In the last week, through an Australian expat group, Chris found out about a kids’ play space that would be fun for Kaia. Space Club has two locations, one in Fort Greene and one in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It’s open 365 days a year and is $39 for one child accompanied by one adult for a two-hour play session. Any additional time is $15/hour. It seemed like a reasonable price given the cost of rent in New York City, plus what they offered.

The space was really thoughtful and well done. They have magna-tile and Lego building areas. There are walls that kids can put letters on or play on with sequin designs. There is a huge maze that goes up and down in various ways with slides that dive into a “star” pit. They have a glow-in-the-dark room with endless stars and spelling areas. There are sound and music areas. They have different types of swings, ladders, and ropes. The beading room, where you can literally swim in beads and make (and take!) as many necklaces and bracelets as you want, was a huge end playtime highlight for Kaia, who got to bead her very first handmade necklace. There’s also a cute cafe area with sanitizing wipes and big paper towel rolls, an Aussie-inspired, reasonably priced menu, and two spacious single restrooms with wet wipes, stools for littles to reach the sink, a nursing area, and clean open counters for you to rest any of your endless kid supplies/bags on. Space Club has Wi-Fi for any parents/caregivers who need to work or browse their phones.

Needless to say, Kaia was obsessed and did not want to leave. I also had a friend and their child come along, and their kid loved the play space, as well. I am already thinking about when I want to take her back here to enjoy other parts of the space that she didn’t get to play in much. New York needs more spaces like this that are affordable and creative for littles.

This is a bit embarrassing to admit, but I did not learn how to do a proper braid until I was 33. I got inspired while we were in Bali when I saw all these braiding services on offer on every street and alley we walked down. I admired all the braids by tourists who were willing to pay for these services. And so I looked up some quick videos on YouTube to teach myself how to do a proper braid and a Dutch style braid (it’s just a backwards braid that points downward). I didn’t have the patience to look at French or twisted braids; that seemed too advanced for me. Maybe one day if I had a daughter, I thought, that could be my time to teach myself how to French braid.

Well, I’ve done a few basic braids for Kaia once her hair got long enough; now, it’s very, very long. She tolerated them for a bit a year ago, and now, she can barely sit still for a pony tail with me. However, she always, always sits still for teachers at school who want to braid her hair. Lately, Ms. Anna, her Chinese teacher, has been indulging her and doing the most complex twists and double French braids in her hair. She comes home from school with these beautiful knots that are not only tightly wound, but also very straight and even. It’s clear when she prances around that she is absolutely obsessed with her hair-dos.

The other day, I asked her if she wanted her mama to braid her hair. She gave me a disapproving look.

“No, you can’t braid my hair, mama!” Kaia exclaimed. “Only Ms. Anna can braid Kaia’s hair!”

Welp, I guess I missed my window.

We finally had a success last night! I was able to estimate the time of Kaia needing to pee early enough so that she did not wet the bed, and actually peed in the potty! I originally came to her bed at around 11:30, and she sleepily told me she did not need to pee. I laid with her for another 45 minutes, and then at around 12:15, she came with me to the bathroom with little resistance and urinated! Then, she insisted that she “wants mummy” to lie down with her. So I laid with her for about an hour and 15 minutes. I tried to sneak back out to my own bed, but she came out to look for me. As she stood in the hallway at around 1:30am, I asked if she needed to pee. She said nothing but wandered into her bathroom and turned on the light. I pulled her shorts down, placed her on her potty seat, and she urinated the second time that night. I had a pretty good feeling when I set an alarm for Chris to wake her up to pee at around 3am.

Chris had her successfully pee again at around 3am. I passed out and barely noticed that wakeup. When I woke up again just before 6:30am, she had come into our bed… with dry shorts. We didn’t have any wet bed situation, no soiled shorts to throw into the laundry, and no pee-stained Kaia to clean up this evening! It’s been our first fully successful night! We celebrated, gave her many hugs, kisses, and high fives, and I told her that if she kept this up, she’d be that much closer to getting her requested and much wanted pink and purple nail polish!

Now, the question is: can we keep eye balling correctly her pee windows and keep her dry so that she will then want to wake up on her own to pee?

Last week, Kaia’s school sent out a message to all families that a “Moving Up to Pre-K” ceremony and celebration would be happening today at school. It would include some speeches, a slideshow of the kids throughout the school year, a performance by the kids in Kaia’s 3K class, and then end with a lunch celebration with the families. Although I am familiar with preschool/Pre-K “graduations” (I myself had a preschool graduation), I didn’t realize that schools gave ceremonies for kids who were in 3K moving up to preschool. It could be a new thing — who the heck knows? It feels like a bit of a participation trophy, but I guess that could be argued for preschool, elementary, and middle school graduation, as well. All I know is that we were given about a week’s notice for this, and we were asked to contribute money for the lunch — what joy!

So Chris and I both came today. I had known that Kaia had been singing some mysterious Chinese song I didn’t recognize, and I suspected it was a “surprise” song for the performance today, so I didn’t press the teachers when they didn’t send me all the names of the Chinese songs Kaia was singing parts of at home. Our administrator gave a speech and showed a photo slideshow, followed by the main teacher of the class giving a speech (or, well, reading off a piece of paper and having zero eye contact with any of the audience), followed by two dances from the kids. One was an English song about growing up/moving to the next stage. The second dance was to a Chinese song called “Gan Xie Lao Shi” (“Thank you, teacher”). The English song and dance were really cute. The Chinese song and dance, however, totally made me tear up. I am not sure what it is about Chinese melodies or words, but this completely had me getting emotional and feeling like my baby was floating further away from me. It’s not like the Chinese song is expressing anything particularly more complex or deep than the English song. But there’s this line in the song once you translate it that says, “Thank you, teacher, for helping me grow up / Your cute smiling face will stay in my heart … You are a beautiful angel.” Everything always feels deeper and more emotional in other languages than English for me. I am not sure why. I also thought the same thing when I have seen texts translated from French or Japanese.

I still can’t believe my baby has just over a week left of 3K. Then, she has summer camp (at the same school), then it’s officially preschool in September. It’s like time just flew by so quickly. She grew these long limbs. She lost her baby fat and pudge. She can speak coherent sentences now that people other than Chris and I understand. She can use words like, “but,” “yesterday,” and “tomorrow” and know what she’s actually saying. My mom said to me on the phone the other day that I should try as much as I can to, “enjoy with her now… because soon, she will grow up and be like you… want to do her own thing.” She didn’t mean it in a mean or spiteful way; she said it in a very wistful, sad tone. My mom had it infinitely harder than me, as she managed and raised two kids, all in the midst of a demanding and demeaning mother-in-law and a pretty useless husband when it came to child-rearing and managing a household — all on top of a rigid full-time job that was fully in office. I don’t blame her for not being “there” for me as much growing up since she also worked full time. I’m lucky I can have quality time with Kaia and really enjoy our moments together. Sometimes, I still want to freeze time so I can just hold her sweet face in my hands and admire how beautiful and intelligent she is. In the slideshow, they did a photo juxtaposition of each kid the first week of 3K and then this last week — they’ve all grown and matured so much! It’s just so hard to believe it went by this quickly. I guess that’s what parenting is all about, isn’t it — watching your babies evolve into tiny humans and then big humans.

Our original goal was that by the end of this summer (hopefully sooner), we’d have Kaia out of pull-ups overnight. Once we get her out of pull-ups overnight, Pookster will officially be 100 percent diaper free (because, yes, as the Oh Crap! training lady says, pull-ups are still diapers). Last summer, she got the peeing down pretty quickly with an accident here or there. The pooping took some time as expected, but she got it within a reasonable amount of time. After our Australia/China/Hong Kong trip late last year into this year, we stopped carrying around the little potty, so she knows she has to use the big potty (with a toddler seat on top). Day time training was relatively painless for us, especially when I see all the potty training horror stories in my parent groups. Night time training, while we attempted to do it the first week we did day time training, did not go well at all. I still remember that last August, I successfully got her to pee in the little potty overnight just once. And then, several hours later, she still wet the bed for her second nightly pee. With warm summer weather now, we thought it would be easier to try to clean her up and have her wear little shorts to bed to minimize dirty laundry.

Chris’s cousin had suggested that we begin overnight training by simply not sending her to bed in any pull-up. This way, she’d realize how sticky and uncomfortable it was, and that would urge her to pee in the potty. Well, we are on night three of consecutively going without any pull-up, and somehow, she seems to show zero desire to get out of bed to urinate at night. We know she’s wet the bed/herself when she wakes up crying for us, or if she walks all the way over to our bed and says, “I wet” (I still love and cannot get over the cuteness of how incorrect that sentence is. I am lightly dreading the day when she comes over and says, “I am wet” or “I’m wet.” It’s like the other night when I went out with a friend for the evening. I told her I’d be back when she was asleep. And she came over at 5am with a huge grin on her face and declared, “Mumma, you came back!” instead of a month or so ago when she said, “Mumma, you back!” I loved the evolution in the sentence and hated it all at the same time. My baby’s youth was slowly slipping away in front of my eyes…. and ears).

We shall see how this goes. But unfortunately, I have a feeling that the Oh Crap! training lady will have it right in the end; I’m probably going to have to go down the damn “guesstimating” route of trying to guess which two windows at night are when she is most likely to pee and drag her to the toilet. The fun that awaits!