Strange Machines

Ridiculous notions I’ve heard this past month about pregnancy and child rearing:

1. Breastfeeding past the age of 1 will cause an Oedipus complex.

Wow, there must be many mothers and sons having sex now because the sons were breastfed past 1! Seriously, all documented cases I’ve read of incest involves relatives who DID NOT grow up and/or live together from birth.

2. Drinking cold water will make the baby cold.

Right and drinking hot soup will burn the child.

3. Exposing a pregnancy belly is disgraceful for a mother.

But a fashion consultant told me it is chic to do so!

4. 2 year old children need to be toilet trained whether or not they are ready for it.

Tons of research show they are not physiologically ready till 3 and the best way to toilet train is for them to be ready.

5. Children must be fat to be healthy (and hence are overfed).

We already have enough problems with obesity so I wish purporters of this notion will just read some research articles and get a clue. Just because a child is genetically slim and active doesn’t mean he doesn’t eat. He grazes, just like Dr Sears recommends. Smart kid. He’ll never be fat.

6. Children need to be dressed to look as old as they can be.

Children are only small once. Why force them to look old prematurely?

7. Mothers are not entitled to personal time.

This one probably irks me the most. People decline to help or worse, criticise very disparagingly when a poor mother stays up for a few hours after baby sleeps for some personal time, and looks rather tired the next day (we look tired every day!) because they think stay home moms should be on call 24/7 but even maids get a day off sometime! And they get to sleep through the night.

That’s all I can recall for now. You can tell I’ve been hearing these a lot. Feel free to add, and to point and laugh.

Yeah I seriously plan in advance. So now during sale season I can’t help but think what new togs we need for the new baby when it is born.

I think we’re doing ok with slings. I have a wardrobe full. We’ve adapted (actually credit goes to Mom) the cot to accommodate Bear for now so I can stretch a bit. Although these nights I end up sleeping in it. Sigh… We’re still a co-sleeping family so we’re going to keep with it with the new baby too.

Car seats – the biggie and probably the most expensive. I was lucky to have a bunch of seriously expensive car seats handed down to me from my sibs, but with one in our car, one in grandma’s, one in grandpa’s, we would need to buy 3 more good car seats to drive to anywhere!

Okay, maybe not. Bear is almost 1m tall at 2.5 years old so he could use a booster. I’ll have to see if that is safe. But there’s no harm in looking out for a well-made safe infant car seat for baby for now. After all, April won’t be sale season.

In other news, I am still horribly nauseous and tired all the time, which is why I haven’t been blogging much. I must have missed the memo that said nausea and exhaustion DOES NOT stop after the first trimester.

Not yet. But in some 30 weeks another baby is going to make that journey out into the big blue world.

It’s been a challenging first 10 weeks though. Let me count the ways:

1. Hyper sensitive nipples: agonising nursing.
2. Stuffy nose (cured by excessive rest, interestingly).
3. Exhaustion (no cure, unfortunately).
4. Extreme nausea.
5. Food aversions to almost everything.

As a result, a rather tired and moody human achieving very little every day. Hence the low rate of blogging. Shockingly I have even fallen asleep after putting Bear to bed.

Bear is thrilled to have a baby brother or sister and changes his mind about his preference for its gender every day. Now to go force feed myself more food…

And just for the hell of it, a useful article in case anyone complains about my making Bear sleep 12 hours every night: The Connection Between Sleep and Growth.

First off, Nicole Kidman gave birth today to a 6 pound baby girl named Sunday Rose Kidman Urban. She’ll be needing lots of cool baby gear now. Congrats to the happy parents and their lovely new addition.

I always find heavily pregnant women trawling the baby section of Isetan and feel like telling them when they pick up that armful of useless baby things, “You won’t use those! Save your money!” But I don’t unless they pick up a BPA bottle. Then I get upset.

Anyway. The important thing is to be prepared. Shop around first. Surf the net. Lots of stuff and information there. A good place to start is a wiki for baby stuff. Yup, there’s one. It is called ShopWiki and under their critter section, you’ll find tons of cool baby gear, all objectively crawled from online stores all over.

Don’t waste your money on the Baby Bjorn. Get the Ergo or any other one with waist support. Then buy a baby sling that is light and you and other male relatives would actually carry. There are nice ones that actually fold into themselves and wrap into an attached pouch. Forget the rest.

Of course if you travel with your child a lot, here are nice baby moving equipment to consider. Your pet can probably sit inside with it.

I suspect I am pregnant (or the flu virus I have is particularly virulent).

Here’s why:

* I have never had 3 acne pimples on my face at the same time since I was born. One at a time. 2 max, but never ever 3. Not in the same week and not at the same time.

* I just got seriously nauseous playing Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. This from a woman who spent the better half of 2005 playing WoW almost 24/7 (excluding working and sleeping hours of course).

* Lousy appetite. Change in eating habits. Weird cravings. Bought apple baked ham the first time in about a year, devoured it in one go, and then felt ill. No more red meat. Feel nauseous just thinking about it.

* Increased discharge.

* Funny abdominal cramps today.

* Insomnia (but could be due to pseudo ephedrine).

* Bear’s been making some noise about having a sibling (okay, he has for a while but I remember he did so around ovulation time).

* A feeling that something is slightly off-kilter.

Hmm… letcha know in a week or so.