When your home cooked meal yields no leftovers = sadness

Posted on by
Reply

I had my friend come over for dinner on Tuesday night so that we could spend time together with Kaia. With a baby now, it’s easier just to have friends come over and hang out. Not to mention with my pumping schedule, I now pump right at dinner time, so it’s harder to go out in the evening. I prepared most of the food the day before, but I got annoyed with my packets of organic chicken thighs from Costco when I realized that my approximately two-lb bags seemed more like they were 1.5 lb. The total packets are supposed to be about six pounds total, and I’m pretty sure this total was less, which was why this packet was so small. After I prepared Tuesday night’s butter chicken, I looked at the pot and saw how little chicken there was, especially since meat always shrinks after cooking. There was no way we’d have any leftover butter chicken after my friend left! I thought. Plus, with my nanny eating some of the food, setting aside a small portion unsalted for Kaia, and the three adults, there was… just a lot of butter chicken sauce and some diced bell pepper left. I felt so disappointed at the end of the night, seeing how little leftover food we had.

That’s the thing about Asians who cook: we aren’t like most Western people. We get excited when we have leftover food. When it’s from a meal out, that means the cost per meal goes down. When it’s from food that you cook, it maximizes the time that you spent cooking that dish. Oh well. Now, I just need to know to double the butter chicken recipe next time and remember to use more chicken.

9-month appointment

Posted on by
Reply

I took Kaia for her 9-month wellness checkup, and everything is looking pretty good: she’s developing well, has little divots on her bottom front gums, indicating she may have some teeth in the next month, and she’s growing like a little weed: now, she’s jumped up to the 44th percentile for weight (from 25th percentile at her six-month checkup), is at the 88th percentile for length/height (though I do think the medical assistant didn’t straighten out her legs enough to properly measure it, but whatever), and 84th percentile for head circumference. She’s also developing stranger danger more: she was not happy to see the nurse practitioner and was even more unhappy with her handling her and giving her the first dose of her flu shot. But luckily, she cried a lot less at this appointment than in June and calmed down as soon as I picked her up. With all the solids she’s eating, it will be interesting to see where she is at in terms of her weight and height at her 1-year appointment. My baby is happy, healthy, and growing. I felt so proud leaving the doctor’s office today for her.

Nanny’s expanding palate

Posted on by
Reply

I always offer my nanny the things I make because I think that’s just a nice thing to do. She oftentimes declines, but I still continue offering because I’m sure something will be of interest at some point. She’s tried things I’ve made that she’s really enjoyed, like black bean soup, butter chicken and noodles. She’s also tried things she didn’t think she would like, such as the various types of dal I’ve made. She said that the versions her husband likes (he’s Indian ethnically) she didn’t care for, but after seeing how well Kaia ate the dals I made, she wanted to try mine. And she said she really enjoyed mine. She said that if Kaia likes it, it’s probably good. Well, I guess Kaia’s palate is more trustworthy to her than mine is…

The nanny calls in sick on the same day I get yet another milk clog – WTF?

Posted on by
Reply

This morning, I woke up around 5:45 to a text from my nanny, who was letting me know she wasn’t feeling well and would be unable to come in today. While it was obviously fine for her to not come in when feeling ill, especially since I knew I only had two meetings today, I also woke up to a weird feeling in my right breast, like a little rock on the side of it. Ugh, I thought. I had a similar feeling a couple days ago, but luckily it never resulted in a clog and cleared up after I pumped that morning. But this time, after my morning pump, which was much lower than usual in terms of output, I realized that “rock” was still in my breast.

Ughhhhhh. Not only did I not have childcare today, but I’d also have to deal with another stupid milk clog… my third one ever, and my first since I started religiously taking sunflower lecithin supplements twice a day as a preventive measure for clogs to thin out the milk fat. WHY did it have to happen on the day the nanny called in sick?

While it would have been an enjoyable day feeding and spending time with my baby, it ended up being an exhausting day of taking care of her while also trying to get the clog out… which in many ways, took more mental energy out of me because there’s always the stress of not knowing when or if the clog will come out. Plus, it physically hurts. It feels sore and hot since a milk clog is essentially an enflamed milk duct, with milk fat that has gotten stuck. Eventually, it finally went away after a lot of massaging, pumping, and ibuprofen, but it was still exhausting. By the end of the day, I was totally pooped and just wanted to pass out. And I did just that… and even skipped my last pump. That probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do given my clog just came out, but I was just too tired to stay up for yet another hour to pump. I’m now at over nine months of exclusively pumping — no one understands exactly how much time and mental energy this takes to do, not to mention the extreme discipline. My body is still not my own as long as I am pumping, but it’s a sacrifice I’m making for my baby.

Play room

Posted on by
Reply

Up until this year, we’d never really taken advantage of the play room in our building. I’d taken family and friends who visited to see it, but we never really made use out of it because they never brought kids, and we had no kids of our own up until this point. But given that Kaia is now 9 months old and crawling, I realized that now is the perfect time to get her using the play room. So I brought her there for about an hour this afternoon, and she got to explore the play house, the little matted castle where she can climb up a cushioned stairway, slide, and tunnel. She seemed a little apprehensive initially, but once I gave her an incentive (always, her pacifier or my phone), she went along with it. And to my pleasant surprise, with a little support, she was able to actively and enthusiastically climb up the stairs, which I personally thought were a bit wide apart. But she did it twice! I felt so proud.

My baby is growing so fast. It’s exciting and makes me happy, but makes me feel like time is passing too quickly. Enjoying these moments watching her grow and evolve sometimes doesn’t even seem to be enough. Sometimes, I just want to freeze time and hold her face in my hands and just stare at her and kiss her. My little baby is getting bigger and exploring a little more of the world every single day.

Awkwardness around “pumping”

Posted on by
Reply

When I was at my parents’ while in San Francisco, I basically made myself at home with all my pumping gear and bottles: I laid out a towel to put all the bottles in the kitchen. I set up my pump with the pump parts on Ed’s old desk. I also walked around liberally with my breast pump connected as though no one was there. No one really commented on it; my mom knew I was pumping, so she didn’t say anything. My aunt and her roommate upstairs never said a word or even acknowledged that I had a nipple sucker connected. And my dad? Well, he averted his eyes whenever he saw I had my “brrr, brrr” device on.

One day, I did leave the cap on my second pump tube on the dining table. My dad found it and came over to me. “You left your… device piece on the dining room table,” he said.

My “device”? Do you mean… my breast pump piece?

Hahahahhahahahahaha. My dad is so awkward that he couldn’t even say “breast pump” or “pump.”

Weather/seasons-appropriate baby clothing

Posted on by
Reply

A relative on Chris’s side had gifted Kaia three different outfits when she was born in multiple sizes. She thoughtfully gave a gift receipt because she told us that the hardest thing with getting clothing gifts when her two kids were born was to fit the size of the clothing to the time of year and season when it would actually fit the kid. I’ve realized that this was definitely very relevant because I had to return almost all of the clothes from our baby registry that were gifted simply because the outfits were too warm to wear between 6-9 months, which is essentially summer time here when Kaia would mostly be wearing summery things.

“Kaia has no fall clothing,” our nanny announced to me yesterday while going through her drawers and in the closet. “She needs to have layers and coats. Are you going to get her some?”

We had so much, perhaps even too much clothing, for her first 9 months of life, particularly 0-3 month clothing. I had to actively cycle through certain outfits to ensure she’d at least wear them 3-4 times. Now, her clothing pile has dwindled down as she’s gotten bigger, so we now have to actually buy her clothes to fit her soon-to-be toddler self.

Pacifier police

Posted on by
Reply

Once upon a time, we left Lenox Hill hospital with our baby and a whole ton of supplies that the nurses gave us. Included in the massive suitcase and bags that they packed us were five newborn pacifiers. We also had 4 pacifiers that were gifted to us via our baby registry, so in total, we had 9 pacifiers. At some point, one of them got lost while Kaia was out with her nanny at the park, so then we had eight left. And since that one pacifier went missing, Chris became the pacifier police overnight and started maniacally counting the pacifiers on the kitchen counter every evening after our nanny would go home to ensure that all were accounted for.

“Where is the 8th one?” he’d demand at around 6 or 7pm each evening. “You need to tell the nanny to count them at the end of each day!”

I thought this was ridiculous. Eight pacifiers really wasn’t that much to account for, and there was no reason that I needed to insist to our nanny that she had to keep tabs on every single one of them. And given that our baby is now nearly 9 months old and we managed to only lose one… to me, that just seemed like a miracle. We were either really anal about ensuring the pacifiers were all there, or our baby was just far easier to keep track of than other babies. In parenting forums, you always hear about things like pacifiers, bibs, and burp cloths going missing constantly.

So, I suppose this adds to Chris’s list of job titles: father, milk manager, baby bottle feeder, and pacifier police.

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.