am a mother at that, I genuinely will always prioritize comfort over fashion.

The deluge that is a four-day work week after a Monday holiday

Posted on by
Reply

I cannot speak for other countries since I’ve only ever worked or lived in the United States, but I can say, without hesitation, that four-day work weeks after a Monday holiday are always brutal. I think about days like President’s Day, Memorial Day, and Labor Day, all federal holidays that land on a Monday, and historically how my work weeks have felt when I return on Tuesday. And I can say: I never feel great after. I feel like one day has just been taken away from me to be productive and just get shit done, and now, I need to scramble to make up for the day of productivity that was taken away. Not only that, but everyone else feels that way: everyone’s scrambling to get what they would have finished on Monday done, and what’s worse: When you have Type A people you are working with, whether it’s internal or external, whether they realize it or not, they’re taking out all their work-related angst… on you. What I thought would be a pretty uneventful week now has meetings up the yin yang and things that will likely bubble over by week’s end. The joys of being part of the rat race…

Kaia’s love for lychees

Posted on by
Reply

I first introduced Kaia to lychees sometime in the autumn of last year, but there was a huge gap when she had no exposure to them until this summer. We bought them from a fruit vendor on the street in upper Manhattan, and then she totally got hooked on them. I got them once more in Chinatown, and since then, she randomly asks if we have lychees to eat (most of the time, we don’t, unfortunately).

When we were in Richmond, we went into a Vietnamese supermarket and found some at a reasonable price, so we bought a 2.2lb bag of them to eat back at the hotel. Given we had no high chair and no proper kitchen/dining setup, we’d undress her so she’d only wear her diaper, wash and peel the lychees in the hotel bathroom sink, then give them to her in pieces. She was always in heaven, constantly asking, “More? More?”

We brought some back with us when we returned to New York today, and we finished them off after dinner this evening. I’ve been teaching her how to say different food-related phrases in Chinese. So while she gets excited and wants to reach for the lychee shells and pits, I repeatedly tell her in Chinese “Bu chi! Bu chi! (don’t eat!). Now, after I peel a lychee, she points at the pits and shells and says gleefully, “bu chi! bu chi!”

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello: The beautiful creation as a result of slavery

Posted on by
Reply

Monticello was the primary plantation and home of our third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson. He was a self-trained architect and started designing Monticello when he was 14 years old, inheriting the land from his father. This vast piece of land was about 5,000 acres, or 20 square kilometers, and was built and managed by Jefferson’s vast team of over 600 slaves in his lifetime. Today, we drove out to Monticello, which is just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, and took the Highlights tour, which showed us the inside of the house, as well as different parts of the grounds. He had quite an elaborate garden full of beautiful flowers and a large variety of seasonal fruits and vegetables. I lost count of the number of different fruit trees that lined the property, as well as all the different types of tomatoes and squash.

When I learned U.S. history in high school, because I grew up in liberal San Francisco, one of the very first things I learned about Jefferson was that not only did he own and love having slaves as free labor, but he even had sex with many of them and infamously impregnated one of them multiple times (Sally Hemmings). None of this was ever sugar coated to me in my U.S. history classroom. I would guess that Jefferson likely raped and had many children with other slaves that just aren’t confirmed, but I suppose we’ll never know the full story around that. However on this tour, I was completely shocked and disgusted to find out that despite having over 600 slaves serve him and his property over his lifetime, Jefferson still managed to die in debt. At the time of his death when he was 83 years old, he owed more than $107,000 USD, which is the equivalent of over $3 million USD today! Can someone please explain how you can possibly have that much debt when you never had to pay for any labor your entire life…?!

It’s really amazing what you can build when you have access to totally free, enslaved labor. But it’s also amazing how much you can take all that for granted and still push for an even more lavish life that would leave you in that much debt when you die. It’s pretty sickening to think about.

Maymont Farm in Richmond

Posted on by
Reply

A colleague who lives in Richmond suggested we come to visit Maymont Farm, which is actually in Richmond the city, surprisingly. It’s this huge expanse of land that has multiple types of gardens, farms, a barn, and seemingly endless pastures. In the late 1800s, a wealthy Richmond couple, James and Sallie Dooley, completed an elaborate Gilded Age estate on a site high above the James River. Upon their deaths and according to their wishes, Maymont, including its architectural complexes and the 100-acre landscape, was left to the people of Richmond. Sallie Dooley died in 1925, which was when the City of Richmond took control of the land. Until 1975, the Maymont Foundation took control under an agreement with the City of Richmond. They raised money and developed a long-term plan to allow the public to enjoy this space. Today, it is free to come visit with just a suggested donation of $5 per visitor, which is incredible when you see how beautiful and vast the space is. It really is taken care of quite well.

We visited the Italian and Japanese gardens of Maymont, and also the goat farms. I really wanted Kaia to see real animals in person. They allow you to feed them designated goat feed there. A nice visitor had extra coins for feed, so she gave them to me so Kaia could enjoy. Kaia seemed pretty unsure of what to make of the goats. She knew the sound they make (“baa baa!”), but when it came to getting too close, she got a little scared. I tried to model for her and feed the goats to get her more comfortable. She almost did at one point and willingly grabbed the goat pellet feed from me…. Until an aggressive goat head butted a smaller goat we tried to feed to steal the little goat’s food away! That’s when Kaia stepped back a bit and her desire to feed the goats waned, and she ran off! Maybe she will enjoy getting closer to animals when she’s a little older.

It was still worth it to watch her observe them and think about what they were in relation to her, though. My sweet baby is still learning her place in the world and deeply observant of all her surroundings all the time. It’s been amazing to watch her grow every day and fills me with endless joy.

A visit to Richmond, Virginia

Posted on by
Reply

While I was out at dinner on Wednesday night with my friend, she asked if we had any plans for the upcoming Labor Day weekend. I told her that we were planning to go to Virginia and would be based in Richmond, the capital.

“Why?” she asked me, puzzled.

“Why not?” I responded, grinning.

It’s less than an hour’s flight from New York. Richmond may not be a tier 1 tourist city in the U.S., but it is the capital city of Virginia. Virginia has lots of history as one of the 13 original colonies of the United States. It is the land of Thomas Jefferson’s home, the Monticello, and is also known for fresh local seafood. There are also plenty of farms and outdoorsy activities we could do there. Granted, I told her I didn’t book this trip, as Chris did, but to me, every place is worth exploring, even if only for a little while.

The first thing that surprised me about Richmond was… well, I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me given we are living in high inflation times, but the prices! They were high! Eating out was like eating out in New York in terms of the prices we were seeing. Our first meal was at a Vietnamese restaurant, and all our dishes cost at least $15-16 each, with $6 drinks. The cost of pastries and coffee were also like New York, at anywhere from $4-8 each. And of course, the expected percentage of tipping is always going to be the same.

After our lunch today, we wandered around a small ethnic strip mall, picked up some lychees (to satisfy the Pookster) and kunefe, and then went to explore Carytown, a fun neighborhood with lots of interesting street murals, restaurants, and cafes. I was excited to see my very first brick and mortar shop of Jeni’s Ice Cream, which I’d had before and had heard endless raves about, but had never seen in person. There, we got coffee with cream and sugar, as well as wildberry (black currant) lavender, both of which were delicious. We ran into Torchy’s Tacos, which we ate 12 years ago on our visit to Austin, Texas. I had no idea that they expanded east! We got a taco from there, and somehow they messed up our order and brought us two. That ended up meaning we shared one taco as a snack, then let Pookster eat her own when she got hungry a little later. And what may have been most exciting during our walk down the main street: I finally got to experience the brick and mortar fun of Penzey’s, the infamous spice company that is so loved and cherished by cooks around the country! I always thought they were an online only company, but clearly, they have a lot of shops throughout the U.S., just not in New York or San Francisco. I picked up some very fresh, complex scented fennel seeds here.

We also stopped by a local brewery / urban winery on the main drag of Carytown and shared a flight of three honey wines and one white wine They were all delicious, but one in particular was a standout to me: it was called Kitsu, which was a blood peach honey wine with hints of yuzu and jasmine, then drenched in fresh citrus, blood orange, with more notes of tart cherry, raspberry, and yuzu. It was absolutely delicious! Chris was making fun of me regarding how quickly I finished it!

Virginia has its own delicious local produce, farms, seafood, meat, beer, and wine. It’s nice to explore and taste all these things during our travels, and also to get Pookster traveling and seeing all these different parts of the country where she was born.