If you are the parent of a 21st century baby, chances are you are a slave to milk. Every parent from your generation that you meet will extol the wonders of breast milk and you will find yourself spending several hours of every day expressing it, moving it, storing it, organizing it – all the while keeping it refrigerated. If you ever get the urge to mention any alternatives to breast milk in front of a doctor or a mother or in a pre-natal class – resist it at all costs, or you will be made to feel like such a bad parent, you’ll want to neuter yourself.
We always knew our baby would be breastfed, even before he was conceived. Everyone knew. The literature was everywhere – in books, in magazines, in the little free pamphlets on the nurses’ counters, and of course, all over the Internet. Even if you never thought of having a baby, you would know about the wonders of breast milk.
Women who breastfeed are some of the proudest creatures on the planet. Our baby has been fed just about everywhere – shopping mall benches, in restaraunts, and one time, on a sidewalk. At first, I was very afraid someone would come and tell us off, and I think my wife was secretly hoping that someone would because she had this whole “Breastfeeding Is Not A Crime” speech prepared. But nobody ever did, so I stopped worrying about it and my wife eventually got over her disappointment.
Not only are women proud of their ability to produce milk, I think many – if not all – of them measure themselves by it. If one mother says her son has been breastfed for any number of months more than another, the latter will automatically develop feelings of guilt, envy, and the compulsion to say “You’re such a good mother.” When two women start talking about breastmilk, one of them is going to come out feeling hurt. If you are a husband, it is wise to identify the women among your wife’s friends who talk about milk often. They are usually quite easy to pick out because eventually every conversation gets to where they complain about having to throw away milk. Save your wives. Steer them away from these milk queens. To be really safe, keep them off the Internet too. Some of the women on the forums bring a lot of chips to the table. One lady posted a picture of her kid bathing in a tub of her extra milk. If milk expression ever becomes an Olympic sport, we would have a real winner there. At the moment, however, I don’t see the need for anybody to compete at that level.
We used to tell ourselves we’re saving a bit of money from not having to buy formula milk. We’ve stopped kidding ourselves now. This stuff is like gold. Whenever we spill a drop, my wife gets depressed. One time, when the baby was hungry, I drove to her office to pick up whatever she had expressed that day to bring it home to him - burning up two gallons of petrol to deliver about four fluid ounces of milk. The alternative would have been to give him one feed of formula milk, but that’s a minor felony according to all the baby books and we really wanted to keep our records clean.
Next month, my wife will be traveling to New York for work. She’s trying to talk me into going along and bringing the baby so he wouldn’t have to stop feeding. Neither me nor the baby will see anything other than the insides of the hotel. If she succeeds, we would essentially be spending all our travel money for the year to buy him a week’s worth of mother’s milk.
[ 6 comments ] ( 1 view ) | permalink | related link
I'm participating in the National Novel Writing Month again this year(Read all about the event here). I'm supposed to write 1667 every day for the month of November so that I will have a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month. I've not succeeded for the past four years, but that's not stopping me from trying.
Last month, I was telling the Soul Doc about my clever plan to cheat by starting two weeks early but then as usual, I procrastinated and put it off until the actual starting day. I have about 200 words now which means I'm some 3000 words behind, but it's only November 2, so I'm optimistic.
Some help from my editor
[ 2 comments ] ( 10 views ) | permalink | related link
We are nearing the last ten days of my wife’s maternity leave, which means the baby is almost three months old now. So far, being a parent has been great fun but also a lot of hard work. We are almost constantly feeding the baby, burping him, changing his diaper, changing his clothes, bathing him, talking to him, playing with him, comforting him, rocking him, buying things for him, washing his clothes, and showing him off to people. On his part, the baby has survived low-blood sugar, a slightly serious case of jaundice, two weeks of influenza, having his head knocked around and being dropped into the bathwater.
We are now at the stage where we need to introduce the bottle to him. I really thought it would be easy – my wife would pump milk instead of feeding him directly and I would store the milk in the fridge and warm it back up when it’s time to feed and everything else would work the same as before.
As it turns out, this is what happened…
We had some plastic bottles that we had bought quite some time ago, way before the baby came into our lives. My wife did a more little research and found that we really wanted an anti-colic bottle that was free of Bisphenol-A. We bought two of these about a month before the baby was born. My wife attended this one-day breastfeeding session at the same place we had pre-natal classes and tried out several different pumps. In the end, we settled for a single electric pump, because it fit well, was the simplest to use, and didn’t break the bank. Next thing we needed was a sterilizer. We always thought we would just throw the bottles into a pot of boiling water, but in the end, we thought a dedicated sterilizer would be much more convenient. Shopping for one was not easy. Some were small and portable while some were big and could do several bottles at once. Some could sterilize in 9 minutes while others did it in 8 minutes and cost twice as much. We didn’t pay too much attention to these numbers even though the big brightly contrasting font on the front of the boxes boldly emphasized their difference. We ended up with a reasonably-priced unit that could do six bottles at once at 9 minutes.
When we tried it out at home, the sterilizer could fit six bottles but they had to be placed in a certain configuration with the teats on the bottom rack under the bottles and other accessories on a top rack and I couldn’t get anything out of the lower racks until I got the upper racks out. I thought I could sneak out the bottle teats out of the round holes in the rack above it but they were just about a hair too wide. Also, to attempt juggling all these items too soon after sterilization would most definitely result in some scalding injuries, so you really should add 5 minutes of cooling time after the 9 minutes of sterilization. And out of genuine good intentions or sadistic humour, I am not sure which, they included a tiny pair of slippery tongs for you to attempt to pick up the hot sterilized items with.
Pumping milk didn’t seem any easier. Even though the baby could get plenty of milk out of my wife, the pump seemed to be able to get only a couple teaspoonfuls. We cheated and put the baby on one breast while we pumped the other, which worked quite well for the purpose of expressing milk, my wife would have to get used to doing it without the baby’s help when she’s at work. In any case, we had enough milk for the first feed which, as it turns out didn’t happen until three days later, due to some commitments which kept us away from the house during the day. Anyway, the baby didn’t want anything to do with that bottle. Milk is supposed to be able to last three days refrigerated but we kept opening and closing our fridge and those three days were scorching hot even by Malaysian standards, so I wasn’t sure if it was the bottle or the milk that the baby was rejecting. There were other factors too. He had to be in a good mood and I had to be the one feeding and my wife could not be present in the room and he had to be hungry enough. The problem was our baby is never in a good mood when he is even remotely hungry. We discovered early on that he is unable to cry and feed at the same time, so my wife had the tendency to take all crying as signs of hunger. As a result, whenever the baby wants milk, he is very vocal about it. I was beginning to wish the sterilizer could do its job in 8 seconds! It also didn’t help that he has been feeding much more frequently than we were used to. We kept thinking we had two hours between feeds, so I thought I was being very conservative when I started sterilizing the bottles an hour after a feed, but everytime I did that, I would hear a loud cry from the bedroom. By the time I run back upstairs, he is feeding on a breast and my wife gives me a dejected shrug. We soldiered on for the next week or so, but the same annoying pattern kept us feeding him 3-day old milk. Finally, my wife relented and let me throw away some milk I had warmed up and the baby absolutely refused to drink, so the next batch of milk was only going to be a day old at the time of the next feed, the following day.
I could hardly sleep that night. My mind kept going back to a friend of ours who had to quit her job because her baby refused to drink from the bottle. My wife had been hinting about the possibility of her taking a similar option, and my reaction was always to either feign deafness or point out the obvious fact that we couldn’t afford to live on my salary, without selling our newly-renovated house and moving back to a small apartment, to which her usual reply was I was sparking off her post-natal depression and that the stress was not helping with the milk production.
The morning came and we didn’t take any more chances. My wife had been asking around and was recommended 3 brands of teats and 3 brands of bottles (including the one we had been trying). We went out and bought 3 different brands of bottles and 4 different brands of teats in 2 different sizes. We also bought a nice pair of tongs that could put a kungfu grip on any object, big or small. We moved the sterilizer and bottle drying rack into the bedroom to cut a few seconds off our response time. The first combination we were trying was the Medela bottle with an S-sized Pigeon peristaltic teat. It was not an anti-colic bottle but it was the bottle that worked with the pump, so the milk is already in it which means one less bottle to fuss with. When I felt the time was right, I warmed up the milk in a dedicated milk bottle warmer, and timed it with a stopwatch. When it was at the right temperature, I picked up the baby and the bottle, gave the wife a quick nod, moved to a different room and sat the baby on my lap. He was in a good mood and the last feed was almost an hour ago. It was now or never. I tried not to think about the lady who quit her job. The baby opened his mouth very slightly and time kind of moved in slow motion. Whether or not he was going to have a college education hinged on what happened next. I pushed the teat in as firmly as I dared. Then, like a little miracle, he sucked on it.
He kept drinking for maybe twenty seconds. It could have been a minute. I don’t know. Then he stopped. I put the bottle down, sat him straight up and burped him. When I picked up the bottle again, my heart sank. It was still at same level I remembered it at when he started (nearly 2 ounces). Did he even get anything in? I tried to resume, but he kept his lips tightly pursed and fell into a deep sleep. What do I do with the milk? We have nothing left for today. It was a desperate move but I put it back into the fridge and cranked down the thermostat. I left the bottle warmer on 40 celcius just in case.
Less than an hour later, we had some friends over. My wife and the baby kept them entertained while I was fiddling with bottles in the bedroom like some sort of mad alchemist. Then I heard my wife calling and came down to see the little guy had all the usual signs of hunger but was still in a salvageable mood. I picked him up and carried him in his favourite position and rocked him back into a good mood, while I got the bottle out of the fridge, into the warmer and waited. I’m sure I must have rocked the baby more than was absolutely necessary, but he wasn’t complaining. When the bottle was ready, I laid him down and put the tip of the bottle to his lips. He made this slight wince that stopped my heart beating.
I panicked and pushed the bottle teat all the way in.
He moved it around in his mouth with his tongue and then after some thought, started sucking at it again. This time, he kept at it longer. After a few minutes, the fluid in the bottle was definitely at a much lower level. I don’t think I moved until the bottle was almost empty. Then, I tilted the bottle and the little miracle boy slowly drank it down to the last drop.
And that’s the story of our baby’s first bottle feed.
[ 10 comments ] ( 1 view ) | permalink | related link
Sorry I haven’t been updating this. I’ve been busy with the baby and more recently, been a little bit out of the blogging mood.
Have you ever had a problem you couldn’t tell anyone about? I have one now. I tried talking to someone about it and it didn’t help. It didn’t do anything other than depress them and I've been told to stop talking about it unless I've come up with a way to solve the problem - and I have not. I’ve been thinking of whom else I could talk to, and frankly, I don’t see anyone who would sympathize and if I were to be honest, sympathy is more or less what I’m looking for. Of course, some helpful advice would be good too, but I’ve thought about it many times and I’m afraid of some of the advice that might be heading my way.
Don’t worry. It’s nothing life-threatening and it’s nothing medical. I’m not sure yet if it will be a recurring problem.
I have friends. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a close friend. I’ll have to talk to someone about it eventually. Please don’t be upset if it isn’t you. In fact, it probably will not be because the one person I really should talk to, once I summon the courage, doesn’t read blogs.
Sorry I have to be so vague. I guess I just wanted someone – anyone – to know that I have this thing and that not everything is as rosy as it seems. Thanks for reading and knowing of it.
So, have you ever had a problem that you couldn't tell anyone about? Please don't comment if the answer is no. I don't want to feel so alone.
[ 4 comments ] ( 49 views ) | permalink | related link
Sorry there’s been no updates. I guess you could say a lot has happened and yet you could say there’s been nothing that you could put together into a coherent story.
Anyway, today, I just want to talk about the material on this blog. If I’ve been giving the impression that our lives are always easy, then I have given a false impression. Our being together takes a great deal of patience and effort and, more often than you might imagine, involves crying and screaming. Some days, it’s all worth it. Other days, it’s best not to think about it.
[ 4 comments ] ( 44 views ) | permalink | related link
Back Next
Avatar
