Monthly Archives: January 2024

“Ooh, this is good!”

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Kaia’s toddler selectivity continues. Some days, she will accept new food as though it’s the most delicious thing she’s ever seen or touched. Other days, she will simply turn her face away and say “no!” and refuse to give a new food a second look. Yesterday, we picked up some donuts and danish from a new spot we checked out in Morningside Heights. One of the items was a very well made, flaky cheese danish. We rarely give Kaia sweets, but we do give her the occasional bite or two of a croissant or pastry when we’re out. So we decided to let her try this danish.

She was wandering around the apartment and I asked her if she wanted some pastry. Her face perked up, and she followed me into the kitchen so that she could take a look. When I presented the plate to her, she took one look, then gave it some side-eye, and said, “no!” and walked away. Yet as she walked away, I made exaggerated motions and took a big bite, making “mmmmm” and “yummy” sounds. She stopped walking away, then inched closer to me, and finally she took off a pea sized piece of the danish and gingerly put it in her mouth.

“Ooooh, this is good!” she exclaimed, with a huge grin creeping over her face. “Tasty!” She then proceeded to rip off big hunks of the danish until she’d had about 80 percent of the entire damn pastry. I barely got three bites in and had to save two bites for myself at the end, insisting “Kaia ate it all” and there was “no more! all done!” And since I insisted she sit down on the kitchen floor and eat it, when she got up to leave and I wiped her face and hands clean, there was a humongous pile of flaky danish crumbs all over where she sat. Yep – that’s my life now – constantly cleaning, dust-busting, and wiping up after my toddler.

My love has not subsided around watching her try and eat new things. Whether it was when she was a wee baby at six months old just starting solids for the first time, until now, when she’s probably had at least 500+ types of food to date, I still love watching her facial expressions and hearing her verbal assessments, whether it’s through her “mmmms” or her “this is yummy!’ statements. She doesn’t always like everything, but when she does, it’s really priceless. Sometimes, I wish I could just bottle up each of her new food experiences and stick them on the wall to revisit and watch… over and over again.

Two-year-old toddler tantrums and whims: a continuing dialogue

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Almost like clock work, once Kaia turned two, it was as though she got the memo that the “terrible 2s” period had begun, and she started having all these tantrums over things she never really got upset about before. Before she turned 2, while she did have tantrums here and there, they weren’t that regular and were usually easily contained. Since then, not so much. If she doesn’t get what she wants when she wants it, she lays her entire body down, sprawled all over the floor, and just cries and screams. There’s no way to reason with her, so we just kind of let her lie there. I occasionally pat or rub her back and remind her that her mama is there, but there’s nothing else that can really be done until she calms down.

One thing that has been really frustrating is that her meals have been really unpredictable. Some days, she will eat pretty much everything she is offered. Other days, she might just eat a portion of pork, some blueberries, and then call it a day; that will be her dinner, and then she will go to bed. Vegetables at breakfast time have continued to be a no-go. Her lunch is also unpredictable. This past week, she had oddly even gone off noodles/pasta. I had made an aged gouda carbonara, and at best, she would pick at it and didn’t really care for it. My baby – not into noodles…?! She screamed and cried one night when I asked her just to have one bite of the carbonara… I just didn’t get it. So I stopped insisting and let her eat what she was willing to touch.

I try my best not to show any emotion when she has these signs of “toddler selectivity” and let it go. But it’s very challenging. Being a parent and trying to feign indifference at things like this is a huge test of one’s patience. You don’t really get it until you’re in this position. And yet even then, for many people who have gone past the toddler rearing years, they forget so easily! At least I will always have these memories documented so I can refer back to these when my memory fails me.

Inconsistent heat in a luxury apartment building in the middle of winter

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Since we’ve come back to New York this month, we’ve noticed that in our building, which is a newly built, luxury high rise building in the city, the heating has been inconsistent. Sometimes, the HVAC unit, while on a heat setting, doesn’t blow out hot air and seems to just blow out… air. Other times, it does something even worse: it blows out COLD air. We are currently in winter time in the dead of January here in New York City, and this is completely unacceptable, especially given how much we pay to live here. So we’ve had the handyman come and look and tweak things a few times, but they quickly realized that it had nothing to do with our HVAC units per se, but rather the changes in temperature that a certain someone working downstairs has been doing to the master heating units.

The handymen let us know that our super, who seems to think that his paycheck is going to get some deduction for the amount of money spent on heating in this building, has been turning down the heat setting for all units in the basement. Yet, this seems to affect only higher floors… not the lower floors, where he himself lives. In the instant the super has made these switches downstairs, tenants have flooded the doormen with complaint calls about lack of heat. Wow – how surprising that tenants would notice something like this!

You have to wonder what kind of incompetence and total lack of consideration would have to be behind something like this. But hey, that’s fine. If the super of the building thinks he can get away with this type of thing with no complaints to management, then he’s totally wrong.

Contemplations on estate planning, wills, and death

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I’ve thought a lot about death since I was quite young. For the longest time, I had attended more funerals than I had weddings. In our family, we never had babysitters, so as kids, we had to go literally everywhere with our parents. So when someone died and my parents attended a funeral, Ed and I were taken along, too. I still remember asking my mom when I was young if we were going to die, too. She replied and said that yes, everyone has to die, but hopefully we will all live long lives, and it would not happen for a long, long time.

The thought made me so sad. I remember many nights, when I was around 4 years old, crying myself to sleep, thinking that there could possibly be a world I’d live in where I no longer had my mom, dad, or Ed. It filled me with so much fear and anxiety at such a young age. I thought to myself, how was I supposed to live without you all, my family? I was especially attached to my mother then, and it hurt me to the core to think that she could possibly die one day and leave me behind.

Since then, I still think about death often — when there are plane crashes, school shootings (always in the U.S.), when someone in my life dies. The hardest death was, of course, my brother’s. I remember having to change a lot of my beneficiary information on accounts after he died… you can’t really leave money to someone dead, right? So now when I am forced to think about my own death and planning for it with estate planning and wills, it becomes depressing in a very different way.

You have to ask yourself uncomfortable questions, like if you and your spouse die, who is supposed to become the legal guardian of your child? If that legal guardian is also gone, who is the secondary, backup guardian of your child? If you, your spouse, and your child die, who should receive your assets in the event of that family catastrophe?

So while once upon a time, I didn’t think about my own death much, you’re forced to do this, *just in case*; in the event of the worst thing happening, as in you and your spouse both dying, you know that your minor child will be taken care of and will not be forced into the broken and disgusting system that is the U.S. foster care system.

It is my hope that I will outlive my parents, that Chris and I won’t die until we’re far past 80 years old, that Kaia will outlive both Chris and me. I hope no one ever has to make use of all the estate planning and wills until we’re nearly 100. But we live in an uncertain world. And as the Terrible, Thanks for Asking podcast recently noted, in life, there are very few fair deaths. “You are lucky if you can say, “someone I love died at the exact right time in the exact right way and everyone involved was ready for it.” This might apply to people like Chris’s two grandmas, both of whom had lived long, relatively happy lives. They got to see all their children get married, have their kids, and even see their own great grandchildren. But in cases like Ed or our friend Raj, death was not fair at all, and it was untimely in the most painful way. We can only hope that we will live lives that will end with fair deaths that are a long way away from today.

38th year

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So, I turn 38 today at 7:24pm. Thirty-eight years ago, on Friday, the 17th of January, 1986, my mother’s bulging abdomen was cut open, and a little baby was cut out. Well, I actually wasn’t *that* little of a baby. I was told that even though I was three weeks premature, I was actually six pounds, six ounces in weight, so fairly average. Thirty-eight years later, here I am, living in New York City with an Australian / naturalized American husband, a 2-year old daughter, in a white ivory tower.

Although I’ve never mapped out my life the way some ambitious individuals do, there are some things that I always thought I wanted for myself: an exciting, career-ladder climbing career, a bi-coastal lifestyle where I had a home both in SF or LA and in New York City, world travel, a family to call my own (in the form of an egalitarian husband and a son and daughter). My career, to be frank, has not been terribly exciting, nor have I ever reached the level of climbing the corporate ladder as I once naively thought I would. I think I genuinely threw in the towel on that while at my last company, though subconsciously, it could have been a little earlier than that. While I’ve certainly had a lot of privileges and fun travel during my career, I don’t think I ever really “made it” in the sense I would have defined it back in my college years. I do not own any home. I have no home on the West Coast, and the place I live in here in New York City is rented. But I do have world travel and a family to call my own, just with one less child than I’d ideally like. And things are, overall, pretty good. I have somewhat of a bi-coastal + bi-hemisphere lifestyle with about a month of the year in Australia, and I never really thought I’d have that, ever. It’s been fun.

So, while I don’t have the life that I semi-envisioned for myself, I’m actually okay with it. And in some ways, life is better for it. That ambitious career I envisioned for myself? It likely would have been at the expense of my relationships, time to myself, and sleep. It likely would have meant less travel, less time with people I love. I’ve made peace with the fact that I don’t always get exactly what I want, when I want it, how I’d want it. Part of getting older is supposed to be about getting wiser, about being more comfortable in one’s skin and more confident to be who one really is. I don’t need to offer an explanation about my life or any of my life choices to anyone. While many in my generation are chasing impossible ideals and some elusive definition of “happiness,” I think I’m just content to live in the life I have and try to make the most of what I already have.

This week, we had a meeting with an attorney to help with our estate planning and wills. There’s really nothing more sobering about getting older and having more responsibility than planning for the day when you will be dead, or worse, if you and/or your spouse die prematurely and leave your minor child behind, orphaned. So many questions arise, and some of them are just not fun to think about, even borderline painful. But that’s also part of getting older: thinking about all the hard questions and decisions that need to be made to take care of your remaining loved ones… and your assets.

In two more years, I’ll be at age 40. And in this country, age 40 is considered “mid-life,” which means I will be at the halfway point between being born and eventually dying, assuming I stay in decent health. And that is another sobering though: the fact that in 40-plus years, I may no longer be here, and I hope I will leave some legacy behind at least with my child, who I also hope will far, far outlive me.

Postponed birthday plans

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Tomorrow is my 38th birthday. For a few years, I would organize birthday dinners for myself with local friends and have casual drinks out afterwards. It was always really informal, with small groups of people that I love and enjoy spending time with. I’ve never had a ton of friends, so when I do have people I actually call friends, each of them really needs to count.

But then COVID happened. People stopped congregating. And even before that, a lot of our friends moved away. So there was less reason to have group outings. Pookster was born, and so then it became harder to organize group dinners. But after having friends over for a (takeout) dinner in early December, I remembered how much I love cooking for my people, so I decided I’d start doing more of that this year, just at lunch time so it’s easier on Pookster’s sleep schedule.

Well, I thought about doing this about a week ago for my birthday, perhaps the last week of January, but my impromptu thought was a little too impromptu. Not everyone was available who I’d like to invite. So then I settled on a belated birthday/Lunar New Year celebration in mid-February. Lunar New Year falls on February 10th this year, so we’ll have our meal on February 17. And this will also give me more runway to decide what to make.

The older I get, the less I really want “things” or anything big. I just want more time, togetherness, love, and well, time with the people I care about.

Pork bone and daikon soup – a traditional Chinese soup

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Growing up in a Chinese household, soup was always considered the cure for everything. Have a headache? Drink soup. Ate too much fried food and feel “hot” inside? Drink soup. Caught the flu? Drink soup. Recovering from a sickness? Drink soup. “Drink soup” is the solution to literally all of your life’s problems as summed up by my paternal grandma, my aunt, and my mom.

Now that I am in my late 30s, I realize how much I took for granted all the delicious soups I grew up with, whether they were made by my grandma, my aunt, or my mom. Some soups were simple and straightforward and could be done in an hour or so. Others would be simmering on the stove overnight or for two to three days. I never knew how much time or effort they took since I was never involved in making them; I just got to enjoy them piping hot and ladled into a bowl for me. As with all kids, sometimes I even got annoyed with the elder women in my life for always rushing me to drink my soup. But when I look back, this is just the way they all communicated love when they did not have the words to do so.

Occasionally, I am reminded of the soups and flavors. Sometimes it’s via a restaurant that has a “free soup,” and I take one sip and get blown away because it’s like I saw a flashback of my grandma. That happened in the last year when Chris got takeout from China Xiang near Times Square, and the complimentary soup with a takeout order was a pork bone soup that was super milky in appearance, but just tasted so familiar to me. Other times, it’s via food blogs I skim or Instagram reels I watch where people are going “back to basics” with Chinese home cooking. And so that’s why I’ve decided that this year, I want to be more intentional with soup making. In a traditional Chinese or Vietnamese household, there would be a soup to begin every meal, along with 3-4 different dishes to eat with your rice. I don’t have the time or desire to do this entire show every single day when we eat at home, but I do want to make it more regular than just once every few months. So more frequent soup making is going to be a little cooking goal of mine. I’ve already started it by buying pork bones for $2.49/pound at Whole Foods yesterday and bringing them home to make a traditional pork bone and daikon soup. The taste of plucking off super tender, fall-off-the-bone pork made me feel right at home. Chris called this soup “gnawing soup” because I told him he was expected to gnaw/eat the meat off the pork bones. But I consider this “homey” and comforting. And I hope Kaia embraces this all, as well.

Teeth grinding, tooth sensitivity, and dental hell

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I went to the dentist’s office this morning because I’ve been having extreme cold sensitivity on three of my top teeth. This all started in September, but gradually got worse and worse as we headed into December. During our cold early morning photo shoot on Brighton Beach our first week in Melbourne, it hurt me every single time I smiled with my teeth exposed with the cold wind hitting my teeth. In many outdoor photos, especially while in Japan, I just smiled without my teeth because I wanted to avoid any unnecessary tooth pain. That’s how desperate I was getting with the cold sensitivity. This past week, I couldn’t even eat room temperature fruit (grapes were not fun; apples were horrendous biting into) without wincing. So I ended up eating far less fruit than I’d normally eat.

The dentist asked me about my symptoms, tested a couple teeth by blowing cold air onto them and asking for my (not so pleasant) reaction. Then, he took x-rays of the teeth to see how bad the enamel had worn away due to my grinding. The good news, he said, is that the enamel had not worn away to the point of exposing the pulp; that would require a root canal and a crown. In my case, he said he was confident that I could simply have one to two treatments of a desensitizer (like a medication) on top of my teeth, and I’d be fine in the end. I might still have some sensitivity, but it wouldn’t be anywhere as bad as it had been in the last week.

So we took the conservative treatment. I had the desensitizer applied with two coats, and when I went home, I did notice that eating fruit wasn’t as scary of an action. But it only made me hope and hope that my wine cork strategy for stopping my grinding would be fruitful. And in between, the new mouth guard I’d get would help more.

Settling in and thinking about 2024

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We’ve been back for about a week from our four-plus weeks of travel. As always, it’s a bit of a whirlwind from the beginning to the end. The end is always sad, not just because our travels are over, but also because we are returning to a Northern Hemisphere winter. And while that winter may have been relatively mild over the last few years, it’s still what it is, which is… WINTER. That means it’s cold, the heater will need to be on, the apartment will be dry, and we will have seasonal sadness at the short days, long nights, and cold temperatures. The reality is that January in the Northern Hemisphere is always bleak. The festivities and excitement around Christmas and New Year’s have ended. And everyone is getting back into their usual routine for the new year.

I hate to be trite about it, but one goal that has been a goal since September is trying to lose the excess weight I gained as a result of weaning off breastfeeding/pumping. I’m about five pounds off of where I want to be to get back to pre-pregnancy weight. So while I’ve never had a new year’s goal to lose weight, this time around, I actually do… it’s just that it happens to coincide with a new year.

I’m also trying to stop grinding my teeth at night… which is a hard goal, but one I’m attempting with “natural” methods. I’d been wearing a mouth guard for years, but I recently realized that it was digging in my gums and possibly making defects in my gums and teeth. I had a new mouth guard made and am having it adjusted so that it’s comfortable. But a mouth guard doesn’t prevent you from grinding; it simply protects against tooth damage from grinding. And the grinding has been having negative effects on me this last year: I have extreme cold sensitivity in three of my top teeth to the point where I can barely talk outside in this cold weather and not have my teeth hurt. The dentists are planning to apply a desensitizing treatment to those teeth tomorrow.

A tip that my childhood dentist gave me years ago to prevent the problem of grinding was to put a wine cork in between my front teeth and hold it there for 10-20 minutes before bedtime. I’d follow it with a jaw joint massage for a minute or so. This would supposedly relieve any jaw tension (we all have jaw tension) and prevent my jaws from wanting to clamp down while I’m sleeping and thus subconscious. I’ve been trying that since we came back from our trip, and I do notice that my jaw seems less tense when I wake up.

Other little goals I have this year: I want to make more soup, which also means making a lot of the traditional soups I grew up with, that I took for granted, that my grandma used to make. I’m sourcing places to find pork and beef bones to help out with this goal. Soup is nourishing for the soul, and especially during a cold winter, but I also want Kaia to be able to appreciate traditional Chinese and Vietnamese flavors in the form of this nourishing liquid. I also want to explore more Taiwanese cooking, regional Chinese cooking, and Vietnamese cooking. I’d like to start cooking for friends more the way I used to before the pandemic and before Pookster was born. We’ll likely just need to shift to lunch time parties rather than dinner parties given Pookster’s sleeping schedule, but we shall see how it goes.

I also want to start doing more activities with Kaia now that she’s getting older, more nimble, and has increasing awareness of her surroundings. I’d like to take her to the zoo, the aquarium, and do more arts and crafts and cooking. I’m looking forward to the day when she can help meal prep with me and have already bookmarked some toddler-safe practice knives on our Amazon list.

I still have my usual goal of reading about one book a month. January is a cold, hibernating month, so I tend to read the most books this month most years. I’ve already finished one book this month — a mystery/thriller novel called A Quiet Place by Seicho Matsumoto. I decided on a Japanese author so that I could relive the sounds and sights of Japan.

More goals and things to do will follow, but these have been what’s on my mind for now.

Souvenirs from travels and the evolution over time

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Eleven years ago, when I first went to Melbourne and stayed at my in-laws’ home, I marveled over their large collection of souvenirs that they’d collected during their travels over their 40-plus years. The souvenirs ranged from the small, cute, antique items, like the little ones you could place in a glass curio cabinet, to the larger, more impactful pieces, like a Japanese cuckoo clock that has a very intense time precision, to paintings and glass sculptures collected during visits to different countries around the world. There’s even a gorgeous Wedgwood Wild Strawberries collection of bone china they had shipped back to Melbourne that they picked up while in England during Chris’s youth. I always take a look at the Wild Strawberries collection every time I visit. Each illustration of strawberry, leaves, and vines are hand-painted. And the pieces are all painted with a genuine gold rim; they are truly pieces of art.

And usually while I am standing by this glass cabinet and staring at the Wedgwood Wild Strawberries bone china, one or both of Chris’s parents will come over and recount the time they purchased this fragile, gorgeous set. After, they will also comment that they don’t use it “nearly enough,” and be unable to recall the last time they took it out to use. This always made me sad: they probably spent a small fortune on something so beautiful and intricately made. Yet since it’s rarely used, no one is actually enjoying it or getting a return on that investment they made decades before. The Wedgwood china set just sits there, dust-free in a glass display case in their dining room.

For a short period when I was younger, I also liked to collect little cute items to eventually display in my home when I returned from my travels. When I was really young, I used to be told that one day when I got married, I could pick out my own wedding china set, and hopefully, someone would be generous enough to purchase it for me and my future husband off our wedding registry (that never happened; we had no wedding registry, and the man I ended up marrying had zero interest in any bone china set). Now, though, during travels, we rarely buy anything that is not a consumable to take home (e.g. food or beverage; tea!). The only real thing we make sure to get before we leave a new place is a magnet to add to our boards of magnets documenting our travels. We don’t have much space living in a small Manhattan apartment. We also don’t like clutter.

And the thing is: while I do love looking at all my in-laws collected items over the years every time I go back to their home, I realize that while I enjoy it, one day when they are gone, who will appreciate these items as much as they did? Their sons do not appreciate most of them and just look at them as piled up clutter. But why would they appreciate them? They didn’t collect these items on their own travels, so they have less or no meaning to them. As for me, I might appreciate them, but I will unlikely have the space to care and keep them all. These are all items that they collected as momentos of their travels, purchased with money that they worked hard to earn. These items are almost symbolic of all their hard work, as well as their parents’ generation of hard work, before them. So while many in my generation may see our parents as hoarders, whether that’s of antique items or even toilet paper, maybe the way our parents see them is as an embodiment of what they worked their whole lives to build. And perhaps they see our generation as a generation of people who don’t appreciate their hard work and is merely quick to write off and throw away embodiments of it.