Today, we hosted Kaia’s bestie, his little sister, and their parents for lunch and a play date at our place. For the lunch, I prepared butter chicken, pea pulao rice, besan chilla (chickpea based pancakes with various vegetables), served with cilantro mint and tamarind date chutney, tofu scramble (was very impressed by this, as it really did taste like eggs!), and a mushroom and kale salad with cashew dressing, topped with sunflower and pumpkin seeds. We chatted about child rearing, the kids, work, commuting, and travel. Kaia and her friend enjoyed each others’s company by playing with and around each other. Jacob’s little sister slept in the beginning, then woke up to eat a good number of my chickpea pancakes and a nice handful of my tofu scramble (I was so excited to watch her eat and ask for more!). And then, out of nowhere, Jacob runs out of Kaia’s bedroom with one of my Christmas houses – the one with a moving train and lights.

I held my breath when I watched him run out of the room with it and present it to us. I calmly told him, no, he could not take that, and immediately walked him back to the window sill where all my precious real estate sat and placed it back in its place and plugged it in. I noticed my Hamburg Christmas house was taken apart (it’s two pieces). I examined it to make sure it wasn’t damaged and immediately saw the edge of the roof had chipped a little. It wasn’t the end of the world and only someone really scrutinizing it would notice it (so, really, just me), but I was not super thrilled this happened. In general, Kaia has always stayed away from the Christmas houses and a few other very delicate pieces on display in our home. But alas, I cannot control what tempts other kids.

It was just a reminder to me that I couldn’t just let other kids come into our home without watching them and being aware of what they could look at as “toys.” My real estate collection on Kaia’s window sill is really the only “property” we own, so I would have been absolutely devastated if anything had gotten destroyed due to a 3-year-old friend’s desire to have some fun.

Everyone says they want choices. Then when presented with too many choices, people get so overwhelmed by decision paralysis that they realize that they don’t want too many choices, but just enough to feel like they are actually choosing from an array of things. The last several months before heading off to school, we’ve really simplified Kaia’s first breakfast of the day (I say “first breakfast” because she gets a SECOND breakfast when she arrives at school!) so that it’s really just cereal: it’s Weetbix or (organic, Whole Foods brand) Cherrios, and occasionally she can have some toast with peanut butter. But I realized that I really want her eating oats more regularly as she used to, and not just in baked healthy muffins and cookies. So I started making my oat porridge fingers again with oats, peanut butter, flaxseed, and milk. She ate them for breakfast yesterday, but this morning, she got really mad when I presented them to her along with a cup of milk.

“I don’t want this!” she yelled. “I don’t want to eat oats today!”

I told her that mummy made them just for Kaia, so she should eat some for her brekkie.

“I WANT CHOICES!” she yelled back. “I DON’T WANT OATS! I DON’T WANT OATS!”

I always have to stifle a laugh whenever she goes into these little indignant outbursts. I want her to know I take her seriously, but at the same time, I cannot help but think how comical all of these situations are. If we went back to 3-year-old me, circa 1989, and I yelled at my mom like this, she easily would have just whacked me or slapped my face to get me to shut up. She would have hit me into submission until I ate every last bite of oats. But here, I ended up relenting with one other option: I asked her if she wanted toast with peanut butter. She said yes, and I went ahead and prepped that.

Who knows — maybe one day, when Kaia is in her 30s, she will be in therapy and recount the time when she was 3 years old, when her mom *almost* forced her into eating peanut butter oat porridge fingers. And she will discuss how that felt like traumatizing experience to her.

One of Chris’s friends gifted Kaia a Shadow Puppets version of The Little Prince. The way the “book” works is with big sheets of beautifully cut out scenes from the famous book The Little Prince that you hold up facing the ceiling with a flashlight (or your phone flashlight) under it. As you go through the scenes, you also either read the story or have the narrator read it via the pre-recorded story on their website. The idea behind it is to add variety to bedtime stories and also to encourage sleep.

The funny thing about doing this at Kaia’s age is that while she loves getting exposed to new things as a toddler, she gets very easily frustrated when she doesn’t “get” it right away. She seems to have perfectionist tendencies in this way. She tries to hold the puppets up vertically (which you’re not supposed to do), and then gets mad when she doesn’t see their perfect image show up in the light from my phone flashlight. I have to keep correcting her. Then she gets excited when she sees the image render. Then she holds the puppet up incorrectly the vertical way, and then the cycle continues.

I really like these shadow puppets myself and love making shadow images. But I think it’s going to take some time for Pookster to really embrace this and “get” it. After about 70 percent of the way through the story, she gets mad and says she doesn’t want it anymore. So, we end up moving on to her regular books and have to turn the light back on.

I’ve lost track of when, but years ago, Chris and I stopped celebrating or acknowledging Valentine’s Day. I think it’s far too commercialized. The number of flower and chocolate says just for the day itself is completely out of control (you should also see the premium it costs to have flowers delivered on the day of Valentine’s Day!!). And for people who are newly coupled or dating, the day comes with so much ridiculous pressure to prove one’s affection that it just seems pretty senseless to me.

But I will say that there is one sweet spot for Valentine’s Day, and that’s with arts and crafts, especially for kids. Years ago, I used to make and send/give Valentine’s Day cards to my friends; for me, it was just an excuse to be crafty and exercise my artsy side. At school, Kaia and her classmates made “love bugs” that they painted and decorated with different rhinestones; she was very excited by this. And today when I picked her up from school, she immediately wished me a happy Valentine’s Day and showed me some of the little gifts she got from her teachers and classmates. The teachers gave each child a “Smoochy” heart stuffed animal, along with some candy and chocolate. One of her classmates in another class gave her a little puzzle as a Valentine. I like the move away in schools from candy/sweets to cute little tokens like these. They seem a lot more creative, and well, it’s better for one’s dental hygiene, too.

When Chris got home as we were getting ready for dinner, Kaia immediately wished her dad “Happy Valentine’s Day!” And instead of giving his equivalent of an eye-roll, he warmly greeted her back and was pleased to hear these well wishes from his child. Maybe we can learn to semi-embrace Valentine’s Day again just for the fun and joy of our toddler.

When Kaia started daycare four blocks away when she was about 17 months old, she started showing a clear preference for her English kid songs versus her Chinese ones. Oftentimes, when I’d try to play the Chinese ones or sing them to her, she’d protest and demand “Wheels!” She did have one exception, though: She loved it when I sang the chorus for “Lao Shu Ai Da Mi” or “Mouse loves Big Rice.” That is technically not a Chinese nursery song, but apparently a song that is often used to teach people Chinese easily; the words are very straightforward, the meaning is cute, and the tune is catchy. I learned it during my second year of Mandarin in college.

Since September, Kaia has been in a Mandarin immersion 3K, so she’s had half English, half Chinese instruction. I’m still not clear exactly how much Chinese is spoken, taught, or emphasized, as sometimes the teaching can seem like a black hole here. We definitely do not have the same level of updates at this current school versus our last, but it’s hard to blame them given they are stretched thin here (and it’s publicly funded). But since January, they’ve been emphasizing and singing a lot of Chinese New Year songs, so Kaia’s been getting really into all her Chinese songs. She will sing them at home. She will ask me to play them. And she will even take out her Bao Bao Chinese song book and play the songs and sing along on her own, even ones she used to reject, like “Xiao Yanzi,” or “Little Swallow.” That’s honestly not my favorite song since it has a pretty sad tune, but it really made me so happy the other day when I saw her singing along to the songs in her Bao Bao book, completely on her own and without prompting. I couldn’t help but beam and see my sweet bilingual baby embrace her second language.

This morning when I went to take the compost out to our trash room down the hall, Kaia came out running after me to find me (she loves trash room visits. Take what you want from that). I emptied the compost into the bin and when we came out, our neighbor was coming back from a walk with her new six-month-old puppy. I think the dog is a dachshund; her name is Natasha. She is golden, long-bodied, skinny, low to the floor, and screaming with energy, literally. She was jumping nonstop and whimpering when she saw us, as that was her way of saying “hello” to us. Kaia usually loves dogs, but with this dog, given she was yapping away and jumping like crazy, Kaia kept a semi-safe distance and just admired her and kept smiling at her.

To be honest, while I generally do like dogs, I cannot stand this dog even though this was the first time I have actually laid eyes on her. Since the neighbor got this rat-dog, I’ve heard it yapping and shrieking nonstop throughout all hours of the day and night. I can hear the dog crying the clearest when I am either in our entryway hallway, or when I am in my bedroom, which I HATE; if only the sound didn’t travel so easily down from their unit.

On the walk to school in the morning, Kaia finally asked Chris the question I figured she would ask eventually: “Can I have a dog?”

Of course, Chris responded negatively to this.

“No dog!” he responded without hesitation. He hates dogs as domesticated pets. He does not want dogs around him, and he definitely wants no dog in his living space. He had said repeatedly, before Kaia was even born, that he didn’t care what his child wanted; there would never be any dogs around as long as he was alive.

While I enjoy dogs, I also have zero desire to own one. I don’t want the responsibility or the expense. I also just think that too many people care too much about their dogs/cats and prioritize them over human beings, which to me, makes zero sense. So it will be interesting to see if Kaia continues to ask for one and how she responds with the repeated “no” replies she gets.