Farewell, Nee-du

The pacifier (aka the Nee-du) is an amazing invention.  I always try to visualise the expression on the inventor's face when he discovered this simple device that can pacify even the most rowdy baby and help them go to sleep.  He must had been very proud of his invention.

Or maybe not.  Many babies grew so dependent on the pacifier that it became their opium.  Jan was one of them; when she wanted to sleep, she would start searching for her pacifier like an addict.

We had been wanting to wean Jan off the pacifier (aka the Nee-du), but had been putting off the decision as it seemed daunting.  Moreover, it was an easy way for us to get Jan to sleep and to quieten her in public places.

However, many times the pacifier would fall out of her mouth while she was asleep, and then she would wake up almost every hour from 2am to 6am screaming for her pacifier.  One night, after Jan threw her pacifier out from her cot, my darling wife decided that Jan should say farewell to her nee-du.

In the following days, Jan constantly screamed for her pacifier during naptimes.  She would scream at the top of her voice for as long as 45 minutes, with such intensity that ALL my neighbours came over to find out what was happening.  I thought they would ring the police to report me of child abuse, but my plan was to clarify to the police that I was the real abuse victim.  It was extremely challenging to listen to your own baby cry and not doing anything about it.

Our plan was to try for three days and then see how, and we prayed hard we would succeed.  Thankfully, and amazingly, we pulled through!  After the first night, Jan was able to sleep (at night) without much screaming.  She screamed a lot during her afternoon naps though, but by the end of the three days, that became easier also.

So our recommendations to people who want to try this: have total agreement on the plan with your spouse, pray hard and get ear-plugs.

Baby Jan gets royal treatment

For the longest time, I had suspected that my darling wife came from New Zealand, but it wasn't till we started having an oversupply of breast milk in the fridge that my suspicion was confirmed... =P

We felt it was quite "sayang" to throw away the old milk in the freezer, then we found out that others were using it to give milk baths to their babies...so we decided to give it try; it was said to make the baby's skin silky smooth. *wow* And doesn't ancient royalty bath with milk too?

 

So here we were, baby Jan and I, getting ready for our first experience of milk bath.

 

 

 

 

Initially, when we put her into the milk bath, she looked a bit shocked.  I guess she was wondering "why is the bath water different in colour from the usual ones???".

 

 

 

 

 

It didn't take long before she overcame the shock.  She definitely had a great time! 

I did not find it as enjoyable though, 'cos the un-thawed milk has a smell to it, I think it is from the fatty parts of the milk.  The fatiness also make Jan and the bath tub oily after the bath, so we needed to wash both of them.

But well, if it does make her skin "smooth like tofu", then it is worth the sacrifice right? Hahaha...

 

Well, like the chinese saying goes, "All banquets comes to an end".  Jan, it's time to get out of the milk bath...

 

"Mum, that was awesome! Can we have it again some time soon??"

funny face :)

Just some random pics of Jan making funny faces... some look really like those bo gei ah-ma... hahaha!!

Thank God for growth!

We are really thankful for a number of developments over the past few weeks.  Firstly, Jan's appetite has returned!  More importantly, she has been gaining weight.  The strange thing is that Jan drinks less than babies her weight.  She is 7.25kg now and she drinks about 700-800+ml a day; but as long as she is gaining weight I'm not too bothered.  My theory is that she is very energy efficient, so don't need to drink much to get what she needs and even gain weight.  Somehow makes me think of the inverter air-cons....

Definitely a big thank God that Jan no longer wakes up every hour at night.  We stll have not figured out if it was a virus or bug that caused her running stools and discomforts.  However, we are glad that it has lost its impact on Jan's diet and night sleep.  In fact, Jan more or less sleep through to 7am! Really thankful for that, else pt would go crazy with the little sleep she was getting.  More sleep definitely put both of me and pt in better shape.  Jan's stools are still mucus-y though, and sometimes with traces of blood (was considering putting those pictures online, but uh-hmm....I guess you understand). 

Anyway, also thankful that she was able to switch quickly from a 3-hour schedule to a 4-hour schedule.  We noticed she was getting uninterested in feeding, and those feeding sessions were getting increasingly violent (haha....a bit exaggerated, but well, there's some truth in it.  a note when you interpret the word "violent" though, the victim was definitely not Jan).  It was great when we made the switch, the feedings got easier, and this new schedule also gave us more free time.

Lastly, we have also been able to give her the last feed earlier.  Last time we gave the feed at around 11pm, and by the time we finished washing up, it would easily been 1am.  We have since been able to bring the feeding forward to about 10pm.  The worry  of doing that was the baby would wake up in the middle of the night crying for food, but thank God she did not do that.

Well, that's my list of thanksgiving now, definitely look forward to more stuff to thank God for.

Do not worry??!

Jia-en turned 5 months this past week, and I think as much as she has grown, I have learnt much from my role as a parent.

I have grown to understand better why parents worry so much...well, more precisely, I have found that as a parent, there is so much to worry about!  Why is my child having runny stools?  Is there something terrible going on? Eeeks...there's even blood stains in the stools...  Are we teaching her a wrong value by attending to her when she cries?  Is she in some serious trouble when we deliberately don't attend to her when she cries?  These are just some questions that crosses my mind regularly.

Then I was reminded of God's command in Matthew 6:25....do not worry!!!

Becoming a parent really pushes me to trust God more...since now there's more things out of my control, and God does tell me not to worry.

Some updates...

Been a looooong time since the last post. Think have to be more diligent to blog a bit more... Well, not that I don't want to, but Jan has been waking up almost hourly from 3-7am for the past 2-3 weeks and I'm seriously deprived of good sleep! It's really challenging coz I'm always struggling to keep awake at work, especially during meetings. Find it hard to concentrate. Sigh... still praying hard for better nights to come!

Well, we are obviously trying to pin-point why Jan is waking up so often, esp so when she was already sleeping thru the night for a while. Here are some of our guesses:

1. Teething - She's been drooling a LOT since she was 4 mths old and tries to stuff ALL her fingers into her mouth to chew, even if the pacifier is there already...

2. Stomach discomfort - She's been having the runs for more than 10 days, with blood streaks and mucus in her yellow watery/ "pasty" poo (try not to visualise ok?). She'll sometimes wake up in the night crying and then let out a loud fart. Just saw a PD last Tues and she said she might have caught a stomach bug and gave her some probiotics (yakult equivalent). It's been a week since we saw the PD and Jan is not getting any better. Her feeding has been poor as well - only drinking slightly more than half of her normal intake. Going to see the PD again today to see what she says. Praying that it's nothing serious and clear off soon!

Nonetheless, she's still quite her usual self and gets super excited when we talk to her and squeals in delight when we sing. She's really quite fun to play with now and we simply love her laughter!

Oh ya, she's finally flipping! MF and I actually witnessed her first flip about 2 weeks ago and it was a tummy to back flip. Quite unusual coz babies normally do back to tummy first. We kinda figured that it's coz she hates to be on her tummy for too long and probably better if she learns to solve her own problem! Smart girl! :)

goo goo ga ga

Jan is one baby who can complain, wail and scream real loudly but coos so softly that we sometimes call it the "cat mewing". But recently, she has been responding back when we talk to her. She even attempted to sing along and smiles when we sing to her.... amazing!! On "good days", she will laugh quite audibly. Think she loves singing =)

Some "words" she can coo now:
- ah
- eh
- ngai
- ang guh
- uh
- er
- ai

There was once when she was crying and screaming away, I suddenly heard her say "mama". I thought I was hearing things but MF also heard it. So, I declare officially that she's saying mama first!! hahahahaha!!

Oh ya, we started her on the bumbo when she turned 4months! Borrowed from mama's friend, Sharon - she said this bumbo has been sat on by her 2 boys and another friend's son, well worth the investment!

Who do I look like???!? - Part II

The bo liao parents are at it again.... let's do a comparison using baby photos =)

n.b. the one on the left is papa, me centre, and mama on the right

The cutest baby!

Call me biased, but my baby Jan is the cutest! Haha....you don't expect anything else from the parent right?

Jan usually don't like to be placed on her tummy, but we the kiasu parents wanted her to learn how to turn over, and we heard that babies in this position have more opportunities to practice turning and exercise the necessary muscles, so....anyway, she will usually ruin our plans by protesting violently (now that I said it, I think a video of her protesting will actually be very interesting, though I fear that when she grows up she will condemn me for publicizing such embarrassing footages ). 

We learned that one way to overcome her protesting is to let her "climb" on top of a pillow, so her upper body is propped up and she can see more of her surroundings.

HOWEVER, even then, she would still protest if you leave her there long enough....or she would start sucking her fingers and fall asleep in that position...so much for wanting her to exercise...

Another unrelated thought: now that our blog is linked to facebook, I wonder how many more/less people are reading it...do post a "hi" on our blog if you can =)

See how my looks have changed!

You must have heard about how newborns take on different looks during the first few months of their lives. It is almost as if the babies could not decide which parent's features to take on, so they just try new combinations each month.

For us, it is hard to detect this change as we look at Jan everyday. So we decided to put together snapshots of her from every month and see if we can see the metamorphosis in action.

Jan indeed did change her looks! The five photos below show her growing from June (when she was born) till now.  In fact, she looked rather different at birth compared to how she looks now! 

However, comparing her looks from one month to the next, it is harder to tell where the changes occurred.  Can you "spot the difference"? =D

12 weeks liao...

Jan is 12 weeks old and that also marks the end of my maternity leave. I had mixed feelings having to go back to work. On one hand I was kind of "excited" - felt like I'm finally in touch with society again and my life doesn't just evolve around the baby. On the other hand, I definitely couldn't bear to leave Jan at home. Guess that's the irony of life...

Just before I left home for work, Jan seemed exceptionally alert and kept cooing and smiling at me. It's a ploy to keep me at home!! It just melts my heart... sigh... but bo bian... just have to leave liao...

Back in the office, various colleagues were catching up with me and asking about Jan. Then it was the planning of when and where to express, how to store the milk etc. Went to recce around the building with Cindy to see potential nursing venues. It's really challenging to be able to continue breastfeeding Jan as the workplace doesn't have a nursing room. So that means I have to pray really hard for a meeting room to be available. It was quite a relaxing day at work and a slow start for my freezing cold engine *brrrrr*

Just wanna thank God for helping me transit into work better as we were praying really hard for Jan to be able to follow the routine and most of all, not needing to be carried to sleep!! The next prayer request waiting to be answered is for her to drop her 4am feed and let me rest till 7am... hehe =)






Mama, don't go to work... play with me!

Thankfully 11-week old

Jan turned 11-week last Friday! We are thankful for how she has grown over the past weeks, and her schedule has also settled down considerably. Even though we are still waiting for the sleep-through-the-night to happen, we can now predict pretty well when she will next be hungry or sleepy. She is also much less fussy, and is especially easy to handle at night. And that of course translate to better rested mum and dad. =) And we also got more of our usual schedules back--going to church, running errands and such.


Left: Declaring victory or surrendering to pressure? You decide.








Jan has been growing well! She now weighs 5.8kg, 2.8kg heavier than her birth weight, which means she has been following the expected 1kg/month weight gain for 0-3 month old babies.











She now runs on a 3-hourly schedule -- every 3 hours, she would wake up for a feed, then have some wake time, before she goes for a 1-1.5 hour nap. It is so predictable nowadays that I can tell what those hours are: 7am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm, 7pm, 10:30pm, 4am. She has dropped the 1am feed, and our attention now is definitely on the 4am feed.


Left: That is how she usually looks after she had her fill. It's not hard to tell when you should stop feeding.

2 major milestones

Yesterday saw two major milestones in Jia En's development. When I woke up in the morning and found that it was already 6am, I thought I must had a really deep sleep night, 'cos I couldn't recall woken up by Jan's usual 3/4am feed. I then asked pt about it, and I was amazed when I realised tt Jan hasn't woken up for a feed since 12midnight! In fact, we waited for one more hour before she woke up, which meant tt she slept for almost 7 hours! We had been waiting for this moment to come, a time when we could finally have at least 5 hours of uninterrupted sleep! We have been following the parent directed feeding method, which claims to have helped many newborns sleep through the night at 7-9 weeks. The authors' data seems to strongly support the effectiveness of their method, but we still have our skeptism of whether it will work for Jan. Furthermore, Jan's hospitalisation disrupted our efforts to try pdf method with her, so our expectations had been tt it will occur later and not now. but it's happening now! Praise God! Our current hope is obviously tt she will keep up the good work. Last night she didn't really sleep through, but my hope is that she is in transition right now so I'm hoping for the best for tonight.

The second development was Jan's hair. We got someone to shave her head yesterday, so now she is the little botak in our house!
Left: Jia En before the haircut

She looked so different in this new hairstyle, and for a while after the haircut, we were half wondering whose baby was this? ;-) We also gotten ppl to make a chinese caligraphy brush out of Jan's baby hair, on it we scribed the blessing '神织佳恩，仆人精神。', which have two meanings: first is that God created an excellent blessing, who will have a servant's heart. This is to take after Jesus' example written in mat 10:45 - "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”. The second meaning is that God created Jan, and we her parents are reminded to have a servant's heart. Actually as of the time of writing, we are still debating on the final version of these blessings, so you might hear from us again on the final version.


Left: our little botak!!




















See this funny video of her haircut. Notice how she looks like chairman mao at the very beginnning!!

Our 2nd wedding anniversary

This year's wedding anniversary was celebrated together with our little girl. We stayed a night in Raffles the Plaza and spent lots of time together shopping and eating (Prego's, Mos burger, Ya Kun, Kuriya)... a bit deprived during confinement... =)

My full month celebration cum baby dedication

Hello uncles & aunties, just wanna share some pictures taken during my "big day"... enjoy! =)

p.s. my 1st time wearing a dress also. my mama says she not used to seeing me in a dress... hmm...

An unexpected way to spend the weekend

Jan acted strangely yesterday - she was lethargic, didn't eat much, had a sore throat and was unusually cranky. However, she had had days like this, though not in this combination. So we struggled with the decision of whether to bring her to a doctor. We couldn't help thinking if we were over reacting. Moreover, she behaved more normally towards dinner time. Fortunately, I trusted pt's maternal instincts-that something was not right. Jan's pediatrician who is also our good friend also adviced tt we go and see her.

So we eventually arrived at the hospital, and I was expecting the doctor to tell us that Jan's is ok and we could go home, maybe with some medication to help Jan with her sore throat. The shock came when we found out that Jan was running a temperature, and the doctor adviced that Jan be admitted. She explained Jan should be admitted just to be safe, as her symptoms could be caused by more serious conditions. As such, they need to do tests on Jan and observe to rule out those possibilities.

And that's how we ended up in the hospital! And we have to stay till Sunday for the test results to be out.

Left: Poor Jan, she had a drip put into her left heel.

It was a blow to us both emotionally and physically. Already we have been exhausted from adapting to Jan's 3-hourly feeding schedule. i took leave this weekend because i needed rest and i needed to help pt to get more rest. and it wasn't easy for all three of us to get enough rest while adjusting to this new arrangement.

Emotionally, we felt bad that Jan had to undergo such an experience at this age. it was heart wrenching to hear her cry when the doctor took blood and urine samples from her. we also felt helpless when she cried about the discomforts she was experiencing fr the sore throat and stuffy nose. There was also some fears in our heart that the root cause was some serious conditions; i started mentally backtracking things that i had done wrongly which might had caused all this.

Left: After cooping many days in the ward, we decided to get some fresh air. Thankfully the kopitiam at Kent Ridge Wing had a nice patio-like setting and there weren't many people.


All in all, I felt we were given another blow even while we had barely stablised ourselves. We prayed earnestly that God would watch over Jan, that she would be well soon and that we could all go home soon. We also asked our friends to partner us in prayer, and it was comforting when some of them commited to praying alongside us. I told pt that since this has happened, we should see the hospital stay as a getaway stay at a hotel, and make full use of it as an opportunity to rest. So rest for all of us it will be!

In the end, we found out that apart from having the common cold, Jan also had a tract infection, which was the reason she was running a temperature. We were glad that we went to the hospital early to catch it before it got nasty.


Left: One happy family no matter what!














Left: Papa doing silly imitation stuff again...