Almost skipped a MOTN (middle of the night) pump

It was Valentine’s morning this morning, and oddly enough, I had a full five hours of continuous sleep, which is the longest stretch of sleep I have had since the day before my baby was born.

You would think that I would have been happy about this, but instead when I woke up on my own at around 4:20 AM this morning, I was in a panic because I realized that I had hit “off” on my alarm for 2:20 AM to wake up to pump. I usually will hit snooze, but in my sleep deprived and exhausted state, I hit “off“ instead, resulting in my continuing to sleep for an additional two hours. I had had dreams, or nightmares rather, of missing my middle of the night pump multiple times, so clearly this was a source of potential anxiety for me. In my dreams, I miss my middle of the night pump completely and of course panic about my milk supply dropping. If you follow any exclusive pumping blogs and websites, they all warn you to never skip your middle of the night pump up until the time that your supply regulates, which is around the 12-week postpartum mark, otherwise you could severely torpedo your milk supply for after your supply regulates.

I’d had at least a dozen dreams of missing my MOTN pump. In real life, I would wake up in a panic at around 5 or 5:30 AM, to see the milk I had expressed during my 2:30 AM pump sitting and cooling in the fridge where it usually is. This time, I literally jumped out of bed to go into the kitchen to get my pump ready. And well, it was not the end of the world because I actually expressed almost an ounce of additional milk more than I normally do during my 2:30 AM pump. So at least that made me happy.

I feel like my entire waking and subconscious thoughts surround themselves around my milk supply, my output, and how much breastmilk I am producing for my baby to drink and whether I will have enough for her. Granted, I recognize I do not have enough to 100% cover her needs every single day, but if I am able to get to about 75 to 80% of her needs and cover the rest with formula, I will be comfortable. That is not ideal, as I would love to be able to provide her 100% of her needs with a little to put away for a freezer stash, but I am not sure or confident that that is in the cards for me.

When lack of family nearby is felt

Chris is away staying at a hotel for the next two nights because his company is having their annual kick of here. And the company is requiring everyone to stay at a hotel even if they live in New York City because they wanted to create a Covid bubble to ensure that everyone remained safe. This is a little bit ridiculous when you think about it because when you have colleagues who are traveling from literally around the world who have not seen each other since before the pandemic, it is highly unlikely that you are going to prevent and police them from socializing with people that they know outside of work as well as each other outside of work events. And also, if you are at work events, you will be mingling with your colleagues, so how is that any different than mingling with them at a bar or at a restaurant? 

Needless to say, I was pretty annoyed at this… who decided on such a stupid and senseless set up? This also meant that I felt even more overwhelmed without him around, even though he had already gone back to work technically and was working from home. So we arranged for our night nurse to come three nights in a row, which we have never done before. In addition to that, my very good friend offered to come and stay overnight to help out with the baby’s daytime bottle feeds. 

I was grateful for my friend’s help. But it also made me even more cognizant of the fact that I have no family nearby to help when situations like this come up. And when you think about it, you can really only rely on your friends to help out this way just so many times before it becomes a bit tiring for them. For example, my friend was super eager to help out, especially because she had not seen me or the baby since the day after we came home from the hospital because she didn’t want us to get exposed to her potential exposure to Covid. And while she said she was happy to help with the first and second bottle feed, every subsequent bottle feed, you could tell that she was a little bit less excited each time and saw it as a bit of a chore.

I don’t blame her. It is a chore, especially when you have to do it 7-8 times a day. It’s not fun anymore and is just something that has to get done. It has diminishing marginal utility like most things that we enjoy. But that is life with a child – there are things that are not glamorous that you just have to get done for them to grow and be nourished.

And if you don’t have family or friends nearby, you’ll end up having to spend a lot of money on paid help. And well, we don’t have Jeff Bezos’s bank account size, so that ends up adding up… REALLY quickly.

Baby development

What they say is true: your baby’s “firsts”are always extremely exciting and heartwarming. Our baby is quickly approaching two months old, and it is amazing to think how time has flown since I gave birth to her. Her latest developments, other than being able to turn her head both ways, whether facing up or on her tummy, are being able to smile a little bit and mimic what we do. She absolutely hates tummy time and refuses to lift her head much, but she is able to turn her head both ways, which is promising. However, despite the fact that she does not like to lift her head during tummy time, she is more than happy to do it while getting barbed. I think that is a sign of her early stubbornness…  That she has likely gotten from her father. I am quickly approaching two months of leave, which reminds me that I only have about two months left. It breaks my heart a little bit to know that I’m not going to be able to spend all day watching all of her little expressions and developments at every moment, but this is the life of motherhood: always feeling torn that you are not always, always there for your child at every moment. I do not want to be a helicopter mom, but I do want to be able to revel in the joys of my baby’s development at every stage.  Even though she is literally making baby steps now in her development, I am truly loving every moment.

Temporary single parenting and more guilt

Yesterday was Chris’s first day officially back at work. Granted, he did not go back into the office physically, but instead set up his work laptop and monitor at my usual workstation in the second bedroom of our apartment. To go into the office, he would be required to wear a mask and get tested for Covid every week, And the requirement to wear a mask in the office at all times was a deal breaker for him. On top of that, even if he were to go back into the office, he wanted to do that later to ease into the transition of being back at work.

I was bracing myself for this week because I knew that it was going to be a challenge to balance the baby’s feeding schedule along with my pumping schedule. Everything had to align almost perfectly in order to get both done, and both really did need to get done. 

I was chatting with our night nurse about this last week and telling her that I was nervous about how I was going to manage both all by myself. She gave me a sympathetic look and said given that both the feeding schedule and the pumping schedule are happening every three hours, after diaper change, tummy time, feeding, burping, making sure the baby was upright for at least 15 to 20 minutes after a feed, and then setting up my pump and pumping milk, I would be lucky to have 30 minutes to myself, and that would be on a very, very good day. On really bad days, I may only have 10 to 15 minutes to myself, and that would likely not truly be for myself. That time would likely be spent preparing bottles, cleaning bottles, cleaning and prepping my pump parts, and stuffing food down my throat to make sure I had enough calories to produce enough breastmilk (I would also add here that I eat almost all my meals standing up while pumping now – breakfast, lunch, and most of the time even dinner). My night nurse was never one to sugarcoat things, and so she likes to keep it real. 

Well, the first day was absolutely exhausting, and I am saying this as someone who is already exhausted with her husband doing almost all the bottle feeds and taking care of most logistical baby-related things for the last seven weeks. I had limited experience bottle feeding my baby, and so, I was not equipped to read her signs the way that Chris was. I do not always immediately recognize when she is still hungry or if she is truly full. She ended up wanting more food after getting burped and falling asleep at the first and the second feed. I obviously got frustrated because I needed to pump after both, and so I ended up trying to appease her by feeding her a little, or holding off her feeding, and it didn’t really work out. Chris would occasionally come out of the second bedroom and check in to see how things were going, especially when she was crying. And he could tell that I was frustrated and feeling overwhelmed already.

The second day was also rough, but a little bit more manageable than the first day. But Chris had already seemed to make the decision that he was probably going to go back on leave again. I asked him if it was because of some work situation in terms of re-structure that he had alluded to in the previous week, and he said that it was more because in just two days, he noticed how even more exhausted I looked at the end of each day, and this was not sustainable for my overall health and well-being.

I felt really bad and guilty. It was clear that I wasn’t managing well, but I said that I needed more time to adjust and to read the baby’s cues. Two days provided very sparse data. But it seems like he had already made up his mind. And I was not going to push back on him going back on leave. I really wanted and needed the support. And honestly, parenting is just more enjoyable when both of us are together.

But I did not just feel bad and guilty towards him; I felt a deep guilt about all of the other mothers out there in this country who have no support, whose husbands or partners barely even had one day or one week of family leave off. I felt bad about all of the mothers who only had a week or two off from work and immediately had to go back to work, still with postpartum bleeding, painful vaginal tears, pelvic pain, C-section scars — you name it. My partner had originally taken seven weeks off, and as a dad, that is quite a foreign and luxurious concept in this country — that a dad would take off that much time when his child was born. So even if he did continue to go back to work, I still would have been an outlier in this abysmal country that does not value family or child rearing; I would have been an extremely privileged and lucky outlier. And now that he is going back on leave, I know that we are in the less than 1% of the population who has this much privilege. I guess that is also what motherhood is about:  always feeling bad and guilty about pretty much everything. That could be about not spending enough time with your children, not pumping enough milk for your children, going back to work, having more resources and help than other mothers, having more comfort than other others. 

We are not only lucky because we both have so much more leave than the average American, but also because we are able to afford help in the form of our night nurse. Her support does not come cheap by any standard, but we are able to afford it, unlike so many families out there. There are people who are fortunate enough to have family nearby who can help out, and then there are the people who, like us, have no immediate family nearby and pay for the support. But then, there are the people who literally do it all on their own. And for the single moms… I don’t even know where to start. My heart hurts for these people, and at the same time, I have deep admiration and respect for them. I particularly feel for the mothers out there whose partners don’t have much or any leave when they have a child, and they literally have to do everything by themselves, day and night. It is not easy to have a child in this country, and it truly does take a village. And we are lucky and privileged to be able to pay for our mini village.

When an obsessive mom takes photos of her breast milk bottles

In the beginning, I was only pumping a few ml of breast milk, which is considered normal. But 1 to 2 weeks into the journey of pumping  and during the triple feed program, I was still at best producing only about 1 1/2 ounces of breastmilk, with the random fluke of 2 ounces just once or twice. And I knew that the baby’s appetite would only increase as the size of her stomach increased as she grew. As I made a number of changes, including getting my flange size and type corrected, as well as increasing my number of power pumps so that I was doing them every single day since January 20, I have seen an increase in my supply, but the change has been gradual day over day. Chris has a Google Sheet he uses to chart all of the baby’s eating patterns, whether she is having breast milk versus formula and what type of formula, poops and pees, as well as time of day. I added two additional tabs: one for breastmilk output by time/day, as well as one for a pivot table to show this easily day over day. And I would be lying if I said that I did not get excited when I started seeing that my output was increasing. Not only did I get excited, but I also started taking photos of my combined output when I had reached certain levels, so if I finally reach 3 ounces, then I would take a photo of it. When I reached 3 1/2, I took a photo of that. And likely, when I reach four or five for one pump session, I will be taking photos of that, as well. Hell, one day when I put together a scrapbook documenting the babies first few months of life, whenever I get a chance to do that anyway, I will likely be including photos of breastmilk bottles… Just to remember and fully document my breast-feeding and pumping journey and how obsessed I was about this during this period.

I may never be able to fully produce enough breastmilk to 100% feed my baby with food that my body produces, especially given my relatively late ramp up one month in, but I have made peace with that. A big reason that I wanted her to have breastmilk and only breastmilk in an ideal world is because I hate the American formula industry. Yes, fed is best, but… Let’s just be real. Breast milk is the best milk. That is just a fact. How can any type of formula or milk made outside of the human body be better for a baby? It was designed to be the perfect food for a baby. That is just mother nature. That should not offend mothers who choose to formula feed. 

It is absolutely disgusting that mainstream brands of American formula such as Similac actually have hideous ingredients in them such as corn syrup. Corn syrup does not belong in a baby’s diet, much less a newborn baby’s diet. The American Academy of Pediatrics says that parents should not include any refined sugar in a baby’s diet (after starting solids, obviously) when she is one year of age or younger. If that is the case, then why the fuck does formula include corn syrup — and the most common and popular brand of formula in this stupid country, at that?? It’s like we are training babies in this country to have an immediate and early addiction to sweet, and even worse, CORN SYRUP and other processed nasty foods.

If we are able to reach about 75 to 80% of her diet to be breastmilk only, then I will feel satisfied and like I did enough to increase my output and ensure her diet was what I wanted it to be. This is my motherhood obsession.

When the husband goes back to work

On Monday, Chris goes back to work. He has 26 weeks of family leave in total, but he chose to take just seven weeks upfront. Given that he had 26 total weeks, I didn’t think that it made sense for him to only take seven weeks upfront. When would he use all of the other 19 weeks? He was only planning to use about a month or so at the end of the year to go back to Australia, so I had no idea how he planned to use the other weeks. And I told him that it would get messy if we were to hire a nanny and then tell her that we didn’t need her for big blocks of time because he would be on leave. That is a very easy way to send the signal to your nanny indirectly that she should look for a new job.

Both Chris and I are extremely privileged by American standards in terms of the amount of family leave that we both have. I have 16 weeks, and he has 26 weeks off. Americans are lucky to even have one week off, as there is no official family leave that is recognized at a national level (the Democrats tried and failed to push through 12 weeks of leave, and are looking at a dismal 4. This is despite the fact that OUR tax payer dollars are paying for federal employees, which include Congress, to have 12 weeks of family leave). That goes to show how little this country values families. It’s quite pathetic and absolutely infuriating, and every day that we have gone further and further into my leave, the more viscerally angry I have gotten about how sad our society is. In Australia, new moms get an entire year off. It is very similar across all of Europe. The United States is the only industrialized country in the world to not have paid family leave. And yet, people who are so used to how stupid our system is defend it and say that they should not be responsible for paying for other people’s choices to have children. This completely ignores the fact that the same people benefit from future generations being born. Who the hell is going to be fund their Social Security? Who is going to be doing all the work at the stores and businesses that they need to survive?

So given our privilege, I told Chris that he really should be taking more time upfront and he disagreed. Men have a lot more pressure to not take all of their leave, even if they work at a company that has generous family leave. He was worried about how it would affect his career growth at his current company, plus general perception. While I understand all of this, I also am looking at how our day-to-day has been structured over the last seven weeks, and I am genuinely concerned.

While there are certainly pros and cons of having your baby exclusively nursed, one major pro is that whenever you feed your baby, you are actually interacting directly with your baby and taking care of her right then and there. However, when you are pumping, the only thing you are really interacting with is… the damn pump. And when you have bottles connected to your breasts, It is very difficult to try to hold your baby or feed her, particularly if she is still a newborn and needs to have her head held up. So I got worried about how I was going to be able to balance feeding her on schedule while also accommodating her grazing habits… Along with my pumping schedule, both have to happen every three hours during the day and one has to happen before the other… Because I cannot allow my baby to starve while I pump… That makes no sense. I am pumping milk specifically for her to eat. Having someone else bottle feed her has allowed me to pump on schedule pretty much every day in the last seven weeks. It has also given me a little free time to do things like shower, go to the gym, cook, clean, and nap. If I have to bottle feed her and pump, especially given that I pump seven times a day, this would be very challenging for me to accomplish all by myself with no help at all. I told him this, and he said that he would see how this would go for the first few days or the first week. So, I am bracing myself.

Mucus and snot sucking to another level

So, I previously wrote a post about how snot sucking is one of the pleasures of becoming a new parent to a newborn baby. While I did take some delight in sucking snot out of my babies nose, I did that thinking that the situation would be isolated and she would only have the occasional booger for me to remove.

Unfortunately, what I thought would be an occasional booger ended up being daily boogers. And then, it progressed into mucus that she started developing in her nasal passages. We started noticing that it sounded like she was breathing heavier, and when she would cough or cry, She definitely started sounding more congested. And our Night Nurse mentioned to us that she needed to use a bulb to suck out some of the excess mucus because there were some nights when she was waking up because she was so stuffy and trying too hard to breathe. It’s normal at this time of year given the cold weather, the night nurse said, so nothing to be concerned about. As you could imagine, this did not sit well with me: the thought of my baby struggling to breathe really scared me, so I wanted to do everything we could to clear her. This ultimately meant sucking out snot and mucus before bedtime right before her 10 PM feed, and then also again before her 10 AM feed. She certainly did not enjoy this process because… who on earth would enjoy having anything sucked out of their nose? But alas, it must be done.

Sucking out her mucus and boogers ended up becoming a much lengthier task than I had originally imagined. While before, when I would suck out her boogers, it would usually only take a minute or two, in the mornings when I need to clear her, I end up having to allot about 10 minutes to getting all of the mucus and boogers out. And I am completely disgusted when every morning, there is so much mucus that I am shocked that it came from such a tiny little nose from a tiny little human. Part of the reason that it takes 10 minutes is not necessarily the fact that it is so deeply lodged and I am trying to suck it all out. It’s actually because I need to take breathing breaks for myself so that I don’t totally exhaust myself and need to pass out after getting this task done. So as you can tell, it is taxing on both the baby and me.

Chris will often times check in to see how much mucus there was that I was able to dislodge. And, being a very hands-on dad, he tends to stand by and look at the end result in the tube instead of actually watching this task in progress. And several times, I have asked him if he would like to suck the snot and mucus out of our daughter’s nose. And each time, he will respond, “No, that’s OK. You can do it.”

So, he is a hands-on dad to be clear, but he really does not enjoy tasks like this. He takes zero pleasure out of doing things like this… Whereas he knows that I actually feel a sense of accomplishment after doing it myself. But some days, it really does take the wind out of me… Literally. And I really want to just take a nap after. But I have a child to take care of, and so I can’t really do that.

Grandparent demands for photos and videos

It is often said that parents, when they become grandparents, become totally different in the way they interact with their grandchildren. In the handful of Asian mom groups I am in on Facebook, it’s a common experience shared that when we were children, our parents were extremely strict, never said “I love you” or expressed any type of loving emotion towards us to our faces. Yet when they interact with our children, who are their grandchildren, they suddenly become super affectionate and actually start saying “I love you” directly to them.

My parents have become obsessed with Kaia, constantly demanding photos and videos as though that’s all I spend my days and nights doing. My mom finally got the hint that I was no longer going to answer the phone when she called 4-5 times per day, so she’s laid off and occasionally calls and sends a text message. But when I don’t send a photo or video for a day, she immediately gets worried and just jumps to the conclusion that something is wrong, which is really annoying. My dad would email me (because that’s how he likes to communicate with his only living child) and ask if everything is all right, and to please send photos.

On the one hand, it is cute. On the other hand, I do not exist solely to send photos and videos of their grandchild to them. I have to actually… TAKE CARE OF and raise this child, and it’s not a hobby. It is my responsibility, and I am not going to just send photos and videos at their beck and call.

Murasaki Hojicha Diagonal Thi

When we were deciding on names, it was a bit of a debate to say the least. Chris really wanted something for our child that was unique and also represented something about us or something we liked. So he settled on the name Murasaki Hojicha Diagonal Thi (Wong Jacob). We both like the color purple, he said, and he studied Japanese for a number of years and we like Japanese culture, so Murasaki could be her first name. Added bonus: Murasaki is also the name of the first female novelist (from Japan) who wrote the famous book Tale of Genji, and so there’s some good history and feminism attached to this. Hojicha… not sure what his rationale was for this, but that just sounds good and cute, plus it means roasted green tea, which is one of my favorite teas. For Diagonal, Chris hates crossing the street at crosswalks and prefers to do a diagonal whenever possible (and thus jay walk), and so a middle name of Diagonal would be fitting. Plus my middle name is passed down on my mom’s side, and the baby’s name would be complete in his opinion.

Granted, this is not her official name as we all know, but it’s what he thinks is her *real* unofficial name. So, in the morning, he calls her “morning Murasaki,” and once noon hits, she is then dubbed “afternoon Hoji.” It’s a cute transition and a cute name, but it just shows how quirky (and ridiculous) my husband is.

Marital conversations during the newborn weeks

Once you have a baby, the conversations that you have with your spouse day to day will change drastically from the time pre-baby. This is a quick sample of questions that Chris and I ask each other throughout the day:

Chris to me:

How was your pump? 

How was your output?

How many minutes on each boob?

Is she actually eating or is she just pacifying?

Do we still have any berries left?

Why did you get that type of oat milk? (He wants Oatly and only Oatly)

Was it just pee?

Do you want me to change her or do you want to do it?

Do we need more diapers?

Me to Chris:

How was the feed?

Is that formula or breast milk (in the bottle)?

Did she spit up? How much?

Who is that gift from?

Who sent that package?

Can you make sure to buy more veg when you go to Whole Foods/Brooklyn Fare?

I am sure that the questions will eventually get less mundane, but this is the way it goes now.