Category Archives: Contemplation

Visiting a kids’ party venue

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After exchanging many messages between the family of the child we’d like to do a joint birthday party with, we realized pretty quickly that hosting a party in our respective building lounges probably wouldn’t be a great fit. For one thing, my building lounge does not even allow children’s birthday parties in the lounge (talk about age discrimination to the extreme!). Their lounge fee is 25 percent more than ours; it also requires a mandatory extra cleaning fee that we have to pay. None of those fees includes any real help or coordination; we’d have to do all that work ourselves. It also wouldn’t include any kid entertainment. So when I found this venue in our general neighborhood that basically charged similar fees but included built-in entertainment (a large indoor play gym!), I thought this sounded pretty promising.

I was a little skeptical of the space, as the photos publicly available looked like those wide-angle distorted views that make spaces look far larger than they are. But when I went up there this afternoon to see it in person, it was even bigger than I expected! There’s a very large, open play space and a good entry way for gifts, goodie bags, and coats. From the open floor, there’s a stairway that goes up to a fun loft area that overlooks the play space. This consists of two rooms, one large room for the kids to eat and have cake, and a smaller room for the adults to congregate and hang out. I got a tour by the husband of the husband and wife team who run the place, and he seemed pretty relaxed, but also very informative. I took lots of photos and videos to share with Chris and the other parents, and I left feeling pretty good about this space.

I guess I found a little gem in the neighborhood I would have had zero idea about before. And this is all thanks to ChatGPT!

Planning a joint birthday party

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Kaia got invited to a joint birthday party of two classmates later this month. They invited all the friends and family in our entire kindergarten class of 20 kids, and it’s being held at a popular indoor play space in lower Manhattan. As soon as I found out it was joint, I thought this was the most amazing idea: combine two birthday parties so that you reduce the number of parties you require parents to take kids to, thus consolidating schedules, while also decreasing all costs by half. This is win-win for everyone! I immediately started thinking about who else has a birthday close to Kaia’s.

Then at the mid-Autumn Moon picnic on Sunday, a mom who has a kid whose birthday is in late November said she wanted to do a joint birthday because the costs were going up by so much, and I said I wouldn’t mind doing a joint one with Kaia. It would be Kaia’s first real birthday party outside of her class birthday parties, plus her first birthday that Chris’s mom threw, which of course Kaia cannot remember. So I said we’d exchange ideas and figure out a date.

It’s nearly a crime how expensive kids’ birthday parties can be in New York City. Space Club, which is a play space with multiple locations in Brooklyn, charges $990 simply to have a private room for about 90 minutes, and it’s 12 kids maximum. That does not include food, drink, cake, decorations, or goodie bags. It certainly does not include adult food. We tried looking at hosting in our building lounges, but that would require more coordination on the part of us as the parents/hosts.

The research and planning continue. I wonder where we will end up?

Dental visit, sans baby tooth

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This afternoon was my first visit to the dentist since my baby tooth finally came out. They asked me questions about how long ago it came out and inspected the gum to make sure there were no tooth fragments still remaining.

“It looks like it was a clean break!” The dental hygienist said to me. “The gum looks healthy and clean, barely like there was even a tooth there before!”

They asked me how it felt, then asked if I’d be interested in having an implant placed in. I figure it wouldn’t hurt to get cost estimates from the insurance on this, so I asked them to contact the insurance to get the full breakdown and send it over to me. I doubt I will end up doing it since the missing tooth isn’t in a visible spot. I also have zero problems eating without it. It was doing so little work all these years as a teeny weeny baby tooth that it really didn’t add any value to my eating life at all.

When I look back on all those years when I was nervous about my baby tooth falling out, I actually find it a little funny. I suppose hindsight is 20/20. And I guess there’s always fear of the unknown, but in this case, I barely even notice that it’s gone. I was scared of a hole in my mouth and how it might make my mouth less efficient. I was also worried about the cost of an implant. But now I realize an implant isn’t even fully necessary where it is. I’ve been eating just fine without this baby tooth there for about two months now, and I have zero concerns. I also told the dentist today that I also don’t have concerns about other teeth shifting as a result of this gap because I’m one of those diligent freaks and wears a lower retainer every single night.

I still have the baby tooth. I will keep it as a long time souvenir to remind me of my weird predicament of having two baby teeth with no adult teeth that ever developed under them. All I have to say is: I really hope Kaia has all her adult teeth develop under her baby teeth!!!

Parenthood: the ultimate test of patience and perseverance

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As I sat there with Kaia yesterday evening, struggling through getting her to complete a single page of Chinese strokes, specifically, the “na” (捺) stroke—the sweeping downward-right stroke, I thought about my mom and all the work she put in for me before I even got to kindergarten. Before I entered kindergarten and during my preschool years, my mom had taught me the entire English alphabet. She taught me all the letters, both lower and upper case. She made me write them over and over and over again. Before kindergarten began, I knew how to write all of them on my own, and in relatively good form. In addition to that, she taught me all the numbers and had me do basic addition and subtraction in hopes that I’d be more advanced than my peers. While I was initially more advanced than the majority of them, that quickly ended by the time I reached third grade. Multiplication and division did not come naturally to me; it was a painful and miserable process before I finally understood it. I do not think I was the slowest of the pack, but I was most certainly not the quickest in that realm. The concept of “carrying over” numbers was a true struggle. To this day, my mom can do quicker and better mental math than I could even dream of.

When Kaia started 3K, I did momentarily think that maybe I could model my mom and proactively teach Kaia these things in her 3-4K years. But I thought to myself: she has a real curriculum she is following in her two years of preschool. She’ll be fine! They’re going to teach all of that to her, right?

Wrong. They taught her recognition and sounds. We all know that recognition is not the same thing as applying and writing it all yourself.

We are still struggling with writing the date on each page of homework. I wonder when we will get over this hump. She still does her “9” and “6” backwards. She doesn’t do a real “8” that has two circles on top of each other. She also does not like to do the same thing more than three times, apparently, and then has a total melt down. I have to let her cry it out. Then, I myself have to take a deep breath and try not to yell.

I wonder how much whining, screaming, and crying I did when my mom started the alphabet and numbers with me when I was just three years old. I suppose next time I can ask. But whenever I ask her questions about my childhood, she has only vague recollections and does not remember the details. I cannot blame her for that; that would be 37 years ago now. So maybe through this blog, I can preserve some of these “fun” and truthfully painful memories so that one day when Kaia gets older and she asks me, I can simply reference this blog and tell her what a total brat she was and give very clear, concrete examples. I can also share how many times we had to insist to her that she did not have the option of giving up, that she “can do hard things” about a million times.

Massive kudos to my mom, though, for getting me through all that before formal schooling kicked in for me. I just knew I wouldn’t have the patience to do it with my own kid even though my mom did it with me.

A cooking challenge: whole duck

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Last autumn while at Costco, I stumbled upon a whole duck in the refrigerator section. I looked at it and realized it was quite a gem to find a WHOLE DUCK as an option, and for a bargain price of about $3.69/lb! So I decided to add it to our cart… and then was so intimidated by the thought of cooking a whole duck that I left it in the back of the freezer this entire time. The idea of cooking a whole duck has terrified me pretty much my entire cooking life.

So I finally gathered all my courage and yanked my 4.5-lb halal duck out of the back of the freezer and have been thawing it in the fridge since Saturday night. I took it out, drained it, then fully dried it. I decided I would cook it the only way I knew how to, which is Chinese-style. I created a Chinese five spice rub with my Burlap and Barrel five-spice blend (the best!), fresh minced garlic, ginger, salt, and pepper. I rubbed it all over inside and out after pricking the skin all over to allow the fat to render out during the roast. I placed it, uncovered, in our fridge to dry out. I plan to roast it tomorrow afternoon.

Am I terrified of how it will turn out? Yes. I am scared I will overcook the breasts and not achieve crispy skin. I have procrastinated on this long enough, though. And age is supposed to make me wiser, right? I kept trying to get reassurance from ChatGPT Pro, who has been telling me that while I may be a novice to cooking duck, I am certainly no novice cook. I know the usual signs of poultry doneness, whether it’s under or overcooked, etc. I just need to breathe. So tomorrow, I will do a two-temperature roasting, the first at 325 F, then the final blast at 425 F to crisp the skin. I need as many good vibes as possible to ensure I don’t smoke up the whole kitchen from all the duck fat that will be rendered; I read that it can be as much as two to three CUPS of rendered duck fat out of a single bird!! But as all my fitness app trainers have always said: if it doesn’t challenge you, then it won’t change you!

Damaged luggage gets replaced

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After our Caribbean trip in late June/early July, our one small checked roller bag did really well from New York to Barbados, St. Lucia, Grenada, Trinidad, with a stopover in Miami on the way back to New York… and then it didn’t make it quite well from MIA to JFK. That’s basically when some luggage handler probably just thought, “Meh! I’ll just toss ’em all on; no big deal!” Welp. That one haul from MIA to JFK resulted in a dent in our hard-shelled roller bag. It was quite sad to us, especially given we just purchased this set late last year.

We never reported it, though, because it’s a small bag and it’s not like it’s unusable; it was more of a cosmetic issue. So we let it go. But then from SFO to ORD on this last trip, our medium roller bag (of the same luggage set!) got dented pretty badly on the same corner. What the hell? It’s almost like these domestic luggage handlers just do not care about carefully placing luggage on conveyer belts and not treating them like rubbish. Maybe all these “new” luggage brands are just built poorly and cheaply, and thus are not meant to be used more than a handful of times? It’s likely a combination of A and B, as sad as that is.

So I reported this luggage as damaged since it was our second time getting a dented bag with American Airlines in just the last few months. They responded right away, evaluated the photos, then offered to replace the bag from a third party luggage company they work with. The replacement is currently being sent via FedEx from some shipment center in Texas. We got the same color as the one that got damaged: rose gold. We shall see if it’s any more (or less…) durable than this last one that got damaged. Oh, and to make matters worse on that one: when trying to zip close this bag when leaving Chicago, I ripped the stupid seam because the zipper got caught on one of my packing pods. I had to ask the hotel for tape to reinforce it just in case; luckily for me, it arrived home fully in tact. So regardless, that luggage is now getting chucked! I do feel bad about more junk being tossed into a landfill somewhere, but now this bag is just unusable.

NYC ID and Union Square Greenmarket

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New York City has a whole network of farmers markets that operate all over the city throughout the year, but it’s a well known fact that the Union Square Greenmarket is its biggest. It’s at its most vibrant during the late spring to early autumn months. During the summer months, there is probably the most variety when it comes to various types of produce. All colors of the rainbow can be found here in the summer! Once upon a time while at several different companies, I was lucky to work close to Union Square and would stop by regularly. Sometimes, it was just to browse. Other times, I’d pick up things to bring home and cook with. Regardless of whether I purchased anything, I always found it fun to look at what was local and seasonal.

Given I work from home now, I don’t have much reason to be in the Union Square area that frequently anymore, but I always look forward to the chance to go back, not just for the Greenmarket, but also because I just love the area. It was where I spent the first five years of my New York City life working, so there’s some nostalgia there. It’s also got a great restaurant/bakery scene.

Plus as I learned this week, Union Square is also home to New York City’s Human Resources Administration office, where I had to go to renew my NYC ID. I was lazy with it when it expired over ten years ago and didn’t go into the office to do the renewal paperwork. Given I already had access to lots of free things that benefited Kaia through my public library card tied to Culture Pass, I decided I’d let it slide because I really did not want to go and make yet another appointment. Chris reminded me that I am losing out on all kinds of freebies by not having my NYC ID active… things I (or Kaia) would actually enjoy and get value out of that were not originally perks. Some major areas we could benefit from would be a free annual membership to the New York MoMA (which I’ve been wanting to go to again for the last six months…), Brooklyn Children’s Museum, New York Aquarium, and the Bronx Zoo. While I’ve gotten once-a-year free tickets to the Brooklyn and Manhattan Children’s Museum, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have unlimited free access to them in a given year, as it would give more options for low cost/free play dates, especially as Kaia is slowly but surely going to age out of those museums in the next 3-4 years.

I definitely had quite the haul at the Greenmarket after my NYC ID appointment, though. Summer is still clearly here for now but ending, as pretty much every vendor had many varieties of vibrant heirloom tomatoes on offer. Corn was huge and plentiful. Endless colorful varieties of peppers were also being sold. I picked up lots of corn, several varieties of heirloom tomatoes, red mustard greens, some beautiful striped zucchinis, locally grown fat garlic, bright red leaf lettuce, a loaf of multigrain sourdough from Our Daily Bread, and a massive bouquet of basil. My haul wasn’t cheap by any definition (Chris called it “Vuittoning,” the term he uses whenever I spend money…), but I suppose a lot has changed in the last eighteen years of living in New York City. I still remember back then, I thought $4-5/lb for heirloom tomatoes seemed expensive; today, the same heirloom tomatoes are anywhere from $8-10/lb, so at least twice as much. Inflation, higher wages, and a higher cost of living contribute to all these costs going up. But at least I can feel good knowing that a) I am supporting local by eating local, b) the produce is super fresh and seasonal, and c) I know for sure that it will all taste delicious!

Wistful for the past and reflecting back on Kaia’s first words and foods

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Since Kaia started kindergarten yesterday, I suppose it’s only natural that as her mother, I have been thinking a lot about her life to date, reminiscing on past moments and fun with her. While I did look through a number of old photos and videos over the last 4.5 years, what I also did was go back to Chris’s master Google spreadsheet, detailing her feeding/eating/my pumping journey. I included a tab for her solid foods eaten up to age 14 months, as well as a tab for first words. At some point, the words got to be so many all at once that I stopped keeping track; it looks like I stopped at the 76th word. Unfortunately I don’t have dates for those. But these are some funny things I had forgotten about that happened with solid food and words:

  • After her first word “diaper” at about 10ish months, which we found hilarious, Kaia’s second word was “purple,” which is her favorite color next to pink!
  • Her fifth word, which is a vegetable, was “beets!” She still loves beets today.
  • Kaia’s first Chinese word was 面/mian (noodle)! This is very fitting for my noodle loving Pookie!
  • “Weetbix” was her 21st word; she truly is an Aussie baby!
  • Her 54st word, or phrase rather, was “Oh shit!” 🙁
  • Her first solid food, eaten within week 2 of her life, had to be prune juice because her poop was so backed up! Her next solid food was not until she was exactly 6 months old on June 10, 2022, when she was given avocado. The next day, she had both alphonso AND ataulfo mango.
  • About a month later, she had peach for the first time, which gave her a red mouth reaction. Luckily, it subsided, and the reaction never occurred again.
  • She had her first cayenne pepper AND Thai chilies on July 17, 2022, at just over seven months of age!
  • Kaia had her first durian, from Say Weee! and imported from Malaysia, on September 17, 2022 and liked it.
  • On the same day she had her first taste of durian, she also tried hibiscus and lemon verbena in herbal teas separately and seemed to enjoy.
  • The last new food I documented that she ate was just before she reached 14 months of age: this was croaker fish at BCD Tofu House in Koreatown, NYC! This was food #312!

It’s still so much fun introducing her to new foods. I hope my sweet baby always stays this open-minded with cultures and foods.

The four Disney princesses from Ed

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Every time I go back to my parents’, I try to take something back to New York that is a reminder of my childhood. Sometimes, it’s really little things like random cards or photos I find in a pile that I’d forgotten about that remind me of a happy memory. Other times, it’s slightly larger things like my hardcover copy of The Complete Stories of Curious George, which I brought back this time around. Kaia is at a point where she can follow longer stories, and the original Curious George stories are actually not as short as one might expect them to be! She always plays with my Curious George stuffed animal, which Ed got for me during a Christmas back from my high school days when Curious George was the holiday theme for Macy’s. So she knows who he is and that her mama likes this monkey. We already started reading some of the stories together while we were in San Francisco.

On the last morning before we left to go to Chicago, I was rummaging through a bedroom drawer I rarely go into and stumbled upon the extremely heavy mah jong set purchased during my first China trip in 2006. This was a legitimate mah jong set, and an extremely heavy one at that! The truth is that I only ever played mah jong one time ever and have completely forgotten the rules. The only reason I even bought this crazy heavy set was that I thought it would be a nice souvenir to have from my first time in my fatherland… and then predictably, I never even opened or played it even once after buying it. So that was very practical of me at the time. Fast forward twenty years, and now mah jong is all the rage. I sat next to a White woman on the plane who said she took a four-day full-time intensive course to master mah jong! And as ridiculous as it sounds, there is the “Chinese rules” mah jong and the “American rules” mah jong (whatever the hell the latter means). For a split second, I considered lugging it back to New York with me… but then my true practical side took hold, and I immediately placed it back into the drawer.

In that same drawer, I found something Ed had bought me years ago: Four Disney princess figurines, still in their original packaging, never opened. We have Cinderella, Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), Snow White, and Belle (from Beauty and the Beast). They are all wearing glittering gowns. I knew immediately that Kaia would love them. Though the figurines are meant for display, I figured at this point, that didn’t matter anymore. The best thing we could get out of these four princesses was Kaia’s enjoyment, which meant being able to play with them. So I took them all out of the original box, tucked them into a ziplock bag, and put them into my checked luggage.

Of course, Kaia being the little investigator that she is, she found the princesses in my luggage when I had it open in Chicago, and she asked me what it was in her usual tone of, “Is that for me?!” I told her if she was good, she could open it when we got back to New York, but only if she was good.

Today, Kaia was happily playing with all four of them and marveling over their sparkly gowns. I told her that her Jiujiu got them for her mama over twenty years ago. He knew that when Mama was young, she loved all the princesses, so he wanted to get these for me. Now, these are a gift for Kaia. So essentially, Ed got these for Kaia… he just never realized it back then. I told Kaia that these princesses are very special, and now Kaia can have a token of Jiujiu’s love. I am not sure if it’s just me, but she seemed to understand.

“I love them,” Kaia said quietly, as she hugged all of them at once. “Thanks, Jiujiu.”

Ed may not be here today to see Kaia playing with these four princesses he gifted me, but I know he is in both our hearts and minds. If he is somewhere out there watching, I hope he is smiling.

When both your mother and your child give you the death stare

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My parents were pretty strict with Ed and me growing up. From my perspective, in their eyes, it seemed like we could never do anything right and were constantly fucking up something. If I had a dollar for every memory I had when one of us was getting scolded, yelled at, told off, lectured, slapped, hit, or beaten with a fly swatter, I’d have a pretty cushy investment account on my hands today. So it was a weird transition to hear some of the things that came out of my mom’s mouth when it came to how I parent my own child… and how lax she is.

While on the phone with my mom with Kaia there, sometimes Kaia runs around and gets in potentially unsafe territory, so I have to use my stern voice with her. I am not necessarily yelling, but my tone has become more strict and direct. My mom has scolded me and told me not to yell at her, saying it will scare her and wasn’t good for her. Welp, that’s interesting. Does she suddenly have total amnesia over all the times she yelled or hit us as children for the most benign and objectively not wrong actions we did?

Then last week after I gave Kaia a shower, I told her she had to go to the bedroom after so I could blow dry her hair. She had to go do it immediately. Well, Kaia is stubborn and wanted to do things her way, so she said she wanted to go say hi to Popo first before blow-drying. I said no again. She started crying and yelling. Then Kaia ran off, right into my parents’ bedroom and into my mom’s arms.

“What did mommy do?” my mom said to Kaia, holding her and rubbing her back. “What did she do to make my Kaia cry?” Then, my mom turned her eyes up to glare at me. “What did you do to her? What did you do to make her cry? Don’t make her cry!”

As my mom stared up at me, so did Kaia. Kaia’s eyes turned cold, and she started mimicking my mom from her perspective. “Yeah! You made me cry! You made me cry!” Then, she started sobbing even more to get more sympathy and cuddles from my mom. What a little hack.

Okay, at this point, this was clearly an act. My mom was obviously exacerbating it even more, and this was not helping at all. I told my mom that I needed her to blow dry her hair first before coming to say good night to her and my dad, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with that. At her age, she needs discipline. But of course, it’s not up to the freaking grandparents to instill discipline; it’s up to the parents! I grabbed Kaia and pulled her back into my bedroom to blow dry her hair.

Grandparents will rarely be strict with their grandchildren. It’s just the way it is. But I will never forget the double cold glares I got from both my mom and my child at the exact same time. Talk about manipulation!