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...

Jan turned one month!

I realised that time indeed flies when Jan passed her one month mark. Jan's been feeding and gaining weight well, and thank God that her jaundice has also subsided considerably. In terms of her care-taking, the confinement lady finished her 4 weeks with us, so we are now working out a new routine to settle into. Fortunately, the remaining caretakers (pt, myself and my mum-in-law) have grown more experienced in our job, so we are still managing quite well.

However, Jan has been recently having spells of frantic crying, and that really wears us down. Already without these tandrums, we can *at most* rest for three hours in a stretch, as that is the maximum time a feed can satisfy her for (but in reality, it is even shorter, as after each feed, we need to put her to sleep and take some time to wind down...). With these somewhat random tandrums, three hours is definitely a luxury.

At the back of my mind, I felt we need to be in more control of what's going on; we need more sleep, pt needs more rest; the schedule has to be directed by us rather than by the baby. In reality, it is not easy. In particular, it's hard to think straight when you don't have enough sleep, so instead of having a plan to decide when to feed and when to rest, we react impromptu to her demands, which makes resting time hard to come by.

As the saying goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

So my focus now is really to make sure that pt gets enough sleep. Well, that means that I need to be less lazy and do more nappy-changing/baby feeding/baby-soothing etc...and probably also the different tasks that our busy-bee will keep our busy bee awake. Wah...stressed....