Mid Year Check-In

At the beginning of the new year, I wrote a post with a few goals I wanted to accomplish. It's my version of a "New Year's Resolution." Well, Unfortunately for most people, 2020 has turned out to be one terrible year. You can read about my take on the terrible twos here, more for comedic relief than real talk. 

A whole six months has gone by. I can't tell you half of what I did in these six months, But I know the time has gone by because:

• I'm not pregnant anymore
• I have a second child
• There are more gray hairs on my head (I think...I'm not really counting...)

I started the year with three general "goals" I wanted to accomplish. 

1. Finish my cross-stitch
2. Find a new work-life balance
3. Keep my sanity

1. Finish My Cross-Stitch

I did! I finished my cross-stitch. I put in extra hours early this year, stitching at night, but I didn’t finish it before he was born. Somehow, after my son was born, I found time here and there to finish! It took me about three and a half years, but I finished it on June 28, 2020. This is my second large-scale cross-stitch that I've finished. Once again, the irony is that when I purchased this cross-stitch, I was living in China and single. When I finished it, I was living in the USA, married, with two kids two and under.

Originally, I bought this cross-stitch with a goal of finishing it before we had kids. That didn't happen. So then, I wanted to finish it before we were done having kids. That didn't happen either...but to my own credit, I only missed that goal by about three months.

Here it is!

Something often overlooked about cross-stitches is actually the back. If you enter a cross-stitch into a county fair or contest, they actually judge you more on the back than the front. Why is that? The back tells about the journey. Anyone can come up with a nice looking design on the front, but it takes dedication and patience to have a beautiful cross-stitch back.

So what is it about this journey that's so important? 

1. No Knots - cross stitching doesn't involve tying any knots. The ends of each thread are secured by looping your stitches on top of the ends. Every time you start a new thread, it must be secured in this way. 
2. Reaching over vs. starting new - I don't know if there's a technical term for this. If anyone's savvy enough in cross-stitch terminology, please let me know! But this is where instead of cutting the thread and starting in a new location, you take your thread from your last ending point and reach across the canvas to start it in a new location, therefore resulting in a very long piece of thread traveling on the back. It makes the back look messy and sloppy.
3. Consistency - The Xs on the front need to be crossed the exact same way in order to appear consistent and neat. This means if you stitch the bottom left to top right first, it has to be stitched first on every single X. When done correctly, the stitches on the back will all appear to be in the same direction instead of alternating vertical and horizontal stitches. 

Is it obvious to tell if someone's taken their time and cross-stitched the correct way? Yes. If you know what you're looking for, it's extremely obvious. One of the most telling signs is that the back of your cross-stitch should look exactly like the front.

Here's my back:

I have to say, I did a really nice job on this cross-stitch. I've been sloppy on previous ones in the past and learned the hard way, hence how I've been able to come up with my mental list of "what it takes to have a good cross-stitch." The design itself is not a difficult one, especially not compared to the last one I finished, but it fits perfectly for why I wanted to finish it: it's for my children. 

2. Find a New Work-Life Balance. 

I have been able to find a new work-life balance. In doing so, I've cut my students in half, I limit the hours I work, and I'm only teaching online right now. For most of this, I have to thank coronavirus actually. If the virus didn't exist, I would have pressured myself into taking all my students back which would be 12+ hours of teaching a week in five days. Add that onto taking care of my kids during the day while my husband was working as well as breastfeeding, or attempting to breastfeed my son, and that results in one crazy mom. 

I'll never forget the day I put my pump on the kitchen counter and pumped during my 30 minute break in between two lessons while cooking spaghetti on the stove for dinner at the same time after my daughter was born. I don't even know where she was. I think my husband was watching her. 

I'll be eternally grateful for coronavirus that I will not have to do that with my son this time around. But that's pretty much the only reason why I'm grateful for this virus. For everything else, it's ruined a lot of plans, trips, outings, and life in general. 

3. Keep my Sanity

As mentioned above, this virus has helped me to keep my sanity in certain ways. In others? Not so much. It's been a new learning curve to figure out how to plan grocery trips now and be intentional about what I buy. I've had to train my daughter into a daily routine/schedule that doesn't involve going on playdates or wandering stores for fun. But we've found other things that she has enjoyed during these last three months of staying at home and staying out of public places, which has also kept us from going crazy ourselves: going on bike rides in the bike trailer, swinging in our front lawn and "blasting off", swinging in our hammock, watching our neighbors mow and trim their lawns, going swimming in our neighbor's pool, watching bunnies and squirrels, digging in our flower beds which don't have flowers, and learning how to be a big sister, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. 

Overall, I think the transition to having two kids while maintaining both of our jobs and general lifestyle has been pretty smooth. The kids have kept me busy during all this staying at home, and to be honest, it's been nice. I wonder to myself what quarantine with no kids would have been like. I think I would have had a lot more time to do the things I wanted to do and no will to do them. Chances are, I would have sat at home, watched a lot of TV, or spent a lot of money shopping online, neither of which I have time to do now.

I hope despite all the terribleness this year has brought for many of us, you've been able to find some silver linings to reach some goals or discover something new for yourself. 

Here's to the second half of 2020. 

"Terrible" Twos

My daughter is two. Are the twos as terrible as they're infamously named? In some ways, totally. She, on occasion, wakes up from her naps screaming hysterically, and we don't know how to calm her down. Sometimes this lasts for 15-20 minutes. 

She likes to play the "I don't actually know what I want" game. Not familiar with it? It goes something like this:

S: I want ice [in my water]!

Me: Ok. *adds ice in water*

S: No. No. No ice.

Me: 🤦🏻‍♀️ *Takes away bottle. Dumps out - refills water only. Hands back bottle*

S: Ice! Ice! Ice!

Me: Are you kidding me?! 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️

She likes to sleep with her door open, but if it's not open enough, she'll scream at you to open it more. 

She needs all her stuffed animals lined up in a particular place and way under the blanket and if they move even the slightest bit (even if she moved/kicked them around), she'll start crying for you to come back and fix it.

Are you exhausted yet? That's just the start.

**

On the flip hand, she amazes me at how helpful and capable she already is at just two years old. She can help me unload the clean clothes from the dryer into the basket, and sometimes, she'll even drag the basket to the living room for me to fold if she's feeling extra cooperative. She can help me bring bags of light items from the grocery store into the kitchen for me to put away. She can turn on and off light switches when asked to. She can retrieve items for me when requested. 

So is she really that terrible as a two year old? 

Sometimes. The answer is sometimes. 

**

It's the year 2020. We've only had a handful of years with two 2s so far: 2020, 2012, 2002, 1922. Unfortunately, many people started the year with high hopes, only to have them be squashed. Some would say it's been a terrible year. It has indeed been a year filled with uncertainty and unrest.

Bulbs

In the spring of 2016, we went to a nursery and walked through, perusing various plants. This was before babies and toddlers, when Saturday mornings didn't involve automatic alarm clocks blasting through a monitor.

In particular, I was looking for something that could grow in shade. I happened to come across a flowering plant that grew in partial to full shade: Astilbe. Then, I saw the price tag and decided it was too much to pay for one plant. I took a picture of the plant specs and that was that.

Image from American Meadows product page.

For those of you not familiar with this plant, this is what blooming Astilbe looks like.

I saved the picture on my phone to remember the name of this plant. The year after, we even went back to the nursery in search of it again since I had decided to fork out the money. It wasn't there. Thus ended my search for Astilbe, for a while.

Fast forward three years. We were stuck at home with a toddler and a newborn. I wasn't working for the interim, and I was itching to do something. I did a search online and found Astilbe bulbs at a much nicer price, and it happened to be the planting season for our growing region. Now, despite being an amateur gardener, I understood that growing a plant from a bulb was more difficult than planting a grown, potted version. I decided to take the chance and buy a pack of five bulbs. That would have been about the number of plants I'd wanted anyway to fill the space.

The bulbs arrived and my husband planted them on April 16th. We watered and waited. After about two and a half weeks, we saw our first sprouts. One bulb sprouted first and then another shot up a few days after that. Unfortunately the other three didn't fare as well, so I only have two plant babies.

Being in the middle of a strange time in the world, watching these plants has made me remember that nature doesn't need us. When I was a senior in high school, we watched a video during class one day about earth without human existence. While most everyone else was probably zoning out, I have since remembered the general concept of that video: earth thrives without us. Grass and plants would grow wild and spread as they wished. The air would be cleaner because factories, machines, industry would not be running. The water cycle would balance itself out once again without human interference and consumption. 

As I already stated, I'm not the best at taking care of plants or gardening. My interest in this area is severely handicapped by my abilities. I've had many "plant projects" halted or ended because I didn't know what next steps to take. I'm hoping this one can continue at least a year, depending on how well I winterize them once the cooler weather returns. I actually don't know what colors my blooms will be as it was a mixed bag. I'll have to wait for their blooms to find out. Let's hope they bloom.

This will need to be added to my list of goals in 2020 I'd written about earlier this year and revisit the ones I'd originally stated.

Cream Cheese

One good thing that’s come out of this quarantine for a lot of people has been a chance to explore and experiment with cooking and new recipes. I’ve seen lots of people sharing photos and stories on social media about baking their own bread, making pasta from scratch, and even attempting a homemade Beef Wellington. We haven’t experimented with cooking nearly as much since we’ve had our hands full with a newborn, but we did make one thing we’ve never done before: homemade cream cheese.

Bagels and cream cheese is a favorite in our house. Unfortunately, we’re not very good at aligning the two foods together in our possession at the same time. We usually get our bagels in bulk from one store and our cream cheese from a normal grocery store. What ends up happening is we have cream cheese. We buy bagels a short while later, and then we run out of the cream cheese and have too many bagels left.

The other food “problem” in our house is milk. Only one person drinks milk in our household of four. But the amount of money to buy a half gallon is like 75% or more of what it costs to buy the whole gallon unless it’s on sale.  Usually I end up using some in recipes (biscuits, pancakes, cake, etc), but even then we’ve thrown out a good amount of milk gone bad at times.

Enter cream cheese. I googled how to make cream cheese one day and came across this recipe that used whole milk.

I won’t post the whole recipe here, but I’ll provide a shortened explanation with pictures of how it’s done.

Ingredients:

1. Whole milk
2. Vinegar or lemon juice 
3. Cheese cloth
4. Food processor ( I know this isn’t an ingredient, but without it, it’s pretty much impossible to make.)
5. Salt 

Instructions:

Bring milk to a simmer.

Add vinegar (or lemon juice) to curdle.

Strain Curds.

The bottom is whey.

Blend in food processor.

Add flavorings and store. This one is blueberry.

I bought these small mason jars when my daughter was younger and used them to store homemade baby food for her. We still use them now to make her breakfast overnight oat portions, portion canned fruit (vs buying the fruit cups), and I look forward to using them a second round for baby food!

And they make the perfect cream cheese containers :)

A Pot of Curry

I went grocery shopping for the first time today in about seven weeks. Things have changed. There's plexiglass at cash registers. People are wearing masks and gloves. There's a designated person wiping carts at the entrance. Entrances and exits are marked separately. There's tape on the floor marking six foot distances. Traffic on the roads was a lot lighter as well as people shopping overall. (Granted, I did go at 8:30 in the morning...which is early even without our current situation.)

The lady who normally checks me out at the register was working. I wasn't sure if she'd recognize me without my daughter and with a mask on, but she did. We chatted for a bit since nobody was in line waiting to check out behind me. I told her I had two kids now. She didn't believe me. I showed her a picture. She said she couldn't wait to see both of them again. Mentally, I thought about how many more months it would be before I would ever venture outside with my two young kids.

Upon arriving home, I completely changed everything I had worn out and threw them directly into the washing machine. Times have changed. Sadly, they're never going to go back to the way they were. Masks and gloves in public may be a part of our new normal. Social distancing may always be on our minds. But life will eventually go on.

In some ways, I've been grateful for this virus. It forced me to stay home in a time when I would have stayed home anyway. Convenient, right? I've known women who are at the mall or taking their baby out DAYS after giving birth. That is not me. My body has proven to me that it takes time, sometimes longer than normal, to put itself back together. With the quarantine this year, I've appreciated being able to accept that without feeling like I'm depriving myself of anything.

I've appreciated the time at home with my family. My husband was blessed to have six weeks paternity leave from his company. This was a drastic change from two years ago when our daughter was born and he was given one week paternity and took one week of PTO. Looking back, watching one baby at two weeks old by myself at home would have been a piece of cake. Part of me is still anxious and terrified about him having to return to work (at home) and being "left alone"with a six week old and a two year old.

In other ways, it's been a huge pain. We've been to the grocery store two times since having a new baby. I miss using fresh ingredients to cook. Normally, I almost never buy frozen or canned vegetables. I don't really know what to do with them. The texture is different, and sometimes, so is the taste. We've been eating a lot of prepared frozen foods, which, back in my childhood/teenage days, I may have loved. But being an adult now, it gets old pretty fast.

We haven't been able to have as much help as I had thought. My in-laws didn't come. My dad hasn't come over. Friends have dropped off food occasionally, which has been really nice, but I miss seeing people. I was texting a friend and telling her, "T loves to be held. I wish I could give other people the privilege!" He was quite tiny when he was born, not even 7 pounds, and he went down to almost 6 pounds at his lowest, but he is shaping out to be quite the chunky baby. At one month, he was just under 10 pounds, and I'm pretty sure by 5 weeks he went comfortably over that. (Yes, I know, this is small compared to other people's standards, but when he weighs 8.4% of my postpartum weight, not even my normal, that's pretty significant!)

Lastly, it has impacted my work. I am self-employed and run my own business so I knew by taking a maternity leave I was going to be giving up 2-3 months of income. Not a problem.

So where's the problem?

My substitute was an older lady, and when this virus came about, it was decided she would not teach students inside her home. Also, being a substitute who wasn't familiar with my students, online lessons were not likely and my students did not wish to take online with someone who wasn't their normal teacher. Originally, I had been thrilled over half my students wanted to take lessons with the substitute this year - significantly higher than two years ago. I was also very excited to have her as my substitute as well. Unfortunately, none of it panned out.

As a result, my teacher instincts and concern for my students decided to shorten my maternity leave by a month. So instead of starting the second week of June like I had intended, I am now starting the second week of May. I am teaching a lighter load of about 6-8 students, but it means adding the slightest bit of work to my already busy daily routine. You also have to understand though that the longer my students go without lessons - whomever the teacher may be - the more difficult my job is to teach them again when they return. It's a catch-22. Yes, it is my personal decision to do this, but no, it was not the original plan.

When my daughter was born, I went back to work when she was 8 weeks old, and that was planned. I told myself it was too soon and I would need more time with my son. Well...that isn't happening. He will be 7 weeks old when I start teaching again. So, if we have a third child, does that mean I'll go back to work when he/she is 6 weeks old?! Ha...

As nice as it's been to humor my homebody introverted self for the last month and a half, life will eventually need to resume. We can't stay home forever in fear of getting the virus. But we will also never leave our house with the same carefree mindset we used to. Shopping trips will need to be meticulously planned, and stopping by two or three different stores at once to snag the best deals is probably a thing of the past (at least for me.)

Tonight, we'll get to eat our pot of curry with fresh vegetables and chicken.

Stay smart, even if the state is reopening.

All Diapers Are Not Created Equal

In the middle of this quarantine, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, hand soap, paper towels, disinfecting wipes, and disinfecting spray are just some of the items which fly off shelves and are nowhere to be found. Not so high on the list because the population who needs them is smaller would be diapers, baby wipes, and formula.

We got lucky and stocked up on diapers with no intention of being in quarantine for 1+ months after our son was born. How did this happen? Last September, I bought a Groupon for a Costco membership which included extra perks of coupons. One of the coupons was a $25 off $250 purchase online only. I didn't intend to use the coupon because when was I going to spend $250 in a single transaction online at Costco? The coupons didn't expire until the end of February 2020, so I held onto all of them including that one, but didn't think much of making an online purchase.

Fast forward to early February. That flyer included a sale on Huggies diapers. I finally had an epiphany that I could use my coupon towards buying diapers since that was an impending need for the next year or more of our lives, and we were going to be buying diapers for two for an unspecified amount of time as well. So we front-loaded our diaper purchase and were able to use my coupon.

A week after he was born, I came across a Facebook Marketplace post for free diapers of assorted sizes, and the seller was located a mere 10 minutes from us. My husband went out to pick up these diapers and they sat in our garage untouched for about 3-4 days to let any virus/bacteria presence die off, hopefully, if there was any.

One morning, I went out and sifted through the diapers, sorting by size and brand so we could organize them to use in an orderly fashion. I used empty diaper plastic sleeves which I had saved (that's another story...) and lined up the diapers to form essentially an entire box of diapers = probably over 100. The majority were size 1 with a little bit of newborn and size 3. We were able to use the size 3 for my daughter, and my son used up all the newborn and we're currently using up the size 1.

Now, if you don't already know, diapers come in a wide variety of brands and price points. The inexpensive diapers are inexpensive for a reason and typically aren't the ones you want to buy. My favorite brands for the budget would be Huggies and Kirkland diapers. Both can be found at Costco, but I'm not trying to advertise.

The diapers we got for free did not include either of these brands, but included a wide variety of other brands. Here is a photo I took of all the different brands placed side by side.

These are seven different brands of diapers (I think) with seven different styles/cuts. I took a second photo with three very distinct diapers and various differences in shape/style.

As you can see, the diaper on the left is shorter compared to the two on the right. I actually compared it to a different brand of newborn diapers and they were almost identical in size. The two diapers on the right are approximately the same in height, but the width is visibly different and one is skinnier than the other. 

I could go into much more detail about the elastics on each one, and which ones have pockets, but that's a conversation we should have privately if you ever want to discuss different diaper brands and which ones I think are better.

Remember:

- a cheap diaper is not worth it if it causes leaks 

- an expensive diaper is not the best just because it costs the most
- fancy brand names with big reputations don't mean anything

Main Takeaway: If you're having a baby for the first time and don't know what brand of diaper to get, or are curious what brand of diaper to get, consult someone who has used diapers before, or read blogs online to see what other moms have preferred. Don't simply find what's on sale and stock up or trust a big brand. DO experiment yourself with various brands if you have the luxury to be able to do so.

Happy changing!

Mamalogues: Strange Times

We live in strange times right now. It's been even stranger to have a baby during these times. Nobody could come visit us at the hospital. Our own daughter wasn't even able to come visit. We haven't had anyone over at the house to see the baby since he was born including our own family. We don't go to the grocery store if we can help it and mostly live off pantry staples and frozen foods. Some people have come to drop off some groceries or meals here and there, but we haven't asked anyone for anything because we don't want others to risk going out on our behalf.

Our daughter decided to rebel after we picked her up to come home with us after baby brother was born. Every day since has included tears and tantrums of some degree and her sensitivity right now is off the charts. I can't even open the cereal box for her if she wants to open it herself without a crying fit ensuing. We're lucky the second child is rather calm and likes to sleep. We joke that our daughter was a handful as a baby, and now that there's a new baby, she is STILL the handful.

I can feel the postpartum depression creep in at times. The foods I couldn't eat when pregnant, I now still can't eat because of to-go only rules and closed restaurants. Let's face it - sushi is not a to-go kind of food. And even though Asian cultural confinement says you shouldn't go outside for a month after delivery, it's still depressing to think that after my month is up, I still can't go out anywhere as I please. On the bright side, it means I don't have to worry about loading up two kids in the car by myself to go out.

I remember after my daughter was born, I struggled with the same kind of emotions in a different way. After my husband went back to work, I was left alone at home with a new baby whom I barely understood how to take care of. I still felt like I was crawling in the dark, feeling my way around, desperately trying to read nonverbal cues. Music was what helped me get through it. I'd go and play piano for a bit while she slept, and lucky for me, it didn't wake her up.

I would do the same now, but a needy toddler doesn't appreciate it when you don't pay attention to her for more than five minutes. When I've tried to play for a bit, she will actually come up to me and say, "Mama, nano [sic] all done." Clearly she dictates my world as well.

Being sleep-deprived and listening to a whiny toddler is not a good combination. Although my body is used to running on less sleep than the days pre-kids, sleeping two cycles of 2-3 hours and then being up and running for 13+ hours is exhausting. Factor that in with a defiant two year old and you have a recipe for disaster. It's an understatement to say that life at home is tough right now.

I miss my students. I stopped teaching a week and a half earlier than I anticipated because of the virus. I also caught a minor cold the week before I delivered 😬. My substitute plans fell through because of the virus. Part of me feels obligated to start teaching (online) earlier than I originally planned instead of leaving my students hanging for two and a half months. Part of me wants to start teaching when I originally planned. A tiny, tiny part of me thinks I should use the virus and the fact that I now have two kids two and under to stop teaching for a while. But I really don't want to do that.

My daughter's birthday was last week. There were no presents. There was no party. But we celebrated in our own small ways. I looked up a cake recipe without milk or eggs because we need to ration the supplies 😂 and she helped me make it. Then I made a homemade frosting.

I let her mix the batter.

...and then I had to grab a second fork and help her mix.

She was more interested in the candle flames than the cake itself and only had like two bites. Oh well. I’d like to say she’s not that interested in sugary treats, but if we had the chocolate cake from Costco, she’d probably be eating it up by the mouthful...

And of course, in To family fashion, we made her a homemade birthday card. I told myself before her first birthday that I’d hand make her a card every year for her birthday. So now she has two. 

I was filling out my son's baby book. There's a spot for world leaders, the price of gas, the price of a house, and popular movies. But there's no spot for world events, no spot for me to write "Coronavirus" or "Covid-19". Both my children will inevitably learn about this in their history books. But I'll tell them: we lived through this.