It is technically not winter yet, as it’s officially winter on December 21st here in the northern hemisphere, but it certainly feels like it’s winter given the drop in temperatures. I always know that winter has arrived when my head feels naked without a hat on and my hands either need gloves or to be pushed into my pockets. But another reminder of winter is the tiny little snow flurries that tend to happen in late November and early December. When I am in the comfort of a warm office or home, and I look out the window and see tiny snowflakes fluttering around outside, I know it’s really winter. And that feeling that accompanies those snowflakes is usually a mixed one: a little bit of excitement because I think snow is really beautiful, and quite a bit of dread because I absolutely hate cold weather, and I especially cannot stand navigating the snow, ice, and dangerous black ice on the streets and sidewalks of New York. I will also add that snow is especially beautiful when you are nice and warm inside a cozy, heated apartment, with a nice hot drink in hand. And there, you can admire it from the inside out, and the world feels like your own snow globe.

I started noticing the tiny flurries this past weekend. And this afternoon, I noticed them, as well, a bit more furious than this weekend with more intention, almost as if to say, “yep, autumn is gone, and winter is here. deal with the snow!” It’s a different feeling this year, though, with Pookie Bear in my womb, nice and cozy, squirming around in her limited space in the uterus, just waiting to come out into the world. My baby will be a winter baby in the northern hemisphere and a summer baby in the southern hemisphere. No amount of snow or snow flurries could take away the nice warm feeling I get thinking about her pending arrival.

In a lot of cities and towns across the world, when you have friends and family who live just a few blocks from each other, it tends to mean you see each other quite often, whether that’s intentionally planned or by chance. Somehow, when you live in such a densely populated city like New York where people live in these huge high rise buildings with endless units, it’s easy to literally never see familiar people… ever, unless it’s actually planned and scheduled. That’s what it’s like with seeing Chris’s mom’s cousin and his wife and family, who literally live just four blocks from our apartment, but in the last several years of us living in this building, we’ve seen only twice.

Chris’s mom sent an email to her cousin letting him know that I was pregnant, and so he and his wife invited us over for dinner this evening. While I didn’t expect to stay for nearly six hours and until midnight, that’s exactly what happened. We talked about a lot of things, including, of course, the pandemic, the pregnancy, and family. His mom’s cousin and wife are always very warm and welcoming, and his wife has the most infectious, bellowing laugh. From the way they have their house arranged and various items like serving trays and endless ice cream scoops, it’s obvious that pre-pandemic, they are used to hosting and entertaining friends and family often. In fact, a lot of Chris’s family and extended family are like this. I always wonder why my parents are always so standoff-ish and cold at the idea of hosting people over even for something as simple and easy as tea when I am around Chris’s relatives.

I was thinking into the future when we are tentatively planning to bring Pookie Bear to San Francisco to see family and friends, and I was wondering about what the dynamic would be like, if we have friends and family coming in and out of the house to see the baby and how awkward and frustrated that would make my parents. I can already imagine my mom getting stressed out for nothing, thinking about food that needs to be in the house, tea that needs to get served, cups and plates that need to get washed. I’ve always enjoyed hosting people over at my own places I’ve lived, and I clearly do not get that from either parent.

Although I’m about 37.5 weeks pregnant, I still wanted to have a Thanksgiving gathering, so I invited two of my friends and two neighbors over for our meal this evening. Despite being this far along and close to labor, I still feel pretty good. I’ve been lucky in that as of late, the only thing I’m really dealing with is some pain in my butt around my piriformis muscle, which makes me a bit slower, but other than that, my energy level is decent, and I am still happy to be mobile, to exercise, and to move around, even if it is slower. For dinner this evening, I made a slow roasted lamb leg with homemade harissa and garlicky yogurt sauce, roasted orange and pomegranate salmon for my pescatarian friend, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, mushroom, leek, and gruyere bread pudding, brussel sprouts, kale, cabbage salad with pomegranate, apple, almonds, sweet potatoes, and sunflower seeds tossed in a homemade vinaigrette, and sticky date/toffee pudding. My friend brought her spinach broccoli casserole. My other friend had a delivery from Breads Bakery that was supposed to be pumpkin pie and chocolate babka/harvest babka, but the delivery was incorrect, so they ended up sending us these in the end, along with a babka pie and pecan pie. Needless to say, we had way more food than we really needed, and everyone took a doggy bag home.

Everyone usually says they spend Thanksgiving with their families, for better or for worse. That’s usually the time of year people either get really excited to see their families… or they end up having stupid fights about family tensions or politics. My parents don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving anymore and consider it just another day of the year, so I have zero reason to go home. So my new family is Chris and my long time middle school friend, and soon to be out of the uterus Pookie Bear. Everyone else who is at our table is chosen family, a makeshift “urban tribe” of people I care about and want to make feel welcome in our home… and feed. Feeding people always makes me happy. Togetherness with people I care about and food that is delicious is all we really need for Thanksgiving.

One of the more unique things about living in New York City, especially Manhattan, is that most expectant parents will not own a car. That is a very different story than for most Americans in this country, who rely on their car just to travel one block since they probably aren’t used to walking even that little. What that also tends to mean for expectant Manhattan dwelling parents is that they will not have a car to have an infant car seat permanently installed inside of it, which means… well, you either have to get everywhere by foot or train/bus, or you have to get a car seat that doesn’t require a base and get used to installing it quickly just with a seat belt in cabs and Uber/Lyfts/ride shares.

So today, after renting a car to take a trip to Costco for our last major haul before Pookie Bear arrives, we spent the last hour of our Zipcar time figuring out how to install the car seat with the seat belt in multiple ways. It’s definitely not as intuitive or straightforward as I’d like, and we had to try it a few times before (I think?) we got it right. Installing it with a base would be trickier and likely take more time, but given that we don’t own a car and would likely, at most, only use that in Australia when we have access for weeks at a time to a single car, we didn’t really bother with going over the instructions for that.

It likely will be a bit nerve racking doing it for the first trip home from the hospital, but hopefully it will go smoothly and the Uber driver won’t dock our star rating for taking too long. I mean, this WILL be our very first time doing it in real time…

Since we moved into this new apartment in our same building, we haven’t had our magnet boards up in our kitchen as we did in the last apartment. When Chris first attempted to put one up in the last kitchen in 2017, I insisted to him that it was crooked. He didn’t agree and insisted it was straight, and so we had to have our building handyman/friend come to intervene and give his opinion… which was that it was obviously crooked. Since our handyman friend is, well, a handyman, he does this kind of task very quickly and easily, so he graciously and generously installed all three magnet boards for us in our last apartment. So we were waiting for him to come to install these in our new place, too. The only issue is that there are some work politics here where his counterpart has been lazy and handing off a lot of jobs to him, so in the last several months, he hasn’t had time to come visit and hang out, and thus hasn’t had time to help us install the magnet boards. When he was asking me about how my belly was doing and expressing how excited he was to meet our little one soon, I told him that if he wanted to give the baby a gift, he could come install the magnet boards this weekend. And apparently it worked: he showed up! 😀

He put all three of them up, two of them being in our kitchen right where my happy place is, and I couldn’t believe how happy I was to see them up; it just felt like we had really, finally moved in and like our kitchen was actually whole once again! Since he helped put them up, I keep looking up at them to admire all the places we’ve been to, and I can’t wait to continue adding more magnets to the third board in the second bedroom with little Pookie Bear accompanying us soon.

Every year when we put up our Christmas tree, I get excited. We don’t have that many Christmas decorations or items since Chris is very anti-clutter, especially considering that we live in a Manhattan apartment. While we do have more space now given we upgraded units, the storage space has quickly been overtaken by the endless baby items we’ve been gifted, handed down, or bought, and so this has increased Chris’s frustration with clutter. But hey, like Marie Kondo says, if an item is seasonal and “sparks joy” the way our collection of specially curated Christmas ornaments do, then they are worth taking up space even though they are only used at one time during the year.

When I look at all our ornaments every year, I remember all the stories and travels behind them: the Pike Place Market handmade ornament I got during my second trip to Seattle with Ed and our cousin; the handmade ornaments my friends have made for me over the years when we had a DIY gift theme; the handmade and hand painted wooden ornaments from Germany, the mouth blown glass nativity scene ornament from Vienna that I guarded with my life in transit back to the U.S.; the $3 hand knit potato ornament we got from the Canadian Potato Museum in Prince Edward Island; the endless Macy’s ornaments that Ed would get 80 to 90 percent off after Christmas for me because he knew I loved ornaments and Christmas so much. Christmas is nostalgic for me, and our tree’s ornaments are symbolic of many happy moments for me. While it would be great to have a fresh, pine-smelling tree every year, it’s not as great for the environment, and plus… they’re a lot harder to maintain and keep the house clean with. So I’m happy to have a fake tree with my lovely ornaments.

It was Saturday today, so we were out and about yet again for another food crawl, this time around the Fordham / Arthur Avenue area in the Bronx. Unfortunately for me, I felt especially heavy and slow today, and it seems like during longer walks, my Braxton Hicks contractions keep going a little out of control. Walking up stairs now gets me far more winded than it used to, and so I am definitely a lot slower than even just a few weeks ago. I guess we’re in the home stretch, so I can manage this for just another month or so before totally going nuts.

It may only be in New York where you can get access to authentic Dominican and Puerto Rican cuisine and amazing Italian cuisine within blocks of each other. We made stops at some old staples we found last year, like Cuchifritos for mango juice, chicharron, and alcapurrias, Gino’s Pastry Shop for my favorite NYC cannoli, and also at the Calabria Pork Store for freshly made sausage (this time, I chose sweet Italian with fennel). We also discovered some new spots, like Borgatti’s for fresh pasta (we got fresh tagliatelle egg noodles and ricotta/porcini ravioli), and Casa Della Mozzarella, which had quite the line out its door. They are famous for being on multiple lists for making the very best mozzarella in New York City. Our main sit down meal was at Antonio’s, where we had magherita pizza with some of the best mozzarella on pizza we’d ever had, and Chris actually had a glass of Italian red (“super Tuscan”) that was for once, very fruity, tasty, and satisfying.

During food treks like these, on the way home, I always feel very grateful to live in such a diverse and delicious city. To have access to foods of this quality just a subway ride away is a real privilege and blessing. I hope my little Pookie Bear is able to embrace all of this deliciousness, too, when she arrives.

Tonight, my friend and I went to see the Broadway musical Come from Away, which is set during the week following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and tells the story of what happened when 38 planes were ordered to land unexpectedly in the small town of Gander in Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada due to U.S. airspace being shut down as part of Operation Yellow Ribbon. Those 38 planes consisted of over 7,000 passengers plus 19 animals in cargo, which doubled the population of the small town. That is really mind boggling to think of now.

My memory of what happened and the media reports around September 11, 2001, are quite hazy. It was the beginning of my sophomore year of high school. I understood that a terrorist attack had happened, but I didn’t quite understand the background and all the events that led up to it. I only really started paying attention and reading news regularly that year. But given what others have shared, it sounds like for the most part and based on what I remember, the vast majority of the reporting was on what happened with the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon from the reports to the photographs, and relatively little was highlighted around these planes making emergency landings in Gander. But honestly, I wish I had known more about it then instead of learning about it 20 years later.

The musical showcases how everyday citizens of Gander welcomed these people from all over the world on these planes into their homes for meals, showers, and warmth simply because of the worldwide emergency that had erupted, just because of the kindness of their hearts. And it was just so heart warming to see this musical and see it on full display. And having visited Newfoundland and Labrador, I can definitely attest to the fact that it’s a beautiful Canadian province with warm, kind humans who do seem a bit different from other Canadians in accent and demeanor, but actually seem like better humans than the average American. I’m not really sure what would have happened if planes had diverted and landed somewhere in the U.S. Who knows how that would have ended up. But I think all these people who ended up in Gander were better off there than anywhere in U.S. territory.