hello!
(doctor!)
singapore/ sunny coast
melbourne! ♥
(would love to bake for a cafe/
?bird & brie)
wallflower
☁
my brother says i am
a cumulonimbus cloud :)
also
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
peiyu; caleb; kevin; daniel; joel;
lois; susanna; june; jane; cheryl;
yuwan; christina; jocelyn;
ivy; mangyik; jasmine; ida; valerie;
jason; joab; shaun; jintat;
jonathan chua; freedy; gary;
iris; sammy; nicky;
love
history
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credits
Layout: /strawberrying
20161007
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!).
4:55 pm
20161002
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...
4:43 pm
