Independent toy store experience

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While my friend was visiting last month, she popped into a cute independent toy shop in Chelsea and bought Kaia some gifts. One of the gifts was a stuffed rabbit, which, while sweet and cute and incredibly soft, was not something that I thought Kaia needed more of; she has endless stuffed animals, and only a select few that she has any amount of attachment to. So I was grateful that my friend was thoughtful enough to provide a gift receipt. I went downtown to exchange the rabbit for something else. When I entered the shop, I was not only surprised to see how large the shop was, but just the sheer variety of toys and books for so many ages. And it suddenly dawned on me that I had never really been in any toy store for years, much less an independent one. This toy store was most definitely a rarity in today’s day and age.

Most of the purchases we do are online now; it’s the way most of us live and operate. With online shopping being so readily available and Amazon providing so much convenience with a few clicks to purchase (plus free shipping with Prime, or a relatively low minimum for free shipping), it’s just too easy. But as I was perusing all the endless options in the shop yesterday and spending way more time than I’d originally imagined going through potential options, I realized how much value is lost with online shopping; you don’t get to actually see, touch, feel, even hold items in your hand. When you buy a pair of earrings online, they can seem sparkly and pretty… until you receive them in the mail and the gemstones are so tiny that you can barely see them; plus, the size seems almost half of what they looked like on the model’s ear in the online photo you viewed. The same goes with toys: the concept of something like a wooden tea time play set may seem fun (and sustainable); but then you get it delivered, and it seems like flimsy garbage that might give your toddler splinters. There are some things that are definitely better purchased after seeing it in person.

I ended up replacing the stuffed rabbit with a wooden coffee maker play set of the same value (I will never get over how expensive good quality stuffed animals can be!!). I thought it would be a good complement to the cooking/dining play set that I recently got for Kaia from our local Buy Nothing group; she really loves that set and “cooking with mummy.” She played with the coffee set a bit tonight and seems to already enjoy it. At this age and stage of development, there’s a lot of value in “pretend play,” and I hope that these toys can help broaden Pookster’s imagination.

When toddlers intervene when their parents are fighting

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 I think it goes without saying that all couples fight. Therefore, it would also be true that all parents fight. Sometimes, the fights are about substantial matters, like what path forward to move your child into, money, career, etc. Other times, they’re about a whole lot of nothing. In our cases, it’s usually about a misinterpretation over something said/insinuated, or about the method of arguing in itself. Chris likes to assume he’s always right, and he gets extremely defensive when I point out something he does that I don’t like or disagree with. I tell him that he needs to stop for a moment and actually think about what I’m critiquing about him instead of just simply denying it and attacking me back. He doesn’t. And the argument goes on. 

I think about my childhood a lot when I think about the way I am. It’s a bit Freudian to say, but most of the reasons we think the way we think and do as we do are rooted in how we were raised. Growing up, because I was in an environment where I was pretty much constantly criticized by my parents for the most benign or inane things, criticism was like having paint on the walls — it was just always there, like the furniture. And so because of that, when I do get any type of critique, I’m more likely than Chris to think about the validity of the critique and how true it actually is. I do not immediately assume it’s true, but I also do not immediately deny its validity.

Kaia always knows when we’re arguing or having a heated discussion. She clearly gets in the middle of fights over toys and the related at school, and she parrots what her teacher says while we’re arguing: “Stop it right now!” “Knock it off!” “Stop it, everyone!” “No, no, no!” “Everybody, CALM DOWN!” More often than not, Kaia intervening serves as comic relief. But other times, I wonder what impact listening to our arguing really has on her. In the realm of arguing, I’d probably say that our arguing is “low impact,” as in, low overall toxicity. But there’s always the question of: how do you model good arguing and conflict resolution to your child so that she grows up to argue in a rational, well-thought-out, relatively respectable way? An argument in a healthy relationship is supposed to have a resolution of some sort. So if we don’t have a real resolution that effects change moving forward, are we actually modeling healthy arguing to her? This is likely a work in progress, especially as she is developing her language and comprehension skills every day. If there is any motivation to changing how we argue and how we resolve conflicts, then she should be the motivator.

Toddler Kaia eats eggs for the first time

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As a baby, Kaia ate eggs in different ways: strips, omelettes, scrambles. Even back then, she didn’t seem to be a fan of them when they were hard boiled, though she did gobble them up when they were marinated in a Vietnamese caramelized pork belly braise. But after she turned one, she pretty much refused eggs no matter which way they were presented, and I have a feeling it’s because she wasn’t a fan of their squishy texture. Today, I realized I had some languishing tomatoes in my vegetable drawer in the fridge, so I tossed them into a hot pan with leftover scallions, some minced pork, and eggs to make a very saucy tomato, pork, and egg scramble. Because of all the liquid that came out of the tomatoes, the eggs were a lot runnier and soupy than I had hoped; they begged for some rice to soak up all the juices. When lunch time rolled around, Kaia was being fussy with the food we presented to her, so I randomly offered her some of the eggs, thinking she’d definitely reject them. But surprisingly, she actually ate a really good-sized helping. First, she took a small pea-sized amount and put it in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Then, she grabbed some more out of the bowl I presented and stuffed more in her mouth. I added some more onto her silicone plate, and she continued to eat it until there were just tiny remnants left. And in the end, she ate a very healthy toddler-sized portion of my tomato scramble.

We tend to assume our kids won’t eat things. We think that after multiple times of rejection, they will just keep rejecting. But it takes a lot perseverance as parents and caregivers to just keep offering a rejected food every time it’s on the menu, even if it’s literally just showing them the food and having them push it away. It takes just a few seconds of our effort. Because you never know when your child might actually say “yes” again.

“Did you have a good gym?” 

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Kaia is speaking in longer, fuller sentences each day. I’m sure a lot of the influence is from school where she hears interactions between teachers and administrators all the time. She also hears us interact at home and likes to mimic us. 

One thing she’s been doing when she’s having breakfast on weekday mornings is yell out for me when I’m coming in through the door, back from my workout at the gym. “Hi, Mummy-Dear!” she will call out before she even sees me. “Did you have a good gym?” 

It’s really cute. Sometimes, she will ask, “Did you have a good day?” at the end of the day when she sees me. And because she knows I am at the gym when she’s waking up and eating breakfast since Chris tells her, she will incorrectly ask if I had a good “gym.” We should probably teach her to say “workout” instead of “gym,” but I can’t help but smile and gush over how adorable this incorrect speech is. It’s like how now that she’s over 2, I still miss the days when she would say “bluey” for blueberry or “mangi” for mango. The speech mistakes are part of the growth, and while I’m happy she learns the correct form of speech, I still reminisce on the incorrect times. 

Secrets to less tightness in your hip: sleeping with straight legs

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For months, I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the tightness in my hip after running. It all started last autumn when I started running more rigorously. I’d feel fine after the run, but the next morning upon waking, I’d immediately notice a tightness in my right hip when I’d get out of bed. It would linger for a few days, and then eventually fade away. I started decreasing my running and instead, increasing my elliptical workouts for cardio. The trainer at the gym advised me to do specific “pre-conditioning” or “pre-exercise” moves to strengthen my glutes, stretch out my hips, and strengthen my core, before any run. I looked up some videos online for stretches and exercises to help with hip tightness. I did all of these things regularly, but to no avail. I was continually tight in that same right hip after runs. Sometimes, even after elliptical workouts, my right hip would be tight. And for this year, it’s pretty much been consistently tight. I had no idea how to resolve this.

I kept up my Google searches, hopeful that I’d run into some new article suggesting the magic exercise or stretch that would ultimately find me. And then I stumbled upon something totally new that I’d never thought of before: an article suggested that because we spend most of our day with our legs bent (walking, sitting down), that we could give our hips a “rest” by simply keeping our legs straight while sleeping. So for the last two nights, I tried my best to sleep with both legs straight. Well, I woke up this morning, and for the first time in months, my right hip was NO LONGER TIGHT. I couldn’t believe it. It was almost as though I had a new hip!

Chris blamed it on my “fetaling,” the fetal position I usually like to sleep in. Whatever it was, if sleeping with my legs straight is the cure to my tight right hip, then that’s fine by me!

“Permission to Fail”

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I’m making good progress reading the book Permission to Come Home by Jenny T. Wang. Right now, I’m on the section called “Permission to Fail,” which is exactly what it sounds like it’s about. In life, through big and small events, we’re constantly learning, and in learning, it’s inevitable that we will make mistakes, but that’s part of the process of living. When babies are learning to walk, they will stumble and fall — it’s not a mistake! It’s all work in progress! They learn from their fall, and then they persevere and try again and again until they can pull themselves up, stand up and stay there, then take one step, two steps, multiple steps. The tiny steps that are built into that process are around using arm, core, and leg strength. They are learning little by little how much of each to use to do what movements at which time.

I thought about the process of babies learning to walk when I was thinking about this section of the book. And I thought about the very damaging advice that my mom used to constantly give Ed and me: “One step wrong, and everything in your life goes wrong!” It was such a fixed (anti growth) mindset, a narrow way of looking at the world, putting ourselves in a situation where we’d basically have zero hope… unless we followed everything exactly as our parents wanted, and then, our lives would be perfect! And then, I comically thought of Kaia learning how to walk, stumbling and falling, and my mom yelling at her, “One step wrong, and everything in your life goes wrong!”

Everything, regardless of whether it was rooted in reality or not, was either a major success or failure growing up. If it was a failure, it resulted in my and my family having “no face.” When I got laid off at my first job out of college just nine months after I started (and during the worst financial crisis to date of my lifetime), my mom got angry at me. She said, “You have no face! No one respects you! No one will want to look at you to your face!” She advised me to immediately move home and start looking for jobs there. In the next month, my cousin was getting married in Las Vegas, and she tried to prevent me from going to the wedding. “The wedding isn’t important!” she yelled. “Why are you going to spend money to go to a wedding where no one will care about you because you lost your job? You have no income, so why are you spending money on travel? You have no face at this wedding! Don’t bother coming!”

It was such an awful, demoralizing, terrorizing thing to say to a 23-year-old who hadn’t even been in full-time employment for a year: because I got laid off and had no job, I was not worth seeing. I had no self worth. I was not worth socializing with. It’s never anyone’s “fault” when they get laid off, especially during a financial crisis where everyone, left and right, is losing their job, the economy is unstable, and companies are cutting costs left and right. But she tried to make it seem like it was my fault, as though I did something wrong. That’s why she kept on saying I had “no face.” To my parents, if you were working, you were a “worthy” person. If you didn’t work, if you had a low-paying job, or if you were unemployed/stay-at-home parent/partner, you were “nothing.” That’s how my parents measure value in an adult.

I’ve lost my job a couple times since that first layoff. It was never easy, but I’ve grown a lot along the way. It was never my “fault.” I never saw them as “mistakes,” but as situations to learn from — because that’s what all of life is ideally: continual learning, growth, and personal evolution. But one thing I did learn from that period? I would never, ever tell my parents if I ever got laid off or fired — ever again. They would never provide a safe space for me. They would never be supportive of me in my down moments and instead, would just push me further down. I didn’t need the constant criticism or judgment. I was already such a harsh critic of myself already, so why did I need two other people judging me?

It’s sad to remember these times, especially since these types of interactions were not isolated. But I think the biggest thing here, as the title of the chapter indicates, is giving yourself permission to fail, even if those who are supposed to be closest to you won’t. Who cares what other people think? You have to give yourself permission to fail, to grow, to move forward. C’est la vie — or at least, that’s the life worth living.

“Reclaiming mental health as Asian Americans”

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After I got the advice from a friend to re-join a second library system, I used my Manhattan address to confirm access to the Queens Library last week, which I hadn’t accessed since 2012, when I lived in the borough. I always had Queens Library access and New York Public Library access since I first moved here, as it was one of the very first things I did once I got set up in this new city; Queens covers just the borough of Queens (since it’s so freaking huge!), while New York PL provides access for Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. As an avid reader, I figured it would be wise to continue getting access to books that my tax payer dollars were covering. Until 2018, I was borrowing hard copies and picking them up/dropping them off at the nearest library. But since then, I access the library fully electronically via the Libby app. This then allows me to either listen to audio books directly from the app, or send the electronic book from the library directly to my Kindle. It’s been amazing: I cannot even count how many books I’ve read this way, and I’m obsessed.

The first book I got off the wait list for in Queens Library that NYPL did not even have in its catalog was Permission to Come Home: Reclaiming Mental Health as Asian Americans, which is written by psychologist Jenny T. Wang (who I actually started following on Instagram during the pandemic!). I already knew by page 2 that this was going to be a good book after I read this line:

“Our suffering and well-being do not exist solely in overcoming major crises or managing diagnoses, but also within the conversations held behind closed doors, in the tears we shed alone in the shower, and in the deep emotions that we cannot ignore despite our best efforts.”

I think when the average person thinks about mental health, they do define it based on crises and diagnoses; they don’t think about the everyday interactions and how they have such an impact on us. I think that is especially lost on older Asian generations like my parents, who think of “mental health” being a concern just for people who are “psychotic,” “crazy,” or “mental.”

I’m about halfway through the book now. It’s an easy to digest read, but it’s definitely extremely triggering, especially once we got into the section called “Boundaries.” So I can’t read too much of it at once and need to give myself breaks, which is what the author actually suggests, along with questions to stop and ask yourself. Other than the sexual and physical boundaries subtitles, my parents have basically violated every other boundary of mine:

They regularly would go through my belongings, from reading letters addressed to me without my permission to my school binders and notebooks to my closet/drawers; my dad has even gone into my electronic files on the shared computer, which resulted in quite the family drama.

They eavesdrop on my conversations and then would gossip about it later/yell at me for what I discussed with others.

Whenever I come home, I’m constantly being asked to do this, do that, with zero regard for what I might be in the middle of doing. I get yelled at if I don’t come right away.

When I come home, I’m expected to drop any plans I had made with any friend/relative so that I can spend time with them… most of the time doing nothing, just being under the same roof. She used to insist that, “(Insert name) is not that important… tell them you are sick and can’t make it,” or, “You already saw (insert name) a couple days ago. Why do you need to see them again? WHAT IS SO IMPORTANT OVER YOUR FAMILY?” And, if I don’t cancel the plans, then I’m “disobedient and against my parents, which means you’re against Jehovah!”

When I was in middle and high school, my mom used to regularly call my friends and ask them to be spies, to “report back” anything “inappropriate” I might have been doing. A friend I used to go hang out with after school at her house was one of these people. She told me my mom would regularly call her to “make sure” I really did go to her house.

Once I started working, I knew something was very, very wrong with my mom’s demand that I only take time off to come home and see her. If I took time off for a trip, it had to be with them. I was not permitted to take time off for myself, to take a trip with friends, or god forbid, a trip with a boyfriend/partner. So when I did take small trips to hang out with friends or travel to new places with them, I just didn’t tell her. The first time I finally admitted to taking a week off to go to Mexico with my then-boyfriend, the fireworks went on for two days. All she did was scream and yell. She said I was betraying her; I was not to supposed to take trips with a man I wasn’t married to; I wasn’t supposed to take time off unless it was to see her. How could I be so selfish…?

My mom has “tested” me by asking to me to write her checks for thousands of dollars… for dental and health procedures that she didn’t even need or follow through with. It was all a test to see how “loyal” I was to her. After sending her one of the checks (and after she cashed it), she told me she ended up not proceeding with that dental procedure. You can imagine how annoyed I was (and how infuriated my husband was…). She just wanted the money and likely had zero intention of ever getting the procedure done from the beginning.

My mom used to say to me regularly, “I control you until you get married, and then when you get married, your husband controls you.” That was fun to hear. I guess it’s no wonder why I made a goal during my senior year of college to get a job out on the East Coast, far out of her control and constant spying. And once I moved to New York, I vowed to never live anywhere close to my parents ever again.

She also used to tell me regularly that Ed and I “have no right to get angry at your parents! You have NO right! We do everything for you, and you get angry with us?!”

It took me a while to figure out that being angry at one’s parents, or at anyone, is completely fine and healthy. All feelings – happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, whatever – they are what they are. There is no such thing as a right or wrong feeling. It’s just a matter of how you deal with them and move forward with them that matters. To tell someone they aren’t allowed to feel is pretty inhumane… and quite sad, when you think about it.

My first therapist once asked me, “Do you think you will ever move back to San Francisco?” I paused for a bit, and then responded, “I’m not sure. I don’t think so? Maybe I could. But only after they’re both dead.” It sounds like a very harsh thing to say, but I really meant it. The truth hurts. I don’t think my mental health could handle being that close to them. They have no concept of boundaries or how to treat me (or really, anyone else) respectfully and with true kindness. And like any other human being, I deserve to be treated with respect and kindness. I’m not asking for that much.

It’s hard to think about the fact that I will never have a good relationship with either of my parents. In an ideal world, we’d get along and be much closer. But it’s not meant to be. Ed was the same way. But his life has already ended. Mine hasn’t… not yet, anyway.

Cancer

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In the last several weeks, the world got the news about the British royal family that they’d all guessed, but weren’t 100 percent sure of: The Princess of Wales was diagnosed with cancer. She’s only 42 years old, so of course, this was met with much shock and sadness. Even I felt sad when I read the news. If someone who likely has access to the best food, nutrition, wellness, and healthcare, amongst other resources, can get a cancer diagnosis so young, then the rest of us are definitely screwed. My next thought was: yep, the rest of us… we’re all going to get cancer and die.

As I was checking in with a friend over text tonight about how her recent trip to Japan went with her parents and brother, I was shocked to learn of some health news about her dad: he just got diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called chordoma. Over the last several months, he’d had some lower back pain that kept getting worse. Initially, they just thought it was arthritis, so they had him see a physical therapist, but it didn’t help. He went in for a scan which showed nothing, but they failed to scan the part of the back where he felt the pain, so my friend pushed for an MRI of his lower back… which ended up revealing a malignant mass on his sacrum. Chordoma can occur anywhere along the spine and it’s extremely rare: only 1 in one million people get diagnosed with chordoma per year. He’s scheduled for an appointment later this week to determine the best course for his case, which may be surgery to remove the mass.

This made me so sad. When my friend was in high school, her mom got diagnosed with breast cancer. They all suspected that it might be related to her work, as she was a nail technician at a nail salon (we all know that nail salon workers are at a high risk of getting cancer due to all the fumes they inhale all day long). Luckily, she got chemo and the cancer disappeared. Then, at age 27 while my friend was in medical school, she got diagnosed with a rare lymphoma, and thus medical school got put on hold. Her type of lymphoma was even rarer: only 0.4 people per million per year are diagnosed with it each year. That would mean that in her family of five, 60 percent of her family had experienced cancer. There’s no way this diagnosis could have been easy to hear.

We can only hope for the best since we’re living in a toxic, chemical-laden world. I just hope her dad makes his way out alive in this for their family’s sake.

Homemade soy candle from candle-making kit is tunneling

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A couple months ago, I used the soy candle making kit I ordered for a holiday team building event. I spent an afternoon melting wax, mixing in essential oils, and hand pouring into my candle jars with a glued-on wick in each jar. I made four candles and gave three of them away, keeping a lavender-sage scented one for myself. I was especially excited about mine because I added some extra pure lavender oil that I’d gotten during a New Zealand trip back in 2013, when we visited a vibrant lavender farm and I purchased a tiny vial.

Unfortunately, as I burned the candle the last couple of nights, I quickly realized that the candle was not of the highest quality: the wick is not big enough for the diameter of the jar (which really isn’t that big!), and so even when you burn it as long as you should, so 3-4 hours, it’s impossible for the wick to burn the wax fully and evenly to the ends of the jar. I went back to the Amazon listing and saw that only one reviewer noted this and posted a photo for proof. It looked exactly like my candle tunnel! The only plus side is that the scent definitely does carry well.

I spent last night using the foil method to try to reduce the tunneling; it helped a little, but not much. And today, I finally took out my heat gun that I use for heat embossing to lightly blow heat on the candle to even out the wax buildup on the sides of the candle jar. While the heat gun was far more effective than the foil method, now, my issue is that my wick is fully covered. So my next step, once this wax fully hardens, is to carve out some of the wax (that will unfortunately mean wax and essential oil waste!!) and burn the candle as evenly as I possibly can. These are definitely first-world problems.

Lasagne bolognese – first time in years!

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I was rummaging through my cupboards to see what random things I’d purchased that I’ve forgotten about over the years, and I found some no-boil lasagne noodles I’d purchased at Trader Joe’s. I still remember when I bought this item, too: it was in autumn 2021 when I was very pregnant, and I thought then that a good dish to make while on maternity leave would be lasagne. Well, little did I know that layering pasta noodles with a long-simmered meat or vegetable sauce and different cheeses would be little priority with a tiny human to constantly care and pump milk for.

So I took out the package and decided that lasagne for our home was long, long overdue. I used my latest Butcherbox ground beef to make a four-hour simmered bolognese sauce on Friday. It even injured me with all the bubbling, as the sauce popped everywhere, including the inside of my right wrist, which still has purple-red bruise marks from the burn marks. Lucky me with my food prep, I already had my parmesan finely grated and stored in the freezer for future use. And today, I spent the late morning layering my lasagne in my much-neglected 13×9 casserole pan. And it felt really fun and satisfying. Lasagne making is almost like therapy. It’s very methodical but doesn’t take too much thinking. Once you know the method: one layer of noodles, one 1-cup layer of bolognese, one 1/2-cup layer of bechamel, and one 1/3-cup layer of grated parmesan — you just keep following it until you run out of noodles. Unfortunately for Trader Joe’s, I only had 3.5 out of five needed layers of pasta, so my pasta layering process got abruptly cut short, so I had to improvise my top layer.

But when it came out of the oven, I was pretty satisfied: forty-five minutes in the oven yielded an evenly browned and bubbly top, with a lid that was very crunchy and satisfying. A small piece really left me feeling satisfied with my efforts from Friday as well as today. It also confirmed something else I’ve always thought: every time I’ve had lasagne that was not homemade, I’ve just never been as happy with it. The meat sauce is rarely as nuanced and flavorful as the one I’ve made, and likely the quality of the meat to the cheese is never as high. Most of them rely too heavily on too much shredded mozzarella to mask anything that the sauce is lacking. So it always feels like a deflating experience ordering it out. Lasagne is really one of those things that I think needs to be homemade, loved, and eaten at home. My next idea is to make spinach lasagne with four cheeses, which I just got an email about from Food & Wine. It’s a doozy in other ways in that it uses four different cheeses and certainly is not for anyone who is watching their waistline, but I still think it’s worth an occasional indulgence… especially since before this, the last time I made a lasagne was when we still lived on the east side — that was over 7 years ago!!

Another bonus: I doubled the bolognese recipe, so I have a full recipe of bolognese meat sauce in my freezer, frozen in large 1/2-C cubes! So less work and more enjoyment in the future await. In that sense, the inner wrist bruising from the sauce burn is more worth it given it was an investment also in future meals and not just this week’s.