🌸 Spring 2024: A time of new beginnings

Hello friends,

I’ve been slow to blog because we’ve been ultra busy putting around the house with little Peach (the internet name of Froggy’s baby brother) but here’s what we’ve been up to.

Pregnancy and birth

The tail end of this pregnancy was terrible this time — weird symptoms, exhaustion, brain rot. Nothing was enjoyable because everything was too hard. Books have always been my solace in difficult times but I’d stopped reading because it was too tiring to remember what I’d just read. Peach’s birth started out all very on theme.

My water broke at 3am and some tufts of hair were already poking out during check-in. I asked for an epidural ASAP. I sat around cramping for an hour and no epidural came. I asked the nurse to please call it in again and moaned for another hour in pain … and no epidural came. I moved beyond moaning and started mooing in much more pain for another. In between moos, I asked the nurse to please please go in person to check on the epidural, but no epidural came!! I learned when I max out my pain meter, my brain starts registering it as nausea and I start dry heaving. Finally the nurse came back, the anesthesiologist had been napping this whole time!!! The resident comes in bleary-eyed, mumbling about being burnt out. I try to sit still between my waves of nausea and mooing as the attending pays suspiciouslyyyy close attention and re-checks every step. But the epidural works and finally around 6:30am, I get some relief and slink down in the bed to get some shut-eye before the big event. Zzzzzz

I wake up to a dozen doctors streaming in. Someone grabs my IV and jams a vial of some chemicals in, another is flipping me and putting my foot in the air. I look like a dog ready to pee on a fire hydrant. One white-robed lady tells me: “Everything is fine but we may have to do other procedures” How ominous. But great news, I’m ready to push baby Peach pops out in less than 15 minutes! [0] 

The doctor comes in to stitch me up, and I insist on nice pretty even stitches. She agrees but, there are no tears!!

Baby Peach arrives fat, healthy, with the wisest eyes I’d ever seen. He looked like an old monk trapped in a baby body. (Froggy had playful eyes) My parents come with the bougie salted caramel cappuccino and breakfast sando I’m never willing to splurge on from the ultra $$$$ cafe near our house. I cuddle our little Peach and sip my coffee. The nurse comes by periodically to ask if I need painkillers but there’s no pain and we are all confused. The restoration to my old self is instant. I feel I could run a mile immediately. I read an article about the physics of retaining walls just to check if my brain works again - it does!!! 

Froggy and the Little Peach

Froggy loves our new little Peach!! He has been busy divvying up his empire in preparation. The week before Peach arrived, Froggy gathered all his plastic fish and dolphins into the tub for bath and proclaimed - “These fish, they all obey me!” Then he portioned out a choice dozen or so to the side and said those will obey Peach. We told Froggy that Peach was born in the year of the Rabbit, and Froggy then earmarked two stuffed bunnies for Peach. 

When Peach first came out of the womb, I thought he looked like a mini-Froggy but from the get go he’s had his own personality. He’s much quieter, cries rarely, but when he decides to cry, you’d better give him what he wants. Peach eats a comical amount of food and it all going to his cheeks. 

Froggy tries very hard to play with Peach. He brings toys to Peach. When Peach doesn’t play with them because he is a newborn, Froggy thinks it’s because Peach doesn’t like the toy he was offered so he brings out armful after armful. One morning Froggy looked grumpy. I asked him why and he was upset that he says hello every morning to Peach but Peach never replies to him. I think he was a bit appalled to learn he’d have to wait another year to chat, but we taught Froggy about baby language they say “auuooo” to each other.

Peach is a super adventure baby. He’ll make a modest peep to let us know he’s bored if we’ve been in the same place too long or he’s hungry. We take him everywhere from fancy sushi to waterfall hikes and watches everything with his wise owl eyes.

Froggy stories

Every month with Froggy is the best month ever. 

• Froggy watched his first movies. We got him started on Lion King and Totoro. We watched Lion King with Nonna Vicky because it’s JPs first movie as a kid. They were both really eye-opening and fulfilling experiences to share. With Lion King, Froggy was scared of the “bad” Lion Scar, and I thought about pausing the movie or skipping it but he decided push through it with the support of his fearless Nonna and me. It is a tiny moment but a coming of age milestone. He got to experience psychological fear, decide to confront it, and savor the fruits of his bravery. 

• Later we watched we watched Totoro because our friend Jeff gifted us stuffed Totoros for Froggy and Peach. It was psychologically interesting to me. At first, I was surprised that Froggy liked it since it’s movie that’s all atmosphere and nothing really happens - unlike say Lion King. I thought the pacing would be too slow, but he was riveted the entire time. But then I thought about it, exploring a new house and walking around a forest and meeting some new animals with your sibling is Froggy current idea of an epic adventure. It’s like Lord of the Ring for him. 

• My other revelation, and truly this may be a reason for me to switch to being a Ghibli over Disney family is that the Ghibli soundtracks have more replay value. It’s a lot more enjoyable by the time I get to the 100th replay in the car.

• Froggy and I started having our first real conversations. He’ll talk about what he remembered from the day and how he felt about it. Froggy is funny as a physical comedian because he’s expressive. He told me he saw a blue bird, but he was too loud and it ran away and he’d stomp his little feet in the air to illustrate it.

• I’m pulling the long con on Froggy for bedtime. I make him tuck me in, and demand stuffed animal after stuffed animal. He stands on the side of the bed and lectures me - “Mommy, you only get 1 stuffed animal for bedtime!!”. Sometimes I give him Chinese books which he tells me he doesn’t know how to read. I insist he makes up some stories for me because Mommy can’t sleep without THAT book. He humors me for the first book so I nag him for a few more books and eventually Froggy wags his finger exasperated, “No more books!! Mommy, you need to go back to your bed so I can sleep!!! Here is your goodnight kiss!!!” He ushers me out the door happy that the difficult work of bedtime is over. It’s a good life as a Froggy mother [2] 

• Froggy’s cousin visited us for a week and it was truly heartmelting to see the kids play and converse. They’d hold hands while hiking and generously offer each other turns to choose the music. One day, his cousin asked him “Froggy, do you like my dress” and he replied “Yes, I do!!” and his cousin was so happy! When they were going on adventures, it was incredible to see him so genuinely happy and excited to see her succeed. There was an advanced slide, and when she successfully climbed to the top to ride it, he jumped for joy shouting “She did it!! She went down the slide!!” Froggy was very keen to impress the cousin - there were many rides at the mall he’d been completely refusing to ride because they were too scary despite seeing other smaller kids ride them. Very interesting as soon as he saw his cousin ride one, he transformed into a mall ride cowboy. Took her around the mall showing off the rides to her as if he hadn’t been mumbling in fear just a few days ago. 

My little Froggy worker and his cousin collecting rocks for me.

Life with yours truly

• Gardening - My love for this hobby has deepened over the years. I love putting around the garden and checking up on my plants. I have some very ambitious goals this year, there’s a sunset palette cut flower garden, and long-term investments in rose plants and peonies [3]. I’m developing the landscape beyond the garden beds — I’d like to have a shade flower garden by our tree hammock and a native wildflower garden by the creek. We’ll have the veggie garden classics of tomatoes, peas, and zucchini and I’m adding a watermelon patch (with pink, orange and yellow personal melons!) and a sunflower forest.

• Childhood round two for meeeee - I’ve been going back to re-live the old childhood dreams I had at Froggy’s age. I’m surprised they’re still floating in my head after almost 30 years.

  • Rocks — I used to eye the shiny bags of polished rocks at the National Park gift shops and gas stations but be sad, they were so small. I liked the big fat river rocks but you could only fit 1-2 big rocks in those tiny brown felt bags. At one point, I talked my parents into buying me a kit but I didn’t know how to research the kits so the results were horrible. YouTube has given me the knowledge to procure an industrial rock tumbler. Motherhood has given power over 1 Froggy worker to deploy on rock collecting duties. There’s a pale pink crystal one I like - they’re $40/lb to buy so I’m making good $$$/hr on my Froggy worker.

  • Bird watching — There was a girl in elementary school, J, who always knew about all the birds at school and brought binoculars to show and tell in 3rd grade. I remember feeling a keen desire to do the same but unable to bring myself to act on it. We took the whole family out with local birding legend Julie and Froggy and I have been the birding life ever since! It’s great - he loves to look for birds, and I love to suggest he look out the window for birds when I need a few more minutes to enjoy my morning coffee.

  • Interesting how J is nowhere in my life, she probably has no clue who I am, but here I am 2 decades later looking at birds and wondering if she still enjoys birdwatching.

  • Froggy is a confident birder - he has seen goldfinches, eagles, and even kingfishers in our backyard. Sometimes I have doubts, but he educates me that the bird we are seeing has a yellow beak just like the ones in his picture books. I am an unconfident mommy as I ponder whether he should enjoy his bird safari in peace or learn to recognize robins and bluejays properly.

  • Wasting money on claw machines and winning giant stuffed animals. My parents never let me waste money on those neon cabinets. I’ve been on a strange low-stakes mom gambling life where I go to Round1 with other moms and win giant stuffed animals from 8-10pm every couple of weeks [4]. I got to flex on some teenage girls who saw me two weeks in a row who were like WHOA you’re such a baller, I can’t believe you can drop $50 here every week.

I’m pretending that I’m doing it for Froggy and Peach so I gotta cram them all in now before they get any actual opinions on what’s fun. It’s for me, but it’s for them - they have more fun if the whole family is passionate and joyful. I want grandkids someday so Froggy and Peach need to see how good I have it. Froggy’s going to grow up imagining the day he has his own Froggy worker to collect rocks for him. This is also for me, but once again for them because hanging out with Froggy and Peach is more fun than I could have imagined.

This is only half the animal from the trip.

I thought I finished coming of age in my teenage and 20s to become my final form. It’s reinforced from all angles - fairytales that end with happily ever, coming-of-age literature, and movies full of young protagonists. Even science tells us the brain plasticity rapidly decreases in our 30s. My lived reality is even weirder than coming of age because ages ~5 to ~30 were a smooth evolution. It’s like going from Charmander to Charizard. Then I mutated - like I started a Charizard and morphed into a Gengar. [4] I don’t think it’s just I had new experiences that changed me or I’m getting older - it feels different from past growth where I can draw a line between what happened and how I changed. Many of this batch of changes have no reason and it’s physical. I like different foods. I find different things interesting. I’m convinced my eyes and nose sense differently now. It’s surprising and scary that I have new beginnings in me but it’s also delightful. As Froggy and Peach grow up and experience the world for the first time, I get to have my own re-birth and experience the world with them.

Thanks,
Kathy

[0] What happened was that the baby’s heart rate fell in the womb around 7am which is shift hand-off time so we had two sets of doctors and nurses for me and the baby. We would have needed a c-section but I was fully dilated so we were able to deliver instead. 

[1] Sigh, I have this vision of myself as a terrifying tiger mom and then I’m like the biggest punishment I can concoct is… a whole 10 minute car ride with no music!! But I do think, if you are willing to threaten, you have to be willing to execute the thread with an iron heart and this is all that my iron heart is capable of. 

[2] To be clear, he likes it — when he’s being slow at flossing his teeth, I threaten to not let him read books to me and he flosses faster.

[3] Literal investments! I’ve got some designer breeds of roses that sell for $6 a stem!!

[4] I have two no-evidence/Kathy-belief-only theories here (1) It’s the large and sustained hormone changes that changed me physically. It makes sense to me that our brains have a puberty like window to transform as parenthood is such a big transition. (2) This brain plasticity loss in our 30’s thing is correlation, not causation. I think loss of brain plasticity is caused by sleep deprivation due to parenthood which happens in our 30s. I recently read an article that recent science has shown brain plasticity decreases in early 30s not late twenties now and I was like HRMMMM really seems in line with a shift in parenthood trends.

🍉 Summer 2023: Slower but lovely

I crossed over into the third trimester of pregnancy last week. Pregnancy has made for a sleepier summer than I’d anticipated (quite literally, I’ve been sleeping 10-12 hours a night). I crave action and adventure but the slowness has given the summer a simple gentleness that’s lovely too.

🤰🏻The pregnancy - round 1 versus round 2
I am not someone who is good at or enjoys being pregnant. The first trimester was terrible — I was curled up in a ball half the time trying to hold down nausea and the other half the time gagging. [0] I asked JP why I wasn’t in such sorry shape last time. Gulp, he said it seemed like I was actually worse last time. I guess nature really wants us to reproduce because I remember it being miserable in theory but the details are all gone. They’re all faded out the way the memory of a vivid dream slips away a mere 5 minutes after waking up. This time must have been better because the number of actual times I puked was smaller. Unscientifically, I think I’m probably somewhere like 90th percentile bad-ness — no one I know in real life had worse symptoms than me but it’s not nearly as bad as anything I read online.

It’s hard for me to directly compare the second trimesters — last time, it was Seattle winter and COVID so there wasn’t much to do and I was in a steady state professional situation. This time we’re in the full bloom of summer post-covid. It’s still mildly unpleasant but in a physical rather than a chemical way that I find much easier to deal with. It’s like the difference between being sick versus taking a fall. The frustrating thing is how little energy I have compared to normal. The uplifting thing is that I think I’ve been able to enjoy life just as much.

I used to love running and hiking. Since that’s too tiring, I’ve been out biking and it sparks the same joy in my heart. I still like cooking but instead of epic quests making new exotic dishes with dozens of ingredients from scratch (no Peking ducks this summer), I go through the rotation of classic comfort foods I’ve mastered. We haven’t traveled at all this summer and shockingly it doesn’t bother me. My garden is doing extraordinarily well since I have no long absences. I thought wouldn’t it be nice to go on a safari (our friend Jane went on honeymoon in Tanzania) so I took Froggy to the zoo and we looked at some zebras and lions there. The doctor says traveling is plenty safe. I just find it such a hardship to be without all the creature comforts and routines of home. I need my giant body pillow with the room temperature dialed in just right to sleep and the down-stuffed sofa to nap on after eating. Oh yes, digesting is tiring so I need to eat small meals and rest after each meal.

If you asked the younger me, they’d insist I couldn’t possibly be happy with my present lifestyle. I am the exact person the younger me grew up to and I am authentically just as happy — I’d prefer to be more energetic but it doesn’t seem to decrease my enjoyment of life. [1] In a way, it’s like a trial run of being old. I feel better about getting older.

🐸 Froggy updates
Froggy is the cutest bestest Froggy that ever lived. Some recent Froggy highlights:

• Froggy is so heart-meltingly sweet. Anytime he has something good, he wants to share it with us now. When I picked him up from daycare last week, the teachers had just given him a chocolate-covered animal cracker. He’d eagerly gobbled up half but stopped and offered the other half for me. He is more generous than I was at that age — I have a vivid memory of being 3 years old and wondering if I could ever be a parent because my parents always saved the best food for me and I didn’t know if I’d be able to make such a big sacrifice for my kids.

• Froggy knows about the next baby and I’m so excited to see him be a big brother — he’ll point to my belly and say baby brother is in there! He’s really great with younger kids - he likes to read books to them. We went blueberry picking with a younger toddler and he spent picked a bunch of nice juicy blueberries and fed them to the other kid.

• Does Froggy have a secret girlfriend?! Every day after we pick up Froggy, I ask him what he did and who he played with. It’s the same cast of names with some occasional variations ex: Duckie, Koala, and Bear. I visited his daycare a bit longer for mothers day and one of the teachers asked me — oh does Froggy every talk about “Alice” (not the real name). And I was like “no he’s never mentioned Alice, are you Alice?” And she replied “Alice is his best friend. She’s the first person he greets when he gets to school and the first person he wants to play with after waking up from nap.” (GASP, he’s keeping secrets from us already!!!)

• Froggy is both brave and cautious at the same time. He faces hardship with stiff upper lip - he never cries after taking a fall. But if he’s had a bad experience with something, he’s got an elephant memory for that. Many months ago he took a bump going down a big slide and even now he’s very careful on all slides, even tiny ones.

• Is Froggy musical after all?? Is it nature or nurture?? Longtime readers may remember that my parents thought my musical ineptness (especially around rhythms) [2] came from lack of exposure to music as a youth so he was on a daily regime of musical marches to remedy this. Froggy likes to sing and make up lyrics to songs. Did you know that Old Macdonald also has a lion that went rawr rawr rawr rawr rawr. Uncle Andrew gifted him a piano keyboard that he likes to play. Froggy hasn’t figured out how to make the melodies but he does bang on the keys in tempo to accompany his singing.

• Froggy’s super abilities — JP’s mom came for a month and he picked up many new abilities at Nonna daycare. He learned to count to 14, recognize a good chunk of the alphabet, and started singing in public after signing with her. He used to be such a shy singer, first he would only sing solo in his bed (and we’d overhear on the babycam) and clam up as soon as he saw anyone. Then he’d sing with people he knew but not if he was being recorded. Now he’ll sing anytime he feels like it camera or not (but not on demand, only when he feel like it).

  • I find his Froggy logic so funny sometimes. The other day I overheard him on the babycam:
    Him: Sings some Old Macdonald
    Also him: ”No more OldMacdonald!!”
    Still just by himself in bed: Sings some more OldMacdonald
    Increasingly frustrated Froggy: “Nooooo, no more Old Macdonald. Old Macdonald yucky!!!”
    Him: Continues to sing OldMacdonald again…

  • He uses 5 to mean a lot even though he can count up to 20. If we’re at the park and it’s full of ducks and I ask him how many, he’ll proclaim 5. If I have a food he really likes and I ask how many pieces he’d like, also 5! I’m not sure if this is a thing all kids do but my mom did the same thing when she was a toddler too.

• Froggy’s restaurant - one of Froggy’s favorite games at the park is to open a little Froggy restaurant. He’ll ask us if we are hungry and offer us food such as rice and then he’ll go on a quest all over the park to find the right rock or bit of wood that’s the perfect “rice”. I’m very impressed by the range of foods he offers — today I got sushi (crab sushi), rice, mangos, very spicy meat, pepperoni pizza, a bok choy salad, and coconut water, all sourced from “the backyard” (aka the other side of the slide). The ever-courteous cook, he always checks “are you full?” before closing up shop.
  
  
  

🚴🏻‍♀️ What else I’ve been up to

The whole family’s gotten really into biking. Sometimes I’ll get into something or JP will get into something but if we both get into something, then it really spirals. He’s had his bike for years but never rode it. JP’s parents were visiting and I thought his mom might like to bike with him and Froggy so I found a cheap bike off FB marketplace. Since we had an extra bike lying around, I started biking and next thing you know we’re biking 2-3 times a week with Froggy in tow and I’ve upgraded to a carbon fiber race bike (ahem, I’m pregnant and need all the help I can get!!) I’ve gotten a lot better at biking and more in shape but it’s offset by becoming increasingly pregnant — for now, I’m still making gains but I’m super excited to become a speed demon after the birth. I am also excited to get some cute biking outfits — JP, stylish as always, looks like he could be in the Tour de France and I waddle around in size L bike shorts.

xoxo,
Kathy

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[0] OFC I tried all the little tricks like ginger, which are utterly useless. I’ve been blessed to have rarely been talked down to in my professional career but when I think of the old people of the gender who can never be pregnant who presume to tell me all my ills will be cured if I just ate some ginger…grrrrrrr…

[1] I am actually a bit surprised it doesn’t because with more energy, I can do more fun things each day but I guess that’s just not how brains work. I am not less happy overall but I am definitely displeased with not being able to do golf or wear all the cute golf outfits I bought last summer.

[2] Err, I’m 99% sure it’s actually because I didn’t practice with a metronome.

🐰Fall & Winter 2023: Down the rabbit hole and out again

I’m on a couch doing some delayed 2022 reflections. He’s celebratory but I’m a touch pensive. I’ve worked so hard all year but somehow going sideways, diagonal ways, and squiggly ways to nowhere in particular. Things I didn’t even know could be hard felt impossible. Activities I used to care about stopped feeling important to me. Subjects I’d dismissed as froufrou nonsense loomed as urgent matters while things I thought were important to me just stopped mattering.

JP is shocked I feel this way. He thinks it’s not humanly possible to have done more. I feel like I went through a lot of trouble to go in a giant circle this year. I’m happy with that though.

Froggy:

We survived his first sick season at daycare, which was brutal. He was a sick little frog for a whole month. It’s miserable to see him so uncomfortable. He got us sick too. He’s not sleeping well. We’re getting woken up with him. We’re not sleeping either. There’s no backup care, so every hour of the day, we review who has the least important meeting that hour and they attempt to attend the meeting while watching a loud and grumpy froggy. We are all still sick and sleep deprived. JP’s mom flew in for two weeks to save us. My parents were recalled to CA because their companies have mandated return to office, but they fly back up to relieve us for a few weeks too.

When the fog of war and sickness lifts, we have the world’s most delightful Froggy. A couple of my favorite memories from the holiday season:

• My first deep conversation with him. He’s crawling backwards on the carpet. I joke: “Are you being an animal?” He actually replies: “yea” I ask “What animal are you”. To my shock, he replies: “cow”. I ask again just to confirm, “You’re being a cow??” and he says “Moo, mooo, mooo.” He’s asked for practical desires like milk, or food, or songs but this is my first glimpse of his creative inner life. It’s also our first actual dialog where the conversation progresses. Everyone else is marveling convos with chat-gpt but I’m marveling about having a conversation with a small creature that came out of my belly.

• He can count (in base 3): He has learned 1, 2, 3 but 4 is still too advanced. If there’s a picture with 6 animals, he counts them up 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 and then looks back up at me very pleased with himself. Ahh if only I could include a record of his cute little froggy baby lisp - wwwwun, toooo, tweeeee.

• We are starting to get some very very small ROI out of him. He likes to be helpful. At his great grandma’s house, he put away all our shoes for us. He also loves to vacuum (a gift from his uncle Adrian) and invites us to vacuum with him at all hours. Froggy also runs a courier service on the little motorbike he got from uncle Chris and will shuttle sufficiently small objects in the basket between the front door and the living room.

• Letters and advanced fish!! We have re-enrolled him in Nonna Vicky daycare. At Nonna Vicky daycare, he has learned to recognize a good half of the alphabet and even a handful of words. He was gifted a fish puzzle game and some ABC books and knows about octopus, squids, sharks, crabs, and even narwhales.

• Froggy dances!!!! We have started to teach Felix some dances to children’s songs. He is heart-meltingly cute in them. He shakes his little froggy butt to Christmas music. We march around like ants all over the house. He doesn’t march properly if it’s just 1 adult and him as an ant - he only marches if the whole family marches with him.

Froggy’s pretty great and we’re at the stage where there’s fun and social life back again. Somedays, I am keenly reminded of my boring suburban motherhood-ness when friends invite me to parties that pregame at 9pm (I did drop in for an hour!!) Other days, we’re romping through the zoo with all my friends and Felix in tow and I’m really happy to enjoy being with people I love from all parts of my life.

Health

I was plagued by health nuisances for most of 2022. No real health problems, just waves of pesky inconveniences: a soreness in my lower right shoulder, crackling sounds in my neck after every marathon coding session, tenderness in my knee on a short jog, a round of covid that had me sleeping 12 hours a day for 3 weeks, and followed by months of mediocre sleep where I never feel truly rested even if I’m sleeping 12 hours a day. (Also, don’t get me started on the appearance of my first forehead wrinkles…) I didn’t realize I could have so many problems while being “healthy”. After working pretty damn hard on things, I’m very thankful to be right where I started roughly 18 months ago with my body in normal working order. The strange thing is, I’m not sure if I did anything to cause these problems — it might just be a combination of getting older and WFH. My other hypothesis is that I lost a huge amount of core strength I took for granted during my postpartum recovery.

• For the soreness and cracking neck: The solution was core work and small muscle resistance band exercises. I thought I was strong because I was benching, squatting, and deadlifting a good amount of weight and completely neglected all the tiny muscles. This meant that I was compensating in weird ways all over my body.

• I concluded that massage is not very effective?? I am a HUGE fan of massages so I’m super sad about this. To me, massage feels good in the moment but takes a long time and the tightness comes back in a few hours. 1 hour of massage has less effect on me than 10 minutes of targeted stretching. I still enjoy a good massage but I don’t reach for it as a solution after a long day glued to the computer or a big gym session.

• Reference pain was often far from the “source” that needs to be stretched out. My sore should actually came from a tight neck. My lower back, a tight glute. A huge amount of the value I got from the PT was being told higher likelihood places to seek root cause solutions for soreness.

Fixing sleep was life-changing!!! (and I was able to do it thanks to sleep tracking) My sleep didn’t seem obviously bad — I fell asleep easily and slept through the night. The problem was I needed 10-12 hours of sleep to feel rested. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough. It’s not practical to have a child and a job and sleep 12+ hours. I started sleep tracking after JP’s mom mentioned this was strange. It turns out I was only getting 30-40 minutes of deep sleep a night despite being asleep the whole time. The thing I noticed in the data was that I got 5-10 minutes of deep sleep early in the night and it became 30+ minutes in the cycles closer to the morning. This was strange because people get more deep sleep in the first cycles and less in later cycles. After seeing this data, I was able to figure out that I wasn’t able to hit deep sleep until the later cycles because caffeine was staying in my system. I was only drinking a cup in the AM but it was too much. The other thing that made a difference was going for a 15-minute run each day.

Mental state: Running, stretching, and very light workouts did way more for me than meditation, journaling, or lifting heavy weights. I had gloomy days last year where it felt like more things were going sideways than forward. I reached for journalism, meditation, and intense workouts as the “classic” mental health best practices and close friends swore by these. I spent months meditating my way through headspace, calm, and waking up — I thought it was at least preventive like maybe I’d be in an even worse mood if I wasn’t doing these things. When I started doing regular PT exercises for the shoulder issues mentioned above and running for the sleep issues, I noticed a giant step function in my mood before and after exercises — AHHH THIS is what an effective solution feels like!! I don’t enjoy running or stretching more than meditation or lifting heavy weights so I found it especially interesting that those were what worked for my mental state.

Work

When I think about my own internal narrative of my life and it’s this beautiful happy arc of progress. The 5 years I spent at Stripe were some of the smoothest sailings. It was a bit of a shock that this starting a company thing proved to be hard. I was playing my favorite game on the easiest setting. I thought I changed it to moderate difficulty, only to realize I’ve irreversibly set it on evil nightmare ninja mode!!! I went from steamrolling bosses to having the tiny rats in the dungeon one-hit me.

This has made me re-remember the other times in my life when I was being one-hit by rats. Suddenly, I remember entire years when everything was baffling, difficult, and confusing. There were years in school when I tried so hard to be a good student and C and even D’s kept rolling in (to the shock of my parents who were stellar students their whole lives). Professional years where I couldn’t code myself out of a cardboard box. Only to be followed by years where great code shot out of my fingers effortlessly but I couldn’t get my company to give me any opportunities to build great things.

Being defeated by rats all those years don’t make me cringe. It’s calming. I did the best that I could as the person I was going into the challenge. The challenge was something I really wanted so I had to deal with it. I wasn’t the right person for the problem I’d set out to conquer. It took being walloped over and over by these metaphorical rats to make me into the person that could solve the problem.

It’s comforting to remember this has happened before. I feel like if I just stay in the game, I’ll eventually grow into the person I need to be for this next phase.

P.S. I used to share these via social media. I’ve found that the last couple haven’t really been shown on people’s feeds. (Maybe I need to start making these as a short form video??) If you’d like to get every blog post, feel free to subscribe below.

🌻Summer: A season of adventure

Summer started out a bit dicey but ended up with a series of back-to-back adventures. Some of these things might even be more fun than golf!

Wedding

We got ceremonially married in Toronto after 3 COVID re-schedulings. I going a little bit batty leading up to it. One day, I picked up my head and realize wow we have 8 weeks until our wedding but life is just so busy it took us a few more weeks to actually do anything so my thoughts are simultaneously:

• Wow, it turns out it’s possible to have your wedding dress tailored by the nearest seamstress between meetings, book a florist and choose flowers in under an hour, and hire a make-up artist via IG in 5min.

• Friends are like wow, I can’t believe you have a baby, a start-up, and planned an international wedding. It’s every bit as hectic and unpleasant as you’re imagining and I would not recommend this experience to anyone!! A lot of good friends couldn’t make the wedding because the invites were going out so last minute and my mother-in-law had to pull some last-minute heroics to get the event across the finish line. I felt bad about both which are things you want clouding your thoughts leading up to your wedding day.

It was an incredible day. Some highlights:

• The speeches from our friends and family. Everyone roasted me but JP got off scot-free. My parents gave a speech originally written in Chinese which was translated and one parent delivered each language which was special to me.

• Doing a choreographed first dance. We showed up at a dance studio with a YouTube video. The poor instructor was like “so that’s a Viennese waltz, you are supposed to be working on it for at least 10 weeks earlier if you want to do that”. And we replied “ah, we’re flying out of the country in 4 days, what do you think we can cram in 2 lessons?” It turns out a whole entire dance! It was the most capital R, romantic thing, I’ve ever done with Justin. You get held and twirled by the love of your life while someone croons oily love lyrics - and you don’t just do it once at the official dance, you get to do it 50 times during practice and it’s just as lovely each time.

• Hearing the updated version of vows from Justin in front of all our family and friends that we hadn’t seen in person for over 2 years. Our legal wedding was back in 2019 so we were able to reflect and celebrate all the ways we’d worked to live up to our original vows. JP who is mysteriously good at all things delivered his vows from memory.

• Seeing little froggy in his little toddler 3-piece suit!!!

Froggy is humongous walking talking Froggy now

Froggy has been growing by leaps and bounds. He’s not even 18 months but he’s larger than the 2-year-olds on the playground and wears shoes for 3-year-olds. He’s starting to communicate with us in his own baby language and we’re eagerly awaiting the use of English or Chinese. Tragically, his choice of word for no is ma-ma-ma-ma-ma…

We found him a spot at the perfect little Chinese English immersion play-based daycare a 20-minute walk from our house. It’s been amazing for us:

• Froggy lives an indulgent life at home and we find it’s great for him to learn he is part of a larger society at daycare. He gets many opportunities to practice life skills like waving hello and saying goodbye and advocating for his needs (he’s learned to cry to get attention after nap time). He’s made a good friend, we’ll call her Koala, who helps him find his stuff when it’s time to pack for the day.

• Daycare gave us more flexibility in our day. There’s a longer range of hours for drop off and pick up if we have a meeting later in the day. The daycare has redundancy built in so we don’t have to arrange alternative childcare if one of the teachers is out.

• He loves daycare. On the very first visit, before we even enrolled, he strode into the classroom, picked out a book, and handed it to a teacher to read to him. He has a little purple tiger backpack and I am very satisfied seeing his face light up when he sees it.

• Froggy recently became a genius froggy!! He’s like a sponge now learning new things every day - he knows dozens of animals in Chinese and English and that coffee machine sounds means Daddy’s around. Justin’s mom came over and within the week, she taught him to push his kitchen step stool to the sink, climb up, wash his hands and face, and push the step stool back!

As Froggy gets older, it’s been enlightening seeing the grandparents interact with him. I find seeing JP’s mom with Froggy and then my own mom with Froggy explains a lot of why JP and I turned out the way we are. Justin is a competent boy scout. I march to my own terribly offbeat drum. JP’s mother gifted Froggy some crayons and a watering can. When Froggy colors with JP’s mom, she has him sit on her lap and colors a whole picture with him, guiding him so he says in the lines. At home with my parents, Froggy scribbles on anything his heart from coloring books, to magazines, to furniture, adding some bright colored dots and lines anywhere his artistic eye wants. Watering with JP’s mom means walking from plant to plant making sure all the plants are watered just right. Watering with my mom means filling the can with anything he’d like whether it’s water or pebbles and pouring the contents on whatever he’d like.

Honeymoon in Italy

Rome is the first place I visited in Europe back in 2012. My college bestie, Sarah, and I did it on a shoestring student budget, gorging ourselves on free hostel breakfast each day and setting off the explore the wonders of western civilization. I was worried it wouldn’t live up to my memory of it but it was so much better.

• I fell in love with the tours. Every single tour guide I had in Italy had a PhD in a relevant subject and their expertise made the ancient world feel close and real to me. They talked about not just what happened, but why it happened, and how modern humans know it, and brought it back to the ground we were standing on. It was especially satisfying particularly because we know so much about ancient Rome so questions are met with deep nuanced answers. One of my favorites was a garden tour of the Vatican which takes you behind the scenes to the Pope’s private gardens (recently opened up as the current one works too much to enjoy the gardens so he had them opened up to the public) which was about the garden but about how the Vatican is run (ex purely logistically, where they source the robes that the cardinals wear?)

• We visited JP’s family in the Italian countryside. They live in a beautiful hill town with 500 people just outside Lucca. The village’s local claim to fame is they were the source of many great plaster artists in the late 1800’s. What’s wild is we were the first visitors from his branch of the family in 40 years! We saw the church where JP’s grandparents got married, the grandparents old house with their flour mill intact. The family hosted us at a rooftop restaurant and it was so beautiful, I cried about knowing I wouldn’t experience it for a long time again. I think another reason I cried is that I’ve been wanting to see my grandparents in China for a long time and we haven’t been able to. JP’s aunt and uncle recently went to visit after us and it made us really happy to see them connecting too.

Burning Man

There was a Burning Man ticket sale at 8pm on the last day of our Italian honeymoon. The odds were against getting tickets but we got them and figured it was a sign that we should go. One last hurrah to close out the summer before we settle back into fall and the season of working. This was our 3rd burn and possibly my favorite yet. Year 1, I was gobsmacked but really sort of a visitor. Year 2, I felt the magic was tinged with a sense of alienation — too much spectacle, not enough human connection that year for us. This year was better because we’d started figuring out a way to gift in non-material ways that felt authentic to us. We ended up getting to know a lot of the humans who helped build the city and art. I found it moving how much they put into gift joy to others and nurtured a spark in my heart to make some sort of creative contribution. I always thought my contribution to BM and this world would be practical in nature.

Turning 30

It felt good to turn 30. I was worried it’d come too soon and that I wouldn’t be ready, especially during some of those mid-20 years like 25 and 26 where it felt like the years would fly by so fast and I wasn’t making any progress toward being the person I wanted to be by 30. 30 is the magical age by which I needed to be a “real adult” because my parents had me when they turned 30 and got real jobs to be able to support me.

I have just one frivolous regret that started creeping in last summer during my hot mom summer. I spent a lot of mental energy trying not to “chou mei” (stinky beauty aka narcissistic) but secretly wanting to be beautiful. It feels sinful to write out even now, married with a kid living in the suburbs.

I feel like I was in my 20s for a very long time and am ready to be 30. All the dreams of adulthood — career, family, and friendship that I longed for so long, I possess now. Better than merely possessing, I have the satisfaction of knowing all these things I earned and they’re securely mine. It’s not humble to say it like that but I know how long I’ve wanted these things and how earnestly I worked to get them for over a decade now. One friend complained I was boring to text and I dutifully bought a book on comedy, a book on texting, and a book on writing to remedy the situation.

The surprising thing this how adrift I feel again. 28, 29 felt secure. I’d done the leg work and just needed to stay the course to the finish line of 30. But BOOM, it’s like I’m 20 again? Asking myself what I want in 10 years today feels even more open-ended and mysterious than when I plotted out my life a decade ago.

I didn’t randomly forget to script anything post-30 like some cartoon character that wanders off the drawn world. My parents wanted certain things for me for the honorable and loving reason that they thought that’s what would set the foundation of a fulfilling life for me. I prioritized doing those things first because they’ve become the things I wanted for myself too. If those things were done by 30, then I figured I’d have earned the luxury of freedom and an unscripted adventure. I just thought this would feel more like an open-world RPG like Morrowind or Breath of the Wild and less like a blank canvas of time staring like you.

On to fall

Summer was great but summer was a lot of back-to-back adventures. I was worried I wouldn’t be ready to give up the Seattle summer paradise. The paradise blooms with so much energy because it’s short - I couldn’t live like that year-round. As the fall colors come in, I’m ready to settle into a more productive period. There are books I want to read, milestones at work to tackle, and a new decade of goals to chart out. The cozy rhythm of fall and winter is perfect for this sort of introspective work.

⛳ Spring 2022: Is there anything more fun than golf?

It’s late spring, but the PNW has been slow to warm up. I’ve been playing muddy golf in raincoats and a parka. I can tell I genuinely like golf because I like it even when it’s not supposed to be good — similar to tea for me, I like fancy tea more, but I enjoy Lipton tea microwaved in a mug.

JP and I started to whack golf balls at the driving range last year a few weeks after Froggy was born. JP was a natural, and I managed to make contact, maybe 1 in 10 balls. Since then, I’ve progressed to playing the children’s par-three nine-hole, and we’re now we’re smacking airborne balls all around the municipal courts. Golf is everything I ever wanted in a hobby! Golf is:

• An outdoor activity that is not too strenuous or physically unpleasant but long in duration to unwind. I like hiking but wished the food and drink were better, and we didn’t have to go up so many hills. Golf is like hiking with all the hard parts taken away!!

• Small group socialization with just enough structure to provide comfort to new or introverted friends but not so much structure that it hides the ability to connect with another human. Boardgames are great at giving a comfortable, structured experience, but they’re so structured I always leave feeling like I didn’t connect or learn anything deeper about the other players.

• You play a single-player game by yourself, against yourself, but as part of a group. I desire to socialize but strongly prefer solitary activities.

  • Interestingly, JP is the inverse of me - he’s introverted but enjoys hobbies with other people.

  • Software engineering pre-pandemic was also A+ for this balancing act in the same way. It’s this great solitary activity, but anytime you want, you can pop over to the common area to socialize with many people doing the same activity! It is the golf of jobs! Or is golf the software engineering of hobbies? [0]

Of course, some things are better than golf! Froggy is now regularly sleeping through the night!!!! 9 pm to 8 am. WAHOOO.

Froggy has picked up a whole roster of new nicknames. I like to greet him in the morning with his full title: Froggy Handsome Pooh Bear, his Italian grandpa calls him Tesoro (sweetheart), and JP calls him Munchkin.

• Froggy loves planes and birds. He has spidery plane senses. Anytime we are walking around, and a plane flies over us, he’ll be the first to notice it and point it out to us. Birds are 80% as exciting to him as planes - I suspect he understands a bit more how birds work since he sees them take off. We’re thinking of taking him to an airfield to watch some planes take off, but we’re not sure if he can link the concept that the aircraft taking off is what he sees in the sky.

• He’s learned to walk, and his primary indoor interest is figuring out how things work around the house. He’s mastered sliding doors. Recently, he’s been into buttons - anything with a circle on it, he’ll press to see if anything happens. Some hits, he can turn JP’s computer and most of the kitchen appliances on and off. Some misses; he’s been pressing all the bolts on the outside of our car to no effect.

• He figured out how to ride down the giant kid slide, which didn’t impress JP. I was like, damn, this kid is brilliant. Froggy can climb stairs, so he went up to the top of the playground, but there was seemingly no safe way to ride down alone. There was a gap at the bottom for older kids to stand up and walk away. Froggy stayed at the top for a while thinking, turned 180 degrees, backed into the slide, and rode down backward on his tummy.

• Froggy is an adventure toddler now! We’ve taken him kayaking a few times - very good for bird and plane watching. I’ve been training his little walking legs so he can go hiking with us soon too.

Between Froggy hitting toddlerhood and much of the world re-opening, it feels like we’ve been everywhere doing everything. A hodgepodge of updates:

• We went on a Florida/Mexico cruise with two other couples, one of my favorite vacations. I was curious about cruises as a theoretical subject because the person who owned our house before us worked for a cruise line. Cruises are very highly segmented: some for oldies who are retired, others are spring break party cruises, and we found Celebrity which has Cirque du Soleil style shows, all you can eat food in the form factor of beautifully plated pasta served on Heath ceramics, and a martini bar with live singers crooning out Backstreet Boy remixes. Totally solid wifi too. I’d previously thought cruises were not good because I thought it was an inauthentic way of experiencing a destination, but I now think the purpose of a cruise is to authentically experience the ship, which is its own unique world, and the ports are extensions of the cruise experience.

  • I feel the same about Las Vegas. You can look down on Vegas and say, ah, the Venetian is but a shallow imposer of the Venice, or you can say Las Vegas is a first-class experience precisely because it has this totally extra Venice recreation compound (where the water is cleaner and the top dog restaurant serves Peking Duck)

• I’ve somewhat learned to juggle! A teammate told me you could learn in 10 min and be doing it with some consistency within an hour, and I was like, huh, that can’t be true...but it was!

• I left Stripe and started a company called Aqueduct with my friend Abdul.

• I went on a medical odyssey to deal with lower back and shoulder pain. It all started after a marathon 3-day working bender. Definitely not healthy, but sometimes I’d done before, and some good sleep and maybe a nice massage would always sort it out pronto. Except I was still actively distracted by the discomfort a week later this time.

  I tried everything: Running, stretching, weightlifting, rock climbing, the chiropractor, the physical therapist, medical massages, Chinese massages, sleeping 8 hours a day, and clocking in 10k of steps per day. I even cut out golf because it takes so much time to be so healthy every day.

  The lower back pain went away quickly (I’ll primarily credit the chiro for that), but nothing worked for the shoulder pain. One night I’m off on my youtube rabbit hole researching exotic shoulder stretches when I see a physical therapist say shoulder tension often responds well to dry needling (where they stick a needle in the tight muscle), which seems somewhat plausible. I’m thinking acupuncturists do much more work with needles than physical therapists, so I decide to book an appointment with an acupuncturist and ask them to do the dry needling instead.

  I get there. The acupuncturist holds my wrist, gives me a long spiel about my Qi energy being low which will make acupuncture a tiring healing process for me, and then sticks a bunch of tiny needles in my feet. I lay there for 20 minutes with the needles and leave convinced this is total quackery. That evening I’m hanging out with Felix at the park. BAM, out of nowhere, I’m so tired, I can’t keep my eyes open. We rush home, I barely manage to crawl into bed, sleep for 12 hours, and when I wake up, the shoulder pain is gone and has been gone since!! [1]

I’ve thrilled to be experiencing this moment because it hums with possibilities and the adventure of the unknown. Shoulder cured, I have a world of golf courses left to explore. Froggy is growing into his own person. I’m off to explore new professional frontiers (as is JP who transitioned to engineering management). We’re impossibly busy but never bored.

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[0] There’s one other great thing about this software engineer as a job business. I always got into trouble in school for being too fidgety and talking too much. I’d be told that this is for your own good as this is practice for having a REAL job. I finally get my first internship at a tech start-up, and on the first day, I chipperly ask my mentor when I’m allowed to talk to other coworkers, how often I’m allowed to use the restroom, and whether I need approval from him!! Poor guy was probably terrified that I would actually ask for permission every time I needed to use the loo.

[1] I’m not sure what the learning is here besides exercise is good and no more marathon working benders in my old age.

• Initially, I thought chiropractors seemed quacky and was spooked when my chiropractor showed me a video about subluxations and how lack of spine alignment causes everything from diabetes to allergies. However, the actual treatment was reasonable: you have lower back and neck pain from slouching too much; here are some x-ray videos showing you that; we want to adjust your spine and have you strengthen some muscles. I’m now going through their 12-week program. In practice, they fixed the lower back pain in like the 2nd session, and I haven’t noticed a huge difference. After treatment, when I move my neck around, I feel it more cracking/rattling - which I’ll optimistically take it that they did get some misaligned stuff unstuck.

• My physical therapist does a lot of stretching and targeted exercises with me. She is the most strict personal trainer I’ve had. I’ve learned that I used to be stretching at like 2/10 intensity. When she stretches me at like 8/10 intensity, I’m way more flexible the next day.

• I’m slightly more of a massage skeptic for my set of issues. Used to ad hoc get massages after a flight or a big hike or w/e, and it was pretty good at relieving 2/10 discomfort. It seemed less effective than stretching for more significant amounts of discomfort, and I was often sore the next day after a massage but not after stretching. One exception is that I did find massage pretty good for neck soreness — perhaps because there are limited ways to stretch all the nooks in the neck.

• I’m torn on this acupuncture thing. On the one hand, I’m “cured” now and find the Qi explanation challenging to accept. The actual treatment is bit boring as the needles take 2 min to stick in but then you have to lay in the dark for 30 min and focus on “moving” your Qi. On the other hand, it’s 100% the MVP that saved the day. The actual recommendation for restoring my Qi is reasonable (I need to be asleep from 11 pm to 3 am), and I should do more of the thing that worked. I was willing to get past my skepticism about the chiro subluxations, so maybe acupuncture Qi should be the same?

☁️ December 2021: The grey doesn't bother me

The crisp autumn air has transitioned to Seattle’s signature grey and rainy winter. It’s my third PNW winter. It doesn’t bother me this time. I’ve been telling friends for years that the Seattle winter here is not as bad as people think, that it’s more grey than rainy, that sun comes out for a couple hours most days, that they can always travel to Hawaii in the non-COVID times. Those observations all true but they imply an adversarial relationship. I need to do more than just tolerate its physical reality to call this place home.

I’ve fallen in love with the PNW. It’s not where the stories of greatness I was raised take place. When I imagined the story of my life, it’s set in an old and famous city. In the lack of narrative here, I find the space to live my own life. It’s an easy place to be present. I like seeing all the different colors of moss on my morning stroll and catching glimpses of Rainer while driving to the airport. The early evenings make for a cozy backdrop for drinks and games by the fireplace. On rainy mornings when my husband makes me a nice coffee, I feel like we are alone together at the center of the universe.

Bellevue isn't the place I thought I'd call home. I spent my 20s exploring the entire world - home could have been the motion and energy of NYC, the ambitious heart of tech in CA, maybe a return to my heritage somewhere in Asia, or the romance of Europe. [0] I had this idea that a new start in a new place would transform me into a better person. I was very drawn to places with big energy, SF and NYC in particular. SF/NYC in particular allowed me to ambiently meet interesting people who represented "better". They read better books[1], had better ambitions, wore better clothing, lived better lives. I thought could borrow those attributes and become better myself. The energy and the momentum I found in SF and NYC allowed me to be a passenger in my own transformation and growth. I'm glad I went though this period of exploration. I have a lot of lovely or at least funny memories trying new things but it changed...nothing. Today it's almost as never happened, not even a faint stylistic imprint remains.

I'm living the exact life my childhood was designed to produce. My parents were my best friends and I hung out with them for hours every day of my life. When I left for college at 17, I was a reflection of their perspectives. I spent a decade making my own choices, undertaking an extensive exploration effort spanning big decisions like jobs, choices in friends, potential life partners and small - clothing, hobbies, food. I didn't try to stay close a correct path - I asked myself big questions like: Do I want to participate in the institution of marriage? Is gender a social construct and what would happen if I tried to live an un-gendered life? [2] My guess as to why none of these efforts changed anything is that I internalized my parent's values around what makes a good life. Values are subjective with many valid choices. I ended choosing the spirit of what my parents wanted for me even if the details differ. There was never going to be an alternative answer that could be so clearly superior to make me throw out the defaults I started given the type of relationship I had with them. I find that even friends with more conflicted relationships with their parents often see the conflict in the implementation and strive to fulfill the spirit of their parents' value.

There's an interesting question of where my parents default values came from given the changing times both they and my grandparents were raised in - Beijing 1930s (grandparents) to 1980s (parents) and what I'll pass onto to Froggy. Our values are created in a life lived together over the years but as much as I can capture it, the biggest themes were around:

• Family comes first

• Heroes show up when normal people don't do their duty.

• The environments are designed for the median person who inhabits them so try to be normal on everything that doesn’t matter. I think belief is the primary reason my explorations never made a difference. Once I'd made the biggest choices, I let the little choices take the path of least resistance.

• If family and duty are taken care of, some sort of contribution to society via science or engineering (preferably engineering) would be an appropriate side quest. I'd guess this one is very much the product of the cultural era my parents were raised.

My period of exploration ended abruptly a few years ago with a whimper. The narratively appropriate answer would be that I went a journey and either discovered another side of myself or learned to love myself. The honest answer is that I started dating JP. I wanted to be better so the world would tell me it would love me. This chip on my shoulder is should only a small one - I had trouble making friends for a few years in middle school. At one point I down to one friend who regretfully informed me that her friends thought I was boring and none of them would hang out with me anymore. I decided in a very deep way that I never wanted to be without people to eat with at lunch. JP is down to metaphorically and literally eat lunch with me for the rest of my life. Now that I bask in his affection, I don’t need the world to tell me it loves me. I am relieved of the desire to become “better”.

I once had this depressing idea that my youth would end at 30 and it would just be kids, a boring suburb, and some office job on a computer. Like ending of an old school Disney princess story - you marry the prince that's the end of the story. This prediction came true by the letter but not the spirit. I worked very hard in life to earn this blank container so that it can hold the life I want to live in it.

P.S. One more Froggy story:

• Froggy gets livelier by the day. He can pull himself to stand and shuffle around with any knee height furniture. He is very keen to cruise and this is ~3 months early! I'm not sure if this entirely natural. We usually put out a selection of 3 toys for the day and keep the rest on our low fireplace mantel. As soon as he learned to cruise, he beelined for the toy shelf and his eyes shined with happiness at his new found power.

Special thanks to Abdul who helped me edit this into something that hopefully makes sense and Lingtong who gave me the confidence to post it.

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[0] A while back, my manager was quite concerned about my juggling a move and some changes on a my team. I informed him I’d moved every 6 months for the past 4 years. They were all pretty easy except for the DIY one we did during Burning Man. We procrastinated until night before move out day. We packed our stuff into hundreds used Amazon boxes held together with scotch tape. JP rummaged up the clean boxes from recycling rooms of our apartment complex. All the electronics and kitchenware were padded with a hodgepodge of free tech t-shirts and our neighbor’s junk mail. Crammed them into our tiny 500sq ft apartment day of BM departure -> BM hijinks for a week -> started the day back at 7AM on the burner express and unpacked nonstop until 2AM.

[1] I was bamboozled into reading Infinite Jest end to end. I went back to this “better” intellectual, only to find out he hadn’t actually finished it!!

[2] I was curious whether presenting as less obviously gendered would help me have conclusions. I cut my hair in a bowl cut and wore baggy grey sweaters for a year. It was not a successful experiment because I learned about people's assumption about women who cut their hair in bowl cuts and wear baggy clothing and nothing much about the nature of gender. There were a couple of good self-love learnings though. Overnight I went from "cheery and energetic" and to "intense". Intense was an adjective I'd long coveted for myself. It was great to learn that I'd had it inside me all along.

🍁 Welcome Fall!

Hello friends,

The Pacific Northwest summer wound down a bit earlier than last year but I feel okay with it. JP and I had a whirlwind summer this year. Some highlights:

• The USA<->Canadian border opened up so we hosted Justin’s parents and one of his younger brothers at our house for a whole month. We’ve had to make do with FB video calls with the family in Canada for two years. I enjoyed the slower paced interactions of just living together as we had enough time to settle into our little rituals. It was luxuriously slow living as JP and I were both on parental leave. Every morning, I'd walk Froggy out to the garden to pick peas, tomatoes, or strawberries. Our regular group excursion to a beach or a hike. At night, we'd make sidecars and wind down by a fire in our backyard.

• Got every dress I own tailored - recovering from pregnancy really drove home that I will run out of years of beauty long before I run out of money.

• Clocked in three destination weddings - all dear friends getting married, a bachelorette party. We had a Tahoe, NYC , and a Santa Cruz wedding.

  • Chance encounter at the NYC wedding of our friends Lauren and Peregrine - we're all masked up and we chat up a guy in line to get drinks.

    "So, where are you from?"

    "Seattle? Oh me too - well, Bellevue"

    "Oh yeah, I'm in such and such neighborhood"

    "Huh, me too - I'm 4 minutes south from this extremely specific neighborhood park"

    And that's how we ran into our next door neighbor at a wedding in New York! They hosted a BBQ a few weeks later and we had a great time hopping the fence to crash the party.

• JP’s product shipped - Ray-Ban Stories! He always chooses the most cutting edge technology projects. He never leaks me any information but I could tell it was going to be juicy because he was so exicted about the project the entire time. It should solve a personal problem for me. I want to take more photos to remember the moments, but taking a photo takes me out of the very moment I want to memorialize.

• My team GAed a new product- Stripe Revenue Recognition! IYKYK - we automated a good chunk of accounting that is considered tedious. In all seriousness, building this product was a pleasure and a fascinating deep dive into the scorecards and infrastructure holding up our financial system.

• Caught the majestic Mt. Rainer fully out on a sunny day

On the Froggy front - every month with him is my favorite month yet:

• We’ve started Froggy on solids, which is actually pureed foods. We do 3 days in a row of each new food to monitor for any allergic reactions and have been sticking with lower risk foods - his favorites are avocados and sweet potatoes. I always thought I'd be the tiger parent but actually JP is the strict one. On his 6 month half-birthday, I wanted to offer him a lick of ice cream but JP insisted on the regular scheduled programming of pureed veggies. Poor Froggy was downgraded to smelling the ice cream! 😂😭

• Froggy is on the brink of crawling - which is strangely early as a 6 month old baby. He can scoot around with his arms when he's very motivated. Froggy also rocks back and forth on his hands and knees with his butt high in the air, which I am told is a classic pre-crawling milestone.

• We’re working on sleep coaching with Froggy. [0] Our strategy is to slowly ease up on how much we do for him before bed and to give him the tools to fall asleep. We used to rock him to sleep in our arms before bed. Now we put him to him to bed drowsy and let him sleep himself.

• Froggy has a huge assortment of toys now. I thought I'd be a parenting minimalist but it turns out I'm a spineless sheep, descended from sheep, married to a fellow sheep. Anytime any of us see any baby really enjoying a toy in any sort of social media or advertising, we rush to get one for Froggy just in case he likes it. One time, my mom, JP, and I got 3 versions of the same toy...and I think we just decided to keep all three in case there was a variant he liked more?? [1]

I've been surprised by the ways that having Froggy has changed my view of the world - it wasn't an overwhelming change of identity but a softer difference in the texture of the world. I used to care about things like the environment or equality because I wanted to be a "good person" but now I want it because it's the world Froggy will inhabit. I feel more relaxed - I've already accomplished something big by bringing Froggy into this world. I don't need any more gold stars from society. [2]

---

[0] Also known as sleep training, but I find that sleep training makes folks think of some crazy athletics training program.

[1] The serious version of this is that it's tiring to engage with a baby all day, especially with our no screens policy. Having a variety of toys that we can swap in and out to keep him engaged and setting up multiple play areas near where the adults want to spend time makes life more simple.

☀️ Summer in the PNW

It's summer in the PNW and I'm living my best life right now. Big life updates — a new job, a wedding, a move to a new city, a birth — are exciting because they represent progress towards paradise but actually living in paradise is a series of small moments to be savored while I have it.

Our little froggy continues his debut into the world. The things we take for granted are source of endless wonder for him. We get a chance to relive life vicariously.

• Froggy has recently discovered he has hands and his favorite activity in the whole world is munching on them. Sometimes he misplaces his little fingers and bursts out crying when he can't find them. The other adults rush to provide him a pacifier but I insist he finds his own hands and guide them back to his mouth. My heart is moved by his cries but we must set him for for life of age appropriate agency. 🐯I feel great pride and share in his happiness when he does successfully jam his fingers back into his mouth.

• 🥁My parents have concluded my failure as a musician and a dancer is was due to insufficient exposure to music with beats in my youth. To save froggy from this fate, they have put him on 2x a day Chinese rap music listening regime (Phoenix Legend is the go to)

• He is capable of baby conversations - if you talk to him, he will say goo, goo back at you. He also smiles when he sees people he recognizes. Currently, he smiles biggest for AnMa (aka Grandma) but the rest of the family has caught on and are hard at work currying favor. AnMa was clever and volunteered for all of Froggy's favorite activities such as bath time which is how we think she got so far ahead. 🛁 The current pecking order in the household - Grandma, Daddy, and me and Grandpa tied in last place…

• He's learned to use his first toy! Froggy hasn't engaged with any of the toys we've offered him except a wooden spinney toy for his bouncer from our friends Kelly and Alex. Day 1 he looked at it suspiciously and wouldn't even touch it. Day 2 he started grabbing it and smacking it. By day 3, he figured out he could spin the parts and smacks them when he's bored in his bouncer (in fact he's smacking them while I sneak off to write this)

In my personal life:

• My strawberries are incredibly productive. I get a whole pint every day or so and we eat them fresh and turn the leftovers into ice cream. My secret is that I dump our daily coffee grounds into their bed. I fight my daily battles with the rabbits and wage a weekly war against the Japanese knotweed [0] threatening to invade from the east.

• ⛳ Indoor winter hobbies have been swapped out for summer hobbies. I'm back on the paddleboarding life and added golf to the rotation. My parents are here subsidizing my hot mom summer aka they take Froggy when I golf in the morning and paddle in the evening. I've been ferociously golfing as JP work's so I can get ahead and finally have a sport I'm better at. AHAHAH, despite all my hard work on the driving range - JP hits the balls much farther. I asked my golf coach what I needed to do to be able to hit further than JP and his reply was: You should compare your progress against yourself... 😣

• Spanish continues to trot along one Duolingo lesson at a time - ROI is excellent for something I do 20min a day in the morning but I think I need to move to 1:1 tutoring. I've ended up inverse illiterate - I can read a surprisingly large amount of Spanish but can barely string together spoken sentences. Rather surreal experience when I told my landscaper I was learning Spanish, totally understood what he said in Spanish, and couldn't eek out any sensical words. The only things that were coming to mind were nonsenicial practice sentences "las vacas limpian la cocina" ( the cows are cleaning the kitchen)

The other day I woke up from a nap and thought, at the end of my life, if I could go back to any moment to relive, maybe it would be this very banal moment. JP playing League of Legends in the living room. My parents were holding our froggy up up Simba style telling him that when he turns 21, all the wine in the our wine fridge would be his [1] . All of us basking in the feeling of community and abundance.

[0] Japanese knotweed is afaik the most invasive plant in the world. It regrows from any part with roots that go 3-10ft down. I am the Lord Commander of the garden watch staring down the plant Night King...The eastern neighbor's yard has completely fallen to the knotweed invasion. She does a full chemical spray that turns her entire yard to a brown crisp. I inject pure concentrated roundup into any stragglers that make it over to my side of the fence. Alas, they completely regrow in just two weeks and we are told they may finally go away if we diligently continue our efforts for the next 5 years.

[1] Fat chance, I'm going to throw a huge party the night before his 21st birthday and he can watch us oldies chug it all down while while he sips grape juice.

Mid April: The last hurrah and then we welcomed our lil froggy

The big big news is our lil froggy arrived early and we're been getting settled in as new parents. I'm feeling pretty protective of our baby's privacy so he's going by a pseudonym online - he's the froggy for now. He has powerful legs and luminous eyes.

March was filled with a last hurrah of adventures and hobbies.

• Made Platinum on Team Fight Tactics - I'm proud of this as TFT is the only competitive video game that I'm plausibly better at than JP. We actually did play a few rounds in the hospital but...err lot of interruption and so my ELO went down 😿

• Hanging out in my garage...I have a whole new house with many barely furnished rooms (ha, the nursery is a pile of stuff in a room) but I am inexplicably drawn to the garage. We've tiled the floor, completed the gym. We're styling it though - I have a whole vision for a 1950's style retro themed garage.

• Made a baby quilt for the our lil froggy and a matching one for his cousin who will be a month younger than him!

• Made a day trip out to Whidbey Island on the first good day of spring with our friends.

I like this photo because you can see the how proud I am of my first quilt. The sun and the moon for my baby. The stars are hand embroidered with JP’s, Froggy’s, and my constellations.

And BOOM - our froggy decided to arrive early! I know already know he's going to be an angel because he was so good to his mother during birth.

• Prelabor: I woke up leaking and the internet falsely reassured me this was totally normal. We went out to enjoy lunch in the park and popped into a baby store to round out the nursery. I was editing my team's performance review packets when the nurse called me up telling me I need to go to labor and delivery "NOW!!". BAHAHAH, I actually planned to finish up the packets for a hot 10 minutes before deciding that would be insane and headed directly to L&D to check my amniotic fluid checked out.

• The birth: When I showed up at L&D around 6pm, I was 3.5cm dilated (10cm is when you start pushing) and 60% (out of 100%) effaced but no contractions. We started Pitocin as part of the induction around 9pm. I woke up with pain from contractions at 3am and requested the epidural. It was the perfect epidural. I slept until the morning and when the doctors came to check me around 11am I was ready to push. We pushed for about an hour and the lil' froggy came into this world! This edition of labor was less unpleasant than a redeye flight to Asia. AHAHAH, there was a great moment when the doctors all stream in for the final delivery - the baby's half hanging out of me and I'm rummaging the lunch menu discussing whether I should have a burger or a quesadilla. I felt as natural as a chicken laying her daily egg.

  • I actually feel a bit uncouth sharing what an easy labor I had given the range of experiences and how hard it can be for so many. However, I did want to share it because the narrative I was exposed to was mostly birth is sacrifice and pain and that's just my lot as a mother. It seems like the previous situation was that women suffered in silence. It's an improvement that we're talking about the difficulties of childbirth but I hope that we make it so everyone has can expect good reasonable physical experience. During the night, I endured some cramping for about 30 minutes thinking the pain wasn't unbearably bad yet. My nurse noticed I was in pain and nonchalantly mentioned I might call the anesthesiologist in the same tone as I could ask her to bring me water if I was thirsty. Then it clicked - I simply didn't need to be in pain.

• Postpartum week 1: This was the hardest part of the entire pregnancy journey even though I did it on easy mode. Excessive attempts at breastfeeding triggered a short downward spiral of sleep deprivation and hormone fluctuations. My original plan was to make a reasonable effort at breastfeeding and then explore alternatives like bottles and formula as needed. "Reasonable" was quickly stretched to as long as I don't faint from the pain. The decisions are mine to own but I will say that the expectations I encountered in the first few days certainly made me feel like the one true path is that the baby shall only ever feed from the boob and that I wasn't committed to froggy if I didn't push through the pain.

  • Same commentary r.e. being a labor: I don't love that the general expectation around breastfeeding is difficulty and pain. Many trivially solved problems today used to be terribly hard and it seems sensible to find solutions to the challenges of motherhood too!

  After following the recommended exclusive breastfeeding guidance for a mere 24 hours, my nips turned into bleeding swollen masses resembling rooster mohawks. Four different nurses and lactation consultants sweetly reassured me this was perfectly normal. They gave me some gel pads and recommended I should continue feeling through the pain and slowly heal in little two hour windows between feedings on no sleep. It really didn't seem like there were other viable alternatives as attempts to consider pumping or formula resulted in well meaning doomsday warnings: Nipple rejection - he might forever suckle lazily or never want my nipple again. My supply might not come in if I don't nurse enough early on and he might be denied all the benefits of breastmilk [1]. I eventually used formula for two nights when he started losing too much weight. Here I could finally give myself permission because it was for froggy's health not me. However, with the benefit of some good sleep, I was able to actually heal, came to my senses and went back to my original definition of reasonable [2].

  The baffling thing is that I went in with a sensible plan but I let myself be accidentally guilted into one that didn't work for me at all. My well meaning efforts on breastfeeding made sleep deprivation and physical recovery worse because I was waking up every 2 hours to feed through my throbbing nips (which definitely weren't healing...fancy gel pads or not). Halfway through the week, I was hit with infamous baby blues my brain started outputting nonsensical ideas and I'm certain the physical pain and sleep deprivation didn't do me any favors. [3]

• Postpartum week 2: This 2nd week going on to third has actually been really fulfilling. Froggy is waking up to the world and we marvel at how he grows day over day. Logistically, we've starting to figure out how he integrates into our lives and we integrate into his and to my surprise this new life is actually enjoyable. Years ago, I'd convinced myself that getting a boyfriend would be the end of life and fun. I found myself surprised when I preferred going through life with JP than to the wild freedom and independence of my early 20s. Maybe it's a similar transition I'm going through now. There's still challenges but it feels productive and wholesome now - like a hard workout. The actual analogy for the past week that comes to my mind is that this feels like a strange domestic Burning Man. I'm on this journey and there's no right or wrong way of doing it. Part of it are physically miserable but other times I feel so complete and one with the universe (pretty sure the hormones that fluctuate 100x from baseline can give whatever people take at BM a run for it's money). Time and the rest of the world doesn't really matter. The nights are long and disorienting - breastfeeding makes me extremely thirsty and ravenous so I'm always chugging water and rummaging for foods at 3am. (We've joked about setting up a home poutine stand to round out this DIY BM experience) It takes forever to leave the house since we need to pack for every eventuality. I've purchased everything off Amazon that might remotely contribute to my comfort and I need duplicates of everything

Froggy hanging out with us as we get some peonies and lilies planted.

[0] I don't identify as a mama at all but everything targeted to pregnant/new mothers seems to be for "mamas". I do however identify as a 妈妈

[1] I'm in a demographic that reads a lot of Emily Oyster and I'm convinced the benefits of breastmilk are moderate short term improvements like fewer colds as a baby...and then this same demographic seems to go hardcore on breastfeeding - myself included. 🤷🏻‍♀️

[2] The logistics that actually worked for us the last two weeks:

• Daytime: Nurse 15 minutes on each side during the daytime when I had energy to focus on technique and coaxing the baby. Time-box to 15 minutes to keep my nips intact and keep the amount of time we spent feeding sane. Then, top up froggy with pumped breastmilk if available, use formula if out of breastmilk.

• Nighttime: I pump as needed. If I feel like nursing I nurse. If I don't, we bottle-feed him from the last round of pumping. (We used to need the occasional formula top up for a half oz here or there but my supply has come in most generously)

[3] There's a bit more to this. Baby blues hit me around the time my milk came in and my boobs became these terrible throbbing lumps. It's actually merely uncomfortable rather than painful but it feels so foreign and so wrong. It reminded me of getting my period for the first time and having to accept that I was going to cramp and bleed monthly for decades. I'm not sure if the lumps triggered the blues or the blues triggered the revulsion at the lumps. I found the fight for mental control scarier than the actual anxiety / sadness - my brain was outputting all these thoughts I didn't identify with. It was most unpleasant to argue with myself when I'd already decided what my true beliefs were.

Feb 2021 recap: All I think about is cars and spring

Hello friends!

Golly, I really can't believe we already wrapped up 2 months into 2021! Now there that we're in March, I'm eagerly anticipating:

• ☀️ Longer sunny days and a return to hiking and paddleboarding

• 🍓The PNW spring and getting my garden up and running. Last year I grew everything on sale at Home Depot and youtubed how to raise them as I went. It wasn't very fruitful but it helped me find what I like or what's low ROI. I worked for a month in the heat tending to little turnips making sure they didn't get woody and what - I visit the farmers market and realize I can buy even better turnips for $5! This year, I'm planning on a strawberry patch (a nod to Bellevue's past in the strawberry growing industry), an herb garden (highest ROI plants), a cut flower garden (highest joy plants), and focusing on tomatoes and peas (biggest delta between fresh and store bought).

  • We also started an orchard with a handful of bare root trees. It's a long term play - they'll be producing fruit for us in 3-4 years. I'm just an Animal Crossing LARPer. 🦝

• Froggie’s arrival - we're anticipating his arrival mid-April! My parents are also coming up to meet him.

• Maybe even a respite from COVID and seeing friends again.

With so much on the horizon, I'm resisting the desire to plow through the current moment. I'm always in hurry to get on to the next big thing. High school self wanted to be in college. College self wanted a job and new grad self couldn't wait to be an experienced engineer. Looking back, they were all the good old days. When I think back, the official moments that the transitions - "graduation" or "first kiss" or "first day working" aren't what I crave to relive. I remember them in a sterile way - a photograph of a memory. Those moments feel external. It's the internal moments when hopes I didn't even know I had tip over to reality that feel vivid today. I long to return to a hot summer playing Pokemon in the local park and my first taste for really feeling belonging with my peers. My fondest college memory is a walk down Riverside park finally feeling at peace being alone after an anxious freshman year in NYC. I felt successful in my role as a manager when I realized the team I supported was the team I always wanted to be on.

Beginning of Feb, I had what should be an official moment. I started a seven month pause from work by stringing together an assortment of leaves. It's not quite a 7 month vacation since Froggie will arrive in April but I've never taken such a long personal time. I'm about a month in and the main thing that jumps out is the weird rabbit holes I have time to go down now.

• 👩🏻‍🔧 Car detailing: I'm not too sure what happened but I've gotten really into car maintenance. Maybe the folks talking about the brainwashing power of YouTube are totally right and I should be glad it's something as innocent as car detailing. My oh my, people who are into cars are really into cars. My car's a Civic and it's not too exciting to detail a Civic [0]. Pretty luckily, we actually had a yellow Miata sitting around in CA. I had it shipped up, changed all the fluids, did a full interior detail, hand washed, clay bar'ed [1], paint corrected (uggghhh, I can see my mistakes now), and put a ceramic coating on it! For anyone else that might finding how to wash a car riveting (I’m entirely serious), AMMONYC is my favorite car detailing YouTube. Special thank you to Khurram who has convincingly answered "Of course you can" to any car project I've thought about.

  • Side note: Harrumf, everyone thinks its JP hobby. We went to Autozone to buy last minute chemicals and the sales reps only talked to him, even though I outlined the projects and asked all the questions. Ahem, the pregnant lady is clearly running the car show here!! Don't worry on Froggie’s behalf. I did the actual work with a super intense p100 woodworking mask on outdoors. Meanwhile, poor JP is worried that the neighbors think he's abusing me when I'm the one forcing him to do all the (literal) heavy lifting. 😈 JP: "If I knew what I was signing up for, I would have called the local shops for quotes first" [2]

• 👗 Sewing: My parents helped me dig up on sewing machine from...middle school. I am on a velvet decorative pillow phase now but have a slate of projects with increasing difficulty lined up: waxed canvas tote bag, sleeping robe, travel slippers, and a dress. The dress will have to wait for my postpartum measurements.

• Lest anyone accuse me of being a dilettante, the old hobbies are still around too. Chugging along with Spanish - I'm halfway through the Duolingo course with about 2k words learned (thank you Abdul for all the language learning advice) and here's my latest watercolor - in honor of Ox year. Actually, this is based off a real hairy coo I met in Scotland winter of 2012 and fed slices of bread too.

Thanks,

Kathy

[0] I did feel guilty short changing the trusty Civic that has been with me for a decade and never broken down. We decided to give it the full treatment as well. 🥰

[1] 🤯This step was magic to me. The car looked clean and then I sprayed a whole bottle of IronX on the car (b/c these are 10 year old outdoor cars) and watched the car bleed rivers of red (the IronX turns red when it binds to the iron contamination) and then spent 3 hours rubbing the clay bar all over the car. Holy 🐮, got rid of 90% of the imperfections in the coat and the car has never been so smooth and silky.

[2] I think to have hired people as through and diligent as myself, it probably would have been a solid 2k+ package…PER CAR! (not quite apples to apples, the pros do a fancier ceramic coat that’s IV cured with more layers)

2020 Newsletter

Me, 4 months pregnant (I’m 2x the size now), on the creek on our dream home!

Hello friends,

Welcome to my inaugural newsletter on the last day of 2020 - I hope to share the kinds of things I'd talk about if we were to catch up over tea.

Pregnancy

I became pregnant this summer around the time the wildfires were ravaging the West Coast. I didn’t feel especially ready, but it was an intentional decision. Intellectually speaking, it was an optimal choice for me:

• My parents are my best friends and I want my children to grow up with them and make memories with them living their most vivid lives. Today, my parents are the sort of people who physically train for their trips to Europe by doing 15 mile hikes with backpacks loaded with weights. In turn, I’ll want to know my grandchildren and fully plan on out hiking them in my 50s.

• The expected value of the health of the child seems to best between 25 and 30, especially factoring in that Justin and I are financially able to support a family now.

• With most decisions I can estimate how much I’ll like it based on how I’ve enjoyed similar experiences. I have eaten many Peking ducks and can be very confident I’ll love eating my next one. TBH, my past experiences watching small humans play with wood blocks wasn’t exactly the most fun thing I’d ever done. However, I believe that becoming a parent will make a different person with a completely set of preferences so there’s no way for me to assess how future me will value experiences. Regardless of emotional readiness, I’m absolutely certain I want to be this person.

  • Why I’m so confident I want to be a parent (err, it gets personal): The winter after I turned 21, I started having panic attacks about death. Most of time I can’t really comprehend it and there’s a mental block that feels safe. If I’m in just the right (or wrong?) mood, I can tumble over that block and take a peek into oblivion. This was totally terrifying and I turned to books to try to help me find peace - the denial of death (from my friend Yifan) was the most helpful and it argues that one of the purposes of society is to construct a hero quest that if you complete, you can tell yourself that your life was worth living. In calmer moments, I play around with very noble ambitions (Muskian tasks come to mind) but when I’m in one of these moods, the only thing I’ve thought is - all I want in this life is to love and be loved.

Because this was such a planned decision, JP and I read a dozen books on parenting but a couple of things still took me by surprise:

• First trimester was the worst - I haven’t finished 3rd trimester yet or given birth but those combined seem like they’re maybe 20% as bad as first trimester. I’ve heard for some women it’s NBD but for me it was basically like waking up with a bad hangover with overwhelming nausea every day for 2 months straight. Silver lining, it turns out all those restrictions on what you can’t eat don’t matter when you’re too nauseous to want to eat anything at all. To make things worse, miscarriages are very common (arguably as high as 40% from first detection) so most people don’t say anything and just deal with it privately.

• Everyone including strangers have been incredibly protective of me now that I’m obviously pregnant. Store clerks bring me cushy chairs, friends offer to walk on the side of the street with cars, people open doors (haha at one point Justin got scolded for letting me open a door). So many congratulations!

• Although my reasons for becoming pregnant were rooted in a rather cold feeling commitment to making optimal decisions, I became overwhelmingly excited after my 20 week ultrasound. Something about seeing him (it’s a boy) swimming around on screen made it so real. I’ve decided my baby has the cutest face profile I’ve ever seen. I’m inspired to watercolor animals for his nursery. I’m super excited to meet my baby!!!!

House

JP and I snatched up our dream home after looking at at O(100) homes the past two years. Before COVID hit, we’d tour houses for fun in all the local neighborhoods and fantasize about hypothetical lives in hypothetical houses. This gave us a lot of clarity that we’d found the perfect house - later I actually realized - it’s exactly what I’d aspired to in high school (inspired by a friend’s house in Los Altos) and proclaimed I wanted. Side note: as a youth, I said wanted to work by the wall st bull (done, freshman year internship with SecondMarket), raise my kids in a house just like my friend’s (on-track with baby baking and the house purchased), and become a billionaire (errr ?????). The house is a comfortably oversized cottage - vaguely British feeling with a steep wooden roof and lined with flowers. We’re not far from downtown but on nestled at the end of the private street with a creek so I can pretend we’re somewhere rural. A couple of things I learned along the way:

• It was worth taking our sweet time checking out houses and neighborhoods. Our preferences shifted pretty dramatically over the course our search. We’d developed eagle eyes for fake nice versus real quality, which helped a lot in gauging value.

• The two valid strategies in a seller’s market are get a reasonable house for the perfect price or get the perfect house for a reasonable price. Life is about trade-off and this like the CAP theorem of home buying.

• The mortgage matters arguably more than the housing price - the effective rate we would have paid in terms of $$$ per month over 30 years varied by 20% between the best terms and normal terms whereas the market is efficient to not have houses mis-priced by anywhere close to 20%.

  • The fact that I think this is a most interesting thing I learned while indicates a shift from preferring to think about form, structure, and meaning to where to get cheap turpentine (It’s a Picasso reference). If I bought a house in my early 20s I’d probably prefer to be thinking about something in the vein of the influence of industrial design on housing styles.

Personal goals

AHAHAHA HAHAHA - yeah those didn’t happen in 2020. See the bullet on 1 trimester pregnancy. That said, I’ve gotten my energy back and I’m back in the groove of things:

• Learning Spanish via Duolingo every morning and Pimsleur at night. I remember trying both these products 10 years ago and not being very impressed then. Wow, they’ve become incredible since - it’s as close as effortless as learning a new language can get. I just do what the flashing lights tell you to do on it schedule it tells you to do. I find that I’m surprised to encounter Spanish ex a sign or playlist song and actually understand it! You should invite me on any trips to Latin America or Spain.

• Developing an extensive theoretical (and personally useless) understanding of wine. We shape our buildings and they shape us. Aka, the dream house we bought comes with a centerpiece wine rack with UV treated glass, temperature and humidity control but I’m (1) pregnant (2) fairly allergic to alcohol. I was originally going to fill it cheap bottles as decorations but the nerd in me just can’t do it so now I’m off reading wine textbooks and watching YouTube videos of wine regions and wineries. If you come over in the after COVID times, I’ll cook you dinner and you can watch me LARP being a somm as I chose you a theoretically perfect bottle of wine.

Work and professional

The end of 2020 means marks two years as a manager - I work harder than I did for arguably less recognition than when I was an IC but it’s 100% the most fun job I’ve had. The big payoff is that I work with the team I’ve always dreamed of working on. I’m still learning but I’ve gotten to experience a variety of situations, make a call, and see how it played it out. Some of the things I’ve learned or shifted my opinion on:

• Bottoms up decision making → Tasting menu decision making: I used try to involve my team in every consequential decision and set up extensive processes to ensure we had a consistent decision making process that anyone, not just me the manager could participate in. I’ve shifted towards the POV that good decision making is a service and a benefit that the manager provides (rather than a privilege they have snatched away from the team).

• Management as a performance based occupation - I do a lot of “stuff” that matters day to day but seem to only slightly affect outcomes in the end. A lot of success actually comes down to nailing a few big items. Some are obvious such as representing your team during performance review or hiring. Others are less obvious, like which presentations are business poetry that simply need to exist versus which will sway a key decision. My trick is I work very hard upfront to make all the “stuff” effortless (or at least delegatable) so that I can spend 10x as much on ensuring the big moments go well.

Looking ahead to 2021 - I’m excited for

• Our little froggie (our nickname for our upcoming baby) is due mid-April!

• Post-COVID we’re still planning on having a wedding

• I’m effectively GCing a bathroom addition to make a 2nd master for the parents (and I have a vision for converting our formal living room into an equinox-esque gym. Will report back on learnings.

• I’m trying to do a better job of learning from the advice of others (rather than yoloing and learning things the hard way myself). If you’re vaguely older than me or know people you’d be willing to make an intro to (I’m 28), I’d love to find time to just hear about how life has played out the past several years and get life advice.

I know for many its been a difficult and disorienting year - I’m grateful for the kindness and support I’ve encountered this year. If there’s anything I can do to offer it to you, please don’t hesitate reach out. And if you've received this, I'd really love to hear a few words from you on how your 2020 went!

Thanks,

Kathy

P.S. Thanks to Pete Huang whose tweet inspired this and Khurram and Lingtong who gave me feedback!

All the best recipes I’ve cooked since shelter in place started

I’ve gone from eating 3 meals a day at the office to being a devoted home cook. Every week we’ve cooked 5 to 10 new recipes and these are favorites that keep making it back to cooking rotation. They taste as good as or even better than I’ve had at restaurants and come with clear enough instructions for beginners. If you follow my instagram cooking adventures, I’m pretty new to the cooking game myself! JP and I are still part of the barbaric class of people who puts their chef’s knives in the dishwasher. 

1. Braised Instant Pot Pork Belly from Woks of Life

This is the dish that turned me into an instant pot true believer. Taiwanese pork over rice has gone from a weekend indulgence to my go to weekday lunch.

I cook this with rice and some sautéed green veggies for a complete meal. If you keep the extra sauce/stock mixture after the first time you cook it to braise the meat for subsequent meals, you can get a fantastic meal cooked with 10 minutes of active prep time. We like to shorten the Instant Pot cooking time for a slightly firmer bite. We buy our pork belly in bulk from Costco. 

2. Chicken Pad Thai from Recipe Tin Eats

This pad thai recipe splits the difference between the sweeter Americanized pad thai I did all my 2am college p-sets to and the more authentic fishier pad thai’s I had in Thailand. 

What I like about this recipe is that they have a tamarind sauce version (which is better) but also a ketchup based substitute that can be made with ingredients you can find at a Whole Foods or Safeway. I’ve sneaked some extra veggies into this recipe with no degradation in taste. 

3. Ravioli with balsamic brown butter sauce from The Food Network

This is what I cook when I only have 15 minutes to grab lunch. #managerlife I usually swap out the walnuts for whatever I think will go well best with the ravioli favor.

If you drop the chopped walnuts, it shorten’s the cook time down to just 5 minutes. The brown butter with the balsamic vinegar is so good. I’ve never ordered a brown butter sauce at a restaurant after learning how effortless it is to do at home. If we want to get really specific, I’m partial the having these with the mushroom ravioli from Trader Joes. 

4. Dragon roll from Just One Cookbook

Unlike the other recipes above, this one isn’t super fast but it makes me so happy to be able to make such fancy seeming food at home.

I love all of Just One Cookbook’s recipes because they explain how to do Japanese cooking with precise instructions that assume you know absolutely nothing. They teach you why you have to do each step and how the art of cooking from their recipes. In this one, she gives you the tips and tricks for how to plate the dragon roll so it looks just one the ones at the restaurant. 

5. Instant Pot Jambalaya by Boulder Locavore

I had the great misfortune of having jambalaya and gumbo for the first time in New Orleans which means I’m both obsessed with these dishes and can never be satisfied with anything less. I’ve gone to so many Southern restaurants only to come home disappointed. I thought I was just humoring my partner JP when he suggested cooking this and to my shock, I loved it. To be honest, my standards have probably dropped since it’s been 4 years since I was in New Orleans but I think this is almost as good. 

Bonus:  The three highest ROI meta cooking things I’ve done are:

1. Read Salt Fat Fire Acid

Everyone raves about it for a reason. It’s helped me break through the I can successfully follow recipes but too scared to improvise barrier. The biggest lightbulb moment for me in the book is understanding that I need to use culturally appropriate fats and acids to get authentic tasting regional cooking.

2. Stop asking Google how to cook and start asking Youtube

Youtube is far better at demonstrating and explaining how to cook.

3. Learn how to freeze meat correctly (aka wrap it in plastic wrap and stick it in a ziplock) Then you too can shop at Costco for a household of 2! On a side note, we cooked a $12/lb Costco Ribeye last week and it was seriously the best non Japanese wagyu steak I had in my life. I’m starting to get real suspicious of tasting menus…