Even when you aren’t aware, babies and toddlers are constantly taking in all the information around them, from your words (in whatever language) to your facial expressions to your actions. These tiny humans really are little sponges. That’s why as their parents, it is our job to try to do as much as possible to teach them, whether it’s with language or through our actions. They will do as we do, not do as we say, as every parent so wisely knows. Today, we all had the day off as it was President’s Day, and we went out for ramen in the neighborhood and went to a playground afterwards with Kaia. At the ramen shop, as Kaia was getting reunited with her beloved noodles once again, I asked her what these were while Chris started swinging them in the air from his chopsticks. Instead of responding in English with noodles, she let out a little giggle and grinned, exclaiming, “Mian! Mian!” She was saying noodles in Chinese. My heart almost burst.

Even when I don’t think she’s paying attention or listening to me, she actually is. And it’s in these moments when it’s evident. It reminded me of the time when I was patting her dry after a bath on the bathroom floor while she wiggled around on top of her towel, and out of nowhere, she started singing the “Lao Shu Ai Da Mi / Mouse Love Big Rice” Mandarin song chorus that I realized she was always listening when I was singing to her. She sang it with the right tune and almost all the right words. She was really paying attention and taking it all in.

She also has her very affectionate moments after refusing hugs and kisses when I ask for them, whether in English or Chinese. While I was stir frying sugar snap peas with king oyster mushrooms this late afternoon, she came over and insisted that I hold her up because she wanted to see the stove action. I held her up to see, and she said she wanted some snap peas and mushrooms. When I tried to put her down to scoop out the stir-fry from the pan, she insisted I hold and hug her as she nestled her face into my neck. I couldn’t help but think it was so sweet, so I stopped what I was doing and just sat with her on the kitchen floor, hugging her close. These are the moments, I thought. I have to embrace them while I can because one day, they will be no more, as she will be all grown up and running away from me.

Since I was young, I’ve been flossing nightly quite religiously. Even in my twenties, when I would come home after drunk nights out, I’d still somehow manage to brush AND floss my teeth before passing out in my bed. My mom constantly told Ed and me that we had to take care of our teeth: we only had one set of teeth (well, after elementary school, that is), so we had to take good care of them. Otherwise, we were in for a lot of very painful (and horribly expensive) work like she had to endure, as she had zero dental care growing up poor in Central Vietnam until she moved to the United States.

I hope to instill the importance of taking care of one’s teeth in Kaia, but also explain the “why” behind all of the “you have to” statements. For example: don’t brush too hard, otherwise your gums will wear away and won’t grow back! Rinse your mouth after eating fruit/citrus, otherwise your enamel will wear away and you’ll have sensitive teeth (like your mom; UGH). Brush your teeth every day, twice a day, to prevent plague and gum disease! No one ever warned me growing up that if gums wore away, they wouldn’t grow back. No one was probably even aware that something healthy like an orange could actually erode your enamel back then. So now, I’m paying the consequences…

The cute thing is that since her crawling days, Kaia has always expressed fascination with flossing. Each evening before reading to her and putting her to bed, I’d wash my face and floss. She’d watch me intently and get really excited when the floss would come out. Occasionally when she was a baby, she’d try to reach for the floss, so I’d give her a clean piece and watch her carefully to make sure she didn’t swallow it. We once had an incident where she watched me toss my used floss into the trash. When I turned away, she quickly went into the trash, retrieved it in near stealth-mode, and started chewing on it. That was a very not-fun and disgusting moment.

Now that she’s older, when she knows that I’m flossing, she will eagerly run into the bathroom in the evening when I am there and ask to “floss with mummy.” So while I floss now each evening, I will give her a short piece of clean floss, and we’ll “floss” together. I will sit down on the edge of the bathtub and floss with her so she can see what I’m doing with the floss in my mouth, and then she will give me a big grin and say, “Wanna sit with mummy” while flossing. Then, she’ll stand so that she’s right between my legs, and we’ll continue our mommy-daughter flossing activity together. Granted, while I am actually flossing, I know she just has the floss in her mouth and is chewing on and licking it, but at least she knows that this is a nightly, regular ritual. And hopefully, this is one ritual she will do properly when she is a little older and needs to floss. At the very end of the activity, I will tell her I’m all done, and I’ll throw my used floss in the trash. I will ask her if she’s all done, and when she is, she will also throw her used floss in the trash, as well. These are the sweet moments of watching my Kaia Pookie baby grow up — the moments most people don’t really talk about, but we all relish.

While at the Central Park Zoo with Kaia’s friend Jacob and his parents on Sunday, we were exchanging notes and laughs about all the interesting things that we’ve learned as parents to a young toddler… like how smart they get very quickly regarding how to escape certain situations, whether that’s hair brushing or getting into a stroller when they don’t want to. Jacob’s parents were trying to put him in his stroller, and he didn’t want to get in. So on top of yelling and crying to indicate he didn’t want to, he also did the infamous backwards back bend/back arch that we all detest; Kaia does this when she wants to walk and refuses the stroller, and also when I am trying to comb her hair and she doesn’t want to (does she ever…?!). We all called it out and laughed at it at the same time because we were all too familiar with that back bend move.

Of course, it’s cute, and it’s a way that our toddlers are showing us that they are have strong opinions that may not always align with ours. But it’s nevertheless extremely frustrating in the moment and made even more infuriating when it’s in public, where everyone is watching your defiant child and you battling said defiant child. But, I suppose it’s something that in some way we should be happy about. Children shouldn’t always be obedient all the time; they should have opinions and different perspectives, and they should want to assert themselves even when their parents don’t want them to. As my friend said, “Our kids aren’t guai guai (Chinese for “good/obedient) like we were when we were their age.” But she also noted something else that’s true: we don’t really run our households like our parents did, and we aren’t parenting with the notion of instilling fear in our kids, nor do we want to. We’ve seen and felt the negative ramifications of that for sure.

If I had to stereotype my child based on her gender, I would say that she most definitely does not act like a “typical” girl in that every single time I have gotten her a new pair of shoes, she gets angry and fights putting them on. She always wants what she is familiar and comfortable with on her feet. Granted, I haven’t indulged her too much in this regard because she doesn’t seem to have a strong preference (yet) for certain types/pieces of clothing, plus I am just very practical with most clothing given she will eventually outgrow it all (or get it all messy at school). So she’s really only had two pairs of shoes she regularly wore to daycare that she has since outgrown; two pairs of sandals, and now, two pairs of shoes she regularly wears to school. Today, I introduced her to a new pair of snow boots since it’s a snow day and Chris is taking her outside. When I showed them to her, she kept yelling “no!” over and over again, insisting she wanted her purple glitter shoes (which she also initially hated). When I finally put the boots on, she seemed to calm down and not really care anymore.

But what I’ve heard at school is funny: when I have come to pick her up, her teachers will gush and talk about how cute Kaia’s new shoes are. They told me that she would walk up to them at the beginning of the day, point down at her new purple or silver shoes, and say to them, “Look at my new shoes” with a big grin on her face.

Got it. So, let’s just get this straight: She brags about her new shoes to her teachers and friends at school, yet she screams and yells at me for getting her the freaking shoes in the first place. I see how the gratitude already is nonexistent from an early age…