"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.

Color Blind

With staying indoors and going out less, I've been using electronics a lot more with my daughter. Part of it is she's a picky eater and I have no patience to try and cajole her into eating without the assistance of something she actually enjoys. The other option is reading a book to her over and over and over again, which normally I wouldn't mind. But, if I'm in a hurry or I want to eat too, or I'm managing the baby at the same time, it doesn't quite work.

I tell myself what I show her is educational: library story-time, cooking shows, songs from Veggie Tales, or video clips of our friends and their children.

We watched a Reading Rainbow episode a few weeks ago. I grew up watching the show many afternoons at 1 pm or 1:30 pm, whatever the original air time was. She's really into Arthur right now so I picked the episode where they read Arthur's Eyes. It's the one where Arthur couldn't see and got glasses, was embarrassed about needing glasses, and eventually, embraced them in the end.

After reading the book, the show incorporated a series of different worldly applications of some ideas taken from the book. In that episode, one idea he mentioned was being color blind. Levar explained what it means to be color blind and the test for color blindness. He showed a few pictures of the colored circles with numbers inside them. He also mentioned another kind of color blindness.

"There's another kind of color blindness the kind that has nothing to do with your eyes. Has to do with your mind. Not with what you see but how you see it. Has to do with your heart. Not with who you see. But how you see them. People come in all kinds of sizes shapes and colors, and when you see through the skin on someone's face to the person underneath, then you're colorblind in the best possible way."

That episode originally aired on July 27, 1983. It is very unfortunate that in the last 37 years, we have cumulatively moved forward very little in this regard.

Let's be color blind.

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 :)

Valid Concern

My Chinese has never been very good, but by some miracle, I've been able to keep most of my speaking fluency and some of my reading abilities.

After my husband and I found out we were expecting two and a half years ago, I made a mental note that I would speak solely in Chinese to my child(ren). I knew early on that my children would only be as good as or worse at Chinese than I was, so I was going to have to work really hard to pass on as much as I could.

Now, there was a second factor into this situation: my husband! Unfortunately, his Chinese skills when we got married were not very good. When people asked about his language skills, I'd have to explain to them that his parents were fluent in too many languages, and because of that, he never got to really focus on anything other than English. It's also just really hard to pay attention in Chinese school as a kid growing up: I'm guilty of that myself. 

One day in the car, this conversation popped up, and it was noteworthy (and funny) enough for me to share it with his permission:

Two years later, I have to say, teaching my daughter Chinese hasn't felt like very much teaching at all because complete immersion is the best way to learn, and she has been completely immersed since she was born. I also have to say I've never actually pushed my husband to learn Chinese from me. Sure, I've joked with him about it here and there, but I've never sat him down and told him straight up: you will learn Chinese and I will teach you. We maybe had one evening when I taught him colors. :) 

Our daughter really started talking and took off with her language skills around 18 months. I will never forget the day I was laying in bed one morning, pregnant with my son, and I see my daughter come walking through our bedroom door to my side of the bed. She came up to me and said very clearly, "妈妈起来.” Mommy, get up. And with that, I was wide awake, getting up, and amazed at how fast my daughter was growing up right before my eyes. 

When she started speaking more, I noticed my husband would ask me what certain words meant as I said them. I would tell him and he'd say it a few times. I'd correct him if it was way off in pronunciation, but for the most part he was close. 

Slowly, he picked up phrases and started saying them more: 洗澡， 吃饭， 睡觉， 过来。

And now he's saying even more phrases and even getting close to using complete sentences: 最后两口， 躺好换尿布， 你的 (object) 在哪里,  穿衣服。

Toddlers learn language so quickly at their young age - it's absolutely amazing. My daughter will say words or phrases during the day and I'll ask my husband, "Where'd she learn that from?" 

And he usually always replies, "I don't even know what that means so she didn't learn it from me!" 

Of course, she learned it from me, but I didn't realize she could remember so much of what she had heard me say. 

There was one day I was speaking to my daughter in Chinese and then I turned to my husband to ask him a question. I almost asked him in Chinese, not having completely switched languages in my head, but I caught myself. 

Unfortunately for him, her language skills will surpass his - they probably already have - and chances are, they will be better than his for her entire life. She's got the advantage of time on her side. However, I am very proud of him for learning as much of the language as he has in the last year two years. However valid my concern was two years ago, I am not concerned anymore. One of these days, I may not have to catch myself to switch languages, and he may even be able to reply (in Chinese!)

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!