Parenting in 2020

It’s three hours away from 2021 and as I look back o the year, I have to say the biggest challenge of the year within our family was parenting. Many of what we thought were temporary measures had to be re-invented for permanence. These are some of my biggest reflections.

They don’t need much to be happy

This is the year that everything they knew was taken away from them… school, friends, playgrounds, movie theaters, birthday parties. Do they miss it? Hell yeah. But somehow they’ve managed to stay happy. And it’s such a joy to me to be able to see that. They’ve found new ways to play with the same toys, they’re inhaling books, learning new games, apps, recipes and learning new things about themselves. They truly want to be YouTube sensations and spend much of their time making me video record their endeavors. We go on hikes and while they don’t love the physical act, we’ve found ways to keep it interesting like telling jokes and Harry Potter quizzes. Instead of trying to fill each weekend with novel and interesting experiences like we had in the past, we’ve hunkered down on spending quality time indoors with a weekly beach trip(summer)/outdoor hike(winter). In the early days, I did a ton of research to buy different active indoor games for them but turns out, all they’d get sweaty any day to play “punch a balloon” (self-invented game), hide and seek, or “tickle monster”. It’s been almost a year and #1 requested game is still “punch-a-balloon”! Who would’ve thought?? This year has thought us that it doesn’t take much to find joy and roll with the punches.

(For those that are interested, punch-a-balloon is really easy. You blow up about 20 balloons and split the family into two teams. You divide a room into half using furniture and start a countdown timer for 5 minutes. At the end of the 5 minutes, the team with the least number of balloons on their side wins! It’s stupid easy and stupid fun. One of those games where it leaves you tickles the entire five minutes!)

School meets Life

Other than the obvious thing where school is actually now IN our home, schooling is also happening outside of school hours. I’m no teacher so the last thing I want to do is sit down and do worksheets with them But I’ve focused this year on teaching them skills through life. For baking, I limit the measuring to 1/4 tsp and 1/4 cups. They don’t know it yet, but they’ve mastered fractions. I love games so I use that to teach them English, math, logic, patterns and even geography(our favorite games in this post). Thomson mastered multiplication through his own custom lego designs and making DIY recipes on animal crossing.

Emmy opened her first virtual business in November making her first $23 selling hand-painted holiday cards. I used that experience to teach her about design thinking, product market fit, sales/marketing, accounting and customer service. She got so much energy out of, she’s already on to her next business idea! What I have learnt about life is that learning opportunities are everywhere, you just have to find it. Kids are so resilient and elastic in how they learn!

And in case you were wondering, both kids did fantastic on their report cards! We must be doing something right (other than Chinese school).

They have become best friends

“Thomson, can you come play this with me? It’s boring without you.”

“OK”

I overheard this stunning admission Emmy made last week. She didn’t think I heard her, but I did. And if there’s ONE thing I am 100% thankful for this year, is that they were forced to become best friends. Emmy as an older sister had never really played with Thomson. She was a social butterfly with many friends and she didn’t need him. Now, she does. I actually do even less to intervene now because they have all the time in the world to figure things out. (Although the yelling sometimes makes me lose my shit still). And these days, when I ask them to pose for a picture, we always get bear hugs. So warms my heart.

Covid puppy family project takes center stage

5 million dogs get put down every year. After considerable research, we decided as a family to adopt a rescue puppy. We named her Luna. A couple of my close friends actually tried to talk us off the ledge, telling me about all the things dog owners don’t talk about but we decided to give it a go anyway. I had many regrets in the earlier days where I barely had any time to spend with my own kids, let alone our third “child”.

But this is giving our family a shared experience to learn, bond and tackle as a family. It’s not always easy, like how she used to pee every single time she saw me, or when she pushed Thomson into the lake or when she decided to rip a piece of my down sweater off! I was ready to call the refund hotline. Mikee usually got mad at me for abandoning my commitment, but the kids pleaded with me to have patience and love. I made a decision that I would be diligent about spending time with Luna and actually getting to know this new family member. I’m proud to report that there have now been many “puppy love” moments as Emmy would like to call it.

If you’re thinking of getting a COVID puppy however, read this first.

Time is 100% our own

For the first half of this year, my life was crap. Work became super intense (accelerated by COVID) and I barely had time to help school the kids, be a good parent/wife, and I felt like I was doing everything at 50%. This was also the first time in my life where I couldn’t stop thinking about whether or not I should leave a job I love. It broke my heart when the kids overheard me talking about it and pleaded with me not to quit. Thankfully, we got through that rough patch as a family and have been able to actually achieve normalcy in the past few months. And if I were to truly take a step back, the truth is with all the social engagements and “outings” canceled, we actually have a TON of free time on our hands, and how we use that time is completely up to us! Thanksgiving and Christmas this year were sad in some ways, but so relaxing in other ways. For the first time, the only people we had to think about was us. Our little bubble. I will always cherish this year for that reason.