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Recently I have found myself drawn to background noise videos on YouTube. Sometimes I will listen to Lo-Fi beats or soft café jazz music. Other times I will play a stream of sounds from a busy coffee shop. Even more recently, however, I have been very much enjoying city street background noise, especially the ones with light rain. I will put on a long-stream video & let it play in the background while I’m puttering around the house doing chores, or while I’m click-clack typing away on my computer. I know ambient static noise has become quite popular these days (i.e. white noise, brown noise, pink noise, etc.), but I have really found these everyday background sounds to be the most soothing/calming for me personally.
I live in a very stereotypical, quiet American suburban neighborhood. Sometimes I can catch the sounds of a delivery truck or a neighbor speeding up our hilled street, or the sounds of a lawn getting mowed. If I am in my backyard, looking out past the wooded area behind my house’s property line, I can not only see the freeway overpass, but I can hear the distant noise of the cars & motorcycles whizzing by. Every once-in-a-while, an airplane from the nearby airport can be somewhat heard flying over our neighborhood.
I would love to be able to crack open a window in the house & listen to all the sounds coming from outside, but I can’t for various reasons. For one, my mom dislikes anyone opening a window unless someone is cooking & it’s making the whole house smell. Secondly, she has a fear that someone will forget to shut the window at night & a random intruder will sneak in to burglarize our house. On top of that, my mom has removed all the screens on all the windows for easier window washing. So now we can’t find half the screens for all of the windows, which means bugs can get inside if we open a window…& not just one or two, but an annoying amount of bugs. Plus, we don’t get much ambient outdoor noise except for my next-door neighbor’s super irritating dogs barking at everything. (She has 4 fur balls.)
That’s when I discovered this completely new-to-me rabbit hole on YouTube of random background sounds. I have been listening to the Café Music BGM channel & the Chillhop Music channel on YouTube for the past couple of years already, but I have never thought of putting on ambient noise before now. This latest idea originated from something completely inane that I have already been doing for years, but never gave it much importance. It’s one of life’s small, yet impactful, pleasures that really brings me comfort & joy…listening to the sounds coming from an open window. Yes, it really is that simple, generic, & kind of dumb action that we take for granted every single day.
I started consciously & actively doing this from the time Jian & I started traveling together. Whenever we stay in a hotel somewhere, if there is an openable window, I’m going to open it. I love letting the everyday sounds from the outside waft in to our room while we’re settling in & unpacking our suitcases, or open the window when we wake up in the morning to circulate the air in the room. Obviously, due to hotel regulations, the windows do not open wide enough to get a full breeze circulating around the room, but at least we can feel a modest flow of air.
When we take breaks in our hotel room, I like to crack open the window & listen to the sounds coming from outside, rather than always have the TV on in the background. Some of my fondest memories are of the times when I’d accompany Jian on one of his work trips, & I’d be on my own for most of the day while he was working. I’d explore the city on my own for a while. Then, I’d grab an afternoon coffee & snack, head back to the hotel, & just listen to the sounds from an open window while putting my feet up on the chair & taking a relaxing break.
Jian is not too keen on my penchant for window-opening. He likes to colorfully express his fear of pervy voyeurs peering into our room, especially while we’re getting dressed or getting ready to take a shower. It doesn’t matter if the hotel room is on the 3rd floor, 20th floor, or 50th floor, or even if the windows are shaded. He believes there’s always someone out there trying to sneak a peak at us, either partially or fully in our birthday suits, perhaps with an HD resolution, military-grade, telescopic lens. Much to his chagrin though, I still enjoy cracking open that window, however much the hotel regulations allow. As long as we can hear the sounds from outside filtering in to our room, or we can feel a slight breeze, that makes me feel content.
Seeking these kinds of little pleasures in life is what truly lifts my spirits. It gets me in a good mood & puts a smile on my face. Like Gen Z aptly puts it, it’s giving chill vibes AF. I’m in my “vacation mom” era. Ahem, I’m only kidding. I don’t talk like that in my everyday life, let alone write it out. Let’s forget all that nonsense & just enjoy the ambient tunes of idle café chatter & cars passing by some nondescript city street, pretend we are people-watching as we sip our iced lattés at the sidewalk table under the awning. It’s getting closer to happy hour, & the sky is no longer a vibrant blue. Shades of pink & orange are starting to streak across the skyline. The 21 and over spot next door just put out their $1 dollar oysters sign. I’m about to reheat some leftovers for tonight’s dinner. Until the next cup, cheers!
My little family trio just got back from Los Angeles (again). I was excited to finally meet my cousin’s new baby, but that still did not spark my interest in going back to Los Angeles. The amount of times per year my little family unit has to travel to Los Angeles for family events has now become a chore. Yes, we love going to visit our extended family based down in Southern California, & we love spending time with them, but it’s just become an obligation at this point. In case you’re wondering, none of our relatives from down south ever come up to visit us in the Bay Area…at least nobody from my generation, except for my siblings, & my mom’s siblings.
Well, however that may be, our little trip still had a fun time this past weekend. We had a typical Chinese family dinner with our aunties & uncles straight away, to pay our respects to the older generation. Then we took some time for ourselves as a little family unit before we had to attend the all-important (& the reason why we came in the first place) banquet dinner celebration of the newest addition to our ever-growing family. My cousin & her husband, along with her two sisters, coordinated a warm & wonderful party to celebrate our new nephew’s 100-day milestone. The 100 Days celebration is a popular tradition among many Asian cultures.
The party was raucous & fun, & I was totally shocked when my little bean adapted to the lively festivities like a champ. I mean, she barely had a decent nap in the car, at most 30 minutes…when she normally naps for at least two hours. Then, she normally freaks out at seeing rowdy kids, but this time she was cool as a cucumber. The only time she freaked out, even a little bit, was when we had to change her diaper in an empty banquet room (’cause the restaurant didn’t have a diaper changing table in any of the bathrooms).
Overall, we spent the weekend at a pretty chill pace. The weather was actually not hot for once, & it actually rained a tiny bit on the day of the big celebration. We ticked a couple of eating spots off of our ever-growing list of “Want to Eat” places. I was on the hunt for more interesting/unique children’s books for my little bean’s already full bookcase. More surprisingly, we ordered room service for breakfast each morning, mostly because there were no western style breakfast spots or coffee shops with breakfast-y foods near our hotel. Jian is usually the one who dislikes ordering room service, thinking the prices are a rip off & the food is mediocre at best. However, he was the one to suggest room service breakfasts on this trip.
In other news somewhat related to this post, I did a mini haul of stationery goods. I didn’t go nuts on shopping this time like I have done in the past. I didn’t get much of a chance to hit up many of my favorite spots, so there really wasn’t much opportunity for me to go wild anyway. I made sure that my purchases were modest & intentional. I mean, I honestly have a huge stationery supply already. I couldn’t possibly use everything in my collection, even within the next 10 years. So this time I picked out a few much-needed everyday use pens & added 2 more sticker packs to my does-not-need-to-grow sticker stash. Also, more recently, I’ve been really into collecting mid-size to large format vinyl decal stickers.
See below images for reference.
Well, that was my small rant-to-recap of my family-packed weekend. I am seriously counting down the days until my little family trio goes to Japan. We just received our little bean’s very first passport in the mail the other day, & that got me super excited. I mean, that’s just one more thing to solidify our big overseas trip. The moment we actually book our flights, that’ll be the final piece to our planning puzzle. By then, it will finally sink in that we are going on an epic adventure abroad, taking our kid on an airplane for the first time, going out of the country with our kid for the first time, also our first big-format travel plans since the pandemic happened. I hope that I will be able to take enough photos & get enough content to put in one of my long-format blog posts. Until the next one, cheers!
Today’s song of the day:
So, if you’re a mommy blogger, or baby expert, or child behavior expert, or any other developmental specialist, please do not come for me. My little bean was born 2+ years ago, & I have barely “baby-proofed” my house. Of course (I mean, obviously…) the basic guidelines are in place. For example, prescription medications are on the highest shelf of a hard-to-reach cabinet, sharp objects are mostly out of reach of fast toddler hands, etcetera. However, I haven’t quite done ALL of the baby-proofing that parenting books & other guides tell you to do.
My house looks pretty much exactly the same as it did pre-child; still got tons of my mom’s meaningless crap random knickknacks strewn all over the place. We still have a lot of fragile decor displayed everywhere. I haven’t put any stick-on safety bumpers on any hard furniture corners. I also haven’t put up any baby gates (luckily, I live in a single level home with no indoor stairs) or safety latches on any cabinets or drawers. The most “baby-proofing” I’ve done so far is put a top-of-the-line (most popular on the market) baby monitor over my child’s crib-now-a-toddler-bed & plastic safety covers on the wall outlets/sockets.
I know that I still have time to “child-proof” my house, but whenever I look for things to make my house safer for my kid, I either end up getting the wrong product (wrong size, wrong fit), or Jian has some long-winded debate about its non-practicality & waste of money, & then there’s my mom chirping in the background that she doesn’t want our house to get overrun by too many children’s things. She also likes to argue that she won’t know how to use any of that stuff (like the safety latches on cabinets) & it’s all too complicated, so we might as well not incumber her life with all these newfangled (stupid, as she calls it) gadgets, therefore why bother? Besides, in her words, we never had these kinds of baby-proofing things when we were growing up in the 80s & 90s & we still turned out okay. I guess there will always be an excuse to justify not baby-proofing the house, which is mostly us parents being lazy & also giving in to grandma’s reasons for keeping things the way they are.
So far, we’ve had success in our child not harming herself in any way. We are extremely lucky to be in a position where one adult or another is able to keep an eye on her at all times. Jian works from home 4 out of 5 days per week, & my mom lives with us, so there is always a pair of adult eyes on our little bean. Right now our little bean is in her explorative phase, & like every other child she wants to go through all the drawers & cabinets. We have been lucky, so far, that when we tell her to put something down or to not touch something, she will do as we say, but we also follow up with a brief explanation as to why we gave her such a command. We try to explain…I guess you could call it child-splaining…to our little bean what things are & why they are not meant for her to touch or play with. We use simple terms, & talk to her in a calm, clear voice.
For me especially, I try not to use the phrase “because I said so” or other blanket phrases because that doesn’t really let her know that she’s not supposed to touch or play with the thing(s) you don’t want her to grab. I take the time to show her the item (just out of her reach, of course) & explain to my little bean what it is & why it’s not meant to be touched by little hands or played with…things like scissors, chopsticks, tools, etcetera. The little bean still gets to look at the item she’s so laser focused on, but then she also learns what it’s meant for & learns that it’s not a toy. So far this method has worked for our little family unit. Our little bean walks by the laundry closet full of spray bottles & detergent pods, but she has never once opened the sliding closet door & grabbed anything she wasn’t supposed to. I’ve shown her the closet a few times & explained that we keep soaps in there to wash clothes, & she hasn’t ever given it a second thought to grab anything.
One major thing that I was very concerned about when our little bean became more mobile was our fireplace. Everyone in our little household has been teaching our little bean about what is hot/cold & to not touch hot things (like coffee cups & the stove), but our little bean likes to play near the fireplace, especially on cold days. We live in an area where we regularly have to turn on our gas-powered fireplace on full blast during the winter season, & I’m the forever-worrier. So, I bought a good fireplace screen. It keeps a nice little barrier between our bean & the fire & teaches her about boundaries. So far it has worked, & has kept our little bean from getting too close to the heat. This was one of the best baby-proofing investments I’ve made.
Of course, all of this teaching our little bean about what are grown-up things & what are kids toys could easily fly right out the window, & she could end up trashing the entire house one day, but for now, I will continue to educate my child on what things she can & cannot touch. You know, I still have recurring thoughts about “baby-proofing” my house. I go back-&-forth in my own head about what items I can still buy to keep my child safe at home. I think about these things, & I become very indecisive about which things are still worth getting, or I think about Jian complaining about me spending too much money again…even though I am buying things for our child & not frivolous things for myself. For now, I suppose we are okay with not really baby-proofing our house. We live in a single-level Eichler home built in the 1960s. The house is very sturdy & already child-friendly. We should be fine…I guess. We’ll see. Until the next post, cheers.
Today’s song of the day:
Rabbits & Foxes 
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