Category Archives: Child rearing

Overnight potty training, part II

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Luckily after sleeping almost 11 hours, I woke up this morning and actually felt much, much better. Though I didn’t have any real body aches, I did have an on-and-off headache yesterday, so I was happy to feel that it was all gone, and my phlegm and cough had subsided quite greatly.

In the last number of days, I checked my Oh Crap! potty training book, and I realized that given Kaia has been staying dry each night for about over a month now, we’re now ready to move to stage 2 of overnight training, which is instead of waking up at two different intervals at night, we will consolidate to one wakeup. We used to wake up at around 11:30 and then 2:30. Now, we will wake up just once, at around 12:30, and then just pray that she holds it until she wakes up to pee. This also means that both of us no longer need to wake up each night, that we’ll now alternate nights.

“It’s like we’re back to the night nanny days, on nights and off nights!” Chris declared, laughing.

We have now had four nights of waking Kaia up at 12:30 to dream pee, and so far, so good. She has a bigger pee at that time, and then when she wakes up between 6:30-7, she has a wake-up time pee. Now, all we have to do is get her to wake up on her own to pee. How are we supposed to do that?

Another year, another sickness

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The most amazing things about years 2020 and 2021 are that I never got sick, even a single time. In 2020, I was isolated from pretty much the entire world, so who was going to get me sick? In 2021, we were technically still in COVID times, but I was still fairly isolated. Then I got pregnant and had Kaia. And I was still in the clear. Then 2022 came and the world was open and free again. Chris went to Chicago for a big work conference, came back and gave baby Kaia and me COVID. My milk supply (temporarily, thank God) plummeted for those days, and I still remember every pumping session was painful and so sweaty that I had to change my top and air out my pumping bras each time. After he got back, he learned that over a dozen of his colleagues went home with COVID. He never tested positive, so he annoyingly claims, to this day, that since he never tested himself, he never had it.

In early 2023, Kaia caught Hand Food Mouth from a friend in the play room, and then gave ME my first case of HFM. I had it worse than she did. In the spring of that year, she got sick, and I got really sick, too, AGAIN: I was sick on and off for at least a month. I was so miserable, with my violent coughing fits. I went to see a primary care physician, a respiratory specialist, and even a gastroenterologist just in case. I took lung capacity tests and even a scan of my lungs for anything potentially more serious (all came back negative for problems). No one could give me any answers for why I was having these coughing fits. I still don’t know why I get them now.

Then memorably in November 2024, so about a year ago, I got a peritonsillar abscess as a result of getting hit by two rare strains of first the flu, and THEN strep throat. Because both hit me at the same time, an abscess developed on my left tonsil about three times the size of a quarter. Ever since that happened, I told myself I seriously needed to isolate myself and stay the hell away from anyone remotely sick. Although I am not sick anywhere as often as my colleagues who have young children, when I do get sick, I get REALLY sick, and I hate being nonfunctional. Inefficiency is one of the things that pisses me off the most.

About two weeks ago, I could feel a sore throat coming on. I did all the things I was recommended: daily salt gargle, daily evening nasal saline rinse, all the ginger-lemon tea. I even added a few TCM teas into the mix, like apple-fig-apricot kernel and ginger-aged tangerine peel-honey. While I clearly had a cold because I had some congestion and a cough, I was fully functional for the last week and a half. I did everything I’d originally planned to do and worked every day. I just skipped a few mornings at the gym. It felt like a standard, mild cold. I could deal with that. Then, we had two friends over for lunch on Sunday. I thought I’d wake up Monday morning being 100 percent. No, I did not: I woke up with a scratchier throat, a sharper cough, and more phlegm than I’d had the previous week. I had no idea what was going on. Today, I basically moved any meeting where I had to speak a lot, or joined meetings camera-off when I could, because my cough and phlegm were so bad. Chris got me some soup, and I increased my hot liquid intake and took a long, steamy shower.

I keep maniacally checking my uvula to ensure it hasn’t deviated. It has not, fingers crossed. I also keep checking to see if I have any weird spots in my throat. I just want to be a regular person who gets a minor cold and then it goes away. Why is that so much to ask? In my twenties, I almost never took real “sick leave” because my colds were so minor that I’d just sleep them off. Now into my late thirties, it’s as though my body says, nah, you can’t have it easy anymore! Now, you have to suffer because you’re getting older and you have a child, muah hahaha!

Kaia tried to wake me up earlier than I wanted this morning, and I told her to be nice to mama because she’s not feeling well. She pat me on the head and said, “Mama, why are you sick?”

“That’s a good question, Pookie,” I said back to her. “Why am I sick? Is it because of you?!”

A family heirloom passed down to Kaia from a loving, non-blood-related auntie

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A friend and I caught up over coffee last week, and she was telling me about the chaos of moving into her new house. She has endless documents and boxes to sort through, and it’s been a very overwhelming process since they lived in their last place for over 14 years. She mentioned she stumbled upon a few of her wedding items, including a pair of gold and jade earrings she wore for the ceremony that was passed down from her paternal grandma. The earrings were a family heirloom likely passed down to my friend’s grandma, but she said she had no sentimental attachment to them or even her grandma at all. My friend was abandoned by her parents when she was born. Her mom fled and was never to be heard from again after the birth. Her dad made brief appearances in her life, with an outreach in her teen years saying he was ready to be her dad. But that ultimately failed, and she was sent into the foster care system. Out of helplessness and feeling sorry for my friend, her dad’s mother took her under her wing and raised her, but with a deep sense of resentment that was always loud and clear to my friend. When her grandma eventually died about five years ago, my friend said she felt almost nothing because of how bitter her grandma was for having needed to raise her. So, my friend said that given she doesn’t have kids and will not have any, she wants to give the earrings to Kaia.

I was so touched. I didn’t even really know what to say. I was just so shocked at the generosity and kindness that my friend was extending to Kaia — and me. She insisted it was just an object she had that she didn’t know what to do with, would never wear or need again, and she had no family of her own to give it to, and because she loved Kaia, she wanted to give these to Kaia.

“It’s just sitting there!” my friend insisted. “I want her to have them.”

I get what she is saying, but it still felt like a very generous, loving gesture, one that is usually only suited to blood-related family members. To date, this is the most generous gesture that anyone’s given my Kaia Pookie. I’ve only known this friend for just over four years, but I’ve really enjoyed getting to know her. And I do feel we have a kinship that is far below surface. I am always deeply grateful for the kindnesses and generosities that others extend to my sweet baby.

“Couples” date in Elmhurst today

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Today, the three of us met up with my friend and her husband for lunch at an Indonesian restaurant we like in Elmhurst, Queens. The funny thing is we originally met them at a food event in a Brooklyn backyard just over a year ago, so this wasn’t actually our first time meeting her husband. I’ve met up with this friend over the course of the last year one on one, but we’d never arranged for the guys to come until this time. Kaia was intrigued by the “new friends” at the table. My friend’s husband knew way more about Bluey and Peppa Pig’s family than we would have ever guessed. And we talked a lot about family and cultural dynamics, travel, and college experiences.

The “couples mingling” thing is always funny because two friends can get along amazingly well when it’s just the two of them, but their spouses may not get along when in that group setting. Or, one of the friends may detest the other friend’s spouse, or whatever other combination you can think of. Given this was the first time we were all hanging out together, the conversation was fairly neutral and tempered, and nothing really edgy came up. But I was thinking about “couples friends” and how hard, in reality, they are to make, given the above potential situations. In most of my friendships, I far prefer just hanging out with my friends vs. hanging out with them and their spouses. I like being with them all occasionally, and I do enjoy seeing potential group dynamics and how they can unfold. But I almost always would prefer their spouse not be there. There are very few people I can name where I can say I equally enjoy time altogether as much as time spent with just my friend.

So, we’ll see if we all hang out again. I hope we do, but if it doesn’t happen that often or again, it won’t necessarily be the end of the world. The good news, though, is that both like kids, and they definitely enjoyed spending time with Kaia Pookie. I could tell Kaia was warming up to them, too. When we took a bathroom break, as we washed our hands, she asked me if my friend would still be at the table when we came back. When she asks questions about my friends, this is how I know she likes them.

Halloween with a sweet little ice cream vendor, and Kaia’s first real packaged Halloween candy

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This year, we dressed Kaia up as an ice cream vendor for Halloween. It was Chris’s idea, and Kaia was obsessed with it. The costume came with a hat, shirt with a big red bow, and white pants, but the part that really reveals her costume is a large white cloth tray that houses six detachable ice cream cones in six different colors. It has straps that you velcro onto your child. So it’s a bit bulky and annoying to carry around. Kaia did embrace carrying it around in the beginning, smiling and giggling endlessly while saying “Who wants ice cream?” and then naming her (constantly changing) flavors by color.

This year’s Halloween was quite cool and windy, so she had to wear a jacket over her costume to keep warm, as did all her classmates during their annual Halloween parade that the parents come for. Once we got to the playground and took group photos, she immediately wanted to rip off her ice cream tray and ice creams and run around freely. So of course, she handed all that over to me (which her teacher eventually took).

In the evening while Chris passed out candy to our building trick-or-treaters, I took Kaia trick-or-treating in our building for the second time ever. Last year when it was her first time, she did not completely get what was going on, but went with it. This year, she understands that when she rings doorbells and the doors are opened, if she says “trick or treat!”, then she gets candy! She got really sad, though, when some participating neighbors didn’t want us to ring their bell and instead set up “self serve” candy stations, either with large bowls, buckets, or bags full of treats. I’m still very impressed by some neighbors’ selections of treats they are dishing out, some of which I can remember from last year. This year’s treats handed out ranged from authentic packaged stroopwafels, Walker’s shortbread, granola bites, to “healthy” lower sugar options. When we went to all the units to trick or treat, we relented and finally let Kaia eat some of her Halloween candy (last year, we confiscated all of it). Chris let her choose two, and she settled on one tiny box of Nerds, and one Twix (mama’s favorite Halloween candy from childhood!). She savored both of them and ate them slowly. In the end, she declared she liked the Nerds more.

People ask us if we let Kaia “indulge” on Halloween. Well, that’s as far as “indulgence” is going to go for our almost-four-year-old! And she seemed quite happy with her overall Halloween experience and her candy eating allowance today!

Elementary school applications, tiger parenting, and the desire to “have a happy child”

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Years ago, when the “tiger mom” book was making lots of media headlines, I thought that I might be a Tiger Mom Lite. I’d push my child to be the best that they could be within the bounds of what they actually enjoyed. I’d demand obedience (to a limit) and self-discipline. I’d expect them to do house chores, homework, and extracurriculars. And hopefully all that would culminate in their developing into a good citizen of society and the world — growing into an adult who would be intelligent, curious, empathetic, disciplined, globally minded, and passionate.

Fast forward years later, after a year of futilely trying to conceive, IUI, IVF, and finally the birth of Kaia Pookie, and I think I’ve softened quite a bit. I’m no where as strict as I thought I would be as a parent. I’m a lot more gentle than I ever imagined. And all I can think about is how not to continue intergenerational, “inherited” trauma in her. In my mind, I just want her to be safe, healthy, and happy.

I think about this during the recent weeks’ worth of elementary school tours, open houses, and parent outreaches and conversations. And all these parents seem to say the same thing: we want our kids to be happy and thrive in their environments. But then the big question when choosing a school is: which environment is best for my child to optimize their happiness and learning?

I recently finished reading this culinary memoir called How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty by Bonny Reichert. Bonny’s father survived near-starvation during the Holocaust in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and this legacy of hunger impacts the family’s relationship to food. The book, though repetitive and slightly irrelevant tangents at times, shows how trauma can continue across generations even when the older generations who directly experienced trauma try so hard to shield it from their offspring. In Bonny’s case, her father steered as clear as possible from sharing vivid details of his struggle and survival during the Holocaust, insisting that she and her sisters not worry or think about it. He constantly says over and over to the girls that there’s no need to know about all that in the past. “Just be happy. I want you to be happy.” But the anxiety from not knowing the details but being aware of their father’s Holocaust experience constantly echoes in their lives and causes Bonny an internal instability that she cannot shake. We spend most of the book navigating this journey, which leads her… right back to Poland.

I suppose the reason I thought about this book during this elementary school application process is that it’s not really enough, at the end of the day, to focus on our child’s happiness, as made evident in Bonny’s case with her dad. What does “happiness” mean to kids at each stage of development, anyway? At times, it can seem like an empty, meaningless word. Something actually needs to drive them internally for them to move forward. And all we can do, as their parents, is to be the one to help them navigate through all their options and choose what we think is best for them as individuals.

That feels very difficult (and vexing) right now.

More autumn leaves, Mark Twain House and Museum, and skeletons galore

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I’ve never been a big Halloween person. When I was young, I never got to have fun or elaborate costumes. I basically was a pumpkin for years on end because my parents didn’t care for Halloween, nor did they want to pay for us to have different costumes every year. But while I don’t really care for dressing up myself, I do love seeing other people’s Halloween decorations in front of their homes. In New York, we mostly see it when we go to the outer boroughs. Or in Manhattan, you can see a good amount of Halloween decorations at brownstones on the Upper West and Upper East Sides.

This trip, we’ve already seen endless massively large skeletons everywhere. Skeletons as tall as twenty feet have towered over people’s lawns. At March Farm where we stopped by for some apple cider donuts and photos so Kaia could frolic amongst the pumpkins, there was a huge tractor that had “run over” a skeleton. While we pointed this out to Kaia, she did not seem to mind much, as she was enjoying nibbling away at her first apple cider donut that she did not have to share.

During our coffee stop this morning before the Mark Twain House and Museum tour, we parked next to a car that had a skeleton in the front passenger seat. He had both his hands up… as well as his two middle fingers up! The Mark Twain House and Museum tour was fun and informative, though I will say that while the inside was quite elaborate that I enjoyed walking around its grounds just as much given all the fall foliage. It’s like the house was made to be flanked by these gorgeous autumn colors. The tour also kind of made me want to read Huckleberry Finn again… Maybe this time if I read it, I’ll do the audio version.

Maybe next year when Kaia has better fine motor skills, I’ll actually go get us a pumpkin that we can carve and light up — it will be Kaia’s first jack-o-lantern. Though I also did not do much of this growing up, when I’ve done this with friends or at work festivities, this has always been really fun and creative. Plus, there are so many tools available now that make pumpkin carving safe. It wouldn’t be like what my dad did when we were kids — he used an extremely dull (AND DANGEROUS) chef’s knife to cut poorly shaped triangles and squares to make a jack-o-lantern!

Jeans with belt loops for my very verbal and demanding toddler

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As Kaia has gotten older and more verbal, she’s been expressing more of her wants in terms of actual things she wants. In recent weeks, she has explicitly says she wants a Hello Kitty pink dress with sparkles, a birthday hat (I’m assuming it’s the cone type?), a play kitchen (hmmmmm, I am not sure about this one– we have a real kitchen. Is this really necessary?!), and new ice cream hair clips. In addition, she’s actually said for months that she wants to wear jeans. Earlier in the summer, I made the mistake of going to Uniqlo, being a practical toddler mom, and getting her faux jeans, as in, “jeans” that did not have an actual zipper, fly, or belt loops, but were simply denim in appearance with an elastic waist. When I told her I got her jeans and unveiled them, she was not happy. Her disappointment was written all over her face.

“But it doesn’t have belt loops!” Kaia cried, staring at her new “jeans” with the most horrified look on her face.

Yep, that was a failure. She ended up still wearing them fairly often (because we made her and had already removed the tags). But alas, I’ll have to give them away now because they were already running short back then for 4T (how the hell did this happen at Uniqlo?) and now, they are basically like cropped pants on her. This is definitely not good living in a place like New York City where we experience four seasons. And yes, we are currently in fall and quickly transitioning into winter very soon.

So as I usually do for her once a year, I did some online shopping this month with all the seasonal fall sales and got her a few things she needed. And I happened to find jeans with a “faux fly” and REAL belt loops, so I ordered them. And when they arrive, we shall see very soon if they live up to her standard of what “jeans” should be!

Very “clean” baking mixes

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The neighbor I’ve been hanging out with while having play dates with our kids gave me a Simple Mills box mix for banana muffins or bread loaf. She said she has so many of this brand’s mixes that she’s gotten bored of the flavors, and she thought that maybe I could work my baking magic and jazz it up. The slogan is, “Only purposeful ingredients. Nothing artificial, ever.” The mix is gluten free and vegan (though it does call for three eggs and suggest using yogurt in place of water to increase moistness of the muffins). And when you look at the “simple ingredients” list, it just lists these: Almond Flour, Banana, Organic Coconut Sugar, Arrowroot, Organic Coconut Flour, Baking Soda, Organic Cinnamon, Sea Salt.

Based on the above ingredients list, there’s no weird artificial or “natural flavors.” No dyes or preservatives are listed. No weird names of things that the average person cannot pronounce are here. The average grocery store box mix has preservatives like propionate, potassium sorbate, sodium benzoate, and other emulsifiers. Simple Mills really is what it states: straightforward, simple ingredients. I wanted to believe this had to be good, so I decided to whip it out today and see how it was.

The instructions say to use three eggs, 1/2 cup water, and 1/3 cup oil. I used two eggs, replaced one egg with a “flax egg” (1 tablespoon ground flaxseed to 3 tablespoons water), replaced the water with yogurt as the suggestions stated to increase moistness, and used 1/3 cup coconut oil. The mixture seemed really thick, so I added some coconut and oat milk to thin it out a bit. I also wanted to add more spices because the only spice mentioned here was cinnamon, so I added some ground cardamom, ginger, allspice, nutmeg, and mace. I mixed it all up, added the batter into my mini muffin pan, and baked it. The bake time was also longer than I thought by about 50 percent, which was weird, but I’d rather have done muffins than liquidy ones.

Once the muffins were done and cooled, I tried one. It did not poof up the way wheat flour muffins do and was quite flat on top, but the flavor was pretty decent. The texture was soft and on pair with other almond-flour-based breads/muffins I’d had before. The spice flavor was very good. The one downside, though, was that there was absolutely zero taste of any banana. The spices, coconut milk, and oat milk had completely drowned out any banana fruit flavor.

I had one first and didn’t tell Chris what I thought. I did not want to influence what he tasted or thought. After he had one, he immediately said, “Not bad. Did you put something Indian in it?”

Touring schools while checking my Chinese proficiency

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Yesterday morning, Chris booked a tour of a private Chinese immersion school in our neighborhood. We actually visited this school about a year and a half ago when Kaia was getting ready for 3K, but because we found our current school in Chinatown, we decided to give this place a shot (and ended up really liking it). Fast forward, and believe it or not: we’re already looking into kindergarten and elementary schools for my sweet Kaia Pookie. Sometimes I just can’t believe how quickly time has flown. It was like just yesterday when I was still pregnant, nesting and getting everything for her arrival. And then she exploded into this world and made my heart swell more than I ever thought possible. She’s a tiny human with a strong personality making more and more sense of the world every day.

One part of the private tour we were on included observing a kindergarten class, so a class Kaia would hypothetically be in if we got in and chose to matriculate here. We entered and watched the teachers conduct the class. The kids, for the most part, were extremely well behaved, always raised their hands to speak, and their Chinese was quite good; I heard no one speak any English in this class. The teacher had images and Chinese words on the screen, and she was asking the kids to describe what they were seeing. As I looked at the projector and observed all the interactions, I was heartened and relieved by one thing: I could understand and read everything that was written and said in that classroom during that quick visit. So yay, I have at minimum kindergarten level mastery of Mandarin Chinese!

Although Kaia mostly responds back to me in English, occasionally she does surprise me by responding in Chinese. Sometimes, she shouts out the Chinese name of whatever object or thing it is that she sees. And maybe even once or twice, she’s corrected my Chinese. Yes, my almost-four-year-old wants to correct her mama’s Chinese! If she ends up going to this school, I may have to take a deep breath and just remind myself that if she continues to correct my Chinese, it’s actually a good thing, a sign that she’s getting more and more proficient, and way past whatever my level of proficiency is in the language.