Category Archives: Toddler moments

“No, no, no! No new shoes!”

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If I had to stereotype my child based on her gender, I would say that she most definitely does not act like a “typical” girl in that every single time I have gotten her a new pair of shoes, she gets angry and fights putting them on. She always wants what she is familiar and comfortable with on her feet. Granted, I haven’t indulged her too much in this regard because she doesn’t seem to have a strong preference (yet) for certain types/pieces of clothing, plus I am just very practical with most clothing given she will eventually outgrow it all (or get it all messy at school). So she’s really only had two pairs of shoes she regularly wore to daycare that she has since outgrown; two pairs of sandals, and now, two pairs of shoes she regularly wears to school. Today, I introduced her to a new pair of snow boots since it’s a snow day and Chris is taking her outside. When I showed them to her, she kept yelling “no!” over and over again, insisting she wanted her purple glitter shoes (which she also initially hated). When I finally put the boots on, she seemed to calm down and not really care anymore.

But what I’ve heard at school is funny: when I have come to pick her up, her teachers will gush and talk about how cute Kaia’s new shoes are. They told me that she would walk up to them at the beginning of the day, point down at her new purple or silver shoes, and say to them, “Look at my new shoes” with a big grin on her face.

Got it. So, let’s just get this straight: She brags about her new shoes to her teachers and friends at school, yet she screams and yells at me for getting her the freaking shoes in the first place. I see how the gratitude already is nonexistent from an early age…

“Ooh, this is good!”

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Kaia’s toddler selectivity continues. Some days, she will accept new food as though it’s the most delicious thing she’s ever seen or touched. Other days, she will simply turn her face away and say “no!” and refuse to give a new food a second look. Yesterday, we picked up some donuts and danish from a new spot we checked out in Morningside Heights. One of the items was a very well made, flaky cheese danish. We rarely give Kaia sweets, but we do give her the occasional bite or two of a croissant or pastry when we’re out. So we decided to let her try this danish.

She was wandering around the apartment and I asked her if she wanted some pastry. Her face perked up, and she followed me into the kitchen so that she could take a look. When I presented the plate to her, she took one look, then gave it some side-eye, and said, “no!” and walked away. Yet as she walked away, I made exaggerated motions and took a big bite, making “mmmmm” and “yummy” sounds. She stopped walking away, then inched closer to me, and finally she took off a pea sized piece of the danish and gingerly put it in her mouth.

“Ooooh, this is good!” she exclaimed, with a huge grin creeping over her face. “Tasty!” She then proceeded to rip off big hunks of the danish until she’d had about 80 percent of the entire damn pastry. I barely got three bites in and had to save two bites for myself at the end, insisting “Kaia ate it all” and there was “no more! all done!” And since I insisted she sit down on the kitchen floor and eat it, when she got up to leave and I wiped her face and hands clean, there was a humongous pile of flaky danish crumbs all over where she sat. Yep – that’s my life now – constantly cleaning, dust-busting, and wiping up after my toddler.

My love has not subsided around watching her try and eat new things. Whether it was when she was a wee baby at six months old just starting solids for the first time, until now, when she’s probably had at least 500+ types of food to date, I still love watching her facial expressions and hearing her verbal assessments, whether it’s through her “mmmms” or her “this is yummy!’ statements. She doesn’t always like everything, but when she does, it’s really priceless. Sometimes, I wish I could just bottle up each of her new food experiences and stick them on the wall to revisit and watch… over and over again.

Two-year-old toddler tantrums and whims: a continuing dialogue

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Almost like clock work, once Kaia turned two, it was as though she got the memo that the “terrible 2s” period had begun, and she started having all these tantrums over things she never really got upset about before. Before she turned 2, while she did have tantrums here and there, they weren’t that regular and were usually easily contained. Since then, not so much. If she doesn’t get what she wants when she wants it, she lays her entire body down, sprawled all over the floor, and just cries and screams. There’s no way to reason with her, so we just kind of let her lie there. I occasionally pat or rub her back and remind her that her mama is there, but there’s nothing else that can really be done until she calms down.

One thing that has been really frustrating is that her meals have been really unpredictable. Some days, she will eat pretty much everything she is offered. Other days, she might just eat a portion of pork, some blueberries, and then call it a day; that will be her dinner, and then she will go to bed. Vegetables at breakfast time have continued to be a no-go. Her lunch is also unpredictable. This past week, she had oddly even gone off noodles/pasta. I had made an aged gouda carbonara, and at best, she would pick at it and didn’t really care for it. My baby – not into noodles…?! She screamed and cried one night when I asked her just to have one bite of the carbonara… I just didn’t get it. So I stopped insisting and let her eat what she was willing to touch.

I try my best not to show any emotion when she has these signs of “toddler selectivity” and let it go. But it’s very challenging. Being a parent and trying to feign indifference at things like this is a huge test of one’s patience. You don’t really get it until you’re in this position. And yet even then, for many people who have gone past the toddler rearing years, they forget so easily! At least I will always have these memories documented so I can refer back to these when my memory fails me.

Museum of Play and Art (MoPA) in Sandringham

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A few months back, a friend who lives in the Melbourne area posted on Instagram that she brought her son to the Museum of Play and Art (MoPA) in Sandringham. We ended up meeting there for a play date on Boxing Day for both our kids, who are within 6 months of age of each other. MoPA is a big children’s museum that has two locations in the Melbourne area, in Sandringham and Geelong, and when you book your ticket, you pay for a session play period, usually 2-2.5 hours depending on the day. Unlike the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, though, there’s both structured and unstructured play. The museum is spaciously laid out with areas designated by both theme (science, math, reading, motion, etc.), and appropriate age range. I was shocked to see how modern and fun some of the areas were. The whole place was extremely colorful and eye-catching; I could totally see how parents would buy annual memberships to a place like this. They had actual mini buildings you could climb into and on top of, huge slides, bouncy areas, and even a real car that kids could paint (with supervision from their staff). For structured activities, such as painting, dance club, and arts & crafts, they not only had dedicated staff members get each child ready for the activity and supervise, but they would also provide children all the necessary tools needed to participate.

I think the biggest value in going to a place like this is that there’s both structured and unstructured play. The kids can learn and explore on their own, and also be taught to; some of the activities mimic what they would get in a school or daycare center. There are some parts that are meant for self exploration, as well as areas where it would be helpful for them to be guided along by a caretaker. Given we had only two hours, it definitely did not feel like enough to explore the whole place. But at least we always have next year to explore and have Kaia return (the appropriate age range for the museum is between 1-7 years).

I was also impressed by the food offerings and the price points at the cafe in the museum. They had properly brewed coffee (we enjoyed flat whites), a delicious, not-too-sweet chia seed pudding (which I ended up enjoying more than Pookster, who only took about two bites before deciding she was all done), and a very gourmet sausage roll, which had roughly cut beef mince along with a number of different veggies inside. And for the three items I got, it all came to just $12 USD. The only thing I thought was extremely marked up were the baby/toddler fruit/veggie pouches, which were probably about 5-7x what you’d see at a local Cole’s or Wooly’s.

The paint spill on Boxing Day 2023

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A couple weeks ago, Chris’s dad had told us that he was doing some minor paint touch ups around the house. I had noticed the cans of paint at the sides of the garage when coming and going from the house, but never thought much of it. Chris’s parents’ house has a two car garage that when you add a lot of paint and gardening supplies, plus just household tools and files, feels crowded and borderline cluttered. Once the two cars are in the garage, it’s a tight squeeze to get in between the vehicles, and often when coming in with the second car, passengers in the backseat (as in, Pookster and I) will need to get out of the car before it’s fully pulled in and parked.

Well, despite Pookster being an active toddler running around everywhere, grabbing and ripping things, and causing mischief galore, we luckily have not had anything in the house break or get misplaced in our 2.5 weeks here. So when we were about to leave the house today to head over to Chris’s uncle’s house for Boxing Day family festivities, an accident finally occurred. With Pookster in my arms and her fat, stuffed diaper bag on my back, I was squeezing between the second car and multiple cans of paint and supplies when suddenly I felt the diaper bag knock something heavy and… BAM! A can of paint fell over, the lid fell off, and white paint oozed out all over the garage floor and into the driveway.

“Shit! Shit! SHIT!” I yelled, as I saw the white paint flow down the slight incline. Chris peered over from where he was by the car and had a frustrated look on his face. I went to tell his parents and asked if they had any paint thinner, and we all had to spring into action, and quickly. We sopped up as much paint as possible with throwaway rags, random paper bags and paper towels lying around, and plastic bags. We took out a bottle of turpentine to remove the paint residue as best as possible. We used the hose to spray and loosen the paint. We had to use the turpentine on our own hands to remove the paint we got on ourselves. All the while as we’re scrambling to ensure nothing gets permanently damaged, Kaia is sitting in her car seat in the car with a door open, singing endless different songs and babbling away as though everything was merry and bright.

Chris, Pookster, and I left to go to Chris’s uncle’s first, while Chris’s parents and his brother took the second car to go, but stopped by a hardware store to see if they had more turpentine. They told a worker there what happened, and they advised to not let the paint dry and to address the matter as soon as possible. So in the end, Chris’s dad stayed behind to clean and hose down the excess paint, and just Chris’s mom and brother came to the family gathering. I felt pretty terrible knowing that I had not only delayed getting to the family gathering for us, but also created extra work and stress for everyone, and potentially the worst thing was making Chris’s dad feel compelled to stay behind and clean the remaining residue. But after it was all done, we just talked about how lucky we were that a) Kaia and I didn’t fall and get covered in paint, and b) the car closest to the paint didn’t get damaged or have any paint on it.

And really, the moral of this paint story is…. declutter, declutter, declutter. Ugh.

Christmas in Australia: Santa comes around the airport, too!

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The attack on and demonization of Christmas has been going on in the U.S. for decades now, if not longer. You can’t say “Merry Christmas” without someone looking at you strange in the U.S. and someone on the far left insinuating you’re not being inclusive. The far right demonizes this and makes the entire situation worse. Since I’ve spent my entire full-time working life employed by digital marketing or technology companies, saying “merry Christmas” is not something that is acceptable in a group setting, and everyone feels forced to say a generic “happy holidays” message when it is Christmas time. This is supposedly to be sensitive to those who are Jewish, Muslim, or just don’t celebrate Christmas. This is ridiculous since any Jew you know will tell you that Hanukkah, while a holiday in Jewish culture, is not a big deal at all, with no real decorations or associated gift giving (the gift giving, from what I’ve been told, only really started because of the gift giving around Christmas and that influence). In addition, even in many non-Christian majority countries or majority Muslim countries, people celebrate Christmas in a secular way, meaning they embrace the Christmas trees and decorations, Rudolph the red-nose reindeer, and Santa, but they don’t really celebrate it as the birthday of Jesus Christ (and well, any real Christian can tell you that it’s not REALLY Jesus’s actual birthday, anyway!). The majority of my friends who celebrate Christmas celebrate in a secular way and are in no sense Christian, yet even most of them feel compelled to say “happy holidays” to each other. It’s annoying and exhausting.

I had to exercise a lot of restraint and keep silent while on a work call a few days ago when someone on Zoom said, “Hope you all have a happy holiday if you celebrate this weekend (um, there’s only ONE known holiday this weekend, and it’s CHRISTMAS). And if you do not, hope you all have a restful time off.” Why couldn’t she just have replaced the word “holiday” with “Christmas?” Is “Christmas” really such an evil word? N

So you can probably imagine that when I tell friends and colleagues in the U.S. how easily and readily and often people wish each other a “happy Christmas” or “merry Christmas” in Australia that they are pretty surprised. People don’t get offended by it. My general response or thought back would be, if someone wished me a happy Kwanzaa or happy Rosh Hashanah, why the hell would I get offended? And you know Christmas is embraced by all here, even if you don’t celebrate it or identify as Christian, when there is an actual Santa Claus who walks around the major airports here with an elf and a big sack of gifts to pass out to young children in transit; this would be very hard to imagine happening in any U.S. airport, ever.

Kaia met Santa twice going to and from Bundaberg at the domestic airports here. At the Melbourne airport, Santa walked up to her at our gate and presented her with a stuffed kangaroo with a little joey in her pouch. And on our way back to Melbourne at the Brisbane airport between our connecting flights, Santa appeared again at the entrance of the Qantas lounge, where she was given a set of special edition Qantas 3-5-year old-size pajamas with the kangaroo logo redone so that the kangaroo had a glittery red nose, sparkling gold antlers, and a name on the front of the pajama top reading: Roodolph. It was so sweet and special, yet I have a feeling that Chris, Chris’s dad, and I were going to enjoy and appreciate this far more than Kaia ever would for a long, long time.

So the TL;DR of this is really: Christmas is better in Australia than in the U.S. And I can walk around with dancing Santas or blaring red and green Christmas baubles on my head here, and no one will do a double take because I will blend right in.

The dancing and singing Santa in front of the barber shop

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Today, we met up with Chris’s friend, husband, and their two daughters for brunch at a fun, kid-friendly brunch spot called Eastwood. Next door to Eastwood was a little barber shop that had a life-sized dancing Santa in front of the store. When you click a button by the Santa’s feet, it starts singing all different Christmas songs and dancing, moving both its arms and legs. As you’d imagine, the three kids were completely enchanted by this Santa. Kaia has just been getting acquainted with Santa in the last week, having seen him walking around the Melbourne and Brisbane airports and lounges twice already. Our friends’ younger daughter, who can be a little feisty, was a bit rough with the Santa. The owner of the shop popped out once to let her lightly know that the kids could get hurt if they were too aggressive with the Santa. He was so gentle and warm with the kids that it seemed like he was more worried about their safety rather than whether the kids would break his dancing Santa. Eventually, he took the Santa back into the shop, but I thought he exercised a high amount of patience and restraint given what the youngest kid was doing with his Santa.

I imagined the same thing happening in the U.S., and I imagined it would have been more of a scold to the parents rather than the shop owner addressing the kids nicely. In the U.S., kids are seen as a nuisance and a liability, whereas here, they seem to blend into society more and be accepted as actual tiny humans. It was actually sweet to see the exchange between the shop owner and the kids.

Kaia’s obsession with menus and the woman who saves the day with a menu

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In the last couple of months, Kaia has become obsessed with menus at restaurants. When we sit down at a table, she will immediately grab one of our menus and prevent us from actually reading it. So oftentimes, we will have to share a menu between the two of us while she fusses with hers, flipping the pages (if it’s multiple pages) or thrashing it in the air. While eating at Grunske’s the other day, she was super attached to the menu. When the server came by to take them, she was still intently playing with it when the server removed it from her hands (with some resistance) and walked away. Pookster immediately had a melt down, crying with big fat tears streaming down her face. Yet out of nowhere, a nice woman came and gave Kaia her menu. She turned towards us with a sympathetic expression on her face.

“I can’t believe that mean server just took the menu away from you!” the woman said to Kaia. She then turned to us. “I mean, she was in the middle of reading her menu happily, and then she just grabbed it and took it away without any regard for her! She deserves to take as much time as she wants to read the menu! This age is just so precious and goes by so quickly! I hope you enjoy her as much as you can!”

It’s so true, though. Little kids at Kaia’s age have big feelings, and they don’t have all the words to verbally express themselves. We give them orders all day long, especially telling them they can’t do this, can’t touch that. We take things like menus at restaurants away from them without thinking they have any autonomy. From their perspective, it’s a LOT. This nice woman’s intervention made me think more about how having a toddler slows you down… and frankly, it should. We really should think more about their feelings and go at a slower pace for them to take everything in around them. It would probably benefit us all to slow down and stop going through life so quickly.

Pookster: 2 going on 12-13

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Pookster, as with almost all our trips, has adjusted really well to the 16-hour time difference this past week. Every night, she has slept the full night in her own (floor) bed. The only area that’s been a bit iffy is whether she knows what time it is to eat and when she’s actually hungry. But I’ll take the sleeping-through-the-night over the all-over-the-place eating/hunger any day. I know she will make up for the calories at some point later.

But I will say: fighting with her over getting her into her high chair or putting on her silicone bib to eat is not fun. The other day, I chased her around the kitchen area after telling her it was time to eat dinner.

“Pooks! It’s time to eat dinner!” I called.

“No! No!” she yelled back, running away.

I followed behind her, holding her bib and positioning it so that I could put it around her neck.

“Yes, it’s dinner time!”

She turned back, glared at me, and then turned her back towards me. “No! I do what I want!”

Chris’s mom and I both did a double take and looked at each other, then started laughing. Did she really say what we think she just said? And who the heck taught her how to say that…?! She just turned 2, but she’s already giving me all this attitude and grief! I was not prepared for this!

First family photo shoot that goes a bit awry

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A few months ago, I started thinking about booking an outdoor family photo shoot session for the three of us while in Melbourne. I had originally thought of the idea for our Australia trip last year, but I thought that given Kaia wasn’t walking yet back then that the photos may not be as interesting. So I decided to start looking into it for this year when she’d be 2 years old and more active. Unfortunately, what that also meant is that at this age, she has a more acute “stranger danger” and gets scared or mad at new people getting close to her. I hesitated to book it given her stranger danger, but I thought, why not? The vast majority of family photographers are used to “stranger danger” and getting kids of her young age to smile and be silly in photos, so I figured her experience as a photographer would help ease Kaia into the session.

While it may have been a bit cliche to do a photo shoot at the beach boxes on Brighton Beach if we lived in Australia, it seems more fun and unique since we live in New York, so we decided on that location. For dates that worked with us, this morning was the only time that worked, and when you want the optimal light for an outdoor photo session, a good photographer will insist that your session either be at dusk or dawn. So we had to suck it up and get all of us up early for the shoot. At least it was just a two minute drive from Chris’s parents’ house.

Our photographer was sweet, friendly, patient, and efficient. Unfortunately, even with the snacks we packed Kaia, she still fussed and got really upset at our photographer’s presence. It also probably did not help that we started at 7:30, so we had to cut Kaia’s breakfast short, which caused a lot of tantrums. In addition to that, it was extremely windy on the beach and a bit cold given what we were wearing, and though Pookster usually enjoys the wind, you could actually see her shivering and have goosebumps on her arms. She refused to walk almost the entire time. I would be shocked if our photographer got even a few photos of Kaia smiling. But somehow, our photographer was gracious and helpful the whole time with suggestions, and she made it all work.

Welp. We paid for the photo session, so it is what it is. I’m positive that there were at least a handful of photos that were good that we’d want to frame and display. But I do know for sure that if I book another family photo session, I will make sure that a) Kaia is old enough to follow directions and not have stranger danger anymore, and b) if any way possible, to control for the weather/wind. I guess that’s why so many families do indoor photo sessions, either in their own homes or at a studio, so that they don’t have to worry about the weather!