Contact dermatitis

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It’s been about six weeks of introducing Kaia to solid foods, and while I’ve been a little nervous about choking and allergens, it’s been an enjoyable process to watch her explore and play with foods, put them in her mouth, and see which ones she enjoys the most. It certainly requires a high level of patience to watch her play and throw food, not to mention the extreme mess everywhere and the cleanup, but I figure that this is an investment into her future of eating and being open-minded to everything and anything food-wise. I want her to have positive associations with food and not to be scared of trying new or different things.

This morning, after having oats with flax, tahini, egg, and peach, our nanny took Kaia out for their usual late morning outing. But she stopped in her tracks while in our building lobby when she noticed that Kaia had redness around her mouth and neck and brought her back up to the apartment.

She opened the door of the second bedroom, where I was working, which she normally doesn’t do unless she’s grabbing diapers or wipes. “Yvonne, look at Kaia’s face,” she said nervously. She looked as though she’d seen a ghost.

Kaia had little red bumps around the corners of her mouth and on her chin. In addition to that, her drool rash seemed like it had gotten redder since earlier in the morning. Despite all that, she was still babbling and smiling and being silly.

Our nanny said it may just be a reaction from the acid of the peach, but it could also mean she’s allergic, maybe to the peach or the tahini since it was only day 2 of tahini. She asked me to email the pediatrician for advice, and so I did that while also snapping a photo of Kaia’s face to share.

A few online sources also mentioned the temporary acid reaction. The doctor also replied soon after and said it’s likely just that — a temporary rash which is a reaction to the acidity of the fruit, which is very common. The doctor said it didn’t look like an allergy. It’s called contact dermatitis, and it tends to fade after a couple hours of eating the fruit culprit. Luckily for us, Kaia’s redness faded within the next couple of hours, and she seemed totally fine. I wasn’t as worried as our nanny, especially when I saw the baby’s mood. But I did have a moment of, “ummmmmm…. WHAT IS THIS? NOOOOOO.”

Okay, so maybe I should slow down the speed that I’m introducing solid foods and spices. I was going to mince up some lychee for her this afternoon, but I decided to hold off. She can have some foods she’s already had for the next day or so, and then we can introduce something new on Wednesday. I just want to make sure she’s comfortable and that I’m not being too aggressive.

Asian greens baby

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Today was Kaia’s second day having mustard greens. I blanched the mustard greens I got from Brooklyn Chinatown with a little oil, and I separated the leaves from the stems, as the leaves can be a choking hazard unless finely minced for babies. I gave her three stalks yesterday afternoon, and she happily grabbed and gnawed on them, sucking their juices out. I was very pleased with her first exposure. Then today, the nanny reported back to me that she gnawed and chewed away at another set of three stalks to the point there was barely any vegetable left. The membranes were all broken down with little left.

I hope my baby grows up to love all green vegetables, but to especially embrace Asian greens. They are her mommy’s favorites, and I hope she knows just how special and delicious they are. Mustard greens are particularly good because it’s her first exposure to something that is slightly bitter. “Bitter” is a good flavor for babies to develop a taste of early on, so I hope this is a good sign. Who knows – I may introduce bitter melon to her next!

2nd baby shower this year

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Today, I went to a second baby shower of the year for me: my friend and his wife are expecting the arrival of a baby girl in about two weeks. Since they moved apartments for more space, I went out to Forest Hills for their housewarming/baby shower party. I was also reunited with a few of their friends, who had since had babies (or more babies) since the last time we all saw each other. Of course, we exchanged baby pictures, videos, and stories, and a number of the kids were actually there. It was actually the most un-baby shower baby shower I’d ever been to. There were no baby shower games, no opening or unveiling of gifts. It was just a bunch of adult friends with some of their kids, catching up and enjoying food and company.

This is why I tell Chris that baby showers really aren’t always awful events the way he thinks: baby showers are just excuses to host / throw parties and gatherings of friends and family. It’s an excuse to have a social event with food and to get people together and have fun. They don’t always have to have baby shower elements like the annoying games or party favors. They are what you make them. If you want to be social and host a party, why not use a baby’s pending arrival as an excuse? Chris avoids baby showers like the plague.

Chris just doesn’t like hosting parties or events… or really anything that resembles a group that is not family. He rather just go drink at a bar. 😛

Baby goes to Flushing

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Although we’d taken the baby to Queens a few times, we hadn’t yet gone to Flushing with her and did that today. Flushing is not necessarily the easiest place to take a stroller with its crowded streets and endless hustle and bustle, not to mention that most of the food spots barely have enough space for adults to sit and eat, but somehow, we made it work. We were able to get seats in places where you usually have to fight for seats. We sat in the New World Food Court to feed her and eat some Uighur kebabs and a samsa. We even managed to get through a torrential downpour where we got separated for about half an hour. I was waiting for fish dumplings that were being cooked to order, but I wanted to pick up my favorite soy milk and pork-cabbage bao at the same time. So I walked a block away to get the milk and bao and ended up getting stuck there due to the flooding. Chris and the baby found shelter inside a random nearby apartment building, where the doorman offered to let them stand inside. When I reunited with them, Kaia couldn’t be phased by anything, and it was like business as usual for her.

We returned home earlier than expected to have our fish dumplings and bao and with a good assortment of Asian greens for me to eventually wash, cut, and cook. I’m looking forward to having our baby be an Asian greens connoisseur.

Instant Pot is back in action here!

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A few months ago, I discovered I made the biggest screw-up in my kitchen: I accidentally melted the side of my Instant Pot pressure cooking lid, which basically rendered the entire device useless outside of steaming, sautéing, and reheating. I was so angry at myself: I had made endless delicious meals in that Instant Pot over the last nearly four years, and to see I had completely ruined it steamed me to no end. Luckily for us, we had gotten it for free with Amazon credits, so it wasn’t the biggest waste, not to mention I had used it so much that I definitely got my money’s worth out of it.. even when it was free! So Chris suggested we upgrade to the Instant Pot/Air Fryer combination when Prime Day rolled around. Well, that happened this week, and so I decided to get the Instant Pot Duo Crisp.

The new Instant Pot Duo Crisp, which actually isn’t new, just new to me, has a lot of enhanced functions: of course, there is a second lid just for air frying, broiling, dehydrating, baking. The steamer rack has been improved in its design and sits up better; it just feels sturdier. And perhaps the greatest new feature is that the venting/sealing knob has been streamlined: now, the knob automatically sets itself to sealing (previously, you had to manually set it, and well, people forget…), and it allows you to push a button to vent. You also have the option to turn it to stop the venting completely. This prevents overcooking and allows you to control when you can safely open the lid. I didn’t completely appreciate this until I saw it in action, but it’s a really great step up. It simplifies the use of the Instant Pot even more and makes it more dummy proof.

The instructions are also a lot clearer if you choose to read them. They have charts describing what exactly is happening in the pot and when, depending on what setting you use. They even have cute little sayings in the manual like, “Turn on the Instant Pot. Go ahead: don’t be afraid! You can do it!” They do this because they know a lot of people are so excited to buy the Instant Pot, but when they finally take it out of the box, they are so scared of blowing up their kitchens that they let it sit there for weeks on end with no use. In the back of users’ minds, they are thinking of the pressure cooker that blew up someone’s kitchen counter or sent an innocent user to the emergency room.

Anyway, I’m so happy to have a working Instant Pot again. I’ve already done the water test, made dal, and steamed sweet potatoes in it just in the last two days. I feel like my kitchen is whole again.

Early exposure to allergens

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Contrary to popular belief, when babies begin solids, it’s better to expose and “test” to see how they react to common allergens earlier rather than later. On average, babies will show readiness for solids at around 6 months of age, so it’s a good idea to start gradually introducing common allergens like peanuts, tree nuts, and eggs at around this time. Kaia had already enjoyed peanut butter a number of times in June and enjoyed it. She fed herself the peanut butter right off the spoon and always seemed to want more. I breathed a huge sigh of relief at that. Today, I prepared a tiny omelet for her to eat both at her morning solids feed and afternoon solids feed. I cut the omelet into strips that had a width equivalent to two of my fingers held together (that was the Solid Starts preparation recommendation). When I placed the egg on her tray this morning, she immediately picked up a strip, put it to her mouth, and started biting on it. The nanny cut up a bunch of the egg and had it in tiny pieces for her to eat, and both ways, she seemed to enjoy it. At her afternoon feed, she fed herself egg strips. I also prepared a mix of toor and moong dal for her, which she happily gobbled up.

My tiny foodie is growing and growing. I’m so proud to see her embrace all this new food and hopefully continue to enjoy a diversified palate. She also ate a good amount of spinach today and more broccoli, so the nanny warned me that her poop may be extra, extra smelly soon.

Coming home with the baby brings anxiety

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I’m planning to come back to San Francisco at the end of August since I have a work offsite planned, and Chris and the baby are coming with me. It will be an opportunity for me to not only go for work and meet my colleagues in person for the very first time, but it will also be the first time my family will be meeting the baby. For our sanity’s sake, we’re only spending the weekends at my parents’, while spending time at the hotel that will be expensed during the weekdays since I’m in town for work. My mom called today, so I told her we were planning to go home since I have a work offsite planned. When she asked me how long, and I told her it would be just over a week, of course, she got upset.

“Yvonne, why is it so short?” she said, in her usual annoyed tone. “Why can’t you just work here and stay here longer, and I’ll take care of the baby? You should stay at least a month. Why don’t you think about me?”

It’s always about her.

My mom is delusional. She always forgets how miserable we are together when we are in the same place for longer than 3-4 days and all the fights. She has short term memory. She always imagines everything to be flowery when it is not. Also, has she completely forgotten that she herself said she isn’t even strong enough to hold the baby while standing up? She can’t even hold a coffee mug without spilling it all over the carpet at home. I reminded her this, and she responded, “Well, I can try.”

“No,” I responded sternly. “You can’t ‘try’ to hold and take care of the baby. You either do it or you don’t, and you won’t. Taking care of a baby is work, and you can’t do it.”

She wasn’t happy I said this, but I wasn’t saying any of this to make her happy. I don’t trust her being with the baby alone given all her outdated recommendations (e.g. “why doesn’t the baby sleep with a blanket?”), not to mention her lack of strength with her arms and back. I just need to try my best to be emotionally detached, being calm, managing the conversation at hand and not engaging. I’m already getting anxiety about being home, and this trip feels like it’s going to be more work than actual pleasure already.

When handing down baby items brings sadness

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A friend of mine is having a baby in a few weeks, and we offered to give our handed down bassinet to him and his wife since it’s still in great condition. Since Kaia has already transitioned into her crib as of mid-June, I told him that the bassinet would be ready to pick up anytime now. I had already washed the mattress pad cover and cleaned the bassinet after Chris took it apart. But because we’re used to the music attachment on the bassinet, we’ve still been using it at bedtime to put Kaia to sleep. Granted, it’s a bit redundant given we already have the Hatch sound machine playing soothing water sounds, but we partially just turn it on out of habit.

As I cleaned all the bassinet parts, I felt so sad to think that last night would be the last night we’d play the bassinet music for Kaia. We had many, many nights of playing this same music to soothe her to sleep, so there’s some nostalgia attached to this music maker and bassinet. This bassinet was the first place she slept in, the only bed she slept in outside of the hospital and one hotel for the first six months of her life. I obviously would be crazy to keep the music just to remember those bittersweet early days, and I know I have to give this away to hand off to my friend, but it still makes me sad and wistful. My baby is getting so big so quickly. She’s no longer a newborn. She’s a growing baby, and soon before I know it, she’ll be a toddler and then a little girl running around everywhere. The newborn phase was really hard, no doubt, but I can’t believe it’s already over.

So as ridiculous as it sounds, I was a little happy when my friend said he couldn’t come to pick up the bassinet today and would come on Friday instead. Well, I guess that’s at least three more nights of Kaia.. or well, myself, enjoying and reminiscing with this music.

Welcome to the US, where people don’t give a shit about moms and born babies

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This week, I’m attending a virtual course every morning on Crucial Conversations. There’s about 28 participants in the course, and while a lot of it is large group lecture and discussion based, we also do a good amount of small group breakouts, in groups of 2-3. When one of the first breakout sessions happened, another woman who was based in Colorado apologized to me in advance in case I heard some crying or cooing because she had her 8-week old baby sleeping in her arms, below the view of the camera. I laughed in response, as I told her I could totally relate: In fact, full disclosure, I said to her, but I was actually pumping milk and had my camera angled above my chest so that it wasn’t in view. Good thing my pump was so quiet that on Zoom calls, no one would notice! I half joked.

I noticed her baby was on oxygen and said she looked really cute and tiny, but it’s all relative since my own baby is seven months old now. She told me that while her baby is on paper 8 weeks old, she is quite small for her age because she was born about a month premature and was in the NICU. She had only two weeks of maternity leave, and though her company has an “unlimited PTO” policy, the company did not allow her to tack on any PTO to her maternity leave, which was already dismal. She was frustrated about this, since it was a big reason she took this job in the first place. So she wanted to use the skills she hoped she would learn in this course to confront her management about this.

It really hurt my heart to hear this. And while my heart hurt for her, I also just got really angry and could feel my pulse racing because of how infuriating and senseless all of this was in one of the richest nations on earth. It’s a case in point about how here in the U.S., people and employers truly do not give a shit about moms and their born babies. It’s everyone for themselves, and business is business, which means we’re all about profit and don’t care about the well being of our employers. I had 20 weeks off, and I didn’t feel like it was enough. I cannot imagine only having a tenth of that like this woman did, plus having the stress of having my baby in the NICU and needing to leave the hospital with oxygen support at home. The entire situation sounds completely terrifying, but insanely enough, that’s what’s “normal” for so many moms across this wretched country.

How did we become such an awful, cold, heartless place to live?

When you become a pumping mama resource

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A couple days ago when Chris’s parents were still here, I was hand expressing milk to “prime” my breasts for the pump in the second bedroom. I came out with the collection bottle in my hand, and Chris looked at the bottle, a little incredulous.

“You got that amount out just using your hands?” he asked. “Once upon a time, that’s how much milk you got during an entire pump session.”

Trying to conceive was a journey. Pregnancy was a journey. And breastfeeding/pumping has been its own journey full of many ups and downs. I’ve definitely come a long way not just with my output to feed my baby, but also with my knowledge of breastfeeding and pumping in general. Now, I actually frequently answer questions about pumping from colleagues as well as a neighbor friend who recently gave birth. She is about eight weeks postpartum and had a hard time feeding her baby directly from the breast. If I didn’t know it any better, I’d say we were the exact same person with the same problems. She, however, had me as a resource since the beginning, so I’d been sharing pumping resources and tips with her since before she even gave birth. She took me up on a lot of my suggestions and read through my resources, and this morning, she texted me a photo of her first morning pump, the largest one she’d ever had to date, which was approximately seven ounces (210ml). I don’t think I got to that level of output in a single pumping session until after the 12-week mark, but then again, I also didn’t have all the resources then that I shared with her now.

I’m happy to help other mothers who are struggling to breastfeed in any way I can. I only wish I had all this knowledge and help back then. But it’s one way I can “give back” to help others who are going through their own downward spirals and just trying to help their babies eat, grow, and be healthy. I know if I did this again, even though it would be challenging, I’d have a lot more experience and resources at my fingertips so that I wouldn’t be as upset as I was in the beginning of this journey. But that’s what all moms need: more support, more resources, and more help.