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Liniment oléo-calcaire
Multicultural life is exhausting, so it’s soothing to find things that feel like wins. Something like, being able to pull from multiple different cultures. Yes, I genuinely pick and choose what part of each culture I want to keep and what I want to ignore. I believe that sticking to things “because that’s how we’ve…
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How we cloth diaper
Maybe we got lucky but we feel like it has been pretty easy to cloth diaper our baby. We decided early on in pregnancy that we were going to give it our best shot, and spoke to a lot of parents who started then stopped or who intended to cloth diaper but then didn’t. Based…
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breastfeeding is hard – my story
This is a read best left for those who are seeking reassurance and solidarity in their breastfeeding struggles.
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Notes from Confinement
These are the incomplete ramblings of a new parent in the first weeks of my child’s life. Questions welcome!
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Working during pregnancy
It’s wild that we expect pregnant people to be full-time economic actors during their entire pregnancy. With how gross, destabilising, hormonally chaotic, and simply painful pregnancy is, we still expect people to show up to a job and perform its responsibilities as if they weren’t a living, breathing chrysalis with a solar storm raging within.
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Learning from my own lessons
Speaking personally, the hardest thing to reconcile growing up mixed was the way my European (and religiously Christian) parent dismissed a lot of my Asian parent’s cultural observances with religious logic. Whilst faith and festivals are often intertwined, it’s still possible to celebrate the festivals and what they teach us about our history and culture.…
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Why I’m doing postpartum confinement
Yes, the truth is that I am under no obligation to do a postpartum confinement. I am not fully Chinese, my partner’s family is not Chinese, and I don’t live in a Chinese community. There is no social or cultural expectation that I would follow any Chinese traditions of any kind (including all those feast…
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Race and Culture, Race or Culture?
Recently, a couple of conversations have arisen in various circles I frequent that I feel kinda uniquely positioned to speak to. I grew up mixed both racially and culturally, and the extent to which both have shaped me is informing the ways I plan to navigate these issues with my own children. This will be…
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Release and Ready
Do you have a point of focus for the year ahead yet? It’s not for everyone, but I typically find it helpful to sit quietly with my thoughts at the turn of the calendar page. This can take any form: barefoot during the silence of a new morning with a hot cup of tea and…
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Evolving as Keepers of Culture
We’ve had a lot of conversations around here of late about what it means to be immigrant carriers of culture, and the dissonance of returning to your homeland after years abroad. Typically, the culture there has evolved and updated with the times, whilst often the culture carried abroad has ossified and become outdated. Our cultural…
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Where we’ve come from
As we look forward to raising our child in this complex and confusing world, we think it’s important to have a clear picture of how we ended up here. Coming from completely different worlds ourselves, we’ve somehow navigated our way to each other to build a life that reflects our values and nurtures our dreams.…
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Take what serves you and leave the rest
I’ll probably write about this a few times over the next month-to-a-year, as it’s a topic close to my heart. For today, I want to focus on the idea that when we honour traditions we need to adhere to them. While on the one hand I absolutely agree with and advocate for the notion that…
Figuring it out too? We’d love to hear from you!