Zodiac Birthday

I'm turning 36 this year. It's not my golden birthday. 36 is not my special number. But this birthday hits me differently than any other birthday has. 

My mother was 36 when I was born. If she were alive today, she would be twice my age. In the Chinese Zodiac, we are the same animal. The only year we got to share together as a multiple of 12 (besides the year I was born) was the year I turned 12. She was 48. 

I've always loved the book Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. I first read it in grade school, again in middle school, and I've reread it multiple times as an adult. After middle school, reading it was like reading about myself. Salamanca was embarking on a journey to walk in her mother's footsteps. My entire life....has felt like that in a way. Since her death, I had to learn to live without her, but I've always remembered her. 

Having kids without her was definitely the hardest.  Mothers understand things nobody else can. Becoming a mother without my own has had heartbreaking moments. I'm not saying we would have been the best of friends and agreed on everything and lived in perfect harmony. We most definitely would not have. But I am saying living knowing she isn't here brings a hole in which having her alive, even with an imperfect relationship, cannot replicate. 

Being 36 scares me in some ways because in my head, it is the start of a countdown. It's the start of the 9 years I had my mother without cancer entering our lives. It's the start of the only 13 years I had with her. Walking in my mother's footsteps through these years of my life is scary. I know how it ended for her. It's not that I expect it to happen for me: I genuinely hope it doesn't. But because I've lived on the opposite side as the observer, I know it's not impossible for me to become the one experiencing it. 

I actually tried using AI to put a photo of my adult self next to my mother. Seeing it made me cry. I've never physically stood next to her as an adult and had a photo taken. But then, I realized, if my mother were alive today, she wouldn't be in her 40s anymore. She would also have aged another 22 years. When I asked AI to age progress her, the resemblance was completely lost. I say that also knowing I don't know what my mother would have looked like at 72. Even if technology could do so accurately, the person it would show me would no longer be someone I knew, someone I cherished. It would be the equivalent of a stranger. So at the same time that it superimposed me as an adult with my mother at 47, it's not the same person I would have stood next to if she were still alive today. Sometimes, we need to see it to realize it's not actually what we want. 

I don't want to be 36 standing next to my 47 year old mother. That would have been and is impossible. At the same time, it is impossible for 36 year old me to stand next to my 72 year old mother. Nobody will ever know what she actually looked like. And I don't want a fabrication.

I miss her a little extra this year for my birthday.  

Decapitation

My daughter's homeroom teacher at school has fresh flowers every week. Her husband brings them to school on Monday. The flowers stay in a vase on her desk all week. On Friday, she hands out a few stems to each student to take home. This tradition has been fun for us because we've had a small vase of flowers at our house each day for the last 4+ weeks. 

Last week, she brought home two tulip stems from her teacher. As soon as she got into the car, I saw one of the blooms snap off the stem. My heart sank a bit when I saw it happened. It must've been something about the motion of her getting onto the car and holding the stems in her hand which jolted the flowers and broke off one of the flower heads. 

We drove home and I thought about what I could do with the beautiful yellow flower.  I couldn't just throw it away, it was still vibrant and alive. I ended up finding a shallow dish, filled it with some water, and put the flower head directly in. This way, we could still enjoy the flower even though it wasn't on top of a stem. 

This flower head lasted for 6 days like this!

 

I've been a perfectionist for much of my life. In the last decade of having children, I thought my perfectionist tendencies had gone away some. My kids leave the house in disarray with toys and papers; I don't always ask them to clean up. My children leave bits of food on the table after a meal; I don't bother wiping them off immediately. This is somewhat true. I don't feel the need for instant solutions regarding issues of cleanliness or young children's natural behavior. 

But when it comes to emotional "mistakes", I find myself having a hard time relinquishing my perfectionism. When I saw the flower break off the stem (yes I saw it happen), my heart sank because I knew how excited she was to bring home flowers at the end of each school week. It brings her so much joy to give them to me, and I get joy from watching her. Is it true she could have held the flowers more carefully and not broken one upon entering the car? Yes. Can you say she knew to be more careful and hold them more gently? I actually think so. 

But at the end of the day, it wasn't her intention to break the flower off of its stem. Should this be something she's "at fault" for? No. 

She actually wasn't that upset after the flower broke off. Part of me was glad. We came home, I put the flowers in water, and she went about her afternoon and I started working.

Perfectionism is what motivates us to keep working at the same problem to find better solutions.  Perfectionism is what allows us to reach new personal bests. Despite perfectionism being a potentially good characteristic, it can become debilitating if left unchecked. Mastering this balance is one of life's greatest challenges. 

Technology Advancements

My senior year homecoming, I drove myself part way because my date wasn't able to stay the whole evening. After dinner, he drove me from the restaurant back to my car and I drove myself for the rest of the night. I knew my gas tank was low that night. I hadn't been able to get gas before and it was nearing empty, but the gas light didn't turn on....

...until I started driving after dinner. 

I had no idea how many miles I had until I'd literally run out of gas. I knew my car wouldn't stop running immediately, but I was cutting it close. I drove that whole night living on the edge. I made it to all the places I was going and home without running out of gas. 

I still have the car which I drove to my senior homecoming, but it's not my main vehicle anymore. We recently upgraded my car to a hybrid. Jumping 20 years in car technology was really like traveling through a time warp. I got a sunroof, heated seats, a digital screen, CarPlay, keyless start, power trunk, a built-in dash cam, rear camera, kick open sliding doors, touch unlock, front and back sensors, rear windshield wiper, and tinted windows(!). I'm sure you might be reading this and thinking you had these features 5 years ago, 10 years ago, or even 15 years ago on your car. That's great! All of these are new to me as of 2026.

These features are nice, but by far my favorite feature is the ability for my car to tell me how many miles I have left to drive until empty. Yup, yet another feature I've never had until now. Coupled with the hybrid technology, I only get gas about once a month now and I do a solid 180-200 miles a week on average.  

The last time I got gas, I was able to wait until the middle of the week after I dropped off my children at school in the morning. There's less crowds of people getting gas and gas is generally less expensive compared to getting gas on the weekends. When I made it to the gas station, my car told me I had 73 miles left in the tank. My gas light hadn't turned on yet, and I'd already driven over 573 miles.  

 

 

 

I've never been a "car person" or thought of myself as one, but being spoiled by all of these features has really changed my mind on what I value in my vehicle. I will always view my vehicle as a functional tool to get me from place to place, but when I can do that with some extra "luxuries," it's nice.

I'll never have to panic now if my gas light turns on. I just have to be able to do math. 😜

More Chicken

Continuing from last week's blog, I made another dish with my remaining shredded chicken. I was poking around online for some eggroll recipes and I actually came across this recipe. They call it "eggroll in a bowl" because it was like an eggroll filling without having to wrap it up and fry.

When I went to the grocery store, I was hoping to find some bags of coleslaw on sale to use in the recipe and just throw it all in. Fortunately, they had some on sale. Unfortunately, the cost of buying it pre-cut was too much for me to stomach even on a whim. Instead, I ended up buying green cabbage from the grocery store and using my own carrots and onions from home. There was no purple cabbage in my final colors, but it actually turned out okay.

When you add garlic, soy sauce, and sesame oil to anything, it's hard to go wrong from there. 

 

The actual recipe called for ground meat to be used. I used my shredded chicken because my goal was to use up the rest of what I already had. I think because my protein was pre-cooked, the whole dish ended up being slightly drier than perhaps the recipe intended. Also, there wasn't any added fat from needing to cook my protein. My chicken had also been kept in the refrigerator for many days since it's initial cooking date. From a texture and mouth-feel perspective, it wasn't my favorite. However, the flavor was very good. 

In the future, if I were to actually use ground pork (my favorite) in addition to following this recipe, it could be quite delicious. It's a great recipe to have on hand to use up leftovers and make a balanced dish. Personally, I think any of the following vegetables could be added to this recipe and it would still turn out very well:

- mushrooms
- cabbage
- carrots
- onions
- celery
- spinach
- bell peppers

I would just make sure to cut all my vegetables to about the same size - julienned or shredded.   

I don't think this is a recipe I would purposely add to my rotation as there are many other dishes I enjoy more. However, I think this is a great recipe to make on a whim with some leftover ingredients you may already have at home in your refrigerator.  

Samosas

I made samosas this past week! The idea was birthed out of having an excess of shredded chicken and wanting something different that wasn't a creamy sauce-based dish. I'd done clam chowder and chicken pot pie in the same week. I wanted something different with the rest of my chicken.

I had potatoes and onions at home so I decided to make samosas on a whim. I cooked the filling the night before and made the wrapper the day after. I actually made two batches of wrappers with two different recipes, but this recipe is the one I enjoyed more. Yes, I deep fried them. 

They turned out quite well! I think I could have added more salt to season the filling more. I had slow cooked the chicken by itself and already added salt so I didn't want to add more salt for fear of being overly salty. I tasted the filling to make sure the potatoes were done but didn't think to taste the chicken. Also, I overlooked the fact that the dough wasn't overly salty so the filling needed some extra flavor to compensate.

I guess this is what happens when I cook on a whim. I wouldn't do anything differently because it's the short-notice which results in creativity. It just also comes with a side of imperfection. 

The filling recipe I followed (which I can't find anymore...oops) had said to add water if the mixture got too dry in the pan. I think I took this direction too seriously and added too much water because when I went to fill my samosas, the filling kept leaking and popping the seams on my dough wrapper. I had to get creative on how to stretch portions of the dough over each other to fix the holes.  This is not the batch pictured above. 😄 Halfway through I did drain some of the extra liquid out of the filling mixture so that is why the second batch closed much nicer. 

The deep frying wasn't too bad since I knew the inside filling was already cooked. I just had to watch the color on the outside and remove when done. My dough skills are not great so my wrappers were on the thicker side and resulted in a more doughy outside rather than the traditional flaky. Personally, I don't really care because I knew it was my first time and I'm not going to risk the samosa falling apart during cooking just to roll the dough thinner.  

I still have some extra chicken leftover so I'm trying to find a creative way to use it up. I'll probably be heading to the grocery store after this just to see what ingredients I can find on sale and try something new. I might blog about it next week. Stay tuned!

The Things that Matter

I picked up my son from school the other day and started asking him about his day. At one point, I heard the sentence, "I brought home my crayon box that had popcorn in it."

Um. What?

Turns out he had a snack at school (popcorn) as part of their lesson and it was passed out in little treat boxes which looked like crayon boxes. Phew. He told me he had saved his box and wanted to keep it. Okay...

A few days later, I found this crayon box tucked into a drawer handle in our kitchen. My first thought was: I have got to throw this away. I use this drawer and it can't have a snack box wedged in the handle. But there was also a more rational side of me which was thinking how endearing it was that he loved this treat box so much to bring it home after finishing his treat and strategically placing it in a "special" place. 

Some of you might be thinking how ridiculous it sounds since I thought a piece of trash was endearing. Part of me feels it too.  But, I also know I was once the girl who kept a toothpick from a sandwich from the Princeton University cafeteria because it was a toothpick from Princeton University, and I'd probably never go back again in my life. (Still true. I haven't been back.)

As much as I wanted to throw his treat box in the trash, and alas, it will someday end up in the trash, I decided to keep it a little bit longer. I just had to move it from the frequently used drawer handle to an infrequently used cabinet handle.

New location secured.

He saw it this morning while eating his breakfast. I didn't have to explain why it had moved to a different handle. He just smiled knowing I had still kept it. 

These are the things I think about when raising my kids. Am I taking the time to value the things which are important to them? Even the ones which aren't important to me? We remember various memories in our life. Some of these memories can shape the way we view people. Some of these memories will affect our impressions of locations. Some of these memories will affect the choices we make later in life. I know a treat box from popcorn at school in 1st grade doesn't seem like a life-changing memory to a grown adult. And it's possible years from now, this paper box will be long forgotten in the memories which don't make it. But in this moment, keeping it a little longer than I otherwise would have, made him smile. 

We were driving to church last Friday evening, and because we were running late due to unforeseen schedule interruptions, we ended up driving west during the sunset hour. My kids told me to take a picture of the sunset and to save it. 

 

 

I'm horrible when it comes to saving photos of non-people on my phone because they don't get printed, I don't have enough memory to save them all on my phone, and realistically, I'm not scrolling my phone to go down memory lane and look at all the photos I've ever taken. So this one will be saved here on my blog and added to the list of things that matter to my children. 

Natural Highlights

It's been almost four years since I last dyed my hair. I still have days when I look in the mirror and see all the greys screaming at me amidst the sea of black. I also still have days when I look in the mirror and I can tell myself I am aging well and still look young for my age. In the years since I've stopped dyeing my hair, I still get comments about my grey hair. I've learned to ignore most of them. They don't really bother me anymore. I say "really" because part of me will always react to these types of comments differently than if I didn't have to hear these comments as part of my life. But I have learned to cope and the reaction is less negative and more neutral. 

 Last week, I had a first. I was having lunch with a friend and it was my first time eating at this restaurant. As I was leaving the register with my food, the lady behind the counter asked me a rendition of the question which I've never heard.

"Is the white in your hair highlighted or is it white hair?" You may be relieved to know she didn't ask it in English because seeing it written out in its translation makes it that much more....awkward. 

I told her, "It's natural."

"But you're so young! How come you have so much white hair?"  I'm glad I look young. I do still feel youthful at heart. 

"I've had a hard life," was my response. 

After that, I continued bringing my food back to my table and proceeded to have a wonderful lunch with a wonderful friend.  

 ***

When I responded with "it's natural," it actually was for two reasons. The first was my brain was working on comprehending what she had just said and trying to formulate a proper response without too much lag time. The second was emphasizing that my grey hair is natural. I don't dye my hair. This is the color it grows out. And I've learned to be okay with that. Honestly, the fact she could have thought my hair was highlighted grey means it's growing out in such a pattern which makes it well dispersed. I've contemplated getting a grey blend, but I've never felt strongly enough to go pay for one. 

I've been asked too many times in my life to find reason in their question anymore as to why my hair is grey. Who can pinpoint the reason as to why his or her hair has grown grey? Our hair only grows about a half inch per month. If we knew the reasons why our hair was growing grey, I'm pretty sure someone would have come up with a reversal/cure by now and would be rich. There's quite a few products out there which advertise grey reversal or slowing the process of greys, but none are truly able to guarantee results. 

Half my lifetime ago, I didn't know how to respond properly to this question. Most of the time, it took me by surprise. I wrote about this a few years ago in my two decades series. I was caught off-guard at a CVS and the cashier literally spoke the words for me which I did not have in myself. I'm proud to say in my mid-30s, I can finally feel more of the confidence I was desperately wanting as a young adult and could never quite find. 

This is who I see in my head - they are my natural highlights.