Bringing up Gourmandito

Food is such a bonding experience for everyone. Young, old, no matter where in the world you are, food seems to constantly be the center to which everyone gathers and create memories. Why would we deprive little babies of the same experiences?

Since Mads turned 4 months and was able to hold her head up steadily, she's been eating solids. And by solids, I really mean pulverized liquid concoctions. To ease her into the idea of swallowing something more substantial than the consistency of milk, I started with the Stage 1 baby food jars. The notion of spoon feeding was also super foreign so we started slowly with some rice cereal just to see how she'd do.

A couple gags and weird looks later, luckily Mads embraced the spoon like a champ and soon started chowing down jars of liquid vegetables like a pro. I started getting excited buying her all sorts of baby food varieties with enticing pictures on the front until one day when I fed her mashed peas and she gave me this weird "Really mom? You really want me to eat this?" look and it dawned on me that I never bothered tasting her food. How am I to feed my child something that I didn't even want to taste? So I took one nibble of the mashed pea liquid and made exactly the same face at her. That was the last time peas were in the picture.

Since then, I've taken to making her own baby food which afforded me much greater freedom in ingredient mixing and I actually trusted what she was eating and how it was made. I began experimenting with two vegetable ingredients and slowly worked my way through a repertoire of colorful veggies California had to offer.

Steaming her lunch for the week

At 5 months, our ped gave us the go-ahead for some more various proteins so fish came in the picture. It was baked tilapia (farmed fresh water - lowest mercury content) then baked salmon. Then came all sorts of combinations but I followed my own simple guidelines to making baby food:

• Vegetables take the lead, always. Organic only and washed thoroughly.
• If protein, tender healthy lean bits only.
• Never salt.
• Steam most of the veggies to retain nutrients (boiling loses a lot of the nutrients in the water that you throw out). Stir fry or bake as necessary.
• Don't be afraid to flavor with garlic, nuts, or non-salt or sugar based herbs. I've done shallots, basil, chives, rosemary. (Nuts is a personal call. Talk to your ped)
• Don't mix fruit into the meal. Fruit is for desserts.

I have two equipment pieces I use - the Vitamix and the Immersion Blender. Vitamix is great for very very fine, smooth foods great for the younger times when she cannot handle swallowing textures. Immersion blender is great for when she got older and more able to handle coarser textures. 

Quinoa, asparagus, and beef

We've purposely held back on giving her any fruits as it is commonly known that babies love sweet things (breastmilk is really sweet) and if you start them on fruits for solids, they have a harder time accepting non-sweet foods. So only once Mads became comfortable with various baby food flavors, none of which contained fruit, then we started giving her fruit as a dessert at the end of the meal. I would cut up various types of fruit bits (or halve the blueberries) and put them into a silicon feeder so she can learn to feed herself.

What has been surprising is that Mads now will eat anything we give her. I mean anything. Even if she doesn't really like it, she won't refuse. But she hasn't shown extra interest in very sweet things. If fruits are too sweet sometimes she'll only nibble a bit and be done with it.

As a working mom, making my own baby food has been quite an interesting maneuvering of logistics. I wanted to be the one to grocery shop, prep, cook, and store. I wanted to keep her food fresh and exciting and not make too big of a batch that she'll end up having the same thing over and over forever. But I also only had a small window to operate 'heavy machinery' aka the Vitamix without waking her up so efficient use of my time was key.
It's been a fun and exciting journey and can't wait to keep introducing her to more and more flavors.

From Psychologist to Googler

Mike Jones once said "back then they don't want me, now I'm hot they all on me."

Well, they are not 'all on me' but suffice it to say people I never really spoke to have now suddenly started to contact me from different fields. The biggest question (and the most obvious one) that everyone asks right off the bat :

So how did you get from being in the psychology field to not only being at Google, but doing business development for Android?

Often times those questions came with both disbelief and hope - hope that they themselves could make the transition and disbelief that with my background on paper I'm where I am.

'Til this day, I'm still living an imposter syndrome, a syndrome where I constantly feel inadequate, undeserving, and doubted by my colleagues of whether I can deliver. Perhaps that's also the reason behind the drive for me to always feel like I must work twice, three times harder than everyone, double check everything, make sure I'm delivering, I know what I'm talking about, and that I maintain awesome relationships with those I work with.

However, the reality is my colleagues at Google are beyond amazing. They are intrigued by my background but their judgement of my work is not tainted by it. They understand people at Google come from all different walks of life but as long as you can deliver and you know your stuff and you're what they call it, "Googley" then whatever. Go forth and excel.

What is a shame is that society is not there yet. I can guarantee that I will still not be able to get a job somewhere else doing what I do because ANY recruiter will take one glance at my LinkedIn profile or my resume and go...urm...no thanks. The disparity between my last psychology position and my first position at Google is like the Grand Canyon. "How did she even swing that? She has no XX years of relevant experience, no MBA or shiny expensive degree from a name brand university, nor tenure or stint at another brand name company." Instead of truly digging into a person's capability at their current role, society is still heavily dependent on your paper pedigree as the sole indicator of future success.

And for full disclosure, it wasn't that I wasn't qualified for one of those brand name schools. I didn't attend for the pure simple reason that I just could not afford it and I was an international student, which severely limited my financing options. I just couldn't do that to my parents. So think about that next time you judge someone based on their alma mater. Or recruit solely based on institutional affiliation.

You want to know how I got to where I am? Here's what I did:

1. I networked. I reached out proactively.
2. I was truthful, realistic, and humble to myself and to whomever would give me a chance.
3. I worked my ass off. I volunteered to do anything and everything outside of the prescribed scope of my job when help was needed and made sure I delivered. Big, small, doesn't matter.
4. I listened and asked questions. Tons of questions. I'm married to an Engineer so the basics I've learned from him but I always wanted to know end-to-end what the product was trying to achieve and stashed up knowledge. Nothing was "none of my business".
5. I made genuine friendships. It takes a humble attitude to approach everyone with a "You're definitely smarter and more knowledgeable than me" attitude but I genuinely cared and loved it. I have made some amazing friendships with some of the most influential and intelligent people on this earth because of it. I treated everyone's time as more valuable than mine when working together. And people remember.

One may think that this is quite an extreme approach but I wanted to start all over. I had no technical or business background, and definitely no shiny degree from an Ivy to back me up. I had me and my brain and confidence that I am up to the challenge.

I can't speak to any other company willing to take the risk that my hiring manager at Google did. Sometimes I still look at my LinkedIn profile wondering if I should just remove everything because I don't want people to negatively judge me because of my random hodgepodge of a resume. But then I think, hey I'm here at one of the best companies in the world, doing deals affecting the epicenter of the global mobile market. So deal with it.

I'm sad that the job world has prescribed this preconceived expectation of a person's abilities based on words on a piece of paper. I'm forever grateful for the individuals that took a chance on me and thought progressively of how to measure a person's future success. This is how one succeeds in life. This is how I got to where I am.