Ever since I got pregnant with Kaia, I’ve thought a lot about a lot of my privileges as a mother, but especially in regard to time. Since I work remotely and have a flexible job, on average, I have far more time than the everyday parent of a young child to really engage with and spend time with my child. I notice her little changes every single day, what new words or phases she is speaking (and in what language), the movements she is progressively learning with how much more agile she becomes and grows into her body. In real time, I marvel over her development and growth. I admire how she’s able to see the world through such a sweet, innocent lens. As a toddler, Kaia can see the sheer, pure beauty in things and the simple magic in everyday life. I think a lot about what I love about motherhood/parenthood the most, and while this is quite a large category, I truly believe that what I enjoy the most is watching her discover new things and react to them with such a young, sweet joy.

I love it when she sees the trains coming in and out of the subway stations, and when they come and go, she waves hello and goodbye to them, sometimes yelling, “Hi!” and “Bye Bye!” loudly, eliciting smiles and compliments from nearby strangers. Sometimes when I am holding her hand and she wants to wave to the incoming/outgoing train, she yells at me and says, “Mama! Stop holding my hand! I have to wave bye bye to the train!”

I love when she relishes and gets excited about a new piece of clothing, usually a dress or skirt or swimsuit. I can feel myself smile hard when she discovers that she can twirl in a long-skirted dress or when there is a food or animal she likes on her swimsuit, like ice cream or popsicle or bird or tiger. I admire her admiring herself while twirling over and over and watching herself in the mirror.

And sometimes, even when it’s frustrating, I even like her cheeky stubbornness when it comes out because it’s so adorable (well, it is for now…). As of late, when we insist she has to do something she doesn’t really want to do, she will express exasperation and say, “Okay, fine!” – with major emphasis on the “fine!”

It’s even cute when she insists she gets the last “big” bite of something delicious, whether it’s an ice cream cup we’re sharing or a luxurious cherry rhubarb muffin (as we recently enjoyed from ACQ Bakery in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn). Kaia will exclaim in protest, “But I want the last big bite! You have to share! SHARING IS CARING!”

I think about when my mom was a young parent of one… and then two. I think about how she was always so pressed for time and had pretty much zero time to herself to rest and recharge. She didn’t have much quality time one-on-one with either of her kids. She had a rigid full-time job with zero mobility. She had a husband who was stuck on outdated gender roles. My mom was constantly multi-tasking and always worrying about what was coming next. And I feel sad sometimes when I think she probably wasn’t able to really enjoy and soak in these little moments. Like many mothers of her generation, she had to do almost all the housework and child-rearing… on top of a full-time job. When was she really able to stop and truly observe her children growing up in front of her very eyes? And then out of nowhere, both her kids grew up and became adults. Our childhoods wrapped up and came to an end. One of them died tragically. The other moved all the way across the country and sees her only about once a year now.

Being present in your kid’s life is a huge thing regardless of whether they are three days old, three years old, thirteen years old, or thirty years old. Every person on earth wants to feel loved, appreciated, listened to and understood, and like they matter. Everyone wants to be seen. While I feel sad that my mom wasn’t able to be fully present in Ed’s or my life, I feel very grateful and privileged that I have the ability to be truly present in Kaia’s life and enjoy watching her grow, moment by moment. I have a lot of luxuries in my life, but this is really one of the biggest luxuries I am privileged to enjoy.

In the last week, through an Australian expat group, Chris found out about a kids’ play space that would be fun for Kaia. Space Club has two locations, one in Fort Greene and one in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It’s open 365 days a year and is $39 for one child accompanied by one adult for a two-hour play session. Any additional time is $15/hour. It seemed like a reasonable price given the cost of rent in New York City, plus what they offered.

The space was really thoughtful and well done. They have magna-tile and Lego building areas. There are walls that kids can put letters on or play on with sequin designs. There is a huge maze that goes up and down in various ways with slides that dive into a “star” pit. They have a glow-in-the-dark room with endless stars and spelling areas. There are sound and music areas. They have different types of swings, ladders, and ropes. The beading room, where you can literally swim in beads and make (and take!) as many necklaces and bracelets as you want, was a huge end playtime highlight for Kaia, who got to bead her very first handmade necklace. There’s also a cute cafe area with sanitizing wipes and big paper towel rolls, an Aussie-inspired, reasonably priced menu, and two spacious single restrooms with wet wipes, stools for littles to reach the sink, a nursing area, and clean open counters for you to rest any of your endless kid supplies/bags on. Space Club has Wi-Fi for any parents/caregivers who need to work or browse their phones.

Needless to say, Kaia was obsessed and did not want to leave. I also had a friend and their child come along, and their kid loved the play space, as well. I am already thinking about when I want to take her back here to enjoy other parts of the space that she didn’t get to play in much. New York needs more spaces like this that are affordable and creative for littles.

This is a bit embarrassing to admit, but I did not learn how to do a proper braid until I was 33. I got inspired while we were in Bali when I saw all these braiding services on offer on every street and alley we walked down. I admired all the braids by tourists who were willing to pay for these services. And so I looked up some quick videos on YouTube to teach myself how to do a proper braid and a Dutch style braid (it’s just a backwards braid that points downward). I didn’t have the patience to look at French or twisted braids; that seemed too advanced for me. Maybe one day if I had a daughter, I thought, that could be my time to teach myself how to French braid.

Well, I’ve done a few basic braids for Kaia once her hair got long enough; now, it’s very, very long. She tolerated them for a bit a year ago, and now, she can barely sit still for a pony tail with me. However, she always, always sits still for teachers at school who want to braid her hair. Lately, Ms. Anna, her Chinese teacher, has been indulging her and doing the most complex twists and double French braids in her hair. She comes home from school with these beautiful knots that are not only tightly wound, but also very straight and even. It’s clear when she prances around that she is absolutely obsessed with her hair-dos.

The other day, I asked her if she wanted her mama to braid her hair. She gave me a disapproving look.

“No, you can’t braid my hair, mama!” Kaia exclaimed. “Only Ms. Anna can braid Kaia’s hair!”

Welp, I guess I missed my window.

We finally had a success last night! I was able to estimate the time of Kaia needing to pee early enough so that she did not wet the bed, and actually peed in the potty! I originally came to her bed at around 11:30, and she sleepily told me she did not need to pee. I laid with her for another 45 minutes, and then at around 12:15, she came with me to the bathroom with little resistance and urinated! Then, she insisted that she “wants mummy” to lie down with her. So I laid with her for about an hour and 15 minutes. I tried to sneak back out to my own bed, but she came out to look for me. As she stood in the hallway at around 1:30am, I asked if she needed to pee. She said nothing but wandered into her bathroom and turned on the light. I pulled her shorts down, placed her on her potty seat, and she urinated the second time that night. I had a pretty good feeling when I set an alarm for Chris to wake her up to pee at around 3am.

Chris had her successfully pee again at around 3am. I passed out and barely noticed that wakeup. When I woke up again just before 6:30am, she had come into our bed… with dry shorts. We didn’t have any wet bed situation, no soiled shorts to throw into the laundry, and no pee-stained Kaia to clean up this evening! It’s been our first fully successful night! We celebrated, gave her many hugs, kisses, and high fives, and I told her that if she kept this up, she’d be that much closer to getting her requested and much wanted pink and purple nail polish!

Now, the question is: can we keep eye balling correctly her pee windows and keep her dry so that she will then want to wake up on her own to pee?

Last week, Kaia’s school sent out a message to all families that a “Moving Up to Pre-K” ceremony and celebration would be happening today at school. It would include some speeches, a slideshow of the kids throughout the school year, a performance by the kids in Kaia’s 3K class, and then end with a lunch celebration with the families. Although I am familiar with preschool/Pre-K “graduations” (I myself had a preschool graduation), I didn’t realize that schools gave ceremonies for kids who were in 3K moving up to preschool. It could be a new thing — who the heck knows? It feels like a bit of a participation trophy, but I guess that could be argued for preschool, elementary, and middle school graduation, as well. All I know is that we were given about a week’s notice for this, and we were asked to contribute money for the lunch — what joy!

So Chris and I both came today. I had known that Kaia had been singing some mysterious Chinese song I didn’t recognize, and I suspected it was a “surprise” song for the performance today, so I didn’t press the teachers when they didn’t send me all the names of the Chinese songs Kaia was singing parts of at home. Our administrator gave a speech and showed a photo slideshow, followed by the main teacher of the class giving a speech (or, well, reading off a piece of paper and having zero eye contact with any of the audience), followed by two dances from the kids. One was an English song about growing up/moving to the next stage. The second dance was to a Chinese song called “Gan Xie Lao Shi” (“Thank you, teacher”). The English song and dance were really cute. The Chinese song and dance, however, totally made me tear up. I am not sure what it is about Chinese melodies or words, but this completely had me getting emotional and feeling like my baby was floating further away from me. It’s not like the Chinese song is expressing anything particularly more complex or deep than the English song. But there’s this line in the song once you translate it that says, “Thank you, teacher, for helping me grow up / Your cute smiling face will stay in my heart … You are a beautiful angel.” Everything always feels deeper and more emotional in other languages than English for me. I am not sure why. I also thought the same thing when I have seen texts translated from French or Japanese.

I still can’t believe my baby has just over a week left of 3K. Then, she has summer camp (at the same school), then it’s officially preschool in September. It’s like time just flew by so quickly. She grew these long limbs. She lost her baby fat and pudge. She can speak coherent sentences now that people other than Chris and I understand. She can use words like, “but,” “yesterday,” and “tomorrow” and know what she’s actually saying. My mom said to me on the phone the other day that I should try as much as I can to, “enjoy with her now… because soon, she will grow up and be like you… want to do her own thing.” She didn’t mean it in a mean or spiteful way; she said it in a very wistful, sad tone. My mom had it infinitely harder than me, as she managed and raised two kids, all in the midst of a demanding and demeaning mother-in-law and a pretty useless husband when it came to child-rearing and managing a household — all on top of a rigid full-time job that was fully in office. I don’t blame her for not being “there” for me as much growing up since she also worked full time. I’m lucky I can have quality time with Kaia and really enjoy our moments together. Sometimes, I still want to freeze time so I can just hold her sweet face in my hands and admire how beautiful and intelligent she is. In the slideshow, they did a photo juxtaposition of each kid the first week of 3K and then this last week — they’ve all grown and matured so much! It’s just so hard to believe it went by this quickly. I guess that’s what parenting is all about, isn’t it — watching your babies evolve into tiny humans and then big humans.

Our original goal was that by the end of this summer (hopefully sooner), we’d have Kaia out of pull-ups overnight. Once we get her out of pull-ups overnight, Pookster will officially be 100 percent diaper free (because, yes, as the Oh Crap! training lady says, pull-ups are still diapers). Last summer, she got the peeing down pretty quickly with an accident here or there. The pooping took some time as expected, but she got it within a reasonable amount of time. After our Australia/China/Hong Kong trip late last year into this year, we stopped carrying around the little potty, so she knows she has to use the big potty (with a toddler seat on top). Day time training was relatively painless for us, especially when I see all the potty training horror stories in my parent groups. Night time training, while we attempted to do it the first week we did day time training, did not go well at all. I still remember that last August, I successfully got her to pee in the little potty overnight just once. And then, several hours later, she still wet the bed for her second nightly pee. With warm summer weather now, we thought it would be easier to try to clean her up and have her wear little shorts to bed to minimize dirty laundry.

Chris’s cousin had suggested that we begin overnight training by simply not sending her to bed in any pull-up. This way, she’d realize how sticky and uncomfortable it was, and that would urge her to pee in the potty. Well, we are on night three of consecutively going without any pull-up, and somehow, she seems to show zero desire to get out of bed to urinate at night. We know she’s wet the bed/herself when she wakes up crying for us, or if she walks all the way over to our bed and says, “I wet” (I still love and cannot get over the cuteness of how incorrect that sentence is. I am lightly dreading the day when she comes over and says, “I am wet” or “I’m wet.” It’s like the other night when I went out with a friend for the evening. I told her I’d be back when she was asleep. And she came over at 5am with a huge grin on her face and declared, “Mumma, you came back!” instead of a month or so ago when she said, “Mumma, you back!” I loved the evolution in the sentence and hated it all at the same time. My baby’s youth was slowly slipping away in front of my eyes…. and ears).

We shall see how this goes. But unfortunately, I have a feeling that the Oh Crap! training lady will have it right in the end; I’m probably going to have to go down the damn “guesstimating” route of trying to guess which two windows at night are when she is most likely to pee and drag her to the toilet. The fun that awaits!

One of the very first hands-on, fascinating science experiments I did in elementary school was when I was in first grade. In our class, we were studying the lifecycle of a butterfly, and we had caterpillars that we were housing in a protective environment. One big distinction I remember when I was six years old is that the teacher emphasized that a butterfly’s protective casing (or “house”) during its pupal stage is called a chrysalis. The chrysalis “house” is hard and smooth on the outside. This is different from a moth, which uses a cocoon, made of silk. And yes, butterflies and moths are not the same. I was never great at science. I was okay at biology, decent at chemistry, and horrible with physics. But this one fact about a chrysalis and a butterfly I remember until this very darn day — all because of that first grade lesson plan.

So when I got a copy of the famous and popular children’s book by Eric Carle called The Very Hungry Caterpillar (via my local Buy-Nothing group — yay!), I got annoyed when we reached the part of the book where the caterpillar builds “a small house, called a cocoon, around himself.” This would have been all fine and dandy had he become a moth. But no, he turned into a beautiful butterfly as the book so clearly states! So instead of calling it a “cocoon” as the book does, I would correct it and tell Kaia that it’s a chrysalis. She never had a reaction to it any of the countless times I’ve read this book with her. Chris would troll me and tell me that I didn’t actually read that part of the book correctly, but I didn’t care. Get the facts straight! Understanding facts (and fake news) starts early — as in NOW!

In the last couple weeks, Kaia’s class has been doing a lesson on butterflies. And so they’ve also watched the metamorphosis of a butterfly…. not a moth. While giving Kaia a shower this evening, she randomly talked about butterflies and what she was learning in school, and she exclaimed, “Butterflies come from a chrysalis!”

I shrieked with joy and started clapping my hands vigorously. Kaia got really excited and started squealing with delight at my reaction. And Chris, having overheard this from outside the bathroom, once again came in to troll me and said, “You meant the cocoon!”

This seriously made my day today. I was so happy after she said this. I felt like a very proud parent of her child. My baby is going to know the real facts, not the made up ones!

There’s a lot to love about parenting a toddler. There’s also a lot that will make you want to rip your hair out and ask yourself why you ever thought becoming a parent is a good idea. “Character building” is certainly one way to put what parenting does to you when you are, in fact, an active parent who actually cares about your offspring.

Last night, we were eating the last of our first batch of lychees for the season. I finally taught Kaia how to peel lychees on Sunday. She already knew how to eat around the pit, as she does with cherries, but this was the first time I actually forced her to peel them herself. Though she initially resisted with her favorite line of, “I don’t know how to!”, she ended up complying after I gave her a small head start by peeling off a tiny piece of one’s shell. As she peeled more and more, she got faster and faster. Kaia even started peeling off huge, long pieces and getting excited by how large the peels were getting. Her focus was very clear as she was peeling each one, and she was definitely getting prouder of herself with her increased speed and peeling off larger sections at once with each following lychee. As I multi-tasked with cleaning and also sitting with her, she insisted that, “Mumma, sit down!” I want you to peel lychees with me.” I tried to offer her a few of the ones I peeled, but she was so sweet; she said I should have them and she will peel her own. It was so cute for her to insist that I sit with her and do this new activity together, and that I also be able to enjoy the lychees alongside her.

Well, that sweetness was then all washed away when the next morning, while eating her organic Whole Foods “cheerios,” out of nowhere she asked for the healthy chocolate muffins I made. We’d run out of those before we left for Guatemala, so I wasn’t sure why she suddenly asked for them. I told her we didn’t have anymore, that she had eaten them all, so she couldn’t have any. Well, that wasn’t the right answer (duh), and she proceeded to have a melt down. “I didn’t eat them all! No, I didn’t!” she yelled.

She cried, yelled, screamed, and kicked up until the point it was time to go to school. Throughout that period, she yelled multiple times, “I don’t want you! I don’t like you, Mumma! GO AWAY!”

Chris always laughs and finds it amusing when she says this. He likes to remind me (because he is a mean husband) that she says that to me at least several times a week. There’s also a subtle implication that she doesn’t say that to him as often. However, I do not fall for the bait, and I say little in response whenever he brings this up. I do not need to deal with the ridiculous concept of parental rivalry in the emotional whims and immaturity of a toddler.

When I was at lunch with my friend on Monday, I shared similar extremes of Kaia to let her know what parenting is like on the average, typical day of someone in her age range. My friend gave me this sour look and laughed.

“It’s no wonder people who become parents stop having sex!” she said to me. “Who wants to have sex when you’re exhausted as fuck by all that?!”