“if you need to check the weather, we can use your ipod.” (i mentioned to her that we could also look out the window.)

“RRRR. i’m a pirate!” (she had one foot stuck in a plastic cup.)

on the weekends, tae doesn’t like to go out. she prefers to stay home and hang out with me. for the past three weekends, we have gone out in the car exactly TWO times. she is ok with walking to gymnastics and going to get coffee, but other than that, she apparently loathes going out. she has me only slightly wrapped around her little finger – what am i supposed to do when she says, “i just want to stay here and hang out with you because i looove you!”

so that’s the first problem – i don’t know how to get her out of the house on the weekends. my hunch is that i need to plan ahead more, build in more routines – since she is fine going to gymnastics on sundays, and she is fine leaving the house during the week.

here’s the second problem – she doesn’t nap. she has never really napped without going out in the car or in the stroller. so yesterday, after giving her 30 minutes to mentally prepare, we left for the grocery store. and as we drove home, she started to zone out, and by the time we got home at 4pm, she was conked out.

napping at 4pm is always kind of awkward, so i decided to give it a shot and tried to wake her up at 6pm. i offered her snacks, playing, music, everything… and she just faded right back to sleep, and finally asked for her pajamas at 7:30pm.

this was not a good sign. i got in bed around 10:30pm, anticipating an early morning. but nothing could have prepared me for what happened at 2:45am. 2:45am (mind you, this is after she had me up fetching her food between 1:30am and 2:30am – this is always a precursor to waking up for her.)

“mommy, i want to get up. mommy, come play!”

next, i feel little hands under my neck and back – she was trying to physically lift me up. next, she is smothering me with kisses. “mommy, it’s wake up time.”

that was at 3:00am. she read to her self for about 20 minutes (oh the irony, in my semi-delusional state, i heard her reciting “don’t let the pigeon stay up late!”), and then played around with my ipod for another 10. and at 3:30am, she was up, and i was up.

after playing for 4 hours, she was ready to go to school at 7:30am. her teacher was a little surprised to see us, since we typically arrive at like 9:00am.

i am so wide awake now, but we’ll see how i am at 3pm. YAWN.

today in the car:

tae: “K and B live together. they are friends.”
me: “that’s right, they do live together and they are friends.”
tae: “mommy and tae live together. they are family.”
me: “yup, we are family.”
tae: “and we love each other.”

then she proceeded at ask me about where i lived when i was little (did you live with gi-gi and pop-pop when you were little?) i told her i did.

then she asks, “and then you got big you came back to tae and i was alone in boston?”

Swimming lessons, however, are dominated by Koreans. More precisely, Korean moms and their children. Their kids somehow manage to look immaculate even while in the water. The little girls wear frilly swim caps and goggles that match their swim suits, and the boys’ brush cuts glisten with little drops of water whenever they surface. Two minutes before classes end, a line of Korean moms stand at the edge of the pool with towels-in-hand ready to wrap up their children so they don’t get cold. They are then whisked off to the showers where the mothers scrub them from head-to-toe. Even if by Western standards, those kids could scrub themselves.

The moms, sporting pastel-colored cashmere cardigans and cropped chinos, congregate together, chatting in Korean. They fawn over each other’s babies and answer newcomers’ questions about what to do in our city. They look so put-together in their jaunty-yet-sporty outfits while I sit on my bench with a book and Tae’s towel in my lap.

But, I want to talk with them! I want to say, I know I may not look it, but I’m Korean, too! I want to know which Korean market they go to. I want to know if I can get the frilly swim caps here or if they brought them with them from Korea. I want to ask if I can fawn all over the sweet little baby in the stripey sweater that sits contentedly in her stroller looking at me for the entire swim lesson.

They are so…elusive. They remind me of jellyfish. They are so elegant. So pretty. So lithe. I am so…the opposite. I fear that if I approach them wearing my normal uniform of jeans, a fleece jacket, and Crocs (it’s a pool), that I will cause them to flutter away.

So I sit there watching and admiring this group of women who, despite all the reasons why they have left Korea to be here, have found each other. Admiring that they are finding their way here despite being so far from home and, perhaps, not speaking English so well.

I imagine that if they were in Korea, they would be doing the exact same thing, spending the afternoon at the pool watching their kids swim, chatting with friends, swapping packets of candy and kim and other treats. It would be exactly the same. Except they are here.

Maybe next week I’ll “dive in” and ask them about the swim caps.

in the fall, when tae had her three year check up, her doctor was concerned about her height and weight. friday, we had our follow up visit. i actually saw the words written out on some of the lab work tae had done, “FAILURE TO THRIVE.”

um, ok. i think she’s thriving. she’s energetic, she’s learning, she’s active, she’s engaged with the world. she’s just not big. yesterday, she came in in the 7th percentile for height (35.5 in) and 1st percentile for weight (24.1 lbs). apparently, she’s not keeping up with the “charts” she’s even lower or all the charts than 3 months ago, especially on the body mass index scale.

mostly, i’m not worried. she’s a picky eater. she’s the same size i was at that age. i’m not a huge person. her dad is not a huge person.

but, to be safe, she had tons and tons of blood taken, and ever since then she’s been on edge. she still has the band-aid with the gauze on it stuck to her arm – she won’t let me take it off. she walks about like her arm has been mortally injured. not to mention that she still has a band-aid on her thigh – there is no boo-boo there except for the rash from keeping the band-aid on too long.

last night as she slept, i tried to pull off the stupid band-aids, after dousing them in baby oil. in the middle of the operation, eyes closed, tae says, “don’t touch my boo-boo. just look at it.” i failed at removing the band-aids. why do they stick so well and for so long?

then at 2am when she woke up hungry last night, she told me that she couldn’t hold her sippy cup because she had a boo-boo. she asked me to feed her and i nearly lost it. at least she has some common sense because when she woke up at 4am, she asked for her smoothie in a bottle, which is thinner so she could hold it with one hand.

up on the bulletin board, all the kids had drawn pictures of things that make them happy. the teachers had written little phrases on the bottom of each picture.

tae’s said: reading books with mommy makes me happy.

mine would have said: connecting with tae over books and poetry makes me happy.

* * * * * *
speaking of which, tae has been really in to rhymes lately. sometimes she gets things that actually rhyme, sometimes she does alliteration, and sometimes she matches vowel sounds. “cat, snack, that’s a rhyme!” “toe, tae, that’s a rhyme!” “night, light, that’s a rhyme!” “poop, poop, that’s a rhyme!”

in trying to engage her in this, i’m trying to expose her to more poetry. she likes to pick up anything from dr. seuss to sylvia plath. i decided to try something new – shel silverstein. for some reason, i forgot how wacky some of his poems are.

one that seems to perplex tae the most is about how “people from mars have clothes just like ours…” it goes on to talk about how everything is the same, except for the faces are not in the same places. and there’s a picture of a guy with his head attached to his butt.

Thank you for being too mah wha for me to have to share. (Although Tae eats kimchi and kakktugi now so I’ll be in trouble soon…)

Thank you for never disappointing me through the years. It’s nice to know you can count on something.

Don’t ever change. I love just the way you are.

All my love,
Elia

i think i’m doing ok. tae routinely recycles cereal boxes by flattening them and putting them in the recycle bin before we are done with the cereal. i bring my own bags to the grocery store. i unplug all my unused electronics.

the two things that i will try to do:
not wear so many clothes that require dry cleaning (hard in the cold months)
try to use less juice boxes

so, friday, i sent tae to school with a brand new sigg bottle. i’ve found that the multitudes of sippy cups that we have will all leak eventually, so i didn’t want to send that in her lunch box. so i caved and bought a new bottle (which really isn’t the best solution, but i’m trying here). part of my rationale was that her teachers will throw away the juice boxes after lunch, because they can’t be closed up again. this is so wasteful! and all the boxes!! at least with a bottle, i can keep better tabs on how much juice she actually drinks.

and when i picked tae up today, she was walking around the playground clutching her new bottles, smiling, as happy as a clam.

right now, i am most glad that we’re in boston because we’re close to gi-gi and pop-pop. my job title just officially changed over to “acting director.” which means that i’m doing my old job and my old boss’s job all at once. (yet i’m not being paid two salaries. hmm.) and managing a toddler. and trying to maintain some semblance of a normal adult life. and so, without gi-gi and pop-pop and the rest of my support network here in boston, i wouldn’t be able to do it.

if i had a dollar for every time someone called me super woman for managing all that i try to manage, i could send tae to college for free. i don’t like being called super woman, because i’m not. i just have amazing friends and family, an amazing daughter, and a career that sustains me. and it is those things that give me the strength to do all the things that i do.

i’m not joking.

last night, i had some spare time. (gasp!) and as i stood in the middle of my living room, i figured out what i needed to do.

yes, i reorganized my book case. i alphabetized all of my asian american lit (the majority of my books; by author, separated into non-fiction and fiction). and i re-arranged the rest of my books so they would make sense… to me.

and when i was finished, and noticeably calmer, i looked, and i saw: i had organized my books by race.

ok, well, race and gender. i have one book case that is the white male book case: jared diamond, jrr tolkien, jack kerouac, eric schlosser, tom perrotta, nick hornby, dave eggers.

the only exceptions on that shelf are: jk rowling, one jennifer weiner book, one sophie kinsella book, “i don’t know how she does it,” and a book about online identity written by a female sociology professor at MIT.

i have one shelf devoted to asian american lit. and one shelf that is a mix of books by black and latino authors (house on mango street, alice walker, bell hooks) and women’s studies type books (the bell jar, a bridge called my back, she’s not there).

and suddenly, i felt better. anyone have book cases for me to organize?