It’s a Girl

So Matt Gross, who writes the amusing Frugal Traveler blog for the New York Times, recently published a article (and a hilarious video) about taking his 13-month-old daughter, Sasha, to San Francisco.

Alone.

As Gross wrote in the article, “One week with this baby was more physically challenging than hiking across Montana and more psychologically draining than . . . anything I’ve ever done.”

We liked this article in part because it focused on San Francisco’s Mission District, a neighborhood near and dear to our former Bay Area-residing hearts. (He eats at Udupi Palace and El Farolito! Aww.) But as parents to a kid only one month younger than Sasha, what really got our attention was all the cool Sasha Travel Paraphernalia: the inflatable ducky tub, the Italian cloth gizmo Gross wraps around his seated kid as an impromptu high chair, and the pop-open travel crib from KidCo.

We also noticed several things bound to strike fear into any anxious first-time parent’s heart: Sasha, at 13 months, is an experienced walker. Delphine, at 12 months, isn’t even crawling. (She does pretty well with scooting, rolling, and folding herself over forwards, but walking ain’t on her radar yet.) Sasha, despite complaining one night in San Francisco about spinach and scarfing it up the next night, eats pretty much whatever grown-up food her dad gives her, including spicy noodles and greasy burritos. Delphine, despite all our efforts to give her chewy bits of cheese and meatballs, is still at the mush-and-nursing stage. (Of course, like all kids, she will happily chomp on sugary Cheerios. But that’s not really food, is it?)

Sasha is also a New York City kiddo, which means — at least in the video her dad shot of her — that she wears lots of stylish neutral-colored duds, making it hard to tell whether she’s a boy or a girl. Delphine wears blue, but also a lotta pink. (When you have a wardrobe of hand-me-downs, you wear what fits.) Even so, her blue outfits (despite the presence of, say, flowers and/or ruffles) have been known to confuse strangers on the street. Gross doesn’t mention what the local Mission parents thought of his kid in her blacks, browns, and grays. Of course, Sasha didn’t care either way.

Gross also notes, in his blog post about the trip, that the experience left him awed of single parents:

All of which gave me a newfound respect for the millions of single moms and dads who do what I did every single day, not because they’re on vacation but because they have no other option, and who embrace frugality not as a clever means to travel but because it’s the only way to survive.

Incidentally, Gross also has an article in the current issue of Saveur magazine, about trying to get his Taiwanese in-laws to teach him how to cook Taiwanese food. Self-deprecatingly, he tries to stick up for himself and his unconventional choices in life:

It’s been more than ten years since I met Jean Liu, the only daughter of Mei-Mei and her husband, Kan-Nan Liu, but I’ve never quite found my place in her family. At first, the reasons seemed obvious. I’m not Taiwanese, and I speak only a little Mandarin, the official language of Taiwan, and hardly a word of Taiwanese (the dialect of the descendants of the Chinese who arrived on this island 400 years ago). Also, I am not a doctor. Jean’s mother is a general practitioner, and her father is a brain surgeon. A brain surgeon! I’m a writer, which in the Liu family cosmology ranks well below doctor, computer-chip designer (Jean’s brother’s job), and even artist — but above day laborer.

And, occasionally, single parent.