Have you ever used a ceramic knife? I think my friend Nichole was the first to tell me about the ceramic knife when I spotted it at her house. Mark and I later saw a Kyocera knife for sale at one of the stores at Chelsea Market and we decided to give it a try. They’re lightweight and super sharp, but the claim that it actually prevents cut fruit from getting brown (which supposedly happens when metal interacts with acidic juices) was the thing that sold me. I pack the girls apple slices nearly every day for lunch, and in the past those containers of cut fruit would sometimes come back untouched at the end of the day because the apples looked “too brown”. Now, I will say that it doesn’t prevent all browning as it claims, but it does a good enough job that I definitely do see a difference and the apples get eaten every day. Besides, that white blade! It really is a fun knife to use.

I think you all know by now that the girls wear Salt Water sandals almost exclusively as their summer sandals, but have I told you why? (Miss C got these gold pair this year). Aside from the reasonable price (yes, there was a time when I got sucked into all the adorable, yet pricey kid sandals when the girls were toddlers), they are durable and have even lasted us 2 summers depending on how much their feet would grow during the winter. Those more expensive, adorable brands? They would be trashed by the end of summer sandal wearing season, absolutely trashed. One of the reasons why the Salt Waters survive is because you can get them wet and they won’t get ruined in water. If you live in NYC, you know what a big deal this is. With sprinklers open at every playground in the city, and with a playground every 7-10 blocks (at least in our neighborhood), it’s hard to avoid the sprinkler in the summer, especially when all your kid wants to do is get wet. Before I started buying Salt Waters, I’d have this conversation with the girls almost daily:

 
Girls: “SPRINKLER!!!”
Me: “Wait! You’re wearing your sandals and we don’t have your crocs or flip flops. You can’t go in the water with those sandals”.
Girls (as they run towards the water): “But…SPRINKLER!!”
Me: “Did ya even hear what I said?? You can’t get those shoes wet. They’ll get ruined.”
Girls: “Can we go barefoot then?”
Me: “Do you see where we live? This is the city! With rats and glass and god knows what else.”
Girls (as they run into the water anyway): “But…SPRINKLER!!!”
Me: “Nooooooooo!”

 
But now when we enter a playground with the water on, it’s like…sure, get wet, whatever. By the way, there are 2 types of Salt Water sandals – the ones that have stitching on the foot bed and the ones that don’t. The smooth, slightly higher foot beds without stitching seem more durable and hold up best in water.
 
And finally, this dress. Yeah, it totally looks bleh and boring on the website and I would have never even looked at it twice past these photos because I don’t particularly like the way it hangs on the model, but the dress is actually pretty nice in person. I bought it as a late birthday present to myself (and I’m all about dresses with pockets these days).

I will confess, I have never been to the Hamptons. Not once in all my life long years as a New Yorker. When we think of Long Island beaches, we usually head to Robert Moses or Jones Beach as it’s a quick drive from my parents’ house, but when we want to spend a day tootling around the island for some peace and quiet, we head to the North Fork. It’s kind of like the anti-Hamptons and it might just be one of our favorite places to go. Things are quiet out here. Yes, you might hit some traffic as there really is only one main road going all the way to the end until there is no more land, but by and large there are less people on the North Fork as there is on the south. There are a ton of farms and farm stands, wineries, and places to picnic. The one challenging thing is to find a public access beach as many of the parking lots are by permit only for residents and house-renters, but it’s not impossible. And when you do, it’s not unusual to have the entire beach to yourself.

We haven’t been back to the beach by the house we rented since we stayed on the North Fork 4 years ago in 2009. This was before we were going to Seattle every August, so it does stand out as the year we spent August a little differently. Claudine doesn’t remember the house at all, nor anything else from that summer, but it did make a strong impression on Mia and she talks about it now and again. We did a lot of fruit picking and farm visiting and when I think back to that summer, I think of the lavender fields; I can almost smell them again.
 
One of my favorite memories was stumbling on a boat race on our last evening there and meeting some of the town people who live there year round. While in town this last weekend, we visited the fish market where we would often buy fresh seafood for our dinners. Mark picked up some oysters and bay scallops and we recreated one of our favorite dishes from that trip for dinner that night.

Some photos of our day at a farm on the North Fork of Long Island last Sunday. Picking season isn’t nearly here yet so we wandered the grounds, tasted wine at the winery, smelled the flowers, watched a border collie herd some geese and ate some crepes. A quiet day out in nature seems like the best way to end a busy week.

When I was younger, I remember my mother climbing the stairs to our upstairs attic where she would head after dinner nearly everyday for 2 years. My mom was earning her college degree long distance from a small private college in Maine and she used that little 8′ x 8′ room at the top of the stairs as her study. I don’t really even remember how old I was and I certainly didn’t understand what a big deal it was for my mom at that age; I just remember helping her sometimes with the grammar on her papers because English wasn’t her first language and even though she was a fairly fluent speaker, writing was a whole other story.

Of her 4 siblings, my mother was considered to be the “smart” one and the one that had the most ambition. She always wanted to be a doctor, but opportunities were scarce back then in Korea, especially for girls, so she went to nursing school instead and came to NY in 1971 soon after she graduated, seizing the first opportunity that she could find. But she always wanted a college degree. When she finally completed her studies sometime during my high school years, she traveled up to Maine for the graduation ceremony alone. I remember seeing photos of her trip to the college, but I always later wondered why we didn’t go up to the ceremony as a family.
 
When I think about my mom being the age that I am now, I think about her with a daughter who was 19 and already gone from the house and a son who was 13 and ready to enter high school. I think about how she switched careers at this age after 18 successful years as a nurse to real estate because she realized that her career was taking a physical toll on her health. She also knew that she had 2 kids to send to college and she couldn’t do that on a nurse’s salary. I don’t remember with clear details her transition from one career to the other because I had already moved out of the house at that point and quite frankly, was too busy trying to live my own life. But I do remember that my mom would cook and leave dinners wrapped up for my brother as her new work schedule had shifted and she was no longer home by the time he got home from school. My brother’s high school years in that respect, were different from mine.
 
I remember many years ago having a talk with my mom when I wasn’t feeling any validation from her, or praise, or whatever I was seeking at the time. After all those years, the approval from my mom wasn’t any less important than it was when I was 10. I don’t even remember what the conversation was specifically about, but I do remember her response. She asked me where her validation came from. Who was telling her that she was doing a good job? Who was telling her that they were proud of her? Maybe that is why she went to her graduation alone. She never expected validation from her family because she never received it before, from her parents or siblings growing up or from us. Maybe she learned to accept that ultimately, the only person she needed validation from was herself.
 
It’s ironic that I wrote that post about validation from strangers a few weeks ago, because I think about my mom’s response often. It wasn’t the response I was expecting, but it holds truth. We often expect so much from our mothers – the basic needs for survival, food, shelter, unconditional love, praise, and security. When we’re younger, our mothers are our mothers, beacons of love and protection, and we don’t necessarily think about the people that they are separate from that identity. But there comes a point when we realize that our mothers are people too – fears, insecurity, frustrations and all. Maybe you come to understand this when you see your mom cry in front of you for the first time or when you witness a vulnerability that you never saw or understood before.

 
As my girls get older I think about this more and more as we start having conversations not just as mother and daughters, but as people having discussions with our own opinions. I think about the message that I send out to the girls with my actions as well as my inactions. I think about the relationship that I have with my mother and the role that I have as a mother to my daughters. Whatever shortcomings may have happened in the past doesn’t have to be irreparable in the present, and I just want to say to my mother today that I am very proud of her.
 

Did you know that we’re huge basketball fans? All of us, even the girls. It’s so entertaining to watch Knicks games with them because they get so nervous and chatty and they’re full of hilarious commentary. It’s almost like watching a game with cranky old ladies who can’t stop commenting about every play, much like those old Muppet guys sitting on the balcony of the Muppet Show (oh, did you know they have names?? Statler and Waldorf! I had no idea). Mark gets kind of annoyed because he rarely gets down time and when he sits down to watch a game, he just wants to watch the game in peace. Poor guy. He has to watch basketball games with 3 loud, nervous nellies who scream at the TV.

I grew up watching sports with my dad and my brother – the Knicks, the Mets & Yankees, hockey and the Olympics (I was never into football and still find it unwatchable). I was also obsessive about tennis in high school. Even though I was probably the least athletic kid ever, some of my biggest memories from my childhood involve sports, from watching games on TV to going to baseball games at Shea Stadium to playing those crude early Atari and Commodore 64 Olympic themed video games. Even if you’re not into sports, and even if you don’t like what it has come to represent these days (oh, you know…the egos, the celebrity worshipping, the endorsements and bloated contracts) you can’t deny that it has some strange power to illicit the most crazy and passionate emotions out of people. It also has the undeniable ability to generate city-wide pride in a way that few other things can.
 
If you grew up in NY in the 80s, then you’ll remember the year the Mets won the World Series in 1986, even if you didn’t care about baseball. The ’86 season was magical and the post-season playoffs were dramatic. That month of baseball in the Fall of ’86 is one of my fondest memories growing up. My family and I would sit in our basement family room glued to the TV as we watched the post-season unfold and the Mets win another series, and another, until they became World Champions in dramatic fashion. Truth be told, there wasn’t much bonding within our family back in those days, but we bonded and cheered over baseball.
 
I became particularly obsessive with basketball back in the late 90s during my grad school years. I was back in NY and the Knicks were surging. I’ll even admit that I scheduled my social life around Knicks games. Back in the days before Youtube, DVR or TiVO, if you wanted to watch the game, you had to catch it on live TV (well, I guess you could have programmed your VCR, but ours was rather wanky and never recorded things right). I was the worst kind of basketball fan too in that I would get too emotionally invested in the outcomes of the game. If the game itself was close, it would stress me out to the point that sometimes it would get too unbearable and I would have to turn it off. But after the Knicks started dismantling the core players that I fell in love with after losing in the finals in 1999, I fell out of love with basketball. The celebrity status of some of the players got too ridiculous, the money involved in sports were outrageous and the Knicks fell into a decade slumber.
 
So it came as a surprise when last season my interest in the Knicks got piqued again when I kept hearing about that Asian American player, Jeremy Lin. I know, I know, Lindsanity blah blah blah, but you have to understand even if you aren’t a sports fan, that those few months of basketball and the craziness surrounding it last year were unprecedented and remarkable, not only for what he did for basketball and a beat down Knicks franchise, but what he did for the economics of sports, for the city, and what he did for other Asians. It’s like the city woke up; basketball was exciting again and we had something to cheer about. Why was it such a big deal? The truth is, we don’t have a lot of Asian American role models in mainstream popular culture, in sports or really…anywhere. We didn’t have them growing up and we still don’t really have them now 20-30 years later. I mean think about it, and then think about how true that still is. So yeah, when an Asian American kid, and one who arguably fits into the typical Asian stereotype makes waves in pro sports, news and the media and becomes a household name to the point of oversaturation, you can bet that every Asian American person in the country is going to take notice because it just doesn’t happen very often.
 
A lot has been written over the past year about Jeremy’s rise (and “fall”) and some of the discrimination that he dealt with in his young career. My friends and I almost became like protective mother hens as we couldn’t quite imagine the pressure, the criticism and unrealistic expectations that was suddenly placed on his shoulders at such a young age as he became an icon for a whole race, but that’s what happens when there are so few before you. When the Knicks didn’t resign him because of off season contract follies, I was fuming for weeks. But you know, I’m a Knicks fan first, even though they are a team that hands its fans heartbreak over and over again and so I eventually moved on. A year later, we’re watching our team advance in the playoffs for the first time since I was last captivated by basketball 14 years ago, but I doubt that I would have been back to following basketball this closely if it wasn’t for the Lin story. I have to credit him for making me care about basketball again. And now we watch games as a family every night that games are on, sometimes watching live NBA games too at the newly built Barclay Center nearby (but we’ll never be Nets fans. Sports loyalty is weird and complicated like that), high-fiving and yelling at the TV just like I did with my family when I was a kid.

I have to laugh at the universe sometimes. This May is looking a lot like last May, an odd and off month that really set the tone and schedule for the rest of the year. I’m finding myself in a similar place. Okay, I get it universe, I get the message. Sometimes things happen, often beyond our control, that are hard to ignore as signs. So instead of waiting around passively for things to reset itself as I did last year, this year I’m taking control because I’m starting to accept that things may never reset itself. But I’m taking this as a challenge, much like when we started the business 5 years ago when our backs were against the wall. In a lot of ways it almost feels like that time, when we were motivated by equal parts fear and determination.

Coincidentally, all this talk and writing of quitting for the past week led to this podcast through a twitter friend of mine – The Upside of Quitting. It’s long, but an interesting listen to have in the background as I did yesterday ironing and folding tea towels to mail out. I also realized yesterday that it’s a continuation of something I’ve been thinking about since last September when I read the book, “The Dip”. So this is nothing new and almost humbling to discover after reading that post that I’m not really any further along than I was 8 months ago. Why is it so hard to get unstuck? As I was archiving some old photos off my computer, I saw this photo of the The Wizard of Oz taken from a ride at Hollywood Studios. What is the moral of that movie? That we often have the answers that we seek inside us all along? That everyone has the power to overcome their own obstacles from within? Yeah…that.