I’ve never worn a lot of makeup. Since I was very young, my mom always rammed into my head that while eye makeup and lip products are fine, I should always steer clear of foundation/face makeup. She said that foundation would age me faster and make the quality of my skin worse. She used to scrutinize my face occasionally after not seeing me for a while to see if I was wearing foundation. Occasionally, when I had a tinted moisturizer on, she’d ask me accusingly if I was wearing foundation. I always said no. I mean, I wasn’t lying; the moisturizer was just tinted…

While I debate a lot of things my mom says, I don’t think she was wrong about this. A lot of foundations have all kinds of weird additives and chemicals that would not allow your skin to “breathe” properly. Many are unfortunately reputed to clog pores. And because everyone is a unique person, a product can affect one person very differently than the other. While there are many on the market now that are supposed to have ingredients to moisturize and even help with skin concerns like fine lines and wrinkling, I still have no desire or patience to use them. I’m fairly satisfied with the state of my skin, so I don’t really think I need it.

At dinner the other night, my friend commented on the tinted lip balm I was using. Since the pandemic, I don’t even have the patience or desire to fuss over a lipstick or lip balm. I feel like I’m so over all those products, not to mention how expensive they are. I have always been lip balm obsessed, since I like the soft feeling of having balm on my lips, but I normally wear just plain lip balm. But TINTED lip balm: it was like the best of both worlds. I had the moisturizing properties of lip balm, combined with the “hint” of color and shine of a lipstick or gloss. I don’t think I will ever go back to a real lip gloss or lipstick again. And what’s also great about this: the tinted lip balm I’m obsessed with now is SO much cheaper than the average clean lipstick/lip balm!

Now that Kaia is in daycare/school, there’s really little to no way to control everything. Even when our ex-nanny was with us, I couldn’t control everything. She repeatedly went against my back and did things I explicitly told her not to do, and she’d overlook and forget things I gave instructions for her to do. But with daycare, even when you provide detailed notes to the administration and ask that they pass it onto the teachers of your child’s class, there’s no actual guarantee those notes will ever get to the teachers. So it can make you wonder why you have to fill out all those endless forms in the application process to begin with, when you will likely send multiple messages to the teachers directly after you start, and have to reiterate it… yet again in person during drop-offs and pick-ups.

One of the things I wrote in Kaia’s food notes in the original enrollment forms were: no foods with added sugar. Well, these notes were never passed onto the teachers. And even when they were, the teachers actually don’t even know what I mean when I say “added sugar.” To them, they didn’t recognize that fruit or fig bars actually DO have added sugar in them; they said they were “natural sugar.” No, not really: the way these things are processed, it’s definitely added sugar! I had to explicitly write: no fruit or fig bars. The teacher wrote this in capital letters for all teachers and substitutes on the fridge for all to observe (or so we think). Then, I saw photos posted on the daycare app of all the kids, including my own, eating cinnamon raisin bread. In what world does cinnamon raisin bread not have any added sugar? And what about Special K with strawberries — they were also eating this for breakfast the other day! It suddenly hit me that it was highly likely the teachers did not actually understand there were added refined sugars in any of these foods. And that really made me sad: that’s the state of our education. Average Americans don’t even know what they put in our bodies willingly.

At the end of the day, I cannot police everything, and I cannot constantly message the teachers banning all these items from being put into my baby’s body. At some point relatively soon, the Pookster will likely have regular exposure to it, so it’s really going to be up to her (to a certain degree) regarding whether she wants these things or not. For example, yesterday, they were doing deconstructed s’mores. To my inner joy, I was so happy to see that my baby ate part of the graham cracker, but refused the marshmallow (processed, nasty sugar) as well as the tiny bit of chocolate. That’s my baby.

A few weeks ago, our handyman friend came by to help repair something. It had already been over a month since our ex-nanny had left. And he said to us, “Can I just ask: doesn’t it feel good to not have a stranger in your home anymore?”

I immediately answered… YES. While I’m sure many families consider their nanny “part of their family,” unfortunately, we never got to that point with ours. Our ex-nanny was a source of a lot of frustration and tension, constantly judging the way we did things, whether that was how we set up the apartment or how we chose to parent. One of her very favorite phrases to start sentences with when she first started was, “you new moms think you know everything.” She was inflexible and hated any type of constructive feedback, instead scowling or responding harshly to it as though harm had been inflicted on her. I especially do not miss cleaning up after her, whether it is the food that she’d leave on the floor around Kaia’s eating area, which she either willfully ignored or was just blind to; the smeared fruit on the couch that she’d miss, her crumbs on our kitchen counters and in our entry way from all her snacking, the food she’d spill or smear on or in our fridge, or even her makeup stains on our walls and doors. In retrospect, sometimes it felt like it was more work having her as a nanny than not having her.

And now that Kaia is 1.5 months into daycare, it makes me even more grateful for the fact that we found a daycare/school that seems to be pretty good, where the teachers have accountability, and where I know she is exposed to and learning new skills and activities every single day. I don’t have to come up with activities or try to convince a nanny to actually do her job. Each day, I see photos and videos of her doing different arts and crafts or practicing her fine motor skills. And each day, I don’t have to think about whether I am showing enough “gratitude” toward the caregiver of my child. I don’t have to worry about whether something I said will piss the teachers off, and they will just decide to stop showing up; that does not happen at daycares the way it happens with nannies in your private home. The emotional load of having a caregiver in your home is not a small one, especially when that caregiver is repeatedly disrespectful of your wishes and requests, but fakes it to others. It’s strange to me that more people do not discuss or address this in online parent groups.

Today, we took the LIRR out to Port Washington to visit my friend, her husband, and their two kids. Their oldest is 5, and their youngest is about 8 months older than Kaia, so just over 2. As soon as we arrived, we were bombarded by their two kids. Their younger one is a bit shyer and seemed to prefer observing and interacting with Kaia as she explored their endless collection of toys and books. The older one seemed more fascinated by Chris and me as adult guests. She was quick to show us all the things she’s been making in school and in her extracurricular activities, and she wanted to show me all the new things that were recently purchased by her parents or gifted to her by her grandparents or her other parents’ friends. It was really cute.

I think what stunned me about their oldest, their daughter, was exactly how chatty she was, how she was insistent on having back and forth conversation, and how she knew just so much. She seemed to be aware of all the latest songs, cartoon characters, and even how to operate all the electronic devices (Google) in the house. It will be curious to see how Kaia develops and how much she enjoys interacting and speaking with other adults. Right now, she is absolutely obsessed with saying “hi,” or “hello!” and waving constantly to almost everyone she passes. I wonder if she will continue to be that open and friendly as she gets older.

Despite the fact that we’re a tech company based in San Francisco and have many, many employees in the New York City area, we do not have a New York City office, nor are there any plans to make one. Everyone seems pretty happy with having our main U.S. offices just in San Francisco and Denver, and the lack of East Coast office just means that all of us East Coast employees are 100% remote. But what this means is…. we pretty much have almost no in-person bonding time. No water cooler moments. No chance to get to know random people in the kitchen or bathroom or water fountain; sometimes, it can feel a bit lonely. Even though I don’t miss the politics of my last company, I do miss having the in-person camaraderie: I miss the coffee catch-ups, the occasionally lunches and happy hours. I also miss having the random jokes and desk laughs, plus of course, the free snacks and food.

So when my colleagues who live in Westchester mentioned that they’d be in the city today and wanted to have lunch, I immediately jumped at the chance. I cleared my calendar and shifted some meetings… And then was immediately disappointed when the air quality in the area was so bad, ranking even worse than Delhi, that my colleagues decided to reschedule for a later date.

Sometimes, it feels like the only colleague I get to interact with is… my apartment. And that’s the sad, annoying thing about working from home full time. I appreciate the privilege of working remotely full time, and think it fits my current stage of life with a young toddler and a family to feed/chores to get done, but these are the moments when I get annoyed and wish I could talk to more people every day.

In the last few days, wild fires have been breaking out all across Canada. The news has reported that over 400 wild fires are active, and the largest concentration of them are in Quebec. Unfortunately, what that also means is that the smoke is coming all the way down to the northeast part of the U.S. Yesterday, I noticed a huge haze over the city, and when I went outside to pick up Kaia from school after 5pm, it largely smelled smoky outside.

Today, it’s been even worse. Inside our apartment, even without the air conditioning turned on, it smells smoky. The building shut off AC in all common areas since our HVAC system pulls in outside air. The sky has ranged in color from dark grey to orange and yellow. At times, it got so dark in our apartment that I had to turn on overhead lights during the day. Downtown is no longer visible from our windows looking down south. I can’t see the water along the Hudson anymore, either. Kaia’s school sent out a notification that none of the kids would have outdoors time (as they usually do during the summer) due to the poor air quality. In my neighbors groups on Facebook, pregnant women are worried that their fetuses will be harmed. Dog-owners say their dogs refuse to go outside because they can smell the smoke, and so they are searching for any spare wee-wee pads for them. Lots of people can be seen walking the streets wearing N-95 masks.

Climate change knows no borders. It doesn’t discriminate. This, unfortunately, looks like it will be our new normal.