Category Archives: family

First outsourced childcare failure

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Before becoming a parent, I had frequently heard about all kinds of childcare failures: nannies or baby nurses that just stop showing up, daycare centers suddenly shutting down without notice or sending babies home, stat; babysitters cancelling last minute, and even family members and friends who babysat having major meltdowns with the kids. I figured that at some point, something like this would happen to us. I just was not anticipating it happening this soon.

When Annie started working with us after Cheryl left, I had told her at the beginning that we wanted her to come at night. And I told her that when the baby started sleeping through the night, we would start shifting night support to daytime support, but I wasn’t certain of the number of days that we needed help with because it was so far into the future. A common way that I repeatedly started statements with her was, “We’re not sure, but…” Well, it wasn’t that far into the future as I thought, as the baby has started sleeping through the night in the last week. So that’s why we started having Annie come during the day last week. In total, she was still working four days a week with us. But given that we were shifting 100 percent to daytime support, I personally did not think that four days was needed, particularly since both of us are still on family leave. And now that I am unfortunately counting down the weeks until I have to go back to work, this has made me feel very unsettled and emotional knowing that I will no longer be able to spend this much time with my baby once I go back to work. So the thought of having daytime support four days a week, which is just one day less than five days a week when I would be working, just did not make any sense to me.  With that logic, why don’t I just go back to work now?! And so I thought that we could try doing three days a week with Annie.

Apparently, something got lost in translation, and Annie never thought that we would reduce the total number of days that she would work with us. She flipped out when we told her that we did not want her to come a fourth day this week, and she sent me a very distraught text message late at night on Tuesday to let me know that she felt that we had not told her the truth and misled her all along. The next day, we talked it out over the phone, and we both admitted that we could have been a little bit clearer about the communication. I could have explicitly told her that we eventually did not want four total days of support per week. At the same time, she could have also explicitly told me that she needed to work four days a week, and a minimum of 40 hours a week. That was never told to me, otherwise I would have said that this may not be a fit, particularly since I had interviewed other people who were more flexible in terms of the number of hours and had explicitly told me so. So, she was supposed to come this Friday, and because she was so hurt, she decided that she would rather forgo an entire day’s worth of pay rather than work with us one last day. In the end, she is losing a day’s worth of pay because it is highly unlikely that she would have found work that soon, but we also lost: we have a show that we booked for Friday night, and now, we don’t know how we are going to see it without any help. And what’s worse… In the last couple of days, our baby has been super fussy when we put her down to bed after her last feed at around 8 PM, and this is a new development. Chris is not comfortable asking anyone we know who has offered babysitting to deal with this fussiness. And it also makes us apprehensive to have a babysitter come and deal with this.

So what the hell are we supposed to do?

A grandma’s pride

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I was on the phone with my mom other day when she was gushing about my baby, her granddaughter. 

“Don’t tell anyone I said this because it doesn’t sound good,“ my mom started. “It won’t make other people feel comfortable, so don’t tell anyone. My grandchild is the cutest grandchild in the world! There is no one cuter than my little Kaia. She is just so cute! Her cheeks! Her face! Her smile! She is the cutest baby in the entire world!”

I smiled while also half rolling my eyes as my mom gushed endlessly over how cute her grandchild is. Grandparents are generally like this about their grandchildren. They are just glowing all the time, and it’s easy to understand: they get all of the glory and all of the bragging rights without having to do any of the work. They get to have a full night’s sleep every night. They get to go about their day-to-day activities and hobbies. Their everyday lives do not change. What does change is their ability to enjoy a child without having to do any of the raising of the child. And that sounds pretty glorious in itself, doesn’t it, especially since they had their fair share of time raising children.

OK, I am clearly generalizing here. My grandma did not enjoy this: she actually played an active part in raising me, my brother, and all of my cousins for that matter. For most of my friends who live near their parents, their parents played a very active role in raising them, and doing everything from feeding to changing diapers to cooking for my friends after they returned home from the hospital. My parents are not nearby to be able to do this, nor our Chris’s. I’m sure my mom would have helped out with cooking and cleaning as needed if she were closer, but I don’t think she would be physically able to care for the baby given her own health conditions; I know my dad certainly would not have wanted to at all. With Chris’s parents, I don’t have a feeling they’d want to stay up all night, either. His mom might have wanted to do it for a few days or even a couple weeks, but there would be an end to that quite quickly. Plus, as we all know, in-law support is not quite the same.

The real reason I think this is all so comical is that my mom has made and will be making zero effort to come meet her grandchild in person, and she’s using the COVID-19 pandemic, which really isn’t much of a pandemic anymore, as an excuse to not travel. She is waiting for ME to take the baby THERE. And… I just can’t wait for the drama that will ensue when that happens.

Pre-teething

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The other day, I noticed that my baby was drooling a lot more than normal. Unfortunately for us, whenever there is stuff coming out of our baby’s mouth, it is usually spit up from her last feed, which is not particularly fun for me to see. Why is that? Well, here I am, working my ass off to pump milk 6-7 times a day for the last 14 weeks, and to see that precious liquid gold get spit up hurts my heart… Or should I more accurately say, my breasts! So drool is just something a bit different. In addition to that, I also noticed that when I nursed her, she seemed to be latching and unlatching a bit weird. It was just different than what I was used to seeing. And like clockwork, my Cleo rep send me an article to prepare myself for what to expect for pre-teething.

Pre-teething tends to happen somewhere between 2 to 4 months. This is not necessarily the teething stage, which tends to start around month five or six of a baby’s life. Pre-teething, just as it sounds, precedes actual teething. Your baby’s mouth is starting to get ready for the teeth to grow in, and with that comes a lot of excruciating pain for your tiny little human. That excruciating pain is going to manifest itself in a lot of screaming and crying that is going to seem a little bit out of the nowhere. So I went and disinfected her silicone teething toys, froze a few, and offered them to her. As with most new things, she kind of looked at the first teething toy skeptically and was slow to accept it. But gradually, she has learned to suck on it. And I knew that pre-teething had really begun when one afternoon, out of nowhere during her nap, she started screaming and crying nonstop. Nothing would sooth her. Holding her didn’t help, singing and talking to her didn’t help, and she clearly was not hungry. She just needed to be soothed because of the pain in her gums. She accepted some of the teething toys for a little bit, and eventually I just offered her my boob… Because access to the boob is just comforting to a teething baby.

We have been extremely lucky so far in that our baby is always predictable when she cries. She has a specific cry for hunger. She has another cry for attention. She has a faux cry for hunger. But with teething, that would be a very different territory for us to understand and to help with. And so, the adventures of parenting continue.

My growing baby

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Being a parent, as I can personally attest to now, is most certainly a full-time job, and not a 9-to-5 job but a true 24–7 job. It is the most exhausting thing I have ever done in my entire life, but now, I finally understand why parents say that it is also the most rewarding thing that you can do. As Kaia has gotten older and now that she is over 13 weeks old, she is getting more and more attentive, active, and playful. Watching her develop every single day brings me the greatest joy. It’s almost like I can feel my heart is being squeezed. She does the most quirky and cheeky things: sometimes, when I am swaddling her, she farts and I exclaim in response, she gives me a huge grin, as though she knows that what she did is stinky and silly.  Every time she smiles when I smile, my heart melts just a little bit. And last night, when I was bottle feeding her before putting her down to bed, out of nowhere, she reached her hand out to hold my pinky finger and let it stay there the entire time. And I just thought that was the cutest thing ever.

 Lately, she has been cooing and babbling nonstop during certain periods of the day when she is very awake. She particularly loves it when I am singing to her. I have captured her cooing and babbling many times, but she seems to be picking up on the fact that I am recording her on my phone. In the last two days, when I put my phone up to record her babbling and squawking, as soon as she sees my phone, she immediately stops talking. It’s as if she is saying in response, “Get that rectangle thing out of my face and let me be!“

 I suppose that is also another reminder to me that I don’t necessarily need to record and capture every single thing that she does on photo or video, but I really should be more in the moment and just enjoy her for the time and the moment itself. But I really do love sharing these photos and videos with her grandparents and some of my friends who truly adore her and look at her like a niece. At the same time, though, I want to document her growth and development. I want to be able to share these photos and videos with her when she gets older. When I was young, I always loved it when my family showed me photos and videos of me when I was a baby. Because even though I could not remember that time clearly, it was still fun to see me, myself, at a younger age. It was also fun to be able to see how others, like my cousins and brother, interacted with me as a baby. It’s almost like you are making memories of something that you don’t actually have a memory of for your child. And I really like that.

Goodbye, newborn diapers

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Today, my baby turns 3 months old. She is no longer a newborn, which is a bittersweet thing to think about. While it was obviously tiring having a newborn to care for around the clock, it made me a little sad to realize that she was outgrowing her newborn diapers. She was teeny tiny and swimming in the going-home outfit I put her in while at the hospital in mid-December. And now, she just about fills it out. She has already outgrown the two Christmas newborn outfits I got her, the only two newborn onesies she had. Chris unpacked her Size 1 diapers last week and added them to her diaper caddy, and I immediately felt both sad and happy. It’s true what they say: the days are long but the weeks are so short. While I am looking forward to that day soon when she will be eating solids and will rely less on me for pumped breast milk or nursing for comfort, it also makes me a little sad to think she will be less reliant on me for nourishment, as insane as that sounds given how exhausting and mentally challenging that has been for me. Pumping has overtaken my life, but it has given me joy to know that my body is capable of nourishing my baby as much as it is. My baby is getting to be a bigger baby as the days go by, and it’s so gratifying to see.

Milk manager

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Since the beginning, Chris has taken the lead in managing the baby’s feeding, from her schedule to what she eats (breast milk vs. formula) to the amounts she has per bottle. He also has been maintaining a very extensive Google Sheet that documents all details of her inputs (feeds), as well as her outputs (poops and pees). Though endless apps exist to track all of these details, Chris insists that he enjoys updating this and that he wants to own the data. Each evening at around 8:30, when we are preparing the baby’s bottles for her 10pm, 3am, and 8am feeds for our night nurse, I am usually pumping or arising from taking a nap to pump, and he is at the kitchen counter, taking a look at all my pumped milk bottles, emptying them into Avent bottles for the baby’s feeds, and figuring out much more I need to pump before we can reach the ideal amounts for her to eat during each of these feeds with the night nurse (or ourselves when she’s not here). I thought about this while getting ready to pump this evening and started laughing to myself, and I told him that he’s basically the Milk Manager.

“Yeah, well, someone’s got to make sure that this shit gets done,” he responded proudly. “There needs to be data integrity and accuracy!”

He doesn’t seem to trust the night nurses when it comes to their reporting on how much the baby has eaten at a feed. This has happened a few times when we have asked how much the baby has eaten, and they have claimed she ate a certain amount, but the difference remaining in the bottles we see is far greater than what it should be if what they said was true. He also, annoyingly enough, doesn’t trust my judgment and nitpicks at me for 5ml here and there.

It’s okay. I’m happy for him to take the lead as Milk Manager. That’s just one less thing I have to think about.

Quiet moments

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Since Chris has gone back on family leave, the only bottle feeds that I do for the baby now are at 10 PM three days a week, on the nights when our night nurse is not with us. While doing her bottle feeds when Chris was on leave was stressful and exhausting on top of managing my pumping schedule, doing her bottle feeds on these evenings is actually a bit enjoyable now, if I do want to admit it out loud. These are the times when it’s just the two of us in the living room, and I am feeding her, observing her, listening to her little sounds, and enjoying quiet time together. My favorite time while feeding her on these evenings is while I am burping her and figuring out whether she is still hungry or not. I have her positioned so that her head is just over my shoulder, and I am holding her body up while patting and massaging her back. Often times, when she is full, she will start to fall asleep and get into a koala position while on me. And while I hear the sound of her little breath and feel her chest go up and down, I remember how lucky I am to have her, happy and healthy. I stroke her hair and rub her back, and I lean back to relax with my baby in my arms. And I think to myself, even though today was a shitty day in terms of the amount of pain I had in my left elbow and my right wrist, and even though I am still sleep deprived and really dying for a full night’s sleep, while also trying to reconfigure my pumping schedule down to six pumps a day so that I hopefully don’t compromise my milk supply, but also try to regain back some of my life and perhaps some sleep, I am so grateful. This tiny human is slowly becoming a little bit less tiny every single day. She is cooing and babbling, taking in the world around her and observing more and more. Her wake windows are longer, and she wants more interaction and stimulation from us. I can see that she looks for me in rooms now, and she can see farther and farther away. Sometimes, she turns when she hears my voice. And in the mornings when I am pumping and entertaining her at the same time, while she is babbling, she will stop and carefully study my face when I sing to her. These are the moments that make me unbelievably happy.

No pressure (to pump)

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Last month, we started noticing that the baby would have a bit of mucus in her nose, and it would accumulate as the night went on. We could actually hear her breathing loudly while sleeping, and at times, it actually sounded like she was struggling to breathe. This was when I started clearing out her boogers and mucus before bed every night as well as each morning before her mid morning feed. It was actually crazy to think how much mucus this tiny little human had in both of her little nostrils. It made me so sad, and my heart hurt to think about how she could be struggling to breathe.  

We talked about it with our Night Nurse, and she suggested that her nighttime feeds only be breast milk if I could produce enough. Luckily, I had gotten my supply up to a level where I could provide all of her nighttime feeds with breast milk. So during the day, even if I was producing and pacing well with my breast milk output, I would try to save breastmilk for all of her feeds overnight. Even if I did have enough to give her 100% breast milk for an entire 24 hour period, we would still give her one bottle of formula just to make sure that we had enough and then some. It’s almost like my own way of “saving” for the next day, which may be a “rainy day“ in terms of my breastmilk production… Because I had no idea when I might get a clogged milk duct or if my supply would just randomly tank because I still had not regulated my milk supply at that point in time.

On top of this, when Chris would do her bottle feeds, he noticed that she always seemed more satisfied when she had breastmilk. She could have less breastmilk than formula and still be more satiated. This makes sense when you think about breastmilk consumption versus formula consumption in babies: every time you read guidelines on how much babies should eat a different ages by week as well as by month, you can see that many babies from month 2 onward can gain a healthy amount of weight but still consume the exact same amount of breastmilk in a day, Which is approximately 90 to 150 mL per feed. That is a big range, but that depends on the number of feeds in a day. Formula fed babies are not like this, though. As formula fed babies get older and bigger, the amount of formula they need steadily increases. They will eventually need massive bottles of formula to drink. In the one feed a day when she would have Bobbie formula, she would kind of grimace after taking a sip from the nipple of a bottle and look at Chris, like, “what the heck is this? You’re making me drink this?”

Chris told me this, and he told me that she very clearly prefers drinking breastmilk. And I looked at him and said, “great! No pressure to produce more!“ He gave me this exasperated look and retorted back, “why do you have to be so negative? I’m telling you that she prefers your milk over formula! That’s supposed to be a compliment! All of the hard work you are doing to pump milk is paying off! She clearly enjoys it!”

He’s right. I am being negative. I see this as additional pressure to find ways to increase my output to get to as close as 100% as possible even when I originally set a goal of getting to 75 to 80%. But doesn’t it make sense that once you have set a goal in terms of quantity that once you hit it, you keep on reaching higher and higher? So not only does my baby have a clear preference for breastmilk, but she also gets more mucus when she has formula, which is not good. If you knew that your baby was more susceptible to mucus because of an increase in formula consumption, wouldn’t that be pressure for yourself to try to produce more breast milk?

12 weeks old

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“Why do you always kiss her every time you pick her up?” Chris asked me the other day. “You are smothering her!”

I told my night nurse and my friend this the other night when Chris was away at a hotel in his Covid bubble. My night nurse laughed and rolled her eyes. She responded, “She is your baby. You can kiss her however much you would like. There is no such thing as kissing your baby too much!!“

It’s true. I kiss Kaia every single time I pick her up. I tell her she’s my sweet baby as I give her multiple kisses, rock her, and hold her close to me. She’s my life’s greatest gift. Every time I look at her and hold her, I thank God for my sweet baby after all the trials and tribulations I went through to conceive of and give birth to her. I also remember that so many other families have spent longer periods of time trying to conceive and still have not succeeded, and I really feel for them. Not everyone is as lucky and blessed as I am. And with that, I always kiss my baby to remind myself and her of our good fortune.

Today, my baby turned 12 weeks old. It’s cliché, but I really cannot believe how quickly time flies. It feels like it was just yesterday when I had the most excruciating pain of my life being in labor with her, pushing her out of my body, and taking her tiny little self home in a huge car seat from the hospital. This time last year, I was mentally and physically getting ready for my embryo transfer with the one embryo that made it, the little embryo that could, as I liked to call her. While I had hoped and dreamed that this time this year, I would be able to have her in my arms, it has been surreal to think that this actually became my reality.

Motherhood has been full of ups and downs, but mostly ups. I have been blessed with a tiny little human who is a great eater and sleeper, who has easy-to-read signs and is slowly but surely showing bits of her personality. The biggest down, of course, has been pumping milk around the clock for her, as it has definitely tested my mental toughness as well as my physical ability in terms of keeping my nipples comfortable, but I see it as a temporary mother’s sacrifice for my sweet baby. I look forward to her every smile and hearing her laugh, as well as seeing all her other upcoming developmental milestones. But I love even just the little things: smelling her, rubbing my nose against hers, listening to her little grunts and squeals as she stirs before waking up, watching her sleep (she has the cutest little smiles while sleeping… not to mention her tiny night terrors). I love her more than words can express.

A continued weak suck and a second clogged duct 

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Two nights ago, it was just me and Chris with the baby at home. Usually when it’s just Chris and me, I will do the baby’s last feed of the night at around 10 PM. Afterwards, I will do my last pump for the night and go to sleep for approximately three hours. Then, I’ll wake up around 3 AM to do my middle of the night pump. However, I have noticed that the baby tends to be a little bit more feisty on the nights when I have her. That night, she had about 3/4 of her bottle when she started falling asleep. I figured that this was a sign that she was full, so I burped her, held her upright for an additional 10 minutes, and then started to swaddle her to bring her to her bassinet. She was totally fine throughout this entire process… Until I started swaddling her, and she started crying for more food. So I said OK, I can give you more food. I fed her about 20 mL more breastmilk, and then, she started falling asleep yet again. This time, I went through the exact same process as I did above, and then at the exact point when I started swaddling her, she started crying…  again. I was like, seriously?! You need to go to bed and make up your mind and stop grazing! This is your last meal of the night, and it is not a buffet spread that you can just graze at and pick at little bit of foods with on tiny toothpicks!

I gave her about 10 mL more breastmilk until she started falling asleep again. Then, for the third time, I started swaddling her, and she started crying. This is when my patience really wore thin. I continued swaddling her and then picked her up, rocked her, and sang her a song. I told her that this time, she was not getting any more food, and I did not care how much she was going to cry. I needed to pump, and then I needed to go to sleep. She needed to sleep right then and there.

She eventually complied and started falling asleep. I put her in her bassinet and immediately went to set up my pump. I did my last evening pump, and then I went to sleep. I looked at the clock, and it was just a couple minutes past midnight. That was so frustrating. I needed to wake up in three hours to do my middle of the night pump, and the thought made me miserable. I told myself OK, maybe I’ll give myself an extra hour of sleep and get up to pump at 4am. One additional hour of sleep felt very nice and luxurious, and I was going to give it to myself.

Well, I woke up after my alarm went off, and Chris asked if I was going to get up to pump. He was up waiting for the baby to stir so that she could have her middle of the night feed. I immediately felt a weird lumpy sensation in my right breast, in addition to the same tingly sensation on both my boobs, telling me I needed to pump ASAP or risk engorgement. I started massaging both of my breasts as I normally do before a pump, but I noticed that there were two lumps on the top of my right breast… and I was not happy. Seriously? I gave myself one extra hour of sleep, just four consecutive hours, and my punishment is milk duct clogs?? 

I went to do my pump and got a good amount of milk, more than I normally do around this time of night. I actively massaged out both lumps to see if I could loosen them. One of them seemed to have gone away, but one of them still remained. It was strange that my milk output was higher than usual despite having these lumps, because most of the time when you have clogs, they actually block the milk from flowing. That ends up reducing your output from what you normally get. When I finished my pump, I went back to sleep and woke up again in about three hours to do my first morning pump. And this was when I realized that the clog was not going away unless I manually got rid of it: my right breast produced just half of what my left breast produced this time. The unevenness in both of the bottles that I was pumping really unnerved to me. I knew I had to get this clog out, and get it out ASAP.

I went up to the hot tub on the roof and actively massaged the clog. I used the Haakaa and Epsom salt hack with warm water, and soaked my nipple in it about four times throughout the day. I also applied my Theragun on the clog and pushed it down towards towards my nipple. I made sure to be prepared, as I put a bottle under my nipple, and thankfully I did: milk sprayed everywhere when I did this, and I even got it all over my shirt. I am stingy with breastmilk as an under supplier, and there was no way that I was just going to let the milk spray everywhere and lose it if I could control it. I tried massaging the clog out in the shower, and I also noticed milk spraying. I took sunflower lecithin pills throughout the day, which are supposed to loosen fatty milk and prevent clogged ducts.

Finally that evening, I did more Theragun massage, as painful as that was, and did a last Haakaa and Epsom salt nipple soak for the night. this resulted in the clog finally loosening in a way that looked promising: in the Epsom salt soak, which was colored purple because of the lavender in the Epsom salt mixture, I saw a big, slow gush of white fluid in the Haakaa breast pump that eventually spilled out. While it made me sad to lose this milk, it made me really happy to actually see this Haakaa hack in action and actually working. I continued to massage the clog and gradually felt that it was getting smaller and flatter. Then, I thought that it would be a good measure to get into another hot shower, use a hot wet hand towel, and continue to apply pressure to ensure that the clog was gone while bending over to let gravity help me. I used the heel of my hand as my friend suggested and more milk sprayed out. Did I finally get it all?

I did my 8:30 PM pump, and my right breast produced just over 10 mL… That was miserable to see. And unfortunately, I did not see milk spraying out of the milk ducts that I know this clog is associated with on the top of my breast. I didn’t think the clog was fully out. When I massaged the top part of my breast, I still felt a lump, though it was much flatter and smaller than it was before. However, it looked like my left breast wanted to over compensate for my right breast, and it actually produced the difference of what I normally produce for both breasts during this evening pump, which made me a little happy.

This morning, I took another hot shower after the gym and used the hot towel, the power of the heel of my hand, and bent over to get the clog out further. And this time, there was no doubt about it: The milk just gushed out of my right nipple. It started as long, fast sprays, and then it progressed into huge gushes of milk. I felt one part relief and one part sadness… I felt relief knowing that I was actually making progress to get rid of the clog, but I felt really sad because I was literally seeing my precious breast milk going down the drain and ultimately getting wasted.

 The day before, I had finally, in the last 12 weeks, reached over 20 ounces of breast milk output in a single day. I was proud of myself and my progress, as I had worked so hard to get my milk supply up. But then, as though to punish me and laugh at me, my body gave me a clog the day after. What the actual fuck?! It was like mother nature playing some cruel trick on me.

My mom friend told me that my baby would be able to help me get my clog out, as her baby had always helped her get her clogs out. They always say that a breast pump is never as efficient as a baby at the breast. Well, that is having the assumption that your baby is actually an efficient eater. Well, I knew that that was not going to be the case for me because my baby was not an efficient eater at the boob. And my suspicions were correct: when I placed her on the right side at my breast, she lasted about seven minutes tops before she started wailing loudly. And then this morning, she lasted just four minutes and kept on unlatching and cried yet again. This baby was not going to help me unclog myself at all… I can only hope that this laziness and weakness is not indicative of the person she will grow up to be.

The morale of the story is: take sunflower lecithin pills to prevent clogs. Don’t sleep too long between pumps otherwise your body will punish you. Don’t get too excited about your increased milk supply because your body may come back and bite you in the ass… or in my case, in the boob. MILK CLOGS HURT.