fawn
27
(doctor!)
singapore/ sunny coast
melbourne! ♥
(would love to bake for a cafe/
?bird & brie)
wallflower
☁
my brother says i am
a cumulonimbus cloud :)

also

joy unspeakable that won’t go away
and just enough strength to live for today
so i never have to worry
what tomorrow will bring
‘cause my faith is on a solid rock
i am counting on God
♡
in dreams and in love
there are no impossibilities.
- jános arany
☼
You make all things
work together for my good.

people

rong; yurong; diana; may;
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love

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97 days;

matt says that after the first 100 days, babies are good. we shall see about that haha. just spent 2 hours trying to settle a screaming baby, so i would really love it if it got better soon.


breastfeeding
was just thinking about how it has gotten much easier to bf in the last week or so. it used to take forever - 30 mins or so each feed, for 7-8 feeds a day... that works out to 3-4 hours each day! emily feeds for only 5-10 minutes each time, 6 times a day... which works out to at the very most an hour a day. :D

 on only one side each feed. that means some discomfort for me because it leaves the other side filling up for 8 hours or so... and it also worries me slightly that my supply might dip if one side isn't drained for that long a time. i think the supply on my oversupply side has dropped because i'm not having to pump as often to relieve the engorgement. which is good, but also a bit scary... hopefully it drops to a just nice amount and not tip over to undersupply!


audi
have i mentioned that we bought a new old car? we decided that it was time for a bigger car. the straw that broke the camel's back was when we had to go to the airport for our tassie trip, and my mil was flying back to sg on the same day. with the car seat in the back and the pram in the boot, we could only fit one medium sized luggage in the car between myself and the car seat... no space for the other two big luggages! thought that was quite ridiculous, so...

it's an audi SQ5. i haven't driven it yet, and j has already broken it once - he tried to install a security camera yesterday and the car couldn't start after he did it. with all the extras we've gotten for the car... it's becoming a real thing. and j is really quite obsessed. -.-


moth balls
omg don't get me started on the moth balls. my mil stayed in our room for 2.5 weeks the last trip, and for some reason she thought it was okay to leave moth balls in our room, particularly in my wardrobe. when we got back from tassie i found 3 packets and threw them out and aired the room... today i was wondering why the room still smelt like moth balls and took a harder look. and found another 2 packets!! omg. why would anyone think it's alright to put something as strong smelling as moth balls in someone else's wardrobe? i can overlook her doing annoying things in my kitchen, but i think this one really crosses a line. actually everything crosses a line but this one takes the cake. ugh.


contraception
like many of my patients, i don't like the idea of a rod in my arm. that rules out the implanon. don't like the depo either because if i don't like it i'm stuck with it for 3 months. doubt i'd be able to remember to take the minipill at the same time every day now, being sleep deprived and all. so that leaves me with the mirena. lasts a long time, can be removed if i don't like it, no user error...

being a doctor i really should have known to get a bhcg done before seeing the obstetrician today, but i guess my o&g brain isn't working anymore. so i had to have bloods done today, and will be going back in tomorrow to have a pap smear and have the mirena put in. hopefully i don't have annoying spotting for 6 months...


3 MONTHS

i know i keep saying the same thing, but i can't believe emily is already 3 months old. was just looking through the photos on my phone and she looks so different now haha. though i still can't tell which one of us she looks like.

we went to tassie a couple of weeks ago, for our first holiday with emily. or should i say "holiday"? her bad sleeping habits just got worse and towards the end we pretty much had to carry her while she slept zzz. exhausting! when we were at the melb airport waiting to fly to tassie i got a call from mitcham private about an admission for sleep school to start on the day after we got back from tassie. what a relief!


more about tassie
we stayed in oyster cottage in barnes bay on bruny island the entire 6 nights. would not recommend staying on bruny island for that long unless you're really not planning to do much... we'd already been to the get shucked oyster bar, bruny island cheese co, the winery, and the honey place the last time we were there, so we were hoping to get some walks in this time.... didn't happen. the weather wasn't very cooperative - either quite hot and sunny (too hot for a walk) or really windy or rainy, or changing its mind every 10 minutes. i think without a baby we would still have gone ahead some of the time but with a cranky baby it made things quite challenging.

we did visit adventure bay, cloudy bay, the cape bruny lighthouse, and the bruny island berry farm. j ended up taking a 4WD track and we nearly died (and did some damage to the car). never again. i guess the up side of that was that emily slept through the whole thing (she loves the bumps) and we got good insurance so the damage was covered.

there was also a dog who lived with the owners of the cottage who lived next door. she was super excitable and liked to jump up on us. -.- her name was Olli.

j had a total of 47 oysters this trip. mostly from get shucked, but he harvested a couple from our backyard in barnes bay himself and shucked them with his shucking knife... most of the ones there were huge and he only dared to have 2 little ones haha. which he drowned in lemon juice and tabasco so he couldn't even really taste them, ha.


sleep school
we stayed at mitcham for 4 nights. the first day and night the nurses settled emily for us so we could get some rest. they gave us ear plugs and offered me temaz haha but i didn't take the temaz. we were fortunate to have a private room with a double bed so j could stay as well. interestingly our aim was to get emily to settle and sleep in her own bed as opposed to getting her to sleep through the night.

emily slept in her own room in a tall cot with a drop side and wheels. i would love to have one of those cots at home. some of the settling techniques which worked on her were: patting, dummy, a full wrap (containing her flapping arms), and cot rock. we can't rock the cot at home because it doesn't have wheels... and it's low so it's quite tiring on the back.

a GP admitted me and a psychologist came to talk to me also the next day. attended a group facilitated by the psychologist and it was quite interesting/ funny talking to some of the other mums. most of their babies were a bit older than emily.

the last 24 hours we settled emily by ourselves, the nurses didn't really do anything at all. which was both good and bad i guess. sort of gives you a bit more confidence to be able to do it at home when there is no help, but letting them do some of the settling would have given me more rest.

she sometimes settles and sleeps well but sometimes takes forever to settle and ends up screaming. it really makes me swing between hope and despair. since we've come home, she was really unsettled yesterday during the day but slept quite well at night - woke up 3 times overnight but could be resettled once and fed twice. today she is back to her screaming so it's quite disheartening. might have to do another pram walk. which is difficult because of the stairs. sighhh.


growth
as of yesterday,
weight: 5470g
length: ?forgot haha
head circumference: 38.7cm


me
at 3 weeks post partum, i've managed to lose a total of 13kg - which means i am 3kg below my pre-pregnancy weight. :D and back to a BMI of 18.3 (previously 19.5). unfortunately i've also started to drop a lot of hair, which apparently is quite normal at around 3-6 months post partum. :( hopefully it stops soon.


emily was 2 months old yesterday! what? 2 months? soon she'll be a year old and i won't know what hit me. ha.


sleep school
the topic of sleep school has been coming up quite a lot recently, because of a couple of horrendous nights we had where she just refused to sleep and kept crying hysterically. i'm sort of in two minds about it. most of the time she's alright - she can go nearly 5 hours between feeds overnight. of course that doesn't mean i get 5 hours of sleep, because i still need to burp her, settle her, pump, and wash and sterilise bottles. i guess the main thing is that she needs to be carried/ rocked/ serenaded to sleep. if she wakes up while in her bed she can sometimes fall back asleep. but if you go to put her down and she opens her eyes then, you might as well just pick her up straightaway because she will start to fuss and will end up crying if she's left on her own.

so the thing is, do i want to send her to sleep school or do i want to continue with what we're doing? i guess in the medium run it would be useful. saves me time, saves my wrist and arms from aching. in the long run, every kid will eventually learn to sleep, and how long more will they want to be held? tiring as it is, i'm sure i will miss it when it stops. in the short run, i do feel like i'm getting enough rest most days, i think my body has adapted to having less and interrupted sleep.

i've emailed a couple of sleep schools and gotten some information, it looks like they don't have a minimum age limit. but at the same time, babies do change and i'm not sure that what works at this time will work when she's bigger. so. shall sit on it for a while and see how she goes.


supply
a few nights ago we had a terrible night where emily was hungry but refused to eat, and so she couldn't really sleep either, so i ended up having to try to sleep (intermittently) with her in the tula on the sofa until 4.30am, when i tried (successfully) to give her a bottle again. the next day my supply dropped and i seemed to not be responding to the pump very well at all. i used to be able to get more than 100ml in less than 10 minutes, and my pumping sessions rarely went for more than 15 minutes. but that day i had to pump for half an hour and hand express after just to get 100ml (enough for a feed), and it took ages to have a let down. i attributed it to exhaustion and had a couple of lactation cookies (which i don't think helped very much).

the next day i had milo and an avocado, and my supply picked up a bit. still not as much as it used to be, but at least i was getting a better let down. today it seems to be more erratic. one good pump followed by a not so good one.

my initial plan was to pump 5 times a day while emily had 7 feeds, which meant i could basically not pump after 2 of her feeds.
7 x 100ml = 700ml
700ml / 5 = 140ml
after that day i decided to just pump every feed. until everything stabilises at least! less sleep for me.


birthday
it also happened to be my birthday that night when emily decided to not sleep. j got me flowers the day before.

me: where did you get the flowers?
j: you guess.
me: clayton. glen. casey. the hospital.
j: brandon park.
me: oh that would have been my next guess.
j: the florist was closed.
me: so you got them from coles?

loved that i was able to guess that he got them from coles haha. hopefully the next time he gets hello blooms ones. ;p

since he didn't know what to get me for my birthday and i didn't know either, he gave me a budget of $200 to get whatever i want. was considering a tula blanket (or set), but am not quite sure if they are worth the hype and price. might just get the one to check it out first.

in the end i decided to get myself a breast milk charm for my pandora bracelet. weird? probably. but i think it'll be the most meaningful charm though haha. picked one that has breast milk and also first curls (baby hair). snipped a tiny bit of emily's hair off today and will send it with some milk next week. yay!


two of the most important skills to have as a mother, i feel, are: the ability to prioritise, and multitask. my daily to do list includes the simplest of things like having lunch, having dinner, taking a shower, and also other mundane things like pumping, washing and sterilising bottles, and on some days, doing laundry or cooking. i get a sense of achievement (and relief) after a shower, because it's the one thing i can't stop doing halfway if she wakes up and cries. and also i can't really hear if she's crying above the sound of the water haha. i try to fit a couple of things into each sleep slot.

okay time to wake emily up to eat (again!).


8 weeks

so i've been on my own with emily since lunch time on friday, when j and the in laws went back to singapore. that's just over 2 days, but who's counting? i guess it hasn't been too bad. she's reasonably okay during the day, but has been crying for half an hour to an hour (or more) in the late evenings. tula-ing during the day helps too.

it's sort of nice having the house to myself, especially being able to feed emily in the living room while watching tv. and not having mini heart attacks every time she cries because i'm worried about my mil coming into the room when i'm shirtless. that happened 3 times while she was here. i don't understand why it happened more than once. sigh. it's also nice to be able to access my wardrobe freely, and have my kitchen back! and to eat how much i want, when i want. you really can't go back from living on your own.

on friday night emily kept waking up and crying every time i put her down in her bed. i guess i don't have as much patience at night to carry/ rock her until she's in deep sleep as well. so the whole of friday night she slept on my chest. last night was better, she only had to sleep on me once. part of it is her wriggling her arms out of the swaddle and then waking herself up. so this morning i brought her to kmart and got a couple of velcro swaddles, hopefully they help. i kind of wish she was at the stage where she didn't have the moro reflex anymore so she could just sleep unswaddled (which she prefers).

gave her a milk bath yesterday with the remaining milk in the fridge. around 360ml i think, it still wasn't really enough to make the bath look like a milk bath. i'm retraining her to bf instead of bottle feed, so i've pretty much put all the bottles away, and pump only when i absolutely have to. she still hates the left side, so there's a lot of crying involved at feeding time.

back to the tula - we initially got archer to share, but j kept hogging it whenever we went out and it was annoying to have to keep adjusting the straps when i wanted to use it. so my mother got me one for myself! i checked the same website and they had new ones! old designs, but ones they didn't have when we got the first one. so i got little blue. :D to be honest it's actually kind of good that they didn't have little blue the first time around, because both of us really like the design so we would have ended up just having the one haha. hopefully she doesn't take too long to outgrow the infant insert, because that's the most annoying part about using the tula at the moment.

managed to do laundry yesterday and today (since i bought new swaddles and clothes for emily). also managed to watch a lot of tv and a couple of shows as well ha. and sort of cook a couple of meals using soup my mil froze. meatless, because the meat drawer in our freezer is stuffed so full that i can't open it. -.-

j is coming back tomorrow morning and my mil is supposedly coming back again next week. for 2.5 weeks. then we're going to tassie! i think. still not sure how we'll manage at this stage... emily will be 12 weeks old then. hopefully she will be less fussy when it comes to eating, and will sleep better.

haven't thought about that in a really long time, but i guess certain (quite specific) situations will always trigger these thoughts, fears, and insecurities. particularly now that our situation has changed quite a bit.

am really quite happy about all my friends who have recently had/ will be having babies soon. :D :D :D not because of the extremely difficult time they are about to have, but so our kids can be friends... and of course it's nice to have people to be able to ask advice from, and offer advice to. <3

oh yes. emily is now 8 weeks old (and 1 day) and she still hasn't started smiling yet! :( she definitely has started cooing a bit, and can follow us with her eyes. but no real voluntary smiles. hopefully that happens soon...


growth
emily is growing well despite how fussy she has become and what a struggle it has been to feed her.

we saw ceri (our maternal and child health nurse) again on wednesday, when emily was 1 month and 1 day old.
weight: 3650g
height: 51cm
head circumference: 35.6cm

thinking back to when we were still in hospital and she had lost more than 10% of her birth weight and was down to 2530g... she has gained more than a kilo since then! and 580g in the last 13 days, which is 44g/day (average is 20-30g/day).

she spits up a lot though, but ceri said she is probably just a "happy chucker." it just means more laundry for us...


postnatal depression
so ceri got me to do the edinburgh postnatal depression scale (epds) at that visit, and i scored 11. came home and did it again (perhaps more truthfully), and scored 13. 10-12 is the borderline range, so.... i was advised/ encouraged to see a counsellor. j thinks i'm just tired and overwhelmed. i suppose that is true. i prefer to see it as more of an adjustment disorder than depression... the anhedonia is very real.

and very aptly, yesterday was R U OK? day. was just saying to j that i don't think i have cried this much since i was a baby. he said yeah i haven't cried this much since he has known me.


in other news
my mil arrived last sunday and she looked after emily yesterday so j and i could go out for some alone time, which was a relief. we went to mordialloc beach in the arvo and went to watch the secret life of pets in the evening. it's a bit of a dilemma trying to decide if i want some of that sort of relief, or if i just want to sleep when i don't have to watch emily.

tomorrow is a big day for us. j has his GP information session in churchill in the morning, and then we're going for jon and aster's wedding in the arvo. was thinking of dropping by warragul on the way back so everyone at work can meet emily, but we'll have to see, depending on her feeding and how cranky she is. i hope i won't have to spend most of the ceremony trying to feed and settle her also. >.< haven't tried her wedding outfit out so i hope it fits ha. probably should bring a change of clothes as well in case... the nappy bag is going to be extra full tomorrow.

people say it gets better when they're 3-4 months old. 5 weeks down, another 7 to go...


more new mum updates.

yesterday someone (who shall not be named) asked me why i was still fat. :( :( :( a rather insensitive question to ask, i thought... anyway. i gained 10kg while i was pregnant, which is on the lower side of normal for my BMI. i've since lost about 7kg, so i still have an extra 3kg on board, and a bit of a belly too... but it's still less than a month since emily was born, so i guess that's okay... right? :(

the last couple of nights emily has developed an aversion to going to sleep in her bed at night. so night feeds already take forever, and then after that she's wide awake and will refuse to settle in her bed. so that means i have to carry her or just let her lie on me until she's sleepy/ sleeping, then transfer her to the cot. sometimes unsuccessfully too. which means i am sleep deprived++ now. i think it's partly because we've been letting her sleep in her swing in the living room during the day. so now i'm trying to get her to sleep in her bed during the day too. and because j is sleeping in the same room as us, and he's working now, i kind of have to pick her up once she starts crying, as opposed to letting her cry a bit and see if she self settles.

signed up for a new parent group which is facilitated by the council. though i'm not sure if i will be able to make it in the end hmm.

the other day i was in kmart trying on a bra (my old ones all don't fit anymore). j called me (while i had the new bra on) to ask where i was, and i said i was in the fitting room and was going to come out soon. put down the phone, took off the bra, and there was milk literally spilling onto my clothes. my first thought was, what in the world is happening? then i realised that i'd had a let down for some unknown reason. sigh. this breastfeeding thing is a messy and painful business.

started feeding emily at 1.30pm, finished at around 2.30pm, put her in bed shortly after, and now, 40 mins later, she is still awake. zzz.

j is working today too so i will (probably) be going to lg myself. first time going out with emily on my own. sort of, if you can consider lg "out".

the families are organising a sort of full moon thing for emily when we're in sg (though she will be nearly 2 months old by then). j mentioned that he will leave it to me to meet up with our old hope church friends so they can meet emily... i think at the rate things are going, if anyone wants to meet em, they will have to come to me. i don't think i'm going to have the energy to organise meet ups and actually go out to meet people on top of all the administrative stuff i have to do (applying for her citizenship etc).

okay i think she is finally asleep. and i managed to not pick her up at all. yay. must be thankful for the little victories. the days are long but the years are short, they say. the days are definitely going by slowly, especially since she's become a bit more difficult to manage. but she's already 3.5 weeks old and in 5 days she'll be a whole month old. crazy.

oh yes it's the first day of spring today!


so emily is here and she's already 20 days old! it's crazy how quickly it goes by.

thought i should document some stuff here before i forget...

labour
so the original plan was for me to have prostin on friday night (5/8/16). we checked into waverley private at 5pm and got hooked up to the CTG machine. apparently it was hospital policy that a doctor had to insert the prostin (and not a midwife), so we had to wait till ckc arrived. given that she usually consults on friday evenings, we didn't expect to see her till nearly midnight (not even exaggerating). but she arrived at about 7ish i think. i was kept on the CTG the entire time. -.-

anyway, she examined me again and said that my cervix had gone from being closed yesterday (thursday) to admitting one finger! so she did a stretch and sweep and didn't give me prostin. then we were transferred to the postnatal ward for the night. all the double rooms were taken so we were put in a single room just for the night. j went out to maccas for the quick prayer meeting he'd organised for us, and then he had to come back and sleep in a recliner.

the next morning we got up at 6am because ckc said she'd be around at 7am and we figured i would need a normal CTG prior to the induction. but we waited around till nearly 7am before a midwife came to get us. had a normal trace again, and then ckc arrived. she did an ARM at 7.30am, clear liquor, and said my cervix was 1cm dilated, 1cm long. she put in a 16g cannula in my left hand in less than 5 seconds, j said. the midwives let me have breakfast first before starting the syntocinon infusion at around 8am.

they used a different protocol from what we use at work, so it started at 30ml/hr and increased by 30ml/hr every 30 mins or so. i started using the tens machine initially, then by the time we got up to 90ml/hr, i started using the gas as well. the gas made me feel really out of it and also made me slur my speech. not pleasant. plus i guess the tens and gas were both sort of distractions from the pain, so i figured the gas wouldn't do much for me since i was already using the tens. but being me, i had to go up the ladder instead of jumping straight to an epidural.

but things escalated pretty quickly after that. asked for pethidine, so they did an examination at 1.30pm, and i was 4-5cm dilated, fully effaced. the peth just made me really sleepy, but didn't help the pain. it was an interesting experience seeing it do that to my patients, and then experiencing it myself. asked for an epidural shortly after, so they did another examination and said i was still 5cm dilated. the anaesthetist arrived and inserted the epidural at around 2.15pm, thank God.

it worked really well and i had quite a dense block with the infusion running at 10ml/hr, so after a while they (we) decided to turn it down to 8ml/hr. the synt was still running at 90ml/hr and the CTG was reassuring. i could interpret it again once i was pain free, ha. after we turned the epidural down i started to feel the contractions again, to the point of being painful, but only at 2-3/10. decided to keep it at 8ml/hr so i had some sensation and would be able to push better.

the midwife looking after me (dianne) noticed a show when she turned me, so she did another examination at 3.30pm. i was fully dilated! guess the epidural helped me to relax so the contractions could be more effective. the midwife called ckc and she said to wait for passive descent. so we just rested.

ckc arrived at 5+pm and said emily was at +2, and i started pushing! we always tell our patients to push as if they are doing a massive poop, so that's what i tried to do haha. all the while hoping that i wouldn't actually poop. turns out i actually managed to push quite well. wasn't sure how well i was doing initially because no one really told me, until they held a mirror for me to see haha. head on view! kept going... eventually needed an episiotomy, but managed to push her out without needing an instrumental delivery. :)

emily kang en xi
6th august 2016
1759 hrs
weight 2890g
length 47cm
head circumference 34cm


breastfeeding
this is the real difficult part, and it just goes on and on. emily wasn't latching on properly and it was really painful, and my milk hadn't come in yet. i was also really upset because when we first got admitted, we passed the midwife my small stash of frozen colostrum (painstakingly hand expressed antenatally), but she put them in the FRIDGE instead of the freezer. and then when it was about 72 hours from when we came in (ie. when the colostrum had expired), another midwife came in to ask if it was ours. -.- i still cannot for the life of me understand why they put it in the fridge when i came in to be induced, knowing that it can only last for 3 days in the fridge... the worst thing was that there was no explanation or apology from the staff at all. i still feel like i need to complain.

anyway. emily lost more than 10% of her birth weight and we were told to do 3 hourly feeds and pump for 10 mins after, then hand express, and then feed her the expressed breastmilk. so each feed took about an hour and we slept for about 2 hours before doing it all again. exhausting, and also extremely painful because of her incorrect latch. and we got every single midwife who looked after me to help with the attachment but she just couldn't do it right, i think it's because her mouth is just too small.

so in the end we decided to take a break from latching and just give ebm and formula top ups. emily gained some weight, yay! and she was jaundiced, but it was under the phototherapy range. on discharge she weighed 2630g. the paediatrician came to see her (because of the weight loss and jaundice) and said she had a clicky left hip and a whole bunch of stork marks. it made me wonder why i hadn't checked her hips myself before that.

since coming home
initially emily was really sleepy and we had to wake her up for feeds. now she wakes us up like an alarm clock, ha. she's also gained lots of weight - she weighed 3070g yesterday at the mchn visit. at the beginning i was pumping and either j or my mother was bottle feeding emily, but she didn't need any formula top ups once we were home. felt like my new full time job was to be a cow.

was really thankful for my breastpump and the uv steriliser those early days. then came the problem of oversupply and engorgement. i was pumping 100-140ml every 4 hours and emily was only drinking 75ml. went to the lactation clinic at waverley private and got a plan from the lc to help settle the engorgement. cold packs were my best friend for at least a week. it's settled down a lot now, thankfully. except that now i have asymmetrical boobs. -.- apparently quite common in breastfeeding mums, but quite annoying aesthetically, ha.

now emily is a completely dl baby, and i just collect some milk that leaks while she is latching on. my medela pump has been abandoned in the back of the change table shelf. i've got a stash of frozen bm in the freezer, probably about 1.5L worth now, and we're quickly running out of space. her weight gain in the last week was 37g/day. the average is 20-30g/day, so she must be getting enough milk!

we brought emily out to dandenong market when she was 6 days old. she went to church for the first time when she was 8 days old, and then to lg at 12 days old. she started having some proper tummy time today.

some days are more difficult than others, but i guess that's just how it is. in actual fact, she's been a pretty easy baby to look after. but it's still quite amazing to think that i haven't had more than 3 hours of sleep in a row for 3 weeks now and am still somewhat functioning. it's not too bad when i can just stay at home and not do much other than look after her. thankful for my mother who is here and has been doing all the cooking and washing up. and for j, who has been amazing with emily and a really great support for me as well in my emotional moments.

can't believe our baby is nearly 3 weeks old! learning to enjoy the little moments with her.