You turn one today! Happy Birthday!

How does it feel being one, sweetheart? I bet it feels awesome. Especially since you can walk now! Like, really walk. Not just stumbling 2 steps from one piece of furniture to the next. I think you surprised yourself as much as you surprised us. Within a span of 5 days, you went from taking single step stumbles between furniture, to full blown walking. The look on your face when you took your 3rd step and realized you could go on was priceless. At the 3rd step, you broke out into a BIG smile like you couldn’t believe what was happening, like your legs were separate from your body and you were being taken for a fun ride. And then my heart went soaring.

Were you really in my belly once? That thought is at once crazy and magnificent. Were you really that limp little bug who could not hold her head up independently? And here you are, plodding across the floor with your arms folded upwards, beaming with joy at your newfound mobility! What a precious year it has been!

Xiola, you have exceeded all expectations of what motherhood was to be. I had braced myself for a struggle. A struggle to give up a life of selfishness and independence. A struggle to give up sleep. A struggle to deal with cries, screams and the frustration of trying to understand a language-less immobile being. Oh, yes, I have read the mommablogs. I braced myself for all of that and was willing to sacrifice, for that irrational and biological and honestly narcissistic desire to bear a child.

And, sweet Xiola, there was none of that struggle I was ready for. In fact, I wasn’t quite ready for the ecstacy you brought into my life. It was like meeting your father. I thought I was perfectly happy with my life before I met him. I was whole. And then I met him and I was even happier and even more whole with him. Then I thought I was perfectly happy with our life. And then you came into our lives and you sure completed us. We suddenly became a family and a new ecstatic whole. It all felt so natural and biological. This must be why we are hardwired to mate and propagate our species for survival!

You are that baby that everyone says is the perfect child, the golden child. I am biased, of course, but it is quite true. You are healthy, whole and complete, and sleep well, amazingly well, and are generally happy most of the time. You seem to come into the world perfectly at ease with it. I give my lucky stars a pat on the back for your natural disposition to calmness. But I also give your father and myself another 2 pats on our backs as well, because there are 2 things that I’m pretty sure contributed to your sunny being: (1) keeping you to a predictable routine; and (2) maintaining a household with calm, loving and happy energy.

Sure you have your moments of crying and fussing, just like any baby. You still do. But the first thing I worked on as a mother was to not get flustered by fussing and crying, and only see it as your only way of communicating with me. It sure helps reacting to your fussing only with calm, because I think it helps calm you down quickly as well. I have a bizarre ability to sense what it is that you desire, I think all moms have that; we were joined once in the belly after all. On the flip side, I truly believe that you sense everything I feel. I believe that you will react to my energy, and hence, I make sure that I am a happy mother inside. That is the biggest gift I want to give you, a soul with a natural state of security and happiness. Life is good, and you know it, girlfriend!

You also seem to radiate a love for people, Xiola, and I’m so proud of you for that. You seem to get people. You got your Dadda’s sociability that way, thank god. You watch them and you are intimate with them, and in return, people fall in love with you. You are loved, Xiola, and soar with it, honey!

It still floors me how many times you send my heart fluttering each day. I can watch you laugh and play and just breathe forever. A mother’s love. As old as time. The most talked and sang about kind of love. All the cliches. And now I know why. I get it. Describing that love is like trying to describe music. The words I can think of to come close are: pure, simple, grateful, elemental, fascinating, biological. And that doesn’t even come close to that ecstatic energy you give me. It is quite impossible and has only to be experienced. I know that because I was quite indifferent to babies and children before I had you. And know I know what I was missing. You came and you changed me. Now I’m that crazy woman that stops to talk to every kid in the street. Kinda like how I used to hate cats, and then I had 4. Ha.

Our relationship right now is the simplest it will ever be. You are the perfection that all babies are, and you look at me as if I were perfect. I am Momma, the source of food, comfort and love. One day, you will naturally start to question and discover my imperfections as your ego develops its own experience, judgments, and knowledge that will likely (hopefully) far surpass mine. When that happens, as hard as it will be, I will not stifle you by desperately holding on to you as my little baby, but embrace that development and the inevitable evolution of our relationship. I pledge you no Momma guilt-trips from me (I will try!), and will allow you to be your own individual.

Because, sweet Xiola, you owe me nothing in life. I made the choice to create and birth and love you. My duty to you then is to love, nourish, guide and discipline (oh yes you will be disciplined, my little girl!) so that you will love and respect the people in your life, and therefore, to do no harm to others. You owe me nothing and you are free to experience your own life as you want it to unfold.

Happy birthday, sweet Xiola! You deserve every happiness in your life. Remember forever that life is good, that Momma loves you unconditionally, and that you are unlimited in your ability to create good in your life!

Love,
Momma
11 Aug 2010

Another indication was that she stopped looking at my boobs with hungry eyes. It used to be that, when I got home from work to nurse, she’d be famished and the moment I walked in, she would start smacking her lips. I could almost see her thought balloon turning me into a large milk bottle, like when Slyvester looks at Tweety and imagines a big roasted bird. These days, she is realizing the bottle of formula is much more filling and easier to slurp down, and pants in hunger when she sees the bottle, not my boobs anymore. She was clearly ready to drop nursing.

I really wanted to make it to her first birthday before dropping nursing, but at this point (she is 11 months now), it’s really kinda like a loose deadline. Since the Chansidines were going to Tioman (we are in Singapore now for a 3-week vacation…VACATION!! WOO!) sans Xi last week, I decided to drop nursing and not pump and see how it goes. The boobs were slightly uncomfortable for a couple of days, but then it kinda stopped producing. After a week of not nursing, I tried to tonight just to see if she would. But she was no longer interested and reached for a bottle instead. Fascinating how it all works.

What I was surprised by was the emotional slump I felt in the 3rd day, after the boobs stopped producing milk. I lucked out and never gotten any kind of postpartum blues since I gave birth. In fact, I’ve been on a postpartum HIGH. Motherhood has just been nothing but JOY. The fact that breastfeeding released AWESOME HAPPY HORMONES probably helped too. And since I am no longer producing those hormones, it feels like I’m coming down from a 11 month long high.

How blah.

It sure made my last day in Tioman rough. Tioman was as awesome as always, but something felt missing this time, and it was Xiola. I’m very certain that this feeling will alleviate with time. I used to feel like I was unable to be away from Xi for more than a few hours and my first few days back at work not seeing her was rough. Then it became normal and I was perfectly fine being at work 8 hours away from home. This trip was our longest time away from her (we had done a 1 nighter in Florida in March) with 3 nights away and by the 2nd night, I was dying to see her. This Mommahood thing is like a freaking addiction! But it is healthy for me and my baby to have some time apart.

In the end, Xi barely noticed we weren’t there. Sheesh. According to her grandparents (who would have no qualms telling me if she fussed), she was a happy bug the entire time we were away. With 2 doting grandparents and 5 doting grandaunties (she was watched during the day by my aunts who watched me when I was a kid and who are just awesome babysitters), she was spoiled well and good.

Xi is having a GREAT time in Singapore. Being the exceeder of all expectations she is, she was not a problem on the flight at all. She slept the ENTIRE flight from NYC to Frankfurt, and took her 2 naps from Frankfurt to Singapore. When we got in at 6am, we just let her nap at her usual times and woke her up at her usual times. She fussed a little by 5pm since she was exhausted but I just forced her to stay up till her normal bedtime at 730pm. And then she was out like a light. She woke up crying for a couple of minutes at 2am and promptly went back to sleep…and that was it for her jet-lag. The rest of the nights, she slept all the way through, no problem (I wasn’t so lucky…the jet-lag was ROUGH on me this trip and took me a good 5 days to get over).

Tomorrow, we leave for another 3 nights to Krabi. I wasn’t looking forward to being apart from Xi again, but I feel like I must do this. I could have taken her with us, and dearly want to, but then I’ll be cheating grandparents and grandaunts of precious rare time with her.

In a couple of years, I’m going to look back and laugh at myself for being so silly about grieving over 3 nights away from my baby, but that’s how Mommahood is. It sucks you in. Then you are hooked.

At some levels, gold, as an investment, is absolutely ridiculous.

Warren Buffett put it well. “Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace,” he said. “Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”

And that’s not the half of it.

Gold is volatile. It’s hard to value. It generates no income.

Yes, it’s a “hard asset,” but so are lots of other things—like land, bags of rice, even bottled water.

It’s a currency “substitute,” but it’s useless. In prison, at least, they use cigarettes: If all else fails, they can smoke them. Imagine a bunch of health nuts in a nonsmoking “facility” still trying to settle their debts with cigarettes. That’s gold. It doesn’t make sense.

…Everyone knows the price has risen about fivefold in the past decade. But this is not due to some mystical truth or magical act of levitation. It is simply because there have been more buyers than sellers.

…Lots of people have been buying gold in the hope it would rise. But the only way it can rise is if still more people buy it, hoping it will rise still further. And so on.

What do we call an investment scheme where current members’ returns depend entirely on new money brought in by new members?

A Ponzi scheme.

- WSJ, Why I Don’t Trust Gold, May 28, 2010

Re: Diamonds.

Three big banks—Bank of America Corp., Deutsche Bank AG and Citigroup Inc.—are among the most active at temporarily shedding debt just before reporting their finances to the public, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.

The practice, known as end-of-quarter “window dressing” on Wall Street, suggests that the banks are carrying more risk most of the time than their investors or customers can easily see. This activity has accelerated since 2008, when the financial crisis brought actions like these under greater scrutiny, according to the analysis.

…Over the past 10 quarters, the three banks have lowered their net borrowings in the “repurchase,” or repo, market by an average of 41% at the ends of the quarters, compared with their average net repo borrowings for the entire quarter, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data. Once a new quarter begins, they boost those levels.

-WSJ, May 25, 2010

It’s nice to check in once a year to see where my life’s at. This time last year, I had a baby kicking in my belly. This time last year, I thought I’d be up to my neck in diapers and glaze-eyed from the lack of sleep.

Well, parenthood has far surpassed all expectations. Xiola is the easiest baby ever. She has a moments, as with any baby, but it’s always manageable. We can put her down and she is perfectly happy to sit and play happily by herself for an hour or more, which any parent will tell you is a dream. If anything, she isn’t a snuggly baby in that she won’t sit an cuddle for more than a few seconds before she whines for her independence. Momma, I need my space! That’s my girl!

She is 8.5 months now and slowly the beautiful days of immobility are fading away; she flips over easily now and kinda crawls (more like scoot, and backwards only…weirdo baby. I’ve a feeling she’s gonna do stuff backwards since she was breeched. ha!). I’ve a feeling life with baby isn’t gonna be as easy when baby can scoot into trouble. But that’s what playpens are for!

Xi also sleeps 11 hours a night (8-7) and has been for many months now and has slept through the night since she was 5 weeks old. DREAM BABY! No issues with lack of sleep there! And diapers schmiapers! Even with cloth diapers, it’s not a big deal at all. Maybe because I’ve been trained by the most incorrigible cats in the whole wide world (Zion meows incessantly all night so much so that she has to be locked up in the laundry room, which she doesn’t seem to mind, and Buddy has in the last 2 days started to piss on the kitchen floor after being so good for the last year and I DON’T KNOW WHY!!!! Graciela’s still the same, still fat and shedding fur and dander like the dust fairy. And Slope, dear pretty little Slope, is the only problem-free cat we have, aside from the fact that she is barely existent in our house since she hides and runs away from us all the time)…the Universe gave me the best baby in the world to compensate for the worst cats in the world.

Yes, I am quite aware that this post is about my birthday and I’ve gone on and on about Xiola. Which is reflective of how my life is now utterly consumed with being a mom. Scoff, you may, I’m guilty as charged! And I’m perfectly happy with that. It’s probably because I’m not as consumed as I sound. Xiola is such an easy baby who sleeps 11 hours a night and is happy to play independantly most of the time, so I get more free time than an average parent. And I am a working mom so I don’t feel like my life is 24/7 babybabybaby. Now that I have come out of the initial fog of mommahood, and because we have a fantastic nanny for Xi, I’m so happy to be a working mom. Sure, I wish I could spend a few more hours a days with her, but all things considered, I cannot complain.

She gets up at the same time as us at 645am. I get my nursing and playing time with her in the morning for about an hour. Then I go to work and she goes back down for a nap till 10am. She eats around noon. At around 2, she takes a 1-2 hour nap in the afternoon by which Daddy comes home and he gets 1-2 hours of solo time with her before I get home before 6 to nurse, feed, play with her and then she’s out like a light by 8pm. Then Momma and Daddy get important Husband and Wife time for 2-3 hours. Every other Friday, she goes to her Granduncles’ in Manhattan to hang out. Life is so deliciously simple.

It’s a great schedule which is varied in who she spends time with (not just Momma…I’ve known, heard and read about too many stay-at-home Mommas who go cuckoo bananas because they are with their baby 24/7 with Baby Daddys who are less involved), and yet consistent. I have learnt that babies love and need routine; consistency, predictability and solid naptimes and bedtimes are crucial for a happy baby (just my own experience).

I know the time will come, probably when I stop nursing (yes I still am nursing. I have dropped the afternoon pumping in the office but I still nurse in the morning, when I get home from work, and a short one right before she sleeps. I still LOVE nursing my baby and plan to continue at least till her first birthday. I am utterly convinced that breast is best for the baby. I have gotten ill with the flu twice since Xiola was born and she didn’t get sick once because she gets the antibodies I make through the breastmilk but not the germs. How ingenious is evolution?), when I will not be as consumed by motherhood.

Or maybe not. Let’s not kid ourselves. Having a child changes your life forever in ways that you can’t even imagine before a kid. And I love this new life.

Wednesday and Thursday were physically challenging days for me at the hospital. The pain was threefold – MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY, The Gas, and BOOBS.

MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY

I think it was Wednesday in the wee hours of the morning when a nurse came in to sponge bathe me. I have always thought that sponge bathing by nurses was literally just a nurse wiping your body down with a damp cloth or something. But noooo…it was more than that. I guess they really want you clean! She put a pan under my butt and started washing down there. For some reason, while I was still pain-free from the drugs, down there was crazy sensitive and every time she squirted water, I would yelp and burst out laughing. It’s kinda like when I get a pedicure and the lady scrubs the sole of my feet and I hate it cos it’s ticklish. I’m laughing cos of the tickle but I hate being tickled. Funny but no fun. Plus it’s embarrassing. But just like how I was spread-eagled for everyone to see at the operating room, I kept thinking about how this nurse has probably done this a million times and it’s probably like cleaning a baby’s butt to her.

At some point later that morning, my catheter was removed and my IV drip unhooked from the connecting hub between the IV tube and the needle in my hand and the nurse told me I can use the toilet whenever I want now. I’m free! I’m free! I thought. Having an IV drip and catheter makes you feel roped down to the bed for sure. Little did I know how awesome the IV drip of drugs and catheter were. Within an hour or two (who knows? Everything, aside from Xiola, was a haze in those days), I had to pee real bad. So I got out of bed…or tried to, because I only managed to lift my upper body by about an inch before I collapsed back, wide-eyed from the shock of pain in my lower body.

In the days when I was deciding whether to go through invasive action to try to turn my breeched baby to avoid the C-section, I researched manically about C-sections and the big disclaimer popped up in many sites: “C-section is a MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY”.

As I fell back on the bed gasping, I could see the words MAJOR ABODOMINAL SURGERY blinking in red across my head. It’s such a different kind of pain than say, scraping your knee or a toothache which is localized and you really remember how much it hurts. But this was such a unique type of pain that disables your entire body for a moment that it is almost unbelievable and I don’t even really remember how it feels other than it was unbelievable pain. I read about how labor pains are similar, that somehow women don’t remember as vividly the pain (perhaps a way for Mother Nature to make us wanna have babies more than once).

And you really don’t realize how often you use your stomach muscles until you can’t use them without searing pain. After I collapsed back on the bed, my first thought was, oh my god, I am immobile. Then I thought, oh shit, I really have to pee! The 10 steps to the toilet were impossible! Can I have the catheter back, pretty please? I buzzed for the nurse and told her I needed to pee and cannot move and she said “do you want pain medication?” and I replied “oh, you mean I can have some?”. God, I was naïve. Why would I think I would NOT have pain medication after a MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY? I hadn’t realized that my IV drip had been quietly feeding me awesome pain medication ceaselessly all day yesterday. The nurse said that they won’t give me pain killers unless I asked for them. So I said, yes yes yes. She took about half an hour to come back with the drug. It wasn’t so much the pain that bothered me cos I could just lay still and not feel the pain; I just had to pee really really bad. Finally, she came back, reattached my IV drip to the connecting hub and added pain killers.

Within half an hour, I was able to get up and gingerly shuffle my feet to take the world’s best piss. It was amazing. From being completely unable to move, to walking. Incredible. I have a whole new respect for pain medication after this. I don’t like having to take drugs, especially since I intended to nurse, so I tried to take as little as possible. I’d wait for the pain to return before requesting my dear friend Percocet. Upon hindsight, I really should have just taken them as prescribed, about every 4 hours. Because who was I kidding? I went through MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY! I could not move without them! God, I am SO LUCKY to be living in a first world country with easy access to pain killers. In the next week or so, I took 1 Percocet every 4 hours, and gradually weaned to just ibuprofen and within about 2 weeks, I was off painkillers completely. I respect pain killers enough to not take them when not needed.

The Gas

And then, there was The Gas. I should have read the early warnings from all the medical staff. Right from the start, every nurse or doctor who came to see me would ask me “have you passed gas yet?”. And I thought it was the craziest question ever. Why on earth do they keep asking me if I have gas when I felt none? And they all had a look of “aw” when I said no I didn’t “pass gas”. Weirdos.

On Thursday, I finally knew why they kept asking and why they all looked at me with pity when I told them I had not farted. Because I started having movements in my belly like there was an alien trying to get out in there. And you know what the worst thing was? I . could . not . fart. I’m not joking. It was horrible. I’d feel gas shifting inside my intestines and because I had MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY, every moment felt like a punch in the gut, even with pain killers. I never wanted to just let one rip sooo badly in my life.

It was only till the weekend (I think, who knows?) that I finally manage to get some movement going. I shall spare you the details, but you know what I mean. And god, it felt SO good. I was reminded of that joke about the brain and the asshole. You’ve all got that email at some point in your email history.

BOOBS

I’m sorry, but the BOOBS need to be capitalized, because they deserve to be. I was nursing Xiola right from the start because it was so important for her to get the liquid gold colostrum. Thankfully, she never had a problem latching on. But my milk hadn’t ‘come in’ yet. She was getting just a little fussy by Wednesday night and the pediatrician told us early Thursday morning that this was normal because she was hungry prior to the milk coming in. He told me it’d take anywhere between 3-5 days before the milk comes in and it was fine for her but she could be fussily hungry in the meantime. I could give her formula in the meantime if the milk takes a while, but I was adamant about exclusively breastfeeding her but god I hoped my milk came in cos I didn’t want a fussy baby for 5 days. Aside from minor fussing at that point, Xiola was a sleepy dream of a baby.

By Thursday afternoon, I started to feel like my boobs were filling up and I suspected that my milk had finally come in. SUCCESS! I told Pat triumphantly, I’m producing! WOOHOO! My joy was short-lived. Within the next few hours, my boobs turned into rock-hard BOOBS. It was bizarre. As we sat in bed all day together, the BOOBS just kept on growing and growing. By evening, I was in major pain. I had 2 rock-hard stones bursting out of my skin and nothing seemed to relieve it. The nurses told me to just keep nursing and I did, but nothing seemed to come out. Then she said I should pump and wheeled in this hospital grade pump. I tried to pump and it hurt like hell and still, nothing. I got a miserable 5 drops out. Then the nurse told me to take a hot shower to get the milk flowing. I had been holding out on a shower for a while since I felt ginger about my incision. But I eventually did on early Thursday night and tried to massage the BOOBS under the hot shower as instructed. Still, BOOBS were exploding and not releasing. The dear nurses kept coming back with newly heated-in-microwave heat pads for me to place on the BOOBS. By that time, the pain was excruciating.

By the time Pat had to leave for the night at 11pm, the pain was excruciating. I was crying in pain and felt almost panicky. Like, don’t leave me Patty, my BOOBS are going to explode in my face and no one will be here!

And then the nurse came in and said, why don’t you take a painkiller and go to sleep? And I was all, you mean I can do that? (naive Kelly). For some reason, I didn’t think I could go to sleep with my BOOBS waiting to explode. But I did. I took a pain killer and laid down sideways and I swear, it felt like I had 2 rocks as a bolster. I suddenly felt so so sorry for women who had fake breasts. And why would anyone want to live like that?

By the next morning however, my milk flowed and boy, it flowed! Xiola got Momma’s milk! Woohoo!! In the months that followed (Xiola is about 8 months at point of this post and I am STILL nursing her ), nursing would give me the best joy in the world. I nourish my baby through my own body. There is just nothing like it, how can there be?

All the discomfort and the pain. SO worth it!