Last week, Kaia got to be in the company of Chris’s cousin, her husband, and their baby for three days at dinner time. This week, she had Chris’s friend unexpectedly visit and have dinner with us on Tuesday. Then yesterday, our friend came over to see and play with her before she and I went out to dinner together. So, she’s been quite used to having company over. And Kaia being Kaia, she loves being around people and being social in her very toddler-esque ways. So when we came home today, she asked if “friends” would come over. I told her that tonight, we’d have no one coming over, that it would just be the three of us before we got ready for bed and got on a plane to go to San Francisco tomorrow. She gave me a very glum face and said, “I want friends to come,” and then demanded that my friend’s husband come visit (the friend who came yesterday).

I love watching Kaia interact with our friends and family. I love seeing her build bonds and attachments to them. And I also love seeing how she connects partners to partners and siblings to each other. This is my sweet Kaia Pookie making sense of the socially connected world we live in.

When I picked Kaia up at school today, she immediately asked if “my cousin Harriet” would be at home waiting for her when we got back. I said yes, we’d all be eating dinner together. And then she said she wanted to run into the bakery next door to her school so that we could pick up something for Harriet to eat. Granted, Harriet is only four months old, so she would not be eating any solids yet, but I decided to humor Kaia and pick up a few baozi (including one pork floss bao for her) for Harriet’s parents’ breakfast the next (and their last) morning with us. And I guess indirectly, Harriet would be eating the bao since if her mom eats it, she would get it through the breast milk she is being fed. But we didn’t have to explain that to Kaia just yet!

I love seeing how caring and affectionate Kaia is with others. She’s always thinking about others, and she wants them to eat and be happy. Even though Chris used to joke and say that hypothetically, Kaia would be a very jealous older sibling, I always think quite the opposite: she has shown love, care, affection, and empathy from a very young age. I can imagine her doting on and being a very helpful older sibling if she ever had a younger sibling in her life. I love seeing this side of her come out when she’s in the presence of children younger than her; that’s my sweet baby growing up.

Kaia has really loved eating whole apples since she was about 18 months old. Sometimes she will eat the slices when we make her eat the apples sliced, but most of the time, she prefers eating whole apples. And when I say “whole,” I mean she will eat about a quarter or a third of the apple, get bored, and then decide she is done and hand it over to us (oh, the toddler stage!). As you can imagine, Chris and I are not fans of this as it’s extremely wasteful, nor do I want to eat her partially eaten apple (but well, I usually do since I’m anti-waste. Chris could care less, so he just tosses it). So whenever possible, we will slice the apple up and make her eat the slices. In the last few weeks, she’s grown tired of apples and has refused them. At school field trips, the teachers will pack lunches for the kids that include a small whole apple, and she has not eaten them. So she brings them home to us. They’ve gone into the fruit bin in our fridge, along with a couple Pink Lady apples Chris bought. I decided we couldn’t waste the apples (I am not the biggest fan of apples, especially in the summertime when there’s so much good warm weather fruit!), so I decided to use the leftover apples for apple sauce for Kaia. Kaia loves apple sauce. She used to have it occasionally during snack time at her last school. I’ve been buying Trader Joe’s organic apple sauce (the only ingredient, supposedly, is apples) in a large jar to use in healthy baked goods for her. Sometimes when we bake together, she will ask for some apple sauce to eat on its own, and I’ll indulge her and give her a small bowl; it’s her “treat.”

I used two types of apples, some water, and a splash of apple cider we had in the fridge. Even after simmering for an hour, the apple pieces had broken down, but there were still some small soft chunks. It was a bit more watery than the Trader Joe’s apple sauce, but I figured it would thicken as it cooled. I tasted it, and I actually thought it tasted better than the jarred apple sauce — as it should, right, because it’s homemade?

I told Kaia she could have some homemade apple sauce yesterday, and she got really excited. When I presented it to her and she took a spoonful and put it in her mouth, Chris said her face immediately turned, and she didn’t seem to like it. She asked for a “different” apple sauce.

I insisted to her that this was “real” apple sauce, and I said the other apple sauce was “fake” (okay, that’s not really true, but that’s what came out of my mouth). As if she knows what any of this means! She then declared, “I want fake apple sauce!”

I’m not buying the TJs apple sauce for a while, so I said no “different” apple sauce.” Chris force fed her the rest of the homemade apple sauce bowl he doled out for her. I ended up eating the rest of the homemade apple sauce, which I actually found pretty tasty. And it acted as a good after bite while eating Xi’an Famous Foods spicy noodles for me!

Whenever we arrive at our subway station, Kaia likes to go up the stairs and wait for the elevator to get to ground level. When we wait for the elevator, she always checks out all the OMNY card machines, getting her fingers all over the touch screens. She also enjoys peering into the change slots to see if anything is in there. Well, she got lucky earlier this week when through the clear slot, she saw that someone had left their change in there. She shrieked with joy and yelled out, “Mumma, I found money!” I walked over to the OMNY card machine and realized she was right: someone left three quarters in the slot. So I told her she could take the money out, and she carefully held all three coins tightly in the palm of her hand on our walk back home. She was so proud of herself for finding money that she immediately declared it to Chris as soon as she walked through our front door.

What this ended up leading to, though, is that on subsequent waits for the elevator up, she now expects to find money in the slots and gets upset when she doesn’t find any… which is, well, every time other than that one time. On Friday, she said she’d wait at the machine until the money “came.” No way. I immediately whisked her into the elevator to prevent a wait-for-absolutely-nothing situation.

Tonight at bedtime while I told her all the things I say to her before bed, I said to her my usual in English and Chinese, and she finished the sentences: “Mumma loves Kaia more than anything. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to Mumma. Mumma is grateful for Kaia every day. So, every day, mama takes care of you, protects you, and loves you. Did you know? Mumma is so lucky to have Kaia Pookie!” And then she said in response, for the very first time, “And Kaia is so lucky to have Mumma!” I gushed and squeezed her in my arms and covered her face with kisses, to which she giggled endlessly and then gave me kisses all over my face.

And then after peeing in the potty, she proceeded to terrorize me by not going to sleep and playing with literally every toy or stuffed animal in sight until past 9pm before finally passing out from exhaustion.

I love being a mother. I really do. It’s given me so much perspective on life and love and just being. But what it’s also reinforced to me that with everything you love… comes all the things that piss you off to no end. And you really cannot have one without having the other. That goes for pretty much everything in life: your spouse, your kids, your career, your home – it applies to every single thing. The things you love about your spouse are also the things that will make you want to punch him in the face. The personality traits of Kaia that I love are also the ones where I just think to myself, “Can you please just shut the fuck up and go to sleep now and stop being so damn cute all the time?”

When I picked Kaia up from school yesterday late afternoon, we were walking towards the subway entrance when she suddenly said, “Mummy, it’s raining today.”

I wrinkled my brow and looked down at her. “Pooks, it’s super sunny and hot today,” I responded. “There wasn’t any rain!”

“No, it’s raining,” she said, looking up at me, looking hurt because I contradicted her. “It’s raining on my leg.”

Oh, wait. That’s when I stopped and pulled her over to the side of the sidewalk. I looked down at her backpack, and I realized that a teacher likely did not close her water bottle properly. It was dripping so quickly that the water had already soaked the bottom of her backpack and actually was dripping down her leg! I wiped her leg, then took her backpack off her back, removed the water bottle, and resealed it properly. Then, I turned it upside down to ensure it was no longer leaking, and we went about our way into the subway station.

Toddlers can be so smart, so sweet, so hilarious, and so absolutely illogical and infuriating that you just want to rip all your hair out when they have their monstrous tantrums. But when they say cute things like, “It’s raining on my leg,” it shows you how they are putting their understanding of the world together into words. Kaia comprehends the meaning of, “It’s raining.” She also understands getting wet. But she doesn’t really know how to say that something is dripping down her leg (at least, I don’t think she does yet). So, this was her way of conveying it. I found it really cute and clever at the same time, and a sweet look into her psyche and how she’s making sense of the world in her beautiful, developing 3.5-year-old mind.