Color Blind

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's be color blind.

Bulbs

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

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

Image from American Meadows product page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cream Cheese

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

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

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

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

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

Ingredients:

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

Instructions:

Bring milk to a simmer.

Add vinegar (or lemon juice) to curdle.

Strain Curds.

The bottom is whey.

Blend in food processor.

Add flavorings and store. This one is blueberry.

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

And they make the perfect cream cheese containers :)

Valid Concern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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