Friends, I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. This is only the 3rd time in the history of this blog (that is nearly 4 years!) that we’ve gone out to dinner without the girls. The last time was on my 40th birthday nearly 2 years ago. Let’s not get into the why, but rather revel in the fact that we did it (and to think that I got totally chewed out by a blog reader last year who said that I treated the girls like burdens to our lifestyle when we handed the kids off to Mark’s mom as soon as we got to Seattle so that we could walk around Pike Place by ourselves, bwahahaha).

We’re so out of the whole restaurant scene at this point that it was hard for us to choose where to go, but after some deliberation, Mark chose The Modern for his 40th birthday meal, the fancy formal restaurant inside The Museum of Modern Art. Somewhere along the way over the past few years, fine dining with 3 or 4 course tasting menus has turned into dining experiences with many little extra dishes in between the courses that you do choose (we are not talking about the 8 course tasting menus which, sad to say, I’m unsure I can do anymore. Can’t eat like I used to in my old age). So even before your first appetizer comes out, you may have already been given a few amuse bouche dishes and a few extra sweets at the end of your meal. In our case, we had some kind of foamy carrot soup in a test tube-like glass vessel, a bit of raw fish and some kind of goat cheese tart served on spoons, and our personal favorite, a ceviche like dish with skate in a sauce that I could have licked straight from the bowl, with a single squid ink marshmallow cube. And after our dessert course? Your waiter comes around with this insane sweets cart filled with rows and piles of macarons, petite cookies, brittle, marshmallows, chocolates and truffles and you get to choose whatever you want. And while you are stuffing your face with all this sugar (after already having dessert), some other waiter comes and hands you mini cones filled with perfect domes of ice cream, and then as you are handed the check, you are presented with this fancy, shiny box of petite cakes filled with caramel to take home.

I gave it to the girls. Okay, there were 3 mini cakes inside. I ate one.

 
We don’t have any more big birthdays coming up in quite a while (oh thank god, because I didn’t have a problem with 40, but the next one is almost too much to bear), and that has been the only time that we’ve indulged in such fanciness because let’s face it, the bill at the end of the meal can be shocking, but we decided that we should go out to fancy dinners once a year, perhaps on our anniversary. We also decided that when Mia turns 10, we’d like to take her out to a lunch at one of these fancy restaurants. If there is any kid who has a sophisticated adventurous palette, it’s this kid. While looking over the menu trying to decide what to order, we couldn’t resist saying how much Mia would have enjoyed this meal.
 
PS. thank you all so much for the birthday wishes to Mark. So sweet.

Mark turns 40 today! And it also marks the year where he’s officially known me more than half his life. Holy hell! How did we both become so old!? But I’m sort of glad that I’m not the only 40 year old in the house anymore. We can’t be in different decades, psssshaw.
 
For what it’s worth, the girls totally think we’re not old. We’re just “mom and dad”.

 
Happy birthday to a most hardworking guy, a lifelong companion, and a great dad. Look how the girls adore him. Hope they remember those fuzzy thoughts when they become moody teenagers!
 

It really was. Probably one of the nicest Christmases we’ve had in recent memory, despite all odds. We opened gifts and then went to the movies. I think the adults in the audience got more out of the Muppet Movie than the kids since it sort of revolved around the whole nostalgia factor (except I curse the movie for reminding me that “We Built This City” ever existed and now I can’t unhear that song when I had totally forgotten it existed, argh). Who didn’t get excited when the Muppet Show came on at 7:30 in the evening? We tried to explain to the kids what a big deal it was back then.
 
Mark finally got in the kitchen that afternoon after the movie and cooked a proper meal, something he hadn’t done in all of December. Roasted vegetables, roasted garlic, lamb, mashed potatoes, a mashup of Korean food. Oh, and bread pudding which is becoming our Christmas dessert of choice.
 
And…we finally opened our iPad which had been sitting on top of a dresser for about a month. Talk about self control! Incidentally, we ordered it so long ago that the iPad cover, which came in a separate package, is nowhere to be found because we put it away somewhere for “safekeeping” except we have no idea where it is. Hm…
 
So now that we have an iPad, what do we do with it except break up fights between the kids over how much time they get to use it? What apps should we get?

well, hello.
 
Last night I came home from working the table all day at the Brooklyn Flea and collapsed on the couch and pretty much went to sleep right then and there. I hadn’t gone to the bathroom or eaten anything all day, not even a coffee(!) because I didn’t want to run to the bathroom every 10 minutes which is what happens when I drink coffee on an empty stomach. I have no explanation for not eating except that I was sandwiched in between the donut people and the pork belly people all day, so I don’t know, I guess I wasn’t feeling it because I was smelling food all day. I suddenly had the chills when I got home and was convinced that I was getting sick so I slept. I woke up past midnight and dragged myself to bed, but couldn’t fall back asleep till hours later of course. 1:45am, 2:30, 3:15. When I woke up in the morning I felt ok.
 
So I vacuumed. And cleaned. And dusted. And did laundry. And put things away. And cut snowflakes with the girls. And gave Mia a piano lesson.
 
Just normal things. It felt good. Almost like I woke up and all that other stuff from the previous weeks never happened. It’s sort of like pregnancy and child birth, you know? I think we’re programmed to forget the pain so that we’ll do it all over again.
 
My work for the business is pretty much done. I have some gift boxes to assemble this week, but not hundreds. Mark’s still in the trenches but it’s manageable, like a normal workload week, not stressful, crazy time orders pumped up on steroids (so far!). By Saturday night he was cooking dinner again for the girls when I got home, playing that game of cards that Claudine had wanted to play and reading them a bedtime story. He was back.
 
I read through last year’s December posts this afternoon out of curiosity while I drank my coffee this afternoon after all the cleaning was done. Even though I remembered just how crazy last holiday season was (with the added stress of big work deadlines that I thankfully didn’t have this this year), I was surprised at how lengthy some of the posts were…and I was even funny in some of them! But this holiday…I don’t know…kind of sucked the life out of us. Some sobering realities. I’ll share soon.

We’ve built up a nice collection of ornaments the past couple of years and it’s fun to pull them out and have the girls get excited about each one.
 
I have to fight from having guilty feelings every year for being so busy in December that the girls don’t get to do any fun holiday activities until Christmas Eve – or even have our attention, for that matter. This season so far has been particularly hard and it seems so unfair to them, but they don’t really know December as being anything else I guess. Family helps. Grandma comes to visit for a week to give them the attention we can’t give them and Mark’s sister has started the tradition of giving each of them little presents to open all month.
 
We also make sure to get a tree (thank god for free delivery in the neighborhood!) and little things like seeing Claudine’s face completely light up when she comes into the living room to see christmas lights strung around the mirror above our couch remind me that we probably don’t need to do any of that other stuff like visiting Santa (C would probably get scared anyway). But seeing her cry because neither of us have time to play a game of cards with her because we are up to our stressed eyeballs in getting these orders out and work deadlines met makes me sad.
 
December schedules are brutal. Any small business owner who is busy during the holidays knows this. It’s not just us. We’re at the point where we’re pretty delirious from sleep deprivation and working 18-19 hours a day. It’s a game of playing catch up so you don’t fall behind (disastrous!) and through it all, thoughts on how to make next holiday season easier start swirling around. We’re a few days away from a more sane schedule (I hope).

Some dumpling making action over Thanksgiving weekend with my mom and the girls.
 
My mom claims that she hasn’t made homemade dumplings in 20 or so years. I do remember making them with her and my grandmother. She was telling the girls that when I was a kid, there weren’t that many Korean grocery stores and that they would have to make all the foods that are readily available now at stores, like dumplings and sheets of salted, toasted seaweed – you know, the kind that you can buy now already cut up in 2″ x 3″ rectangles in a foil packet. My grandmother would brush sesame oil on each large piece of seaweed, sprinkle some salt and then turn them over the fire on the stove to toast each side. She’d then cut the stacked toasted sheets into smaller pieces with a knife and store them in tupperware containers for the week. Sometimes I would help brush the sesame oil on the seaweed or snip off the roots of beansprouts before they would go into the steamer.
 
The girls were super into making dumplings especially since it’s Mia’s favorite food. Claudine, not so much, but making them appealed to her meticulous nature and they could have made dumplings for days. I don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes I see flashbacks of when I was a kid when I see the girls with my parents. Making dumplings with grandma…just like I used to as a kid.

It’s no secret that the girls are very attached to Mark. It might be because he is the cook, the baker, and the bedtime story reader, but the “traditional” roles of mother/father are fairly blurred at our house. I don’t think you necessarily plan out these roles when you first become parents. Maybe subconsciously these roles are shaped by our childhoods – certainly, neither Mark nor I grew up with fathers who were so involved; our mothers were our everything – but over the years these roles naturally and organically settled in.
 
So when Mark told the kids that he had to drive upstate to visit grandpa who was sick in the hospital again and that he couldn’t spend Thanksgiving with us, the first thing the kids asked was, “who’s going to cook dinner?”.
 
I found that both hilarious and kind of sad. Truth is, we are never away from our kids. The first time Mark traveled away from the girls was last year, to visit his dad in the hospital the first time. Do you remember this? It was awful, only because I was suffering from a 6 week back to back bronchial infection and I strained or cracked a rib from coughing so hard. I could barely move let only take care of the kids, but we all survived. I’ve only ever been away from my family once, when Mia was 18 months old, to attend the CES trade shows in Vegas for 4 days (incidentally I was miscarrying a baby on that trip, though I didn’t know it for sure at the time). That was it though. Not surprisingly the girls get nervous at the thought of either of us going away. I’m not sure what they’d do if we went away together without them. It hasn’t happened yet.
 
Maybe it might surprise you to know that it’s Mia, and not Claudine who stresses out the most on the rare occasions that we do leave them with a babysitter at night. She gets really nervous, frets and cries during the hours leading up to our departure. She is usually fine a half hour in after we leave, however she gets very stressed the moment she knows of the plans. Sometimes I think the kids need to get over it because they should feel lucky that we spend so much time with them, but really…it’s no fault of theirs…they don’t know anything else.
 
Mark left this morning after dropping them off at school. Surprisingly they took it well, though both teachers told me they talked about it, often. They spent the evening writing notes for him. That is something sweet that they like to do, whenever I go out for the evening, they leave a good night note and place it on my computer.
 
So far so good…till Saturday…happy thanksgiving.

Sometimes you just have to give into your cravings. There is just no other way.
 
Did you have a good weekend? Ours started off well: a long overdue visit with some old friends of ours and the last outdoor Brooklyn Flea Market of the season before it retreats indoors for the winter. Today has been a confusing day though and I’m not sure what the week will bring. It’s Thanksgiving week. A big change of last minute plans. We won’t be together this holiday…still…need to think about the things we are thankful for.

I’m not much of a wedding person and I really haven’t been to that many to be honest, but I will say that my cousin’s wedding a few weekends ago was fun, mainly because we got to hang out with all my cousins. The girls, on the other hand, were excited about the whole thing – from getting to wear their most fanciest dresses, to the cocktail buffet before dinner, and to the dancing. We didn’t stay for cake because it was a really long wedding and after awhile the girls complained that they were really tired. What is it about little girls and weddings? I really don’t recall being so interested in them when I was young. The girls aren’t obsessive about them at all or anything, but all the neighbor kids held a fake wedding the other day on the stoop. They’ve been talking about it forever and they got all dressed up and had a wedding. Who was the bride? Mia.

Families are an ever evolving, often complex set of relationships, aren’t they? I look at my parents and my kids, particularly my dad who my brother and I had an uneasy relationship with growing up at times, and see how easy it is between him and the girls. It’s not something that you could ever know until it happens, much like how you don’t really know what kind of parent you will be until you become one. But this…seems so natural (uncooperative family photo poses and all).

And then there is this:

I can tell you that it took my dad a while to accept the fact that my brother was having a baby 2 years ago, mostly because it was a surprise to all of us. It didn’t happen the way that maybe he envisioned it might happen. There was a time when my dad and my brother did not speak for a few months. At one point my brother resigned to the possibility that his kids might not have the same kind of relationship that my kids have with their grandfather. I think as first generation Asian Americans and kids who grow up identifying mostly with American culture, we expect our immigrant parents to accept our decisions no questions asked. I just told my brother to give him some time.

He is right in one sense. My dad doesn’t have quite the same relationship with my brother’s kids as he does with mine, but this is because of distance and nothing more. My brother and his family live in California and we only see them once or twice a year. They were in town to celebrate my nephew’s 2nd birthday and his new daughter’s traditional 100 day celebration.

So it would come as a bit of a surprise to hear my dad make a speech during the party with our whole extended family. That he would be the one to say that despite the fact that maybe the additions to his family might not have been what he envisioned when he thought about it abstractly years ago before any of this ever happened, when he looks at his children’s spouses and his 4 grandchildren, what he sees is family.