Mommy pain continues

Since Kaia’s birth, my cubital tunnel has flared up again. All the holding and picking up/putting down of a baby really wears at your hands, wrists, and arms. And then, in late March/early April, I started getting mommy thumb in one hand. Then, I got it in a second hand in May! What joy! While I’ve splinted, taken ibuprofen, and iced, the pain comes and goes. Certain things trigger it, and when I least expect it, some action I take aggravates it, and it feels like a tendon in my wrist snaps. As that probably sounds, it’s really, really painful — a sharp pain that makes you think… FML.

This afternoon while grabbing something while feeding Kaia solids, I accidentally knocked my right thumb against the wall, which then caused a sharp pain to shoot into my wrist. From that point forward, the thumb side of my right wrist has been hurting. Even putting on a sweater sleeve makes my wrist feels tender, as pathetic as it sounds. So I finally contacted Galileo Health through work to see if I can get a referral to see an orthopedic specialist who may be able to give me a steroid injection. I was hoping I could avoid it, especially with gradually weaning down my number of pumps (hand expression is definitely contributing to the thumb/wrist pain), but it seems like the condition doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon, sadly.

I wonder what it will be like, to be able to move my wrists and thumbs again without the threat of a sharp snapping pain. It will feel like I’ve been reborn if this actually works!

First pancakes for baby

I had been looking forward to the day when I could make Kaia baby pancakes. I’m a huge pancake lover and hope she would be, too. So the first pancake I made her is quite simple: it’s just a mashed banana, an egg, a little semolina and all-purpose flour, plus some ground up walnuts for extra protein and nut exposure. I cooked them on a buttered pan and served them to her in small pieces so that she could practice her “pincer” grasp (putting her pointer finger and thumb together) this morning. She hasn’t been a huge fan of bananas to date, so I wondered if she’d detect the banana flavor in the pancake. She didn’t seem suspicious at all, though: as soon as I laid the pancake half and pieces of it in front of her, she immediately grabbed the pieces and started eating.. and eating, and eating. She kept wanting more. At the end, she had about 1.25 pancakes, which was more than I thought she’d eat. She loved the pancake! And she got her fill of banana, too!

The next pancake I want to make for her is pumpkin pancake. It is autumn officially now, after all, so why not introduce her to pumpkin, yet another solid food, plus some pumpkin spices mixed together?

Total amnesia of dysfunction

With my parents, while they like to hold grudges against pretty much everyone, the convenient hypocrisy of all of this is that they always seem to forget all the dumb things they do to upset and annoy everyone, including me. And when you try to bring it up, they react with such horrid shock and disbelief that it seems that you are doing something to offend them just by mentioning that they could potentially be imperfect beings who do imperfect things. The audacity!

It’s been about four weeks since we were in San Francisco, and it’s been feeling really good not only to be in an uncluttered, choking hazards-galore space, but also to be free of their constant dysfunction. My mom called this week and said how much she and my dad have been enjoying the baby videos I’ve been sharing. Well, it’s good that they enjoy the videos because they aren’t going to get to see the baby much in person for who knows how long. And frankly, I think my dad may prefer to see videos and photos of Kaia rather than see her in person; he barely interacted with her at all other than a few funny and kissing faces.

“When are you coming to visit again?” my mom asked. “You should come back soon and stay longer.”

She always says this as though the last time I visited, it was just… simply marvelous. We loved every moment of each others’ company and found each other so damn enriching. But that could not be any farther from the truth as we all know. The constant passive aggressive comments. The uncalled for and totally out-there outbursts. The constant criticisms. She has total amnesia and seems to prefer it that way. In her head, she is the perfect mother. My dad is the perfect father. We have some perfect family where everyone gets along. That is not true.. at all. It never was, and it never will be true. We had zero conversations about anything. My dad and I barely spoke. I would say good morning to my dad, and most mornings, he didn’t even respond. What joy at us all being together!

“When Chris comes for work, you and Kaia should come, too,” my mom went on. “Then we can all spend more time together. And I can look after her.”

I reminded her that she’s not fit to be a caregiver for anyone. And she insisted she could simply “watch” her, and when she needed to be fed or changed, then I could do it. Wow, what a great offer to babysit!

It’s always going to be this senseless with my parents until the very end. There’s really no end to the delusion, amnesia, dysfunction, or tyranny.

Freezing breast milk – conflicting feelings

Before I gave birth to Kaia, I had this little fantasy in my head that I would have so much breast milk left over from her nursing sessions (thanks to using the trusty Haakaa!) that I’d already have built a small freezer stash of breast milk by the time I returned to work. I had two sample breast milk freezer bags as a part of a registry welcome gift box. I left it on the shelf of my bedroom closet as a motivation. While I had put a 100-count pack of Medela brand breast milk freezer storage bags on our baby registry, no one purchased them. And that was probably for the best because if someone had, every time I would have looked at them in the first 3 months of Kaia’s life, I’d likely feel guilt and shame that I was never able to use even one of them.

Well, fast forward to 9.5 months later of exclusive pumping and a long, unsuccessful attempt to nurse her, and we’ve finally come to a point where she is pretty much exclusively eating breast milk, along with her solids that she’s enthusiastically embraced. Her milk consumption has decreased as a result of two hefty solid meals a day, and now, every time I look at the top left shelf in the fridge, I’m a little overwhelmed when I see how much breast milk is there. I’m essentially pacing 1 to 1.5 days ahead of her eating. Breast milk is safe in the fridge for up to four days, at which point it either needs to be frozen or discarded (yes, there’s no pasteurization of breast milk being done here! And definitely no preservatives!).

“You should really consider freezing some breast milk,” the nanny said to me today, wide eyed while looking at all the bottles of breast milk in the fridge. “Kaia can’t keep up with your production!”

I looked into freezing again. I looked into the brands of pre-sterilized bags to buy and what would provide safety and also be cost effective. I also read about how much the nutrition of breast milk decreases after freezing. Fresh milk is the best milk. One day old milk is better than two days old milk, and so on. Refrigerated milk is better than frozen milk. And what goes into the freezer first should be the first to be removed for a defrosted feed. Antibodies for COVID (among other things) are still retained in frozen milk… but it starts to degrade after just one month of being frozen. So that was annoying to learn. All those moms who have huge freezer stashes… their milk is likely in the freezer for 4-6+ months. And while the nutrition doesn’t degrade entirely (it’s not like it becomes water!), it still degrades. And so that made me feel conflicted. I rather feed Kaia 2-day old refrigerated milk than feed her 2-3+ month frozen milk that has far less nutritional value due to the chilling. But I also want her to still have breast milk when she’s 15-16 months old.

I never thought I’d be conflicted about freezing breast milk. I thought I would get excited by it and be so proud of myself. But instead, I now feel confused about what I should do.

Exclusive pumpers are out there!

I was having a chat this week with a colleague who has two kids, ages 5 and 2. She asked me if I was still breastfeeding, and I said yes… exclusively pumping. Her eyes lit up, and she revealed to me that she exclusively pumped for both her kids. For her oldest, a boy, they had latching problems that frustrated her to no end, and he wasn’t gaining weight in the beginning, so she decided to switch to pumping completely and to forget about nursing in its entirety. She realized it liberated her so much from being the only one to feed him that when she had her second, she decided she didn’t even want to try nursing, and after birth, she asked the nurses to immediately bring a hospital grade pump to her room. She said she didn’t really care to nurse the way many moms initially intend; the direct breastfeeding didn’t really interest her anymore, and if anything, it stressed her out a lot during the first few weeks of her oldest’s life. And she didn’t want to stress over that. With exclusive pumping or “EPing” as we call it, she had total control: she knew how to build her milk supply at the most critical time, in the first two weeks of her child’s life. She didn’t have to deal with the trial and error of getting a baby to “learn” how to eat properly. She had done EPing with the first, so she knew exactly how to do it for her second and had nothing new to learn. The nurses scoffed at her, saying she really needed to at least try direct boob feeding, but she refused. And she went on to feed both of her kids pumped milk for 14 months.

I rarely meet people who talk about EPing, so it was comforting to have her share this with me, not just about her first experience, but how she willingly chose to do it for her second child. Most of the time when you hear about moms who EP, it’s because of issues like latching, poor milk transfer, weak suck — all the things I’ve heard of and have experienced first hand. So it was good to hear of someone who actually wanted to choose this path for herself and her baby.

Parenting without a second parent around

Chris left early yesterday morning for San Francisco, so when Kaia started crying at around 5:45am, I knew I had to get up and soothe her. The pacifier didn’t work, and she refused to go back to sleep. So I did what we normally do when she refuses to go back to sleep early in the morning: I took her to our bed. She played a bit but still seemed unhappy after, so I decided to feed her a bottle a little early. When the nanny arrived at 8am, I told her what had happened, and she suggested I take a nap in the afternoon. I knew that would be a bad idea for my rhythms, but also because I had a lot of meetings during the day, so it would be inconvenient. I’d just have to suck it up and get through the day.

By the time the nanny left, I’d finished my work day, plus my third pump, which meant I could spend quality time with Kaia and not have to worry about being restricted by an electric nipple sucker. Everything went well in the evening: we played, she crawled everywhere and even worked up a little sweat, we read books and sang songs. But by the time of her bottle feed, I realized her teething must have been bothering her because she kept rejecting her last bottle. She would drink about 10ml, then stop and push the bottle away. And after drinking about 180ml, she flat out started screaming and crying at the top of her lungs. In the end, it lasted only about 20 minutes, but it felt like an eternity. My poor baby was in so much pain, and nothing was calming her down. I finally got her to stop crying by offering some spoonfuls of cold water, plus I put her on top of the AC for some vibration and cold, and that worked. Her Australian baby Tylenol and syringe made her angry, and she kept refusing it until I finally forced it into her mouth. After some more cuddles and soothing, she was finally asleep by about 9pm, when I got ready to do my fourth and last pump of the day before going to bed.

Of course, all these issues in the grand scheme of things are tiny, and they could easily have been a lot worse with a more ill-tempered baby. But isn’t it just convenient that these issues happened on Chris’s first day away on his work trip?

Mothers’ work >>> Fathers’ work

This week is Salesforce’s biggest conference of the year, Dreamforce, so Chris will be away until Friday in San Francisco for that. In the meantime, it will just be the nanny and I looking after Kaia, so I’ll be responsible for feeding her in the morning as well as right before bedtime. Given that I usually pump at 6pm now for my third pump once the nanny leaves, I figured I’d push that pump up to around 4-4:30 so that my evening hours with Kaia would be pump-free, which would allow more quality time with her (and no fear of spilling milk everywhere).

Thinking about balancing pumping and feeding her was really rough in the first twelve weeks. It’s why I was annoyed when Chris said he’d go back to work after 7 weeks of leave… even though he had 26 weeks of family leave in total. The frustration of balancing that also led to him going back on leave after about three weeks back at work. In that time, Kaia also was eating inconsistently and sometimes would like to “snack” on her bottle, eating a little here and there, and when you are also pumping, that snacking can really drive you up the wall, especially if you are the only person looking after her. Granted, she was a newborn, so it was hard to be mad at her, but it was still frustrating nonetheless. A newborn or any baby has no idea that when you are pumping, you are trying to give them milk to survive; they just know that they want what they want — when they want it.

But while thinking about feeding her each morning before I pump, I thought even more about how much harder mothers’ lives are than men’s, particularly in the baby stage of a child’s life. If I had, for example, had a week-long work trip, Chris’s life wouldn’t really change that much: he’d still be bottle feeding her, changing her, and putting her to sleep. He wouldn’t have to feed AND pump the way I do. If I were away, I’d still have to pump four times a day at this stage, and then I’d have the stress of figuring out how to store and cart all the milk back (I get a milk shipment perk through work when I do business travel, but I’ve never frozen milk before. And I’m not sure if I have high lipase milk, which means that the milk could take an “off” flavor after being frozen, resulting in baby rejecting it.. and I’m a little scared to try it because I hate even the idea of tossing milk down the drain). Because of this, during this period, I really have zero desire to travel for work at all without the baby being with me. I think about all the moms who have written in pumping groups about how when they gave up pumping and switched to exclusive formula feeding, they felt so liberated and like they finally had quality time with their babies. And given the balancing act, I get what they mean and why they made their decision. At the same time, I still feel excited and proud of myself when I see a lot of breast milk bottles on the top left hand shelf of our fridge. My boobs have done good.

Prioritizing some foods over others for baby led weaning

While I’ve generally followed the Solid Starts guide and database when it comes to introducing solids and finger foods to Kaia, I haven’t always taken all of their advice. Things I haven’t followed include: avoiding introduction of “hot” spices until after age 1 (why??? If she gets mad about it, she’ll get over it at the next feed, if not sooner), and introducing one allergen at a time (yeah, so maybe I did introduce dairy AND nuts at the same time…). Some solids feeding guides suggest introducing one food at a time for three days before moving on to the next one, but Solid Starts doesn’t do that. Plus, there are only so many days in a year, so if you did that, you’d be severely limiting how many new foods your child would be introduced to, and there’s a finite amount of time before they hit their toddler years, which is inevitably what everyone says is the time that “picky eating” habits tend to descend upon us.. even with toddlers who as babies, pretty much accepted everything. So I am cognizant of this and trying to get Kaia to try as many new foods and spices as possible before she hits her first birthday.

I clearly have had my priorities, though. Things that may seem a bit unorthodox to introduce her to, like Thai chilies, cayenne, kasoor methi, or amchur, she’s already had countless times that I can’t even remember. But it wasn’t until today that I finally gave her a potato. Potato seems like a pretty normal thing to give a baby learning to eat solids, especially if it’s mashed. But lo and behold, after steaming it and serving it with a little olive oil, pepper, and nutritional yeast (the “vegan substitute” for cheese), she took about two bites of it and started swatting it away. That’s a strong sign she’s not a fan. When I tried to insist she try some, she started whining. Welp.

What was she probably saying? “Too bland!” “Boring!” “Where’s the flavor?” I served it in a big wedge. Maybe next time, I will do it mashed, or even in a curry to give to her. We shall see how it goes, but she seems to prefer big flavors over plainer foods so far.

Carrying a stroller up and down the stairs on the subway

For a while when doing our weekly Saturday outings to explore different neighborhoods and boroughs of New York, Chris and I would take the stroller frame with the car seat, and because he was insistent on ensuring he could do it himself, he’d carry the stroller frame collapsed down in one hand and the baby in the car seat in the other. Then, we decided to start using the stroller seat since it would provide Kaia more comfort. And even though you can technically break it down, breaking the seat down means… well, there’s no seat for the baby to go in. And Kaia isn’t walking yet, so someone would need to carry her. Chris did this a couple weekends and decided it wasn’t efficient enough, and so he decided we would both carry the stroller, NOT collapsed, and keep the baby in it. That meant one of us would need to carry the front while the other would carry the back. This was not very comfortable for me given my wrist pains/mommy thumb, plus it would occasionally be ominous when Chris would inevitably try to move the stroller faster than I would, but this is a part of taking a stroller on the subway. The subway is not wheelchair/handicap/stroller friendly AT ALL. And when you get excited occasionally and see elevators or signs for accessible stations, you will also eventually see an “out of order” sign, or the elevator will take ages and ages to arrive. And by that point, Chris will be steaming in his impatience and decide to screw the elevator option.

Is this fun? No, it’s not. It also tells you why so many city parents just stay in their own neighborhoods once they have babies because the subway system was not built for parents of babies. But it also just makes me frustrated that the subway system is not accessible in general, and they don’t have plans to make every station accessible.. until like 2055. Seriously? We spend so much money in subway fare and the fares keep going up, yet the service doesn’t seem to get any better, and we have to deal with inaccessibility crap like this. It’s so frustrating… until I remember that in pretty much every other city in this country, you need a car to get around, and public transportation is not even an option.

So the moral of the story is: it’s either going to suck, or it’s going to suck worse.

When your favorites get smaller and less packed with ingredients

Going to Chinatown since the pandemic has begun has become a little treat. It’s been a time when I can not only get as many Asian vegetables as I can conceivably carry, but I also stock up on perishables (like noodles to freeze), pantry items (bamboo shoots, coconut milk, water chestnuts). And on top of that, I like to get my favorite ready-to-eat items that feel like a treat, like doufu fa (tofu pudding), grass jelly (not all the time, but occasionally), zongzi (Chinese tamales), and nor mai gai (Chinese steamed sticky rice with chicken, mushrooms, and Chinese sausage wrapped in lotus leaf).

I went to my usual spots to pick up treats and goods, and while I stopped off at Mott 46 to pick up two nor mai gai for what Chris likes to call our “morning dinners” this weekend, I noticed that they were quite smaller than they previously were. The last time I tried to stop by, they had already sold out, so I wasn’t sure if my eyes were deceiving me, or if I just had a fake memory. But after steaming them up and opening them, I realized I wasn’t wrong: the filling inside was much lesser, from the meat to the sticky rice. And there weren’t any minced mushrooms, which I love. The price had remained the same, but the product was far less.

This sucks. It’s like when prices go up, the quantity stays the same. When prices stay the same… the quantity you get goes down. My Chinatown haul this trip, despite filling up two reusable sacks plus my backpack, felt so much sadder this time, and it seemed like I had spent more; in total, I’d spend almost $150. Chris even commented that I didn’t get that much when most of the time, he thinks I go nuts whenever I go down there. Not happy.