Food in the tech workplace circa 2022

In preparation for my upcoming trip to the San Francisco office, we had a list of to-dos before we arrive, including a few apps to download, a health questionnaire I need to fill out daily before I arrive at the office (to ensure I am COVID negative, or as close to negative as can be), and to get the Zerocater food ordering app downloaded onto my phone. I’d never heard of Zerocater before and wasn’t quite sure why I had to download any food app for my work trip, as when I heard that food was catered at work, I figured it was like the way it was at my last company when I came, where there would be buffet-style food laid out for us to eat at specific time blocks, and that would be it.

Zerocater is not like that, though: you actually have options from a handful of local restaurants every single day your company sponsors lunch, and from those restaurants, you can choose select dishes to get. This does a few good things: 1) it supports local restaurants and businesses directly instead of stealing business away from them, 2) it eliminates the inevitable food waste that comes from buffet-style eating, 3) you can order the quantity of food (by weight) that you request, which even further minimizes waste. The app is really customized: it presents a number of mains and sides (with lots of details and photos) and asks how you would like them as options. Then, based on your feedback, it creates recommendations for you based on what you’ve indicated you like. After I finished this quick questionnaire, it seemed to sum up my food tastes as leaning heavily towards Asian, South American, and Mexican cuisine. Vietnamese cuisine also got especially called out. Not bad at all.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in an office and had the opportunity to enjoy catered food, and seeing how customized it is now and anti-waste it is makes me happy. There are some perks I do miss that you get while working in the office, and free lunch is definitely one of them.

Family visits and excuses

My cousin and his wife are in town visiting from the Bay Area, so we had them come over today for lunch and to meet Kaia, as well as to see our apartment building for the first time. Well, this cousin actually has a brother who lives here on the Upper East Side, but because his marriage is dysfunctional and miserable, Chris didn’t want them to come over. So I made an excuse and lied at my visiting cousin’s suggestion and said that Chris got COVID, so no one could come over. It seems a bit ridiculous to make up something like this, but we really didn’t want to be exposed to their negativity and bad vibes, not to mention the massive passive aggression between the two of them. Plus, the last time this cousin came, he barely even acknowledged or looked at Kaia, and he spent almost the entire time on his phone doing whoever the hell knows what.

My cousin and his wife are decent, easy going people. Of the three cousins from my dad’s older brother and wife, he’s probably the most “normal” and easy to get along with. But it’s always weird to think that he tries to gloss things over and make everything seem normal when it’s not. He tends to avoid problems and pretend they don’t exist until they are really, really bad. He doesn’t acknowledge that much is wrong with his brother who lives here; he does at a surface level, but he doesn’t seem to recognize exactly how bad and unhealthy it is, or the fact that his brother likely needs professional help. He doesn’t acknowledge that his own mother belongs to a cult.

On the one hand, this cousin seems to avoid problems and thinks nothing is ever wrong. His youngest brother who lives across the park from us thinks everything and everyone is a problem. There doesn’t seem to be much balance here, is there?

Tiny foodie baby embraces fish and goes “nom nom nom”

Today, Kaia had salmon for the first time. After seeing how well she did with sardines all week, I wasn’t surprised to see her embrace her steamed salmon with garlic and black pepper. She clearly loves to self feed; the spoon feeding doesn’t always seem to work with her, and she very much prefers to be in control of what goes into her mouth. Sometimes, she gets a bit too aggressive with her big bites, though, and she ends up gagging and spitting the food out. I always wonder what she is thinking when she’s presented new foods and deciding what to eat and how much, if she actually understands what I mean when I am doing exaggerated modeling of chewing and big bites, and telling her to “chew, chew, chew!”

When I started using social media years ago, I always thought it was a bit comical when I’d read about people talking about or making the “nom nom nom” sound while eating something they enjoyed. But then I realized in the last few weekends while feeding Kaia… that it actually sounds like she makes that exact same sound. She goes between “mmmmm” and “maaa maa maaa” as well as “num num num” over and over again while eating something she seemingly enjoys.

So, did “nom nom nom” actually originate from baby sounds while eating?

Baby’s bedroom vs. Mommy’s office: who wins?

Our nanny has been giving me the side eye the last few days. In the morning when the baby takes her nap, assuming I have no early morning meetings, she’s allowed to sleep in her crib, which is in the second bedroom, which is half her bedroom, half my office space. In the afternoons, though, she usually has to sleep in her lounger in the living room because I almost always have meetings mid-afternoon. The nanny is super unhappy about this because the baby is slowly but surely outgrowing the lounger, which we now have to place on the floor because the baby is rolling now.

“Yvonne,” the nanny says in her taunting voice. “Kaia has to sleep in her crib. You can’t keep having her sleep in the lounger. She just doesn’t sleep well in it anymore. She’s getting too big for it and needs a consistent sleep space.”

Well, what am I supposed to do? I have to work, and I don’t have a third room to work in. Plus, I’m old now: I can’t just work on my laptop anymore given my cubital tunnel syndrome and my wrist/finger issues. I need my second monitor, vertical mouse, and ergonomic keyboard. I can feel the difference in my hands when I use my laptop for typing straight now, plus the touch pad on the Macbook air really kills my fingers and inevitably makes me feel miserable the next day if I use it too long.

The other option is to get a pack’n’play that’s relatively compact and put it in our bedroom. I’m not really sure what to do.

When your nanny misses you

I figured that my nanny would have been really excited to hear that I’d be away most of yesterday because it would mean I would be completely out of her hair. She wouldn’t have to worry about my lurking around and observing her. She could do what she pleased in the apartment without any watchful eye. But apparently, she told me she wasn’t actually that happy that I was away and missed me. My nanny MISSED me. She must be nuts! She’s the exact opposite of any nanny who posts on the Reddit nanny group!

I asked her today if she enjoyed her freedom with my being away. And she responded, “You know, you’d be surprised. Kaia isn’t the only one who missed you. I missed you, too! I was wondering how your day was going, how your meeting went, and thinking of the things I would have said to you if you were here. So I actually wasn’t happy you were gone. I’ve gotten used to working with mom in the house!”

We get attached to those we spend time with, and I suppose that also applies to hired help and how they feel about their bosses. I guess I’m not so awful to have as a “mom boss” after all. 😀

First in-person business meeting since pre-pandemic

So, as we’ve transitioned from being in a pandemic to being in an endemic, work travel is now considered acceptable and encouraged. Not all customers are accepting visitors, though, so it varies depending on the customer we’re working with. However, a colleague and I were asked to come onsite to visit a customer of ours in Bridgewater, New Jersey, today, and so we decided to go. My colleague only lives about a 20 minute drive away, but I had to get there via New Jersey Transit, which took me over an hour, not including the travel time to get to Penn Station. That commute took longer than expected due to a train delay, though. And then coming back, I missed the train I wanted to get on because my meeting ran long, and so I had to take a train that had a longer transfer time at Newark Penn Station. So all in all, I spent almost 3.5 hours traveling for a meeting that lasted about 90 minutes. While I was on NJ Transit this late afternoon coming back into the city, I was thinking about exactly how ridiculous this was. That commute time doesn’t even factor in the amount of time I spent this morning getting ready and dressed, or the time it took me to look up train schedules and figure out the best way to get there. In addition, I had to wake up earlier and pump earlier, then pump right before I left to go. My breasts don’t care that I have to travel for work; they still need to be emptied. And of course, I came home with my breasts uncomfortable and full of milk.

It’s true: in-person meetings cannot be replaced by virtual meetings. But they certainly take a LOT more preparation and leg work to do, and as a pumping mom and someone who has gotten used to working from home the last 2.5 years, this trip, though relatively short with no overnight stay, was still taxing. I just could not imagine doing this type of work travel regularly; I would be so miserable.

Memories of milkies

“How much did you pump?” Chris asked, as he passed me in the kitchen this morning.

“270 ml,” I responded, while tipping out the last few drops of milk into a bottle before dumping all my pump parts into a bowl to wash.

Our nanny’s eyes widened. “You just pumped 270 ml in one session?! Yvonne, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a cow! That’s like 8 ounces!”

“Actually, that’s 9 ounces,” Chris said.

I told her that was relatively normal for my first morning pump since it’s all the milk that had accumulated overnight, as I no longer do a middle of the night pump. But we’d come a long, long way from my early days of struggling to even get 30 ml / 1 ounce per pump session.

I recalled the times early on when I just didn’t understand the concept of “supply and demand” with milk supply, when I didn’t realize my baby wasn’t sucking hard enough on my breasts to create a proper “demand.” Those days, I was lucky to get even 30 ml per pump session. I pumped so little milk that after refrigerating the milk to combine with other pumps, Chris would try to consolidate the milk, and to get every drop and fat residual on the sides of the pump bottles loosened, he’d run our hot water tap over the outside of the bottles like a crazy person. But he ran so much hot water over the bottles to get every last drop of breast milk that one day, the hot water tap tank actually ran out, and so we had to wait for the water to refill and get heated again. It was a hilarious moment when he told me this. But on the other hand, I felt really embarrassed and ashamed that I was producing so little then that he felt like he had to get every last smidgen of milk possible to feed our baby. That also reminded me of how I used to cry and blame myself, erroneously thinking I actually had low milk supply because of my own body as opposed to lack of sufficient demand.

So, I remember those painful and emotional moments when my nanny praises me now, not only for how diligently and on schedule I pump, but for how much I am producing to feed my baby. Like the concept of “you should never trust a skinny chef,” she said she used to think that if a woman had small boobs, she’d never produce much milk to feed her baby. Apparently, I proved her wrong with that since she always tells me that I am a small woman with tiny boobs but a ton of milk!

Most moms already would have given up on pumping by now, my nanny always says. “But you still keep going,” she’s said to me a few times. “That shows how much you love your baby. It is an extremely selfless act. Your baby will never understand this until she one day becomes a mother and tries to breastfeed her own babies. Even other women who don’t have kids don’t get it.”

When your uncle has hip surgery and your parents don’t want to acknowledge it or visit him

A couple months ago, my uncle had a complete hip replacement. He knew it was coming up, and so he prepped his home to get ready for his limited mobility. He arranged for my cousin to bring him to the hospital, a neighbor friend to pick him up and stay with him the first night, and for most foods to be extremely simple and easy to prepare so that he’d stay well nourished. Our whole family has known that he would have this major surgery, but my parents only knew because my cousin and aunt told them. They never acknowledged to my uncle that they knew about it, and they never talked to him about it, nor did they ever offer to come visit him, bring him food, even drop off something nice for him. It sounded pretty petty and sad, especially since about eight years ago, not only did my uncle visit my dad in the hospital after his bypass surgery, but he also came to the house to visit him and dropped off a few things that would make his life a little easier during his recovery. Given the lifelong feuds between them, my uncle never had to do any of those things, but he was at least trying to be the bigger person.

I thought about all this stupid sibling feuding today because my aunt sent me a video of visiting my uncle at his home. My cousin and his wife went to visit, too. And I thought to myself, why can’t my parents just for once, try to be decent people and not live a “quid pro quo” life, and just do the right thing? In this case, if they actually visited him, it WOULD be quid pro quo because he actually visited my dad twice after his surgery! In my parents’ eyes, they are eternally perfect and can do no wrong; everyone else has wronged them. They are always the victims. It really doesn’t make any sense.

Another reason I was thinking about this was because since Kaia’s birth, I’ve thought a lot more about my reason for being and in general, my own mortality. And holding grudges and just having a negative outlook on life, especially in the latter half of your life, are just so draining. I wonder if they ever wonder why they are so miserable and seem to have no where to go, figuratively. I wonder if they ever think about how they could improve their lives with the means that they have, or if they just accept it as though “that’s just life.”

Solid foods competition among babies

As of today, Kaia has already been exposed to 64 different types of solid food, and we have not yet reached her 8-month birthday, or two full months of solid foods exposure. Given that food, and a variety of food, is integral to my being, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I was going to focus on this for my baby. But I shared this with a friend, who has a baby who is about 4 months older than Kaia, and she was really shocked that our baby was eating that many types of food. She started feeling bad, saying that her baby, who is half Mexican and half Bangladeshi, is really behind in the food arena and “eats like a white baby, which we need to start changing ASAP.” So today, she sent me a video of her son’s first time at almost 1-year of age, finally eating spiced dal with rice. Before this, he’d never been exposed to many spices at all. And in the video, it was pretty clear he was not a fan and started shaking his head rapidly and pushing the spoon away.

I didn’t mean to start a competition or a “keeping up with the Jones’s” mentality with solid foods, but apparently, I have incidentally had that effect now.

Rolling, crawling, and eventually walking

Being a mother is definitely the most tiring job one can have, especially while your child is still a baby and 100% dependent on you. But it’s also one of the most gratifying jobs, especially when you are able to watch your child grow and develop. Even the littlest things that my baby does fascinate me as I observe her. Lately, she’s been working on pushing her butt up into the air and getting on all fours, likely so that she can attempt to crawl. She is not quite crawling yet, but is more pushing and sliding her body around the mat to move places. Sometimes, it looks like she’s going to start doing push ups. Other times, she looks like she’s doing downward dog, the yoga pose, or trying to do a side plank by lifting one arm high in the air for stability. I realized she puts her arm in the air for stability in an attempt to begin rolling, and it’s the cutest thing. And then, there are the times when, in Chris’s words, it looks like she is “dry humping” the floor, constantly coming up and down and pushing down. She’s learning her different body parts and how to properly use them.

I’ve also been standing her up on her two feet more over the last couple of weeks to see how stable she is while attempting to stand, and it’s clear she’s getting stronger and stronger. She is able to put a lot of weight on her two feet, and a few times, it actually felt like I could *almost* let go and have her stand on her own for maybe 2-3 seconds. It’s crazy to think that she is almost eight months old and now getting ready to crawl and eventually walk. My sweet little baby is growing up.