Last year I gave myself the insane task of post 5 days a week while raising two toddlers. Needless to say, I was exhausted halfway through the year and decreased my posting frequency. This year, I’m trying out a new method: 6 weeks of posting followed by 1 week of break. Well, I’ve accomplished my 6 weeks (as of this post), so now I get a break. Like most of my other breaks, I won’t be posting, reading, or responding to any new comments. It’ll be a complete break all next week from blogging so I can focus on everything else in my life, and get a few things going.…
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I’m a Stay-At-Home Mom and I Sit and Eat Chocolate More Often Than You Think
It’s true, and I blame my daughter. The stereotype goes that stay-at-home moms sit and eat bonbons all day. And sometimes watching soap operas gets thrown in. When I was a mom of just one, I would laugh. My son was constantly on the move. There were warm days when we would take two walks a day. He loved going to the playground. He liked to run and jump, but had zero caution. The early years were always an adventure. I looked forward to his 50 minutes of speech therapy because it was the only real time I got to sit. When my daughter was born, I seriously thought about…
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The Grass is Not Always Greener
I’m a mom of two, but sometimes I feel like a fraud. Sometimes I fret about how other people see me when I’m out with my kids, and not because of how I parent. But because of how I look, which is absolutely absurd, but, nonetheless, a true experience. I’m one of those ageless Asians. With two Chinese parents, I look like I’m permanently stuck in high school even though I’m 31. It’s easy for people to say how lucky I am and how much they wished they looked like me. Uh, no. Would you want to be mistaken as a high school kid when you’re in a professional environment…
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I Don’t Know Whether to Celebrate or Grieve Whenever I Get My Period
As a teenager, menstrual cycles were annoying, gross, and pointless. I had no intention of having kids and just wanted to rip my uterus out. After I met The Husband, they were a cause to celebrate because it meant I was not going to be a mom yet. After having an early miscarriage and subsequent successful pregnancies, I am now conflicted about them. Over the past 5 years, I’ve had only about a handful of periods thanks to pregnancy and enthusiastic breastfeeding on my children’s parts. Having one after so long was kind of surprising and I couldn’t quite remember what to do. But the most surprising part was how I felt.…
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The Power of a Lullaby
Growing Up With Music Growing up, music was important to my family. My siblings and I were forced into piano lessons, which we took for a varying number of years. But we also independently chose violin, guitar, clarinet, flute, and harp. Not that any of us claim any proficiency anymore. But, before we even began lessons with these various instruments, sometimes learning two of them at a time, we had our mother singing to us every single night. None of us remember, but our mom has always told us that she used to sing us to sleep every night when we were very young. We lovingly joke with her that…
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How I…Am Selecting an Elementary School for My Child
Before we moved, we lived in what felt like the suburbs of the suburbs. It was a quiet area, but had plenty for us to do. Actually, we loved living there. We had our son’s entire educational career planned out. Then we moved to a bustling metropolis. L.A. is huge and sprawling to the point where, depending on where you live, it feels like something between a city and a suburb. A kind of cramped suburb? Anyways, my plans for my son went out the window and, with him starting Kindergarten in August, we’re kind of in overdrive trying to get his educational career back on track. What I love…
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My Late Preterm Babies
November is Prematurity Awareness Month. I debated for a while about whether I should write about my premature babies because, even though they were born early, they are far from the tiny babies born at twenty-something weeks who had to spend weeks to months in the NICU and face a lifetime of health, emotional, and behavioral problems. But if I blog for my children to one day read it and learn a little bit about what they were like as kids, then I want them to know they were born early, but are lucky, and maybe they’ll realize this is why they may have faced challenges at a young age.…
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I’m Not Cut Out to Be an Influencer
Not too long ago, I was on a journey to brand and possibly monetize this blog. So, I signed up at an influencer network site. I’m sure these networks operate similarly, or maybe completely differently, but I’m also sure I ended up signing up for this particular one for a reason. This isn’t to say these networks are bad. Indeed, I have a respect for the millions of people who use and profit from them. It’s just not my cup of tea. For a few weeks, I would check and see what opportunities were being sent my way. There weren’t any I could do and was interested in, until recently.…
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Chicken Scampi
This post was originally published on April 27th for National Shrimp Scampi Day without pictures. I don’t eat seafood. But we like chicken, lemon, butter, and pasta. So we don’t do shrimp scampi, but chicken scampi instead! We were watching The Pioneer Woman one day and she was making shrimp scampi with pasta. Now, my husband is a big fan of lemon butter sauce, but knows I absolutely will not touch seafood. Instead, loving husband that he is, he asked if I could make it with chicken. Of course I could make it with chicken! And it was so easy that, whenever my parents give us lemons from their tree…
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Nancy Drew Was My Role Model
I started reading the Nancy Drew mysteries when I was about 9. I vividly remember spending a summer sitting around all day with my nose in a Nancy Drew book. I loved them so much, my mom signed me up to receive 3 by mail every month. It didn’t take me long to finish them, and it wasn’t long before I was begging her to take me to the bookstore so I could get more. It’s really my mom’s fault. She had read a few of the yellow cover books and her parents had kept them. One afternoon, she was helping her parents clear out an old garage and found…
