Strange Machines

As those who know me know, I can be stubborn as a mule. There were violent protests when I told everyone I’d be nursing Jack even during pregnancy but the toughest part was not the critics but the soreness of my nipples.

A yelp-worthy pain, for the first 10 seconds or so, and then it is okay. But with toddler teeth, especially with a half-asleep baby, it can turn into scream-worthy agony when he bites down unintentionally, like he did tonight. I begged him to let go and in his sleep, he did! Nipple is still stinging though.

At 2.5 years, Jack is not quite yet prepared to wean. He does release the nipple most times and says, “enough” and rolls over to sleep by himself, so maybe he is partway to self-weaning (the most ideal way). It must have been his 5 day bout of the flu that kickstarted his back-to-back nursing again.

There’s really no solution to it but deep breathing, grinning, and baring it. I’ve been doing that since I got pregnant and the soreness is not abating. In fact some articles say it might get worse in the 2nd trimester! Still I’m not giving up, but I am going to try some gentle negotiation during the day and try to be more positive about it myself. (Bought an iTouch with hubby’s blessing to distract during long and painful nursing sessions.)

I’ve been lurking at the KellyMom boards and found some really helpful advice as well as a link to a great article at the LLL about Love, Limits, and Tandem Nursing. Just had to share it.

On a separate note, I just realised that aside from IncomeShield, I have no other health insurance since my corporate one lapsed when I left my last job. Here, maternity insurance is real hefty, so I think I’ll take my chances with the good and competent staff of our government hospitals.

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 Jack 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. Jack 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 Jack to bed.

Jack 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 Jack sleep 12 hours every night: The Connection Between Sleep and Growth.

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).

* Jack’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.

Sunday 14 May 1000 hours +8 GMT

The first of the regular contractions woke me around 10am on Sunday. I dozed a little after but the next woke me again at 10.30am. Rather suspicious, I rested in bed till 11am when the next came at 11am. These were no CONs and they hurt quite a bit.

I called in hubby and we timed the next few. They came every half hour and he deemed it still too early. By noon I was writhing in pain whenever the contractions came and at 1pm, we decided to go to the hospital. Another came at 1.15pm while I clutched the bathroom door and I was never surer that it was time.

Hubby dropped me off and I waddled into the labour ward, clutching my belly as another contraction hit me. The nurses quickly helped me into an exam room and stuck a probe on my stomach. A doctor came to take my history and another came to examine me.

Sadly I was only 1cm dilated although effaced (aka cervix thinned) quite a bit. Now, the annoying thing was that my contractions eased. They were still there but hardly a blip on the monitor. Granted, a couple of painful ones appeared for a cameo but the medical team declared it too early and offered us the option of checking in to the ward upstairs or going home. We went home.

My parents brought Mother’s Day lunch over and sat with me till about 5pm. No pains intervened with my Hakka noodles nor an afternoon of Animal Planet.

Just when I was about to lament how off-schedule this labour was going to be, the next contraction came around 7pm… and continued on every half an hour to an hour throughout CSI Sunday, each bordering on unbearable. But I reminded myself, if women since antiquity have been enduring labour pains without pain relief and still work in the padi fields, so could I. Plus it was a great triple CSI.

Monday 15 May 0000 hours +8 GMT

We went to bed around midnight. Hubby examined me and found me still at 1cm. Disappointed, I tried to sleep. But the contractions were now coming every 15-20 minutes which made it quite impossible. I tried every position in the book that allegedly made enduring contractions better. None worked.

We decided to wait till the contractions were closer or if I dilated more, then we’d go in. No point going in for another false alarm.

At 1.30am, hubby fell asleep and I got up to surf. I figured I might as well distract myself while my cervix was dilating. Oddly enough, sitting up on my squidgy cushion made the pains slightly less painful despite the now 10 minute apart contractions.

But by 4am I was exhausted and headed to bed. When I stood up, the pains got worse and I clutched the walls (very dramatically). The contractions closed in at 5 minutes apart. Hubby woke up and examined me. Still 1cm! He did see that I needed pain relief and we agreed to head to the hospital. So off we went again, this time, we hoped, for the real thing.

I was quite delirious with pain by now but still managed to waddle to the labour ward myself as hubby parked the car. I did have to stop and endure one contraction en route.

The nurses ushered me in again. Ah, you’re back, they mused. Yeah, still 1cm though, I grunted. They strapped me in again and I wondered if the contractions would play me out again. But they came… hard and fast and soon I was squirming in the bed.

The nurses wowed at the contractions spiking the charts. Good contractions, they cheered. Good as in strong, I asked. Yes, they said. Ow, I said. The doctor came in and examined me again. Examinations, if I hadn’t mentioned before, hurt. A lot. He was quick and gentle. I was grateful. Bad news was I was still 1cm, he said, but she clearly needs pain relief. I was grateful.

They wheeled me into the labour room and gave me the gas mask. It eased the pain and I rested placidly for a while. It gave a strange high when wheezed too much. I tried not to do that.

At 6am they gave me an injection on the leg to “let me sleep”. I barely felt the needle. That is the beauty of the gas. But by this time, I was beginning to feel the contractions again. The truth was, the jab was to let the husband sleep. :p And he slept like a baby.

By 8am, the gas and jab were losing their effectiveness. I was starting to feel really painful contractions again. This, I gasped to the nurse, and she summoned the doctor.

Okay, at this stage I was quite delirious (yes, again) and am not too certain of the timeline.

The doctor came in around 8.30am and examined me. I remembered the earlier agonies of being examined and took a nice few breaths till I saw stars and the dead again. It felt like he was digging out my innards and some sentence fragments like, good… is 4-5cm now. And then more digging. I wheezed more and started to actually talk to the dead people in the stars.

Finally that was over and they asked if I wanted the epidural (I had informed them earlier I was open to all pain relief options where needed) and I agreed.

The anesthesiologist arrived around 9ish. She was very pleasant and chatted about her twins. She told me what she needed to do and what she needed me to do. I told her we’d need to time the injection in my back between contractions (those 2-5 minutes!) and she said yeah. I curled up into a ball with the help of the nurse and squirmed when a painful one hit me. They gently reminded me that I had to keep still and I promised.

The first injection to numb the site was quick and fairly painless. I think at this stage my pain threshold had gone sky high, although the IV line still (and always does) hurt. The next injection I didn’t feel and then they taped the hair-thin epidural catheter up and I was all set.

Around 10-15 minutes later, instant bliss. It was 10am. I checked the clock. I smsed my office to say I was in labour. They were quite amused. I still felt and could move my legs at this point so really it is a fallacy that you can’t move your legs although they felt numb around noon.

The nurse helped me practice pushing from around 1030am or 11am (I think - I just remember thinking, ah finally I can sleep but then the nurse appeared to have me do practice pushes). It was important. You’ll see why later.

At first I felt weak and could push no more than a ping pong ball an inch from me (with my pelvic muscles). She was very encouraging and we were buoyed to find out that I was already 9cm dilated and they could already feel the top of baby’s head. No wonder the crazy pain. My body was working overtime to get baby out on schedule. Okay this didn’t hurt because I think my cervix was already very low. None of the seeing dead relatives and raw digging pain I experienced earlier.

Anyhoo, the doctor came around 12.30pm and everyone agreed it was almost time. I practiced pushing for another forty-five minutes (watch monitor, breathe in, hold breath, and push) and finally dilated to 10cm. Showtime! My gynae was called in but at that point, I was aching to push. Some physiological thing. So I held back…

She appeared and we got to work. I pushed with all my might and everyone (2 nurses and hubby) screamed for me to push like it was the World Cup. I saw her turn and pick up the scissors and squeezed my eyes together tight and pushed. I felt baby slide out of me.

They showed him to me and said, it’s a boy, and then swiftly took him away to be cleaned before I had a good look. I heard him cry and saw a little someone with a pink leg waving. I felt the doc sewing my wound up but I couldn’t care less. I just wanted to hold my baby.

Someone put him in my arms moments later and I gazed into the face of this person who had lived in my tummy for the past 39 weeks and 6 days. He opened his eyes, gazed at me, and I felt something inside me just melt.

Overhead, the nurse said, why don’t you try to nurse him? I put him to my breast and he suckled straight away. Not too long after, they took him to the nursery and I waited to have the tubes removed from me. It wasn’t till 4pm did I get wheeled into my room.

My parents danced in a moment later. They’d sped to the hospital despite us not telling them I’d given birth nor found out the room number. It must have been telepathy or my Mom simply figuring out from the last update (hubby and her had been smsing) I’d probably given birth.

Baby Jack was wheeled in shortly and my parents gleefully greeted him. My Mom carried him for a second and then put him in my arms. I cuddled him as his Dad admired how much his baby looked like him. I never felt more content in my life.

Welcome to the world, my sweet son!

Picture first posted 19 May 2006 at 1917h.

The Gathering, a rather satirical poem about stereotypes, has been sold to Poe Little Thing #4, which will out this December.

In other news, I will be the mother of a human child next May.