I am clearly biased, but I think my sweet Kaia Pookie is incredibly cute. She is so cute that sometimes, I just want to squish her little face and eat it. I still have no idea where the idea of “eating” someone or something cute came from, but alas, I use it when it comes to Pookster. I can’t help it; she is just super adorable. She doesn’t have her same fat rolls or chubbiness that I always admired from over a year ago, but sometimes, I still stare at her in wonderment and cannot really believe she is here with us. She is my sweet miracle baby, my bundle of joy that is growing and developing endlessly. She has lots of strong opinions and can be incredibly cheeky. She especially hates holding hands. She gets SO mad when you try to hold her hand while walking outside. It’s like she’s saying, let me be independent! Leave me alone! I will go where I want to go! The exception to this is when there’s a lot of strange, new people around, or when she wants help going up and down the stairs.

Oddly, though, since our Virginia trip last week, she randomly does want to hold hands. She will demand that her hand be held after getting out of her high chair at home post-meal time. She even wants her hand held while she’s in her stroller. She will either demand, “hold my hand!” or “hold me hand!” and then look up at us expectantly. I love these little moments so much because I know that sooner than we think, they will all be gone forever and just a distant memory. So I am still maniacally trying to capture all the moments as often as possible without totally running out of Google Cloud storage space.

As much as I can hope and dream about it, it’s very unlikely that Kaia will ever be fully bilingual in English and Mandarin Chinese. I probably speak Mandarin Chinese at barely a 5-6 year old level, if even that, and as I’m teaching her Chinese, I’m learning and re-learning Mandarin Chinese through helpful YouTube videos and even on Udemy. She’s mastered a lot of fruit, like how to say grapes or cherries in Chinese. She knows what I am saying when I tell her to watch, look, or listen. And recently, I’ve been trying to reinforce how to count from 1-10 in Chinese because she’s been learning that in school for English. So far, it looks like during their daily morning circle time, they are sticking to counting from just 1-10 in English now. So I tried to mirror this for her in Chinese.

Kaia easily counts from 1-10 in English. She’s been doing this for the last two months. Sometimes, she randomly will skip one or two numbers in the sequence when distracted, but she knows how to say all of them. I recently started adding in Chinese, and while she’d look at me contemplatively, I knew she was absorbing what I was saying just based on her thoughtful facial expression. This week, she’s counted up to ten, though it’s clear she’s a bit shyer around this: her voice is much softer as she says the numbers in sequence in Chinese, and as she gets to ten, her voice is almost a whisper. But when she finally did it, I couldn’t believe how proud I felt; I could tell she was feeling victorious as well! She had this big smile on her face and started bobbing her head back and forth. She loves to seek our approval, but I hope to instill in her a sense of pride for her own accomplishments and that many times, that can and should be enough.

I first introduced Kaia to lychees sometime in the autumn of last year, but there was a huge gap when she had no exposure to them until this summer. We bought them from a fruit vendor on the street in upper Manhattan, and then she totally got hooked on them. I got them once more in Chinatown, and since then, she randomly asks if we have lychees to eat (most of the time, we don’t, unfortunately).

When we were in Richmond, we went into a Vietnamese supermarket and found some at a reasonable price, so we bought a 2.2lb bag of them to eat back at the hotel. Given we had no high chair and no proper kitchen/dining setup, we’d undress her so she’d only wear her diaper, wash and peel the lychees in the hotel bathroom sink, then give them to her in pieces. She was always in heaven, constantly asking, “More? More?”

We brought some back with us when we returned to New York today, and we finished them off after dinner this evening. I’ve been teaching her how to say different food-related phrases in Chinese. So while she gets excited and wants to reach for the lychee shells and pits, I repeatedly tell her in Chinese “Bu chi! Bu chi! (don’t eat!). Now, after I peel a lychee, she points at the pits and shells and says gleefully, “bu chi! bu chi!”

Dear Ed,

Happy birthday. Today, you would have turned 44 years old. Today if you were alive, I would have made fun of you and called you old for being in your mid 40s. Unfortunately, dumb jokes about age and getting old and white-haired cannot happen since you aren’t here anymore. It’s still strange to me to think that you died 10 years ago. Ten years passed slowly, yet quickly all at the same time. Ten years ago, the thought of bearing children seemed quite far away, but today, Kaia is over 20 months old, thriving and growing right in front of my eyes. Sometimes when I look at her, I become very sad, knowing that the two of you will never meet. And I wonder what kind of relationship you would have had with her, how you would have spoiled her with endless clothes, accessories, and toys, how you would have played with her and read books to her and enjoyed each other’s company.

While it is pointless to think about what could never be, I still think about it quite often. I think about what life would be like if you were still here. I think it goes without saying that if you were still here, our parents would still not get along with you; hell, it’s not like our parents get along beautifully with me, nor did they ever. Their lives were stressed when you were here; their lives are still full of stress, but for reasons I am completely unaware of. I don’t really know if they would have more or less stress with you still here. That is unclear to me since everything for them is always miserable.

This year, I also thought about all my AFSP fundraising efforts in memory of you and if it really meant anything. This is the tenth year that I’ve participated in AFSP’s Out of the Darkness walk and fundraising for it in your honor. As the years have passed, the funds I’ve been able to raise have dwindled, and I can’t really blame people. People are always supportive of a cause when it’s brand new and freshly painful to the person fundraising. But after a while, it gets tiring and old. I do have a number of very loyal and generous donors who have tirelessly given money every single year since the beginning, but I am wondering now if I am asking for too much by continuing this. I work remotely and have been for the last 3 years, and so I haven’t had enough face time with colleagues to really hustle donations the way I used to at my previous two companies. I’m wondering what all of this is actually worth? But I’ll continue it anyway. I hope this is helping SOMEONE out there.

Or maybe I’m just speaking this way because I’m tired. I’m trying to find some meaning in all of this, and I’m not sure it’s identifiable. All I know is: I miss you, and I hate that you aren’t here anymore. I hate that you cannot meet Kaia and that Kaia will never know you. I will dread the day when I finally have to explain to her how you died. I will not enjoy explaining to her what suicide is and why people “do” it. I would also love it if no one could relate to losing a loved one to suicide. But that is a big, big request in a difficult world where we live.

I’m not feeling super optimistic right now, more just exhausted, also because I’ve been sick for about four weeks now, and just feeling like I need a break from life in general. I saw a glimpse of you in my dreams the other night, and for a split second, I actually thought it was real, that you were real again. But it was all gone when I woke up coughing.

I hope you will send me positive vibes from wherever you are. I love you and miss you. Hope you are thinking of us fondly.

Love,

Yvonne

Kaia has never really had any affinity to any stuffed animal. While she used to enjoy peekaboo with her elephant lovey that we named Shungu, and she occasionally grabs her elephant Babar and plays with his different sensory parts, she doesn’t seem to have an attachment to any stuffed animal. She’s never dragged a specific stuffed animal from one room to another or used one to sleep with. Once, I even wondered if it was abnormal for her to NOT have an attachment to a stuffed animal and even went down the Google rabbit hole of checking (it’s not a bad thing; in fact, over 50% of children don’t have attachments to any objects).

But we knew quite early on that she loved her books. She loves, loves reading, and now she loves repeating words and naming what things are in the books we read together. She goes through phases where certain books are her favorites, and she demands we read the same book over and over again. She will drag the book from one room to another as though it’s an animal friend. Currently, her favorite book is called Penguin and Pinecone, which is the story of how a penguin found a “friend” in a pine cone, but realized that they couldn’t grow and live in the same place because they needed different environments in which to thrive. Penguins need to be in cold areas, whereas pine cones need to be in the forest to thrive. But despite that, they always love and remember each other and their fun times together. The hilarious thing is that Kaia doesn’t seem to care about the penguin as you might assume; she is especially fixated on the pine cone. The last few nights, she has refused to let go of the book when we’re done reading it (you know, for the fifth time), and she ends up falling asleep either holding it or on top of it. I eventually have to sneak into the room after she’s fallen asleep to take it away. One night this week, she woke up after an hour to discover that the book was no longer with her, and she started crying, yelling, “Pine cone! Pine cone!”, until I returned the book to her side. She then immediately calmed down and went back to sleep.

Child development is so peculiar and fascinating. It’s been sweet and endearing to watch my baby grow into this very curious, thoughtful, cheeky toddler.

At school on the weekdays during morning circle time, Kaia’s class goes through a few routines, such as counting from 1-10, colors, shapes, days of the week, and body stretches/identification of body parts. The majority of the language used in class, unsurprisingly, is in English, but the teachers do work on introducing American Sign Language as well as a few words here and there in Spanish. I noticed that once Kaia started daycare in May that her affinity for Chinese songs had started to decline, so I’ve been a bit more deliberate about trying to continue her exposure to those songs at bedtime. In addition, I also try to do things like count in Chinese and discuss colors in Chinese, as well.

It’s hard to know sometimes what she understands and what she doesn’t given she’s still quite young. She’s increasingly verbal every single day. My Pookster is a total sponge, constantly studying what you’re saying, doing, and even how your lips are moving when you speak. Last night, we were counting in English and I transitioned to counting in Chinese and let her know I would count in Chinese. I asked if she could practice counting in Chinese. She initially looked at me thoughtfully, then climbed off the bed and made a beeline to the bookshelf. She immediately grabbed the Chinese counting/food book we have and handed it to me and demanded, “Read!”

That made me so, so happy. My baby does understand what I’m saying, and she also knows the difference between Chinese and English. Every day, I feel so excited and proud by her development. At the same time, it makes me feel a little sad that she’s growing so rapidly. Sometimes, I still have moments when I just want to bottle her up and freeze time to make a note of exactly how adorable, sweet, curious, and intelligent she is.

When Kaia was around 10 months old, she started pulling herself up to stand, whether it was on us or along furniture. She started cruising along furniture around the same time, and she was doing it quite quickly as she approached the one-year mark. Given she had no problems sitting up independently, getting into and out of a seated position, and cruising, the doctor said that she’d likely be walking within a month of her appointment in early January.

Well, that didn’t actually happen. Kaia continued cruising and pulling herself up, but she still showed zero interest in actually walking independently. She started using her pusher/walker more around the end of February and got really good with it in March, but still, every time we tried to encourage her to walk, she’d stand for up to a minute on her own and then immediately get down and crawl. She did the same thing when we would walk alongside her, holding her hands and guiding her. She either seemed scared or like she just had zero desire to walk.

So after the doctor suggested early intervention given she wasn’t yet walking independently by 16 months, I started reading more about how to encourage your baby to walk. I found a video that Emma Hubbard posted on YouTube about how to do this; she’s a pediatric occupational therapist from Australia, and I’d previously watched a number of her videos last year when tracking Kaia’s development. She suggested that we not keep Kaia’s arms up when walking with her, but instead, to either have them at her own arm/shoulder level or lower so that she could balance herself properly. In addition, she also suggested leveling baby at her waist, ensuring she’s square on her feet and her hips are firmly in position, then coaxing baby to come forward without holding your hands.

I spent over an hour doing this exactly activity this afternoon. Initially, Kaia resisted. She yelled and refused. She insisted on getting on her hands and knees and crawling. But after encouraging her in both English and Chinese, motioning her to come forward, and insisting she stand, she finally started standing and walking forward. She kept her arms out ahead of her or at her sides to keep her balance, and she would walk forward. At first, it was just four steps. But then four steps became eight, which became 16, which became too many to count at once. She grew faster and faster, and she started enjoying it and giggling nonstop. She then insisted that she continue walking and would even walk independently while clapping at her own efforts. It was the sweetest, most enjoyable afternoon to finally watch my baby reach this milestone.

Kaia still needs practice, of course, and needs to straighten one of her feet, but we can happily thank Emma Hubbard for her tips on how to encourage little bub to walk on her own. I am a very proud mama today. And it’s the last weekday before her first day at daycare/school!