The 38-year-old actress talked motherhood and baby gifts with the 'Late Show' host.
Gift giving for Mindy Kaling's newborn daughter is getting competitive!
The A Wrinkle in Time star appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Thursday, and the two discussed the difficulty that comes with balancing parenthood with work, among other things... like gifts.
"[My daughter is] often like, 'Who dat?' to me, because I've been a little busy promoting this movie," Kaling, 38, jokingly confessed. "When you have a baby, you don't necessarily know in the beginning that you're going to be up every three hours. I'm up in the middle of the night with her, and then afterwards, it's hard to go back to sleep, so I'll just return emails [to family] and things like that, and say, 'Thank you so much. I'm thinking of you. Thank you.' The next morning, people will be like, 'Hey, why did you send me an e-mail at 3 a.m. that said I am thinking about you? You're like a weird pervert.' So, that's my life now."
The actress added that before becoming a mom, she was "not a kid person" in the least.
"I was not a kid person at all. I was a person who, if you had a baby at a party, I would go up to them, shake their hand and be like, 'Hello!' I didn't understand how to be around babies," she told Colbert.
"On planes when babies would cry, I would be mad at the families. Now I'm like, 'Let them cry! Let them do whatever they want! They can sit on me and poop if they want! Whatever they want!'"
Kaling then expressed her gratitude for Colbert's nice, yet "very old-fashioned," baby gift -- a solid white newborn outfit from Pixie Lily, located in his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. Colbert wasn't in denial about the gift's style, stating that it looks like it's from the "late 19th century."
"With a baby girl, you get sent a lot of colorful things, pink things, and I thought this was so, um, so sweet and very fancy," she said during the interview.
"If I'm crossing the Titanic with my baby, hoping for a new future for myself, this is the outfit I put her in. There's a black and white photo of me holding my baby, hoping for a new [life]."
The Champions actress then addressed the elaborate present she received from Oprah, stating that Colbert's gift "straight-up sucks" in comparison.
"It straight-up sucks compared to what Oprah gave me. And I mean that with love, okay?" Kaling stated. "Oprah's present to me was a hand-carved bookcase packed with 100 of the essential children's books of all literature, and each book was inscribed with a little sticker that said 'Katherine's Book Club' -- like 'Oprah's Book Club.' The bookcase was carved in the shape of an old-timey castle. It's such a nice present! And yours was such a nice present."
Colbert's response to being outdone by the media titan? "We were gonna do that," he joked. "I heard Oprah was going to do it, so we did this instead. I'm very happy for Oprah. That's amazing. She gave me a box of steak knives once."
For more on Kaling's new bundle of joy, watch the video below.
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