Although I dread autumn arriving every year, mostly because I know that means that cold, miserable winter is around the corner, I do look forward to the autumn and winter squash. I’ve never really been a fan of summer squash; I am lukewarm to zucchini and think yellow summer squash is totally overrated. However, Kaia was obsessed with zucchini and yellow squash. She could easy have an entire plate of both if we gave them to her. I thought maybe it could mean she’d also embrace autumn squash… but we haven’t quite been as aligned on this.

I bought a bunch of butternut squash, kabocha, and honeynut squash and lined them all up at our window sill by the dining table. I steamed some butternut and roasted butternut and kabocha and set a good portion aside for Kaia. Kaia liked the butternut when roasted (it’s definitely sweeter and nuttier this way), but avoided it when it was steamed. And the kabocha? Well… she ate a few bites of it when she was observing me eat it, but after I stopped eating it, she wouldn’t eat anymore. And unfortunately, I cannot mandate that our nanny eat the food while feeding Kaia.. because that seems a little mean and overly demanding.

Well, I guess she can’t like everything. But hey, I’m not giving up yet… She has to have this repeatedly before we can conclude she doesn’t like the kabocha. I love kabocha so much – ugh!

Last night, I was attempting to cut Kaia’s nails, and she screamed bloody murder pretty much nonstop, even when I was just trying to hold her hand… and even when I stopped to take a break and was just sitting on the bed with her. I don’t even think the nail cutting is actually what she hates the most: she really just hates not being in control of her own hands. The idea that someone would take control of her hands really drives her mad.

Other than the two night nurses we hired, who were both happy to help cut Kaia’s nails, no one other than me has cut Kaia’s nails… ever. Our nanny refuses to do it (she says she’s scared she will hurt her), and Chris refuses to do it. And as if Chris’s parents ever would have offered to do something that would require that level of detail. So really, this means that the stress of cutting her nails and the wrath she unleashes is totally on me. Given that my right wrist flared up after I knocked it yesterday, it made me feel even more miserable. There I was, in pain, trying to cut my baby daughter’s nails and dealing with her screaming nonstop as a result of it.

This moment actually made me realize exactly how easy of a baby my daughter has been to date, though, and how grateful I am for it. She’s fairly predictable, and she rarely is upset without a reason, unless it’s teething. I hear other people complain about their babies – not eating, not sleeping, screaming a lot, hating people. We’re so lucky she’s been this easy going. It’s made the transition to parenthood that much easier and more enjoyable for us.

I had been looking forward to the day when I could make Kaia baby pancakes. I’m a huge pancake lover and hope she would be, too. So the first pancake I made her is quite simple: it’s just a mashed banana, an egg, a little semolina and all-purpose flour, plus some ground up walnuts for extra protein and nut exposure. I cooked them on a buttered pan and served them to her in small pieces so that she could practice her “pincer” grasp (putting her pointer finger and thumb together) this morning. She hasn’t been a huge fan of bananas to date, so I wondered if she’d detect the banana flavor in the pancake. She didn’t seem suspicious at all, though: as soon as I laid the pancake half and pieces of it in front of her, she immediately grabbed the pieces and started eating.. and eating, and eating. She kept wanting more. At the end, she had about 1.25 pancakes, which was more than I thought she’d eat. She loved the pancake! And she got her fill of banana, too!

The next pancake I want to make for her is pumpkin pancake. It is autumn officially now, after all, so why not introduce her to pumpkin, yet another solid food, plus some pumpkin spices mixed together?

Chris left early yesterday morning for San Francisco, so when Kaia started crying at around 5:45am, I knew I had to get up and soothe her. The pacifier didn’t work, and she refused to go back to sleep. So I did what we normally do when she refuses to go back to sleep early in the morning: I took her to our bed. She played a bit but still seemed unhappy after, so I decided to feed her a bottle a little early. When the nanny arrived at 8am, I told her what had happened, and she suggested I take a nap in the afternoon. I knew that would be a bad idea for my rhythms, but also because I had a lot of meetings during the day, so it would be inconvenient. I’d just have to suck it up and get through the day.

By the time the nanny left, I’d finished my work day, plus my third pump, which meant I could spend quality time with Kaia and not have to worry about being restricted by an electric nipple sucker. Everything went well in the evening: we played, she crawled everywhere and even worked up a little sweat, we read books and sang songs. But by the time of her bottle feed, I realized her teething must have been bothering her because she kept rejecting her last bottle. She would drink about 10ml, then stop and push the bottle away. And after drinking about 180ml, she flat out started screaming and crying at the top of her lungs. In the end, it lasted only about 20 minutes, but it felt like an eternity. My poor baby was in so much pain, and nothing was calming her down. I finally got her to stop crying by offering some spoonfuls of cold water, plus I put her on top of the AC for some vibration and cold, and that worked. Her Australian baby Tylenol and syringe made her angry, and she kept refusing it until I finally forced it into her mouth. After some more cuddles and soothing, she was finally asleep by about 9pm, when I got ready to do my fourth and last pump of the day before going to bed.

Of course, all these issues in the grand scheme of things are tiny, and they could easily have been a lot worse with a more ill-tempered baby. But isn’t it just convenient that these issues happened on Chris’s first day away on his work trip?

This week is Salesforce’s biggest conference of the year, Dreamforce, so Chris will be away until Friday in San Francisco for that. In the meantime, it will just be the nanny and I looking after Kaia, so I’ll be responsible for feeding her in the morning as well as right before bedtime. Given that I usually pump at 6pm now for my third pump once the nanny leaves, I figured I’d push that pump up to around 4-4:30 so that my evening hours with Kaia would be pump-free, which would allow more quality time with her (and no fear of spilling milk everywhere).

Thinking about balancing pumping and feeding her was really rough in the first twelve weeks. It’s why I was annoyed when Chris said he’d go back to work after 7 weeks of leave… even though he had 26 weeks of family leave in total. The frustration of balancing that also led to him going back on leave after about three weeks back at work. In that time, Kaia also was eating inconsistently and sometimes would like to “snack” on her bottle, eating a little here and there, and when you are also pumping, that snacking can really drive you up the wall, especially if you are the only person looking after her. Granted, she was a newborn, so it was hard to be mad at her, but it was still frustrating nonetheless. A newborn or any baby has no idea that when you are pumping, you are trying to give them milk to survive; they just know that they want what they want — when they want it.

But while thinking about feeding her each morning before I pump, I thought even more about how much harder mothers’ lives are than men’s, particularly in the baby stage of a child’s life. If I had, for example, had a week-long work trip, Chris’s life wouldn’t really change that much: he’d still be bottle feeding her, changing her, and putting her to sleep. He wouldn’t have to feed AND pump the way I do. If I were away, I’d still have to pump four times a day at this stage, and then I’d have the stress of figuring out how to store and cart all the milk back (I get a milk shipment perk through work when I do business travel, but I’ve never frozen milk before. And I’m not sure if I have high lipase milk, which means that the milk could take an “off” flavor after being frozen, resulting in baby rejecting it.. and I’m a little scared to try it because I hate even the idea of tossing milk down the drain). Because of this, during this period, I really have zero desire to travel for work at all without the baby being with me. I think about all the moms who have written in pumping groups about how when they gave up pumping and switched to exclusive formula feeding, they felt so liberated and like they finally had quality time with their babies. And given the balancing act, I get what they mean and why they made their decision. At the same time, I still feel excited and proud of myself when I see a lot of breast milk bottles on the top left hand shelf of our fridge. My boobs have done good.

Up until this year, we’d never really taken advantage of the play room in our building. I’d taken family and friends who visited to see it, but we never really made use out of it because they never brought kids, and we had no kids of our own up until this point. But given that Kaia is now 9 months old and crawling, I realized that now is the perfect time to get her using the play room. So I brought her there for about an hour this afternoon, and she got to explore the play house, the little matted castle where she can climb up a cushioned stairway, slide, and tunnel. She seemed a little apprehensive initially, but once I gave her an incentive (always, her pacifier or my phone), she went along with it. And to my pleasant surprise, with a little support, she was able to actively and enthusiastically climb up the stairs, which I personally thought were a bit wide apart. But she did it twice! I felt so proud.

My baby is growing so fast. It’s exciting and makes me happy, but makes me feel like time is passing too quickly. Enjoying these moments watching her grow and evolve sometimes doesn’t even seem to be enough. Sometimes, I just want to freeze time and hold her face in my hands and just stare at her and kiss her. My little baby is getting bigger and exploring a little more of the world every single day.

A relative on Chris’s side had gifted Kaia three different outfits when she was born in multiple sizes. She thoughtfully gave a gift receipt because she told us that the hardest thing with getting clothing gifts when her two kids were born was to fit the size of the clothing to the time of year and season when it would actually fit the kid. I’ve realized that this was definitely very relevant because I had to return almost all of the clothes from our baby registry that were gifted simply because the outfits were too warm to wear between 6-9 months, which is essentially summer time here when Kaia would mostly be wearing summery things.

“Kaia has no fall clothing,” our nanny announced to me yesterday while going through her drawers and in the closet. “She needs to have layers and coats. Are you going to get her some?”

We had so much, perhaps even too much clothing, for her first 9 months of life, particularly 0-3 month clothing. I had to actively cycle through certain outfits to ensure she’d at least wear them 3-4 times. Now, her clothing pile has dwindled down as she’s gotten bigger, so we now have to actually buy her clothes to fit her soon-to-be toddler self.

Since Kaia has started really crawling (a few weeks ago, she was “army crawling,” but now she’s REALLY crawling!), she’s definitely accumulated a few scratches here and there on her arms and legs. On top of that, she’s also inevitably managed to bump her head quite a few times. She’s already fallen off the bed once (ugh). While in a sitting position, she occasionally loses balance and falls backwards or sideways and knocks her head. This is fine if she’s on the bed, in her crib, or on the play mat (well, she does cry when she falls on the play mat…), but when it’s on our hardwood floors, it can be painful. Obviously it hurts, and so she usually lets out a cry of terror and shrieks bloody murder for a bit until she is soothed enough.

I always feel so bad whenever I hear her cry like this. I know it’s a normal part of development and growing up; it would be completely unrealistic (and inane) to try to protect her from every scratch or fall). If she never gets hurt, she will never learn and grow. But it still pains me to see her face scrunched up in pain and agony, and all I want to do is hold her to soothe her. But alas, most of the times when these incidents have happened, guess what… I’m tied up to my breast pump. And so I’m usually unable to soothe her, and Chris the savior dad (or what he calls himself, the “ultimate parent”) comes in. It’s another way that Chris gets to build a bond with our daughter that I’m not always able to given pumping. So when I think about mothers who gave up on nursing or pumping early on because they wanted to spend more quality time with their babies, I totally get it. It’s been a huge trade off, but I still stand by my decision to exclusively pump to give the best milk to my baby.