Crawling and more head bumping

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Obsessing over salt for baby

Posted on by
Reply

All parents want to do what is best for their kids regardless of the choices that they make. So when I read about how immature babies’ digestive systems are when it comes to processing salt, I decided that I wanted to do my best to keep table salt out of Kaia’s diet as much as possible before the age of 1. What this ultimately meant was not allowing her to taste food at restaurants or food that’s pre-prepared, and looking at all canned or jarred items like tomatoes, sauces, or even peanut butter, to ensure no salt was on the ingredients list. But a little salt here and there would not hurt them: I’d already given her some ricotta and goat cheese, both of which have a little salt, but not too much (cheese is not cheese with salt, by definition). And she really loved both. Plus, I wanted to expose her to kimchi, and the Solid Starts app suggested rinsing it of excess salt and hot pepper, and she gobbled this up. One day last week, when I was multitasking, I finely minced kimchi for her and completely forgot to rinse the salt off. And in the middle of her feed when our nanny was feeding her, I remembered and panicked and ran out of the room to tell her. Our nanny nearly jumped out of her seat.

“You scared me!” she exclaimed. “I thought a real emergency happened!”

I told her I had forgotten to rinse the kimchi of the excess salt, but she had already fed some of it to Kaia. And granted, there was barely a teaspoon of kimchi in total on her plate, but I still felt bad. Our nanny reassured me that this would not kill her.

“A little is fine,” our nanny insisted. “She’s going to have some salt eventually, and she’s already getting some from the kimchi even when it’s rinsed because you can’t get it *all* off. It’s okay. Don’t worry so much about it. Plus, you can tell she LOVES it.”

Of course she does. Human beings are wired to enjoy salty things. But… It’s hard not to worry a little, though. I don’t want her to get addicted to salty foods or depend on salt for flavor. I don’t want her kidneys to malfunction because she has too much salt. There are lots of worries all parents have about setting their kids up for success as early as possible, and in this case, it’s in the realm of eating. As she approaches 9 months of age in a couple days, she’s just around the corner from her 1-year birthday, and so eventually, I will need to stop obsessing about the salt and just focus on making sure she’s getting a well-rounded diet.

Thanksgiving in Europe again – 2022

Posted on by
Reply

After seeing how well Kaia did on her flight to and from San Francisco, Chris got excited and started looking into flights to go to Europe for Thanksgiving. We haven’t been to Europe or anywhere for Thanksgiving since 2019. 2020 was obviously a lost year given COVID, and in 2021, I was just weeks away from my due date. He booked a trip for us to spend Thanksgiving week in Munich, so we’d be able to experience the famous German Christmas markets again, but in different cities. In 2013 when we went, we experienced the Christmas markets in Berlin and Hamburg, which were incredible, but Munich is supposed to have even more lavish ones if I can even imagine it. And this time, Kaia will be with us. Even before she was born, Chris kept talking about how much he wanted her first Thanksgiving to be in Germany to experience the Christmas markets there. He wanted us to start traveling again and get used to being out and about with her, and he thought it would be a fun memory to share with her when she got older. Plus, she’d be able to see endless photos of herself in Germany for her first Thanksgiving. It would be very un-American, but why not? It will be her first time out of the country and using her passport.

I thought about this while we were sitting at a bar eating tapas and having drinks with Kaia today at Little Spain near Hudson Yards. We really haven’t been able to travel much between COVID, then being pregnant, and getting through the first year of Kaia’s life, and though it will certainly be a challenge, it will be one we will have to face if we want to continue traveling and living the life we want. I hope our baby will continue to both be a good little eater and little traveler. She already has done so well, and it’s been amazing to watch her grow and evolve. It’s hard to believe her one-year birthday is just around the corner, and by that time, she’ll already have been to more places in New York than most adults; to New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California; to Germany, and finally at the end of the year, to Australia.

A calm weekend – different from last weekend

Posted on by
Reply

It’s a long weekend for us here in New York with Labor Day tomorrow. Yesterday, we went to the Bronx. Today, we’re mostly at home and in the neighborhood. I vacuumed and cleaned a lot, cooked a few things, and enjoyed some time on the roof. I was productive, but I also felt very relaxed. I felt a lot more relaxed this weekend than last weekend in San Francisco, even though I did get to see my friends.

I always feel a little bad when I see my friends in San Francisco. I feel like they probably get a more tense version of me because I have to deal with the toxicity of my parents while there, which leads to my not being that at ease while with them. I’m not sure if they’ve ever noticed it, as no one has ever said anything. But I don’t feel like my normal self when there.

It seems like it’s impossible to be calm and at ease in the presence of my parents. Whether it’s my mom getting mad and making a big deal out of something senseless, accusing me of doing yet another “bad” thing I haven’t done, or my dad criticizing me or constantly talking to himself, nothing is ever “calm” there. He can’t help but nitpick and get mad about something when I am home. Despite the fact that he lives in a cluttered mess, he still feels the need to give feedback about things I do while in his home for such short periods of time. This time, he got mad at about how I didn’t tightly wrap up the baby’s pee diapers in the trash bin (that they were already going to take outside anyway), and then he got mad that I didn’t wipe down the bathroom tiles after showering (the long run issue here is that mildew buildup can occur). Is either the end of the world or going to cause massive problems? No. But he has to point them out anyway because when you do things that are “wrong,” then they are WRONG and BAD. If he does even half a thing wrong, it’s totally cool. And if Chris hadn’t been there, he likely would have raised his voice and been a lot more mean about it when addressing me. It’s exhausting, and I am always so relieved to finally leave that place.

When everything is suffering

Posted on by
Reply

“You want to be happy, and you’ve taken actions to make sure that you live a happy life,” a friend said to me this week over lunch. “You don’t want the same life your parents have, and that’s why you are cognizant of building a different life for yourself and not becoming them.”

I thought about this when I was thinking back to a week ago during my visit home. This time last week, I woke up on Saturday morning to pump in my parents’ house, and when entering the kitchen, my mom had a whole stove full of food she was preparing… at 6:30am. I had no idea why there was so much food and the need to get up so early for all this food.

“Why are you making all this food so early in the morning?” I asked her. “It’s so early.”

She had an angry look on her face, as though I was asking a stupid question. “Your aunt is having us upstairs for dinner tonight. Don’t you know?! You don’t just shove your way into a dinner like that. That’s not our custom! You have to bring something! You don’t come empty handed!”

That last part was basically like a snake hissing at me.

“I was planning to buy something today to bring it,” I responded simply. “There’s no need to make anything. I can just buy it today.”

“JUST DON’T! DON’T SAY ANYMORE!” My mom raised her voice, increasingly getting mad. “When I say something, just shut your mouth! I tell your dad this, too! Just STOP talking back! I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it! I can’t put up with it anymore! I suffer SO much!”

At that point, I left the kitchen. I wasn’t going to take any more verbal abuse that early in the morning. The whole conversation was just stupid and irrational. Plus, the tension could potentially hurt my milk output, which I didn’t need. She remained in the kitchen, “suffering” and cooking endless food that mostly would not get eaten, mumbling to herself about how she’s always suffering.

When I’ve gotten invited to meals or potlucks, I’ve always welcomed the opportunity to make a dish or bring something. I’ve never looked at it as “suffering” or “more work” that needed to be done. I suppose it’s because meals are social events, and I like both parts to them: I like the food (plus the opportunity to make something that would be fun for me to cook or bake), and I like socializing and being around people. But that’s the way my mom is: it seems like literally every single action she takes is “suffering” in her eyes. She sits in her room where everything in existence is all suffering and refuses to get out of it. She’s beyond help, and talking to her is of no use. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t have kids to support or a crappy day job to go to: everything is miserable to her.

When your almost 9-month old baby falls off the bed

Posted on by
Reply

I was recently reading a post in a Facebook Asian moms group about how it’s basically a “right of passage” to experience when your baby falls, whether it’s off the bed, out of a chair, off their changing table. You know how it goes: falls are the number 1 accident that happens with babies that results in some injury. In the newborn days, leaving Kaia in the middle of our bed was not a worry at all because she had no core strength to roll, and so we’d easily leave the room with her on the bed to grab another onesie to get her into — no problem. Once she started rolling at around six months, we had to start creating “barriers” with huge pillows all around her if we’d leave the bed even for a second because we knew she was a fall risk. Sometimes, to ensure she didn’t roll or fall off, I’d give her something I know she would get fixated on, like my (locked screen) phone or her pacifier, so it would buy me at least 30 seconds to a minute where I’d know for sure she’d be safe.

Well, the day finally came when I accidentally let my almost 9-month old baby fall off the bed. I had just finished changing and moisturizing her, and I was letting her roll and squirm around the bed as she pleased. I was at one corner of the bed, and she moved so fast, just outside of arm’s distance away, and fell off the bed — first with her head hitting the cushioned bed frame, then straight onto her head onto the rug. It happened so quickly that I barely even registered what happened for a second until her piercing scream and cries ensued. I quickly grabbed her and pulled her up to look at her, and for a second I wasn’t even sure if she was breathing because she had this look of terror on her face, and she just grew silent for a few seconds before continuing her shrieks of pain and terror. While she did cry a lot and eventually calmed down after being comforted by both of us, luckily, she had no bumps or signs of injury, and so we’ll just be monitoring her over the next 24 hours to ensure she’s fully all right. Within 20 minutes, she returned to her usual babbling, rolling, smiling self, thankfully.

Welp. That was a pretty shitty mom moment. I felt awful about what happened and that I had allowed that to happen. And it only made me realize (in a painful way) exactly how quickly she is developing, how fast she is crawling and rolling around, and I really need to step it up and keep up with her. I need to account for anything that she could get her hands (or mouth) on, I need to ensure she has barriers from dangerous edges, and I need to think three steps ahead before getting too far away from her when she’s on any elevated surface. This is when babies start becoming really dangerous, so I need to keep up with her better moving forward. Sometimes, you learn the hard way, but in this case, at least she is still safe.

Decompressing after family visit and scrutinizing my brother’s nose

Posted on by
Reply

I think that by today, my body has fully adjusted to being back in New York on Eastern time. I always adjust right away, but with the baby sleeping on me plus the red-eye, this last flight was a real doozy for me. But more so, I think I am still mentally decompressing from my visit to my family. I was chatting with my therapist today, and she said that I need to work on a plan for myself where I can enter the family visit like it’s just any other day, and leave the family visit without any need to decompress. I told her that I thought that would be nearly impossible. Everything there is such a trigger for me — the hoarding, the clutter, the mess everywhere, the excessive amount of food that I know will inevitably rot or get thrown away; the dilapidation; the weedy backyard; even my brother’s old belongings that still sit around in the bedroom.

Before I put Kaia to bed last night, I was staring at the photo of Ed and me on my bedside table, scrutinizing his nose against mine and trying to figure out if we had the same nose… because if we do have the same nose, then that means Kaia also has Ed’s nose. But the more I stared at it, the more I realized that Ed’s nose was more like our dad’s, whereas mine was more like our mom’s. But Ed and I do share the same eyes. Kaia’s eyes seem to morph, and while sometimes they look like mine, other times they look ambiguous. I then tried to remember his voice, and for a split second I failed, and this deep feeling emptiness came over me. And then out of nowhere, I heard it again. I tried to remember his laugh and could not hear it, though. This is what time does. It’s been over nine years since he’s died, and now I suddenly cannot remember the sound of his laugh. That just felt so heartbreaking to me. Everything seems to fade away over time.

Dads – then and now

Posted on by
Reply

My mom mumbled and ranted aloud multiple times while I was home. I’m pretty sure she meant for me or my dad to hear.

“I busted my ass off raising two kids nearly by myself!”

“I raised two kids with no help at all!”

“Now you have a baby. You know how hard it is!”

This one was meant for me to hear: “You are so lucky that Chris is so helpful,” she said, after observing Chris feed and burp Kaia multiple times, change her diapers, and organize her milk in the kitchen. “It makes it easier to have a family. Your dad… he was useless back then, and he’s useless now. You need to tell him what to do step by step, and even then he doesn’t do it right. It’s just easier most of the time to do it by myself.”

My mom always says she puts up with my dad because if it wasn’t for him, she’d likely already be dead in Vietnam decades ago. That’s probably true. She definitely owed her life to him. Unfortunately, he definitely has been an unsatisfactory husband and father. And with both their combined traumas, their marriage has definitely not been a happy one. It makes me sad for them, but it’s their life, and I can’t do anything about it.

I am grateful to have a supportive, egalitarian partner. If it weren’t for Chris having as much family leave as he had and being as supportive and progressive as he is, there is no way in hell I’d have managed exclusive pumping and likely would have just switched to exclusive formula feeding long ago. I’d likely be in a far worse mental state as a first time mother. But that’s the thing: as time progresses, people like Chris should not be the exception: they should be the rule. We need to expect more of fathers being active parents and expect mothers to do less than they historically had because they did WAY too much before.

An extra day… wasted

Posted on by
Reply

You would think that my parents would have been happy that our flight got cancelled, meaning they’d have an extra full day to spend time with Kaia. While my mom said she was happy because it’d mean she would see Kaia more, she didn’t take advantage of it at all. She spent the morning doing “chores” – sweeping the floor, scrubbing the back sink, cleaning out who knows what bins. Then, she went to her JW meeting and was out of the house for three hours. When she came back, she left AGAIN to take a walk for “exercise.” She was probably gone another hour. My dad? He was a lost cause. He was watching some WWII movie when we went out for a walk and to the Columbarium and back, and he didn’t make any effort to play with Kaia at all, except when my mom would force him to. “You need to spend some time playing with her. She’s going to leave soon. Play with her NOW!” My dad would make stupid excuses, “Well, I have to get ready to leave in 20 minutes.” Umm, that’s… 20 minutes from now.

My mom barely said much to me other than to suggest I eat or drink things, criticize what I was doing with Kaia, or to pick a fight with me this past Monday. My dad said even less to me. He just asked about random medications and supplements he saw I had in the bedroom, and that was really it. We had no real conversation at all during the 5-ish days we spent together. It was annoying, strained, and not enjoyable at all. My mom put up her usual act when my aunt was around to be cheerful and overly effusive. My dad acted like his usual childish self and constantly had to be told what to do by my mom and served food. It was the usual and expected stuff.

Yet somehow, despite all this, as she usually does after I leave, when I talked to her today, she said I needed to stay longer next time. Stay longer — for what? She finds it impossible to not pick fights with me and bicker over senseless things. She criticizes how Chris and I parent our child (which I expected, so I was barely annoyed with it). She and my dad barely talk to us at all. She kept telling Kaia that “your mother is bad! She doesn’t want you to eat (this)! She won’t give you a blanket! She won’t let you do (that)! She’s very bad!” But I let it all go because I really didn’t care, plus I know at this age, Kaia doesn’t totally understand what she’s even saying.

Even if there was no passive aggression, no criticism, no fights, and no hostility, and even if their son hadn’t died from suicide, the air would still be uncomfortable there because of all the clutter and junk they hoard and pile up. It’s physically uncomfortable being there. And I really do worry for their safety with all the junk, as they could easy fall and get into accidents… or worse, even die from a fall. They just don’t get it at all when I try to warn them and they think that I am the one who criticizes! My mom says to me, “Not everyone is high class like you,” or “not everyone lives in luxury like you do,” or “Just don’t say anymore!” Seriously?

That house is truly the house of terror, the house of misery, of suffering. I even felt weird bringing Kaia there and felt more paranoid about her potentially choking on food there just because of the bad omens. I was a lot more careful with preparing her food than I normally am because of the negative vibes. That’s how ridiculous that house is to me. Nothing thrives or grows in that house. Things only go there to die.

I guess I always futilely hope that something will change, that maybe they could have just a few moments of being happy. I suppose that’s why I keep going back. But I am always let down.

Redeye with a baby in business class

Posted on by
Reply

On Saturday evening, we received a frustrating notification that our flight on Sunday morning had been cancelled. Because we were booked on two separate bookings since my flight was paid for by my work, we also got placed on two separate flights to go back to New York, which was not good for many reasons, but especially because Kaia would be with us. So I called American Airlines and eventually changed both of our flights to be on business back to New York on a redeye flight Sunday night, which would return Monday morning. The last time I’d been on a redeye was when I had to come back to New York for Chris’s citizenship ceremony in 2018, and I felt miserable when I landed and for a few days after. It’s funny how our bodies change: I used to take red-eyes regularly through college to come back to Boston, as well as in my early to mid-twenties, and I’d always hit the ground running and never even needed to nap when I got back. Well, this time was very different: I’m 36 years old now (which means I have aged and my body cannot handle that type of travel anymore regularly), plus I’m traveling with an infant in lap, so a red-eye flight has a very different meaning now. Plus, everyone knows that a red-eye flight from California to New York is too short to sleep properly, even when you do have the privilege of a lay-flat bed in business class. Even privilege and money cannot get you the perfect red-eye flight back.

We got to the airport early so that we could get comfortable, get Kaia fed and settled to sleep as soon as possible, and so I could pump a little earlier so I would not need to pump in flight. And while she did fuss initially when we boarded the plane, mainly because of the sounds and bright lights, she did amazingly well throughout the flight. She slept soundly on top of me… which is good because at least one of us slept well. While I love having her on me, it made it impossible for me to sleep. I really just had my eyes closed the whole time. We came back early this morning and got back to the apartment relatively quickly, but I was so beat when we got back. I ended up having to take a nap in the afternoon just for a little rest. It still wasn’t enough, though.

It’s like now, my body is recovering from the red-eye travel, while my mind is recovering from being with my parents in their house of terror. So all of me needs recovery time now, which will likely take a few days at least.